We continue now with three quick chapters from Edward Jay Epstein's work,'Agency of Fear Opiates and Political Power in America'...

...A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.
-EDWARD LUTTWAK,
Coup d'Etat
Of course the fragmentation of the police in the United States has largely resulted from the deliberate intention of denying the federal government a possible instrument of tyranny.
-EDWARD LUTTWAK,
Coup d 'Etat
Richard Milhous Nixon did not follow any of the charted channels of American politics in his extraordinary passage to the presidency. Whereas other American presidents could point to their "humble origins" with some sort of romantic pride (or even describe their family summer home as a "log cabin"), Nixon really suffered during his childhood from poverty. His father, Frank Nixon, moved to California at the turn of the century after having been frostbitten working in an open streetcar in Columbus, Ohio. After working as a farmhand and oil roustabout, he attempted to cultivate lemons outside Los Angeles. After Richard was born, on January 9, 1913, Nixon abandoned the "lemon -ranch," and the family moved to the Quaker community of Whittier, California. They were so impoverished that Nixon's mother was forced to work as a scrubwoman in a sanatorium in Arizona in order to pay for the treatment of Richard's brother Harold, who suffered from tuberculosis. At the age of ten Richard Nixon was sent to work as a farm laborer to help out his family. He fully understood the degrading nature of poverty; at the age of fourteen he was forced to work as a barker for a fortune wheel for the Slippery Gulch Rodeo, a cover for illegal gambling rooms in back of the rodeo."

Young Nixon also exercised his oratory skills on the Whittier High School debating team and won prizes for the best oration on the Constitution. He graduated from high school in the. depths of the Depression, and worked his way through a small Quaker college in Whittier while living at home and supporting his family. Then, winning a scholarship, he attended law school at Duke University. Although he distinguished himself and graduated third in his class, all the prestigious New York law firms where he applied for a job turned down his application, apparently because he did not have the right contacts or connections. He continued to eke out a living as a clerk in a local law office in Whittier for the first few years after law school; then, when World War II broke out, he joined the Navy as a junior officer. He was eventually sent to Middle River, Maryland, to assist the Navy in liquidating contracts for a flying-boat project (in which Howard Hughes also took an active interest)

Late in 1945, a few months after he completed the settlement for the Navy on the boat project, Nixon was invited by a group of local businessmen, in his hometown of Whittier, to seek the Republican nomination for the congressional seat then held by Jerry Voorhis, a liberal Democrat. But until that time, Nixon had had no grounding in local California politics-indeed, he attended his first political rally in 1945-and therefore, in lieu of local issues, he played upon a more generalized fear: the fear of communism. In likening communism to an invisible virus that infects the body politic, he was able to arouse fears among the public that even avowed non-Communists might serve as carriers of this dread disease. Thus, even though his opponent Voorhis was outspoken in his criticism Of Communism, Nixon labeled him in the public's mind as a tool of communism. The politics of fear worked for Nixon, and he was elected to Congress in 1946 and reelected in 1948. In 1950 he defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas for her seat in the United States Senate, having defamed his opponent as the "pink lady" and a "dupe" of communism. In the Senate, he so adroitly managed the putative menace of international communism that General Dwight D. Eisenhower chose him as his vice-presidential candidate. In 1952, seven years after he entered politics as a Navy veteran, the former barker from Slippery Gulch was elected vice-president of the United States.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/07/part-2-agency-of-fearthe-barker-of.html