The Arrogance of Power (19 page)

Vincent Teresa, at the time the only high-ranking mafioso to have turned government informant, later admitted having taken part in the IBM stock scam. He told the Watergate Special Prosecution Force that he had used Rebozo's bank to cash the proceeds of another batch of stolen stock. A convicted stock swindler, Louis Mastriana, testified to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations that the publicized stolen stock case had been “brought in by Teresa.” He said he himself had been to the Key Biscayne Bank and had dealings with Rebozo. Asked whether Rebozo was aware of his mob connections, he said: “I don't know. I understand he would take a hot stove, too, if you gave it to him.”

Mastriana acknowledged in his testimony having worked with Washington mob figure Joe Nesline, with whom Kotz was closely associated, as well as with Vincent (“Jimmy Blue Eyes”) Alo, the senior surviving longtime associate of Meyer Lansky's. Questioned about Rebozo in a rare 1997 interview, Alo used the same metaphor as had Mastriana. “Everyone,” he said, “knew Rebozo would take a hot stove,” later adding that he “was the one who picked up the money for Nixon.”
*

William Gallinaro, a senior investigator with the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, recalled: “We were preparing to subpoena Bebe Rebozo and to go to his bank. . . . We were going after him. He was keeping stock in there that was fraudulent, stolen. . . . When we started making inquiries about this, somebody tipped him off to watch himself. And next thing we know he sold the stolen stock. That's a crime in itself, and he should have been arrested and gone to prison for that. Bebe Rebozo was a friendly banker when it came to the mob.”

Sometime in the sixties those monitoring organized crime in the Department of Justice and the FBI developed designations for criminals, fringe criminals, and their associates. A former FBI agent who specialized in organized crime in the Miami area, Charles Stanley, identified Rebozo as a “non-member
associate of organized crime figures.” This designation applied to individuals determined to have significant, witting association with “made members” of La Cosa Nostra.
¹⁴

_____

Having been so close to Rebozo for so long a period, Nixon cannot have been totally ignorant of Bebe Rebozo's connections and cannot surely have been unaware of his friend's proximity to the world of organized crime, a world he promised to combat with the full power of the presidency. Still, he chose Rebozo as his closest intimate.

Some of the material on Rebozo in this chapter was first probed in late 1971 by the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative team for the East Coast paper
Newsday
. As the journalists prepared the series, they found doors slamming in government agencies and that FBI agents had reached interviewees before them. Both FBI and Secret Service agents ran surveillance on
Newsday
reporters.

The paper suffered severe reprisals after publishing the results of its investigation. Its White House correspondent was ostracized by the president's press secretary and prevented from covering the groundbreaking visit to China. Behind the scenes, orders went out for tax probes of its publisher and senior editors. The president himself was behind such measures. “Nixon's reaction,” thought William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter, “was worse than foolish. . . . Nixon could not take it when it came to an attack on Bebe.”

Later still, when the Cronkite
Evening News
ran reports on Rebozo, a White House aide said Nixon bitterly resented the coverage. The aide said he saw nothing wrong with Rebozo's behavior.

Other presidents of course have relied on confidants. Roosevelt had Harry Hopkins, Truman had Harry Vaughan, and both of them had the company of George Allen. Eisenhower and Kennedy had their brothers. The men at their side served as advisers and court jesters and often just patiently listened. None, though, has left behind so little sense of substance or so strong a sense of the furtive, of criminality, as Bebe Rebozo.

“When you were dealing with Bebe and Richard Nixon,” said George Smathers, “you were dealing with two of the most secretive, reserved, fearful people you could ever know.” Robert Finch regarded Rebozo as “one of the silentest men in U.S. history.” According to another White House aide, “Bebe would endure having his nails pulled out one by one, rather than reveal anything but commonplaces about the President.”
¹⁵

By 1952, as his relationship with Rebozo was growing closer, Nixon had become consumed with political ambition, ambition advised less and less by the strict precepts of his upbringing. He was becoming mired in shabby secrets that could not be told, and that made Rebozo, in the most unfortunate way, the right friend for him. “Bebe,” as William Safire has said, “was never going to blab.”

All you have got to do in this country of ours is just to tell the people the truth, and not hide anything from them

—Richard Nixon, September 1952

“F
or Richard Nixon,” wrote Stephen Hess, an aide in both the Eisenhower and Nixon presidencies, “the end is power.” Not content with having become a representative at thirty-three and a senator at thirty-seven, the political comer from California did not pause in his rush to rise higher.

Legislative activity was evidently not a priority. No sooner had Nixon taken his seat in the Senate than he began crisscrossing the nation making speeches—forty-nine of them in 1951, and only three of those in his home state. On the tour he projected an image, as Earl Mazo saw it, of part revolutionary hero and part doomsday preacher. Nixon explained the purpose of these travels in a letter home to Herman Perry, the Whittier bank manager who had first urged him into politics: “A few friends in other states may prove to be of considerable value in the future.”

In fact, national power brokers by now had come to see in Nixon a man who could spearhead the Republican party's comeback from two decades of drift and defeat. The currents of history were about to whirl him to the center of the stream, beside the man whom just six years earlier, as a junior naval officer, Nixon had watched parading through Manhattan as the conquering hero of World War II.

General Dwight Eisenhower, now supreme commander of NATO, had been courted by American big business interests since 1948. Eisenhower had met secretly with Nixon two years earlier, for a briefing on the Hiss case and the extent of domestic communism. Nixon had been present in 1950, when Eisenhower auditioned at Bohemian Grove, one of those curious gatherings in the California redwoods at which wealthy patrons inspect politicians with promise. When they met again in Paris, six months into Nixon's Senate tenure, they discussed matters on which they were unlikely to disagree. Nixon felt a certain “aloofness” in the general and in time was to feel he was “just Ike's prat boy.”
¹
For now, though, a connection had been made.

Two months before the 1952 Republican convention, New York Governor Thomas Dewey summoned Nixon to Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel. Dewey, a two-time presidential contender, had looked favorably on the younger man for a long time; now he was the party's senior kingmaker.

In his suite on the twenty-fourth floor, Dewey revealed to Nixon that there was “a possibility of him becoming the Vice President.” Earlier that evening, after Nixon had made a rousing speech at a political dinner, Dewey had taken his trademark cigarette holder from his mouth, reached for the younger man's hand, and exhorted him: “Make me a promise. Don't get fat, don't lose your zeal, and you can be President someday.” The two men never divulged the finer details of their conversation that night, but later speculation suggested that Dewey had tempted Nixon with the vice presidency on condition that he woo the California delegation over to Eisenhower at the convention. To do so would involve treachery, but Nixon complied.

Weeks before the meeting with Dewey, Nixon had signed a legally binding pledge to support California Governor Earl Warren for the presidential nomination. But now he proceeded to mail to twenty-four thousand Californians a cunningly phrased questionnaire, the cost of which, about one thousand dollars, was charged illegally to the government—inquiring whom they would prefer as the Republican presidential candidate. The questions in the mailing were worded to suggest strongly that Warren's candidacy was doomed. At the convention in Chicago, Nixon and Murray Chotiner, well aware of the damage they were doing to Warren, intrigued busily on Eisenhower's behalf.

Warren behaved with dignity at the time, but never forgot the disloyalty. “He hated Nixon,” said Californian John Rothmann, keeper of the finest private archive of Nixonia and for a long time a Nixon supporter. “The most distasteful moment in Warren's career would come in 1969, when as Chief Justice he had to swear Nixon in as President.” “Tricky,” Warren said in old age, when he was no longer concerned with party niceties and when Nixon was sinking beneath the waves of Watergate, was “despicable . . . a cheat, a liar, and a crook . . . he abused the American people.”
²

When the 1952 convention ended with Eisenhower emerging as the candidate for the White House, the nominee wrote down a list of six potential vice presidents, with Nixon's name at the top. After a smoke-filled room session
and with key support from Tom Dewey, Nixon was picked as the running mate. He was lying in his shorts in his hotel room when the news reached him and was said to be “surprised as hell.”

The previous night he and his wife had argued into the small hours over whether he should accept the nomination. Pat was voicing “second thoughts,” and Chotiner was enlisted at 4:00
A
.
M
. to change her mind. “I guess,” she said when Chotiner had finished talking, “I can make it through another campaign.” But she dreaded the prospect.

Pat was to claim that she too was surprised to hear the next day, over lunch, that her husband had been nominated. “The bite of sandwich popped right out of my mouth,” she recalled. She joined her husband on the victory platform, with instructions to be sure to smile for the cameras. That night in Washington photographers burst into the Nixons' home, brushed past the baby-sitter, and insisted on waking their sleeping daughters to pose them for photographs.

The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket did not begin auspiciously. As the crowd acclaimed the general, Nixon had grabbed the older man's wrist and pulled his arm above his head as though he were some pugilist's manager. It was not Eisenhower's style, and the expression on his face showed it. The incident marked the beginning of a long and chilly relationship.

The following week a smiling, idealized picture of Nixon was featured on the cover of
Time
magazine, the first of a staggering fifty-six such appearances. He had been picked for the candidacy, readers were told, because he was young and a proved vote getter and because he had “fought government corruption.” A series of scandals concerning tax fraud, kickbacks, influence peddling, and lax prosecution of top Democrats had plagued President Truman's administration, giving the Republicans a ready-made election issue. “When we are through,” Eisenhower told voters, “the experts in shady and shoddy government operations will be on the way back to the shadowy haunts in the shadowy sub-cellars of American politics from which they came.” Then, within two months of the convention, a corruption scandal exploded around Nixon himself.

The allegations first appeared in a story by Leo Katcher, in the
New York Post
in mid-September, with a headline charging,
SECRET RICH MEN
'
S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY
. Katcher and three other journalists had conducted an investigation based on an original tip from embittered supporters of Earl Warren. They established that wealthy California supporters had supplied Nixon with thousands of dollars to supplement his Senate pay. Dana Smith, the corporation attorney who had raised the money and kept it in a Pasadena bank, was to say it amounted to about eighteen thousand dollars.
³
The money, Smith explained, had been used to compensate for Nixon's “personal lack of funds,” office expenses—including the mailing of twenty-five thousand Christmas cards—production of material for radio and television broadcasts, airfares, and hotel costs.

Notified of the story before it broke, Nixon had responded with apparent nonchalance. Rumors of impropriety, he said, were “all wrong”; the money was just a “political fund . . . used to pay expenses.” He did not know the contributors' names, he claimed, and none of them had enjoyed any special favors. He put the reporter who interviewed him, the conservative columnist Peter Edson, in touch with fund organizer Smith.
⁴
Nixon had told his colleagues privately that the charges were “nothing to worry about.”

As it turned out, the Katcher story caused a sensation. In a campaign in which the Republicans were trumpeting their probity in contrast with Democratic corruption, it was an incendiary revelation. Within days, as Eisenhower and Nixon moved about the country on separate campaign trains—in those days a factor that made communication difficult—it became a full-fledged scandal impossible to ignore.

Eisenhower did not rush to Nixon's defense but instead instructed him to make an immediate and fully documented disclosure of how much money he had received and how he had spent it. The Republicans, he added at a press briefing, must be “as clean as a hound's tooth.”

Halfway across the country Nixon claimed the whole affair was a Communist smear and, when heckled, blamed “the Alger Hiss crowd.” Eisenhower in turn found himself confronted by pickets, and some papers began calling for Nixon to withdraw from the election. Four days into the crisis, from New York, Dewey informed Nixon that most of the general's advisers thought he should resign.

Late the same day Eisenhower himself called Nixon and urged him to appear on national television to tell the public “everything there is to tell.” Would the general then announce his own view on the matter? Nixon asked. “Maybe” was the most Eisenhower would promise. Nixon had been alternately angry or despairing for days, and now he lashed out. “General,” he burst out, “there comes a time in matters like this when you've either got to shit or get off the pot. The great trouble here is the indecision.” Eisenhower remained cool in the face of the insolence. Go on the television show, he repeated, and then he would decide.

On September 23, five days into the scandal, Nixon went to the NBC studios in Los Angeles to deliver the make-or-break performance of his career, the Checkers speech. He was scheduled to speak for half an hour at prime time, immediately after
The Milton Berle Show,
from the theater that was normally home to
The Colgate Comedy Hour
and
This Is Your Life.

Long after the event he was to insist there had been no rehearsal, no run-through of movements or facial expressions. A witness, however, reported that—prompted by a professional director and advertising executives—he had practiced poses and smiles. In a later talk to broadcasting executives, Nixon acknowledged that he had delayed the broadcast for two days in order to “build an audience.”

Sixty million Americans, linked by more than eight hundred television stations, watched and listened that night. Not a cent of the disputed eighteen thousand dollars, Nixon said during the speech, had gone to his personal use, only to political expenses. The fund had not been secret. No contributor had received “any consideration” he would not have received as an ordinary citizen. Independent accountants and attorneys had formally reported that Nixon had neither profited nor broken any law. Nixon next appealed to the hearts of ordinary people. He offered his version of his life, of a childhood spent in modest circumstances, of his hardworking “Mother and Dad,” and of “the best thing that ever happened to me,” his marriage. Pat sat close by throughout the broadcast, her face immobile whenever the camera cut away to capture her reaction. Her eyes were fixed on Nixon as he told the nation, “Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she looks good in anything.” He cataloged their apparently insignificant income, the mortgages on their homes in Washington and California, their 1950 Oldsmobile.

Then came the pull on the heartstrings that gave the speech its familiar name, when Nixon admitted that the family had accepted a gift after the last election, a cocker spaniel sent to his daughters by a man in Texas. It was black and white, and Tricia had named it Checkers. “And you know,” he went on, “the kids, like all kids, loved the dog. And I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”

As he approached the final part of his address, Nixon turned to a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “God must have loved the common people—he made so many of them.” (Nixon later said he had fortuitously remembered the quote, when in fact he had earlier phoned two of his former Whittier College teachers to request a number of Lincoln samples.) That reference led him on to politics: to the fund enjoyed by Eisenhower's opponent, Adlai Stevenson, a man who had “inherited a fortune” and was thus clearly not one of the common people; to Truman, who had failed to clean up corruption and expose the Communists and who was not fit to be president; and finally, back to his own predicament. “I don't believe I ought to quit, because I am not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat is not a quitter. After all, her name was Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick's Day,
*
and you know the Irish never quit.”

Then came the conclusion: “But the decision, my friends, is not mine. . . . I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight through this television broadcast the decision which is theirs to make. Let them decide. . . . Regardless of what happens, I am going to continue this fight. I am going to campaign up and down America until we drive the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them out of Washington. And remember, folks, Eisenhower is a great man. Folks, he is a great man, and a vote for Eisenhower is a vote for what is good for America.”

Nixon was still talking, his hands spread and reaching out to the viewers, as the picture faded. Realizing the program was over, he stumbled into a camera, began stacking his notes, then hurled them to the floor and buried his head in the stage drapes. “I was a failure,” he muttered to his television adviser. “I loused it up. . . . Let's get out of here and get a fast one. I need it.”