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  • Nixon’s First Cover-up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President by H. Larry Ingle
  • Lawrence J. McAndrews
Nixon’s First Cover-up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President. By H. Larry Ingle. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 272. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8262-2042-4.)

Just as many Americans are turning away from religion, many American historians are rediscovering it. One such scholar is H. Larry Ingle, with his meticulously researched and richly detailed study, Nixon’s First Cover-up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President. Ingle effectively argues that few have written about Richard Nixon’s faith in large part because the nation’s thirty-seventh president wanted it that way.

Ingle, the author of two books on the Religious Society of Friends, is at his best when he explains the historical divergence between the eastern “silent Friends” (such as William Penn’s followers) and the western “evangelical Friends” (such as Richard Nixon’s parents). Ingle condemns Nixon for pretending to be one of the former while severing his attachment to the latter. “As a Quaker myself, I believe religion has a role to play in the public arena, one that can be defined and defended intellectually and practically,” Ingle reveals in his introduction, “In his decision to avoid all religious discussions in his campaigns, Nixon was being, I think, untrue to the very heritage he claimed” (p. 13).

Nixon’s heritage featured what the author calls an “intensive” Quaker upbringing (p. 45), a conversion experience at age thirteen, matriculation at Whittier College, and Sunday school teaching at the East Whittier Friends Church following his graduation from Duke University Law School. Yet his renunciation of that heritage included his naval service in World War II; his spurning of the local Friends congregations while in Congress, the vice presidency, and the presidency; and his disparagement of those Quakers who protested his prosecution of the Vietnam War. To Ingle, the Watergate scandal was the logical culmination of a public life that had long since forsaken moral clarity for political ambition.

Nevertheless, Ingle at times permits his disdain for Nixon’s politics to color his discomfort with Nixon’s religion. In the book’s introduction, Ingle candidly admits that he voted against Nixon all three times that he could, and in some ways, despite the author’s profession of fairness toward his subject, this book marks the fourth time. Although Ingle notes that 60 percent of American Quaker men of [End Page 865] military age served during World War II (p. 50), he accuses Nixon of abandoning the pacifist tenets of his faith to advance a political career that had not yet begun. In 1960, when presidential candidate Nixon defends the separation of church and state, Ingle attacks him for suppressing his religion. When Nixon’s Catholic Democratic opponent John F. Kennedy makes a similar statement, Ingle calls it “masterful” (p. 109).

As for Nixon’s presidency, Ingle dubiously claims that “historians agree” that Nixon was “a—even the—central figure” of all those American public officials connected to the Vietnam War, including Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, “whose name seems rather unfairly attached to the Vietnam conflict” (pp. 160–61, emphasis in original). There is scant attention to Nixon’s rapprochement with China and the Soviet Union, which seemed consistent with a Quaker’s passion for peace. There is no mention of Nixon’s education policies, with his assault on Jim Crow racial segregation and his enactment of Title IX’s ban on gender discrimination, which appeared to reflect a Quaker’s devotion to equality.

The portrait of Richard Nixon that ultimately emerges from this volume is that of a politician who publicly and privately embraced religion (whether others’ or his own) more frequently than many presidents, from the prayer service at his first inaugural and the regular worship services at the White House to his firm friendship with the famous Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. Yet Ingle largely dismisses these gestures as disingenuous and self-serving.

Although he does not say it, the author seems to long for a president who combines evangelical religion with Democratic politics (perhaps it is no coincidence...

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