Being Nixon: A Man Divided (13 page)

Nixon decided to go to San Marcos only after he was in his car the next morning. At the gates of the university, he faced about two thousand people, chanting and emitting that high, jeering whistle. Along with his translator, Colonel Vernon Walters, and a Secret Service agent, Jack Sherwood, Nixon walked up to the crowd. He told Walters to translate: “I want to talk to you. Why are you afraid of the truth?” (Walter later recalled he heard a student say, “El Gringo tiene cojones”—the Yankee has balls, high praise in Latin America.)
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Suddenly, a rock glanced off Nixon’s shoulder and hit Sherwood in the face, chipping a tooth. As more rocks began to fly, Nixon ordered retreat—but slowly, still facing his attackers. In the open limousine, Nixon instructed Sherwood to brace his legs as he stood to shout, with Walters translating in rapid-fire Spanish, “You are cowards, you are afraid of the truth! You are the worst kind of cowards!”

Back at the hotel, Nixon was within fifty feet of the door when the crowd closed in again. A demonstrator spat in his face. Sherwood spun the man away, but not before Nixon had kicked him in the shins. “Nothing I did all day made me feel better,” Nixon recalled.
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Nixon’s brave stand drew international attention. Ike sent him a cable—“Dear Dick, Your courage, patience, and calmness in the demonstration directed against you by radical agitators have brought you new respect and admiration in the country.” Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Time-Life founder Henry Luce, sent Nixon a one-word cable that pleased Nixon, the Teddy Roosevelt worshipper. It read: “Bully.”

A still more severe test awaited. The CIA had picked up rumors in
Venezuela of a plot to assassinate the visiting American vice president. Venezuelan authorities reported back that everything was under control.

From the window of his airplane at the Caracas airport on the morning of May 13, Nixon could see and hear demonstrators whistling and chanting. On the red carpet leading into the terminal, the Nixons paused while a band played the national anthems of both countries. “For a second,” Nixon recalled, “it seemed as if it had begun to rain.” Nixon looked up at the observation deck. The crowd was spitting. Pat Nixon recalled that the gobs of spit looked like giant snowflakes.
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Nixon turned to look at his wife. Her bright red dress was splotched with brown stains (the mob was chewing tobacco).

Inside the terminal, Pat tried to reach out and touch the shoulder of a girl who was screaming at her. The girl turned and burst into tears. Inside the limousine, the Venezuelan foreign minister tried to use his handkerchief to wipe the spit off Nixon’s suit. “Don’t bother,” Nixon said. “I am going to burn these clothes as soon as I can get out of them.”

Exiting the highway near the National Pantheon, the motorcade ran into a roadblock. Nixon’s Secret Service man, Jack Sherwood, looked out the window and said, “Here they come!” Hundreds of people came boiling up out of the alleys and side streets. They were yelling and armed with crowbars and stones. The first rock hit the supposedly unbreakable window and lodged in the glass, spraying the car with tiny glass slivers. One struck the foreign minister in the eye. Bleeding, he began to moan, “This is terrible, this is terrible.”

A man began smashing at the window with an iron pipe. Glass fragments cut the mouth of Nixon’s interpreter, Colonel Walters. Nixon began to feel the car rocking back and forth. He had read about mobs overturning cars and setting them on fire. For the first time, he later said, he wondered if he was about to die.
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Sherwood pulled his gun from his holster. “Let’s kill some of these sons of bitches,” he said. In a cool, even voice, Nixon told him to hold his fire. As Walters later recalled Nixon’s words, the vice president
said, “Put away that gun. If they open one of those doors and pull me into the street—and only if I tell you—do you use it.”
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The press truck ahead managed to pull out of the mob and lumber over the traffic island. Nixon’s limousine followed, plowing through the crowd. The Venezuelan police reasserted some measure of control, and the motorcade roared away and headed for the embassy. Nixon had been trapped for twelve minutes. A later investigation found a cache of Molotov cocktails waiting at the Pantheon.
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Nixon flew home from the Caracas airport, which was empty this time, cleared by troops and tear gas. Eisenhower, the cabinet, leading members of Congress, the diplomatic corps, and about fifteen thousand people were waiting for him at the airport in Washington. Crying, Tricia and Julie hugged their parents. For several weeks thereafter, Nixon wrote, “neither Pat nor I could appear anywhere in public without people standing up to applaud. For the first time I pulled even with Kennedy in the Gallup presidential trial heat polls.”
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Jack Kennedy had been a war hero, celebrated (after some skillful family promotion) for his bravery as a PT boat captain in World War II. Now Nixon, too, was seen as a heroic figure—a
popular
hero.

Every summer vacation
that Nixon had planned since he came to Washington in 1947 had been cut short, and 1958 was no exception. Nixon had just arrived with his family at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia on August 25 when the White House called. The president was on the line. “I wonder if you could talk to Sherm….” he began.
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Sherman Adams, Ike’s chief of staff, had gotten caught up in an influence-peddling scandal. Adams had taken a Vicuna coat and other favors from a New England textile manufacturer named Bernard Goldfine. Adams, an acerbic New Englander who usually hung up without saying good-bye, had few friends left in Washington. The president needed to cut Adams loose, and he wanted Nixon to do it for him. At the Greenbrier, Nixon abandoned his family and drove back to Washington to see Adams. The encounter with the president’s
top aide was painful. The vice president, who hated personal confrontations, hemmed and hawed with the phlegmatic Adams, who stared stonily back at him. More unsuccessful meetings and failed delegations followed. Grumbling about his feckless subordinates, Eisenhower himself finally had to fire his chief of staff.

“My mother would remember always that particular episode,” Julie Nixon Eisenhower recalled, “not only because the vacation plan was ruined, but also because she foresaw that for her husband it was a no-win proposition: Adams would resist, and the President would be disappointed.”
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Nixon recounted the incident more obliquely, but tellingly. In his memoirs, he remembered a conversation from about that time with Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s World War II chief of staff. In his cups, the hard-bitten Smith began to tear up. “I was just Ike’s prat boy,” he told Nixon. “Ike always had to have a prat boy, someone who would do the dirty work for him. He always had to have someone else who could do the firing, or the reprimanding, or give orders which he knew people would find unpleasant to carry out. Ike always had to be the nice guy. That’s the way it is in the White House, and the way it will always be in any organization that Ike runs.”
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In a later interview, Frank Gannon asked Nixon if the experience with Sherman Adams and Bedell Smith affected him during Watergate by making him reluctant to fire his top aides until it was too late. Nixon answered, guardedly but with uncharacteristic self-awareness, “It probably had some effect.”
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Nixon resumed his
globetrotting. He continued to surprise foreign observers who had formed a sour impression by reading the American press. America’s relations with its most valuable ally—Great Britain—were shaken after the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Eisenhower had peremptorily stopped a British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. On a trip to London in November 1958, Nixon was able to reassure the British government that the Atlantic Alliance remained necessary and strong. After meeting privately with Nixon at Whitehall, the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote a memo-to-file:

After Dulles’s ponderous evasions, Nixon’s incisive frankness was a great relief. He has a first class mind backed up by a masterly understanding of the world scene….The president’s deputy does not appear to be, as was sometimes feared, a kind of political ogre without principle or integrity, but rather a tough politician who possesses common sense as well as formidable energy, charm, and a lively intelligence…if he succeeds Eisenhower, the world will have nothing to worry about. He may well be a considerable improvement!
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At the Grosvenor Square residency of the U.S. ambassador, Jock Whitney, Nixon hosted a Thanksgiving Day dinner for the Queen of England. Nixon had packed his white tie and tails, only to learn at the last moment, in a reversal of his embarrassment at Christian Herter’s, that the Queen expected less formal attire—black tie, not white tie. “Frantic,” Nixon’s military aide Don Hughes recalled, Nixon’s aides stripped an American PR man of
his
tuxedo and put it on Nixon.
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The comic opera wardrobe changes might have worked, but Nixon couldn’t resist blurting out to the puzzled young Queen, “I’m afraid this isn’t my suit!”
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Nixon described himself to an admiring early biographer, Bela Kornitzer, as a man who rose above political invective, who did not take the bait. Kornitzer tried to get a rise out of his subject: “I believe you are the most maligned figure in political history,” he said to Nixon in an interview on March 25, 1959. “I acquired from my mother a great tolerance, an understanding of human failings,” Nixon responded, a bit piously, invoking the Quaker tolerance of his parents. “I’m not as tolerant as they are,” he said. “But I have a considerable degree myself. I do not hold on to grudges. I inherited from my father a hot temper but I inherit from my mother an ability to control it.”
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Nixon’s remark about “not holding grudges” seems preposterous,
given the events that were to come, but there is little reason to doubt that he saw himself that way. In any case, he was given a chance to demonstrate his self-control with one of history’s brashest provocateurs, Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev, on a trip to Moscow in late July 1959. In the Cold War America of the late 1950s, still shaken by Sputnik and the doomsday specter of Soviet rockets raining down nuclear weapons, Khrushchev was a figure of fascination and not a little fear. Bragging and bombastic, the Kremlin leader had threatened, “We will bury you!” at a meeting with Western ambassadors in 1956. He had meant that communism would ultimately triumph over capitalism, but Americans took his threat more literally. Eisenhower wanted to meet with Khrushchev, to talk him down, but first he sent Nixon to Moscow on a scouting trip.

Even by his law school “iron butt” standards, Nixon’s preparation for his first trip to the Soviet Union was epic: For nearly six months he studied CIA and State Department briefings and interviewed all manner of experts. His wariness of Harvard notwithstanding, he used as his tutor Harvard professor William Yandell Elliott, who in turn put Nixon in touch with a prodigy of international security named Henry Kissinger.
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Arriving in Moscow on July 22 on a brand-new Boeing 707—the age of jet travel had just arrived—Nixon, typically, could not sleep. His first encounter with Khrushchev at the Kremlin the next morning was not elevating. The Kremlin boss swore that a congressional bill calling on the Soviet Union to release its “captive nations” in Eastern Europe “stinks like fresh horse shit, and nothing smells worse than that.” Not to be one-upped in the barnyard, Nixon countered that “there is something that smells worse than horse shit—and that is pig shit.”
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Nixon tried to be statesmanlike when the two drove together to a trade fair, where they stopped at a TV studio built by RCA to show off to the Russian people the novelty of color television. But he fretted that he came across as meek next to the browbeating Khrushchev. When the vice president left the studio he was “sweating profusely,” recalled William Safire, then a twenty-nine-year-old PR man working
for a homebuilder who was exhibiting “the typical American house.” Nixon wasn’t being paranoid; Khrushchev had “clobbered him,” Safire recorded in his memoirs.
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But when the debate moved to a different set—an ultramodern American kitchen—Nixon rallied and hit back in measured fashion.

“We are strong. We can beat you,” blustered Khrushchev, heaving his bulk around.

Nixon responded sternly but calmly: “No one should ever use his strength to put another in a position where he has in effect an ultimatum. For us to argue who is the stronger misses the point. If war comes we both lose.”

There was more posturing and finger-pointing and some raised voices, but Khrushchev seemed to sense that Nixon was not an adversary he could easily bully. At a banquet afterward, Nixon followed Khrushchev’s lead and threw his vodka glass into the fireplace.

Nixon was given the unprecedented opportunity of addressing the Russian people on TV, a speech he sweated over but delivered calmly. Afterward, Nixon may have become a little tipsy, because Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother who had joined them on the trip, later told historian Michael Beschloss that Nixon consumed “six or seven” martinis and became sloppy. That many martinis would have put Nixon under the table; Nixon more likely drank two or three. With his limited capacity, one or two would have made him wobble, especially when he was exhausted and excited, as he surely was that night.
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Nixon’s euphoria, no matter how gin-induced, was understandable. Khrushchev was an enormous figure in the Cold War world, menacing with his rockets, meaning to frighten and succeeding. By standing up to him in the kitchen debate, Nixon had shown his mettle to a global audience. That Nixon could keep his cool while Khrushchev blustered was a tremendous confidence builder. Nixon had begun the 1950s showing that he was ready for a California-wide political campaign. He ended the decade demonstrating that he was ready for global statesmanship. He had “won” by remaining cool; for
an excitable, decidedly uncool kid in high school, the face-off with Khrushchev was immensely redeeming and self-affirming. Nixon had found, through politics, a confident identity.