Six Crises (15 page)

On our way from Denver to Los Angeles we made a sentimental stop at Ely, Nevada. That predominantly Democratic mining town gave a rousing welcome to its now famous native daughter, Pat Ryan Nixon. Then we flew on to Riverside, California, to spend Tuesday night at the Mission Inn where Pat and I had been married twelve years before, on June 21, 1940.

The next day, my Press Secretary, Jim Bassett, who was on leave from his job as political editor of the Los Angeles
Mirror,
told me that one of the reporters assigned to cover us had mentioned that his paper had a story scheduled for Thursday about a Nixon fund.

“That's probably the Pete Edson story. There's nothing to worry about,” I told him.

We went ahead the next day with our plans for the rally at the railroad station in Pomona. It was to be televised nationally. It turned out to be colorful, exciting, and, by every political standard, completely successful. The crowd was big and enthusiastic, and the television cameras gave millions of people an opportunity to see a campaign train pull away from the station at the beginning of what was to be the shortest and most dramatic campaign trip in history. There was only one minor mishap. Governor Earl Warren said, in introducing me, “I now present to you the next President of the United States.” But the crowd loved it and he, in high good humor, laughed at his slip of the tongue. Everyone was in fine spirits as the “Nixon Special” pulled out of Pomona on schedule, with the candidate waving good-by from the rear platform of his first campaign train. I had only one minor problem. I had caught a cold on the flight from Ely to Riverside and my throat was sore and my voice hoarse.

We had not reached our first stop in Bakersfield when word reached us from Republican headquarters in Los Angeles that a story with regard to a “Nixon fund” would be published the next day and that it might cause trouble. It still did not seem serious to me, but I decided to talk the matter over with four of my advisers in the lounge of my private car.

Those who joined me were Jack Drown, one of my oldest and closest friends, who was our train manager; Murray Chotiner, a Los Angeles attorney who had served as campaign manager to Earl Warren and William Knowland before managing my 1950 Senatorial campaign; Pat Hillings, who had succeeded me in the House of Representatives when I had been elected to the Senate; and William P. Rogers, a New York
and Washington lawyer whom I had met in Washington during my work on the Hiss case when he was serving as Counsel for a Senate Investigations Committee. Drown, Chotiner, and Hillings, as Californians, knew about the fund. But Rogers was a newcomer. In fact, when I had asked him to come along on our campaign trip as one of my advisers, one of the selling points I had used was that it would be a pleasant experience and not too much of an ordeal because “nothing ever happens to a candidate for Vice President.”

I now explained all the details of the fund to Rogers because I thought since he knew nothing of it he could give me a good objective opinion on the subject. I said that the fund had been set up at Dana Smith's suggestion and that we had been scrupulously careful to avoid any possible charges of improper collection or use of the contributions. For that reason, the fund was set up as a trust in which only Smith collected the contributions and disbursed the money according to vouchers and bills for political activities sent to him from my office. He had even arranged for an independent audit by a certified public accountant so that he could send reports to the contributors accounting for every dollar collected and spent. Rogers asked about the size of the fund and I told him that, as I remembered it, a total of between $15,000 and $18,000 had been collected and disbursed over a two-year period.

Rogers observed that the only unusual feature of this fund, as distinguished from other political funds, was that it was so scrupulously accounted for, was openly solicited, the amount of any contribution was limited, and that none of the funds passed through my hands but were disbursed by a trustee.

I explained to him that there were two reasons for setting up such procedures. First, Smith himself was an impeccably honest man and had always insisted in the campaigns in which he had been finance chairman that the contributors deserved to have their money accounted for in a manner which would meet not only the legal requirements but the highest ethical standards as well. In addition, when Smith had suggested the idea of such a fund to me, I had told him that it would have to be handled in such a way that it would be completely above criticism, whether justified or unjustified.

I had recognized from the time I became a member of the Committee on Un-American Activities, and particularly after my participation in the Hiss case, that it was essential for me to maintain a standard
of conduct which would not give my political opponents any solid grounds for attack. I have often told those who investigate in the field of Communist activities that they must always be sure that they are right on the issue, that their procedures are impeccably fair, and that their personal conduct is above criticism. “Even when you are right they will give you a rough time,” I have said. “When you happen to be wrong they will kill you.”

I knew that the standards which would be applied to the average Congressman and Senator as far as collection and disbursement of political funds were concerned might well not be applied to me, and I was determined not to give anyone even the slightest opening through which they might attack not only me, personally, but the work I was doing in investigating Communist subversion in the United States.

For example, I pointed out to Rogers, it is perfectly legal for a Congressman or Senator to have relatives on his payroll, provided they work for the salaries he pays them. It is also proper for a lawyer who happens to be a Congressman or Senator to remain a member of his law firm and to participate in the division of fees, except in cases where there is a conflict of interest. I had resigned from my law firm, however, and never received a fee from law practice after I was elected to Congress in 1946. My wife had spent many days working in my office, both while I was a Congressman and a Senator, but had never been on the government payroll.

After we had explored every facet of the fund, I asked Rogers for his honest opinion. He said, “I don't see anything to worry about. There is nothing illegal, unethical, or embarrassing about this fund. If your opponents try to make something out of it, they will never get anywhere on the merits.” Chotiner was even more emphatic. He labeled the whole story as “ridiculous, a tempest in a teapot.”

The consensus that night among our little strategy group was to ignore the attacks, on the theory that answering them would simply give them more publicity and would play into the hands of those making the attacks. This, I knew, was generally sound political strategy. “Let's wait and see what they do,” I said.

•  •  •

We did not have long to wait. The next morning the attack began. But it was not in the Edson story, which as I had expected was a fair and objective account of the fund.

It was the New York
Post
which let me have it with both barrels.
Jim Bassett gave me the substance of the story between whistle-stops. The headline on the front page screamed, SECRET NIXON FUND. Inside the tabloid, the story by Leo Katcher, a Hollywood movie writer who also covered the Los Angeles area for the
Post,
was a masterpiece of distortion: “The existence of a ‘millionaire's club' devoted exclusively to the financial comfort of Senator Nixon, GOP Vice Presidential candidate, was revealed today,” said the opening paragraph. The story went on with substantially the same information that Dana Smith had told all the reporters. It was a clever example of the half-truth. In fact, more than half the story was true—but that was the bottom half. Nowhere did Katcher explain the “millionaire's club” and nowhere did he say or indicate that the fund was “secret.” Only the headline said that. The subhead over the story declared: “Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.”

The
Post
story did not worry me. It was to be expected. The
Post
was and still is the most partisan Democratic paper in the country. It had done an unusually neat smear job, but I did not expect anything to come of it. After all, I had come into this 1952 campaign well prepared, I thought, for any political smear that could be directed at me. After what my opponents had thrown at me in my campaigns for the House and Senate, and after the almost unbelievably vicious assaults I had survived during the Hiss case, I thought I had been through the worst.

In fact, that Thursday morning I was worried not about the campaign fund story but rather about the split-second timing we needed in order to make ten whistle-stops a day on our tour up the Central Valley of California and into Oregon and the state of Washington.

At our first stop, Bakersfield, I called to the crowd, “Who can clean up the mess in Washington?”

They knew the answer. They yelled back, “Ike can.”

At Tulare, the next stop, the train started to pull out of the station before I finished my speech. I cut short my remarks by calling out, “Come along and join our crusade,” and people ran down the tracks after the train. Like most candidates, I had an exaggerated idea about the importance of what I had planned to say if only a mistake hadn't been made in starting the train ahead of time.

I proceeded to chew out our staff and particularly Jack Drown, our train manager, for what I thought was a major error. Fortunately for everyone concerned, several members of our small staff combined an
excellent intuition for politics with a sense of humor. As I was telling Jack, “never let that happen again,” Bill Rogers walked up and said, “I thought you planned it that way. Just as soon as the train started to move you finished your sentence and then spontaneously said to the crowd, ‘come along and join this crusade,' motioning for them to follow the train. It gave a sense of participation and excitement which could never be conveyed by ending a speech on time and then waiting for the engineer to get up steam.” I laughed and recognized that I had just experienced another example of the truth of one of Eisenhower's favorite admonitions, “Always take your job, but never yourself, seriously.”

But these light moments of relief from tension were now to be few and far between. As our “Nixon Special” moved up the Central Valley through Fresno, Madera, Merced, Stockton, and Sacramento, more and more reporters joined our campaign train and demanded that Jim Bassett get a reply from me to the charge that I had a “secret fund.” Getting excerpts ready for the press, walking back through the lounge car to meet the political dignitaries who boarded the train at one stop and who were to get off at another, boning up on the local color and the local issues which I was trying to discuss at each of the stops, trying to use the microphone as much as possible so that I would not do any further damage to my already raw throat—thinking about these and other relatively minor problems left little time to prepare an answer on the fund. Finally, in midafternoon, Chotiner and Rogers prepared a brief statement of about two hundred words stating the facts with regard to the fund, which I approved and issued.

Our opponents had wasted no time in capitalizing on the
Post
story. By the time I issued my statement on Thursday afternoon, Democratic National Chairman Stephen Mitchell had called on Eisenhower to demand my resignation. Senator Karl Mundt, with whom I had fought so many battles against the Communists when we served together on the House Committee on Un-American Activities, countered for the Republicans. He asserted that the attack on me was a “leftwing smear” and a “filthy” maneuver by a pro-Stevenson newspaper. His statement, however, was lost in the back pages of most newspapers while Mitchell's demand that I resign made most of the front pages. But this is part of political warfare. An attack always makes more news than defense. When I turned off the light in my stateroom that night I was still convinced that because the attack was entirely partisan, it would not stand on its merits. I thought it would eventually
run its course and be forgotten, provided I continued to play it down.

But I had not reckoned with the determination and skillful planning of our opponents. At nine o'clock the next morning I delivered my whistle-stop speech to a good-sized crowd in Marysville, a small mining and lumbering town in northern California. Just as the train started to pull out, a car screeched to a stop at the station and a group of men, who we later discovered were dispatched from Democratic headquarters in Sacramento, ran toward the train. “Tell us about the $16,000!” one of them yelled.

That did it. Despite all of our plans to ignore the attack, I could not see myself running away from a bunch of hecklers. I wheeled around and shouted, “Hold the train!” The train stopped a hundred yards down the track and the crowd pressed forward while I collected my thoughts. Instinctively I knew I had to counterattack. You cannot win a battle in any arena of life merely by defending yourself. I pointed my finger at the man who called out, directing the crowd's attention to him, and then I let him have it.

“You folks know the work that I did investigating Communists in the United States. Ever since I have done that work the Communists and the left-wingers have been fighting me with every possible smear. When I received the nomination for the vice presidency I was warned that if I continued to attack the Communists in this government they would continue to smear me. And believe me, you can expect that they will continue to do so. They started it yesterday. They have tried to say that I had taken $16,000 for my personal use.

“What they didn't point out is that rather than charging the American taxpayer with the expenses of my office, which were in excess of the amounts which were allowed under the law, what I did was to have those expenses paid by the people back home who were interested in seeing that information concerning what was going on in Washington was spread among the people of this state.