A .Nixon Photograph

...of the Cowles newspapers, quoted Chief Justice Warren as saying to Mazo: "I do not like it when you use me...

...If candidates for the Presidency were selected on the basis of a competitive civil service examination, Hoover—incidentally the only non-lawyer of the lot—would surely not have been the only one of these Republican worthies to have succeeded in his quest...

...During the year and more that Mazo spent preparing this book, he interviewed almost 300 persons who have had close associations with Nixon throughout his career...

...Murray Kempton...

...The expression, though infrequently heard in Whittier, California, fits the Vice President, too...

...Because Earl Mazo has rigorously adhered to the highest standards of the objective reporter's craft, he has raised many questions that would never have occurred to his readers without his aid...

...Perhaps, as Mazo argued at the time, the Chief Justice would not have handed down a judicial decision based on anything short of the full record...

...Both had unsuccessful fathers and ambitious mothers...

...Nonsense...

...Nor did Hiss...

...Mazo also talked to the men and women who taught Nixon at school and college, to his fellow townsfolk in Whittier, California, to members of his family, to his political associates and his political rivals— Democrats and Republicans—Thomas E. Dewey and Adlai Stevenson, Herbert Brownell and Harold Stassen, John Foster Dulles and Jerry Voorhis...

...Part of Our Time, attributes the Hiss-Chambers friendship to the attraction of opposites—the romantic, bohemian Chambers and the practical, ambitious Hiss—both Communists, but differently motivated...

...Warren, Stassen and Joe McCarthy...

...There are also those who doubt the President's own devotion to some of his principles of a few years ago...

...Richard Nixon, a decade later, chose to advance his fortunes by associating himself with Eisenhower Republicanism...

...Robert A. Taft and Thomas E. Dewey...

...author, "A World History of Our Own Times" THIS BOOK, within a week of its publication, inspired the Chief Justice of the United States to deliver one of his dissenting opinions, not from the bench but at the bar—of a Washington cocktail party...

...Herbert Hoover...

...Had Nixon never crossed Hiss's path—or Hiss Nixon's—their careers and the history of our times would have taken different courses...

...Godless cynics on the eastern seaboard have used the word "Christer" to describe Alger Hiss...

...But Nixon is singularly complex, a paradoxical combination of qualities that bring to mind Lincoln...

...Both became big wheels on different—very different—college campuses...

...Nixon falls into the Poincare category, along with such fellow Republicans as Elihu Root...

...His public activities do not provide an outlet for private frustrations...

...Complexity of character is not unusual among important men," writes Mazo on his opening page...

...Both men came of God-fearing middle-class families of less than middle income...

...What of 1960...

...Endless possibilities suggest themselves, and while Mazo is too good a reporter to commit himself to any reading of the future, there is such a thing as carrying the do-it-yourself school of political analysis too far...

...By the same token...

...Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Joe McCarthy...

...when you use this book, to step on my head—to go over my body to promote Nixon...

...The most readable pages deal with Nixon's campaigning, with the Hiss case, and with the Vice President's trip to Latin America...

...How different...

...He takes—or at any rate proclaims—a fatalistic view of his own political career...

...Democrats tend to fall into the Briand category—William Jennings Bryan...

...To this reader of both versions of the Nixon story, the difficulty goes deeper...

...The two men, according to Mazo, finally parted on good terms after the Chief Justice admitted that he had read only the parts of the book that had appeared in Look magazine...

...Nixon, like Hiss, belongs to the genus eager beaver americanus...

...He has no use for maverick Republicans of the George Norris-William Borah-Hiram Johnson type...

...Dulles...

...A train of thought that had never occurred to this reader's mind before the Mazo biography came along is that the parallels and contrasts between the careers of Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss throw more light on the Vice President than do comparisons between Nixon and Abraham Lincoln, Joe McCarthy or anybody else...

...Perhaps the time has not yet come to answer them, but when it does Mazo has an unfulfilled duty to perform...

...Will Stevenson do to Nixon what Truman did to Dewey or will Nixon do to Kennedy what Hoover did to Smith...

...There are those who doubt that Hiss remained a loyal Communist after he moved into the higher reaches of the New Deal...

...How those episodes ended the reader already knows, but Mazo brings them to life again...

...Moreover, somebody has subtitled Mazo's biography a portrait, not a photograph...

...Charles Evans Hughes...

...Here Mazo does less than justice both to himself and to Nixon...

...Without casting any aspersions on the Chief Justice's judicial integrity or on Mazo's journalistic integrity, it still seems possible to suggest—even to insist—that something more than thorough, objective reporting is needed to do full justice to the career, to date, of Vice President Nixon...

...As luck would have it, both Nixon and Hiss apple-polished their way into the good graces of John Foster Dulles...

...The Nixon career also recalls the classic contrast Clemenceau drew when he remarked that Poincare knew everything and understood nothing, whereas Briand knew nothing and understood everything...

...Nixon cannut withhold admiration from Chambers, who, in turn, writes warmly of Nixon in his autobiography...

...His family life has brought him as much happiness as his political life has brought him success...

...All of us consist of masses of paradoxes...

...The most valuable pages of this biography reveal new information on Nixon's personal relations with President Eisenhower...

...Will Nelson Rockefeller do to Nixon what Eisenhower did to Taft...

...The Vice President submitted himself to frequent, detailed, extensive interviews...

...Herbert Hoover, Dewey...

...Other judges, not of law but of letters, had already praised Earl Mazo for an outstanding contribution to contemporary history and biography, in the best tradition of thorough, objective American journalism...

...In Nixon's case, these paradoxes spring, in part, from the contrast between his political and personal aspects...

...Like Alger Hiss, Nixon doesn't believe in what he calls "fighting windmills...

...Mazo has relied primarily on his gifts as a narrator rather than upon his analytical powers, and in like manner has stressed the excitement rather than the significance of Nixon's career...

...I never in my life wanted to be left behind," Nixon has said of himself...

...There are those who doubt the purity of the Vice President's Eisenhower Republicanism...

...But after the two Earls—Warren and Mazo—met for the first time at a party, Clark Mollenhoff...

...But it does seem that a responsible reporter must stand by what a responsible magazine publishes over his name...

...And when Mazo began to defend himself, the Chief Justice asserted: "You are a damned liar...

...The deeper Nixon paradox—more implicit than explicit in the Mazo biography—is that he seems like a kind of cross between William Whyte, Jr.'s organization man and David Riesman's inner-directed type...

...Alger Hiss, in the 1930s, chose—at least for a while—to advance his fortunes by associating himself with Stalinist Communism...

...What he does not do is to pass any judgment of his own on the Nixon story, to date, or even to suggest some possible future alternatives...

...What should happen will happen," he says...

...Mazo also quotes Nixon's critics and admirers with fine impartiality-Having undertaken this enormous labor, having weighed and presented the evidence...

...writing on the Hiss case, in his book...

...Woodrow Wilson (who did not equal even Senator Lodge as scholar or historian), Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman...

...It is a dishonest attempt to promote Nixon...