The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Some of Nixon’s Democratic foes speculated in private about where at least a portion of the money had gone. Within a month of the Hughes loan’s being approved, Nixon bought a grand new house in Washington, once the property of former Attorney General Homer Cummings. He reportedly paid seventy-five thousand dollars for a sixteen-room Tudor-style château, set in leafy grounds overlooking a park. Nixon maintained he purchased it solely thanks to a mortgage. Yet he was reportedly able to do so before selling his existing house.

  Was Howard Hughes rewarded for his largess? Some observers believed so. The Internal Revenue Service had been blocking the billionaire’s efforts to have his Hughes Medical Institute declared a charity and therefore granted tax-exempt status. The institute, announced as providing millions of dollars to “combat disease and human suffering,” was a tax dodge, 84 percent of its vast income going not to medical research but to Hughes. Two months after Hughes made the Nixon loan, the IRS reversed its decision. Because IRS files are so tightly held, there is no way of determining what caused the change of course.

  In the months before the loan, moreover, and against the advice of his senior executives, Hughes had committed his company to the largest airplane order in aviation history: more than four hundred million dollars for new passenger jets and equipment. The massive outlay, which represented more than the value of the company’s assets, was made at a time when the Hughes airline, TWA, was losing ground to its competitors and showing a loss. In the month of the Hughes loan the Civil Aeronautics Board gave TWA permission to raise huge loans, in a manner contrary to its usual restrictions. In the months that followed, the airline was granted new domestic and international routes and long-delayed fare increases. The new president of TWA, appointed soon after, was one of Nixon’s financial backers.

  Did Richard Nixon influence these developments, or were they just lucky breaks for Hughes? Dietrich, for one, found the IRS reversal on the Medical Institute ruling curious. “Did Howard get a bargain?” he asked. “. . . You can draw your own conclusions.” Hughes “was definitely not a philanthropist. . . . In the back of his mind, there was no question it was to put the vice president of the United States under his obligation.”6

  Even after the disaster of the 1956 loan, however, Nixon was unable to resist accepting financial favors from Hughes. It was a folly as great as that of President Clinton in the nineties, engaging in a silly sexual dalliance long after he had been pegged as a womanizer, and with the knowledge that his enemies saw his philandering as his Achilles’ heel. Yet while Clinton survived the Monica Lewinsky affair, Nixon’s lasting need for Hughes’s money was to be a major factor in his downfall.

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  “I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. . . .” In January 1957, as he again intoned the inauguration pledge to the American people, Nixon’s promise to his wife not to run had been broken—for the first time but not the last. Since he had made it, their marriage had inexorably changed.

  The Pat the public saw loyally continued to uphold the image of the devoted spouse. She accepted all the titles bestowed upon her: Outstanding Homemaker of the Year, Mother of the Year, the Nation’s Ideal Wife. She indeed had been a rock, ever supportive, ever at Nixon’s side. She took part in trivial activities without looking bored, shook a thousand hands, handed out ballpoint pens inscribed “Patricia Nixon.” She shared with the press absurd facts: that her campaign wardrobe consisted of five dresses, four suits, two pairs of shoes, and eight hats, but no briefcase, because she was only the wife. “She had the characteristics of a great actress,” Nixon told his daughter Julie years later, “being at her best when onstage.”

  Privately Pat was ever more frustrated. “I would like to do part-time work,” she wrote her friend Helene Drown, “rather than all the useless gadding I am expected to do.” She let slip, at the 1956 convention, that she could think of “any number of things I prefer to politics.” Nixon was aware of her resentment and had even confided in Eisenhower that he had “a serious problem with his wife.” If Pat did not reconcile herself to staying in Washington, he told the president, “I will have difficulty in doing anything.”

  Two years had passed since CBS’s Robert Pierpoint, shocked at how remote Pat had grown, had seen in her a “deep-seated terror” of doing anything that might impede Nixon’s ambitions. Now she began to lash back. Visitors spoke of having witnessed Pat “blowing her stack,” and insiders commented on her “rare but furious temper.” Nixon’s go-between with the FBI during the Hiss case, Father Cronin, had become his principal speechwriter in 1956. Once, when Nixon delivered a speech badly, Cronin recalled, “Pat chewed the hell out of him in front of the staff.

  “One day,” Cronin said, “Dick sent me to his home in the suburbs to get some papers he needed in a hurry. I knew the family well, had been there to dinner, and liked the daughters. But when I knocked, Pat opened the door and said, ‘Oh no! He can’t get back in by sending a priest!’ I went back and said, ‘What did you get me into?’ He said, ‘Oh, I didn’t think she’d say anything to you. We’re just having a little problem now.’ But I noticed then that Nixon was not going home at night. He kept a hotel room in the District. . . . And he was just living there.”

  It was probably during this period that—as Nixon’s cousin Jessamyn West learned—Hannah Nixon flew across the continent to the rescue. She came not to be with her son but with Pat, who “wasn’t speaking to him.”

  “Pat is in one of her moods,” James Bassett told his wife in a letter home. “Nobody else in the U.S. would believe it.” Bassett observed the couple on the campaign plane. “They would always sit across the aisle from each other, or still further apart. Then, as the plane circled for landing, they would get together and put on their ‘Pat and Dick’ smiles. He would put his arm around her for the photographers.”

  In late 1956 Nixon returned from a trip to Europe with the suggestion that they adopt a refugee child. Pat refused.

  Months later Bassett came upon Nixon, a senior cabinet colleague, and a bevy of six young women in a secluded Maryland restaurant. The colleague disappeared with one of the women. Nixon, who was very drunk, refused Bassett’s offer to take him home. He said the girls would look after him.

  Bassett thought Nixon looked on women as “a different species . . . an extra appendage,” that he had “a total scorn for female mentality.” Nixon had a repertoire of smutty jokes, and a favorite—one his staff knew well—concerned a stud who prevailed on his wife to have sex a dozen times a day. When at last she protested she was too tired for more, went the punch line, her sneering husband would call her “Deadass!” One morning on the campaign train, Bassett recalled, Nixon emerged from his compartment with Pat on their way to breakfast. Then, in front of aides, he looked at Pat “with a curious glint in his eye, and said: ‘Deadass!’ ” No one laughed.

  During that same 1956 campaign, Nixon’s once-fierce father fell seriously ill. At seventy-five, suffering from kidney disease, arthritis, and bleeding ulcers, Frank Nixon sent word from Whittier that he wanted to see his son. Nixon was unable to go to California at first but, on a secretary’s advice, managed a “Dear Dad” letter instead of his usual “Dear Mother and Dad.” Then, during the Republican convention, his father suffered a rupture of the abdominal artery and went downhill rapidly.

  Fresh from his nomination for vice president, Nixon hurried to the dying man’s bedside. “I shall always remember the last time I saw him,” he wrote years later. “He asked me to shave him, because he was too weak to do it himself. When I had finished, he said he felt better. I told him, ‘I will see you in the morning.’ ‘I don’t think I’ll be here in the morning,’ he replied. ‘Dad, you’ve got to keep fighting,’ I said. His last words to me were, ‘Dick, you keep fighting.’ The next day he died. . . .” During the deathwatch, Nixon’s mother had welcomed sympathizers with a request they sign a visitors’ book and inspect a square of red carpet o
n which her son had stood when he took the oath as vice president in 1953. He had sent it to her himself, she said. When Hannah let the press in, at her son’s suggestion, Nixon told them she had risen at dawn to bake them apple pie.

  Sitting with Nixon that weekend as his father suffered upstairs, Bassett thought his boss seemed oddly detached. “I could hear the strangled breathing, a crackling noise,” Bassett remembered. “It didn’t seem to bother Dick, but it bothered me. He was busy planning his campaign. . . .”

  After Frank Nixon died, on September 4, Nixon forbade photographers to take pictures of the grieving family at the funeral. This, he let it be known, was “strictly personal sorrow.” Within weeks, though, back on the stump, he was courting the sympathy vote without a qualm.

  In Buffalo, New York, on October 16, Nixon opened his speech with “My father . . .” Then, after a catch of the breath as if to master his emotions, he continued: “I remember my father telling me a long time ago—‘Dick, Dick,’ he said, ‘Buffalo is a beautiful town.’ It may have been his favorite town!” Moving on to the city of Rochester, and then to Ithaca—three political rallies in twenty-four hours—Nixon reportedly began each speech with the same line about his father’s “favorite town,” changing only the name of the city.

  While in Ithaca, Nixon had exploded with rage after taking questions from Cornell University students on a television show. “Get me away from these little monsters!” he hissed to an aide, and rushed off the set. So upset was he that, back at the airport, he vomited at the edge of the runway before boarding the plane. Once airborne, he lost control completely, ranting in front of the press and threatening—it was a line he often used—to “cut off the balls” of the staff who had set up the program. “You son of a bitch!” Nixon shouted at Ted Rogers, the loyal TV aide who had masterminded his fund appearance four years earlier. “You put me on with those shitty-ass liberal sons of bitches; you tried to destroy me. . .!” He flung himself on Rogers and had to be pulled off by one of the reporters. During the same tour Nixon allegedly punched another man in the face.

  Any political candidate is exhausted by the end of a campaign. Nixon, though, seemed abnormally disoriented. In Kentucky he kept referring to the time as “tonight” when it was early morning. Hours later, in Illinois, he thought he had just arrived from Texas. In Ohio, boarding a plane at a deserted airstrip, he turned to wave at a nonexistent crowd. James Reston noted in the New York Times that reporters had been “psychoanalyzing” Nixon since the convention.

  Watching Nixon at the convention, Bob Haldeman had been shaken. “Before gray-colored draperies in a San Francisco hotel room,” he recalled, “Dick Nixon stood among a group of Republican delegates. I moved closer and listened in dismay. My first thought was that he had been drinking. His sentences were almost incoherent; his monologue rambled on circuitously while everyone around him looked at each other, wonderingly. . . .”

  Slurred rambling was typical of Nixon when he was fatigued and stressed, whether he had been drinking or not. It worried Bassett, who by now knew Nixon very well indeed. “What scares the hell out of me,” he had told Nixon the night he ran amok after the Ithaca television show, “is that you would blow sky-high over a thing as inconsequential as this. What in God’s name would you do if you were president and got into a really bad situation?”

  Nixon said he would consider the question. It was just a few months since he had learned that Dr. Hutschnecker, his New York medical consultant, had decided to specialize solely in psychotherapy. The news had distressed him, because it meant that future appointments with the doctor might prove embarrassing. His meetings with Hutschnecker would now be less frequent and usually at a private location.

  “I have a feeling,” Nixon had written to Bebe Rebozo as the campaign went into high gear, “that I might be applying for one of the famous Rebozo ‘rest cures’ after the battle is over.” And so he did, heading down to Key Biscayne right after the election.

  There was always Rebozo.

  15

  * * *

  Does a man “enjoy” crises? . . . I find it especially difficult to answer the question.

  —Richard Nixon, in 1962

  By the summer of 1957 visitors to the Nixons’ new home were shown a cornucopia of foreign wonders: pictorial scrolls from Japan on the living room wall, copper candelabra from Korea on the table. A third-century Buddha in Richard’s study, courtesy of the king of Afghanistan. A teak chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl; “Madame Chiang Kai-shek gave it to me,” said Pat. A fine rug in the dining room, a gift from the shah of Iran, an early token of a generosity that would be extended for years to come. Two lacquer coffee tables from a land not yet familiar to Americans, named Vietnam.

  The gifts, Pat told guests, were diplomatic tokens of esteem from forty nations. The number of countries would exceed fifty before the vice presidency ended, and by then the Nixons would have traveled twice around the world. They visited countries where no American president or vice president had set foot before. They were “superambassadors,” an idea conceived by Dwight Eisenhower.

  “What are you doing this summer?” the president had asked in 1953, and then suggested a trip to the Far East. Nixon had accepted the task eagerly and took his mission seriously. Every stop of the journey was preceded by meticulous briefings, the record of every potentate on the route thoroughly analyzed. In each country diplomats were urged to get the vice president off the cocktail circuit and into meetings with ordinary citizens, ranging from businesspeople and intellectuals to laborers and peasant farmers.

  Nixon was to recall that tour as his first step in gaining the foreign expertise that years later, when the rest of his reputation was squandered and gone, might enable him to claim the mantle of “great statesman.” It also presaged, in country after country, what many now consider Nixon’s future policy errors and personal folly.

  In Indonesia, Nixon and Pat banqueted—he would remember—“off gold plate to the light of a thousand torches, while musicians played on the shore of a lake covered with white lotus blossoms.” President Sukarno’s gifts to Nixon included ivory ornaments embossed with the Kuwaiti coat of arms, perhaps received by the Indonesian president as presents from the Emir and then recycled to his American guest.

  Nixon later said that Sukarno’s “corrosive vanity” offended him, although his own concept of grandeur would one day raise eyebrows in his own country. The splendor of his escort’s regalia on a visit to India would inspire him as president to order Ruritanian uniforms for the attendants at the White House. In India in 1953, Nixon got on neither with Prime Minister Nehru nor with his daughter, future Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Nehru’s verdict, when Nixon followed a visit to Pakistan by endorsing U.S. military aide to the Pakistanis, was to call him “an unprincipled cad.” Nixon got on well, on the other hand, with the general soon to become leader of Pakistan, Ayub Khan.

  Nixon’s comments as president about Indira Gandhi were, as Henry Kissinger was to say, “not always printable.” He despised her, and he distrusted Indian policy statements. Nixon was to favor Pakistan in the 1971 war between India and Pakistan—even after a million Bengalis had been killed and more millions left homeless in a genocidal rampage by Pakistan’s army. Before the war ended, he would consider using nuclear weapons in the event China and the Soviet Union were drawn into the conflict.

  A vital underlying issue for Nixon in 1971 would be the opening to China, in which Pakistan was an intermediary. In 1953 the young Nixon had visited the Chinese Nationalist island of Taiwan, as the honored guest of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He said then that Red China would not be recognized and encouraged the impression that the United States backed Chiang’s hopes of reconquering the mainland. Soon, though, at a Christmas party in Washington, he would be heard to say, “Someday I’ll go to China . . . mainland China.” Two decades later, the Chinese breakthrough was to be his undeniably fine achievement as president.

  In 1953 Nixon also went to Iran, where
he met the shah, His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Although he quickly became, in Nixon’s words, a “personal friend,” Pahlavi is referred to only once and briefly in the Nixon memoirs. There is no mention of the fact that their meeting came within months of the shah’s return to the throne with the assistance of Operation Ajax, a CIA-orchestrated coup designed to bring oil-rich Iran firmly under Western influence. Nor does Nixon discuss the way that following a personal visit as president, he would anoint the shah (a repressive ruler with a brutal secret police) the guardian of Western interests in the entire region. Nixon armed the Kurds at the shah’s request and gave the ruler extraordinary access to the latest U.S. weaponry, without prior consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the State Department. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball likened this to “giving the keys of the world’s largest liquor store to a confirmed alcoholic.” The negative consequences are still reverberating today.

  Least of all would the Nixon memoirs mention the extent of the shah’s personal largess. Gifts to American leaders by foreign heads of state must by law be turned over to the government. After Nixon left office, at least a dozen such gifts from the shah were listed as “missing.” The shah also reportedly contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars—by one account more than one million dollars—to Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

  There is little in the memoirs about the Philippines, also on the 1953 itinerary, and not a single reference to the later president of the Philippines, the robber baron–dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos and his wife, Imelda—she of the myriad pairs of shoes—are variously reported to have contributed either $250,000 or $1 million to Nixon’s political campaigns. Marcos’s motive was simple. As historian and Nixon specialist Professor Stanley Kutler has said, he was “buying influence”—as was the shah.