Being Nixon: A Man Divided (16 page)

Years later, in his memoirs, Nixon explained his reticence with Eisenhower. The night before the White House lunch, he recounted,
Mamie Eisenhower had called Pat and begged her to stop the president from campaigning. The strain on his heart might kill him, the First Lady had said. According to Nixon’s account, she had also implored, “Ike must never know I called you.”
⁴²
So Nixon had behaved nobly by refusing, without explanation, Ike’s help on the campaign trail. The diary of Dr. Howard Snyder, Ike’s physician, supports the claim—it records Snyder himself asking Nixon to “either talk him out of it or just don’t let him do it—for the sake of his health.”
⁴³
Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, later said that Mamie denied to her that she had called Pat asking her to intervene; Susan’s brother, David, speculated to the author that his future father-in-law just didn’t want to rely on Ike, that he wanted to win the presidency on his own—a sin of pride forgivable in such a self-made man.
⁴⁴
The misunderstanding between Eisenhower and Nixon was just the last in a long series. Though he was put off by Nixon from time to time, Eisenhower knew that, together, the two men had reinvented the modern vice-presidency; that Nixon had been an active and respected participant on the National Security Council; and that he had acted exceptionally well as Ike’s envoy and executor. Even Mamie, though she had been catty about Pat’s off-the-rack wardrobe, had defended Nixon against the criticisms of Ike’s brother Milton and his son John.
⁴⁵
For his part, Nixon showed remarkable loyalty to a man who on occasion treated him shabbily. Nixon could behave like an angry child when he was exhausted and stymied, but he also showed remarkable forbearance and acceptance of the things he could not change.

Between the Republican
Convention in July and Election Day on November 8, Nixon traveled sixty-five thousand miles and gave 180 formal speeches. By the end he was drained and, at moments, near delirium. In Stockton, California, he fell so profoundly asleep that his aide Don Hughes was not able to shake him awake. Finally, Nixon opened his eyes and announced, “I think God is with us.”
⁴⁶
After an endless day of jumping from airport to airport, rope line to rope line,
Nixon turned to Haldeman as he staggered to his limousine and said with exhausted seriousness, “Bob, from now on, there will be no more landings at airports.”
⁴⁷
A few days before the vote, in Detroit, the candidate became upset when an advertising consultant named Everett Hart refused to run an errand; Nixon punched him in the chest.
⁴⁸

After a grueling trip to Alaska to fulfill his pledge to visit all fifty states, Nixon slept for two hours—his first time in a bed in seventy-two hours—before arising on Election Day to cast his vote and to visit his mother in Whittier. Nixon wanted to get away, anywhere. He sent Pat and the girls to get their hair done and told Herb Klein, “No reporters.” With Hughes and Jack Sherwood, the Secret Service man who had pulled his gun in Caracas, he motored south (“no radio”), eventually reaching Tijuana, just over the Mexican border, where he drank margaritas at a German restaurant. On the way back, he summoned Hughes (“You’re my favorite Catholic”) and sat in the back pew of the old Mission at San Juan Capistrano, lost in thought or prayer.
⁴⁹

His election night headquarters was the gaudy Royal Suite at the Ambassador Hotel, a riot of purples, pinks, reds, violet silk, and velour. While Pat retreated to her room upstairs, Nixon watched the early returns. All the anchormen in New York were predicting a Kennedy victory, perhaps a landslide. Nixon was skeptical; he knew it was going to be close. By midnight on the East Coast, the anchormen were looking less smug: Nixon was doing well in the Midwest and his native West. But by 2:30
A.M
. (11:30
P.M
. in Los Angeles), Nixon’s extraordinarily accurate internal vote counter—supplemented by columns of figures on his ubiquitous yellow pads—told him that victory was probably impossible. He would have to carry Illinois as well as his home state, California, and at least one other.

Nixon summoned Pat and told her that they needed to go down to the ballroom, face the TV cameras, and concede that Kennedy was likely to be elected president “if the present trend continues.” She refused. She had been hearing the rumors of voting shenanigans in
Illinois and considered Kennedy a fraud and scoundrel. Two weeks before the election, she had asked adviser Bryce Harlow, “How can we let the American people know in time what kind of a man Kennedy is?”
⁵⁰
Now, she angrily told her husband, “I simply cannot bring myself to stand there with you while you concede the election to Kennedy.”
⁵¹
She turned and went back upstairs to her room.

Her friend Helene Drown followed her. “You’ve got to go with him,” she said. Pat knew she was right.
⁵²
She had come this far with a mixture of fortitude, fatalism, and a certain dry humor (she was thinking of titling her memoirs
I Also Ran
.)
⁵³

Pat went to Nixon, who was alone scribbling notes, and said, “I think we should go down together.” But it was hard. She would always feel pained to remember the television image of her face, almost skeletal (she had lost ten pounds from her thin frame) and desolate as she choked back tears standing beside her man. “No, no, no!” came cries from the audience. “You’re still going to win!”

After his almost-concession, Nixon watched the returns—still agonizingly close, but not close enough, and went to bed around 4
A.M
. Barely two hours later, he recalled in
Six Crises
, “I felt someone shaking my arm insistently and urgently. I opened my eyes and saw it was Julie.” The Secret Service had showed her to his room. The twelve-year-old girl asked, “Daddy, how did the election finally come out?”

Trying to be as gentle as possible, Nixon answered, “Julie, I’m afraid we have lost.”

“She started to cry,” Nixon recalled, “and the questions tumbled through her tears: ‘What are we going to do? Where are we going to live? What kind of job are you going to be able to get? Where are we going to school?’ ”
⁵⁴

On the grimly
silent plane back to Washington, Nixon summoned his campaign aides, one by one, to the front of the plane to thank them. Peter Flanigan, a twenty-seven-year old New York investment banker, was brooding over the Catholic vote. It had been split 50-50 in 1956,
but in 1960 it swung 75 percent to Kennedy. JFK had made a campaign issue out of religious bigotry, going on national TV to say that nobody had asked his religious beliefs when he was serving in World War II. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Kennedy’s brother Robert had been using every surrogate he could find to get out the Catholic vote. “Bobby played it like a yo-yo,” Flanigan recalled. Young Flanigan, who had been a contemporary of Robert’s at Portsmouth Priory, a small Catholic boarding school (from which RFK had been dismissed for cheating), had wanted to “stem the tide” of Catholic defection from the GOP with “independent” advertisements aimed at Catholic markets. Nixon had chewed him out. “Don’t play the religious card under any circumstances whatever,” he told Flanigan. Nixon undoubtedly picked up anti-Catholic votes from Protestants, but he had been smart—and principled—enough to leave the issue alone.

Now, as he made his way up the aisle of the plane to see the boss, Flanigan prepared himself to apologize for not trying harder to win Catholics. “I thought it was my job to tell him we had let him down,” Flanigan recalled. “But his purpose was to ease our disappointment. He said, ‘Peter, we’ve laid to rest the dragon of religion in politics.’ ”
⁵⁵

Flanigan and others in the campaign, including those who had endured the candidate’s occasional tantrums, would always remember Nixon’s decency in defeat—and his unwillingness to match the Kennedys’ slickness and dirty tricks. Nixon had a different takeaway from the 1960 campaign. “Kennedy’s organization approached campaign dirty tricks with a roguish relish and carried them off with such insouciance that captivated many politicians and overcame the critical faculties of many reporters. I should have anticipated what was coming….”

He made up his mind not to make that mistake again: “I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.”
⁵⁶
Or, as his daughter Julie put it more succinctly, Nixon “vowed never to be at the mercy of such political hardball himself.”
⁵⁷

*
“Walking around money” may have been a bigger factor than the flyers, which were not distributed in time to affect the vote. The Kennedy operation made large payments to black preachers and local politicians to make sure that they got out the vote.
³¹
The Nixon campaign passed up chances to reach out to black leaders. Jim Bassett recalled that Haldeman at the last minute canceled a brunch for Nixon with “leading blacks of Chicago, clergymen, businessmen, etc.” Nixon later claimed he had never heard of “walking around money” until the 1960 election—and that when his GOP operatives did try to use cash to win black preachers, they were outbid by Joe Kennedy.
³²

O
n the night after the election, Nixon’s plane “landed in one of those dreary, drizzling rains which plague the Washington area during the late fall,” Nixon recalled. Within two days he was on a boat off Key Biscayne, having a drink and trying to let the sun soak out his nearly existential fatigue. Len Hall, the Republican Party leader (who had felt marginalized in the campaign), somewhat cruelly dredged up the recent past by asking, “Why did you debate?” Nixon looked up at the sky with his eyes closed. “He looked incredibly tense, that terrible tension was there,” remembered Hall. “And there was no answer.”
¹

Nixon was having dinner at the Jamaica Inn in Key Biscayne that night when the maître d’ told him he had an important phone call. Herbert Hoover (“the Chief”) had been enlisted by Joe Kennedy to set up a meeting between Nixon and President-elect Kennedy.
²
The Kennedy patriarch was worried that Nixon would contest the results. Kennedy had won the popular vote by an official count of 112,827 votes out of approximately 68.8 million cast, a paper-thin margin. In Chicago, where a switch of just 4,500 ballots would have given the critical state to Nixon, there were rampant charges that Mayor Daley had turned out the graveyard vote. In the wee hours of the morning of November 9, Daley had called Kennedy and said, “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re
going to carry Illinois.”
³
(In one mostly black precinct of Chicago, there were more votes cast for Kennedy than people living there.)
⁴

Nixon graciously offered to meet Kennedy at his father’s Palm Beach home, but Kennedy answered that it would be easier to come to him (“I have a helicopter at my disposal,” said the commander-in-chief-to-be). When the two men met at the Key Biscayne Hotel on November 14, Kennedy began, “Well, it’s hard to tell who won the election at this point….” The president-elect was fishing, trying to gauge whether Nixon would go to court.
⁵

The two men skirted around the issue, trading political shoptalk, but Kennedy needn’t have worried. To be sure, Nixon was under pressure from his daughters at home: “How can you possibly talk to that man after what he said about you in the campaign?” Nixon answered that it was the only proper thing to do. Julie interjected, “He didn’t win. Haven’t you heard about all the cheating in Illinois and Texas?”
⁶
Leading Republicans from President Eisenhower to Len Hall to Senator Everett Dirksen urged Nixon to consider a legal challenge. Nixon permitted some “independent” groups to test the legal waters.
⁷
But by mid-December he had confirmed his initial instinct that a challenge would be counterproductive, making him look like the sore loser and putting a cloud over the new president at a dangerous time in the Cold War. To Bryce Harlow, who was sure that Lyndon Johnson had stolen Texas for Kennedy and that the vice president had a “responsibility” to assure the country of an honest election, Nixon replied, “It’d tear the country to pieces. You can’t do that.”
⁸

Nixon did the right and honorable thing, and he showed his grace again when he found himself in the awkward position, as vice president, of formally certifying his opponent’s election in Congress. On January 6, presiding over a Joint Session in the House chamber, Vice President Nixon announced the electoral vote (Kennedy 303, Nixon 219) and made a short speech:

This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated
and announced the victory of his opponent….In our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.

Republicans and Democrats alike stood and loudly applauded until the vice president took a second bow.

Two weeks later, on a cold clear day at the East Front of the Capitol, Nixon listened as President Eisenhower audibly ground his teeth through his successor’s Inaugural Address. Vowing to “bear any burden” sounded like dangerous over-promising to Ike.
⁹
That night, Nixon, alone, was driven to the Capitol, past the couples struggling through the new snow in their ball gowns and tuxedos. Nixon opened a door off the empty Rotunda and looked out over the West Grounds, toward the Washington Monument, stark and clear against the sky, and the Lincoln Memorial shining in the distance. “As I turned to go inside, I suddenly stopped short,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs, “struck by the thought that this was not the end—that someday I would be back here. I walked as fast as I could back to the car.”
¹⁰

The message was
waiting by the telephone in the hall of Nixon’s home in Wesley Heights. It was from Tricia. “JFK called,” read the note from the precocious eighth grader. “I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.” Nixon was being summoned to the White House. It was April 20, 1961; the headlines were all about the new president’s first bold stroke, a fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. A CIA-backed rebel force had been driven into the sea by the army of communist strongman Fidel Castro.

Entering the Oval Office, Nixon was shocked by JFK’s appearance. The vigor had vanished. He looked “beaten, very wan, tired, harassed,” Nixon later recalled. Kennedy got up from his rocking chair and started to pace, “using a string of four-letter words that he didn’t use at Harvard,” Nixon recalled.
¹¹
(“He said shit six times!” Nixon wrote at the top of his notes of the meeting.)
¹²

Kennedy asked Nixon what he should do. Flattered to be consulted, the former vice president responded, “There’s no question about what should be done. You’ve got to get Castro out of there.”
¹³
By instinct as well as by dint of his long tutorials with John Foster Dulles, Nixon was an interventionist. He believed that the United States should use military force to drive back communism. In 1954, when the French had abandoned Vietnam, Nixon had been more inclined than Eisenhower to send in ground troops.
¹⁴
Pondering what to do about Cuba, President Kennedy was reluctant to send in the Marines. Nixon told him he would support him whatever he decided to do.

As Kennedy walked Nixon out to the Rose Garden, the president suggested that “every public man” should write a book—as a good way to “elevate himself in popular esteem” as “an intellectual.” Then Kennedy remarked, “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for the president to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?”

Nixon’s devotion to
politics, dimmed by the painful loss, was renewed by his Oval Office visit. Nixon could not help but feel that he, not Kennedy, belonged there and that, in time, he would find his way back. In the meantime, partly inspired by Kennedy’s offhand advice, he did produce a book. For a memoir by a politician,
Six Crises
is remarkably candid about the author’s moods and temper, his visceral turmoil as he fought through the Hiss case, the Checkers Speech, the “Dump Nixon” campaign, and other struggles of his fourteen years in Washington. But the book is ultimately more tendentious than intentionally revealing. It is a carefully constructed argument designed to show how Nixon’s emotionalism was a sign of strength, not weakness—that his sleeplessness, his testiness, his occasional explosions were all necessary steps, even welcome in their way, toward facing down his enemies. The book says everything about how he psyched himself up to deal with crisis. It says nothing about the risks of exaggerating his enemies or becoming oversensitive to slights.

Of course, it is just a book, a political memoir designed to buff the reputation of a recently vanquished candidate for president, not a confessional intended to bare his soul. Maybe the memoir is simply incomplete; we cannot know what he was thinking in the darkness before the dawn. At some deep level, Nixon may have grasped that he was caught in an elemental contest, wrestling atavistically with his fears. But Nixon never admitted to such a struggle. Nixon’s essential nature remains elusive in part because he took steps to hide who he was—from the public and his family, and, perhaps, at a conscious level, even from himself. In an unusually frank interview with Stewart Alsop in 1958, Nixon said, “I can’t really let my hair down with anyone, anyone at all.”
¹⁵
It is not glib to suggest that Nixon could not have honestly looked inward and still been Nixon. Nixon had to overcome his extreme shyness, his essential aloneness, to meet the demands of vote-getting and projecting a public persona in a massmedia democracy. There is something undeniably brave about his determination to convert his insecurities from debilitating weakness to propulsive power. If he had to put on blinkers to run on a muddy track, so be it.

And yet, blinkers can blind. Again and again, Nixon faced the question of how to reconcile his introverted nature with his extrovert’s calling. That conundrum, of course, begs a larger question: How many great men of history were truly self-aware? Could they afford to be, and still see themselves as great? In Greek tragedy and later in Shakespeare, hubris is less a warning than an inevitability—
the
fatal flaw, unavoidable even when recognized. It is not an accident that two of history’s greatest leaders, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, showed signs of manic depression, at times suffering from what the clinicians call “delusions of grandeur.” Yet in their mania, if that’s what it was, they were very grand indeed. Nixon was not manic, but he could be at once visionary and blind.

Nixon was a proud writer. Like all politicians, he used ghost writers and speechwriters, but he labored over drafts, and his work—and the voice behind his published words—can be truly called his own.
He recalled that writing a book was surprisingly hard and draining. He became run down and lost ten pounds.
¹⁶

Nixon drafted
Six Crises
while living alone in an apartment, then a rented house in Los Angeles, eating TV dinners off trays. He had gone to work at a law firm run by one of his old political supporters, Earl Adams, to make some money. Pat was back in Washington while the girls finished the school year before moving to California. Nixon was, by his own account, lonely, short-tempered, and bored. He missed politics and the public stage.
¹⁷

“The pressures to run for governor began almost from the day I arrived back in California,” Nixon wrote in his memoir
RN
. As he was leaving the Oval Office in April, even President Kennedy wanted to know if he would run for governor. Nixon answered no, but over the next few months he changed his mind. A rematch against Kennedy in 1964 seemed like a prohibitive long shot, and the California governorship was a way to keep his hand in politics. At first, Nixon was ahead in the polls. Still, he had some reasons to hesitate. One was that he really wasn’t interested in being governor. Another was Pat—he had promised that he would spend more time with her and the girls, who were just entering their teenage years.

Nixon was building a “dream house” for his family in Trousdale Estates above Sunset Boulevard, with white carpeting, seven bathrooms, and large picture windows as well as a full-time staff—Manolo and Fina Sanchez, Cuban refugees who were to become part of the Nixon family. “I had never seen Pat so happy. She was so glad to be out of politics,” Nixon biographer Earl Mazo later told Julie.
¹⁸
On September 25, 1961, Nixon apprehensively gathered his family at the dinner table and told them that he was thinking of running for governor (he had already told an aide to schedule a press conference for September 27). Nixon expected Pat to balk, and she did. “If you run this time, I’m not going to be out campaigning with you as I have in the past,” she said. The girls were more positive: Tricia wanted Nixon to run “just to show them.”

Nixon repaired to his study to make some notes, as he recalled,
“announcing that I had decided not to run for governor.” After about half an hour, Pat came in. Nixon could not really see her face in the shadows outside the circle of light from his desk lamp. He could hear that her voice was struggling with emotion. “I have thought about it some more,” she said. She was “more convinced than ever” that running would be a mistake. But if he did run, she said, “I’ll be there campaigning with you just as I have always been.”
¹⁹

And so the play went on. Nixon seemed to need to test Pat, to win her support by saying that he was ready to give it all up—so that she would rescue him once more by pledging her devotion. The Nixons may not have been aware of the drama they were staging, but they certainly knew their parts.

On the campaign trail, Pat’s driver, Jack Carley, a twenty-one-year old college grad, noted that Mrs. Nixon was savvy, good-humored, and deliberate. She was so fastidious that Carley once had to pull off into the emergency lane of a roaring freeway to fetch a fresh pair of white gloves from the trunk. Pacing herself, she would ask Carley to circle the block rather than get to an event before almost everyone else had shown up. But she was steadfast; she never complained. Late in the campaign, she cracked three ribs in a fall. Her doctor told her to go to bed, and instead she taped up her rib cage and kept campaigning.
²⁰

On the stump, her husband was oddly flat. He had to fend off a challenger from the right, ultraconservative Joe Shell, and the incumbent governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, was not dazzling, but he was gregarious and available. By autumn, Nixon was running behind Brown in the polls and needed to debate to try to catch up. At the face-off in San Francisco on October 1, Tom Braden, publisher of the
Oceanside Blade-Tribune
, asked a loaded question: Was it moral or ethical for Nixon to permit his family to take a “secret loan from a major defense contractor”?
*
¹