The Arrogance of Power (35 page)

The two men spoke circumspectly, as Hunter afterward explained to Nixon in a “Dear Dick” letter. He told Hoffa that Nixon “did not have the knife out for him, and bore no preconceived prejudices against him.” He agreed that no person “could be elected President of the United States without substantial support from the rank and file of labor.” Then he asked Hoffa what he “expected of the government” and what he “might do for political candidates whom he favored.”

In reply, Hoffa complained that the Department of Justice, then under close Nixon associate Attorney General William Rogers, was harassing him with “nothing more than nuisance suits.” He asked that the judge in a corruption case against him be removed. Then he said he could best help Nixon in 1960 by generating endorsements from local Teamsters officials and by harshly criticizing leading Democrats.

Hoffa did precisely that, attacking Kennedy as soon as he announced his candidacy. After a further meeting with Hunter, at the Republican National Convention, he hammered away at him for the duration of the campaign, especially in the weeks after he had passed on to Nixon's people the five-hundred-thousand-dollar Mafia donation. “You may be assured,” a senior Nixon aide told a correspondent at exactly that time, “that neither the Vice President nor the Republican Party will ever ally themselves with men like Mr. Hoffa.” Behind the scenes, almost coincident with the Marcello donation, the Eisenhower-Nixon Justice Department abruptly stopped the indictment process in the corruption case Hoffa had raised with Hunter. It was to be reactivated after the Kennedy election. Attorney General Rogers, thought investigator Sheridan, “obviously did not want to leave behind him what might appear to be a fixed case for Jimmy Hoffa. Thus Richard Nixon's political debt to Jimmy Hoffa remained unpaid.”

It would be paid, however, during the Nixon presidency, when Hoffa was in prison, sentenced to thirteen years for his crimes. Then, following more
alleged payoffs, Nixon would order Hoffa's release after he had served only five years.

In 1960 no reports ever surfaced about help from organized crime for either candidate. Instead, thanks to yet more bad luck and bad judgment, another skeleton came rattling out of the Nixon closet. Six weeks before the election, while campaigning for his brother in California, Edward Kennedy received a call from an attorney who said he had “something hot” to impart. Days later, at a meeting at the Los Angeles airport, the man handed young Kennedy a single sheet of paper, a draft agreement under which the Kennedys were asked to pay half a million dollars for access to “research” about a “feebly disguised loan.” The information, said the attorney, “might affect the election.” Kennedy replied, “I don't know whether we would use this or not,” pocketed the draft agreement, and left. The Hughes Loan, the $205,000 gift the millionaire Howard Hughes had made four years earlier—ostensibly to Don Nixon but with his brother Richard's connivance
*
—was about to surface.

Word of the airport rendezvous reached a second attorney, James McInerney, a close Kennedy friend, who was also, as fate would have it, lawyer for the accountant who had acted as proxy to hide Hughes's involvement in the loan. Perhaps by chance, perhaps not, the accountant had recently come into possession of the entire bulky folder on the matter.
¹⁷
He now made it available to McInerney, who passed it to the Kennedys, who in turn passed it to a newspaper friendly to them, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A comedy of errors followed. A
Post-Dispatch
reporter, in California checking the story, left a briefcase containing documents on the loan in a photographer's studio, and photocopies were soon being circulated all over town. The material eventually reached
Time
magazine, which put five men on the story. The Kennedy people made certain it also found its way into the hands of Nixon's perennial nemesis, Drew Pearson.

Howard Hughes meanwhile ordered his crack troubleshooter Robert Maheu to help rescue Nixon from “tremendous embarrassment.” Sequestered in the Bel-Air Hotel with the Hughes' copy of the records, Maheu thought he saw a solution. He went for “the sympathy angle,” showing
Post-Dispatch
reporters portions of the file that indicated Nixon's mother had pledged all her worldly possessions as security for the loan. If the story was printed, Maheu said, Hughes would be forced to take all this “poor lady's assets.”

Influenced not only by this argument but also by concern about printing such incendiary information late in the campaign, editors hesitated. They did not run the story, might never have run it, had Nixon himself not subsequently panicked. “Nixon naively believed he could control the ‘spin' on the story if he was the one to release it,” Maheu recalled. Nixon decided—and it was a unilateral decision, press aide Klein confirmed—to give a doctored account of the
loan to Peter Edson, the same friendly reporter used years earlier to preempt revelations of secret funding by wealthy supporters.

“They made a sucker out of me,” Edson acknowledged later. The story fed to him was a total distortion, one that made no mention of either Hughes's involvement in the loan or of Richard Nixon's. Provoked, Drew Pearson promptly went to press after all, naming both men. Then, while Nixon was still denying the charges, his brother Donald admitted Hughes was the source of the money. The accountant in the case, meanwhile, said the major decisions on the arrangement for the loan had been made by Richard Nixon. All this emerged on November 1, with only six days to go before the election.

Nixon was to tell Haldeman and Bebe Rebozo that he believed the Hughes furor had been a major factor in his defeat at the hands of John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy thought so too. As for John F. Kennedy, by the closing weeks of the campaign he shed all pretense at feelings of friendship for his old congressional colleague. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin heard him say of Nixon, “He's a filthy, lying son of a bitch, and a very dangerous man.”

As quickly as the Hughes scandal flared, it died away. The Kennedy people had sensed only a brief surge in their fortunes and George Gallup of Gallup poll fame declared the election too close to call or, as
Time
magazine put it, “as close as a boy with an ice-cream cone.” After a last lap of grueling travel, the quixotic trip to Alaska, Nixon finally came home to Whittier for election day.

As soon as he and Pat had voted and smiled for the cameras, Nixon eluded reporters and sped south down the Pacific Coast Highway to Mexico, where he lunched on enchiladas and beer in the border town of Tijuana. He is said to have prayed on the way back at what he called “one of my favorite Catholic places,” the mission chapel at San Juan Capistrano.

That evening Nixon sat in the Royal Suite of Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, monitoring what turned out to be a cliff-hanger of an election. He isolated himself in front of the television, accepting occasional visits from Pat and his daughters and a select few associates, including Murray Chotiner and Rebozo.

By 11:00
P
.
M
. California time Nixon deemed his chances of winning “remote.” At 11:30 he prepared to make a statement, telling his daughter Tricia, “I'm afraid we've lost, honey.” At 12:15, in front of the cameras in the hotel bedroom, he announced to supporters that “if the present trend continues,” Kennedy would win. He never did verbally and publicly concede defeat.
¹⁸

Millions of viewers had watched Pat, standing beside Nixon as he spoke, struggle to keep from crying. Then she broke, the tears flooding down her face. As they walked away, out of sight of the cameras, she darted from her husband's side and ran for the privacy of her separate bedroom. Jim Bassett's wife, Wilma, recalled how soon after, as she walked along the hall, Pat's door opened and “a long, bony arm reached out and drew me in.” “Now,” Pat sobbed as Wilma tried to comfort her, “I'll never get to be First Lady.” She had not wanted her husband to run but was distraught at the prospect of defeat.
Nixon meanwhile prowled the corridors far into the night. There was still a chance he might win.

The result, when it came, was too close for any man to bear with equanimity. Kennedy became president with 49.71 percent of the popular vote to Nixon's 49.55 percent, with 303 electoral votes to 219 for Nixon. Translated into voter numbers, Kennedy had won by a tiny margin of a mere 113,057 votes out of a turnout of nearly 69 million people. If 28,000 Texan voters had cast their ballots differently, along with 4,500 in Illinois, they would have shifted enough electoral votes to Nixon to elect him president.
¹⁹

There was the immediate suspicion of election fraud, and those who questioned the outcome focused on Illinois, one of the last state tallies to come in. A shift of just 4,480 votes from Nixon to Kennedy there would have left neither man with an electoral majority and thrown the decision on who was to be the victor to the House of Representatives.
²⁰
From Illinois came rumors of legitimate voters' having been denied a vote, of votes cast by nonexistent voters, of manipulation of the count, even photographs of voters being slipped money after voting. “With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” archetypal power broker Mayor Daley of Chicago had told Kennedy by telephone when the vote hung in the balance, “you're going to carry Illinois.”

As documented once and for all in Richard Mahoney's masterful 1999 study of the Kennedys,
Sons and Brothers,
the “friends” were the local mafiosi. “If it wasn't for me,” Chicago mob boss Giancana would brag later, Kennedy “wouldn't even be in the White House.” While that was an overblown boast, the Mafia chief's brother Chuck has recalled how “guys stood menacingly alongside the voting booths, where they made it clear to prospective voters that all ballots were to be cast for Kennedy . . . more than a few arms and legs were broken before the polls closed.” “I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get Kennedy in,” claimed Mickey Cohen, who had ties to the Chicago mob. “The presidency really was stolen in Chicago, without question, by the Democratic machine.” Even Notre Dame law professor Robert Blakey, who once worked in the Kennedy Justice Department, has used the word “stolen” to describe the Democratic victory in Illinois.

The situation was not entirely one-sided, however. Republicans may also have cheated in the election, though obviously not with the same happy result as the Democrats'. “The point,” the
New York Times
' Tom Wicker wrote years later, “is not that the election was stolen from Nixon but that it
might
have been, since it was so close. Republicans had ample reason to think it
had
been stolen.”

For several anxious days, the Democrats worried that Nixon would challenge the result. He did not, and later claimed he chose not to do so because he felt he “could not subject the country to such a situation.” Although some considered this Nixon's “finest hour,” his friend writer Ralph de Toledano claimed the opposite was true. “Nixon was bitter,” he said. “I discussed it with him. . . .
He
pressed for the investigation, and it was Eisenhower who said,
‘No, it will tear the country apart.' At the time, Nixon and the people around him were absolutely furious at Eisenhower.” To have taken the credit for not challenging Kennedy's victory, said de Toledano, was “the first time I caught Nixon in what you might call a lie.”

In private Nixon never did accept that Kennedy had defeated him. “I lost,” he started to say at the age of eighty, then added hurriedly, “Well, not really . . . everyone around me, including Mrs. Nixon, believed that the election had been stolen and that I should have demanded a recount.” At the time he was shattered. “He started to sob, and he couldn't stop . . . he had to be led out of the room,” recalled campaign chairman Len Hall. Days later, in Florida, Herb Klein thought his boss “completely depressed. . . . Nixon found it difficult even to speak.”

His spirits lifted somewhat when Kennedy, urged by his father to mend fences in the name of national unity, helicoptered in from Palm Beach to see him. Later he would claim Kennedy had offered him a post abroad and that he had turned it down, a story that Kennedy denied. In private the president-elect just shook his head and said, “It was just as well for all of us that he didn't quite make it.” “If I've done nothing for this country,” he told an old friend, “I've saved them from Dick Nixon.”

For Nixon, it was the bitter start to a resentment that festered for the rest of his life. “I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money . . .” he was to write. “I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.”

One longtime aide, however, took a different view. “Dick didn't lose this election,” he told Theodore White off the record. “Dick blew this election.” Another said thoughtfully “Maybe Dick was never cut out to be a top banana, from the very beginning.”

Two years before the 1960 election, the author Margaret Halsey had written a strangely prescient article for the
New Republic,
looking ahead to the day when Nixon might become president. In that event, Halsey wrote, “Many people will automatically develop a sort of selective morality. They will have one set of ethics—the one they were taught as children and have been used to all their lives—for judging themselves and their friends. They will have another, and a much lower one, for the President of the United States.”