![]() ![]() The next man to defeat Nixon at the polls was Kennedy, 31 years later. The victor, Robert Logue, is in rare company. Nixon lost his bid for high school student-body president.Īlthough president of his eighth grade class, Nixon lost the election for student-body president when he was a high school senior in 1929. Each of Nixon’s four brothers-except for Francis, who bore the name of his father-were given names of English kings. The future president was named for Richard the Lionheart. Whether or not Nixon had royal roots, he definitely had a royal moniker. Through his maternal grandfather, Nixon reportedly descended from King Edward III of England. In addition to using the alley in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building, Nixon had another one-lane alley built in the basement beneath the North Portico entrance to the White House. He’d even bowl a few frames dressed in his suit. One of Nixon’s favorite pastimes in the White House was bowling. ![]() As president, he occasionally tickled the ivories, playing “Happy Birthday” for Duke Ellington at the White House and “My Wild Irish Rose” in honor of his wife at the Grand Ole Opry. His musical talents turned ot to be political assets: Nixon’s 1963 appearance on “The Jack Paar Program,” during which he played a tune he wrote, helped rehabilitate his image after losing the California gubernatorial election the prior year. Although he never learned to read music, Nixon could also play the saxophone, clarinet, accordion and violin. Nixon’s mother insisted he practice on the family’s upright piano every afternoon, and in the seventh grade he was sent 200 miles away to take lessons with his aunt, who had studied at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music. Nixon could play five musical instruments. He enrolled at Whittier College, a Quaker institution, and attended mandatory chapel hours every day. As a boy, Nixon went to Quaker meetings four times on Sundays and played the piano at church services. After the failure of his father’s lemon grove in Yorba Linda, California, Nixon moved with the family in 1922 to the nearby Quaker community of Whittier, which was named after one of America’s most eminent Quakers, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Nixon’s mother, Hannah, was a devout Quaker who instilled the faith in her husband and children. Foreshadowing their later lives, the couple wed in the presidential suite of the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, on June 21, 1940. ![]() Nixon first encountered his future first lady as a leading lady in 1938 when both auditioned for the Whittier Community Players production of “The Dark Tower.” The amateur theater production led to a romance between Nixon and Thelma Catherine Ryan, nicknamed “Pat” by her father because she was born on the eve of St. Community theater brought Richard and Pat Nixon together. When the ancestors of Nixon’s mother moved from Germany to England in the 1600s, they changed their last names from Milhausen to Milhous.ģ. ![]() Nixon’s unusual middle name came from the maternal side of his family. The account was puzzling, since Nixon was not in Dallas in April 1963 and no newspaper mentioned any visit. I want to go and have a look.” After locking him in a bathroom, Oswald’s wife convinced him to turn over his gun. In a further coincidence, the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald testified to the Warren Commission that in April 1963 the alleged assassin read a local newspaper report, tucked a pistol in his belt, and told her, “Nixon is coming. After Nixon landed in New York, he learned that Kennedy had been gunned down in that motorcade. Kennedy, the man who defeated him for the presidency three years prior, on the streets of the city’s downtown. Nixon saw the preparations for the motorcade that hours later would carry John F. In the early morning of November 22, 1963, Richard Nixon rode through Dallas to the airport to fly home after attending a Pepsi-Cola board meeting. Lee Harvey Oswald may have plotted to assassinate Nixon. ![]()
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