The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Nixon applied for and obtained admission to the New York bar, responding to one question with praise for the Constitution’s safeguards against the misuse of power. He worked from a twenty-fourth-floor office at Nixon, Mudge, Rose, seated at an antique desk adorned with a vice presidential ashtray and a pen set Eisenhower had given him. As the new “name” partner, Nixon brought the firm prestige. Powerful backers, Pepsi’s Don Kendall and Bob Abplanalp of Precision Valve, now moved their legal business to Nixon, Mudge, Rose.

  The firm and its clients were attuned to Nixon’s politics. Milton Rose, a senior partner, had led the promotion of U.S. business in Latin America after the riots during Nixon’s vice presidential tour. The firm had represented shipowner Stavros Niarchos during the tussle with Aristotle Onassis over oil shipping routes, directed from Washington by Nixon.* Corrupt San Diego banker Arnholt Smith, a Nixon contributor, would use Nixon, Mudge, Rose to fight a case for him. It may not be incidental that during Nixon’s tenure the firm had as a client the government of South Vietnam.

  From the office on Broad Street, Nixon wrote to a judge requesting leniency for Mario García Kohly, the rightist exile—now in trouble on counterfeiting charges—whom he had once pressed on the CIA as the potential leader of free Cuba. He also worked to recover the millions of dollars claimed by relatives of the assassinated Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo; thirty million dollars had reportedly vanished in a plane crash that killed Kohly’s primary financial backer.3

  It would be the firm’s business that put Nixon in Dallas on the day that John Kennedy was assassinated. Public courtesies aside, their feelings about each other had remained suffused with rancor. “It makes me sick,” Kennedy said privately of Six Crises, deprecating the saccharine way Nixon had woven his family into the text. “He’s a cheap bastard.” “Bastards” was the description Nixon used of the Kennedys, too, as he smarted over tax audits he believed they had ordered.

  Five months before the assassination, both men had happened to be in Rome at the same time. Both had appointments to meet the newly elected pope, Paul VI. On learning that the president’s visit had lasted thirty minutes, Nixon contacted the U.S. consul general to insist that his audience be “exactly as long as the one Kennedy had.” Before ending his state visit, the president telephoned Nixon at his hotel. “He just wanted to say hello,” Nixon recalled. The two men never spoke again.

  Early on the morning of November 22, Nixon was in a suite at Dallas’s Baker Hotel, winding up two days’ work for Pepsi at a bottlers’ convention.4 In a city seething with anti-Kennedy feeling, he had not been able to resist mixing politics with business, telling local journalists, “I am going to work as hard as I can to get the Kennedys out.” Kennedy was reportedly irritated by this comment, the latest of several Nixon outbursts, as he scanned the newspapers that last morning. He may or may not have noted that along with the criticism, Nixon had expressed the hope that Dallas would give Kennedy a “courteous reception.”

  Nixon flew out on a commercial flight just two and a half hours before Kennedy arrived in Dallas aboard Air Force One. By the time he arrived in New York, the president would be dying. Unaware of the assassination, Nixon threw out more anti-Kennedy barbs to a group of reporters at the airport, posed cheerfully for photographers, and hailed a cab. On the way into town the cab was stationary at a red light when a man rushed up to ask if the driver had heard the news: Shots had been fired at the president. At Nixon’s home in Manhattan a weeping doorman told him Kennedy was dead. He rushed into the apartment to find his daughters watching the tragedy unfold on television.

  The writer Stephen Hess, arriving minutes later, found Nixon “very shaken. He took out the Dallas morning paper, which had a story about the press conference he had had the day before. He had talked about how the people of Dallas should have respect for their political adversaries. . . . He was saying to me in effect, ‘You see, I didn’t have anything to do with creating this.’ He was very concerned then that Kennedy had been assassinated by a right-winger and that somehow Nixon would be accused of unleashing political hatred.”

  As Hess listened, Nixon placed a call to FBI Director Hoover, who told him that he believed the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact a leftist, leaving Nixon “somewhat relieved.” His reaction, Hess recollected, was “There but for the grace of God go I.”5

  That night Nixon wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy recalling that he and her husband had been “personal friends.” He attended the funeral in Washington6 with Pat at his side. A year later, in an article for Reader’s Digest, he would praise his former rival’s “keen intelligence, his great wisdom and vitality.”

  The sourness, however, remained. In the eighties he attributed the nation’s sense of loss at Kennedy’s death to “mythology” and argued that Kennedy’s achievements were “not so much what he did, but the man, the style.” Haldeman said Nixon had “neither respected nor liked” the slain president.

  When Nixon in turn reached the White House, a former Secret Service agent recalled, “It sometimes seemed that he went out of his way to take his place as a martyr beside Jack Kennedy. In his first term Nixon’s favorite limo was said to be SS 100X, the restored midnight blue eight-thousand-pound Lincoln Continental that Kennedy had been shot in.”

  The tragedy had one important ramification for Nixon. “History intervened,” his colleague Len Garment noted. “John Kennedy’s death had the ironic consequence of restoring Richard Nixon to life as a national political figure.” Nixon had sensed his opportunity immediately. Stopping by at his apartment again the morning after the assassination, Hess found him huddled with key Republicans, “already assessing how this event would affect or re-create the possibilities of Nixon running for president.”

  “I never wear a hat,” Nixon would respond, when asked on The Arthur Godfrey Show whether he planned to run in 1964, “so it must always be in the ring.”

  _____

  “If all I had was my legal work,” Nixon was soon telling friends, “I would be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four . . . there was no other life for me but politics. . . .”

  On a visit to the New York World’s Fair, his daughter Julie recalled, a Republican companion was warned in advance to “not bring up politics with my mother.” However, as soon as Pat and the girls were packed off to Europe for a month, Nixon immersed himself in the 1964 campaign.

  While his declared role was one of neutrality, he initially tried to position himself as an alternative to Barry Goldwater. When that scheme failed, he made a highly successful convention speech. Even as the red, white, and blue balloons floated down upon Goldwater, nominated but on his way to the worst Republican defeat in thirty years, Nixon was once again being spoken of as a future leader.

  The political machine was running again, and Nixon already knew which image of himself he would present to win over his countrymen. It was the image that he hoped would be his legacy: that of world statesman par excellence. On a night flight to Europe, after several martinis, Nixon had a prompt response for a friend who wondered why in the world he would want to run for president again.

  “Because I know the fucking Commie mind,” he replied. “But they don’t know mine. I really think I could do something. I really believe I could make a contribution to peace.”

  Nixon’s law firm colleague Len Garment had previously been a Democrat and “reflexive Nixon denigrator.” Now, though, he joined the Nixon camp. One night in Florida in 1965, in a rare intimate interlude, Nixon seemed to open his heart to Garment.

  After dinner with Elmer Bobst, the two men headed for a newly built house that had been placed at their disposal. Then, fearing the developers might use his presence for publicity purposes, Nixon ordered the driver to return to the Bobst estate. The gates were locked—it was after midnight—and Nixon and Garment got in by climbing over the wall.

  “We didn’t want to wake up Elmer,” Garment remembered, “so we found the pool house, where there w
ere two camp beds. There Nixon was, with his big head sticking over the covers. The lights were off, but he couldn’t sleep—he never could—and he just kept talking. He talked for what must have been an hour, sounding sad and determined, about the things that meant a lot to him. If he couldn’t live in politics, he said, how was he to live? We had been talking about him running for president. And he said that if he couldn’t play a real role, on that front or otherwise, he’d be dead very soon.

  “It was a soliloquy,” said Garment. “He was talking himself to sleep.” Nixon declared himself driven “by his pacifist mother’s idealism and the profound importance of foreign affairs. . . . He would do anything, make any sacrifice, to be able to continue using his talents and experience in making foreign policy.”

  As the historian Michael Beschloss has noted, Nixon was “a romantic and ardent champion of the great man theory of politics.” Of all the world leaders whose careers he studied, he revered one above all others, Charles de Gaulle. When he announced his move to New York, Nixon had said Paris was to be his secondary base of operations. Within weeks he made a trip there, paying court to de Gaulle, whom he had first met in Washington in 1960. The general was now five years into his extraordinary eleven-year rule, a period during which he wielded more power over his nation than any French leader since Emperor Napoleon III.

  Seated with Nixon on the terrace of the Élysée Palace, de Gaulle held forth on world affairs. He said the United States should negotiate with China, urged that it improve relations with the Soviets, and introduced Nixon to a term he had not heard before, détente. Most important of all, de Gaulle raised his glass in a toast his guest never forgot. Nixon, he declared, would someday return to serve his country “in an even higher capacity.”

  The older man’s confidence won his guest’s lasting devotion. Nixon gazed admiringly on de Gaulle at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, visited him on every trip to Paris while out of office, sent an emissary to him during the 1968 run for the White House, and made an audience with him the high point of his first European trip as president.

  Henry Kissinger believed that the respect was mutual. General Vernon Walters, who interpreted for them, said de Gaulle treated Nixon “as an equal.” Nixon was, however, as Haldeman put it, “in awe” of de Gaulle. Writing about the French president, Nixon referred to him by his full name, Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle. It resonated, Nixon thought, with echoes of Charlemagne, the eighth-century emperor Charles the Great, and of Roman Gaul—“grandeur, glory, greatness.”

  Nixon noted without demurring that the Frenchman had no use for the parliamentary system, that he thought “Members of parliament can paralyze action, they cannot initiate it.”7 “Authority,” he quoted de Gaulle as arguing, “derives from prestige . . . there can be no prestige without mystery.”

  No book in Nixon’s library reportedly was more well thumbed or more densely annotated than de Gaulle’s 1960 memoir, The Edge of the Sword. He underscored passages like: “Powerful personalities . . . frequently lack that surface charm that wins popularity. . . .” Also, “Great men of action . . . have without exception possessed to a very high degree the faculty of withdrawing into themselves.”

  As early as 1960, the year he met de Gaulle, CBS’s Nancy Dickerson watched the Nixons board an airplane “as if they were traveling royalty on an imperial state visit.” She believed Nixon had even then “studied de Gaulle and was already trying to emulate him.” Robert Finch thought the same, as did Bob Haldeman.

  “He feels he should be more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious, i.e. de Gaulle . . .” the chief of staff would note after a session with Nixon after arriving in the White House. And soon after de Gaulle died: “We discussed the general P.R. question . . . especially since the death of de Gaulle we have a real opportunity to build the P as the world leader. . . .”

  On a state visit to Paris Nixon publicly extolled his mentor as “a giant among men.” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who agreed that Nixon tried to imitate de Gaulle, suggested dryly in a 1997 interview that therein lay the difference: Nixon was “a shrewd, calculating figure, but no giant. He would have liked to have been more giant than he was. He was not an imposing figure like de Gaulle.”

  _____

  To establish himself as a master world statesman, Nixon began an extensive program of travel. In 1963, during what was supposed to be a family vacation, he saw, in addition to de Gaulle, Spain’s Franco, President Nasser of Egypt, Italy’s defense minister, the British foreign secretary, and West Germany’s Adenauer.

  Touring East Berlin behind its newly erected wall, he filed a news report on the excursion in breathless tabloid tones. “As we were walking along the street searching for a taxi, a shadowy figure walked up to us and said, ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ . . . The man looked around and said, ‘Our only hope is with the Americans.’ ”

  Nixon’s guide in the Eastern sector, BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler, recalled how Nixon leaped out of the car on Stalin Allee to hand out visiting cards inscribed “Vice President of the United States of America,” a post he had not held for nearly two years. To the bemused Wheeler, Nixon seemed “weird . . . Totally mad.”

  Two years later, while in Finland, he decided on a whim to make the twenty-hour train journey to Moscow. A Canadian journalist, David Levy, came upon him there dining at the Sovietskaya Hotel, “seated at a long table groaning with jellied sturgeon and Georgian wines.” Learning that Levy knew the private address of Nikita Khrushchev, ousted and “unpersoned” six months earlier, Nixon asked to be taken at once to see the man he had once famously confronted.

  When the babushka at the door of Khrushchev’s apartment building proved uncooperative, Nixon made do with leaving a scrawled note. On the following day he engaged in a dialogue—fatuous, according to Jules Witcover, a usually evenhanded biographer—with an official at Moscow University. He also “accosted a policeman with stupid questions.”8 American reporters present thought his behavior ludicrous but reported it all anyway. Nixon achieved what he wanted: publicity back home.

  He continued his circuit of the world for five years, taking in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia—especially Asia, where the United States was becoming mired in the Vietnam War. He covered 225,000 miles and on one of ten flights to Japan contracted phlebitis, the inflammation of a vein in his leg that—as president and afterward—would come close to killing him.

  Nixon was to claim later he had been “running the whole operation on a shoestring, traveling sometimes on coach flights with only one person with me and sometimes none at all. . . . As far as privacy was concerned I just took the inside seat and put whoever was riding with me on the outside, opened my briefcase and became deliberately oblivious. . . .”

  This was a misrepresentation. The companion on many of the flights was his best friend, Bebe Rebozo, and much of the travel was paid for by Reader’s Digest or Pepsi, which he represented as VIP attorney at bottle plant openings. Neither company was a mean patron, and Pepsi certainly got a return on its investment. In Rome, Nixon addressed the press while conspicuously sipping the soft drink. During a television appearance a waiter reached past Nixon to turn a Pepsi bottle so that the label faced the camera.

  Globe-trotting for Pepsi, however, was hardly the Gaullist grandeur to which Nixon aspired. “Nobody paid any attention to him,” said Life’s Hugh Sidey. “Some of my bureau chiefs said he would come into town—a former vice president—and ask to see the head of state, whether he was in Kuala Lumpur, Algiers, or some faraway place. In many cases they wouldn’t see him. He was a has-been; they didn’t like him very much.

  “He didn’t care. . . . When he got to the White House, he knew virtually every leader of every country in the world because someplace along the line he’d ended up as a reject with the guy. . . . Six or twelve years later this fellow would be elected president or prime minister, and he’d be Nixon’s pal. . . . It paid off in the end.”

  Behind Nixon’s desk in his New York
office stood a second desk, holding serried ranks of signed photographs of the high and the mighty. The monarchs had pride of place: the queen of England, the kings of Belgium and Thailand, the emperor of Ethiopia, the shah of Iran. There were poses of Nixon at Eisenhower’s side and—somewhat unexpectedly—a portrait inscribed with “bonnes pensées” from Albert Schweitzer in his West African leper colony. A book about the Quakers was left lying where visitors could not miss seeing it.

  “This,” an aide reflected later, “was Nixon’s carefully set stage for winning over the skeptical.”

  _____

  Sheer hard work, more than his attempts at window dressing, is what ultimately brought Nixon real rewards. During one forty-eight-hour period in the fall of 1966 the man who was not a candidate appeared before the Supreme Court in his legal capacity, flew to San Francisco to give television interviews, drove north to Oakland to address a political meeting, south to Palo Alto for a planning meeting, then—after three hours’ sleep—there was more television, a fund-raising breakfast, an airplane flight, a press conference, a rally for a fellow Republican, another flight, another press conference, more TV, another flight and another rally, yet another airplane hop, and then—after another short night—the long haul back to the East Coast.

  Nixon had sallied forth to breathe fire into the Republican faithful in the midterm elections, to bring the party back from the ignominy of 1964, and he delivered a smashing victory. On election day, with most of the results in, he celebrated with colleagues at El Morocco, the New York nightclub. “I never heard him sound happier,” said Herb Klein, whom he called that night. “It was clear that he knew he now had a launching pad for another try at the presidency.”

  Nixon had been refusing even to discuss the possibility of running in 1968. He remained noncommittal even after the big win and a Thanksgiving break with Rebozo, and after political intimates said they wanted to organize a Nixon for President committee. The following year, as other contenders—George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and a former actor by the name of Ronald Reagan—entered the lists, Nixon watched and waited. In nearly two hundred years no man defeated in a run for the U.S. presidency and denied renomination on the following attempt had ever been nominated again, let alone elected.