Being Nixon: A Man Divided (20 page)

Nixon avoided saying much of anything about race riots or the sexual revolution, and he was studiously vague on Vietnam. As vice president, he had been hawkish, but his interventionist rhetoric became
more generalized over time. Privately, he told aides that he thought the war could not be won, but he wanted to keep some leverage against the enemy.
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With an eye on both the North Vietnamese and the divided American voters, he advocated a middle-of-the-road approach.
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“End the war and win the peace in the Pacific” was his motto, and because no one was quite sure what that meant, word began to circulate that Nixon had a “secret plan.”

With some trepidation, Tricia’s boyfriend, Edward Cox, asked Nixon about the “secret plan” at the Nixons’ apartment one night in February 1968. There was, in fact, no “secret plan” to end the war, but Nixon was already thinking of a bold approach to pressure the North Vietnamese to make a deal. He told Cox, “I’m going to Moscow and Peking.” No American president had ever been to either place, and Peking, or Beijing as it is called today, had been closed to all Americans since the Communist revolution in 1949. At the time, Cox did not understand the significance of what Nixon was saying; he was just trying to make conversation. The press and the experts also missed the significance of Nixon’s opaque wording (“win the peace
in the Pacific
”), just as they had missed his signal about Red China in his article in the October issue of
Foreign Affairs
. That was fine with Nixon. He was a believer in surprise—in “audacity.”
²⁷

Still, the New Nixon was just as shy and awkward as the old Nixon. He invited Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman, up to his room and offered him a drink while declining one himself. Realizing that refusing a drink seemed a little prissy, he said to Cronkite, “I tell you what, I’ll have sherry.” But that didn’t quite sound like one of the boys either, so he blurted, “In fact, I’ll have a
double
sherry.”
²⁸
Down in the hotel bar, reporters were making up a ditty about the “Newest Nixon.”

But Nixon’s
homme serieux
strategy was working. Theodore White, a barometer of the conventional wisdom, was coming around. “I myself in 1960 had found him banal, his common utterances too frequently a mixture of pathetic self-pity and petulant distemper,” White would write in
Making of the President, 1968
, but “to my
surprise, [I] found in myself a slow and ever-growing respect for him.”
²⁹
“Powerful political columnists such as Scotty Reston of
The New York Times
and Joe Kraft of
The Washington Post
hailed the ‘new’ Nixon who seemed so reasonable and calm, a welcome relief from the tumultuous LBJ,” recalled Haldeman.
³⁰
Even the Georgetown set, also sick of LBJ, let up for a brief time on their favorite object of ridicule. Stewart Alsop made the case for Nixon in the pages of
Newsweek
.
³¹

Nixon won big in New Hampshire, with about 80 percent of the vote. But less than a week later, Robert F. Kennedy jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination, and two weeks after that, Johnson announced that he would not run again for president. Nixon was watching the TV in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, when RFK, surrounded by members of the Kennedy clan, announced his candidacy. When it was over, John Ehrlichman recalled, Nixon sat and stared at the black TV set “for a long time, saying nothing.” Finally, like some Greek oracle, he shook his head and spoke. “We’ve just seen some terrible forces unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this.”
³²

Right away, the Kennedy presence was felt. Pat Buchanan, one of Nixon’s speechwriters, recalled a gloom settling over the Nixon campaign. Dick Tuck, the Kennedy prankster, was already bribing the band at Nixon rallies to play “Mack the Knife,” so that the smiling, waving Nixon would be greeted to the strains of, “…and the shark has pearly teeth.” He also hired pregnant women to carry signs saying, “Nixon’s the One.” John Mitchell was outraged. “We’ll get even, we’ll get even,” he muttered.
³³
Haldeman wanted to know whether the Nixon campaign could hire someone as creative at “black advance” as Dick Tuck.
³⁴

The year 1968
veered toward madness. On April 4, four days after LBJ announced that he would not seek reelection, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Rioting broke out in dozens of cities. Nixon was in a personal and political quandary. Alabama Governor George Wallace was entering the race as a magnet for angry
poor whites. “Send ’em a message!” was his line. With an eye on Wallace coming up on the right, Nixon had to walk a fine line between appealing to the populist vote in the South and antagonizing northern moderates. He wanted to reach out to Mrs. King, but he didn’t want to “grandstand,” as he put it. (William Safire, a member of the more liberal wing of the Nixon camp, groaned when he recalled that Nixon’s refusal to “grandstand” in 1960—by publicly sympathizing with Coretta King when her husband had been jailed—had cost him the black vote).
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Quietly, Nixon traveled to Atlanta to console Mrs. King. From Key Biscayne, where he had flown afterward, he asked his campaign staff, “How’s it playing?” He was told that his visit to the King family wasn’t playing at all—because it had been kept secret. “Damn it!” Nixon exclaimed, “I’m going to have to go down there to that funeral.”

Back in Atlanta on April 9, Nixon jammed into the Ebenezer Baptist Church basement after King’s service with other high-profile mourners. One of them was the pro basketball star Wilt Chamberlain. “Are you going to march with us?” Chamberlain asked. Nixon’s personal assistant, Dwight Chapin, was watching the unlikely scene unfold. He recalled: “I see this look on Mr. Nixon’s face like, ‘March?’ ” But off they went, along with Bill Cosby, Jackie Robinson, Marlon Brando, and Bobby Kennedy, beginning the solemn three-and-a-half mile procession to King’s resting place. Nixon made it a block or two and said to Chamberlain, “Got to go to the airport.” Chamberlain asked, “Can I get a ride?” The 7′1″ basketball star and the 5′11″ presidential candidate piled into a car ordered by a scrambling advance man.
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Less than six years after he had been declared a political has-been, Nixon seemed on course to cruise to the GOP nomination for president. Romney had dropped out, and Nelson Rockefeller was dithering. But Ronald Reagan was gaining. The summer before, Nixon had defeated Reagan in the Bohemian Grove primary—the governor, who had also attended the Grove and warily met with Nixon, was dismissed
by the well-heeled campers as a “lightweight.” But Reagan’s denunciations of hippies and black radicals played well in the South, and Nixon feared a Rockefeller-Reagan “Stop Nixon” pincer movement.

In the South, former Governor, now Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was pulling together all of the Republican state party chairmen to cast their delegates’ votes as a block at the GOP convention in early August. They summoned Nixon, along with Reagan and Rockefeller, to audition on May 31.

Returning to Atlanta just six weeks after King’s funeral, Nixon was once more trying to navigate the treacherous politics of race. The Supreme Court had just struck down the attempts of Southern governors to get around the 1954 school desegregation ruling,
Brown v. Board of Education
, by instituting “freedom of choice” plans that would, in effect, keep blacks and whites separate. Nixon knew there was no going back on
Brown v. Board of Education
, and, faithful to his Quaker roots, he opposed segregation. Instead, he promised to put “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court who would not
force
integration by, for instance, busing school children.

Nixon needed Thurmond’s endorsement. He had been courting “States’ Rights Strom” for years; when the family dog of Thurmond’s closest adviser, Harry Dent, was killed by a car, Nixon sent the Dent family a new dog.
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Now, as he rode in a limousine with Thurmond on the way to meet with all the GOP state chairmen, Nixon was sweating profusely, recalled Bob Ellsworth, a longtime Nixon adviser who was riding along in the jump seat. Nixon wanted to ask Thurmond for his formal blessing, but he was afraid that Thurmond would demand in return that Nixon pledge to support “freedom of choice”—in practice, segregation. “I can’t do that,” Nixon had said to Ellsworth. “I can’t do that and win the presidency.”

Nixon asked (“with a lot of nice circumlocutions”) for Thurmond’s endorsement. In his barely comprehensible low country drawl, Thurmond responded, “You’d be a great president, and I’d like to endorse you.” He paused and grew silent. Nixon sweated
some more. Finally, Nixon croaked, “What would you like me to do?” Thurmond leaned forward and said, “I want you to promise me you’ll never let up on the communists.” Like a man who had been offered a pardon instead of a hanging, Nixon instantly answered, “It’s a deal.” He looked “just drained,” Ellsworth recalled. Thurmond was cagey, and he understood Nixon’s predicament on civil rights. He thought he’d have a better chance to defeat the Democrats than Rockefeller (too privileged) or Reagan (still too green).
³⁸

The night of the California primary, June 4, Nixon went to bed in New York before the results were in from the West Coast. He was awakened by a voice calling his name over and over. “Mr. Nixon, excuse me, Mr. Nixon.” Nixon opened his eyes and saw Julie’s fiancé, David Eisenhower. “What is it?” he asked. “They shot Kennedy,” Eisenhower said. A mad gunman had mortally wounded RFK after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Nixon had spent election night in 1960. Nixon attended the funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, a communion of the shaken in a season of tumult.

Young Eisenhower and Julie had fallen in love in college—she was at Smith, he was at Amherst—bonded in part by their strange celebrity and out-of-fashion politics. In July, Nixon went to Walter Reed Hospital to ask for the campaign endorsement of David’s grandfather, President Eisenhower, who was slowly dying of a heart condition. For once, Ike did not equivocate about Nixon. “Dick, I don’t want there to be any more question about this,” he said. “You’re my choice, period.”
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At the GOP convention in Miami in August, Nixon gave a sentimental but moving acceptance speech, recalling himself as a child who “hears a train go by at night and he dreams of a faraway place where he’d like to go. It seems like an impossible dream.”
⁴⁰

At 1:30
A.M
., Nixon summoned one of his speechwriters, Bill Safire, to his penthouse suite in the Hilton Plaza. The candidate, who had slept only two hours the night before, couldn’t sleep and wanted to talk about the speech. Safire found him slouched in an easy chair,
tinkling the ice in a light scotch. “Professionally,” Nixon asked, “what did you think of the speech?”

The train whistle was nicely evocative, said Safire. But another line, “Let’s win it for Ike,” sounded too much like a line out of the old Ronald Reagan movie
Knute Rockne, All-American:
“Let’s win one for the Gipper.”

“Yeah, I know, you intellectuals don’t go for that sort of thing. The press won’t like it at all, they’ll climb the wall. None of them could write a speech like that, one that reaches the folks, and they’ll hate me for it….” Holding his glass by the rim, he took slow sips.

“They call me ‘intelligent, cool, with no sincerity’—and then it kills them when I show I know how people feel. I’d like to see a Rocky or Romney or [New York Mayor John] Lindsay do a moving thing like that ‘impossible dream’ part, where I change my voice.” He frowned, thinking of somebody else who could. “Reagan’s an actor, but I’d like to see him do that.”
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He chatted on, dozed off, woke up, ordered some ham and cheese sandwiches from the Secret Service man, and kept peppering questions as Safire eased toward the door. Nixon punched his speechwriter in the arm. “They won’t like my speech, will they,
The New York Times
and those boys….” He shrugged, pretending not to care. “Fuck ’em.”

Pat had long since retired. For most of the night, Pat and the girls had waited in a trailer outside the convention hall for their grand family entrance at the final balloon drop. Tricia grumpily asked, “Whose brilliant idea was it to sit out in a trailer all night?” Pat looked at her and replied evenly, “How about your father’s?”
⁴²

Ed Cox, soon to be Tricia’s fiancé, was doing his best to fit in with the Nixon family. He found his prospective father-in-law to be formal but sometimes surprisingly approachable. In the hotel suite, he watched TV with Nixon as Nixon’s new running mate, Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, fielded questions at a press conference. “What do you think?” Nixon asked his daughter’s boyfriend. Taken aback, Cox stammered, “Well, he’s got presence.” A few minutes
later, when Nixon met reporters, the Republican nominee said of Agnew, “He’s got presence.”
⁴³

The choice of Agnew—a first-term governor who was not well known—surprised many, including those close to Nixon. But Nixon was intrigued by Agnew, who had been a strong Rockefeller supporter. Nixon took particular delight in stealing away Rocky’s talent—he was already eyeing Rockefeller’s chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger. He saw Agnew, the son of a Greek immigrant, as an anti-elitist subversive and a populist. Presciently, he understood Agnew’s potential appeal to the silent voters turned off by the noisy liberal media. From a border state, Agnew was regarded as a moderate on race, but he was not afraid to tell off black militants. Campaign manager John Mitchell knew the law and order issue would play well. “Mitchell particularly liked Agnew’s Baltimore speech chewing out black leaders,” Bob Ellsworth recalled.
⁴⁴

In 1967, Nixon
read a memo written by an intellectually ambitious young congressional aide named Kevin Phillips with the title “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority.” Dubbed “the Computer” by Len Garment, the pale and dour Phillips was hired by the campaign as the “ethnic specialist” to provide charts and demographic statistics, but his secret boiled down to, as he bluntly put it, “knowing who hates who.”
⁴⁵
The enmities were not hard to find in a year when John Wayne’s
Green Berets
was showing across town from
Wild in the Streets
(a fantasy of a president, elected by newly enfranchised fourteen-year-olds, who forces everyone over thirty-five to take LSD). Nixon did not have to be taught: He had practiced the politics of resentment all the way back to his pursuit of Alger Hiss. But Nixon was not overtly playing to anger in 1968; rather, he was appealing to voters who were tired of all the yelling. He was appealing to what he called the “silent center, the millions of people in the middle of the political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.”
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