The Arrogance of Power (41 page)

By the time the Democrats discovered the ruse and again got a judge to stop it, half a million copies of the mailing, of a planned total of nine hundred thousand, had been sent out. The Republicans evidently judged it an important weapon, for the cost of the effort, seventy thousand dollars, was its largest single reported item of expenditure. What no one knew at the time was the extent of Nixon's personal involvement in the scam.

A year later, under questioning during a Democratic suit over the mailings, Haldeman was asked if Nixon had reviewed the plan. He replied: “I don't think so.” The head of the public relations company involved in producing the
material, however, recalled having gone over the proofs with Nixon and Haldeman at Nixon's house in Bel Air. The judge determined that Haldeman had lied under oath, as he would after Watergate. He declared in his judgment that the mailing had been “reviewed, amended and finally approved by Mr. Nixon personally.”

Neither Nixon's complicity nor Haldeman's perjury received public attention at the time, because the Republicans quietly negotiated a settlement. The Democrats' state chairman, Roger Kent, accepted the deal because of the high cost of pursuing the case. Nixon, for his part, felt no shame. Speaking of the matter at the height of Watergate, the White House tapes show, he said of Kent: “Do you remember in '62? . . . the little asshole sued us. . . .”

Nixon's fraudulent mailings had involved a poll for recipients to fill out and mail. Getting caught in 1962, however, would prove no deterrent to trying similar tricks in 1972. Another White House tape shows the following exchange between Nixon and Charles Colson:

This exchange was followed by laughter, and then:

In 1962 Nixon's old foes Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro contributed indirectly to Governor Brown's election victory. Khrushchev's dispatch of missiles to Cuba, the act he called “throwing a hedgehog at Uncle Sam's pants,” triggered the world's worst nuclear crisis and pushed coverage of the Nixon-Brown confrontation off the top of the front page of the newspapers.

Nixon had in fact been edging closer to Brown in the polls. Now, on October 22, as he sat in Oakland's Edgewater Inn watching the televised broadcast of Kennedy's address to the nation, he decided his campaign was doomed. On election day morning two weeks later, when speechwriter Stephen Hess asked if he still thought he was going to lose, he said, “Yes.” Hess suggested he might be mistaken. “I'm not wrong,” Nixon replied.

He sat up most of election night watching the returns come in at Los Angeles' Beverly Hilton Hotel, in the same presidential suite where Truman,
Eisenhower, and Kennedy had all once stayed. He wore a robe, which at first glance gave the impression of relaxation, but under it his shirt and tie, buttoned up tight. “We had,” he wrote later, “to play the dreary drama through to its conclusion.”

The outcome was clear enough by midnight, and at 4:00
A
.
M
. Nixon went to bed. When he woke and called for coffee at about 8:00, he learned he had indeed lost by 297,000 out of 6 million votes cast. Press aide Herb Klein went in to see him with a draft concession statement and thought Nixon looked “haggard . . . bad.”

Told the press was waiting to see him, Nixon just stared and then simply said, “Screw them.” When aides told him he ought to make the traditional admission of defeat, he said it again and again, adding with finality: “I'm not going down there. To hell with those bastards!” It was agreed that Nixon would leave from the hotel's rear entrance while Klein spoke to the reporters. “He was,” Klein remembered, “in no shape to do anything else.”

Nixon's friend Pat Hillings recalled what happened next. “Suddenly the figure of Richard Nixon came hurtling into the room and practically pushed Klein off the platform. He was angry. It was quite apparent. . . .” Haldeman had urged him to tell the press “where the hell to get off,” and Nixon now launched into the rambling speech that no one was ever to forget, the one with the famous “last point.” It was now that he told startled reporters: “You won't have Nixon to kick around any more because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. . . .”

“All the members of the press,” he declared, were delighted that he had lost. From that he swung to the assertion that he “had no complaints about press coverage.” From that, via meandering references to defense contracts, Cuba, the economy, and Governor Brown, he circled back to the “fun” the press had had attacking him over the past sixteen years. He said he hoped his speech would lead the media to “put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.”

Nixon had been angry at the press in 1960, even though the vast majority of papers that did endorse a candidate had backed him. He was especially miffed in 1962 because the
Los Angeles Times,
long his mouthpiece, had changed its policy and become more evenhanded. His press aide Herb Klein, himself a senior newspaperman, did not think the overall coverage unfair to Nixon that year. His fund-raiser Maurice Stans, looking back on the incident in 1997, thought the attack on the press had been “ridiculous.”

“What unnerved the reporters,” the
New York Times'
s Gladwin Hill thought, “was an uncomfortable feeling of being involuntary viewers of an appalling act of self-revelation, of a convulsive venting of a long-dammed bitterness towards many people. Although Nixon appeared to be lucid—his words were unslurred, his syntax orderly—his fifteen-minute monologue was a patchwork of schizoid contradictions. . . .”

“I gave it to them right in the ass,” Nixon muttered to Klein when it was
over. “It had to be said, goddammit.” Then he stepped into the waiting car and went home to Bel Air, only to drive off alone again soon after. Nobody knew why he had left or where he had gone. “Desperately we alerted friends,” Klein recalled. “He finally wandered back.”

At that “last” press conference local reporter Jack Langguth had thought Nixon looked like “someone you'd see if you went into a bar on Eighth Avenue in New York at seven in the morning, talking almost to himself, so exhausted but too tired to sleep.” He and fellow journalists concluded that Nixon had been drinking, although they decently omitted from their reports anything about his physical condition.

Years later Gladwin Hill attributed the performance to “the perversely stimulating effects of tranquilizing pills on top of some drinks.” Loyal aides admitted only that Nixon had had “one or two scotches” the previous night and a “watered-down drink” in the morning.

John Ehrlichman was more forthright. He knew his boss “occasionally resorted to pills or liquor,” and on the night of the election he learned from colleagues that this was such an occasion. “Nixon had begun greeting defeat with lubrication but without grace,” he recalled. “Haldeman and the others had decided that in view of his deteriorating condition there would be no Nixon interviews for the TV cameras. . . . As the evening wore on I gathered that our candidate was good and drunk.” Nixon's lecture to the press, Ehrlichman said, came “after a night of drinking, sleeplessness, remorse. . . .”

Insomnia was a long-term problem for Nixon. Even at the start of the campaign, he admitted, “I was more tired than I had been at the end of the 1960 campaign . . . and I became short-tempered at home.” Just how short-tempered was not revealed while he was alive. Research for this book, however, suggests that Nixon physically attacked his wife after his loss in 1962.

_____

As Pat once again stood tearfully at her defeated husband's side, many had felt sympathy for her. Betsy Cronkite, wife of the CBS newsman, found herself at lunch the next day with a group of Republican women friends. One said, “I felt so sorry for Pat last night.” Betsy Cronkite responded: “I feel sorry for her every night.”

At the start of the campaign John Ehrlichman had spent time with Pat and the girls on a yacht cruise through the San Juan Islands, off Vancouver. “We talked about a lot of things,” he recalled. “We were at close quarters, and I think I got a fairly good read of the dynamics of them. She wasn't happy about his running, was dragging her feet about the campaign. She was talking about how a settled life, the house and kids in school, was her desire.”

Ronald Ziegler, protective of the Nixons' memory, also remembered “tension” between them during this period. Howard Seelye, who had known Pat years earlier in Whittier, found himself sitting next to her at lunch that year. “I'll never forget,” he said recently, “how she said, ‘I just hate politics.' In the
early days she had thought it was great. But things had got tough.” In public Pat acted out her role, “bubbling with excitement” and telling reporters, “Our hearts are in politics, and we are glad to be back in the thick of it.”

Nixon called Pat his “secret weapon” and, in an allusion to her namesake Pat Brown, dubbed her the new Pat, destined soon to reside in the state capital. Watching as she went through the motions, the
Los Angeles Times'
s Richard Bergholz thought her “just a stick of furniture sitting there, someone who smiled and had that adoring look on her face when she'd heard the same speech for the fiftieth time . . . she was obviously on edge, and we all suffered when she suffered. He abused her perpetually.”

Word spread about an ugly moment during a plane trip from San Francisco. Pat, sitting apart from her husband while he talked with others, had asked if she might join them for a drink. The answer, reportedly, was a snarled “Keep your fucking mouth shut.”

In the blur of Nixon's defeat, when he was drunk in his suite at the Beverly Hilton, aides were preoccupied with preventing him going downstairs. Pat reportedly sat alone, sobbing quietly, in an adjoining room. Just as the press coverage after his exit omitted to mention Nixon's hung-over condition, so too there was no mention of another episode involving Pat.

This concerned a prizewinning
Los Angeles Times
reporter, Jack Tobin, who had opened a recent article with a reference to Nixon's house in the Trousdale Estates and the estates' link to the Teamsters. Now, as her husband finished his harangue and the cameras ceased turning, Pat “went berserk.” In a reprise of the scene on the day she moved out of her Washington home, Tobin recalled, she “began to scream obscenities at me, and kept saying, ‘You caused this!' ”
⁹

As the car whisked Nixon and his wife away at last, home to the Trousdale house, Pat is said to have sat slumped silently in the back seat. From that point on, the precise sequence of events is unclear. It was soon afterward, according to press aide Klein, that Nixon slipped out of the house, climbed into his car, and vanished for several hours. This apparently was in the time frame that his then fourteen-year-old daughter Julie would one day describe in her book about her mother.

Pat, Julie was to write, was watching television in the den when the television ran the “kick around” speech. At the point where Nixon attacked the press, she shouted, “Bravo!” When her father came home, Julie recalled, “We were waiting tearfully in the hallway at the front door. Mother spoke first. She said brokenly, ‘Oh, Dick.' He was so overcome with emotion that he brushed past and went outside to the backyard. That afternoon was the first and the only time my parents gave way to their emotions simultaneously, and it bewildered Tricia and me. . . .”

Domestic life for a top politician is rarely what most families would consider normal. What happened to bewilder the children that sad Wednesday in November 1962, however, may have been something they never learned of as children.

Future cabinet member Bob Finch, Nixon's intimate for many years, once admitted cautiously that he had sometimes witnessed Nixon in a rage, a rage “irrational in that it was much broader than the incident that provoked it.” Speechwriter William Safire would write of Nixon's capacity for “deep, dark rage.” Pat had a temper too.

Another aide remembered a night in the sixties when Nixon was enjoying a couple of vodka martinis. “God,” he said, “these martinis are great. But you mustn't have more than two of them.”

“Why not?” asked the aide.

“More than two,” Nixon replied, “you fight with your wife.”

Nixon's offhand remark may have been more than just the exaggeration of a common cliché, for rumors that he had physically abused Pat circulated in Washington for years. Two investigative reporters stumbled on such stories, but none were at the time well enough sourced to publish. While writing
The Final Days
with Carl Bernstein, their account of the end of the Nixon presidency, Bob Woodward was told of an incident in which Nixon supposedly hurt his wife badly enough to put her in the hospital.
¹⁰
Seymour Hersh, while working on his study of Henry Kissinger,
The Price of Power,
learned from sources of three alleged wife-beating incidents.