The Wars of Watergate (11 page)

Kennedy’s election hurt Nixon deeply. Its close outcome inevitably led to second-guessing of might-have-beens or should-have-dones. But the answers were painfully concrete for Nixon. First, he believed that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the Democratic organization in that city had stolen the
election to give Kennedy the important state of Illinois. Periodic tidbits through the years have lent credence to the possibility. A Kennedy confidant has recorded that Daley telephoned the Democratic candidate on election night, saying: “With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.” But the charges have remained just that. It is important to note that the Illinois election board, dominated four-to-one by Republicans, did not hesitate to certify Kennedy’s election. Furthermore, whatever the truth of the Illinois situation—and opinion is decidedly divided—the fact is that Illinois alone would not have given Nixon an Electoral College majority.

Richard Nixon believed (or chose to believe) that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. Supporters and friendly biographers generally have praised him for not challenging the outcome, thus sparing the nation a great deal of anguish and difficulty. But Nixon’s outward magnanimity and graciousness masked his faith in the relativeness of political morality. Privately, he seethed over Kennedy’s tactics and behavior. A dozen years later, President Nixon repeatedly invoked the behavior of others to defend his own actions.

The loser’s rationalizations in 1960 were vintage Nixon. He believed that Kennedy had unfairly exploited his intelligence briefings to raise the issue—and promise—of military intervention in Cuba. The Kennedys also had blatantly exploited the Catholic issue. (Actually, Kennedy’s approach to the problem of his religion was also a favored Nixon device; turn a negative to one’s own advantage.) The Kennedys had lavished money and other favors in the right places. But most of all, Kennedy had seduced the media, which gave him excessive and favorable attention largely at Nixon’s expense. The Kennedy camp had “bred an unusual mutuality of interests that replaced the more traditional skepticism of the press toward politicians,” Nixon later wrote. In less personal reasoning, Nixon also pointed to other factors that contributed to his loss: the recession, the U-2 affair and the failure of the Paris Summit in 1960, and the CIA’s mishandling of the alleged “missile gap.” Years later, as President, Nixon regularly berated CIA Director Richard Helms and the agency for giving Kennedy advice on Soviet missile strength which the Democrat had exploited.
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Nixon was not alone in such judgments. But they offered small comfort at best: defeat was still defeat.

The letdown must have been excruciating. A few weeks before he left office, the Vice President fulfilled his constitutional duty by formally counting the electoral votes in the Senate and declared Kennedy the victor. Nixon was gracious in performing this function as the first Vice President since 1861 to confirm his opponent’s victory. That seemed to be his last hurrah. “I found that virtually everything I did seemed unexciting and unimportant by
comparison with national office,” Nixon later wrote. Ironically, the Kennedy Administration’s disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure brought Nixon briefly back into the national limelight, but given his own identification with anti-Castro policies, his public statements mostly were confined to the usual bland recommendations for nonpartisanship in foreign policy.
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Once again, Nixon returned to his native California following a failure to “make his fortune” in the East. Not for the last time did he return in shame. He accepted a partnership in a California law firm, but only for its promised income, not for its challenges. After fourteen years in public life, Nixon and Nixon-watchers alike seemed uncertain, even confused, over his future course. Certainly, he remained a public figure. Almost from the moment of his defeat, speculation centered on whether Nixon would challenge California Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown in 1962. The reasoning was simple: Nixon had to have a political base if he were to maintain any leadership role in the party and the nation.
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But the reasoning was flawed: Brown was fairly popular, with a long record of state electoral success, and he had done a creditable job as governor. Most important, Richard Nixon knew precious little about the special problems confronting state governments, particularly in the burgeoning principality of California.

The California gubernatorial campaign in 1962 had a surrealistic quality. Nixon’s familiar campaign methods seemed irrelevant, if nothing else. Californians confronted enormous problems and challenges peculiar to their rapidly expanding society. Water, education, land use, environmental controls, roads, and, of course, taxes—these were the issues. Nixon’s references to his experience with the National Security Council, his exchange with Khrushchev, his visits to Latin America and other places throughout the world—all this provided no insight into controlling smog or allocating scarce water resources. Brown was expert and knowledgeable about state issues, and he defeated the former Vice President. Brown’s margin of victory was only a bit more than a quarter-million out of six million votes; nevertheless, given his national prominence, Nixon had been outclassed, even humiliated.

The humiliation led to Nixon’s extraordinary post-election press conference—which he promised would be his last. The morning after his defeat, Nixon had his Press Secretary read his concession statement. Reporters asked why Nixon did not publicly read the statement himself. Watching the proceedings on television, Nixon decided to confront those he regarded as his longtime antagonists. Nixon berated the reporters, charging that they had treated him unfairly. He “recognized” the media’s “right and responsibility” to give a candidate “the shaft” if they opposed him, but he insisted they still had a responsibility to provide coverage of what the candidate said. Unlike “other people” (that is, President Kennedy), Nixon said he had never canceled a newspaper subscription. But seemingly it was the end:
“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

The event may have been contrived; in the end, it proved Nixon to be alive and well. As soon as it was over, he told his young campaign aide, H. R. Haldeman: “I finally told those bastards off, and every goddamned thing I said was true.” Haldeman has recalled Nixon as “delighted.”
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At last he had used the media; his performance was the news, not his defeat. California television stations replayed filmed coverage of the press conference several times throughout the day and evening. Audiences watched and watched again with almost morbid fascination. Nationally, ABC News offered an instant analysis entitled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” But ABC used Alger Hiss as a commentator—and that itself quickly became the news, even creating a backlash of sympathy for Nixon. With or without Hiss, ABC, along with those other media pundits who cogitated about the political death of Richard Nixon, would have been better advised to read the story of Lazarus.

If the repetition of pattern means anything, Nixon-watchers might have divined more meaning in his next move. Once again, Nixon faced east, as if sensing that his fortune and destiny were there and not in his native western wilderness. In May 1963, he announced that he would join the distinguished New York law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd—now to become Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander. The firm announced that Nixon would concentrate on labor law, a rather unlikely prospect unless the firm thought that several years on a congressional labor committee more than fifteen years earlier gave the new partner special expertise.
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It was somewhat late in the day for Nixon to seriously assume a full-time career as a Wall Street lawyer. The Nixon literature generally attributes his move to a wish for financial security and to satisfy his family’s needs, especially its desire that he abandon politics. But a fifty-year-old man, in the prime of life, who had come so close to the pinnacle of his ambition, simply could not abandon the very life that sustained him. Nixon may not have liked the last shuffle or two, but he liked the game.

Nixon’s real value to his new law firm was the prospect that he would lure clients who, unlike California voters, would covet his international connections and reputation. Still, Nixon needed to make some mark as a lawyer. Appropriately, he soon found a case that allowed him to do so and had the added advantage of national prominence—the case even gave him the limelight of a Supreme Court appearance. In 1966, he represented the plaintiff in an invasion-of-privacy suit against
Life
magazine. Nixon lost the appeal, largely on First Amendment grounds, but he advanced some telling arguments
on behalf of individual privacy. Reports generally praised his performance before the Justices. Leonard Garment, Nixon’s law partner and chief of litigation in the firm, had prevailed in the case in the lower courts. For the appeal, Garment worked closely with Nixon on the preparation of the briefs, and the two spent a great deal of time together in the office and on planes discussing the First Amendment. “He worked like a horse and learned the law,” Garment recalled, comparing Nixon’s effort to starting “athletic life by doing the Olympic decathlon.” Perhaps moral victories meant little to Nixon, however. He told Garment that he never wanted to hear of the case again, and he did not mention it in his memoirs. Nixon also told Garment he never would be permitted to win “against the press.”
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Politics never strayed far from Nixon’s thoughts. He realized that he had little claim on the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. The California debacle was still fresh in memory, underlining an emerging theme: Nixon was a loser. Nixon also may have believed that Kennedy would be too popular to overcome. In the event, 1964 belonged—especially after Kennedy’s assassination—to the growing polar forces in the Republican Party: Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. Goldwater’s eventual nomination alienated many within the party, but Nixon proved to be the loyal soldier. (He scoffed at Eisenhower’s stumbling and indecisive endorsement of Goldwater, privately calling Ike a “senile old bastard.”) Nixon introduced Goldwater at the Republican Convention and forthrightly supported the Arizonan. More important, Nixon paid special attention to the needs of other Republican candidates. After the election, Nixon dutifully touched base with President Johnson, congratulating him on his victory and also taking the occasion to urge support for an official residence for the Vice President. Johnson, in turn, urged Nixon to join him in mobilizing national unity. “You can do much,” he told Nixon, “in making that unity a firm reality.”
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Nixon wasn’t about to become a nonpartisan unifier. It was time to restock the political capital for Nixon’s inevitable claim to an inheritance denied—or stolen, as he believed. After Goldwater’s rout in the 1964 election, someone had to pick up the Republican pieces. Nixon was there.

Richard Nixon’s years in political limbo thinly veiled a calculated “long march” in his ongoing quest for the presidency. The journey began in the ashes of his agonizing defeat in 1960; the California debacle proved only a temporary setback and, given the events of 1964, a most fortunate one for Nixon. New York became his Yenan, the base from which he mounted carefully orchestrated operations designed to gain his cherished objective. As befitted his isolation and weakness, Nixon first staged a series of guerrilla forays, meanwhile carefully planning the sustained drive that would eventually award him the ultimate prize.

The march quickened as Nixon beat the campaign hustings for the 1966 congressional elections. A little luck and a lot of ineptness on the part of his enemies spurred the pace. As Nixon prepared for a trip to Waterville, Maine, to campaign for Republican candidates, a CBS reporter interviewed him and recorded the predictable remarks: Johnson was growing unpopular; the 1964 election had produced an exaggerated Democratic victory; and Republicans would make significant gains in the November elections. At the same time, the
New York Times
ran a feature on Nixon. It was too much for the increasingly harassed and ever-thin-skinned Johnson. When asked about Nixon’s remarks, he denounced him as a “chronic campaigner … who never did really recognize what was going on when he had an official position in the government.” Walter Cronkite promptly gave the former Vice President an opportunity to respond on the CBS evening news broadcast. Thanks to Johnson, Nixon was news.
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Nixon smelled blood and reverted to form. He stepped up his attacks on the President’s Vietnam policies, contending that the war could last another five years and cost more casualties than Korea. While he repeatedly said that he would not attack Johnson personally—only his policies—he referred to the President as “that master political operator in the White House,” who used the eighty-ninth Congress as his “lapdog.” Johnson “barks and it barks,” Nixon said. “He tells it to roll over and it rolls over. He tells it to play dead and it plays dead. In fact, he doesn’t even have to pick it up by the ears.” The President’s staff replied in backgrounders to reporters that Nixon talked out of both sides of his mouth, one moment advocating escalation of the war, the next talking about peace. His complaints about Johnson’s peace efforts, they said, were “dirty pool,” reminiscent of Nixon’s earlier allegations that Truman and Speaker Sam Rayburn were traitors. The staffers adroitly contrasted Nixon’s attacks with the loyal support for the President tendered by Eisenhower and Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen.
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The Republicans made significant gains in the 1966 elections, substantially trimming Democratic majorities in both houses. And suddenly, Nixon was back. With the party’s polar wings at odds, and their leaders, Goldwater and Rockefeller, equally contemptuous of one another, Nixon emerged as the preeminent party spokesman. He campaigned in more than sixty congressional districts. The
Washington Star
reported that “his standing with the Goldwaterites is very good indeed, and though he is disliked he is not completely unacceptable to the moderates.” Nixon even received a little help from Eisenhower, who offered a belated explanation of his famous 1960 remark. He privately told Nixon that he “could kick” himself “every time some jackass brings up that goddamn ‘give me a week’ business. Johnson has gone too far.” Eisenhower then issued a public statement, flatly contending that any suggestion or inference that he “at any time held Dick Nixon in anything less than the highest regard and esteem is erroneous.”
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An attack from Johnson, a blessing from Eisenhower, an interview with Cronkite; truly Nixon’s cup was filling.