The Arrogance of Power (46 page)

At nearly eighty, pacing his vast cavern of an office in lower Manhattan, Morgenthau recalled how, during the investigations of several cases, “Nixon's name kept coming up.”
³¹
“We were looking at Paradise Island,” said Morgenthau, “and that led us to Nixon. We didn't have an open investigation of him, but we were going to open one.” When the author shared with Morgenthau the document showing the “N & R” accounts at the Cosmos Bank, the district attorney reacted strongly. He had never seen it before, but his probe had led him in exactly that direction. He had information on a visit Nixon had made to a Paris attorney, an expert in helping people set up Swiss bank accounts. “I have no doubt,” Morgenthau said, “that he used Cosmos. He may have used something else too. But he certainly used that bank.”

When Nixon became president, New York's U.S. attorney was working with the House Banking and Currency Committee to formulate a new law that would have made it much harder for U.S. citizens and corporations to operate secret accounts abroad. Long before it materialized, however, Nixon removed Morgenthau from office—over the protests of senior Republicans as well as Democrats. The new law curbing the use of foreign bank accounts was eventually passed, in 1972, but in attenuated form.

The author's interview with Morgenthau brought him once again to the issue of Nixon's alleged financial interest in the Paradise Island toll bridge. “We had Cosmos people, the American branch of Cosmos, before the grand jury,” said District Attorney Morgenthau, “and they were asked who owned the 20 percent investment in the Paradise Island bridge. They said, ‘We own it.' We said: ‘Have you ever made another direct stock investment?' And they could not tell us of any such investment they'd ever made. I don't have any doubt they were holding that for Richard Nixon. Could I prove it? No. Am I sure of it? Yes.”

Cosmos Bank failed in 1974, and chronologically the trail ends there—except for an item District Attorney Morgenthau received through the mail in 1997, a single sheet of paper sent anonymously.
³²
It reads:

“UBS” stands for Union Bank of Switzerland, the largest Swiss bank, specializing in investment management for private clients. Bank Cantrade, which is part of it, advertised—as late as 1998—“absolute loyalty towards our clients . . . trust discretion, performance, and continuity.”

Even though this was an anonymous communication, the reference to Baerwald & DeBoer is interesting. That was the securities firm that had been run by Franklin DeBoer, the trust officer at Rebozo's bank and the man who said he managed “private portfolios” for Nixon and Rebozo.

This account of Nixon's alleged secret funds has thus come full circle. If the late nineties communication received by Morgenthau was mere fiction and mischief, it was put together by a cognoscente. The DeBoer connection is an obscure one, not exposed at length anywhere until publication of this book.

Finally, the man who raised funds for Nixon through three election campaigns, and a staunch loyalist, let slip an interesting detail shortly before his death. “Rebozo,” said Maurice Stans in a 1997 interview, “was a very nice guy, a sweet fellow. . . . He told me, ‘I've set up a trust fund for Richard Nixon's family—to take care of the family.' The only money set aside for Nixon was through Bebe's generosity. Bebe told me that.”

Stans said the fund, which he believed was started in 1968, never became public knowledge, and he himself never learned of its extent.
³³
It was therefore initiated years before the first of the large deposits made in Zurich's Cosmos Bank in the names of “N & R,” according to the document seized by the IRS.

A Swiss hotelier, Raoul de Gendre, met Nixon while he was working in the United States. He later returned to Switzerland, to become manager of the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich. A fan of Nixon, whose photographs cover the walls of his present place of business, de Gendre has fond memories of their further encounters. He has recalled that throughout the eighties, sometimes accompanied by Pat, often by Rebozo, Nixon traveled to Zurich every single year.

He has been vaporized by political nukes half a dozen times and resurrected by his own hand. He has breathed into his own mouth.

—Bryce Harlow, Nixon friend and adviser

W
hatever his future fortune was to be, Nixon claimed enduring financial hard times after the 1962 defeat. Pat was “nagging him about their plight,” according to a source close to the family, and wanted to get out of California. It was a plan that suited Nixon well, even as he once more promised her that he would never run for public office again. Within a month of his loss to Pat Brown, Nixon had met with intimates in a suite at New York's Waldorf-Astoria to discuss how to keep himself politically in play. New York in fact seemed the one place where resurrection might be possible.

To that end, Nixon wanted an attorney's job in Manhattan, one that would pay $250,000 a year and leave him free to use his time as he liked. “He had to have his cake, money,” said one aide, “and eat it too—pursue his interest in foreign policy.”

One account suggested it was Rebozo, working with DuPont heir Ed Ball and World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, who landed him such a position. Another—the version Nixon perpetuated—held that pharmaceuticals tycoon Elmer Bobst arranged it. In any event, Nixon became a senior partner of a New York law firm, thenceforth to be known as Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander.

The Wall Street firm was a long-established champion of big business,
described by
Life
's Hugh Sidey as a place where “the faces inside are commanding but for the most part unrecognizable . . . the talk about corporations and dollars.” Its lawyers served their clients by guarding their money from taxation, negotiating bond issues, and administering estates. The company existed primarily for the manipulation of big money.

Lucrative job offer in hand, the Nixons found a home to suit their stature, a $135,000 Upper East Side apartment with a view of Central Park and Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a neighbor.
¹
With their daughters and Manolo and Fina Sanchez, the Spanish valet and housekeeper who had become permanent members of the household
²
—and their now geriatric dog Checkers—they moved east in June 1963. No one in California gave them a going-away party.

Pat was to describe their time in New York as a “six-year vacation.” She decorated the apartment in “French provincial,” all pastel yellows and golds, and remodeled the twin-bedded master bedroom. Her “Republican cloth coats” were now joined in the walk-in closet by a mink. She sent her daughters to Chapin, the fashionable private school for girls, and in due course would launch them as debutantes. In spite of such conformity with the social requirements, Nixon was not readily welcomed into the bastion of the eastern establishment. “They just didn't want to go to dinner with Nixon,” recalled an acquaintance of one attempt to corral guests for a dinner party.

Nixon applied for and obtained admission to the New York bar, responding to one question with praise for the Constitution's safeguards against the misuse of power. He worked from a twenty-fourth-floor office at Nixon, Mudge, Rose, seated at an antique desk adorned with a vice presidential ashtray and a pen set Eisenhower had given him. As the new “name” partner, Nixon brought the firm prestige. Powerful backers, Pepsi's Don Kendall and Bob Abplanalp of Precision Valve, now moved their legal business to Nixon, Mudge, Rose.

The firm and its clients were attuned to Nixon's politics. Milton Rose, a senior partner, had led the promotion of U.S. business in Latin America after the riots during Nixon's vice presidential tour. The firm had represented shipowner Stavros Niarchos during the tussle with Aristotle Onassis over oil shipping routes, directed from Washington by Nixon.
*
Corrupt San Diego banker Arnholt Smith, a Nixon contributor, would use Nixon, Mudge, Rose to fight a case for him. It may not be incidental that during Nixon's tenure the firm had as a client the government of South Vietnam.

From the office on Broad Street, Nixon wrote to a judge requesting leniency for Mario García Kohly, the rightist exile—now in trouble on counterfeiting charges—whom he had once pressed on the CIA as the potential leader of free Cuba. He also worked to recover the millions of dollars claimed by relatives of the assassinated Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo; thirty
million dollars had reportedly vanished in a plane crash that killed Kohly's primary financial backer.
³

It would be the firm's business that put Nixon in Dallas on the day that John Kennedy was assassinated. Public courtesies aside, their feelings about each other had remained suffused with rancor. “It makes me sick,” Kennedy said privately of
Six Crises,
deprecating the saccharine way Nixon had woven his family into the text. “He's a cheap bastard.” “Bastards” was the description Nixon used of the Kennedys, too, as he smarted over tax audits he believed they had ordered.

Five months before the assassination, both men had happened to be in Rome at the same time. Both had appointments to meet the newly elected pope, Paul VI. On learning that the president's visit had lasted thirty minutes, Nixon contacted the U.S. consul general to insist that his audience be “exactly as long as the one Kennedy had.” Before ending his state visit, the president telephoned Nixon at his hotel. “He just wanted to say hello,” Nixon recalled. The two men never spoke again.

Early on the morning of November 22, Nixon was in a suite at Dallas's Baker Hotel, winding up two days' work for Pepsi at a bottlers' convention.
⁴
In a city seething with anti-Kennedy feeling, he had not been able to resist mixing politics with business, telling local journalists, “I am going to work as hard as I can to get the Kennedys out.” Kennedy was reportedly irritated by this comment, the latest of several Nixon outbursts, as he scanned the newspapers that last morning. He may or may not have noted that along with the criticism, Nixon had expressed the hope that Dallas would give Kennedy a “courteous reception.”

Nixon flew out on a commercial flight just two and a half hours before Kennedy arrived in Dallas aboard Air Force One. By the time he arrived in New York, the president would be dying. Unaware of the assassination, Nixon threw out more anti-Kennedy barbs to a group of reporters at the airport, posed cheerfully for photographers, and hailed a cab. On the way into town the cab was stationary at a red light when a man rushed up to ask if the driver had heard the news: Shots had been fired at the president. At Nixon's home in Manhattan a weeping doorman told him Kennedy was dead. He rushed into the apartment to find his daughters watching the tragedy unfold on television.

The writer Stephen Hess, arriving minutes later, found Nixon “very shaken. He took out the Dallas morning paper, which had a story about the press conference he had had the day before. He had talked about how the people of Dallas should have respect for their political adversaries. . . . He was saying to me in effect, ‘You see, I didn't have anything to do with creating this.' He was very concerned then that Kennedy had been assassinated by a right-winger and that somehow Nixon would be accused of unleashing political hatred.”

As Hess listened, Nixon placed a call to FBI Director Hoover, who told him that he believed the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact a
leftist, leaving Nixon “somewhat relieved.” His reaction, Hess recollected, was “There but for the grace of God go I.”
⁵

That night Nixon wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy recalling that he and her husband had been “personal friends.” He attended the funeral in Washington
⁶
with Pat at his side. A year later, in an article for
Reader's Digest,
he would praise his former rival's “keen intelligence, his great wisdom and vitality.”

The sourness, however, remained. In the eighties he attributed the nation's sense of loss at Kennedy's death to “mythology” and argued that Kennedy's achievements were “not so much what he did, but the man, the style.” Haldeman said Nixon had “neither respected nor liked” the slain president.

When Nixon in turn reached the White House, a former Secret Service agent recalled, “It sometimes seemed that he went out of his way to take his place as a martyr beside Jack Kennedy. In his first term Nixon's favorite limo was said to be SS 100X, the restored midnight blue eight-thousand-pound Lincoln Continental that Kennedy had been shot in.”

The tragedy had one important ramification for Nixon. “History intervened,” his colleague Len Garment noted. “John Kennedy's death had the ironic consequence of restoring Richard Nixon to life as a national political figure.” Nixon had sensed his opportunity immediately. Stopping by at his apartment again the morning after the assassination, Hess found him huddled with key Republicans, “already assessing how this event would affect or re-create the possibilities of Nixon running for president.”

“I never wear a hat,” Nixon would respond, when asked on
The Arthur Godfrey Show
whether he planned to run in 1964, “so it must always be in the ring.”

_____

“If all I had was my legal work,” Nixon was soon telling friends, “I would be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four . . . there was no other life for me but politics. . . .”

On a visit to the New York World's Fair, his daughter Julie recalled, a Republican companion was warned in advance to “not bring up politics with my mother.” However, as soon as Pat and the girls were packed off to Europe for a month, Nixon immersed himself in the 1964 campaign.

While his declared role was one of neutrality, he initially tried to position himself as an alternative to Barry Goldwater. When that scheme failed, he made a highly successful convention speech. Even as the red, white, and blue balloons floated down upon Goldwater, nominated but on his way to the worst Republican defeat in thirty years, Nixon was once again being spoken of as a future leader.

The political machine was running again, and Nixon already knew which image of himself he would present to win over his countrymen. It was the image that he hoped would be his legacy: that of world statesman par excellence.
On a night flight to Europe, after several martinis, Nixon had a prompt response for a friend who wondered why in the world he would want to run for president again.

“Because I know the fucking Commie mind,” he replied. “But they don't know mine. I really think I could do something. I really believe I could make a contribution to peace.”

Nixon's law firm colleague Len Garment had previously been a Democrat and “reflexive Nixon denigrator.” Now, though, he joined the Nixon camp. One night in Florida in 1965, in a rare intimate interlude, Nixon seemed to open his heart to Garment.

After dinner with Elmer Bobst, the two men headed for a newly built house that had been placed at their disposal. Then, fearing the developers might use his presence for publicity purposes, Nixon ordered the driver to return to the Bobst estate. The gates were locked—it was after midnight—and Nixon and Garment got in by climbing over the wall.

“We didn't want to wake up Elmer,” Garment remembered, “so we found the pool house, where there were two camp beds. There Nixon was, with his big head sticking over the covers. The lights were off, but he couldn't sleep—he never could—and he just kept talking. He talked for what must have been an hour, sounding sad and determined, about the things that meant a lot to him. If he couldn't live in politics, he said, how was he to live? We had been talking about him running for president. And he said that if he couldn't play a real role, on that front or otherwise, he'd be dead very soon.

“It was a soliloquy,” said Garment. “He was talking himself to sleep.” Nixon declared himself driven “by his pacifist mother's idealism and the profound importance of foreign affairs. . . . He would do anything, make any sacrifice, to be able to continue using his talents and experience in making foreign policy.”

As the historian Michael Beschloss has noted, Nixon was “a romantic and ardent champion of the great man theory of politics.” Of all the world leaders whose careers he studied, he revered one above all others, Charles de Gaulle. When he announced his move to New York, Nixon had said Paris was to be his secondary base of operations. Within weeks he made a trip there, paying court to de Gaulle, whom he had first met in Washington in 1960. The general was now five years into his extraordinary eleven-year rule, a period during which he wielded more power over his nation than any French leader since Emperor Napoleon III.

Seated with Nixon on the terrace of the Élysée Palace, de Gaulle held forth on world affairs. He said the United States should negotiate with China, urged that it improve relations with the Soviets, and introduced Nixon to a term he had not heard before, détente. Most important of all, de Gaulle raised his glass in a toast his guest never forgot. Nixon, he declared, would someday return to serve his country “in an even higher capacity.”

The older man's confidence won his guest's lasting devotion. Nixon gazed
admiringly on de Gaulle at John F. Kennedy's funeral, visited him on every trip to Paris while out of office, sent an emissary to him during the 1968 run for the White House, and made an audience with him the high point of his first European trip as president.

Henry Kissinger believed that the respect was mutual. General Vernon Walters, who interpreted for them, said de Gaulle treated Nixon “as an equal.” Nixon was, however, as Haldeman put it, “in awe” of de Gaulle. Writing about the French president, Nixon referred to him by his full name, Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle. It resonated, Nixon thought, with echoes of Charlemagne, the eighth-century emperor Charles the Great, and of Roman Gaul—“grandeur, glory, greatness.”