Six Crises (23 page)

Going through the fire of crisis together had welded the members of my staff and several of the reporters who had covered the fund episode into a high-spirited, united team. Four days after we left Wheeling, Jim Bassett came up to me on a flight from Nashville to Washington and told me that the traveling press had a “profound proposal” to present to me. They suggested a new social organization—completely non-political: all of the press corps and my staff who had been with us on the long journey from Pomona to Portland and back to Los Angeles should be initiated as charter members of the Order of the Hound's Tooth. We formed the organization on the spot, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Checkers was our mascot, Pat was president, and I was vice president. After the campaign, I sent out membership cards along with a watch charm to which was attached a sliver of ivory, as a fitting symbol of the immaculate hound's tooth.

Checkers emerged from the campaign the best-known dog in the nation since Fala. By Election Day we had acquired for her from dog-lovers around the country a vast collection of dog collars, hand-woven dog blankets, a dog kennel, and quantities of dog food—enough to last a year.

But there was a negative reaction to the fund broadcast, as well. As I had learned in the Hiss case, in politics there is never anything akin to “total victory.”

The speech itself was smeared and labeled “a carefully rehearsed soap opera.” Ted Rogers' statement of the truth—that there had been no rehearsal at all, and that I had not arrived at the studio until twenty-five minutes before broadcast time—received virtually no play in the press.

It was labeled as the “Checkers speech,” as though the mention of my dog was the only thing that saved my career. Many of the critics glided over the fact that the fund was thoroughly explained, my personal finances laid bare, and an admittedly emotional but honest appeal made for public support.

But the other and more important consequence of the fund episode was that, like almost every smear, when enough mud is thrown at a man in public life, some of it sticks—justified or not.

For example, when I met General Eisenhower at Wheeling, he asked me in the privacy of his campaign train quarters about rumors that had been relayed to him by his staff—rumors that I had spent $10,000 with an interior decorator in furnishing our home in Washington. There was not a shred of truth to the charge and a very routine inquiry could have knocked it down before it was passed on to him.

I told him that I had put absolutely every fact about my personal finances into the broadcast. “This is just like a war, General,” I said. “Our opponents are losing. They mounted a massive attack against me and have taken a bad beating. It will take them a little time to regroup, but when they start fighting back, they will be desperate and they will throw everything at us, including the kitchen sink. There will be other charges, but none of them will stand up. What we must avoid at all costs is to allow any of their attacks to get off the ground. The minute they start one of these rumors, we have to knock it down just as quickly as we can.”

A week after the broadcast, the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
printed a front-page story to the effect that I had been with Dana Smith, the trustee of the fund, in a gambling casino in Havana the previous April. The true story—that I was five thousand miles away from Havana at the time, making a series of speeches in Hawaii—was buried a few days later on the back pages of the papers that carried the original charge.

A few weeks later, a syndicated Washington gossip columnist printed a story which is an excellent example of how a half-truth can be distorted into a smear. He charged that I had “borrowed” money in 1945 from an engineering firm with which I was negotiating a settlement in terminating a war contract, so that I could fly back to California to run for Congress. The truth was that an officer of the company offered to pick up my ticket for me at the airline office in downtown Baltimore with his credit card so that I would not have to leave the negotiations which were in progress at the time. When he received the bill for the ticket, I paid him that same day and I had my cancelled check for $128.05 to prove it. But again, the same papers that considered the charge “news” showed no interest in the true story.

Five days
before
the election, the same writer sent out a syndicated column charging that Pat and I had made a sworn statement in California that our joint property did not exceed $10,000 in order to
claim a State veterans' tax deduction of $50. This was so demonstrably false that I demanded a retraction and threatened to sue. Two weeks
after
the election, the retraction was printed—at the bottom of a column. It had been another Richard and Patricia Nixon, complete strangers to us, who had made the application. And again, even the most routine inquiry by a reporter interested in the truth would have established this fact before the charge was printed.

The smears did not stop on Election Day. Throughout my two terms as Vice President, I had to answer charges, some of which were printed, and many of which were not, reflecting on my personal integrity and honesty. In the 1956 campaign, for example, rumors spread like wildfire through the press corps that I had another “fund.” This one supposedly amounted to $52,000 paid by the oil industry for my “services” and was fully “documented.” I demanded that the rumor be investigated by a sub-committee of the Senate Elections Committee, which at that time was under the control of the Democrats. The sub-committee found that the rumor was based on a letter reputedly from a vice president of a large oil company to his public relations director, mentioning the $52,000 fund. The letter, when traced, turned out to be a complete forgery which had been instigated by some of my unscrupulous opponents on the far left.

Even when I left Washington in 1961 and returned to California, the attacks were to continue. Nasty rumors were circulated, asking with raised eyebrows how I could get the money to buy a new home in Beverly Hills. The implication was that I must have stashed away some money when I was Vice President and now was able to put out the full purchase price of the house. The rumormongers ignore the fact that when I applied the eighty-hour week, to which I had become accustomed during my fourteen years in Washington, to private pursuits, my income from law practice, from a syndicated newspaper column, from magazine articles, and from this book I am writing, in just one year will be greater than my entire government salary for the fourteen years I was in Washington. Under these circumstances, it should be obvious that my credit would be rather good and that I could easily afford the down payment on any house I might want to buy. But again, the truth is not nearly as newsworthy as the charge.

I recall, for example, a conversation with some of my friends in the press whom I had invited to a Christmas reception at my house in Washington after the 1960 election. I asked them if, in view of the charges that had been floating around through the years with regard to my financial affairs, they thought it would be worthwhile for me to
take the unprecedented action of putting out a complete financial statement of all my assets and liabilities on leaving office. They indicated their personal understanding of my concern on this issue, but they doubted if the story would have enough news value for them to go to the trouble of writing it. If they had shown any interest, my statement would have shown that after fourteen years in Washington, including eight years as Vice President, all that Pat and I had in the way of an estate was the equity in our Washington house. After we deducted the cost of moving to California, that came to $48,000. We owned no stocks and bonds, and had no pension except for the Congressional Civil Service retirement plan to which I had contributed as a Congressman, Senator, and Vice President, and for which I would not qualify until I was sixty-two years of age.

I have been asked by friends, “How does a man in public life take the kind of attacks you have been subjected to over the years?”

A man who goes voluntarily into the political arena must expect some wounds in the battles in which he engages. Unwarranted attacks, particularly those involving personal integrity, do take their toll, of course. No matter how often you tell yourself that “this is part of the battle,” or that “if you can't take the heat you ought to get out of the kitchen,” or that “an attack is a compliment because your adversaries never bother taking on someone who amounts to nothing,” there are times when you wonder if you shouldn't chuck the whole business. Many do. This is particularly true of businessmen. Many come to Washington, thinking they are going to tear the town apart and “show those politicians how a businessman can run the biggest business in the world,” and then they are shocked, dismayed, and finally deeply hurt by what they call the “unfairness” of both politicians and the press in launching attacks which are not based on fact.

The crisis of the fund was the hardest, the sharpest, and the briefest of my public life. Because it was decided so quickly, it did not have the lingering effect which some of the more prolonged crises like the Hiss case had had, and were to have. Nevertheless, it left a deep scar which was never to heal completely. From that time on, Pat was to go through campaign after campaign as a good trouper, but never again with the same feeling toward political life. She had lost the zest for it. We had both become perhaps overly sensitive, even when we were subjected to the standard attacks which a public figure must expect with regard to his personal affairs.

Why then should an honest man enter public life and submit himself and his family to such risks? The answer, of course, is that if men with
good and honest reputations do not take such risks, they leave the field of public service to the second-raters and chiselers who have no reputations to worry about. Every public figure, whose most important asset is his reputation, is at the mercy of the smear artists and the rumormongers. No one can keep pace with a concerted smear campaign. To deny a rumor publicly, to sue in a court for libel or slander, is generally a mistake, because it helps spread the smear. A charge is usually put on the first page of the newspaper; the defense is buried among the deodorant ads. The man in political life must come to expect the smear and to know that, generally, the best thing to do about it is ignore it—and hope that it will fade away. The 1952 fund smear was an exception to this general rule, but then it was an exceptional situation.

The over-all political effect of the crisis of the fund on my career was strikingly similar to that of the Hiss case. A distinguished political science professor, after making a thorough study of the 1960 election, stated his considered judgment that if it had not been for the fund broadcast I would have been elected President of the United States. It was a neat theory, brilliantly supported by facts and figures, but like most classroom theoreticians he had not faced up to the hard reality of the alternative. If it hadn't been for that broadcast, I would never have been around to run for the presidency.

Decisive action relieves the tension which builds up in a crisis. When the situation requires that an individual restrain himself from acting decisively over a long period, this can be the most wearing of all crises.

CHARLES G. DAWES once described the job of Vice President as “the easiest in the world.” He said he had only two responsibilities—to sit and listen to United States Senators give speeches, and to check the morning's newspaper as to the President's health.

On Saturday, September 24, 1955, the United States Senate was not in session, and any concern about the state of the President's health was the furthest thing from my mind.

The day was unusual in one respect only: this was one of the few Saturday afternoons in my years in Washington that I had not spent in my office, catching up on the week's accumulated correspondence. Instead, Mrs. Nixon and I had attended the wedding of Drusilla Nelson, a pretty New Hampshire girl who had served as a secretary in my office for the past four years, and Henry Dworshak, son of the Senator from Idaho. By the time we returned home it was after five. I picked up the
Evening Star
from the sidewalk as we went into the house and sat down in the living room to scan the headlines. A brief item on the front page reported that President Eisenhower, out at the Summer White House in Denver, was suffering from a slight case of indigestion. I hardly gave the item a second thought.

Almost everyone close to the President knew he was susceptible to stomach upsets. I recall, for example, an incident on my first goodwill trip abroad as Vice President, a seventy-two-day round-the-world tour in 1953. The Governor General of Australia, Field Marshal William
Slim, who had served with Eisenhower during World War II, greeted me with a friendly, “How's Ike?”

I replied that, despite the rigors of his new job, he seemed to be in the best of health.