The Making of the President 1960

p. 65

White characterizes Richard Nixon: He is an “almost stock character in the panel of American types. Poor from boyhood, able, intense, dark and watchful as he surveys the word around him, Richard M. Nixon has brought from his impoverished middle-class youth many strange qualities–the thrust of enormous internal drives, an overwhelming desire to be liked and, where he is rebuffed, a bitter, impulsive reflex of lashbacks. Having made it on his own, he has had to learn to court people whom he has necessarily disliked. He has had to realize how vulnerable a naked man, without money or family prestige, can be in a hostile world that over and over again savages him for no reason he can define. He has thus come to regard the world around him with a wary, forbidding suspicion. A brooding, moody man, given to long stretches of introspection, he trusts only himself and his wife. An outsider trying to get in.