The Wars of Watergate (8 page)

Nixon learned more about the mysteries of bureaucracy after he received his commission, when he was assigned to the Naval Air Station in Ottumwa, Iowa. At first, he thought he would spend his entire war service in the Midwest, but he eventually was accepted for sea duty and sent to the South Pacific. In 1944, he served as a transport-control officer on New Caledonia and Bougainville. He experienced some Japanese shelling of his base, saw some air-crash victims, and by his own account had a great deal of success at the poker table. Poker may have honed some worthwhile political skills, but his “combat experience” and his officer status gave him a political winning hand and ample chips to play it.
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Whatever significance emerges from Nixon’s early years results to some extent from reading history backward, from reading deeper meanings into earlier events that may or may not anticipate later ones. In that vein it is clear that after 1946, Richard Nixon became a public man. His history thereafter is a matter of record, and consists of conscious and unconscious deeds, as well as both calculated and accidental incidents, that together form a complex mosaic of explanation of the man and his actions.

Nothing shaped the basic historical perception of Richard Nixon more than his first campaign for public office, in 1946. Shortly after the end of the war, a Whittier banker wrote to Nixon, then in Baltimore awaiting demobilization, asking if he were interested in running for Congress. With no
apparent prospects in sight, Nixon promptly expressed interest and offered to begin campaigning by the first of the year. But he had misunderstood the query; his friend was only seeking prospective candidates who would be scrutinized by a “Committee of One Hundred.” The committee consisted of conservative Republican businessmen and professionals passionately committed to defeating the incumbent congressman. Nixon appeared before the group (in his naval uniform), assailed the New Deal, and promised “a platform of practical liberalism.” The committee promptly chose him in preference to a Pomona furniture-store owner.
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Jerry Voorhis, the Twelfth District incumbent, was no ordinary congressman. First elected in 1936 in the Roosevelt landslide, he had managed to retain office in a marginal district through careful attention to his constituents’ needs and his support of liberal public legislation that nevertheless appealed to rural conservatives. Voorhis became an expert in such matters as rural electrification and farmers’ cooperatives. Now, after ten years in Washington, he was well regarded by liberals and conservatives alike, and he had attracted a good deal of attention from the national press. In his most recent term, Voorhis had given his name to Public Law 780, which required organizations controlled by foreign governments to register with the Department of Justice. Communist-front groups were Voorhis’s obvious target; indeed, the West Coast edition of the
Daily Worker
bitterly complained that “Voorhis is against unity with Communists on any issue under any circumstances.”
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In all, Voorhis was an entrenched incumbent, active on a wide front of popular legislative activities, and a man who had diligently nurtured close ties with his constituents. He was a model anticommunist liberal.

For a variety of reasons, 1946 was a Republican year, and California’s Twelfth District race in that year was special. The political novice, totally unknown outside Whittier, trounced the five-term Congressman by more than 15,000 votes out of a total of 115,000. Richard Nixon later claimed that the contest was between “a well-known New Dealer and a conservative Republican.” Voorhis lost because “that district was not a New Deal district,” Nixon contended.
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But Nixon had promised his benefactors “a platform of practical liberalism,” and that is largely what he offered during the campaign. The New Deal in 1946 was still fighting ground, bitterly contested by conservative Republicans. In his campaign, Nixon dutifully alluded to the dangers of governmental control of economic life, yet he hammered away most strongly on the need for jobs for veterans, a position that hardly illuminated any ideological difference. The Republican candidate neither walked nor talked like a “conservative Republican.” Nixon, who had emerged from Whittier College as a self-confessed “liberal,” nowhere stated in 1946—nor ever acknowledged—any rejection of the New Deal’s basic recovery, relief, and reform measures. At Duke, Nixon had been known for
his enthusiastic support of Supreme Court Justices Brandeis, Cardozo, and Stone, who distinguished themselves at that time for their support of the New Deal. The simple ideological confrontation that Nixon described for his maiden campaign explains nothing.

It was Nixon’s style and language that distinguished this campaign and set the tone for the search for the historical Nixon. For Nixon’s defenders, his campaign against Voorhis amounted to a typical effort by an “out,” free to attack his opponent’s record and to promise change. By this logic, Voorhis, the “in,” had “only one positive theme”: his seniority and experience. The implication is that he was “soft,” and incapable of confronting the challenge of his “buzz-saw opponent”; but the ultimate “softness” charge centered on the claim that Voorhis was a tool of the “Communist-dominated” Political Action Committee (PAC) of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

In the first public debate between the candidates, Voorhis denied having sought and received support from the labor PAC. But Nixon countered with a report from Southern California unions recommending that the PAC endorse Voorhis. Apparently, Voorhis realized that for many of his constituents Sidney Hillman and other CIO-PAC leaders seemed like some alien, sinister force, and he issued a tortured statement saying that he long had cherished support from organized labor but repudiated any from the CIO-PAC. He acknowledged the possibility that the Communist Party exercised “inordinate if not decisive influence” in the CIO. It was not enough. Nixon hammered at the theme that Voorhis had loyally voted for the CIO-PAC programs, and he talked obliquely about “lip-service Americans” and high officials “who front for un-American elements.” Nixon also emphasized his military service, indirectly underlining Voorhis’s civilian status. As for the charge that voters received anonymous phone calls denouncing Voorhis as a Communist, Nixon’s supporters thought it possible that such calls were designed to hurt Nixon “by making him appear guilty of vicious tactics.”
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Critics have denounced Nixon’s campaign for its smears and innuendoes. For example, his attacks on Voorhis’s labor connections emphasized the PAC’s “Communist principles and its huge slush fund.” Nixon’s leaflets described him as “the clean, forthright young American who fought in defense of his country in the stinking mud and jungle of the Solomons,” while Voorhis remained “safely behind the front in Washington.” The campaign, Nixon’s detractors have contended, represented only techniques and tactics, with no ideological substance whatever. He displayed here a rhetorical skill he eventually mastered, one of leveling a charge even while self-righteously denying he would ever do so.

The evil genius behind Nixon’s campaign supposedly was Murray Chotiner, a Southern California political public-relations man who had worked
for Senator William Knowland and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Chotiner believed that a candidate could be packaged and merchandised to the public as a commodity. Nixon’s debate training and speaking skills, combined with his youth and war record, provided a perfect match for the Chotiner formula. Technique dominated, and substance was immaterial—all “a calculated part of the synthetic image that [Nixon] with the help of his financial backers contrived.” Voorhis had not in fact been endorsed by the CIO-PAC; a local group had merely recommended doing so. No matter. Nixon had “learned how to employ the various devices of the half-truth, the misleading quotation, the loose-jointed logic, that were indispensable in the creation of the
BIG DOUBT
.”
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The contrasting portraits are clear. For some, Nixon was the returning war hero determined to rid America of its un-American elements; he was vigorous, aggressive, and, above all, resourceful. For others, the Nixon of 1946 marked a new beginning in the commercialization and packaging of political candidates; as for the man himself, he was perceived as manipulative, exploitive, opportunistic, even deceptive and dishonest. For both proponents and detractors, however, Nixon was now a man to be reckoned with.

Nixon’s victory over Voorhis gave him some measure of national visibility, but nothing was as extraordinary as his meteoric emergence as a national public figure during his freshman term in Congress. Timing and events operated in his favor. Nixon coveted a seat on the House Labor Committee, and he was duly rewarded by the victorious Republicans. But they also selected him for the Committee on Un-American Activities, for reasons that are somewhat uncertain; membership on the committee had not been considered a plum assignment. Nixon claimed that Speaker Joe Martin asked him to serve as a personal favor and to help reverse the dubious reputation the committee had acquired through the years. “[I]t was an offer I could not very well refuse,” he later recalled almost apologetically, adding that he accepted only reluctantly. It was also true, however, that Nixon had discovered the Soviet threat and the corresponding link to internal subversions, both topics within the purview of the Un-American Activities Committee.
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That
offered an opportunity he could not refuse.

Nixon participated in the preparation of the Taft-Hartley labor law, and he publicly debated the merits of the bill with John F. Kennedy, a freshman Representative from Massachusetts and fellow Labor Committee member. In addition, perhaps as repayment for his favor to Martin, the Speaker selected Nixon as one of nineteen congressmen to participate in a select committee—chaired by Christian Herter, a future Secretary of State—formed to determine the foreign-aid needs of war-torn Europe. According to Nixon, a poll revealed that three-fourths of his constituents opposed any aid package,
and he received warnings not to be seduced by eastern Republicans and the siren calls of Europeans. Nevertheless, he eventually supported the Marshall Plan, invoking Edmund Burke’s classic injunction that representatives must vote their conscience, not the whims of their constituents.
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But it was Nixon’s service on the Un-American Activities Committee that catapulted him to national prominence. The committee persisted in its controversial ways, warmly applauded by those who believed the nation in imminent danger from internal subversion and international Communism, and roundly condemned by civil libertarians, by those who saw the committee exclusively serving the interests of the Republican Party and the business community, and by those, who, from a variety of motives, believed that the preservation of world peace required cooperation with the Soviet Union. There was little middle ground; similarly, Nixon’s chosen role defied neutrality.

As a member of the committee, Nixon rode the crest of the anticommunist hysteria that paralleled the heightening conflict of the Cold War. When an American Legion member in San Francisco wrote to ask whether “Communist art” (a typical mural of the 1930s, depicting proletarian themes) could be removed from the San Francisco post office, Nixon solemnly replied that a Republican president and Congress would “make a thorough investigation” of such art and would remove any of it found to be “inconsistent with American ideals and principles.”
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Post office art, of course, was small change when stacked against the most sensational charge of the day: that Soviet intelligence had penetrated the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman as a result of betrayals by high officials. After nearly ten years of making what seemed to be altogether implausible charges of like character, the Un-American Activities Committee found a receptive public. And Richard Nixon proved its most skillful member in exploiting the opportunity.

Early in 1947, the committee treated the nation to an early version of guerrilla theater when it spent months trying to prove that a small band of Hollywood screen writers had injected Soviet and Communist propaganda as wholesome values in some films. The hearings revealed a variety of Hollywood civil wars, but only the notoriety of the accused gave the sessions some public credibility. Charges of subversion and spying in high places in Washington presented another matter altogether. Whittaker Chambers, ex-Communist, ex-Comintern agent, and then a highly placed editor of
Time
magazine, appeared before the committee in August 1948 and repeated charges he had made earlier to FBI investigators and others. Chambers’s most sensational moment came when he testified that a ring of Soviet sympathizers had infiltrated the government. The most prominent member of the group, he claimed, was Alger Hiss. Hiss was then working for the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, but as a ranking State Department official he had accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta in 1945 and choreographed the San Francisco Conference that inaugurated the United Nations that same year. By 1948, Yalta was a synonym for “sell-out,” even treason for some critics. Hiss was made to order for the moment. He was many things, but above all, he served to focus many hatreds: Harvard Law School graduate, New Deal bureaucrat, eastern-oriented internationalist. In his subsequent public appearances, he struck many as haughty and arrogant, and thus only confirmed their visceral reactions.

The Chambers–Hiss confrontation became the first of Nixon’s famous “Six Crises.” His own description of the affair, as well as that of his supporters, portrayed him as a relentless prosecutor, convinced of Chambers’s truthfulness and Hiss’s perjury. Hiss’s subsequent conviction, of course, only reinforced the picture. Inevitably, Nixon’s enemies long nursed grievances against him for his role in the case. An extensive study of the case, one decidedly hostile to Hiss, contended that Nixon was not the “cool, confident and decisive” investigator he had long claimed to be; instead, a “combination of accident, good luck, inside information, fear, and panic” best characterized Nixon’s first crisis. Subsequently, Pat Nixon asked the committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, who had persuaded Chambers to provide the famous “pumpkin papers,” to “allow Dick to take credit for breaking the case.”
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