The Arrogance of Power (27 page)

Later, as he returned to his hotel, people threw fruit and small stones. A man he remembered as a “weird-looking character . . . [with] bulging eyes” spit full in Nixon's face. On receiving a sympathetic message from Eisenhower, Nixon replied that the only casualties were “a couple of Ben Freeman's suits which I will be unable to wear again.”

After that, Nixon recalled, he was “hailed as a hero by the citizens of Lima.” He deemed the episode a victory and flew into a rage when told that State Department officials thought he had embarrassed the host government, with U.S.-Peruvian relations suffering as a result.

The real drama, though, came in Venezuela. From the moment the Nixons emerged smiling from their plane, it was clear the Communists intended a massive onslaught. As the couple stood to attention for the Venzuelan national anthem, a mob on a balcony began showering them with spit. “It fell on our faces and our hair,” Nixon remembered. “I saw Pat's bright red suit grow dark with tobacco-brown splotches.” They stood and took the abuse, then struggled to their separate limousines for the motorcade into the city.

In the capital's roughest suburb the Communists had prepared a series of ambushes. What followed, one reporter said, was “like a scene from the French Revolution.” First came a shower of rocks, then a crowd of ragged people brandishing placards and clubs. The Nixon motorcade found a way through, only to run into another barricade to make another short-lived escape, and again be blocked. The chanting this time was not “
Fuera Nixon!
” but “
Muera Nixon!
”—“Death to Nixon!”—and it came close to that.

The man with the pipe, Nixon said later, looked to him like a combination of Gerhart Eisler, Eugene Dennis, and other Communists he had seen in the past. He had of course seen Eisler and Dennis, both American leftists, in the more tranquil ambiance of a congressional hearing room.
²
In Caracas the thug with the pipe succeeded in punching a hole in the car window. Flying glass wounded Nixon's interpreter, hit a Secret Service agent, and nicked Nixon in the face. The iron stave began poking at him through the hole in the window.

“Then we heard the attacker shout a command,” Nixon recalled, “and our car began to rock. I knew now what was happening. It was a common tactic for mobs throughout the world to rock a car, turn it over, set it afire. For an instant, the realization passed through my mind—we might be killed. . . .”

They indeed might have been had not a Venezuelan security detachment cleared the roadblock and made it possible to drive on.
³
With its wipers flapping—to clear the waterfall of spit on the windshield, Nixon's limousine pulled away.

No one had been seriously hurt. The car carrying Pat Nixon had also come under attack, but she was uninjured. Six cars back secretary Rose Woods had been superficially cut by flying glass. On the advice of his Secret Service aide and the interpreter, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Nixon abandoned plans for a wreath-laying ceremony and headed for the U.S. ambassador's residence. The party were soon relaxing over gin and tonics and canapés courtesy of the American ambassador's wife.

Intelligence later established that had Nixon gone on to the wreath laying he would have faced being bombed with Molotov cocktails, four hundred of which had later been found neatly stacked near the tomb of Simón Bolívar. “I don't think the American people realize how close to death Mr. Nixon and his wife came,” Secret Service chief U. E. Baughman wrote years later. “He damn near got creamed,” said the CIA's Caracas station chief, Jacob Esterline.

That evening an alarmed President Eisenhower ordered Operation Poor Richard, the movement of a thousand marines, paratroopers, six destroyers, a cruiser, and an aircraft carrier toward Venezuela. They were not needed. Nixon traveled to the airport the next day in a heavily armed convoy and flew home to a hero's welcome in Washington. The president, the cabinet, senior members of Congress, and a cheering crowd greeted him at the airport.

The placards Nixon now saw carried statements like
DON
'
T LET THOSE COMMIES GET YOU DOWN
,
DICK
and
COMMUNIST COWARDICE LOSES
—
NIXON COURAGE WINS
. Soon, in the spirit of the Hound's Tooth group formed to celebrate his fund crisis, Nixon would found a club for veterans of the Latin American trip. He called it the Rock and Roll Club, presumably referring to the attempt to overturn his car. Members serenaded him at the first reunion with a song, to the tune of “Frère Jacques,” that knocked Venezuela and Peru—“Abajo Venezuela!” (“Down with Venezuela!”)—and hailed their leader with “Viva Nixon!”

The trip had put Nixon in the man of action's “arena” he so often evoked. Having emerged unharmed, he seemed to indulge the notion that all had worked out well in the end thanks to him, that
he
had been in control at all times. Witnesses agreed that Nixon did show courage. Whether he demonstrated real control or the sort of wise judgment and self-control a citizen would hope for in a leader is another question. In part the answer lies is in his own compulsive comments about the tour.

“I slept very little,” Nixon said of the night before he confronted the Peruvian rioters. “I knew this necessary period of indecision was far more wearing than tomorrow's action would be. This was part of the crisis syndrome. . . . A man is not afraid at a time like this because he blocks out any thought of fear by a conscious act of will. . . .”

“I felt the excitement of battle,” he said of the moment he chose to abuse the protesters as cowards, “but I had full control of my temper as I lashed out at the mob.” “It was a terrible test of temper control,” he recalled, of the time a demonstrator spat full in his face. In a tough situation, Nixon said he remained “analytical and cold.” “When someone is trying to damage you, the way to hurt him is not to become angry, but to handle him with detachment.”

Yet by his own contradictory account, Nixon had been far from “cold.” “I felt an almost uncontrollable urge,” he said of the spitter with the bulging eyes, “to tear the face in front of me to pieces.” Only the intervention of a Secret Service agent, he admitted, prevented him from striking the man. Even then, he said, “I had the satisfaction of planting a healthy kick on his shins. Nothing I did all day made me feel better.”

Nixon lost his temper several times during the trip. The first occurred in Peru, when he summoned two State Department officials—half dressed, because they had been preparing for a state dinner—to chastise them for suggesting privately that his actions might prove diplomatically damaging. In Caracas, as his car ran the gauntlet of the mob, he let the Venezuelan foreign minister “have it with both barrels” for trying to explain his government's policy on demonstrations. Later, his military aide Don Hughes recalled, he gave other government leaders “the most godawful dressing down.” He “exploded in fury” when told Eisenhower was mobilizing American troops for a possible rescue, because the White House had not consulted him first. (It could not have done so, in fact, because communications had been temporarily cut off.)

The “detachment” Nixon ascribed to himself extended also to his attitude to the long-suffering Pat. He had made no move to shield her as they stood through the playing of the Venezuelan national anthem in a shower of spit. He had then insisted that Pat's car drive immediately behind his, breaking the Secret Service's cardinal rule that only agents travel in the follow-up car. “One remark made by Mr. Nixon stayed with me from this terrible episode,” said Secret Service chief Baughman. “The agent inside Mr. Nixon's car said to the Vice President after the motorcade had started to roll again: ‘I hope Mrs.
Nixon gets through.' To which Mr. Nixon replied, ‘If she doesn't, it can't be helped.' ”

Nixon would claim it was he who made the “command decision” for the maneuver that brought the motorcade out of the moment of greatest danger, and that he then made “another command decision” that avoided further trouble at Bolívar's tomb. Other accounts, however, indicate he had nothing to do with the first decision and acted on advice for the second.

Nixon used similar military language to describe how the incidents affected him. “Once the battle is over,” he wrote, “a price is paid in emotional, mental, and physical fatigue.” In Peru he felt “worn out” after an experience lasting just two hours. He was “wrung-out” after the Caracas episode and took his “first afternoon nap in twelve years of public life.” “My reaction to stress, a challenge, some great difficulty,” he explained, “is sort of chemically delayed. . . . After a crisis like that is over, I feel this tremendous letdown, a fatigue, as though I'd been in battle.”

The irony, one that was to have parallels throughout Nixon's life, was that he had brought the Latin America ordeal upon himself. “It was entirely avoidable,” the Secret Service's Baughman said of the close call in Caracas. “I'd had a report on just how bad things were, and I didn't want the Vice President to make the trip. It was like talking into a barrel.” Nixon's experiences “did not seem to temper his indiscretion.”

The man who supplied the advance intelligence on Caracas, CIA station chief Jacob Esterline, had tried almost desperately to have the visit canceled. Weeks earlier surveillance had produced “incontrovertible proof,” captured on tape, that local Communists were planning to kill Nixon. On his own initiative Esterline had flown to Washington to brief Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and to warn Nixon. Dulles said: “It's a political decision. Nixon's going and that's that.” A Nixon aide told Esterline to “keep your damn nose out of it.”

On the eve of the trip, when Nixon was already in Bogotá—the stop before Caracas—Esterline had tried one final time to stop the visit.
⁴
Dulles, a Nixon friend, again told Esterline Nixon had gone ahead “for his own political purposes.” “It soured me on Nixon,” recalled Esterline, “I realized that he was driven above all by his ambition, his single-minded ambition to become president.”

Neither grave risk to the lives of others nor the questionable effect the tour had on U.S. foreign relations was, surely, justified by Nixon's demonstration of his bravery. “The possession of guts,” Stewart Alsop pointed out, “obviously does not in itself qualify a man for the presidency.” “As an exercise in national self-bamboozlement,” James Reston wrote less gently, “the reaction to Nixon's trip was a classic.” “A national defeat has been parlayed into a personal political triumph. . . .” Nixon had virtually incited disorder in pursuit of political victory, a pattern he would play out in his future career.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, he would order the Secret Service to limit crowd control measures in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a way that—in the words of Secret Service chief Baughman—“rendered our protective strategy useless.” The result, a field agent reported, was that “orderly crowds immediately deteriorated into an ever-growing, mad mauling melee.”

In 1970, before a rally in California, reporters were tipped that there was likely to be trouble. As if in a deliberate re-creation of the Lima confrontation, Nixon climbed onto the hood of his car and gave the V sign to a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War. Stones and missiles began flying, and the president's aides were jubilant. “It looked like he deliberately provoked that crowd,” said James Wrightson, editor of the
Sacramento Bee.
“It was like Caracas, which he liked to brag about.”

_____

On July 23, 1959, Nixon flew into another foreign airport, one where the “ominous unfriendliness” reminded him of his arrival in Caracas. This time, though, no crowd had assembled to scream abuse; in fact there was no crowd at all. The motorcade sped into town through almost empty streets, and the few passersby barely turned their heads. At the U.S. ambassador's residence Nixon was briefed in a small sitting room, the only place deemed free of hidden microphones. He had arrived in Moscow, on the most significant mission of his vice presidency.

For the Americans on the trip, as President Eisenhower's brother Milton put it, this was a journey of “hope, mystery, and fear.” Since the end of World War II and the fall of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had become not only a military threat but also a land unknown and virtually inaccessible to Americans. For years the two countries had been rattling their nuclear weapons and fighting a protracted war of espionage and propaganda.