Being Nixon: A Man Divided (10 page)

Nixon jumped up and put on his wrinkled gray suit for an audience with the general. “I felt hot, sleepy, and grubby,” he recalled. There was no time to shower and shave. A few minutes later, Nixon emerged from the motorcycle-escorted limousine and ascended to Eisenhower’s suite at the Blackstone Hotel. Nixon greeted his new running mate with a boisterous, “Hi, chief!” He immediately regretted his attempt at bonhomie.
³⁶
Ike’s wide smile faded. General Eisenhower, Nixon was discovering, harbored a certain reserve and did not appreciate informality from those down the chain of command. Nixon would later say that he “always felt like the junior officer coming in to see the commanding general.”
³⁷

Pat Nixon was in the Stockyards Inn coffee shop, biting into a sandwich, when she heard the news of her husband’s selection. “That bite of sandwich popped right out of my mouth,” she recalled. She went upstairs and put on her prettiest black-and-white print dress and a white hat and headed for the Amphitheatre. She kissed her husband once, then again for the photographers.
³⁸
An enormous roar went up from the ten thousand revelers jamming the hot, loud convention hall. Nixon, wide-eyed, thrilled, gripped General Eisenhower’s wrist and held up his arm. He sensed that Eisenhower “resisted it just a little.”
³⁹

On a brief holiday in the mountains, the running mates attempted to bond. Eisenhower tried to teach Nixon how to fly cast. “I caught his shirt on the fourth try,” Nixon recalled. “The lesson ended abruptly. I could see he was disappointed.”
⁴⁰
(The next year, Ike would try to instruct Nixon at golf. The lessons went no better. “Look here,” Ike told Nixon, “you’re young, you’re strong and you can do a lot better than that.”)
⁴¹

Nixon’s role in the campaign, traditional for a running mate, was to go on the attack so that Eisenhower would not have to. Nixon duly compared Eisenhower’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, to a “waltzing mouse” and, before a Texas audience, went further, accusing the Truman administration of “coddling communists.” Nixon was performing a part, but he seemed to relish it. “Rock ’em, sock ’em” politics kept him in the news.
⁴²

In mid-September, the
Nixon Special
, the vice-presidential candidate’s whistle-stop tour, was chugging up central California, when Nixon’s press secretary, Jim Bassett, told the candidate that the
New York Post
had published a story under the headline “
SECRET NIXON FUND
!” The subheading read: “Secret Rich Man’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.” The greatest crisis of Nixon’s young life had arrived.

“
T
he
Post
story did not worry me,” Nixon recalled in
Six Crises
. “It was to be expected.” At the time a liberal paper, the
New York Post
was given to tabloid salaciousness. “Six Sex Arrests” was a larger headline on the
Post
’s front page that day than “Secret Nixon Fund.”
¹
The story, written by a Hollywood reporter who doubled as the
Post
’s West Coast political writer, wasn’t even a scoop. Other news organizations had reported the existence of the roughly $18,000 fund (almost $160,000 in 2015 dollars) in less lurid terms. The money had been raised from private donors to allow Senator Nixon to run what Murray Chotiner called a “permanent campaign”—largely, to meet travel expenses. It was not a secret, and Nixon did not use it to maintain a lavish lifestyle.
²

At whistle stops that day aboard the
Nixon Special
, Nixon was mostly concerned with protecting his sore throat as he yelled out to the crowds, “Who can clean up the mess in Washington?” (“Ike can!”) But by the end of Friday, September 19, Nixon and his increasingly anxious staff began to note that more newsmen were coming on the train, and they were persistently asking Nixon about “the secret fund.”

At ten o’clock that night, as the train pulled off on a siding in southern Oregon, a reporter asked Nixon if he had any comment on the
New York Herald Tribune
editorial. Nixon asked, reasonably enough, “What editorial?” The newsman reported that the next
morning’s paper would have an editorial calling for Nixon to step down from the ticket.

The vice president and Mrs. Nixon.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

“This one really hit me,” Nixon recalled. He felt as if the train had suddenly jolted. The
New York Herald Tribune
was his ally. Its Washington bureau chief, Bert Andrews, had been his friend and partner in chasing Hiss. The newspaper was known as the voice of the Republican establishment. But that was the problem. The true loyalty of Andrews and the editors at the
Herald Tribune
was to a culture and a set of customs that were far removed from the failed citrus orchards of Yorba Linda or the smash-mouth politics of Murray Chotiner. The editorial, Nixon realized with a growing dread, could reflect the thinking of General Eisenhower and, just as certainly, the bankers, lawyers, and retired generals in Brooks Brothers suits who surrounded him.

He had not heard directly from the Eisenhower campaign for two days. Three time zones separated the
Nixon Special
from the Eisenhower campaign train, the
Look Ahead, Neighbor! Special
, and communications in that pre–cell phone age were primitive. Still, the silence was ominous.

Nixon called in Chotiner and Pat. The candidate suddenly felt exhausted and depressed. He told his wife about the
Herald Tribune
editorial—Chotiner already knew about it—and she was “shocked,” Nixon recalled. “Much of the fight had gone out of me by this time, and I was beginning to wonder how much more of this beating I was going to be able to take.” Maybe, he suggested to his wife, he should resign.

Pat reacted “with fire in her eyes,” he recalled. He later reprised her words:

You can’t think of resigning. If you do, Eisenhower will lose. He can put you off the ticket if he wants to, but if you, in the face of attack, do not fight back but simply crawl away, you will destroy yourself. Your life will be marred forever and the same will be true of your family, and particularly, your daughters.

How well she knew her husband! “I was never to receive any better advice,” he reminisced, “and at a time when I needed it most.”
³

By the time the train pulled into Portland on Sunday, the crowds were turning ugly. Hecklers carrying signs that read “
NICKLES FOR POOR NIXON
” were throwing coins at Pat and Dick until they had to duck. At the hotel, Nixon received a massage for his agonizingly tense neck and back. He was handed a telegram from his mother—“Girls are okay. We are thinking of you.”—which Nixon understood as her Quaker way of saying that she was praying for him. He had to step into a vacant room to hide his tears.

In the living room of his suite, Nixon huddled with his campaign advisers. Bill Rogers, a Washington lawyer who would later become Nixon’s secretary of state, said that Nixon would have to resign. Chotiner said no—the PR man was savvy enough to know that if Nixon were dumped from the ticket, it would be a confession of Republican corruption and Eisenhower would lose the election. Nixon got up from the table and said, as though to himself, “I will not crawl.”
⁴

Finally, at 10:05
P.M
., came the long-awaited telephone call from the Eisenhower campaign. Nixon was slouched in an armchair with his feet propped up on a coffee table. His arms were hanging listlessly by his sides.
⁵
Rose Woods stuck her head into the room and said, “General Eisenhower is on the phone.”

Nixon braced himself. “Hello Dick,” came the flat Kansas twang over the line, “warm and friendly,” Nixon would recall. “You’ve been taking a lot of heat the last couple of days. I imagine it’s been pretty rough,” said Eisenhower. Nixon did not disagree.

“You know,” the general continued, “this is an awfully hard thing for me to decide. I have come to the conclusion that you are the one who has to decide what to do.”

Nixon let the line hang silent. Eisenhower suggested that Nixon go on national TV to make his case to the American people. Nixon had already been considering such a step, but he wanted to know if Ike would back him up—or at least put him out of his misery. “General,”
he asked, “do you think after the television program that an announcement could be made one way or another?”

The man who gave the order on D-Day hesitated. “I am hoping that no announcement would be necessary at all,” he replied, “but maybe after the program we could tell you what ought to be done.”

This was too much for Nixon. He could no longer “yessir” his commander. “There comes a time in matters like this,” Nixon blurted, “when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot.”

Nixon could see that his language startled the others in the hotel room. He assumed that it shook Eisenhower, “who was certainly not used to being talked to in that manner.” But Eisenhower, who was hardly unfamiliar with barracks language or intemperate subordinates, would not be stirred. “We will have to wait three or four days after the television show to see what the effect of the program is,” he said.

There was nothing more to discuss. Eisenhower never asked whether the fund story was true. “Keep your chin up,” said Ike and hung up.
⁶

Nixon went to find Pat. She was resting in bed nursing a painfully stiff neck. Her friends, Jack and Helene Drown, had been trying to comfort her. Over and over, she had said to them, “It can’t be happening. How can they do this? It is so unfair. They know the accusations are untrue.” Helene later told Julie Nixon Eisenhower, “It almost killed me to look at her. She was like a bruised little kitten.”
⁷

But with her husband Pat was firm: “We all know what you have to do, Dick,” she told him. “You have to fight it all the way to the end, no matter what happens.” Nixon returned to his own room—he did not share a bed with Pat, who found it impossible to sleep with her husband when he was constantly getting up in the middle of the night to write notes to himself.
⁸
Nixon sat up most of the night, thinking, girding himself, alternately swallowing or channeling his self-pity, forging the power of his resentment.

On the plane to Los Angeles in the morning, Nixon tried to doze but couldn’t. He began jotting notes on some postcards he had found
in the seatback. He recalled a quote from Lincoln that “God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them.” He remembered that during the 1944 election, FDR had ridiculed his critics for attacking his dog Fala. Here was a chance to turn the tables on the Democrats. He made a note: “They will be charging that I have taken gifts. I must report that I did receive one gift after the nomination—a cocker spaniel dog, Checkers, and whatever they say, we are going to keep her.” He recalled a Truman scandal involving a $9,000 mink coat to a White House secretary. He made a note that Pat had no mink coat—just a “good Republican cloth coat.”

He turned to Pat in the seat beside him and told her that Eisenhower had said that they would have to disclose all their personal finances. She burst out, “Why do we have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe? Aren’t we entitled to at least some privacy?” Nixon answered, “People in political life have to live in a fishbowl,” but he knew, as he later recalled, that “it was a weak explanation for the humiliation I was asking her to endure.”
⁹

Chotiner dropped by Nixon’s seat. He noted that all the Democrats except the presidential candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson, were attacking Nixon. “I smell a rat,” said Chotiner. “I’ll bet he has something to hide.” Chotiner’s typically base and shrewd instinct was confirmed when they arrived in Los Angeles, where Nixon was to go on national television the next day. Stevenson confirmed that he had his own private fund for campaign expenses, just like Nixon. But he refused to take reporters’ questions, and—gallingly to Nixon—the press “treated him with kid gloves.”
*
¹

All through the night and into the next day, Nixon holed up in the Ambassador Hotel, working on his speech, “scarcely bothering to touch the hamburgers that were ordered from room service.”
¹¹
He was troubled, also thrilled. Here was crisis in the extreme, politics in
its purest, most trying and exalted form. He was alone, with the whole world watching. In
Six Crises
, Nixon would lay out an elaborate rationale for his relentless work ethic in stressful times. “It has been my experience that, more often than not, ‘taking a break’ is actually an escape from the tough, grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance….Sleepless nights, to the extent the body can take them, can stimulate creative mental activity.” He added, revealingly, “For me, it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at it.”
¹²

Republican Party officials had paid $75,000 to buy a half-hour of airtime on the NBC network at 6:30
P.M
. (9:30
P.M
. Eastern time). At 4:30
P.M
., while Nixon was grinding away at the third draft of his speech, he received a phone call from a “Mr. Chapman” in New York. That was the code name for Governor Dewey. Nixon instantly sensed trouble in Dewey’s pinched voice.

“There has been a meeting of all of Eisenhower’s top advisers,” Dewey began. “They have asked me to tell you that it is their opinion that at the conclusion of the broadcast tonight you should submit your resignation to Eisenhower. As you know,” Dewey continued, in the time-honored tradition of political cowardice, “I have not shared this point of view, but it is my responsibility to pass this recommendation on to you.”

Nixon was struck dumb. Dewey jiggled the receiver. “Hello, can you hear me?”

Nixon asked, “What does Eisenhower want me to do?” Dewey hedged and equivocated.

“It’s kind of late for them to pass on this kind of recommendation to me now,” Nixon said. His anger was rising. He looked at his watch. He had a half-hour to get cleaned up and read over his notes.

“What should I tell them you are going to do?” asked Dewey.

Nixon exploded: “Just tell them I haven’t the slightest idea as to what I am going to do and if they want to find out they’d better listen to the broadcast. And tell them I know something about politics too!” He slammed down the receiver.
¹³

The 750-seat El
Capitan Theater in Hollywood was empty. Nixon wanted no reporters. They watched over a monitor in a separate room. NBC had constructed a flimsy, fake-home set with a desk, a chair, and a bookcase set into the wall. A makeup man applied beard-stick to Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, even though he had shaved a half hour before.

Nixon was “suddenly overwhelmed with despair,” he later recalled. His voice trembled. “I just don’t think I can go through with this one,” he told Pat. “Of course you can,” she answered, and took his hand. They walked on stage.

The director gave the signal. “My fellow Americans,” Nixon began, “I come before you tonight as a candidate for the vice-presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity has been questioned….”
¹⁴

Nixon had warned
Pat that he would lay bare their personal finances, and he did. To show the nation that he was not a sleazy politician on the take, he earnestly, painfully recited their modest income and considerable debts, including a $3,500 loan from his parents and a $500 loan to buy life insurance and the $80-a-month rent he and Pat first paid on their little apartment in northern Virginia. “Well that’s about it. That’s what we have,” said Nixon, “and that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much. But Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she’d look good in anything.”

The camera cut to Pat Nixon, sitting beside her man on the set. She looked noble, exposed, tragic, and stricken.

“One other thing I should probably tell you,” Nixon went on, “because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station down in
Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted. And our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers.”
¹⁵