President Nixon’s connection to Duke ‘is what it is’

Friends and law school roommates Lyman Brownfield and Richard Nixon ranked second and third, respectively, in the Class of 1937 at the Duke University Law in Durham, N.C. After graduation, Brownfield settled in Columbus, Ohio, and joined a law practice there. 

Nixon returned to his hometown of Whittier, Calif., and took a job with the law firm Wingert and Bewley. In 1939, the firm was renamed Wingert Bewley & Nixon. Nixon remained a partner of that law firm until 1952, when he was elected vice president of the United States.

 

Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon

Throughout his political career, Nixon stayed in touch with Brownfield, and they remained loyal pals. 

In 1970, Brownfield revealed: “Dick (Nixon) had to grow on you. He was intelligent, sincere…but not a backslapper.” 

“There wasn’t much to do but study at Duke,” Brownfield said. “We didn’t have money, so dates were few and far between.” 

“Ordinarily, Dick was a quiet fellow…but every now and again, we’d get a few beers in him and get him up on a table to make a political speech,” Brownfield said. “He had a great one on Social Security. It was all done in whimsy, of course.” 

Brownfield had a car – a nine-passenger 1926 Packard sedan. The law school students nicknamed the vehicle “corpus juris,” which “means body of law.” 

“Meals were supplied by a widow who ran a boarding house in town. It cost 25 cents for all you could eat,” Brownfield recalled. “Anyone who brought six or more people to dinner got his free, so I’d always pile as many people as I could into the car.” 

Nixon’s entry into politics came in 1946. Living in California, he ran as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He upset a five-term incumbent, Democrat Jerry Voorhis. Nixon was unopposed in 1948. 

Opportunity knocked in 1950, and Nixon ran for the U.S. Senate, facing off against Congress member Helen Gahagan Douglas. He won the race, but she was the first to give Nixon the label “Tricky Dick.” 

Nixon was still a relatively unknown commodity when the Republicans put him on the national ticket in 1952, as the “youthful running mate” of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Nixon showed an interest in learning how to fish, and Eisenhower gave him private lessons.

 

The Eisenhower-Nixon team won a landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson of Illinois and John Sparkman of Alabama. 

For the 1956 election, Republicans remained united with Eisenhower-Nixon as its dynamic duo. Stevenson was nominated for president once again by the Democrats, but Estes Kefauver of Tennessee became Stevenson’s running mate. 

When the votes were counted in 1956, Eisenhower and Nixon won re-election convincingly. 

But the political horizon was changing. At the Democrats’ 1956 convention, other names mentioned for vice president included: John F. Kennedy, Al Gore Sr., Hubert Humphrey, Luther Hodges and Lyndon B. Johnson. 

This set the stage for the historic election of 1960. Who would succeed Eisenhower in the White House? 

The Republicans picked Nixon as their presidential candidate in 1960, and his campaign came to Greensboro, N.C., on Aug. 17, 1960. (He was accompanied by his “personal advisor” Lyman Brownfield.) 

Nixon’s had promised to physically visit and speak to people in all 50 states. He told supporters in Greensboro: 

“The main personal reason why I wanted to come back to North Carolina as the first of the states in this part of the country is because I owe my education to North Carolina and to Duke University. If the university had not been so generous with its scholarships, I could not have come here.” 

“I have many memories of Duke,” Nixon said. “I remember that I worked harder and learned more in those three years than in any three years of my life. And I always remember that whatever I have done in the past, or may do in the future, Duke University is responsible one way or the other.”