The night of John F. Kennedy's inauguration, after the oratory about the torch being passed, the loser toured the mostly deserted Washington streets. Until the bewitching hour of midnight, Richard Nixon still commanded his official vice presidential car. He ordered his chauffeur at last to take him to the Capitol. He marched alone past the Senate chamber, down a corridor to the vast and empty Rotunda, and on to a balcony, where he gazed at the darkened horizon. Nixon had virtually willed himself to within a few thousand votes of the presidency. And in this portentous scene of departure, his will was almost palpable. Yet the story did not end here; his lonely leave-taking became the prelude to a return—and worse.

Stephen E. Ambrose's book [Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962] is an old-fashioned sort of biography. The author, a historian at the University of New Orleans who has written the definitive two-volume biography of Eisenhower, seeks balance, not irony. Ambrose's facts are lined up in rows and made to march to a very measured judgment. His prudent interpretations do not stray from the accumulated details. There are no great themes, no theories of history, no analytical leaps. In short, Ambrose has written the standard, a middle point of reference, around which all Nixonia may be organized.

Ambrose's extension of the historian's empathy to his subject seems at first to make Nixon's motivation understandable. But the more we know, the more unknowable Nixon becomes. There is no searching point of view; and finally the professionally “balanced” approach to an unbalanced subject does not penetrate deep enough. Still, this sheer massing of material on Nixon cannot help but evoke a certain reaction. Ambrose's affectless prose is not without effect; this vanilla has an aftertaste.

The first of two volumes, the opening of an American tragedy, Nixon is utterly chilling in its inexorability. Even as we begin the first page the last terrible one is known. Nixon does not exactly drift toward his fate. Instead, his ambition builds into a juggernaut, driving him toward rule and ruin. Each of his passages was final, sealing him off from possibility. The more tightly Nixon coiled his ambition, the more he became entangled in forces outside himself. The biographer's piling up of facts seems almost heartless, because they are ultimately crushing; yet Ambrose's naturalistic style implicitly fits the amoral rise and fall of his subject. Richard Nixon's story belongs in Theodore Dreiser's world.

Nixon's trajectory has been described conventionally (and unconventionally in Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes) as a parable of the Protestant ethic, according to which work and ambition produce virtue and success. Perversely, the worldly-wise Nixon twisted his success into failure: the self-made man unmade. Nixon, however, is at least as much about environment as it is about character, about a mechanical politician in a mechanistic universe, who was found by forces he eagerly rode.

Nixon, for his part, projected the impersonal as the enemy. Always he faced a faceless conspiracy that had to be brought under control. He was the individual against the crowd below and the elite above; the choice was always between order and chaos. Though his ascent to power was amazingly rapid—elected vice president at age 39—he believed he was constantly being thwarted. He sought to conquer a society with which he was radically at odds. And he never felt that he had arrived, that he could loosen his grip on himself. Thus his spirit was stunted by a fierce obsession with survival. “I had to win,” he said, justifying his sordid first campaign. The situation was always desperate; he was always cornered by circumstance.

Nixon's most enduring piece of writing, Six Crises, about his struggle, is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography with a paranoid subtext: half-banal, half-mad. Any self-revelation on Nixon's part was unintentional. He was certain that he risked destruction if he displayed authenticity; against his enemies, he carried insincerity as a shield. The political obliterated the personal. “In my job,” he said in 1959 to Joseph Alsop, “you can't enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships. You can't confide absolutely in anyone. You can't talk too much about your personal plans, your personal feelings.”

Nixon grew up, surrounded by a loving family, in a religious Quaker community. Like many Quakers, he was bred to be reserved in private but confident in public. The great mystery is his inability as an adult to trust. There is “nothing” to explain it, according to Ambrose. The death of his little brother, Arthur, made him strive harder to please his parents. He recited poetry, played the piano, debated like a champion, and rose every morning at 4 to pick up vegetables at a farmers market for the family store. In high school, he ran for class president, losing to an “athlete and personality boy.” He had no close friends; but he was widely respected, and he had no enemies.

When he won a scholarship to Harvard, necessity demanded that he choose the hometown Whittier College. His family could not afford his living expenses elsewhere because his older brother, Harold, had contracted tuberculosis. Nixon, however, showed no discernible bitterness. Harold's death two-and-a-half years later apparently intensified his will to succeed. Nixon was the Big Man on Campus—class president, founder of a fraternity, rotten football player but good sport, and winner of the Reader's Digest Southern California Extemporaneous Speaking Contest of 1933. He was also the lead actor in the school play, so skilled that he could cry on cue. “Buckets of tears. I was amazed at his perfection,” said the drama coach. The school yearbook recorded:

After one of the most successful years the college has ever witnessed we stop to reminisce, and come to the realization that much of the success was due to the efforts of this very gentleman. Always progressive, and with a liberal attitude, he has led us through the year with flying colors.

Then on to Duke Law School, where he closed the library every night, including weekends, and lived in a small shed lined with cardboard, without heat. He graduated with honors, third in his class. “His life to date,” says Ambrose, “had been an unbroken record of achievement and success.”

Nixon's political career had its origins during the war, on a remote Pacific island, where the Navy man ran a small store, just like at home, and was an expert poker player, known for his disciplined bluffing. He carefully guarded his winnings, exhibiting the virtue of frugality, and saved the money for his first campaign. He came rushing out of the war, and almost immediately a goal for his energy materialized.

In his congressional district, a group of small businessmen called the Committee of 100 had formed, searching for a bright young man to support against the long-time incumbent, a New Dealer, Jerry Voorhis. “Like their counterparts throughout Southern California, and indeed through the nation,” writes Ambrose, “these middle-class Old Guard Republicans were in a mood close to desperation.” They believed they were true-blue Americans, but they had lost their rightful place in the world because of the unnatural Depression for which they had no explanation. Roosevelt's presidency was a warp in time. Yet again and again they had been frustrated. Liberalism was leading to socialism, which led to communism. What kept this un-Americanism in power was an unholy alliance of labor unions and minorities, Hollywood celebrities and federal bureaucrats. (This enemies list—cast as special interests, radical chic, and big government—has lasted for decades.) Two systems were in conflict, according to Nixon: “One advocated by the New Deal is government control in regulating our lives. The other calls for individual freedom and all that initiative can produce.” With this formulation, Nixon convinced the Committee of 100 that he was the man to slate.

“Had enough?” was the Republican slogan of 1946. (These magic words were manufactured for the GOP by the Harry M. Frost advertising company.) Like the late 1970s, the late 1940s was a period of economic and foreign policy turmoil. And the right had ready answers. Communists and fellow travelers were “gaining positions of importance in virtually every federal department and bureau,” Nixon told an American Legion crowd. “They are boring from within, striving to force private enterprise into bankruptcy, and thus bring about the socialization of America's basic institutions and industries.” What's more, he elaborated at another campaign stop, “There are those walking in high official places … who would lead us into a disastrous foreign policy whereby we will be guilty of … depriving the people of smaller nations of their freedoms.” Here was an anticipation of McCarthyism, and the prehistory of rollback and the Reagan Doctrine.

The symmetry between the right's frustration on the domestic scene and its frustration with the international scene was striking. At the war's end, communism, or more precisely the Red Army, was on the march. To conservatives, no explanation made so much sense as that President Roosevelt had betrayed Eastern Europe at Yalta. For the right, the acceptance of the cold war, and of containment, and later of deterrence, meant reconciling itself to permanent frustration. The incumbent Democratic stewardship of this policy provided the opportunity to taint the Democrats as unpatriotic. By contrast, the right began to move away from the old isolationism toward an eschatological anti-communism—a program of simple vengeance that would result in an America once again untroubled by foreign problems. Nixon, in time, supported the Marshall Plan, the pillar of containment. Yet he cultivated the right's anxieties about a tense world; they were useful as a political instrument.

Nixon's campaign for Congress consisted of unalloyed lies, innuendos, and distortions. The words the judicious Ambrose uses to describe it are “vicious … snarling … dirty.” Many of the neighbors and friends who had known Nixon since he was a boy were shocked by the apparent transformation of character. “To them, this was a ‘new Nixon.’” Later, a group of them prevented the Whittier City Council from naming a street after their most famous son, then vice president. “I had to win,” was Nixon's rationale—the Protestant ethic without ethics. This Nixon was the only “new Nixon” that ever really mattered.

But the emergence of the first “new Nixon” involved more than a question of character. From the beginning, Nixon's lack of principles was in the service of the principle of partisanship. He was very much a member of the resurgent Republican class of ‘46, and within that a creature of the embittered right wing. U.S. News, a purveyor of mostly uncritical Republicanism, immediately proclaimed 1946 as Year 1 in “a new cycle in American political history.” This was wishful thinking, but it contained some truth, as Nixon's progress would bear out.

The realignment theory that emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election has tended to overlook realignment's true origin in the old Republican minority and in its reaction against the New Deal, which brought it little but sorrow until the midterm elections of 1946. For the GOP, no greater gains have been recorded since: 56 House and 13 Senate seats. This shift was traumatic enough to inspire Senator J. William Fulbright to call for President Truman's acceptance of the electoral returns as a vote of no-confidence and, in the British way, to step down. Despite the shock, though, the general features of the old party system seemed stable, as the Truman victory two years later confirmed. Beneath the surface, however, there were deep cracks.

The 1946 results were a tremor, a premonition of the coming Republican strength in the Sunbelt and Mountain states. In Congress, the conservative Southern Democrats and the right-wing Republicans made an alliance of convenience that was not defeated until Lyndon Johnson assumed the civil rights cause as his own in 1964. The Democratic setback in 1946 also exposed the party's ideological confusion about the post-New Deal era, a confusion that is still to be resolved. But the right wing demonstrated its willingness to engage in a single-minded politics of desperation. This sentiment was later made into a complex formula by Kevin Phillips, an aide to Nixon's 1968 campaign manager, John Mitchell. In The New Republican Majority, Phillips proposed a polarization of the electorate along racial, ethnic, and regional lines. It was Nixon's historic mission to exploit these tensions to create a lasting GOP advantage.

Nixon's entrance onto the political scene was a sign to the old right of both hope and vengeance. He was loved for his enemies. His early Washington years illustrated the evil of the conspiracy that the Old Guard believed had been in power since 1933. “I was elected to smash the labor bosses,” he declared upon arriving in the capital. He was tutored by Father John Cronin, one of the communism experts who attached themselves to the right, to expose Communists “in the State Department.” So Nixon chose an assignment on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

That Alger Hiss turned out to have been almost certainly guilty was Nixon's great luck. He did not enter his first “crisis” as a disinterested party, but out of sheer partisan impulse. At a crucial juncture in the case, Nixon secretly met in a New York hotel room with the “senior brain trust of the Republican Party, and had this group decided to withhold its approval, Nixon would have had to drop the case.” These men (John Foster Dulles, who was Thomas Dewey's chief foreign policy adviser; Allen Dulles; C. Douglas Dillon; Christian Herter) were the personifications of the GOP Eastern Establishment, held in contempt by the Old Guard. Yet Nixon's determination had made the case such a partisan cause that they were drawn into it. And Nixon convinced them to bless his continuing struggle.

Nixon had hit upon a theme that Republican candidates used with tremendous effect in the 1950 midterm elections. It was a theme that the GOP had been marketing at the lower frequencies for years, without much result. Now it worked: “Fear. Nixon knew that fear was the way to get to the public. Fear of Alger Hiss and his kind; fear of Stalin and his bombs and rockets; fear of change; fear of someone getting ahead in the arms race; fear.”

When Hiss was convicted, Nixon immediately intensified his partisanship. “This conspiracy,” he said, “would have come to light long since had there not been a definite … effort on the part of certain high officials in two administrations [Roosevelt's and Truman's] to keep the public from knowing the facts.” Among the congratulatory notes he received was one he “cherished most,” from the Old Guard icon-in-exile, Herbert Hoover: “At last the stream of treason that existed in our government has been exposed in a fashion that all may believe.”

By now, Nixon was running for the Senate, attacking the Democrats as the blame-America-first party, a party that “has been captured and is completely controlled by a group of ruthless, cynical seekers after power—committed to policies and principles completely foreign to those of its founders.” His campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas was as noteworthy for its scurrilousness as his effort against Voorhis. Ambrose notes that Douglas herself was not entirely innocent of mudslinging. But once the campaign turned to mud, she was vastly outdone by the master.

Senator Nixon became Vice President Nixon in a thoroughly characteristic way: by becoming indispensable to the aspirations of a force larger than himself—those seeking the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention. His role required nothing less than the betrayal of the Old Guard that had previously sustained him. Nixon had already been handpicked for the position by talent scout Dewey, who escorted him into a meeting with the Eisenhower political directorate months before the convention. Thus Nixon allied his ambition publicly with the force he had initially and privately encountered in the Hiss case.

The nomination turned on the outcome of a credentials fight between competing Southern delegations—one group pledged to Ike, the other to Senator Robert Taft, the Old Guard standard-bearer. And the key to the outcome of this issue was the vote of the big California delegation. Within the delegation, the central figure was Nixon, who, with great aplomb, fostered the notion that Taft was unelectable. Nixon then gave an eloquent speech on the convention floor swaying delegates to vote for the Eisenhower Southerners, who were then seated. Years later, in 1969, while swearing in Nixon as president, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who, as governor, had been the nominal leader of that California delegation, confided to Nixon aide Herb Klein “that but for Nixon he might have won a compromise nomination for president himself in 1952.”

Two months after the convention, Nixon was revealed to have maintained an ＄18,000 “slush fund,” set up by friendly businessmen, for his personal use. His famous defense in the “Checkers” speech commingled themes from Horatio Alger with themes from Alger Hiss. There was the paean to hard work—“every dime we've got is honestly ours”—and the resolve to root out the all-encompassing conspiracy—“I am going to campaign up and down America until we drive the crooks and communists and those that defend them out of Washington.” Quickly, Eisenhower embraced him: “You're my boy!” Back home, his old drama coach at Whittier College, Professor Upton, watched his former student on television put his head on Senator William Knowland's shoulder and weep tears of joy. “That's my boy?” Upton shouted. “That's my actor!”

For Eisenhower, Nixon served as the partisan id. He spoke the unspeakable, earning him Adlai Stevenson's sobriquet as “McCarthy in a white collar.” Ike kept his distance, while gaining the benefit. Nixon was his bridge to the Old Guard, his conduit to McCarthy, and generally a source of political information. The vice president's many suggestions for foreign intervention, including dropping atom bombs on Vietnam in 1954 when the French were besieged at Dien Bien Phu, were uniformly rejected by the commander in chief. But he learned a great deal, traveled widely, and ran for the White House in 1960 on his superior experience.

Within a year of his honorable defeat by Kennedy, he was thinking of running for governor of California, a base from which he could again venture forth to win the GOP presidential nomination. The party establishment, “from Eisenhower on down,” feared that the California right would seize control of the state party. Since 1946 the Southern California right had grown more confident and virulent. Its motor, in the early 1960s, was a forerunner of the New Right, founded in the bitter aftermath of Taft's 1952 convention defeat: the John Birch Society. The shift from the time of Representative Nixon was apparent in the election as congressman of John Rousselot, the Birch regional director for Southern California and five Sunbelt states. Rousselot's 1962 fund-raising dinner featured the renowned toastmaster Ronald Reagan.

The suggestion that Reagan might be a candidate for governor quickened the pressure on Nixon. After he announced, his fund-raising lunch at the Bohemian Club was attended by the massed corporate titans of California—“quite a contrast to the Committee of 100 from the 1946 campaign,” writes Ambrose. But Nixon was not anointed. Instead he endured a primary against a right-wing candidate, Joe Shell, a former college football star turned oilman. Nixon attempted to denounce the Birch Society while giving credence to its anti-communist passion; he also did not want to alienate its activists and the many Republican officeholders who were Birch members. In the meantime, liberal Republicans deserted him to support the incumbent Democrat, Edmund “Pat” Brown. Soon Nixon was giving his most memorable performance since the “Checkers” speech: “You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” But he was wrong. There would be new Nixons; for them we must await Ambrose's concluding volume.

The Reagan years, filled with rhetoric about “a new cycle in American political history,” have curiously obscured Nixon. After all, it was Nixon, the native Californian, who began what Reagan hopped aboard. Unlike Reagan, he was painfully self-conscious about what he was doing, and about the price that was being exacted from him and others. Nixon actually lived and bore the scars of the social Darwinism that to Reagan has always been romance.

Moreover, the achievements of what is called the “Reagan revolution” pale next to the transformations that Nixon accomplished at all levels. Nixon in China is still breathtaking. By contrast, the most celebrated Reagan accomplishment—the change in the national brain waves from worried to happy, partly intended to induce amnesia about Nixon—has been the most ephemeral. Reagan's current bouts of cheerfulness, while the special prosecutor prepares his briefs, are more detached from reality than ever. In retrospect, Reagan may be seen as the end of the era that Nixon inaugurated.

As Reagan's benumbing optimism wears off, many of those who had faith in its powers are returning to a primordial resentment. Conservative activists and placemen, columnists and policy-makers are getting themselves in the mood for a young Nixon. If he cannot be found in 1988, a reconstituted Committee of 100 undoubtedly will begin the search.

He's back.