Being Nixon: A Man Divided (19 page)

A
t Chapin, an exclusive girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Nixon was regarded as a popular father, according to Ruth Proffitt, a longtime Chapin teacher.
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Unlike some of the distracted Wall Street lawyer-fathers, Nixon was attentive and upbeat with his daughters’ friends when they came over, playing the piano and asking them about their lives. “Aunt” Rose Woods would remember coming in with Nixon from work on her frequent visits and watching as Nixon immediately turned on all the lights in the living room and his study, lit a fire, and put a record on the stereo. “Within minutes the room would be warm and bright and filled with happy voices and the music from
Carousel
or
The King and I
or Strauss waltzes,” Julie Nixon recounted in her memoir of her mother.

The Nixons were loving parents. “Mommy is pretty, sweet, unselfish, kind, understanding and her same self—if not better than ever—which is near perfect,” Julie wrote in her diary after the Nixons moved to New York in 1963. “Daddy is nice and busy and seems happy. He tries hard to have a fun ‘family life.’ ”
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It is possible to detect a note of skepticism in her teenage observation—“he tries hard….”—but there can be no doubt that Nixon adored his daughters and they loved him back, fiercely.

Less than two weeks after the Nixons had moved into their apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue in the summer of 1963, Pat looked across
the dinner table and said to her husband, “I hope we never move again.”
³
She probably knew that her hope was forlorn. In the summer of 1967, Julie observed, “Mother was unmistakably troubled as she faced the prospect of another political race.”

On December 22, 1967, after the Nixons’ annual Christmas party, Nixon repaired to his study, pulled out a yellow pad (“his closest friend,” quipped Leonard Garment), and started writing down a list of all the reasons why he shouldn’t run for president. “Losing again could be an emotional disaster for my family,” he wrote. He weighed the burden of ambition and duty. “I startled myself,” he later recalled, by writing at the bottom of the page: “I don’t give a damn.”
⁴
That Christmas, Julie wrote in her diary that her father had told Tricia and her “that he had decided—almost definitely—not to run. He was depressed. I have never known him to be depressed before—not even after 1962.” At Christmas dinner, Pat said she couldn’t bring herself to urge her husband to run, but that she was “resigned to helping out,” as Nixon put it in his memoirs. Julie, however, was insistent: “You have to do it for the country.” And Tricia spoke the final truth: “If you don’t run Daddy, you will have nothing to live for.”

When Nixon scrawled, “I don’t give a damn,” he was lying to himself, as he certainly knew. Certainly he worried about his family’s emotions, and with equal certainty he cared intensely about fulfilling his political destiny. Among his favorite readings was a book called
The Will to Live
, by Arnold Hutschnecker, the physician who had helped Nixon with his psychosomatic illnesses in the 1950s. Borrowing from Goethe, Hutschnecker wrote that when “men of destiny” left the public stage, they lost their will to live and soon died. Nixon feared that the same would happen to him. But he also worried that Pat’s willingness to play the rescuer—to urge him to run, whatever his or her doubts—was waning.
⁵

As he often did in trying times, he headed alone to Florida to stay with his friend Bebe Rebozo at Key Biscayne. Under the warming sun, Rebozo and Nixon sat in silence. (“I already knew what he thought,” Nixon recalled.) As Nixon moodily walked on the beach,
he was joined—providentially, if improbably—by the Reverend Billy Graham, who was in Florida recovering from a lung infection.

Graham, with his affinity for political power, was a familiar face. Nixon had taken his mother to Graham’s revival meetings in Los Angeles and talked politics with him from time to time. When Nixon’s beloved mother had died that September, Graham presided at the service. Nixon had been in a state of near-collapse. He was furious at the newsmen who filled the pews, forcing many of Hannah’s friends from Whittier to stand outside the church. After the service, Nixon had laid his head on Graham’s shoulder and sobbed.

Back at Rebozo’s house, Graham read from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Nixon needed to look to faith for strength, said Graham. The world was full of woe. It needed a true leader, and Nixon was being called. In Nixon’s retelling of his decision to run, the walk and talk with Graham is presented as quasi-divine intercession. Family lore culminates with a dinner on January 15, 1968, when Fina, the housekeeper, emerges from the kitchen to tell her boss that he was destined to be president: “You are the man to lead the country! This was determined before you were born!”
⁶

It all sounds a little romanticized. Nixon’s aides never believed his periodic vows to get out of politics for the sake of the family. When Nixon had said he wasn’t going to run again in 1956, Jim Bassett, his sometime press aide, bet ten dollars that he would and then upped the stake to thirty when Nixon repeated his promise.
⁷
At the very least, as he solemnly took counsel or comfort from his daughters and Bebe, Billy, and Fina around the New Year, he seems to have been trying to create a bandwagon effect to get Pat on board. Nixon had been running for president for years, if not decades. With Dr. Hutschnecker in mind, he privately told others that if he kept practicing law he would soon be dead—mentally dead even sooner.
⁸

To cock an eyebrow over his call to the mountaintop is not to denigrate his motives, however. He really did want to fulfill his mother’s (and grandmother Milhous’s) dream that he go forth and serve in some good and great way and “leave footprints in the sands of time.”
Nixon did regard himself as a man of destiny, and so did his family, Pat’s reluctance notwithstanding. He would not give in to the bitterness of his “last press conference” blurt in 1962. Whatever else he was, he was not a quitter. His mother’s last instruction, as she had lain dying just a few months earlier, were words more persuasive than any sermon Billy Graham could summon: “Richard, don’t
you
give up. Don’t let anybody tell you you are through.”
⁹

Despite his deep
feelings, churning and thinly disguised, Nixon seemed at times to deny that he had an inner self. “He was never into self-analysis,” recalled a longtime friend and adviser, Ken Khachigian. “[To him] it was weak and phony. To obsess over your psyche, that never occurred to him.”
¹⁰
Emotion suggested vulnerability, and vulnerability was a sign of weakness, and weakness, for Richard Nixon, was intolerable. “There was nothing he feared more than to be thought weak,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his memoirs.
¹¹

Nixon wanted to be around strong men, never weak ones, and the composition of his political inner circle reflected his idealizations and dislikes. “Eggheads” were suspect. Though a bookworm himself, Nixon protested that he preferred the company of non-intellectuals. “God I hate spending time with intellectuals. There’s something feminine about them. I’d rather talk to an athlete,” he once said.
¹²

It was sometimes hard to tell when Nixon was being disingenuous or exaggerating for effect—he enjoyed provoking and playing devil’s advocate (“You agree, don’t you?” he would demand, and if the answer was yes, then maybe his interlocutor was just a sap or a toady).
¹³
Even so, it is not hard to understand why, as he pondered running for the presidency in 1968, Nixon was drawn to the persona, if not necessarily the actual person, of one of his new law partners, John Mitchell.

Mitchell was a brilliant lawyer with working-class roots (check that box!) who had turned down Harvard Law to go to Fordham (check, check!). He was an ice hockey star and, in World War II, a highly decorated commander of a PT boat squadron that was reputed
to have included Jack Kennedy (check, check, check!). He was a bond lawyer, which doesn’t sound very political, but in fact it was: He was extremely well connected to leaders in state and local governments around the country who needed to raise capital. His manner was offhand, taciturn, but tough-guy. He turned a limp from a sore hip into a swagger. He would fiddle with his pipe (disguising a hand tremor) while arguments raged around him, then gruffly deliver the last word.
¹⁴

Nixon put Mitchell on a pedestal. “I’ve found my heavyweight!” he said to Bill Safire, who was doing political PR work for Nixon before he formally decided to run.
¹⁵
Nixon knew that he had erred by trying to run his own campaign in 1960. Now he approached Len Garment about sounding out Mitchell for the job. Following Mitchell into the men’s room at the University Club after a bibulous partners’ dinner at Christmastime 1967, Garment asked, “Say, John, how would you feel about managing a presidential campaign?” Pipe in mouth, Mitchell leaned back and said, “Are you out of your fucking mind, Garment?” which Garment understood was Mitchell’s way of saying yes.
¹⁶

But John Mitchell was not quite what he appeared to be. His biographer, James Rosen, was unable to find any records of naval decorations or that he had ever been wounded in action (supposedly the source of the limp) or that he had even met JFK, much less commanded him. Nor was Mitchell as modest as his pose; he joked, crudely, “Nixon couldn’t piss straight in the shower if I wasn’t there to hold him.”
¹⁷
He had a troubled second marriage to the alcoholic, out-of-control Martha Mitchell, and the more troubled she became, the more he drank, too. His phlegmatic style, doused with alcohol, would become a mask over anguish.

Nixon liked to be surrounded by attractive, vigorous young men. His “body man,” the traveling aide who looked after his immediate needs, fended off unwanted strangers, and charmed the people who needed to be charmed, was Dwight Chapin. A young University of Southern California grad, Chapin had the social graces of an Ivy
Leaguer without the attitude. Chapin was drawn to Nixon by his worldiness and ambition, and he was willing, by and large, to overlook Nixon’s moods and quirks. Nixon, even more than most, did not like to have his privacy intruded on or his routines disrupted. Scheduling snafus could make him angry enough to lash out. He once pushed Chapin into a wall, bruising his arm. (Nixon apologized. Such physical outbursts were rare. “He was mostly calm, he’d just say, ‘Chapin, you don’t understand,’ ” Chapin recalled years later.)
¹⁸

Chapin was a handsome, warm extension of the handsome, chilly H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, the campaign’s chief of staff. Haldeman was Nixon’s self-styled “S.O.B.”—the zero-defects enforcer of order and timeliness in the Nixon campaign, the man who, as time went on, would spend more waking hours with Nixon than anyone else. Smart, tough, capable of humor and even gentleness, Haldeman kept his sweet side under cover. He had a certain scowl—tight lips, furrowed brow, steely eyes—that staffers grew to fear. The campaign “was so warm and friendly and cozy,” recalled his rival for Nixon’s attentions, Rose Mary Woods, “until Bob Haldeman arrived.”
¹⁹

Haldeman, a Big Man on Campus at UCLA and an advertising man by trade, had stood outside the El Capitan Theater to volunteer to work for Nixon on the night of the Checkers Speech in 1952. By 1956, he was a regular advance man for Nixon campaigns. It was said that Haldeman was drawn to Nixon by his unmasking of Alger Hiss—Haldeman’s family, prominent in Los Angeles business and social circles, was hard-line anticommunist—but Nixon’s real appeal to Haldeman was more ineffable. “He was to me that rare species, the uncommon man,” Haldeman told Jonathan Aitken. Haldeman had a knack for handling troublesome geniuses, or so he believed. As the manager of J. Walter Thompson’s Los Angeles office, Haldeman had been in charge of “the terror clients” such as Walt Disney. “By comparison, Nixon wasn’t that bad!” laughed Haldeman.
²⁰

Haldeman’s best advance man was his friend, another UCLA grad named John Ehrlichman. Quick, mordantly funny, Ehrlichman liked to tell stories of campus politics tomfoolery at UCLA after the war.
He had worked for Nixon as a mole in the Rockefeller campaign in 1960 (he got a job as driver), and he was a resourceful and clever infighter. He was also unusually direct with Nixon. A teetotaling Christian Scientist (just like Haldeman), Ehrlichman had seen the candidate “pie-eyed” in a hotel suite at the 1964 GOP convention, and he extracted a promise from Nixon that he would “lay off the booze.” (“The Christian Scientists believed one drink made you ‘pie-eyed,’ ” observed a Nixon aide.)
²¹
As the Nixon campaign geared up in the winter of 1968, Haldeman and Ehrlichman brought discipline and a touch of youthful arrogance to the operation. “The approved advance man’s style around Nixon was supercool,” Ehrlichman recalled.
²²
The New Nixon—colder, but also cooler—was born.

Nixon launched his
campaign for the presidency at the last possible moment, on February 2, 1968, in a sleet storm in New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary was a little over a month away. “Gentlemen, this is
not
my last press conference,” he drolly began (his joke writing had improved with the addition of Paul Keyes, a former Jack Paar comedy writer and producer of the TV show
Laugh-In
).
²³
The media’s darling in the earlier going, Governor George Romney of Michigan, was fading out. He had gotten his words tangled up about Vietnam, saying truthfully, but disastrously, that he had been “brainwashed” by the U.S. military briefers in Saigon. Nixon, meanwhile, was trying on his de Gaulle robes. He instructed that he would not be kissing babies or slapping backs in this campaign; the “rock ’em, sock ’em” campaign style would be replaced by something more dignified.
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