In October 1960, during
Richard Nixon's presidential campaign, columnist
Drew Pearson accused Richard of having a conflict of interest as Vice President; on December 10, 1956, Hannah Nixon allegedly received a $205,000 loan from the
Hughes Tool Company, owned by
Howard Hughes. Afterwards, Pearson wrote, Hughes' "problems with various government agencies had improved". Robert Finch responded to the allegation by saying it was "an obvious political smear in the last two weeks of the campaign", and that the loan actually came from Frank J. Waters, a California attorney who was Nixon's friend. Nixon had no comment. Richard described his mother as "a
Quaker saint". Sanchez spoke of his pride in being a
citizen of the United States and Richard and some female cleaners who were present applauded. One of the women present, Carrie Moore, asked Richard to sign her bible, which he did, and holding her hand told her that his mother "was a saint" and "you be a saint too". Hannah Nixon is acknowledged to have exerted a tremendous effect on her son's outlook throughout his life. In Richard's final remarks at the
White House on August 9, 1974, he said, "Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother – my mother was a saint. And I think of her, two boys dying of
tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother for three years in Arizona, and seeing each of them die, and when they died, it was like one of her own. Yes, she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint." == In popular culture ==