The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  While Democratic criticism was predictable, the virulence of its expression was unusual. “He would double-cross and destroy the reputation of anybody,” said Roger Kent, the Democratic chairman in Nixon’s home state, “if it seemed to serve his interest.” Adlai Stevenson characterized “Nixonland” as “a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of poison pen and anonymous phone call and bustling, pushing, shoving—the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” Emanuel Celler, the veteran congressman from New York, thought Nixon “naive, inept, maladjusted,” a fellow who could not muster enough character references to join the local library.

  Unlike the millions swayed by the Checkers speech, the powerful columnist Walter Lippmann had considered it “the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear.” George Ball, the future undersecretary of state, dismissed it as an “emetic sciamachy,” a string of absurdities likely to induce vomiting, a toilet reference echoed by others. He deplored Nixon’s “sanctimonious pose of self-pity, seeking to associate himself with other beleaguered Americans burdened by debt and family anxieties.”

  The speech “was the cleverest demagogic ham I’ve seen,” thought Florida’s Congressman Claude Pepper. “It was almost frightening to think how dangerous he is and what a reception he got with it. It was full of holes but they were cleverly concealed.” Norman Redlich, future dean of New York University Law School, read the Checkers speech as a “Handbook for Demagogues” based on low precepts. “Above all,” he wrote in The Nation, “never discuss the actual thing for which you were called to task by the American people. . . . Never raise the question of whether it was right to take money from people who have a stake in the way you vote. Create your own ethical standards and then point out how rigidly you adhere to them. . . . And if the people are really as dumb as you think they are, you may someday be President of the United States.”

  One of Nixon’s taunts at the outgoing president, Harry Truman, was never forgiven. In Arkansas, shortly before the election, Nixon had lumped the president, Adlai Stevenson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson together as “traitors.” Precisely what he said remained disputed. Nixon insisted that he stated that the three were traitors not to their country but to “the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe.”4 Whatever the truth, it was the very word “traitor,” uttered in a time of high ferment about national loyalty, that rankled Truman. In another speech, moreover, Nixon had dared call him “one of these crooks” and then tried to back away from it as he had from the “traitor” remark. Truman told his biographer that he rarely carried personal grudges but that Nixon was one of the only two men he could not stand.5 “You can’t very well forget things of that kind, and that’s why I don’t trust Nixon and never will. . . . Nixon is a shifty, goddamn liar, and people know it.” Truman was not sure if Nixon had ever read the Constitution. “But I’ll tell you this,” he added. “If he has, he doesn’t understand it.”6

  Justly or not, Nixon was held in contempt by very many Americans by the time he became vice president. Such citizens shrank away from him because he was already established in their minds as representing something politically abhorrent, unclean. “Like more than a few Americans of my generation,” wrote New York Times theater critic Frank Rich in 1994, when he was in his mid-forties, “I learned to despise Richard Nixon around the time I learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.”

  As he habitually did, Nixon dismissed the charges leveled against him in 1952 as malicious smears. “My instinct was to fight back,” he wrote years later. “I quickly came to feel a kinship with Teddy Roosevelt’s description of the man in the arena ‘whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.’ ” He used the quotation often during his career, and liked the image of himself as the hard-pressed gladiator fighting massive odds.7

  But at the height of his troubles during the 1952 campaign, in a room at New York’s Barclay Hotel, Nixon had seemed more plaintive—paranoid even—than brave and gladiatorial. “Strip,” he had told his former Hiss-hunting aide Robert Stripling, “those sons of bitches are out to get me. . . . They tried to get me, and they’ll try to get anybody that has anything to do with the Hiss case.” Behind the strident speechmaking, Nixon was not standing up well under pressure.

  “The hotter the political fighting,” Pat told a magazine that fall, “the cooler he seems to get. . . . Dick seldom loses his temper.” In fact, the contrary was true. Nixon admitted to volatility, inherited, he said, from his father. He called it blowing his stack, and aides recalled “Black-Irish” stack blowing after every crisis.

  It was the aides who took the brunt of such rages. Herb Klein and Pat Hillings long remembered Halloween night 1952, when they saw, as Klein put it, “the full display of his quick anger.”

  At an event in Hollywood, Nixon had noticed that the stadium was only half full. Major stars like John Wayne and Jane Russell were there, but hundreds of seats remained empty. Back in his hotel Nixon exploded. “Goddamn you! Goddamn you! How the hell could you embarrass me like this?” he shouted at Hillings. “You could lose us the election like this, Goddamn you!” Murray Chotiner, who was present, had seen such outbursts before; Nixon had behaved much the same after the Checkers speech. To Klein he appeared “as angry as any man I have ever seen.” To Hillings he seemed frighteningly close to violence.

  A leader, Nixon said, had “an obligation not to lose his temper in public,” and his rage usually erupted behind closed doors. After a rally in Southern California, however, when he recognized a Democratic party activist who had long plagued him, he reportedly strode over and slapped her in the face.8 The press missed the episode, and horrified aides hustled him away.

  During the 1952 campaign Nixon’s followers sometimes did resort to violence. In Oregon fighting broke out as his campaign train pulled away, immediately after an angry speech made in the face of pickets suggesting Nixon was corrupt. “The crowd surged over with fists flying,” recalled Charles Porter, later a Democratic congressman. “I was mad because we had a right to be there and express our opinion. This is what Nixon had done.”

  Two days before the election, at Long Beach, Nixon threatened vocal critics with jail. A “gang of roughnecks” in his entourage reportedly beat up hecklers carrying anti-Nixon signs. The local press ran an account of “roughhouse tactics” used by an eight-man “strong-arm squad” traveling with the candidate. Democratic official Richard Rogan complained of incidents in three towns: a Stevenson driver manhandled at Burbank, a placard holder worked over at Glendale, a man handing out leaflets punched and kicked at Pasadena.

  For obvious reasons it was rarely possible to link Nixon himself to his supporters’ strong-arm tactics. When he lost his temper publicly, though, his direct involvement was often clear. “When we’re elected,” he yelled at one heckler, “we’ll take care of people like you!” He then ordered, “Okay, boys, throw him out!”

  Several years later, when he was vice president, a similar situation occurred. When a heckler shouted, “Tell us the dog story, Dick!” identifiable members of Nixon’s party surrounded him. When he raised his voice again and moved toward the podium, Nixon became “white with anger” and instructed police and Secret Service agents to detain the heckler, James Heavey, while he harangued him in front of the audience for ten minutes. Then once again, he gave, reportedly screamed, the command “Throw him out!” Heavey later brought a civil suit, alleging public humiliation, battery, and bruising to his arms and body.9 Such incidents escaped national attention, as did violent episodes in the future.

  Anger and on occasion a penchant for violence alternated with depression and fits of weeping. The well-documented seven days of the fund crisis featured numerous instances of seesawing emotion. On day one, seeing the first headlines while aboard the campaign train, Nixon had slumped in his chair so physically stricken that he had to be helped back to the privacy of his compartment. “He almost needed intensive care,” said a companion. “They almost had to take h
im off the train.” In the early hours of day three, by his own account, he was feeling “the full weight of fatigue and depression.” Hours later he seemed “completely shaken and despondent . . . edgy and irritable.” On day four he was dejected, “ready to throw in the sponge.” To Jack Drown, a longtime friend, he appeared to “age a lifetime.” Worried campaign managers thought it was “conceivable he could blow up.”

  Later the same day a telegram from Hannah Nixon—HAVE FAITH, MOTHER—left him sobbing openly. “When I brought him that yellow paper,” Hillings recalled, “he broke down and cried. I thought I had better leave the room and give him time to compose himself. . . . When I opened his door again, Dick was sitting in a huge leather armchair, his arms stretched out, his hand dangling in that characteristic way of his. . . . I knew I was in the presence of total despair.”

  From then on Nixon surrendered to tears: tears after making his Checkers speech, tears on board his plane in front of embarrassed reporters when Eisenhower came on board to say, “You’re my boy,” and the famous public tears on Senator William Knowland’s shoulder an hour or so later.

  “Frankly,” Chotiner said later, he had been “more worried about Dick’s state of mind than about the party.” As he prepared to fly to Los Angeles to make the Checkers speech, Nixon had tried frantically to reach Dr. Hutschnecker on the telephone.10

  Pat had been supportive of her husband throughout the campaign, in spite of her misgivings, playing the good wife for him in the way the fifties public expected. She prattled dutifully about the details of domestic life, of his wardrobe and hers, of sewing classes and trips to the zoo, of Sunday family picnics on the floor of her husband’s office. As for campaigning, she said meekly, “I go around with him and talk to the women.” She claimed to “really love” the work, and that a future in politics “terrifically thrilled” her.

  When the fund crisis hit, according to Nixon, it was she who urged him not to resign but to go on fighting. Just before the speech, when he felt he could not go through with it, it was she who insisted, “Of course you can,” and led him to the microphone, she who told him afterward that it had been “great.” When it was all over, though, after the conciliatory meeting with Eisenhower, she had driven back to the hotel with her husband in total silence.

  The crisis had only multiplied Pat’s previous doubts. “Why?” she had sobbed. “Why should we keep taking this?” Jack Drown’s wife, Helene, who comforted her, thought she looked “like a bruised little kitten.” Three decades later, when Pat’s daughter Julie asked her to discuss the fund, she turned her face to the wall for long minutes before replaying. “There was so much pain in her eyes,” Julie recalled, “that I could not bear to look at her.”

  “I knew,” Nixon wrote in the seventies, “how much it had hurt her, how deeply it had wounded her sense of pride and privacy. I knew that from that time on, although she would do everything she could to help me and help my career, she would hate politics and dream of the day when I would leave it behind. . . .”

  And then there was Mother. Hannah Nixon played an unusual role in the fund crisis, one that most adult sons would surely have regarded as an outrageous intrusion. She had been in Washington baby-sitting the girls, then aged six and four, when the story broke in the newspapers. Her husband, Frank, like his son, had been reduced to bouts of weeping. Hannah began a series of long-distance calls to Pat and, along with the telegram to her son, composed another to General Eisenhower himself. It read:

  I AM TRUSTING THAT THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH MAY COME OUT CONCERNING THIS ATTACK ON RICHARD. WHEN IT DOES I AM SURE YOU WILL BE GUIDED ARIGHT IN YOUR DECISION TO PLACE IMPLICIT FAITH IN HIS INTEGRITY AND HONESTY. BEST WISHES FROM ONE WHO HAS KNOWN RICHARD LONGER THAN ANYONE.

  HIS MOTHER, HANNAH NIXON

  Eisenhower read the telegram aloud in public the night he welcomed Nixon back into the fold.

  Four months later, on January 19, 1953, as the Nixon family gathered for a private dinner on inauguration eve, Nixon’s mother took him aside and handed him a small piece of paper bearing the following message:

  To Richard

  You have gone far and

  we are proud of you always—

  I know that you will keep

  your relationship with your

  maker as it should be

  for after all that, as you

  must know, is the most

  important thing in this life

  With Love Mother

  “I put it in my wallet,” Nixon wrote of the note, “and I have carried it with me ever since.” Soon enough it was joined there by a brief memorandum to himself that Nixon wrote at Pat’s request. He would retire from politics, he was to promise her, at the end of his first term as vice president, in 1956. He had put the assurance in writing, as if to emphasize that it was unbreakable. “But,” as Pat said years later, “things took a different turn.”

  _____

  Nixon used an ancient family Bible, an heirloom brought along by his mother, at his inauguration as vice president. As a Quaker he had the right to substitute the word “affirm” for the word “swear”—Quakers have a religious objection to swearing any oath—but he chose the standard phrasing and, with his Quaker parents close by, intoned: “I, Richard Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will support and uphold the Constitution. . . .”

  His hand rested on a passage from the Sermon on the Mount—“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God”—which may have been intended as a nod to the Quakers’ guiding precept of Peace at the Center. Certainly, in the years that followed, Nixon was to assert that his life’s deepest desire was to bring peace between nations. In the eight years he served Eisenhower as vice president, he was to travel the world more than any American leader had done before, building up a breadth of knowledge on international affairs unequaled in his time.

  At forty Nixon was the youngest vice president in nearly a century. On that January day of his first inauguration, the head of his Secret Service detail thought, the look on his face was one of “exaltation.”

  Yet even then there were portents. Some of those who would feature in his future disgrace had already crossed his path. A few months earlier, as Nixon arrived at the studio to make the Checkers speech, one of the Young Republicans cheering him on had been twenty-five-year-old H. R. Haldeman. His father, car dealer Henry Haldeman, had been a contributor to the fund. During the campaign a teenager called Lucy Steinberger had had the chutzpah to ask Nixon for an interview when he visited her high school in Virginia; under her married name, Lucianne Goldberg, she would become better known. The revelation of her work as a sex spy for the Nixon White House gave her a bit part in the Watergate saga. In 1998, in a not dissimilar function, she orchestrated the exposure of President Clinton’s sexual adventures with Monica Lewinsky.

  It was also probably in 1952 that Nixon met a much more significant Watergate player, E. Howard Hunt. Then a young CIA officer, he had come over to Nixon’s table at Harvey’s restaurant in Washington, discussed politics for a while, and left his calling card. “My wife and I,” Hunt scrawled on the back of the card, some twenty years before he was to lead the raid on the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate building, “want to thank you for the magnificent job you’re doing for our country.”* 11

  In his function as vice president, Nixon would soon officiate at the swearing in of a new U.S. senator for North Carolina, Sam Ervin. He was the man whom President Nixon, on the Watergate tapes, would characterize as an “old shit,” the man who, as the magisterial chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, earned the affections of millions when he presided over the ruin of Richard Nixon.

  Back in the fifties Ervin had felt “Somewhat cool” toward the young man officiating at the ceremony. He did not like what he had heard about his election tactics.

  14

  * * *

  Handsome and kind, Handsome and kind,

  Always on time, Loving and Good.

  Does t
hings he should, Humerous, funny

  Makes the day seem sunny, Helping others to live,

  Willing to give his life, For his belovd country,

  That’s my dad.

  —Julie Nixon’s poem for her father, written in 1956, when she was eight and he was vice president

  One evening in 1954, after martinis and steak at Duke Zeibert’s Restaurant in Washington, Nixon slumped back amid the plush and gold plate of his official limousine. “This,” he said wearily, patting the upholstery, “is the only thing about the goddamn job I like. Except for this, they can have it. . . .”

  Eighteen months into his term of office his exaltation about the vice presidency had turned to despond. His companion in the limousine that night was James Bassett, the political journalist on loan from the Los Angeles Mirror who was to manage his press relations and scheduling for years to come. Bassett, a bespectacled navy veteran just three months older than Nixon, served as adviser, political sounding board, and drinking companion. His letters home to his wife, Wilma, offer a rare, intimate glimpse of the private Nixon.