Fifty-one years ago, standing before the nation, and just hours before abdicating its highest office in disgrace, Richard Nixon made a prediction. “Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother.” Having reached the pinnacle of public life, he was now wallowing in its depths. “Yes,” he reiterated, “she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.” As sure as there has been no president since Nixon to resign the presidency, there has, in that same time, indeed been no books written about his mother. Until now.

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Quaker Saint: The Life and Times of Hannah Milhous Nixon is the first account of the mother of our thirty-seventh president, chronicling the life of a woman overlooked and misrepresented by history.  It dispels the many myths perpetuated by Nixon scholars for eighty years: that Richard Nixon’s misdeeds can only be explained by a childhood devoid of love and affection and punctuated with puritanical overtones. Quaker Saint corrects the record, telling Hannah’s remarkable story of an idyllic Quaker childhood in southern Indiana, and follows her to the citrus-scented hills of southern California at the turn of the century, when a carefree childhood was eclipsed by the trials of primitive living, a difficult marriage, and the stresses of motherhood.

 

Ultimately, Quaker Saint is the story of how one woman’s faith conquered sorrow and sacrifice. Caring for two young  sons inflicted with tuberculosis, raising a family in the Great Depression, struggling with her Quaker pacifism during war, and being unfairly drawn into the national spotlight of political scandal, Hannah leaned on her “inner light” to carry her through, and to eventually help guide one son to the peak of national politics.

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Quaker Saint presents a little-known perspective into the childhood, heritage, and career of Richard Nixon, and offers a unique window into the life of one who raised, not only a president, but five boys at the turn of the twentieth century in the desolate island communities of California, who knew a blissful childhood, a hard and grief-stricken adulthood, and a proud and fulfilling motherhood. Additionally, readers will be given a hard look into the founding of Quakerism, the transformation of the faith in America, and the role it had on its most faithful in times of great tests and despair. Moreover, while it does correct the record, it also corrects Richard Nixon.

 

Mr. President, there will indeed be a book written about your mother.