Being Nixon: A Man Divided (6 page)

Granting an audience to Nixon, Palmer found the young man “gawky” and earnest—but just the ticket to unseat Congressmen Voorhis, a liberal New Dealer whose ability to hang on to his seat for the past decade had been a reproach to Palmer’s domain. In his column, “The Watchman,” Palmer began playing up Nixon—the clean-cut young war veteran, the Quaker not afraid to fight. “Voorhis,” on the other hand, wrote Palmer, “was once a registered Socialist and that streak will not rub out.” The phrase Palmer and others used was “creeping Socialism”; the choice facing the voters, as Nixon quickly picked up the refrain, was “slave or free.”
³⁸
Nixon would later regard the press as his undying enemy. But in 1946, he had Palmer’s
Los Angeles Times
and the backing of almost every other paper in the Southland.

Nixon’s closest adviser, at least at first, was his wife, Pat. She was stoical and dogged. After they had their first child, Tricia, in February 1946, the Nixons moved into a rented, one-bedroom Spanish-style bungalow. The crib went in the living room. No one got much sleep. A mink farm next door kept them awake with round-the-clock screeching as well as an unmistakable stench. Within three weeks of Tricia’s difficult breech birth, Pat was out campaigning day and night. She quietly bore the snobbery of a Pasadena matron who, at a Republican ladies’ lunch, questioned whether she knew the right nail polish to wear.
³⁹
She quit smoking in public and swallowed her reserve to go out and meet and greet.

Pat could be blunt, even caustic with her husband. “God, she made it rough for him,” recalled Adela Rogers St. Johns, a Hearst reporter and later novelist and screenwriter who traveled with the Nixons. “She would say, ‘That was a disaster’ or ‘Well, I’ve heard you make lousy speeches, but that was the worst.’ ”
⁴⁰
At the same time, she knew when to back off. She did not much like Murray Chotiner,
but she stopped criticizing him. “When she voiced her disapproval, my father decided that Chotiner’s hard-line, street-smart political advice was more important to him than his wife’s objections,” Julie Nixon recalled. “So the subject of Murray became a non-subject.”
⁴¹

In later years, campaign aides and reporters would observe that Pat Nixon rarely spoke to her husband on campaign planes or buses. The pattern was established early. That summer of 1946, Tom Dixon, a radio announcer paid by the campaign to introduce Nixon at rallies, watched as Nixon prepared to record some speeches at a local radio station. When Pat entered the studio, according to Dixon, “Nixon flared at her like a prima donna and said, ‘You know I don’t ever want to be interrupted when I’m working.’ ” Dixon’s wife, Georgia, was in the studio and observed that, “just before air time, [Nixon] looked up and he looked at Pat and pointed at her and pointed at the door, like he would telling a dog to go outside.” Mrs. Dixon followed Pat outside. Pat explained, “You know, Richard doesn’t like to have me in there. I don’t know why but I make him nervous.” The candidate’s wife did not appear to have been too upset. She added, “He’s such a great man.”
⁴²

She believed it. She was willing to put up with a great deal because she saw her husband as he saw himself—as a man of destiny. If anything, she was more sure, more committed. When he wavered, she would brace him, sometimes harshly. More often, she put on a stoical mask. She understood a volatile temper; she had seen her father abuse her mother. Sharing her husband with a rough-edged operator like Murray Chotiner was a small price to pay to achieve the success both of them dreamed of and spoke of late into the night. She learned to deal with her husband’s moods. Under stress, Nixon was prone to outbursts. Pat simply learned to avoid them.

Preparation was an obsession with Nixon. He wanted to know everything about his opponent, especially anything that could be used against him. Nixon had been given a brief tutorial in the art of negative campaigning by Chotiner. Rule number one was dig up some dirt. Although Chotiner’s wiles and energy that summer of 1946 were
devoted largely to William Knowland’s Senate campaign, he was able to feed Nixon some useful political intelligence from time to time. Someone leaked to Chotiner that Congressman Voorhis had been endorsed by an organization called the National Citizens Political Action Committee, or NC-PAC. It was a liberal group, but not nearly as leftist as the similarly named and better-known CIO-PAC, a pro-union group that was regarded as socialist. Voorhis had
not
been endorsed by the far-left CIO-PAC. In his campaign, Nixon artfully blurred distinctions between the two, handing out twenty-five thousand red thimbles while urging voters, “Nixon for Congress—Put the Needle in the PAC” (without saying which one).
⁴³

Frustrated by Nixon’s clever, if slightly dodgy, tactics and the unwillingness of the pro-Nixon press to probe into them, Voorhis made a classic mistake for an incumbent. He agreed to debate the underdog. Characteristically and carefully, Nixon prepared, slipping quietly into the back of auditoriums to watch his foe give speeches.

What he saw was a ponderous, stuffy professor type. Voorhis was a patrician reformer, a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, an East Coast establishment liberal transplanted to the West. After five terms, he seemed to have a safe seat; he had been lazy and slow to react. Nixon was happy to be underestimated, especially by a snob.
⁴⁴

It had been
a brutally hot summer in the Los Angeles basin, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees day after day. Friday, September 13, 1946, started hot and smoggy, but the evening turned warm and lovely by the time nearly a thousand people jammed into the auditorium at San Marino Junior High. Voorhis went first, rambling and droning on in his slightly weary way.

Nixon arrived in the middle of Voorhis’s speech. He had learned, early in his political career, to make an entrance. When he walked alone, he often seemed slumped and lost in thought. But for speeches and debates, he would square his shoulders and stride confidently in the room. Nixon’s own speech was pithy—he denounced Washington bureaucracy and labor agitators—and drew loud applause.

Both candidates had planted questioners in the audience. A Democrat asked Nixon why he had made the “false charge” that Voorhis had been endorsed by the CIO-PAC. Nixon was ready. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bulletin from NC-PAC endorsing Voorhis. Then he got up from his chair and walked across the stage to hand the document to Voorhis, so he could see for himself. Flustered, Voorhis got up to take the pamphlet, realized that he was being led into a trap, and blurted out that NC-PAC was not CIO-PAC. While he fumbled for words to explain, Nixon calmly read lists of directors from both organizations, pointing out that many of the names were the same. The audience lustily cheered Nixon and booed Voorhis.

Staggering off the stage, Voorhis asked a campaign follower, Chester Holifield, how he had done. “Jerry, he murdered you,” said Holifield. “He used every trick in the book.”
⁴⁵

Nixon “scored a hit,” crowed the
Los Angeles Times
. For the next six weeks, Nixon tirelessly banged away at Voorhis for being the tool of the Washington establishment. Skillful at stealing opposition thunder, Nixon became the avatar of the “forgotten man,” the financially strapped shopkeepers and out-of-work laborers to whom FDR had appealed with the New Deal. Nixon deftly turned the New Deal on the bureaucrats and their flunky, Jerry Voorhis.

On election day, Nixon won easily, with 57 percent of the vote. Palmer invited Nixon and his whole family to celebrate in the private suite of the paper’s owners, Dorothy (“Buff”) and Norman Chandler, in the Los Angeles Times Building. Asked what he wanted to drink, Nixon answered, “Milk.” But then he followed Mrs. Chandler into the kitchen and asked, “Could you get me a straight bourbon? I don’t want my mother to see me drinking it.”
⁴⁶
The evening went on until dawn. Nixon recalled in his memoirs, “Pat and I were happier on November 6, 1946, than we ever were to be again in my political career.”
⁴⁷

The investigator.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

T
he Washington Post
called him “the greenest congressman in town.”
¹
His cramped office was tucked away on the fifth floor—called the “attic”—of the Old (now Cannon) House Office Building. Despite the jolt of World War II, the nation’s capital in 1946 was still a small, somewhat Southern town, inbred and hierarchical.
²
Lacking seniority, Nixon was denied a coveted seat on the Judiciary Committee. Knowing no one, unsure of his place, not a member of any “in” group, Nixon, as ever, made do. He didn’t need the Franklins; he would once more start his own club. It took some time to bond with other congressional newcomers, but within a couple of years, he had become a charter member of the jauntily named Chowder and Marching Club. The fifteen freshmen and junior Republicans who got together once a month or so for food and drink were hale and hearty, just like the Orthogonians. One of them was a former football lineman from the University of Michigan named Gerald Ford. Ford later remembered an evening out with the fellows. Nixon was spirited, even a bit of a showman—he could play popular tunes on the piano and lead sing-alongs. But afterward, as Nixon waited outside on the curb for a car, Ford noticed that his fellow bon vivant seemed to be “mumbling to himself. He seemed sad and detached,” Ford recalled.
³

On the Education and Labor Committee, Nixon took his seat at the very end of the Republican side of the table. At the opposite end sat another newly elected navy veteran, Congressman John F. Kennedy
of Massachusetts, last man on the Democrats’ lineup. “We were like a pair of unmatched bookends,” Nixon recalled. Kennedy was all languid grace and lofty manners, a prince of the city, or so he seemed to the anxious young striver whose father had not been able to give him Harvard.

On April 21, 1947, “we had the first Kennedy-Nixon debate,” Nixon recalled. As part of a House Education Committee road show, the two freshmen argued over labor policy in the steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. On the
Capital Limited
train back to Washington that night, Nixon and Kennedy drew straws for the lower berth (“this time I won,” recalled Nixon). They “sat up late,” talking about domestic issues and especially foreign policy, the subject they both most cared about. Years later, Nixon would come to regard Kennedy in the way that Macbeth saw Banquo’s ghost. But that night he felt kinship. He was able to see that Kennedy, despite his apparent ease of manner, was not unlike him, after all. Both men had lost golden older brothers; both felt the heavy burdens of parental expectation. “We shared one quality which distinguished us from most of our fellow congressmen,” Nixon recalled. “Neither of us was a backslapper, and we were uncomfortable with boisterous displays of superficial camaraderie. He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.”
⁴

During the January social season of his first winter in Washington, the Nixons were invited to a dinner party at the home of Christian Herter, a former State Department diplomat and future secretary of state, at the time a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Very tall, stooped by the arthritis that would eventually disable him, Herter was an elegant man. “He’s the cream of the bottle,” declared New York governor Tom Dewey, the Republican candidate for president in the upcoming election.
Time
magazine described Herter as “aristocratic, somewhat aloof.” He was “the example of the good clean man in politics,” a diplomatic historian later
wrote of the Harvard-educated reformer who once described Washington as “a dirty kitchen where cockroaches abound.” Married into a Standard Oil fortune, Herter lived in tastefully refined grandeur.
⁵

The Nixons were excited but nervous to be invited to such a glamorous soiree. The invitation from the Herters said “informal,” so Pat Nixon “bought a beautiful teal-blue cocktail dress for the occasion and my father wore his dark blue suit,” wrote Julie Nixon Eisenhower. “When they walked into the Herters’ home that night they were stunned to see that they were the only two guests not dressed in black tie and long, formal gowns.” In Washington society at that time, “informal” meant a tuxedo; “formal” meant white tie and tails.
⁶

One can only imagine the tense smiles on the faces of the carefully, nicely, but inappropriately dressed “greenest congressman” and his wife. It was one of those embarrassing, awkward moments that rubbed raw Nixon’s feelings of alienation, just under the skin. And yet Congressman Herter, who had himself been shy in college (and liked to say that his “watchword” was a Chinese proverb that exalted “gentleness, frugality, humility”), was probably not offended by Nixon’s modest blue suit. Herter must have been impressed by what his well-prepared guest had to say at dinner. Nixon’s sartorial faux pas did him no lasting harm; a couple of months later, the junior member of the California delegation learned that he had been chosen to serve on an important committee chaired by Herter. The nineteen members—Nixon was the youngest and the only Westerner—were to go to Europe and report on the prospects for a massive foreign aid plan announced by Secretary of State George C. Marshall at Harvard Commencement in June. “I was probably the most surprised man in Washington when I opened the morning newspaper and read that I had been chosen” for the committee, Nixon recalled. He had never spoken to anyone about the committee because, as he explained, “I had not thought there was any chance of being appointed to it.”

Nixon was thrilled. Here was a break, a chance to see statesmen in action, perhaps, in some minor way, to become one. Nixon may
have been “the greenest congressman,” but he was also a most ambitious one. Like many young men of his generation, he had been given, by service in a world war, a firsthand education in the importance of America’s global role. Unlike most returning servicemen, he was not content to find a job and raise a family or even, as a politician, to be satisfied by tending to the needs and wishes of the voters back home. Determined to prove himself on the biggest stage he could find, he understood that as America entered a new Cold War, the main event for a national politician was international relations. The Herter Committee was Nixon’s chance to begin to fulfill a lifelong ambition. “I would now have the opportunity to work with some of the most senior and influential men in the House,” he wrote, “and a chance to show what I could do in the field of foreign affairs.”
⁷

At the end of August, the Herter Committee sailed from New York on the
Queen Mary
. It was to be all business: Herter instructed the committee members to leave behind “their wives and their tuxedos.”
⁸
Apparently wishing to make sure work would be balanced with play, Nixon’s new friend, Jack Kennedy, gave Nixon the names and addresses of three young ladies in Paris. “I don’t think Mr. Nixon even took the numbers away with him,” recalled his secretary, Dorothy Cox. “He was far too embarrassed.”
⁹

Less than a year after he had debated Jerry Voorhis in the San Marino Junior High gym, Nixon was discussing foreign affairs over tea with the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, at 10 Downing Street. The scenes of postwar devastation on the continent left a lasting impression on Nixon. In Berlin, the congressman found people living like rats in caves. “As we stood in the vast ruined hall of what had been Hitler’s Chancellery, small, thin-faced German boys tried to sell us their fathers’ medals as souvenirs,” he recalled. On an island in Greece, the mayor introduced the visiting congressmen to a woman whose left breast had been cut off by the Communists because she had refused to betray her brother, a leader of the loyalists fighting the Communist guerrillas. Nixon was shaken and impressed by the fierceness and ubiquity of the Communist insurgents. In Trieste, he witnessed
an organized mob carrying red flags and singing “The Internationale” as the men, fists clenched, paraded by his hotel. “Suddenly, there was an explosion at the end of the block. The crowd cleared and I saw the body of a young man whose head had been blown off by a grenade,” he wrote. “I was sure what was happening in Trieste would soon be re-enacted throughout Western Europe unless America helped to restore stability and prosperity.” Nixon’s anticommunism was not just a politically useful stance. After the Herter Committee trip, it deepened into conviction.
¹⁰

Before Nixon left for Europe, he had been warned by Herman Perry, the Whittier banker who had recruited him to run for Congress, not to be swayed by State Department “propaganda” into wasting taxpayer money.
¹¹
Perry accurately reflected opinion back home in the 12th Congressional District. Nixon’s own poll found that three out of four of his constituents were resolutely opposed to any foreign aid. Nixon followed his conscience instead.

Nixon was not unmindful of his constituents. Few politicians have been more attuned to the wants and needs of the folks back home. But Nixon possessed a long-range vision that most of his congressional peers lacked. He understood that the Republican Party was doomed to irrelevance if it regressed to pre–World War II isolationism.

The man who as a boy had listened for train whistles in the night could hear a distant call. America was at that moment on the verge of becoming the world’s great superpower, and Nixon understood that his political future lay as an internationalist, not as an isolationist. This was a time to lead, not to follow; in time, public opinion would come along. In December, he voted for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Then he flew to California to make his case that American intervention would save Europe from starvation—and help safeguard the West from Communism, a more persuasive argument back home.
¹²

Nixon also had some repair work to do in his own home, the modest apartment he had rented with Pat just outside Washington in
the Virginia suburbs. Pat was feeling neglected and overwhelmed by the burden of caring for a two-year-old and Nixon’s aging and ailing parents, who had moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, partly to be closer to their rising-star son. “Mother always had scorned complainers,” Julie recorded in her memoir of her mother. But, about eighteen months into their Washington life, Pat finally unburdened herself to her distracted and often absent husband. “My father was stunned when she finally told him how deep her discontent was,” Julie wrote. Shy about expressing himself face-to-face, Nixon wrote his wife a long letter, declaring his “abiding love” and promising to spend more time at home.

It was a promise he could not possibly keep. More than likely, his wife was not fooled. Her discontent may have been deep, but her capacity for suffering was deeper. She stoically accepted his good intentions and swallowed her doubts. Nixon wrote the letter shortly before Pat went into labor with their second daughter on a scorching Fourth of July night (Congressman Nixon was at least able to get Pat a corner room with cross ventilation at the un-air-conditioned hospital.)
¹³
A month after Julie’s birth, Nixon met Alger Hiss.

The first Washington
institution to tap into America’s massive postwar disillusionment was the House Un-American Activities Committee. Many people saw Communism as an incubus, like an evil possession or a disease; it was foreign and unclean;
un-American
, in a popular usage of the era. The threat was not imaginary. During the 1930s, the Soviet Union had actively recruited agents and planted spies; decades later, declassified cables from FBI wiretaps would show that Moscow had aggressively penetrated the federal government, though the spy rings were mostly rolled up after the war.
¹⁴

HUAC, as the congressional committee was known, was a poor scourge of the Red Menace. Its members tended to be blowhards or worse. The ranking Democrat, John Rankin of Mississippi, a flagrant anti-Semite and racist, was known to paw through a dubious volume entitled
Who’s Who in American Jewry
to see if witnesses were hiding
their ethnicity.
¹⁵
The committee had a reputation for trampling on constitutional rights and for engaging in general foolishness. A parade of left-leaning movie stars and screenwriters trooped before HUAC to deny that they were taking orders from the Kremlin; Gary Cooper was guarded but testified that communism was not “on the level.”
¹⁶
An embarrassed House GOP leadership had put Nixon on the committee in the hope, correct as it turned out, that with his legal training he would act as a force of moderation and steer the committee toward some real Soviet spies.
¹⁷

In August 1948, President Harry Truman, largely as a stunt to revive his flagging reelection campaign, called the “Do-Nothing” Congress back to Washington from its summer recess. On the morning of Tuesday, August 3, HUAC returned to its Red hunting, calling as a witness a dumpy, vacant-looking man named Whittaker Chambers. “Chambers was one of the most disheveled-looking persons I had ever seen,” recalled Nixon. “Everything about him seemed wrinkled and un-pressed.” Speaking in a bored monotone, forced to repeat himself (the microphone was broken), Chambers told the story of how, as a disaffected intellectual, he had first joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, then broken with it during the Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s. He named other communist agents in America. One of them, he said, was Alger Hiss.

“A ripple of surprise went through the room,” recalled Nixon. Hiss was a pillar of the Eastern Establishment. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he had clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and risen through a series of State Department jobs, winning the backing and patronage of such worthies as Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his presumed successor John Foster Dulles. He had held important postings at the Yalta Conference in 1945 and at the San Francisco conference creating the United Nations later the same year. He had seemed assured of a glorious diplomatic career.