Being Nixon: A Man Divided (12 page)

The press and public took notice: Here was one famous “Red hunter” turning on another—only Nixon was representing the president of the United States. McCarthy began muttering about “the constant yak-yakking from that prick Nixon.”
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In the spring of 1954, McCarthy finally brought himself down, a drunken bully exposed in nationally televised hearings. “McCarthyism,” chortled Ike, “is now McCarthywasm.”
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But some of McCarthy’s mud splattered on Nixon. Adlai Stevenson accused Nixon of “McCarthyism in a white collar,” implying that he was less reckless but still odious to the American sense of fair play. “The president smiles while the vice president smears,” said Stevenson, who was still smarting because Nixon had dubbed him “Sidesaddle Adlai” in the 1952 election.
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In the fall of 1954, Eisenhower spent the first month of the midterm congressional campaign at the Denver White House (his in-laws’ home). “After a few hours of work in the morning he would golf in the afternoon,” Nixon recorded in his memoirs with a trace of bitterness. Nixon, meanwhile, traveled twenty-six thousand miles in six weeks, visiting ninety-five cities in thirty states and speaking on behalf of 186 GOP candidates. For the last three weeks he slept no more than five hours a night.

His heart was not in it. “I still resented being portrayed as a demagogue or a liar or as the sewer dwelling denizen of Herblock cartoons in the
Washington Post
,” he later wrote. “As the attacks became more personal, I sometimes wondered where party loyalty left off and masochism began. The girls [who turned eight and six in 1954] were
reaching an impressionable age, and neither Pat nor I wanted their father to become the perennial bad guy of American politics.”
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Nixon canceled his home delivery subscription to
The Washington Post
so that the girls would not have to see their father climbing out of the sewer in a Herblock cartoon, but they could not altogether avoid the press.
³⁹
The night their father had been nominated for the vice presidency, cameramen and reporters burst into the Nixon house in Spring Valley; their popping flashbulbs frightened the girls. (Lurking outside a few days later was a
Washington Times Herald
reporter named Jacqueline Bouvier, soon to be Kennedy. When the girls emerged she asked them if they ever played with Democrats. “What’s a Democrat?” asked four-year-old Julie.) In 1954, a reporter chatted up Tricia, age seven, by telling her that her father was “famous.” She responded, “If he’s famous why can’t he stay at home? Why is he gone all the time?”
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Georgetown society dined out on Nixon. In the drawing room of Averell Harriman’s mansion on N Street, his wife Marie and her bridge group snickered that Marie’s pet dog, a terrier, had thrown up watching the Checkers Speech.
*
²
Closer to home, Spring Valley was not always so welcoming, either. Connie Casey, the daughter of a Democratic congressman, recalled that when a rumor spread that Nixon was starting a petition to get rid of neighborhood housing covenants against Jews and blacks, her mother refused to sign. Normally, Mrs. Casey was a good liberal, opposed to racial and ethnic discrimination, but she declared, “If
he
is for it, I’m against it.”
⁴¹

The barbs and cold looks caused Nixon to question his calling. This seems hard to believe, in retrospect—after all, never was there a more committed politician than Richard Nixon. But Nixon’s large capacity for self-pity was aroused by the constant attacks, real and perceived, and he was bothered by the change in Pat’s attitude. She
had always shared his ambition, but after the ordeal of the Checkers Speech, she seemed truly sick of politics. As early as February 1954, Nixon had scribbled some notes on a yellow pad weighing whether to quit politics. At the top of the page he had written, “Reasons to get out”; under “personal” he wrote “Wife—(columns, personal, staff hurts).”
⁴³
He was stung in April when the Duke faculty voted not to give him an honorary degree and was wounded again in June when Whittier students formed two lines at commencement—one for those wishing to shake his hand, the other for those wishing
not
to shake his hand.
⁴⁴
At the Capitol, presiding over the Senate, he seemed to be going through the motions. “He had to sit up front in the Senate, but when he was off duty you would see that hunched figure trying to skulk off down the back ways,” recalled Hugh Sidey of
Time
magazine.
⁴⁵

On Election Day, November 2, as he flew back to Washington, he took out a folder of notes he had made for an election-eve broadcast. Nixon handed them to Murray Chotiner in the seat beside him. “Here’s my last campaign speech, Murray,” he said, wallowing a bit. “You might like to keep it as a souvenir. It’s the last one, because after this I’m through with politics.”
⁴⁶

The Republicans lost control of the House and Senate. Nixon was despondent, and Pat was too. A few weeks after the election, their daughter Julie recalled, they talked about their future. Pat worried that if things turned out well, Eisenhower would get the credit. If they did not, Nixon would get the blame. They were not in control, and their relationship with Ike was, as Julie described it, “so delicate and tenuous.”
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Pat made Dick write down a promise that after the vice presidency he would quit politics and go back to California to practice law.
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O
n a warm Saturday afternoon, September 24, 1955, Nixon was lazily reading batting averages in the
Washington Evening Star
when he got a call from Jim Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary. Hagerty told Nixon that the president had suffered a heart attack. Nixon’s silence lasted so long that Hagerty wondered if he was still on the line.
¹

For ten minutes, Nixon would later recall, he sat in his living room, his mind whirling. Then he called Bill Rogers, his close friend who had offered support during the Checkers crisis. Nixon’s voice was “hoarse and charged with emotion,” recalled Rogers. “ ‘It’s terrible! It’s terrible!’ he said over and over again.” Nixon asked Rogers if he could give him sanctuary from newsmen. Then, remembering that he had forgotten to tell Pat the news, he rushed upstairs to tell her.

Rogers’s wife, Adele, parked a block away as reporters and photographers descended on Nixon’s house in Spring Valley. As Rogers later told the story, it was decided to use the two Nixon girls, aged seven and nine, “as decoys” to engage the reporters in “small talk” while Nixon slipped out the back. Nixon spent the night at Rogers’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, wide awake as he endured Rogers’s fifteen-year-old-son playing with his ham radio on the floor above all night.
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At the White House, Nixon was careful not to sit in Eisenhower’s chair when he presided over an emergency meeting of the president’s
advisers. He knew, as he recalled, that he was “walking on egg shells.”
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In the Cabinet Room, Nixon was not necessarily first among equals. Even before the heart attack, Eisenhower’s powerful chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was rumored to be the White House regent, at least for domestic affairs. John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, was widely regarded in the press as the true architect of American foreign policy, puppetmaster to the syntactically challenged, golf-loving Ike.

The fan.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

This was a misperception fostered by the wily Eisenhower, who liked to work behind the scenes—mainly so that he could use others to play the heavy or take the blame. With Ike gone, Dulles appeared to be the senior partner. Dulles was a public moralizer and aspirant Great Man. In his public appearances, he displayed more gravitas than the “rock ’em, sock ’em” Nixon of the campaign trail. Nonetheless, Nixon had quietly grown close to the pious and outwardly pompous secretary of state. The two were alike: socially awkward, intense, off-putting to some but possessed of a well-disguised gentleness and profoundly absorbed by the task of advancing America’s world role. Nixon would stop by Dulles’s house on some evenings for a drink and a chat. Dulles would teach Nixon about the world, and Nixon would teach Dulles about politics; the overlap was considerable and mutually beneficial.
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Now, as President Eisenhower was slowly recovering in a hospital bed in Denver, Nixon and Dulles kept the nation on course with a minimum of disruption. The Cold War was in a temporary lull, allowing Nixon time to advance his little-noticed education in statecraft. White House speechwriter Emmett Hughes was impressed with Nixon’s poise and restraint during the fall of 1955, when the world wondered if the American president would be able to resume his duties. It was, Hughes later wrote, Nixon’s “finest official hour.”
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Fully engaged in leading while trying not to look like it, Nixon was no longer thinking of quitting politics, his promise to Pat notwithstanding. Later, when reporter and early Nixon biographer Earl
Mazo asked him why he changed his mind, Nixon answered, “Once you get into this great stream of history you can’t get out.”
⁶

On the day
after Christmas in 1955, President Eisenhower, now back in the Oval Office, invited his vice president over to the White House for a chat. Nixon’s sensitive nerves began twitching almost right away. After some desultory chatter, Ike began the real conversation by noting that Nixon’s poll ratings were lower than Adlai Stevenson’s in head-to-head surveys. Sensing a put-up job by Eisenhower’s advisers in the East Coast establishment, Nixon tried to protest that his poll ratings were improving. In his avuncular style, Ike went on: Maybe Nixon should consider taking a cabinet position in a second Eisenhower term. The jobs of attorney general and secretary of state were filled, but the Defense Department might come open, said Ike.

Nixon’s spirits sank. He knew what the headline would read:
NIXON DUMPED
.
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Six or seven times over the winter of 1956, Ike blandly suggested that Nixon take a cabinet post—Commerce, perhaps? Health, Education, and Welfare?—rather than run for reelection as vice president. He said the choice was up to Nixon. Stubbornly and grimly, Nixon replied that the choice was Eisenhower’s, that Nixon would do whatever the president deemed best for the country. This “no, after-you” routine might have been comic, but to Nixon it was deeply demoralizing.
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Eisenhower looked at Nixon the way a general does at an up-and-coming colonel. He believed that the young politician needed seasoning, maturity, and training in management and leadership.
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Secretary of defense would do nicely. Nixon could think only of the political ignominy of demotion. He took it personally. In mid-winter, Republican National Committee chair Leonard Hall was dispatched by the president to give Nixon a gentle shove. Nixon’s eyes “turned dark, dark, dark,” Hall recalled. He turned to Hall and said of the president, “He’s never wanted me. He’s never liked me. He’s always been against me.”
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That was not entirely true, but Nixon could not be blamed for
failing to read Eisenhower’s inscrutable demeanor. The emotional toll of the situation became physical. Nixon checked into Walter Reed Medical Center that winter suffering from exhaustion and various ailments, both real and imagined. He saw at least ten different doctors, and Dr. Hutschnecker prescribed Equanil, a habit-forming, barbiturate-based tranquilizer that would be discontinued a few years later; Dexamyl, an amphetamine-based upper; and Doriden, a sleeping pill later deemed to be hypnotic. These drugs, widely prescribed in the 1950s, made a potent drug cocktail, especially when mixed with actual cocktails. On a desperately needed Florida vacation in March of 1956, Nixon reported to Hutschnecker that two or three drinks in the evening made him “feel good.”
^11
,
*
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All through the winter of 1956, Eisenhower blandly fended off press inquiries about Nixon’s future. At a news conference on March 7, asked if he intended to drop Nixon from the ticket, Eisenhower answered that his vice president would have to “chart his own course.” That was the last straw. On the morning of March 9, desolate and bitter, the vice president drafted a press statement to the effect that he would not run for reelection in 1956 and intended to call a press conference later that day.

Once again, Pat Nixon stood defiant. Wishfully, if not naïvely, she had been holding on to her husband’s written promise, secured just a year earlier, to quit politics and become a private lawyer. But she was shocked by the toll political rejection had taken on her husband. He seemed to be literally wasting away. She would later tell her daughter Julie that she had never seen him so depressed. Realizing that private life could be a kind of death to Nixon, she tore up his “contract.” Eisenhower was being unfair, she argued to her husband. To her friend Helene Drown she wrote, “No one is going to push us off this ticket.”
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A few days later, still feeling wobbly despite Pat’s newfound resolve, the Nixons went to dinner at the home of their one defender in social Washington, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. As they entered her turn-of-the-century mansion just off Dupont Circle, she called out from the top of the stairs, “Have you been listening to the radio? There’s a write-in vote for you in New Hampshire.” Eisenhower was the only name officially on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary, but a surprisingly large number of voters had gone to the trouble to write in Nixon’s name as well. (New Hampshire senator Styles Bridges, an archconservative and ally of Nixon’s, had been quietly beating the local bushes.) A devoted lover of politics, Mrs. Roosevelt rushed through dinner, Nixon recalled, so that they could retire to the drawing room and listen to the radio. Beneath the pelts of wild animals shot by her father, “Mrs. L.,” as Nixon called her, and her guests sipped coffee and discussed the redemptive returns. The ordinary people, the have-nots, the “Silent Majority,” as Nixon would later call them, had spoken, and Nixon got to celebrate the news with the doughty daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, Nixon’s beau ideal of the “man in the arena.”

Eisenhower got the message from the voters. “Anyone who attempts to drive a wedge of any kind between Dick Nixon and me has just as much chance as if he tried to drive it between my brother and me,” he told reporters. Nixon arranged an audience with the president and said that he would be honored to continue as vice president. With Jesuitical innocence, Eisenhower asked why he had taken so long to say so.
¹⁴

In later years,
Nixon’s closest aides—men like Henry Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman—would laugh at the popular image of Nixon the Imperial President, barking orders at cowed subordinates.
¹⁵
Nixon’s desire to avoid awkward scenes was so great that he rarely, if ever, directly braced an underling. His outbursts were not infrequent, but they were very rarely aimed directly at the subject of his ire. He would loudly complain about an aide or adviser, but not face-to-face. More
admirably, he went to great lengths to avoid hurting people’s feelings. Chuck Colson said that Nixon could be “brutally cold, calculating, a manipulator of power”—but also marveled that he “could never bring himself to point out to a secretary her misspellings. I once saw him re-dictate a letter to eliminate a troublesome word, rather than embarrass the secretary.”
¹⁶

He disliked personal confrontation of any kind. Yet he seemed to welcome
public
confrontation. He was a tireless hand-shaker and baby-kisser and was fearless about taking on hostile crowds. On a trip to Africa in 1957, a reporter from an African-American newspaper wrote with some wonder, “Oft times…[I] had heard that Mr. Nixon lacked warmth, soul, sincerity…that everything he did was motivated by cold, calculating logic. The Nixon I observed did not fit this stereotype. I can’t forget the sight of Dick Nixon kissing the upturned faces of little black babies.”
¹⁷

Some of his willingness to risk exposure was just political necessity, a burden shouldered, grudgingly but dutifully, by a private man living a public life. To his speechwriter William Safire, Nixon quoted Walter Judd, a right-wing congressman who had been a mentor of sorts. “Walter Judd used to say, ‘You have to make love to the people.’ It’s always been a very difficult thing for me to do, but you must plunge into the crowds. You have to show you care, and of course,” Nixon added, “you must care.”
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As ever, Nixon’s motivations were cloaked in apparent contradiction. While Nixon could be, or pretend to be, cynical about voters, he more often identified with them. Still, the way in which Nixon waded into crowds—doggedly, bravely, even a little recklessly—suggests some deeper, more personal driving force than political expediency or democratic sympathy. Fear of heights made Nixon a cliff diver.

Elected to a
second term in a landslide in November 1956, Eisenhower continued to use his vice president as a kind of forward observer, sending him abroad to scout out trouble spots and report back.
¹⁹
With its tiny landed oligarchy and vast dispossessed poor,
South America was an obvious target for leftist agitators, and by the late 1950s the universities and labor movements in parts of Latin America were seething with unrest.

In the spring of 1958, Nixon was invited to attend the swearing-in ceremony for the first democratically elected president of Argentina since the fall of strongman Juan Perón. Nixon did not want to go. He was busy organizing Republicans for the 1958 elections, eager to establish himself as the head of the party and the presumptive heir to the GOP presidential nomination in 1960. But Eisenhower leaned on his vice president and laid on a trip that would take the Nixons to every South American country but Brazil and Chile.
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Pat was also not eager to travel. She was in bed suffering from a bad back, a recurring ailment usually exacerbated by stress, in this case brought on by lifting her daughter to look at a bird’s nest.
²¹
Shopping for a wardrobe for the South America trip, she had called Mollie Parnis, a dress designer for First Lady Mamie and other powerful Washington women. When Miss Parnis mentioned this to Mamie, the First Lady breezily responded, “No, no dear, don’t do that. Let the poor thing go to Garfinckel’s and buy something off the rack.”
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The Nixons’ capacity to endure small indignities was further tested in Buenos Aires at the presidential inauguration. The Nixons arrived too late at the white-tie event to see the swearing in; the embassy had miscalculated the traffic. At first, the South American crowds were peaceful, even friendly. But ever since a CIA-backed coup had overthrown the leftist government in Guatemala in 1954, the last vestiges of FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America had given way to suspicions of American meddling. Among students and workers, resentment of
los norteamericanos
was on the rise. In Peru, as his motorcade entered Lima, Nixon heard for the first time an oddly shrill, derisive whistle that signaled mocking disrespect. Nixon was scheduled the next day to visit the city’s ancient University of San Marcos. Leaflets encouraged workers and students to bar the American dignitary
—GATHER TO SHOUT WITH ALL YOUR FACES—DEATH
TO YANKEE IMPERIALISM—AGENT OF GREAT NORTH AMERICAN MONOPOLIES AND PARTISAN OF ATOMIC WAR—
and the local police warned Nixon against going, suggesting instead a visit to the tamer Catholic University.
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Lying in bed that night in the grand old Hotel Bolivar, Nixon recalled how Ike had once told him that he had suffered from sleeplessness in the lead-up to D-Day, but that once he had decided, he had slept well. Nixon could not sleep. He could hear chants of “Fuera Nixon”—Nixon Go Home—and, occasionally, “Muera Nixon”—Death to Nixon.