Crooked (3 page)

I’m being diplomatic, because there’s a more obvious reason why Pat didn’t worry about my electoral scruples, which was that she didn’t think it could possibly matter, because she didn’t think anyone would vote for me.

I saw her point. Even with the benefit of youth, the Nixon face was never beautiful. And then what it turned into! Pear-shaped and heavy about the mouth. The brow and the jowls and the five o’clock shadow. It might at least have had a gritty bulldog force if it weren’t for the whoop-de-do swoop of the nose.

I once said I was an introvert in an extrovert’s profession, but that was only a polite way of saying that people didn’t especially like me. I was an abysmal public speaker. I did solemnity and righteous anger passably well, and I could manage an effortful smile telling a joke or bantering with the press, but for the rest of it I lapsed into a kind of rigid neutral glare, the outward shell of frantic self-consciousness and social panic. The only impression I made completely naturally was that of commonness. For better or worse, no one ever mistook me for a member of the elite.

What did I think I was doing? Why run at all?

I played football in college, and I was terrible. Our school was so small they had to let me on the team no matter how badly I played. I’d sit there on the bench but when we were far ahead or hopelessly behind, the crowd of students and alums would start chanting “Nixon! Nixon!” until the coaches sent me in and they’d all roar with laughter when I trotted onto the field. The ball would be snapped and I’d be knocked down by hits I never saw coming from college kids who had learned somewhere how to move like tigers. Why did I do it? I wanted to belong to something, be the all-American boy I never was and never could be, the loss that broke my heart before I quite knew I had one. So fuck them if they tried to keep me out. Let them try.

Much later I understood that I wasn’t expected to win at all. Anyone who knew anything considered Voorhis unbeatable, and the Republicans needed somebody to run against him purely for form’s sake. In fact, I was the only one involved in the race naive enough to think it was going to be any kind of contest.

No one took a poll during the congressional campaign. We simply made our speeches and tried our little ploys, and when the day came, they counted and we sat and waited for the numbers: 49,994 for him, 65,886 for me. I was terrible at football, but this was a game I could win.

Pat and I sat together in the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena toward the end of our third party of the night, blurry from champagne, numbed with celebration and fatigue. I’d played the piano; someone’s pants had been thrown at the ceiling and still hung from the chandelier.

“What am I doing?” I asked her. “Remind me why we did this.”

“We’re getting on,” she told me. “Going somewhere. We couldn’t stay here. Is it that scary?”

“I’m just worried. Being a lawyer made sense. I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s going to be interesting,” she said. “We’ll make it up as we go along. And whatever you say out there, I’m going to know it’s not really you, all right? I’ll know.”

“All right.”

“We won this. We whipped them good. Nixon’s the one,” she said.

It had been our campaign slogan: “Nixon’s the One.”

Is it possible some people simply aren’t designed to win? That there are people who would be better off losing every day of their lives? That if you’re the wrong sort of person, winning just breaks something in you?

I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because—and why this should be I’ll never know—I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.

“No one recruited
me. I had become convinced that the society in which we live, Western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism. I did not understand the causes of the crisis or know what to do about it. But I felt that, as an intelligent man, I must do something.”

I was sitting in a large conference room in the Commodore Hotel in New York listening to a man named David Whittaker Chambers explain how he’d become a Communist spy. This was one of my congressional appointments, the House Un-American Activities Committee, set up a decade ago to hunt for Fascist fifth columnists during the Second World War.

David Whittaker Chambers was a pale and lumpish man with an enormous head, a scholar and translator and senior editor at
Time
magazine. He had a high-flown academic style of speech composed of long, precise, mesmerizingly dull sentences, perhaps because he’d been giving this same testimony for years to various military and civilian agencies without any result. As he spoke, he listed to one side like a slowly sinking ship. It gave the effect of a man on the brink of succumbing to a soporific drug.

I shifted in my seat, conscious of wasted time and wasted opportunities. This was congressional busywork. I paid a dogged sort of attention but I knew by then that all signs pointed to my being a one-term congressman destined for a quick trip home to Whittier. I should be making speeches on the House floor, I thought. I should be seizing the headlines.

When you get to Washington you feel triumphant. You’ve won an election and a place in the political elite. And then you realize that everyone else there won an election too, because that is how people get to Washington. And that Washington itself is a new and different game, and the skills that won you that election have nothing to do with the skills you need now. There are four hundred and thirty-five people in the United States House of Representatives, and they’re not all going to be president, and in two years many of them will be going home, never to return. Whatever act you came up with in the provinces to fool Ma and Pa Voter isn’t going to matter to the people here. They’ve all seen it.

It’s very seldom mentioned, but I have very nearly the best academic record among United States presidents (due credit to Clinton and Wilson). It’s true that I was smarter than the kids around me and I worked very hard. I think it’s okay for me to say this. When I arrived in Washington I still, at the age of thirty-three, genuinely believed that people cared.

Maybe it’s true that nobody likes a know-it-all, and  maybe it isn’t. It comes down to the same thing because, as it turned out, nobody liked Dick Nixon. I needed to project an image of confidence and connections and money, the things that draw powerful people and wealthy backers. I needed to be anyone but the desperate, lonely striver who worked his way up from his parents’ grocery store. That was an inspiring story back home, but it played very poorly in the drawing rooms of the nation’s capital.

Four or five nights out of the week, Pat and I would play the new game. We would climb in a taxi and go to that night’s reception, testimonial dinner, cocktail party, anywhere we were even halfway welcome. We would chat up lobbyists and staffers and I’d sweat through the latest in a succession of midpriced rental tuxedos.

And at the end of each long, boozy evening I’d find myself in the wood-paneled anteroom of a well-to-do Georgetown home bidding good night to the slightly baffled hostess who was straining to remember how she’d come to invite this strange, doggedly earnest couple, Richard Nixon and his anxious, vaguely heartbroken wife.

Once in a while I’d see Jack. I was making my political debut at the exact same moment as the rookie congressman from Massachusetts who turned out to be the most prodigiously attractive politician of our generation. It was one thing to play politics badly; it was quite another to do it while being treated to the sight of a man playing the game as few others ever have. Jack was the one who taught me to truly crave political office. I wanted to hold a room spellbound, I wanted to change laws, I wanted to stand in front of a crowd of people who were shouting my name in righteousness or exultation and smile and drink it all in, the way he did. And later, every one of those things would happen for me. It’s just the meaning that was changed, like light through a distorting lens. Tragedy for him; farce for me.

I’m the last man to heap further pieties on his legacy, but it was a particular thing to have known Jack Kennedy as a creature of raw potential. Before I met him, I didn’t understand what a politician could be: someone in whom charisma, sex, intellect, and historical moment all came together. I’d ride home in the taxi and think about Kennedy and the way people’s eyes tracked him at a party, the way even my own unwilling heart lurched when he looked at me and smiled. Even the unconscious cells of your body wanted him to like you.

At the age of thirty-one he was an object lesson in what nascent political talent looked like. I could see it; political strategists could see it. Most of all, my wife could see it. Being married, it turned out, only made every bit of this worse. It wasn’t as if I were a stranger to social humiliation. I’d always shrugged it off.
Nixon can take it,
I told myself and I could have lived through it again except now there was Pat. From the start she’d told me she wasn’t a political wife but she would do her duty, and she did. She laughed at jokes and stopped at two drinks and scraped up party invitations and lunch dates, but it wasn’t working.

And what was completely unforgivable was, we both knew it. Pat could see Kennedy, and she could see me, and she could tell the difference. If I had been alone at these events, I might have shrugged off the tiny slights and disappointments, watched my petty private dreams become thin and strained. I might have said to myself,
Well, it doesn’t matter so much. There will be other parties.

But I didn’t even have the solace of knowing that my petty private agonies were private. Pat saw every detail of it, and I saw her seeing it. It was like gazing into an ugly, sneering hall of mirrors. Someone who could see every vain and rotten and false detail of your life, who watched you flinch at every little slight, who saw you at your weakest and did not forgive.

Riding home with Pat in the back of a taxi, I stared at the side of her face as she looked out the window.
This is what marriage is,
I thought.
They’re watching you drown and you’re watching them watch you. You see them hating themselves for being trapped with you.

And the next day I sat on the House Un-American Activities panel and tried to focus on what a bizarre, pudgy little man named Whittaker Chambers was saying.

“In 1937 I repudiated Marx’s doctrines and Lenin’s tactics,” Chambers told us. His voice was nearly inaudible in the crowded hearing room. “I resolved to break with the Communist Party at whatever risk to my life or other tragedy to myself or my family.”

If nothing else, it was starting to become one of our more entertaining testimonials. He clearly thought he’d been involved in something genuinely sinister.

“Mr. Chambers,” Chief Investigator Stripling said, hiding a smile, “in your statement you stated that you yourself had served the…underground, chiefly in Washington, DC.”

I worried that we were egging him on a little too much but Chambers rose to the bait, replying at his leaden pace, “Even in countries where the Communist Party is legal, an underground party exists side by side with the open party. The apparatus in Washington was an organization or group of that underground.”

He’d bought a revolver to protect himself. He’d slept by day, kept vigil by night, but the Communists hadn’t come. I pictured them, assassins with goatees and berets and jazz records. Spies among us, our friends and neighbors harboring deviant beliefs regarding political economics. The filthy beatniks were inside the universities, the media, the federal government! Beware!

But then…Chambers wasn’t just laying out for us in plain, forceful language the historic drama of our time—he was offering us a part in it. I began to see the power in the narrative. I’d implied before that certain people were Communists; I’d said it about Jerry Voorhis the way I’d said everything else I could possibly think of, but I hadn’t quite grasped the scope or the urgency of it all. If I were being honest, I didn’t entirely understand what a Communist was or what they were doing over there in Russia. None of us did. We saw the outside of it, foreign countries with unpronounceable names succumbing one after the other without warning in the dead of night. An international organization with an implacable hunger for power, for secrets, and for new recruits.

The atmosphere in the chamber was gradually electrifying. I looked around to see who was catching it, who really understood the potential. Chambers was good with details. He and his contacts met in a violin studio. There were seven men who ran underground Communist cells under the direction of a sinister individual, a former petty officer in the Austrian army, a man who still had not been properly identified. I found myself hoping he had an eye patch or was missing an arm, but it would work however we needed it to. Chambers was offering me a lifeline; I just had to think ahead, farther and faster than the competition.

And then the name of Alger Hiss surfaced, a man who worked in the State Department. As Chambers told the story, he’d known Hiss in the 1930s. They were friends, close friends, and Communist spies. Chambers left the party in 1937 and tried to convince Hiss to resign as well but failed. After that they parted ways, and for all he knew, Hiss was still operating, if we could just catch him. How hard could it be?

“‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’” I read Churchill’s speech aloud while Pat listened. “‘Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.’ You see it’s got something, right? It’s powerful.”

“It’s a good speech, I’ll give it that.”

“We need this,” I told her. “I can’t keep trying to win elections the way I did last time. It won’t work twice, you know that.”

“Do you believe it? The Soviet menace?” she asked. “I’m not saying it matters, but do you?”

“You read the papers, Pat. What they’ve done in Eastern Europe isn’t a theory. They’re a pretty rough bunch. I could make my reputation on this.”

“Okay. I can see that,” Pat said. She frowned, thinking it through. “Although—not to be a purist about it—what if this Alger Hiss is innocent?”

“He’s not. There’s too much detail. Well enough for a hearing anyway.”

“And you’re not going to lose?”

“Not a chance.”

“All right. I see it. But Dick, you see what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re trying to make people afraid. You’re using them. And I know it’s politics, and I’m not going to moralize at you, but this kind of thing can go very wrong.”

“It’s just until I get a foothold. You know it’s not easy for us.” It was the closest I’d ever come to mentioning those long late-night taxi rides, both of us breathing the air of failure until we couldn’t even look at each other. The absolute indifference of the press, the looming deadline of the upcoming elections. Last time had been a surprise, a fluke, and we both knew it.

“And so you’re going to say there are spies in the government.”

“There are. You should have heard the testimony today.”

“And our friends and neighbors?” she asked. “You’re going to tell people their friends and neighbors might be spies too. That seriously doesn’t worry you?”

“People aren’t crazy.”

“What about me? Did you ever think of that? I fit the profile.”

“What profile?”

“I went to college. My people are poor, and I own jazz records. Maybe I believe capitalism really is awful. Maybe I believe people should just help each other, and this whole thing you call America is a scam for rich people, and I have a secret pact with Moscow to bring it down. What about that?”

“Then you can tell me. Calm down,” I said. “This isn’t about you and me, it’s just politics. Okay? Just let me do this.”

“Then be careful, that’s all. You’re a crusader now. This isn’t the kind of thing you can screw up. Not and be safe.”

“Don’t worry. No one starts wars anymore. Not with the bomb.”