Clams for Nixon

In 1969, the president arrived in San Clemente, California. Things changed fast.

When I was 10, my world was full of sand and salt and endless days under the hot Southern California sun. All summer long I swam and rode the shore break on planks of hard-packed styrofoam. My body was nut brown, my face streaked white with zinc oxide. Still, my nose peeled pink and by September was as rough as raw hamburger.

It was 1969, and nestled halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, San Clemente was peopled mostly by working professionals, couples who had come from everywhere to live by the idyllic blue-green Pacific. Whether in the tendril-like ranch houses or in the glaring stucco cottages, no one lived more than a mile from the beach. Ours was a bright town, with a bright future.

Although nearly uniformly white, we were religiously diverse. My parents, East Coast transplants, were lapsed Jews, and at times it seemed we lacked something, and perhaps it was religion.

Yet our blue clapboard house was surrounded by believers. Born-again Christians flanked us on the right, with…