Nixon biographies set Yorba Linda scene

I recently added ”Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein to my collection of biographies about Richard Nixon, part of a sizeable haul from the Friends of the Library $2-a-bag sale.

One of my reasons for reading so many Nixon books is to see how different authors portrayed early Yorba Linda and used Nixon's young life to account for later events in his political career.

I've found that authors who treated Nixon favorably wrote kindly about Yorba Linda during his 1913-1922 residency and descriptions of his home and family drew positive adjectives.

But authors who depict Nixon as angry and conspiratorial, such as Perlstein in “Nixonland,” see early Yorba Linda in grim terms. For example, Perlstein uses “godforsaken” to describe the community settled by Quakers and others whose lives centered on church activities.

The town, according to Perlstein, was “cactus-covered” and Nixon's home was “a little plaster-frame house...across from a cruddy, oversize ditch” headed by a “self-destructive abstemiousness” father and an “honest” and “pious” mother, two attributes Perlstein attempts to refute.

The “Nixonland” book relies on several secondary sources, including heavy doses from Fawn Brodie's psychobiography “Richard Nixon,” which depicts Nixon's home and parents in harsh terms and partly to blame for Nixon's “divided” character.

However, Brodie, in an exception to a “repressed Yorba Linda” school of scholarship, presents the community in positive terms: “a languid paradise” with gnarled oaks accenting “undulating hills...covered with grass...a cool green in the rainy season and a glowing gold in the summer.”

Brodie describes the home as “an unpretentious frame house,” a better depiction than others for a structure occupied for some 80 years before a 1990 renovation by the Nixon Foundation.

“The Contender,” a favorable biography from Chapman University's Irwin Gelman, admits father Frank was “strict” and “stern” but notes Hannah as “the inner strength of the family.”

The family lived in Yorba Linda--“because land cost less there than in Whittier”--in a “modest house” in a “semi-arid” area with “rolling hills with few trees” and “powerful Santa Ana winds” alongside “plenty of coyotes” and “an abundance of ground squirrels and jackrabbits.”

In “Nixon,” Steven Ambrose notes Yorba Linda drew “mainly young couples...nearly all Quaker” who “imposed a Puritan streak on the town,” and Leonard Lurie's “The Running of Richard Nixon” claims Yorba Linda “was not a world of fun,” only “a world of duty, hardship, marginal existence, religious bigotry, where the presence of death was always felt....”

But Earl Mazo's “Richard Nixon” rapturously describes the railway near Nixon's home: “There were toughness, vigor and unbendable firmness in the smooth steel tracks that stretched beyond sight in both directions....”

And Nixon in his “Memoirs” says Yorba Linda was “for a child...idyllic,” where spring air “was heavy with the rich scent of orange blossoms,” and life “was hard but happy” in a “farming community...surrounded by avocado and citrus groves and barley, alfalfa and bean fields.”