ic address as president is relevant to this research because it captures what appears to have been one of his most deliberate and considered choices about how he wanted his political legacy to be understood. It is possible, of course, that including reference to his parents was a Nixonian strategy for obtaining sympathy at a time when he was beyond being politically embattled and was on the brink of enacting the role of the politically disgraced. But in August of 1974 no one anticipated what turned out to be Nixon's rather successful project of rehabilitating his position as an elder statesman in the decade after his resignation; one of Ambrose's biographical volumes on Nixon refers to his "ruin and recovery" after his resignation (1991). Thus it seems reasonable to suggest that whatever Nixon's other faults may have been as person or politician, he did not attempt to account for his predicament by claiming that something about his past somehow exonerated him from personal responsibility for his present and future. A retrospective viewing of the videotaped speech plainly shows that if he felt ashamed of himself at that or any other moment of pubic life, he appeared to be both proud of and grateful for the parents who nurtured him in childhood.
Because of the contrast between the picture Nixon gave of his childhood and the setting in which he gave it, the course of Nixon's journey from the poorest lemon ranch in California to the White House qualifies as a worthy subject of political biography. But also valuable, and certainly more manageable within the scope of limited research, is analysis of whether and to what extent a milieu of the lemon ranch and sickly siblings exerted an influence on shaping the philosophy, ambition, and behavior of an emergent and effective American politician. No less significant may be research that helps determine whether and to what extent the politician may have abdicated the lessons of life absorbed in ...