" Old friends who knew the family, including Paul Smith, Nixon’s professor at Whittier College, were fascinated by the vastly disparate characters of the two parents: Frank, with his anger and rage, Hannah, with her beatific gentleness and quiet, unbending sense of purpose. To her, a Milhous was still special and her son was a Milhous, destined to be extremely successful and yet highly moral. The effect of that on Nixon, Smith thought, was powerful: He was a young man caught between his father’s rage and sense of injustice and his mother’s high moral purpose, ambition, and concern for correct behavior. In Smith’s view, this was the key to his character—his inability to reconcile the two sides. "

― David Halberstam , The Fifties