The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  In September 1967 Nixon’s mother Hannah died. She had languished in a rest home, giving no sign that she recognized visitors, since suffering a stroke four years earlier. According to Nixon, his last conversation with her had taken place in the hospital in 1962, after she had been through a serious operation and he had been defeated by Pat Brown. Then, he recalled, he had leaned over her bed to urge: “Mother, don’t give up.” She responded, he claimed, by pulling herself up and telling him: “Richard, don’t you give up. Don’t let anyone tell you you are through.” Her advice was almost identical to what, as Nixon told it, his dying father had told him in 1956: “Dick, you keep fighting.”

  Three months after Hannah’s death, according to Nixon, he sat down in front of a fire and made notes on whether or not to run for president. His first line supposedly read: “I have decided personally against becoming a candidate.” Then, after a listing of reasons not to run, he wrote: “I don’t give a damn.”9

  That Christmas, Nixon said, he consulted the family and gave “great weight” to what they thought. Nineteen-year-old Julie told him, “You have to do it, for the country,” and twenty-one-year-old Tricia said, “If you don’t run, Daddy, you really will have nothing to live for.” “Daddy,” Julie has recalled, citing her contemporary diary, “was very depressed. I had never known him to be depressed before. . . .”

  We cannot know what Pat really thought. She later told an interviewer of the “horror” she had been through in the past, that she felt she could not go through it again. According to Julie, though, life as a New York matron was beginning to pall somewhat for her mother. She sometimes grew restless, she confided to a friend. On a stroll along Madison Avenue, Julie remembered, she and her father agreed that “Mother needed something to do.”

  Pat’s resolve to avoid politics had already been broken in 1966, when, as “Miss Ryan,” she had quietly worked a campaign telephone. Was she, Pat asked her daughters that year, “a failure to Daddy”? A few months later, though, she was telling Julie “flatly, almost tonelessly” that she could not face another presidential race.

  Nixon had recently discussed his marriage with his younger brother Ed. “There’s never been anybody but Pat,” he had said, “never needs to be.” In fact, Nixon the proper family man had recently been letting his standards slip a little.

  _____

  During the 1964 convention, while drinking with a group of Republicans in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel, Nixon had become, in John Ehrlichman’s words, “loudly celebratory.” At the end of the evening, when most of the others had drifted away, he made “clumsy passes” at a campaign staffer in her twenties. “He was drinking hard, and he lost it,” Ehrlichman recalled. “She was very embarrassed; we were all embarrassed.” The young woman finally escaped Nixon’s advances and left.10

  Arnholt Smith, who had known Nixon from childhood, recalled an episode during another party in California. “I was looking for my wife and—jeez!—I couldn’t find her. Apparently Dick had maneuvered her into the john, and they were drinking highballs. I finally found out where they were and had to jerk her out. He was high as a kite, and he said, ‘We’re not doing anything, we’re not doing anything!’ . . . When he got to drinking, Nixon was really something.

  “Pat,” said Smith, “was a wonderful woman, but very straitlaced. She was Queen Victoria. I think he sought a change from that. . . . He sometimes wandered.”

  During this period Nixon took an interest in a Chinese woman in her early thirties, a relationship that remained hidden from the public until 1976, when the New York Times revealed that the FBI had investigated a reported “affair” between Nixon and Marianna Liu, a former hostess at the Hong Kong Hilton. The National Enquirer gleefully assigned a team of reporters to dig further and later ran two lengthy stories.

  The situation had begun to surface with a security flap in 1967. “One of my contacts in another U.S. agency,” former FBI Hong Kong representative Dan Grove told the author, “came to see me one morning and said one of his sources, Marianna Liu, was seeing Nixon. He thought I should be aware of this. . . . He said he knew Nixon had had a top secret briefing on the People’s Republic of China, and that made his contact with Liu a risk.”11

  According to Liu’s attorney, FBI records confirm that her contacts with Nixon triggered an alarm and that Nixon himself came under surveillance in Hong Kong, to the point of being photographed through his bedroom window with infrared cameras. Grove believed the work was carried out by the British—Hong Kong was then a British colony—at the request of the CIA.

  Early press accounts suggested the pair had first met in the late fifties, when Nixon was vice president and Liu was visiting Washington with a group from Hong Kong. They certainly met repeatedly between 1964 and 1967, when Nixon was making annual trips to Hong Kong. Liu told the New York Times she thought she saw him on all but one of the visits. In 1967, when she was hospitalized, Nixon sent flowers.

  Later, when he was president, Liu not only moved to the United States but lived initially in Nixon’s hometown, Whittier. Her sponsors for residence included a businessman with whom Nixon had stayed in Hong Kong and a Nixon-era immigration official. By one report, Liu saw Nixon twice at the White House.

  The National Enquirer quoted Liu as telling of “many dates” with Nixon in Hong Kong and of dancing with him on a yacht. “I knew he cared for me,” she was reported as saying, “because despite my constant warnings he still insisted on seeing me and being alone with me. . . . We had many opportunities to make love—we were alone in his hotel room at least six or seven times—but I wouldn’t let it happen . . . he had an important career and a wife and family to think of. . . .”

  Liu later sued the Enquirer over aspects of its story, and the paper settled out of court. Her own attorney, she has said, had advised her not to pursue the case, warning her that the paper’s reporting was “true.”12 Tracked down in 1996 in Los Angeles, where she was working as a waitress, Liu offered the following account of the relationship.

  Her narrative, in broken English and Chinese, was delivered in brief sentences and monosyllables, and with obvious reluctance. She told how after fleeing Communist China in her late teens, she had worked her way up to become chief hostess in the Opium Den, one of several bars at the Hong Kong Hilton. It was there, she said, that local businessman Harold Lee introduced her to Nixon.

  In her interview for this book, Liu told of only two Nixon encounters. “He was nice, quiet,” she recalled with a smile. “I’ll just say he was smooth and nice. . . . Not jump all over, you know. . . . He was not that handsome; one side of his face was bigger than the other! . . . He gave me a bottle of Chanel No. 5. And he gave me his card. He tell me to come to New York and see him. . . .”

  Nixon and the bar hostess were photographed together in 1966 by the Hilton’s publicity office. The second meeting, a private one, occurred when Nixon—in town with Rebozo—invited Liu and a hostess named Theresa to his suite at the Mandarin Hotel.

  “We finished work and went to the hotel,” Liu said. “We went to their room, and they have a bar there. We had a drink and a snack. They had martinis or something. I don’t drink; I had Coke. Mr. Rebozo was very quiet, don’t talk much. We left there around two A.M., I think. We had to catch the last ferry. . . .”

  Liu’s contact with Nixon, she asserted in this recent interview, was “just talking” and involved neither sex nor a love affair. “I don’t want to think about it,” she said, and then—as was obvious—insisted, “I don’t want to talk about it.” She had not attended the funeral when Nixon died yet, surprising perhaps in someone who claims so minimal a connection to the man, she later went to visit his grave.13

  There are no further details to add to this account, except to note that Nixon both publicly and privately expressed an appreciation of Chinese women. At dinner at the Annenbergs’,14 according to Mickey Ziffren, a Los Angeles social acquaintance, he “had too much to drink and began talking about the beauty of Chines
e women and how they were really much more beautiful. He was doing this in front of Pat and kept going on about the particular qualities he appreciated. . . .”

  _____

  In December 1967, when Nixon made “to run or not to run” the subject of a Christmas Day family debate, Pat declared she was “resigned to helping out.” “Whatever you do, we’ll be proud of you,” she added later, according to Nixon. In the months that followed, when he did start running, Pat kept her word, offering the standard trite comments to the media. Pat was “a volunteer,” “running the office for him,” “having a marvelous time.” Newsweek puffed her as “the public man’s dream, a seemingly selfless, super-efficient helpmeet . . . her looks and taste classic Middle American . . . country, family, loyalty and discipline.”

  The campaign was as usual an endurance test for Pat, a time of going through the motions, frozen between bad memories and hope for the future. When a television show audience applauded her, she was seen to be glassily clapping herself. At some rallies she was merely an appendage, not even introduced by name.

  Some perceptive journalists saw through the facade. Pat looked as if she hated campaigning, thought the New Republic’s John Osborne. “Mr. Nixon publicly gave her reason to hate it. . . . On a platform near Los Angeles, in a fashion so crass it could not be missed, he ignored her presence. . . . At Saginaw, Michigan, she didn’t hear him when he called her back to a makeshift platform, and jumped as if she had been flicked with a whip when he roared, ‘Pat!’ ”

  Esquire’s Garry Wills observed pityingly as Pat, asked how it felt to be on the road again, answered: “I love it; one meets so many old friends.” “But,” Wills recalled, “I watched her hands as she said it; the freckled hands were picking at each other, playing with gloves, trying to still each other’s trembling.”

  Very occasionally the mask slipped. “I tell them what their readers want to hear,” Pat said wearily of the scores of required interviews with women’s magazines. On a flight from Denver to St. Louis she tried hard to say nothing to Gloria Steinem, on assignment—as reported earlier—for New York magazine. Steinem, however, pressed for more than the usual bland answers. Had Pat really liked all the stories written in past campaigns? “Yes, of course,” she replied. “I don’t object to what’s been written . . . most of you have been very kind.” In that case, Steinem recalled telling her, she was “the only person I’d ever met, including myself, who liked everything written about them.” There was a flicker of annoyance behind the hazel eyes; the first sign of life.

  “No, she was never bored with campaigning. . . . She liked the theatre, especially My Fair Lady, and had seen Hello, Dolly! three times . . . ‘I feel there’s enough seriousness in the world without seeing it in the theatre.’

  “There is no Generation Gap in our family,” Pat went on. “Why, only the other day, Tricia and Julie didn’t go to one of their parties. I said, ‘Aren’t you going out?’ And they said, ‘No, we’d much rather have dinner with you and Daddy.’ ” “Mamie Eisenhower was the woman in history she most admired, Pat said, ‘because she meant so much to young people.’ ”

  As she probed Pat’s platitudes, Steinem was briefly rewarded with “a stream of anger and resentment”: resentment about her disadvantaged youth, and resentment of Richard Nixon. “There were things she said about her husband that I couldn’t figure out a tasteful way to use,” Steinem remembered, “but she wanted me to say them. She didn’t like doing what she was doing, she didn’t like campaigning. She didn’t like the world in which she was, the world he had created. . . .”

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  I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates to the Watergate affair of 1972. . . . As the same men faced the election of 1972, there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit—or beyond.

  —Walt Rostow, Special Assistant for National Security to President Johnson, 1973

  Months before Nixon announced he was running for president in 1968, his aides were using a code name for their leader in office communications. Their designation—DC—was a straightforward statement of certainty about his ultimate destination.

  From early in the year of the election Nixon ran hard and brilliantly. A Nixon for President headquarters had long since opened its doors, in an old bank building in Washington. The real heart of the operation, though, was the candidate’s New York law office. Throughout the previous year it had served as recruiting office for his troops, including advisers, speechwriters and aides, all waiting to be unleashed.

  Even before Nixon formally announced, the press carried a picture of a group of bright young men in suits, the “New Nixon team.” Absent were Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, still on the West Coast waiting for the serious action to begin; Murray Chotiner, a key player but one whom it was prudent not to publicize; and the new power at the center, John Mitchell.

  Mitchell, of jowly face and trademark pipe, had become a multimillionaire as an attorney specializing in municipal bonds. His clients had been the bond sellers, while the Nixon firm had been the underwriters, and it was this mutual interest that had led the two partnerships to merge. (Perhaps not incidentally the new partnership thus formed had contact with Franklin DeBoer, the broker who later claimed he handled a secret Nixon portfolio at Rebozo’s bank.1 Rebozo, DeBoer revealed, used Mitchell to buy bonds in New Jersey.)

  Mitchell’s public finance expertise gave him a useful entrée to the political world. He was tough but soft-spoken and so understated that even after 1968 the press would characterize him as “a blank.” Billing him as “our leader against crime and lawlessness,” Nixon would later appoint Mitchell attorney general of the United States, in which capacity he would preside over the initial planning of the Watergate break-in and later be sentenced to prison for perjury and obstruction of justice.

  Nixon went into the New Hampshire primary with surgical skill, entering in late January at the last possible moment, and won with more votes than any candidate in any presidential primary in the history of the state. He then triumphed in five other states, the last of them a critical win over Ronald Reagan in Oregon.

  Ehrlichman, who came on board in the Oregon race, was impressed and relieved by the candidate’s performance. In the past, as reported earlier, he had been concerned about Nixon’s drinking, which he thought serious enough to “cost him any chance of a return to public life.” He agreed to join up in 1968 only if Nixon promised to abstain. Nixon responded by taking a “solemn pledge,” which Ehrlichman never saw him break during the campaign.

  The “New Nixon” of whom the pundits were writing seemed easier in his skin, relaxed with the press, less angry, less obviously driven. He presented himself not just as a candidate but as a confident man claiming a well-deserved crown. “Nixon,” thought Theodore White, “has the weight and presence. It is visible. . . . He runs as President.”

  Nixon was watching on television in Oregon when Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy. According to speechwriter Richard Whalen, he repeated two or three times, “We can beat the little S.O.B.” As Ehrlichman recalled, he shook his head for a long moment, then said: “We’ve just seen some very terrible forces unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this.”

  “Why does Bobby get to be so mean,” Nixon grumbled as the Kennedy effort got under way, “and why do I have to be so nice?” In fact, he welcomed the prospect of Robert’s becoming the Democratic nominee, believing it offered an opportunity to indict the Democrats “right back to the Bay of Pigs.” And as Whalen recalled, “He wanted to beat a Kennedy.”

  The ultimate “something bad” that Nixon had foreseen came in June, with Kennedy’s assassination in the kitchen of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, two months after the murder of Martin Luther King. Nixon had attended King’s funeral but worried afterward that it had been “a serious mistake” that would cost him crucial southern white votes. Robert Kennedy’s death was “tragic” for Ni
xon, according to his brother Ed. He also went to that funeral, and then headed for the Bahamas and relaxation with Rebozo and the owners of Paradise Island.

  Two months later, in a regal arrival ritual timed to coincide with prime time television, he flew into Miami for the Republican National Convention. “Nixon’s the One!” sang the campaign girls gathered at the entrance to the Hilton, and soon he was.

  Once nominated, Nixon had to pick a running mate. One outsider was a young Texas congressman named George Bush. The senior House Republican, Gerald Ford, thought he was being seriously considered.2 Nixon, however, had long been focused primarily on Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland.3 Gasps of disbelief went up from the convention floor when the choice was announced.

  Agnew’s only apparent qualification was that he was a centrist, a moderate, though some thought “mediocre” a more apt description. The Democrats quickly capitalized on the curious selection by running derisive commercials, with the sound of prolonged laughter over the slogan “Agnew for Vice President.” Nixon would admit years later that he had opted for Agnew knowing that his running mate was corrupt, the flaw that would eventually force Agnew’s resignation.

  Nixon made an acceptance speech filled with patriotic sentiment, featuring calls for reconciliation at home and peacemaking abroad. Its best-remembered element, though, would be his allusion to the dream of a child—Nixon himself—the son of a hardworking father and a “gentle Quaker mother,” on his way to achieving the American dream. (Two passages from the speech were not included in the excerpts reprinted in Nixon’s memoirs. “Respect for law,” he told his followers, “can come only from people who take the law into their hearts and their minds. . . .” and “Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and to live the truth. That’s what we will do.”)