REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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For all the well-known high points of his campaign biography—son of a hard-pressed Quaker family in Whittier. Calif, who worked as a youngster in his father's grocery store—Dick Nixon as a young man never seemed minted for the kind of pulling, hauling and mauling that have marked his political career. After graduating from Quaker-run Whittier College in Depression-haunted 1934, Nixon studied law at North Carolina's Duke University for three poverty-pinched years. Though he got elected president of the Duke Bar Association in his last year, none of his fellow students expected him to go into politics. Recalls Basil Lee Whitener, a member of Nixon's graduating class (1937) and now a Democratic Congressman from North Carolina: "He was no smiler then, quite the contrary. Like most others, I figured he would wind up doing a wonderful job in a big law firm, handling securities or other matters that need the attention of a scholar, not a politician."

Nixon's fondest hope after graduation (third in his class) was to land a place in New York's famed Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower, was the top active partner, but Sullivan & Cromwell was not taking on any fledgling lawyers from unprestigious law schools that year. Nixon headed back to California, joined a law firm in his home town of Whittier. The woman who was the firm's secretary back then recalls that Nixon often stayed at his desk right through lunch hours: "He was always sending me out for pineapple malts and hamburgers. He just about lived on them." Then, as the campaign biographies have never failed to relate, while trying out for a part in an amateur play, Lawyer Nixon met Nevada-born Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan, teacher of shorthand and typing at a Whittier high school. On their first date, to her astonishment, he told her that he was going to marry her. And two years later, he did.

South Pacific Poker. For a while, in 1942, Nixon worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington, a period that helped shape his wariness toward Big Government. "I came out of college more liberal than I am today," he said not long ago, "more liberal in the sense that I thought it was possible for government to do more than I later found it was practical to do."

Nixon wrestled down his Quaker scruples about military service, spent a year and a half in the Pacific as an officer in the Navy's Air Transport Command, constructing airstrips on jungle islands. Overcoming another Quaker scruple, he learned poker. He played a careful game, kept one of the stoniest poker faces in the South Pacific, and "seemed always to end up a game somewhere between $30 and $60 ahead." a wartime friend recalls.