Reviewed by: Nixon’s First Cover-Up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President by H. Larry Ingle Thomas D. Hamm Nixon’s First Cover-Up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President. By H. Larry Ingle. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. x + 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $50. Winston Churchill once memorably quipped that Russia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That might just as aptly have been said of Richard Nixon. The one thing that unites his biographers--sympathetic, hostile, and in-between—is the conviction that Nixon was an extraordinarily complex person whose psychological makeup defies easy analysis. One would think that Nixon’s personal faith would be the key to such an understanding. But Larry Ingle is the first person to attempt a book-length treatment, with Nixon’s Quakerism as a central theme. Nixon, with Herbert Hoover, is one of the two Quakers elected president of the United States. Nixon was a lifelong Friend, who, even though he eschewed Quaker worship most of his adult life, kept his membership in the East Whittier, California, Friends Church into which he was born in 1911. His father, Frank Nixon, was a convinced Friend, but his mother, Hannah Milhous, came from a long line of Quaker ancestors in Indiana, Ohio, and the Delaware Valley. Hannah’s grandparents were the models for the Birdwell family of her cousin Jessamyn West’s novel The Friendly Persuasion, and her great-grandmother, Edith Price, had been a well-known minister in the Gurneyite Ohio Yearly Meeting. Nixon alluded to these Quaker roots with some regularity, and journalists and biographers have seen them as significant. As Ingle notes, however, they almost always assumed that Nixon’s Quakerism was of the traditional variety, based on silent worship and with a strong social-activist tinge. But the California Friends among whom Richard Nixon grew up were thoroughly acculturated, sponsoring revivals and with a form of worship little different from those of other Protestants. Theologically, they were strongly evangelical. In his introduction, Ingle offers his most provocative assertion, that Nixon was a ranter. Ranters, of course, were a seventeenth-century English movement who “held that God’s salvation had freed them from human-created restrictions and that they hence were not bound by any kind of outward laws, rules, and regulations, as ordinary people were. They were accordingly free to do as they pleased, limited only by their own wills” (6). Nixon, Ingle argues, was a “twentieth-century ranter” who refused to be bound by the doctrines of Quakerism or any other church. [End Page 56] Instead, he fashioned his own religion. That religion was deeply personal, even for an introvert like Nixon. Although if Nixon had a spiritual mentor after 1950, it was probably Billy Graham, Nixon could by no means be considered an evangelical. Quaker elements pop up in fascinating ways in his public statements about his own faith, particularly the idea of “peace at the center,” a phrase that seems to have been Nixon’s own, but which could be seen as a variant of the Inner Light. Ultimately, Ingle makes a convincing case that at Nixon’s center was a desire for political success and power, a center where religion mattered largely as a means to that success and power. He cultivated Protestant leaders like Graham and Norman Vincent Peale for this reason. Other than as a tool, it is difficult to conclude that Nixon’s faith had much content. One can quibble with small elements of this work. Fox example, Walter C. Woodward, the longtime editor of the American Friend was certainly not an evangelical in any sense. And Nixon’s grandmother, Almira Milhous, died in 1943, not 1923. And this is about Nixon as Quaker, or not-Quaker. The responses of other Friends to Nixon are not Ingle’s focus. But these are minor flaws. Unless new material comes to light, it is difficult to foresee a better treatment of Nixon as Quaker. [End Page 57] Thomas D. Hamm Earlham College Copyright © 2018 Friends Historical Association