Nation: Portrait of the Young Nixon

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"As a child he was fastidious. 'He once said he didn't like to ride the school bus,' a cousin remembers, 'because the other children didn't smell good.'" So begins an intriguing account of the early years of Richard Nixon in this week's LIFE by Staff Writer Donald Jackson, who spent weeks searching out and interviewing the President's relatives, boyhood friends and old acquaintances. From an early age, Jackson writes, Nixon was "a serious child; he was never a giggler." Nixon's mother recalled: "Most boys go through a mischievous period; then they grow up and think they know all the answers. Well, none of these things ever happened to Richard. He was very mature even when he was five or six years old."

In the family legend, the Teapot Dome scandal of 1924 fixed Nixon's determination—he was eleven at the time —to become a "lawyer who can't be bought" (his mother wanted him to become a missionary). During a high school summer he worked as a carnival barker at the Slippery Gulch Rodeo in Prescott, Ariz.; upon his graduation, the local Harvard Club voted him "best all-around student," but Nixon turned down the chance to apply for a Harvard scholarship and went to Whittier College instead—early intimations of anti-Eastern-liberal-establish-mentarianism perhaps? At Whittier he helped found a men's social club called the Orthogonians—"a no-necked and merry crew," Classmate Lois Elliott Wilams remembers. Their motto was "4 B's —beans, brains, brawn and bowels."

Nixon took dancing lessons to please his steady college date, Ola Florence: one night he appeared at her house, announced that he could dance and immediately proved it. Says Ola Florence: "He was smart and sort of set apart. I think he was unsure of himself, deep down." Another Whittier girl remembers: "He didn't know how to be personable or sexy with girls, He didn't seem to have a sense of fun. I felt a kind of amused affection for him, like, 'Oh. Dick, come off it.'" However, Nixon really let go the night he learned he had won a scholarship to Duke Law School. "We had fun that night," Ola Florence says. "He was joyous, abandoned—the only time I remember him that way."

At Duke, Nixon and two friends once broke into the dean's office to learn what their academic standing was. His roommate. Bill Perdue, "was boosted through a transom, found a key and located the records," Jackson reports. (It was a bad trip: Nixon discovered that he was no longer one of the top three students in his class.) In the Navy, at the Green Island airstrip in the Solomons, Nixon set himself to learning poker so that he could get into the almost nightly high-stakes games. Once he mastered the game, "I never saw him lose," one Navy buddy says. "He might win $40 or $50 every night." Another remembers: "He was the finest poker player I ever played against. I once saw him bluff a lieutenant commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces."

Nixon has long been a joiner—"and what he joined he led," Jackson writes. "In sheer volume, the list of his presidencies is staggering: one man, a friend from college years on, estimates that he has voted for Nixon, for one office or another, either 13 or 14 times."