Being Nixon: A Man Divided (17 page)

Nixon had heard this one before. Hoping to cash in on his brother’s celebrity, Donald Nixon had started a restaurant business selling “the Nixon Burger,” but it had gone broke, and Don had been unable to repay a $205,000 loan from, as it turned out, an agent of Howard Hughes, the mysterious billionaire whose holdings included Hughes Aircraft. The story had first surfaced in the column of Washington muckraker Drew Pearson before the 1960 election. Now the scandal—seemingly minor but nonetheless nagging—was threatening to cost Nixon some votes. (At a stop in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nixon, oblivious, had posed with a banner that read “Welcome Nixon” in English and underneath, in Chinese characters, “How about the Hughes loan?” The trick was the handiwork of the ubiquitous Dick Tuck.)
²²
At the debate with Brown on October 1, Nixon swatted away any charge of wrongdoing, challenging his opponent to publicly accuse him of misconduct.
²³

The Hughes loan faded as a campaign issue, though it lodged in Nixon’s store of old grudges. Braden was hardly Nixon’s only problem in the press corps. He had always been able to count on the unquestioning support, indeed the boosterism, of the
Los Angeles Times
. Repeatedly on the campaign trail, an
L.A. Times
reporter named Dick Bergholz got under Nixon’s skin, asking pointed, hostile questions whenever Nixon tried suggesting that Brown was soft on communism.
²⁴

Nixon knew that he was going to lose on Election Night. The Cuban Missile Crisis in mid- to late October had distracted the press and reversed some Nixon progress in the polls. (From Washington, President Kennedy had sent an Air Force jet to pick up Governor Brown to “consult” on the crisis, an outrageous ploy to boost the Democratic candidate that Nixon added to his bag of Kennedy grudges.) The morning after the election, Nixon looked bleary-eyed, exhausted, unshaven. His press secretary, Herb Klein, told him that the reporters wanted to speak to him. “Screw them,” said Nixon. But then, watching TV in his hotel suite, he saw reporters pelting Klein with cries of “Where’s Nixon?” and decided to face the mob of newsmen.
²⁵

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he began. “Now that all the members of the press are delighted that I have lost, I’d like to make a statement of my own.” He could see reporters “exchanging glances,” he recalled, and yet—or so—he plunged on. His voice was not abject, but his rambling sarcasm would become permanently enshrined by Nixon’s foes in the annals of what reporters were by now calling “Nixonland.”
*
²
He famously ended, “Just think of how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
²⁶

There was stunned silence. Klein looked aghast. Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “I have never regretted what I said at ‘the last press conference,’ ” but his gloom became positively Stygian when he returned home. Watching on TV in the den, Pat had been rooting for him, shouting “Bravo!” But she and the girls standing in the front hall were in tears when he arrived. “She said brokenly, ‘Oh, Dick,’ ” recalled Julie. “He was so overcome with emotion that he brushed past and went outside to the backyard.” Pat disappeared into her room, darkened by shutters, and wept. “Bewildered,” Julie recalled, the girls were swept off to stay with friends for a few days. Years later, talking to Julie, Tricia wondered aloud if her parents had made too much of losing. Julie asked what she meant, since neither parent had ever talked to them about the 1962 campaign. Tricia answered, “There was a sadness, and the sadness went on for years.”
²⁸

The punditry wrote
Nixon off for good. “Exit growling,” scoffed Mary McGrory of
The Washington Star
. ABC News screened a half-hour special, “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon”—with special guest Alger Hiss. Concluded
Time
magazine: “Barring a miracle, Richard Nixon can never hope to be elected to any political office again.”
²⁹

Three months later, Nixon’s tax returns were audited again (they had been audited in 1961 and 1962 as well). The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the Hughes loan. Neither probe amounted to anything, but Nixon blamed Bobby Kennedy, who was attorney general under his brother Jack, for the aggravation and cost. “I thought that kind of harassment is hard to forgive or forget, particularly when it’s aimed at your family…but on the other hand the Kennedys play hardball,” Nixon told Jonathan Aitken many years later. “They had me down. They knew I wasn’t out, and they wanted to put a couple of nails in the coffin. They almost succeeded.”

On November 22, 1963, Nixon was pulling up in a cab to his new home, an apartment building in New York, when the doorman rushed up and said, “Oh, Mr. Nixon, have you heard, sir? It’s just terrible. They’ve killed President Kennedy.” The next night, Nixon wrote a gracious letter to Kennedy’s widow, who responded with an empathy Nixon did not normally associate with the Kennedy name. Jackie’s handwritten, nearly stream-of-consciousness note read:

I know how you must feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you, all the question comes up again—and you must commit all you and your family’s hopes and efforts again—Just one thing I would say to you—if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family—
³⁰

Earlier that year,
Nixon had told his family that he was thinking of practicing law in New York. “Tricia’s and my immediate reaction was anywhere but California,” Julie recalled (at school, Tricia had felt taunted by the daughters of their father’s right-wing Republican political foes). “Mother was enthusiastic about a move to New York, since it would be a clean break with politics.” Nixon would be abandoning his political base to go on the turf of a Republican rival, former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, but in some ways that
appealed to Nixon’s subversive sensibility—and in any case, New York was, as he put it, “the fast track.” As it happened, the Nixons bought a stately Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park in a building adjoining Nelson Rockefeller’s.
³¹

Nixon joined a Wall Street law firm, Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd—staid, well-established, but a notch below the top tier “white shoe” establishments. The firm was renamed Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. One of Nixon’s new partners, Leonard Garment, vividly recalled Nixon’s enormous, leonine head “and a sunny smile that lit up his face, smoothed out his jowls, and transformed him, momentarily, into the antithesis of Herblock’s scowling, stubble-faced caricature.” Their first conversation was interrupted by phone calls, and Garment could see that Nixon was enjoying showing off a little: “The phone, I started to learn, was his favorite instrument of persuasion. It separated him from the disturbing emanations of another person’s physical presence, enabling him to concentrate his words without having to compose his eyes and coordinate his hands to harmonize with them.”

Nixon adjusted his conversational style to his audience and his objective, Garment observed. The adjustments could be radical—from pol to intellectual to lawyer to regular-guy sports nut, with minute variations in between. The conversation was not linear or necessarily logical. “The rambling start-and-stop and the hem-and-hawing spiked with profanity”—much later to horrify and titillate readers of the Watergate tape transcripts—“were always part of Nixon’s conversational technique,” Garment later wrote. “They were his improvisational method of feeling his way through an uncertain conversation, probing, testing, targeting, gauging what the other fellow really had in mind (or what Nixon himself had in mind).”
³²

Nixon and Garment were an odd couple. Garment was a Jewish liberal who had held a Senate campaign fundraiser for Bobby Kennedy in his Brooklyn apartment. He had played clarinet in a jazz band, and his brother was a psychiatrist. But Nixon and Garment were both curious and restless. They enjoyed each other.

While Nixon was preparing for an important case, he and Garment flew to Florida for a speaking engagement. They were supposed to spend the night in a high-end real estate development near Miami. “Nixon took one look at the place, and his always operational political instincts and suspicions told him that in the morning the developers would expect to get pictures of him in the house in order to use his name and picture for publicity purposes,” Garment recalled. Nixon told Garment to get back in the car, and then told the driver to go to the estate of Elmer Bobst, a pharmaceutical manufacturer and a Nixon friend and donor. The estate was forty miles away, and when they arrived there, after midnight, the gates were locked. A high wall surrounded the estate. Garment wondered,
What now?
Nixon told the driver to come back for them at 7:30
A.M
. Then he turned and said, “Come on, Garment. It’s over the wall we go.” So the two New York lawyers, briefcases and all, clambered over the wall in their wing-tipped shoes. They found an unlocked pool house with twin beds and settled in, turning out the lights “like summer camp,” Garment later wrote.

Nixon couldn’t sleep. He began to talk about his dreams and ambitions. He said that he felt driven by his mother’s pacifist idealism and the profound importance of foreign affairs. Accumulating money and joining exclusive clubs to play golf did not interest him, he insisted. He had lived “in the arena,” and that’s where he wanted to be, even if it meant shortening his life. He would do anything, make any sacrifice, anything, he said, “except see a shrink.”
³³

Nixon told Garment that he would not “whore around” by lobbying Congress, but he was a profitable door-opener for the firm, lining up clients like Pepsi-Cola from his old friend Don Kendall, who had seen the 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate while he was peddling Pepsi franchises in Moscow. Nixon wanted to practice some real law, so Garment brought him in to argue a case called
Time, Inc. v. Hill
. The Hill family was suing Time, Inc., for invasion of privacy for sensationalizing in the pages of
Life
magazine a terrible home invasion they had suffered. Nixon was only too happy to take the
case—Time, Inc.’s First Amendment defense was “pious bullshit,” said the old press basher.
³⁴

Nixon was to argue the case in the United States Supreme Court. He began by “virtually committing the trial record to memory,” by poring over First Amendment tomes and legal opinions, and by scribbling “endlessly” on drafts of briefs. “His preparation was almost obsessive,” recalled Garment. “He left nothing to chance.”

As Garment bustled into the High Court on April 27, 1966, Nixon laid a hand on him. “Never rush into a public place,” he said. “We strode slowly to our assigned seats, as if to the strains of ‘Hail to the Chief,’ ” Garment related. By all accounts, Nixon delivered an excellent oral argument. His client lost the case, by a 5 to 4 vote of the justices. When Garment called Nixon to tell him the result, he asked a couple of legal questions then said, “I always knew I wouldn’t be permitted to win a big appeal against the press. Now, Len, get this absolutely clear: I never want to hear about the Hill case again.” He wanted no reminders of defeat and the distasteful press. Always look forward, he believed, even as he dwelled on the wounds of the past.
³⁵

Nixon was already
plotting his comeback. On January 9, 1965, after a small family dinner party to celebrate his fifty-second birthday, he had repaired to his study, put his feet up on his favorite brown ottoman, and pulled out his yellow pad. He had been thinking of Winston Churchill during his “wilderness years” in the 1930s, written off as a national political leader. Nixon wrote a list: “New Year’s Resolutions for 1965.” The first item was, “Set great goals.” He wrote a long list of items, most of them unremarkable (“Daily rest,” “Brief vacations,” “Golf or some other daily exercise,” “Begin writing book”). Some, like golf and the book, fell by the wayside. One item is intriguing: “Knowledge of all weaknesses.”
³⁶

Did he mean personal weaknesses? The record is devoid of any personal search. Nixon was quite honest about his political liabilities. He knew, he wrote in his memoirs, that he had the image of a loser, and not just a loser but a
sore
loser. “He was unemotional as a politician,”
recalled Stuart Spencer, a California political consultant who traveled with him in the mid-1960s. “Coldly analytical, including about himself. He knew his shortcomings. But he was paranoid,” said Spencer, using the term too loosely, “and as time went on, he thought he was bullet-proof, that he knew better, and he stopped listening to people.”
³⁷

Alone with his thoughts that January night in 1965, Nixon turned off the light and stared into the fire. “For the first time in seven years,” he recalled in his memoir, “I started not only to think seriously about running for the presidency again but to think about where I should begin.”

He decided that “the best way to prepare for 1968 was to do well in 1966.” So once more he took to the road on behalf of Republican candidates. The party was reeling after Barry Goldwater’s debacle in 1964. At the GOP convention, when Pat Nixon automatically began to rise from her seat with the other party faithful to applaud Goldwater’s famous line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Nixon had put his hand on her arm to restrain her.
^38
,
*
³
He wanted to bring the party back to the center. He was hawkish on Vietnam—he wanted more bombing, more troops—but moderate on social policy, accepting Big Government, albeit slimmed down.

John Sears, a young lawyer in the Nixon, Mudge firm, often traveled with Nixon, taking the aisle seat on the plane so that Nixon could avoid strangers and work on his yellow pad. “He loved his privacy and took enormous pains to hide things,” recalled Sears. “He didn’t like people getting into his head.”
³⁹
Nonetheless, he left Sears with some memorable impressions. “Politics would be a hell of a good business if it weren’t for the goddamned people,” Nixon grumbled to an aide after a long day campaigning for congressional candidates. Nixon was cheerfully cynical with Sears. As he was going up the steps of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he turned and said, “Whatever I say in here, don’t you believe a word of it.” As if in
unself-conscious homage to his “Tricky Dick” reputation, Nixon on the stump adopted a somewhat convoluted view of the truth. “John,” he said one day in a holding room, “you’ve got to understand one thing. I can say things that if someone else said them, they would be lies, but when I say them, no one believes them, anyway.”
⁴⁰