The Wars of Watergate (10 page)

Early in 1959, President Eisenhower dispatched Nixon to Moscow to open an American exhibit. Relations between the superpowers were then particularly precarious, largely because Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had threatened to force the Western allies from Berlin. Khrushchev also was aware of American U-2 spy plane overflights of Russia, and he felt provoked by a congressional resolution decrying the plight of the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe. The result was a tense confrontation, resulting in harsh exchanges between Nixon and Khrushchev. Their “debate” in Moscow is vital, for Nixon hagiographers and demonologists alike. Some, like Nixon himself, have seen it as one of his great crises, one in which he mastered and demonstrated vital leadership qualities. His detractors argue that the encounter demonstrated both Nixon’s lack of competence and his immaturity. The same debate has been joined over his behavior the year before: on what should have been a routine Latin American tour, violence erupted against Nixon and his party in Lima and Caracas. Then, too, sharp differences of opinion had surrounded his role. Some saw Nixon as a cool, tough individual who had “stood up for America,” while others argued that Nixon
had needlessly provoked the Latin American crowds and ignored warnings from on-the-scene diplomats. But that was South America. In Moscow, Nixon was in
the
enemy’s house—slightly redesigned to include a model American kitchen.

At the outset of his trip, Nixon clearly perceived its domestic potential. Before he left, he rejected State Department speech drafts, telling his military aide that he never wanted his speechwriters to insert any endorsement of “peaceful coexistence”—and promised to dismiss any staffers who suggested that approach. Nixon objected to the phrase as the State Department’s “Acheson line,” though one would have been pressed to remember such a phrase from Secretary Acheson’s lips. Nixon had his own stamp to put on things, as he repeatedly stressed the notion of “peaceful competition” when he spoke in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev regarded Nixon as the spokesman for the American right wing and the champion of an aggressive, belligerent stance toward the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader seemed determined to display his own brand of belligerency. The two visited the U.S. exhibition, in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, and Khrushchev used the occasion to dismiss the products on display (Polaroid cameras, Pepsi-Cola, IBM computers, Singer sewing machines) as gimmicks. The two men taped a discussion for American television, but Khrushchev used the occasion to denounce U.S. foreign policy. Most observers agree that Nixon emerged somewhat shaken. At that point, William Safire, working as a public-relations man for one of the exhibitors, persuaded the two men to look over a “typical American kitchen.” There Nixon recovered his composure and responded a bit more effectively to the Soviet leader’s barbs. The two played one-upmanship over which country was “ahead” in different areas. And that essentially constituted the famous “Kitchen Debate,” “standing up” to the Russians and personifying what
Time
magazine called a “disciplined vigor that belied tales of the decadent and limp-wristed West.” In Nixon’s view, Khrushchev was trying “to bully” him and the only way to win his respect was to resist and demonstrate his own commitments. Milton Eisenhower, who was accompanying Nixon (largely as watchdog for his brother), was unimpressed.
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At the end of his tour, Nixon spoke to the Soviet people on nationwide television. The first draft of his speech was belligerent, and clearly for American consumption. The U.S. ambassador urged him to tone it down. “You are the first American Vice President to address the Soviet people. You’ve got to make sure you are not the last,” he said. Nixon was “upset, terribly nervous and high-strung” from the situation, and according to Milton Eisenhower, he drank six martinis before dinner. Nixon solicited opinions on his speech, and then, Eisenhower noted, he used “vulgar swear words and everything else in this mixed company.” Altogether, the President’s brother thought Nixon “a strange character.”
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The Vice President, however, never doubted his success. The media widely reported the Kitchen Debate, portraying Nixon as the man who “had stood up to Khrushchev.” Nixon had in one sense elevated his California style to the international arena, and the supposedly hostile media had credited him with a triumph. Some, however, saw the trip as confirming that Nixon could never successfully negotiate with the Soviets. The net result—as was often the case for Nixon—was a grab bag of pluses and minuses.

The succession was Richard Nixon’s. As the Eisenhower presidency wound down, Nixon emerged as the only serious contender for the Republican nomination. That was the easy part.

The contest for the presidency consisted of two campaigns. The first involved Nixon’s long, painful pursuit of Dwight Eisenhower’s blessing. The second was against his opponent, John F. Kennedy, a onetime friendly rival, but now a formidable obstacle. Nixon’s problems with Eisenhower were psychologically simple and classic. Developing a working relationship of mutual respect could not come easily, given the age difference between the two men and Eisenhower’s accomplishments and prestige. Kennedy was another matter altogether. Nixon was only a few years older than Kennedy; they had entered public life together in 1946. Politically, they were peers. But Kennedy was many things that Nixon was not, much to Nixon’s envy. Kennedy had those links to the eastern bastions of power and intellectuality that Nixon himself had courted with limited results; Kennedy was wealthy, with a successful, even appealing, family; and finally, Kennedy exuded an easygoing affability and charm that obviously contrasted to Nixon’s shyness and public awkwardness.

Nixon just barely won the first campaign, but he lost the one that really counted. And it was so close: Kennedy won with a popular margin of 113,000 votes out of more than 68 million cast. Nixon was devastated. “Of the five presidential campaigns in which I was a direct participant,” Nixon recalled, “none affected me more personally.… It was a campaign of unusual intensity.” And it was bitter: “[T]he way the Kennedys played politics and the way the media let them get away with it left me angry and frustrated.”
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Through the following years, the memories of “the Kennedys” and “the media” festered in Nixon like an angry boil. The memory was Nixon’s nemesis. It periodically engulfed him, diverted him, and led him to rash, ill-considered action—eventually with tragic results.

The Eisenhower–Nixon relationship offers a veritable playground for psychohistorical speculations. The essential elements are enough to show that Eisenhower’s behavior undoubtedly heightened Nixon’s periodic anxieties and doubts about their relationship and his own future. But the experience also demonstrated Nixon’s special qualities of resilience and fortitude.
His relations with the President had been at stake, or at least at issue, since the slush-fund episode of 1952. The public speculation surrounding Eisenhower’s desire for a new running mate in 1956 fueled Nixon’s insecurities. At that time, Eisenhower referred to Nixon only in “generally cold and indifferent” terms; he told a speechwriter that Nixon “just hasn’t grown [and] … I just haven’t honestly been able to believe that he
is
presidential timber.” A few years later, Ike, referring to Nixon, complained to his secretary that “it is terrible when people get politically ambitious.” He also told her that he could not understand how a man such as Nixon could have so few personal friends. The secretary summed up the views of Eisenhower’s closest associates (views that might well have been Ike’s as well): the President, she wrote, “is a man of integrity and sincere in his every action.… [E]verybody trusts and loves him. But the Vice-President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”
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Those were private remarks. Perhaps in that cloying, close world of Washington, the Vice President heard about them. But the public statements, whether cryptic or garbled, deeply injured Nixon politically; we can only speculate as to their personal effect.

If Nixon was Eisenhower’s preferred heir, the President hardly made that perfectly clear. Eisenhower nursed fantasies that the Republican Party would rise above simple political considerations and choose a candidate for his achievements and intellectual skills—men such as his Secretary of the Treasury, Texan Robert Anderson, or even his brother, Milton. The President had numerous objections to Nelson Rockefeller, the apparent alternative to Nixon. At one point, Eisenhower told a press conference that the Republicans had numerous “eminent men, big men” who could succeed him. Eisenhower would not identify them, but as if suddenly remembering who was going to gain the nomination, he lamely stated that he was “not dissatisfied with the individual that looks like he will get it.”
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With such endorsements, the Vice President needed no enemies.

After the Republican Convention, reporters pressed Eisenhower as to Nixon’s role in the Administration. Ike insisted that Nixon had taken an active part in discussions, had expressed his opinions openly, and when asked, had offered numerous recommendations for decisions. Reporters persisted, asking the President for a specific instance of a Nixon proposal that the Administration had adopted. Eisenhower snapped: “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” Fittingly, the news conference ended on that note, giving the remark an air of finality.
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Nixon never escaped its apparent meaning.

The campaign itself strained this already delicate relationship. An Eisenhower biographer has perceptively noted that Nixon’s emphasis on his experience and participation in the Administration inadvertently reinforced the notion that Eisenhower reigned but did not rule. Furthermore, Nixon needed
the Republican Party far more than did Eisenhower. Consequently, he made the usual concessions and compromises to attain measures of party support. This included appeasing Rockefeller on reducing defense spending and other issues. The press dubbed the Nixon-Rockefeller agreement the “Compact of Fifth Avenue,” but Barry Goldwater angrily denounced it as the “Munich of the Republican party.” The President complained to Nixon, saying that it might be difficult for him to support a platform that failed to wholeheartedly endorse his Administration. Near the end of the campaign, Ike was frustrated by Nixon’s apparent indecisiveness in giving the President an expanded schedule of speeches. “Goddammit,” he told staff members, “he looks like a loser to me!” Eisenhower campaigned vigorously at the end, but the general consensus was that it was too little, too late.
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His late intervention has been variously blamed on his own inertia, his wife’s adamant opposition to his campaigning, and Nixon’s tardiness in asking for the President’s aid. More than two decades later, Nixon omitted any chapter on Eisenhower in
Leaders
, his reminiscence of prominent world leaders he had known.

The Kennedy-Nixon debates highlighted the 1960 campaign. These so-called “Great Debates” were neither great nor real debates. To compare them—as contemporaries did—to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 only mocks history and trivializes political discourse at its best. The 1960 debates offered a preview to an unsuspecting America of the years to come, when style, format, and media, rather than issues and substance, would prevail in political campaigns. Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan learned vastly more from the Kennedy-Nixon exchanges than did the electorate.
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In retrospect, Nixon, Eisenhower, and Nixon’s supporters regarded the decision to debate Kennedy as misguided, and, of course, fatal. But Nixon fancied himself at the time as the skillful forensic competitor; debate was his turf. After all, he had challenged Jerry Voorhis to the debate platform and immediately put his opponent on the defensive. His debater’s skills had proven effective in his campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, and the “Checkers” speech represented a classic illustration of rhetorical technique. The temptation to debate again must have been compelling. Besides, by debating Kennedy, Nixon could demonstrate being “on his own.”

The story of the four debates is familiar. The first apparently damaged Nixon, perhaps irreparably. He appeared without make-up, highlighting his famous “five o’clock shadow.” He recently had been ill, and the combination made him appear haggard, nervous, and ill-kempt, particularly next to the handsome, neatly groomed, coolly poised Kennedy. Perhaps even more damaging, a reporter resurrected Eisenhower’s remark that he would need a week to think of Nixon’s contributions in the White House. Nixon stumbled through an understandably lame response.

Interestingly, those who heard the first debate on radio thought Nixon had
done quite well. But Nixon recognized his basic mistake—and long before Marshall McLuhan: “I had concentrated too much on substance and not enough on appearance.”
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The Day of the Package had arrived in American politics.

In subsequent debates, Nixon seemed polished and informed. During the third encounter, on October 13, 1960, Nixon satisfied his rightist constituency when he berated Kennedy’s apparent unwillingness to defend the Chinese Nationalist–held offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. In the finale, on October 21, Nixon managed to reach out in the other direction and cast Kennedy as the adventurist Cold Warrior. He chided the Senator for his proposal to assist anti-Castro elements, noting that the charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States prohibited such intervention in Cuban internal affairs. If we followed Kennedy’s policy, he warned, “we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective.”
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At that moment, of course, Nixon was privy to the Eisenhower Administration’s efforts to organize military intervention in Cuba. In any event, his remarks were profoundly prophetic.

The third debate also revealed much about the comparative styles of the candidates. A reporter asked Senator Kennedy if he would apologize to the Vice President for former President Truman’s blunt remarks as to where Nixon and the Republican Party “could go.” Kennedy at first appeared taken aback, but his face quickly betrayed a wry amusement. No, he wouldn’t apologize; and it was a little late in the day to persuade the seventy-six-year-old Truman to change his “particular speaking manner.” Perhaps, Kennedy playfully countered, Mrs. Truman could deal with the problem. It was Kennedy’s moment, but Nixon clumsily groped for one of his own. The Vice President solemnly intoned that a president or former president had “an obligation not to lose his temper in public.” One must think of the mothers and children who were in the presence of presidential candidates; America, said Nixon, needed a man to respect. He was “very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States.” And if elected, Nixon promised, he would maintain the dignity of the office. Parents would be able to tell their children: “Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.”
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Fourteen years later, when Nixon’s tapes revealed his own salty vocabulary, the hypocrisy of his comments about Truman and Eisenhower finally triumphed over their banality.