In descending an airplane ramp he customarily sized up a crowd to see what kind of reception he might expect. One glance at these shrieking youths told him, as he put it afterward, that “here was one place where we would have an altogether different situation than we ever had in any country I visited.” The interpreter said, “They aren’t friendly, Mr. Vice President.” Nixon didn’t have to understand Spanish to know that; the din was so great that he could scarcely hear the national anthems and the 19-gun salute for him. Before the last 105 shells had been fired he decided to skip the other airport formalities, notably the greeting to him and his response. To the interpreter he said, “Look, we’re not going to do the mike scene,” and to Venezuela’s foreign minister, Oscar García Lutín, “Let’s dispense with the customary speeches here and go directly to our cars. No one could possibly hear what we said over the noise of this mob.”
It was then that he missed the limousines. He turned to where they should have been and discovered instead that the red carpet ran all the way to the terminal building, through it, and out the other side. There in the distance the cars gleamed. In between angry teen-agers were forming ranks and brandishing gamy fruit and other refuse. The bayonets of the honor guard might have been useful, but their commander was nowhere to be found.
The situation was rapidly deteriorating when the Americans found unexpected allies: thirty aircraft mechanics at the field. They cheered him as the others booed, making themselves so conspicuous that they briefly distracted the crowd. That gave the Americans time to slip into the terminal building. Coming out of it, Nixon and his wife were just below the observation deck when the bandleader decided to replay the Venezuelan national anthem. The Nixons froze. The Vice President had what he afterward called “the sensation that rain was falling”; then he realized that it was spittle. The saliva was coming from the crowd overhead, and some of it, from tobacco chewers, fell on the new red suit Pat Nixon had bought for the trip, staining it with splotches of a dirty brown. A rubber noise-maker struck Nixon on the face. The music ended. He took Pat’s arm and they waded into the throng, toward the cars, following a flying wedge of Secret Service agents and Americans from the embassy.
With a sudden lurch the wedge shoved the Vice President into the first car and Pat into the second. Secret Service agents and interpreters followed. As they rapidly rolled up windows and wiped the saliva from their faces and clothes, they were joined by their host and hostess, Foreign Minister García Lutín in Nixon’s limousine and Señora García Lutín in Mrs. Nixon’s. Both were mortified. García Lutín, a gentle, mild-mannered man, tried to clean the worst of the spittle from the Vice President’s suit. “Don’t bother,” Nixon said sharply. “I am going to burn these clothes as soon as I can get out of them.” The foreign minister then tried to explain. He said, “The Venezuelan people have been without freedom so long that they tend now to express themselves more vigorously perhaps than they should. In our new government we do not want to do anything which would be interpreted as a suppression of freedom.” Nixon replied, “If your new government doesn’t have the guts and good sense to control a mob like the one at the airport, there soon will be no freedom for anyone in Venezuela.”
The ride into Caracas was hair-raising. Led by a police escort and a press truck, they were going 40 mph on the Autopista, a modern dual-lane highway, while demonstrators on motorcycles and motor scooters zigzagged in and out of the motorcade, shouting, spitting, and throwing rotten fruit at the lead car. The windows had to remain closed. The air inside—there was no air-conditioning—became stifling. Approaching the city, Nixon noticed that the sidewalks were deserted and the shops locked and shuttered. He was about to remark that this was ominous when he heard a dull thud. Momentarily he thought the driver had hit a pothole. Then he heard another thud and then another; the car was being hit by flying rocks. Simultaneously the chauffeur slammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt. They had reached the city limits and the first ambush. A tattered mass of people of all ages and descriptions came boiling out of a dingy alley nearby and rushed into the street hurling heavy stones. The roadblock here was unfinished, and the driver found a way around it, but a few minutes later he braked again. On a slope where the Autopista curves into the city and becomes the lower end of the Avenida Sucre, a six-lane roadway with a center divider, it bisects one of the poorest neighborhoods in Caracas, and the second trap was there. A huge dump truck and several buses and cars had been parked in the street and abandoned. Another ragged throng carrying placards and clubs came howling down on the stalled motorcade. There were more rocks here, and several wild-eyed demonstrators flung themselves at Nixon’s limousine.
Here, too, a detour was found, and the motorcade raced on, tense and silent, until, in the very center of Caracas and almost at their destination, the way was blocked by the most elaborate barricade yet. Three banks of buses, trucks, and automobiles had been parked directly in the path of the motorcade. The chauffeur could not cross the center island because there the traffic was one-way, toward them, and it was hopelessly jammed anyhow. For a few seconds nothing happened. The silence was eerie. Then Agent Jack Sherwood said under his breath, “Here they come.”
Later estimates of this mob put it between two and five hundred. Running full tilt and spitting as they came, the demonstrators brandished axes, poles, and sections of pipe. Watching from the motorcade’s press car, Earl Mazo of the New York Herald Tribune thought the spectacle looked “like a scene from the French Revolution.” This was the ultimate in mobs, a killer mob. The saliva streaming down the windshield was so thick that the driver turned on the windshield wiper. The leaders rode pickaback, shouting instructions and leading the chant: “Muera Nixon! Muera Nixon!” Their obvious aim was to get the Vice President and drag him out, by opening the doors if possible, by smashing the windows if not. A large stone hit one window and stuck in the special glass, spraying splinters from it into García Lutín’s face. He cried, “It’s in my eye! My eye!” Another window, the one by the interpreter, was hit by a length of iron pipe. It did not give way entirely, but pieces of it struck the interpreter’s mouth. Sherwood, hit, began to bleed. Fragments struck Nixon in the face. Another piece of pipe, thrust through the opening, wobbled toward him.
The foreign minister, almost hysterical, sobbed, “This is terrible, terrible.” Nixon looked out the back window. As he remembered afterward, he was relieved to see that Pat was chatting away with Señora García Lutín, “as though the trouble was no worse than an afternoon traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway.” Her driver had showed presence of mind by pushing his front bumper against the front limousine, so that the mob couldn’t get at the Vice President through the rear window. The demonstrators, Nixon saw, were not interested in Pat’s car. Those were the only bright spots, however. The violence had continued here for twelve minutes, and now it seemed that it could have but one outcome.
Inside the limousine they heard one of the pickaback commanders outside shout an order. The car began to rock. To those who knew the ways of mobs—as all here did—this was the most frightening development yet. Rioters unable to get in an automobile rock it, trying to turn it over and set it afire, cremating the occupants. The window beside Nixon gave way. Sherwood and another agent, in the front seat, drew their guns.
***
At that moment, about 12:45 P.M. on May 13, 1958, Richard Nixon’s chances of surviving the afternoon were even slighter than he knew. Four blocks away at the Bolivar Tomb an American scouting party, which included a Secret Service agent, the embassy’s military attachés, and the Vice President’s administrative assistant, had arrived early to appraise the situation for the wreath-laying ceremony. They were aghast. Between six and eight thousand angry people were milling around. Here, as at the airport, police protection had disappeared. In the place of law officers, surly demonstrators were waiting at strategic corners on the Avenida Sucre. Their hostility toward Americans was obvious. The attachés being in uniform, they were kicked, s
pat upon, and manhandled, and a window in an embassy station wagon was broken. Thoroughly alarmed, the scouting party sent back three separate warning messages in code over a prearranged radio network centered at Caracas police headquarters.
At the third barricade the motorcade was disintegrating. Drivers behind the leading cars who could find a way clear were wheeling out of line and racing away down side streets, leaving the embattled American Vice President and his escorts to their fate. So chaotic had the situation become that to this day there is confusion over how Nixon escaped. According to his recollection, the driver of the truck carrying the correspondents who were covering the tour “somehow… edged his way into the oncoming lane of traffic, clearing a path for us like a football blocker leading a ball carrier. Our driver took us down the wrong side of the street with Mrs. Nixon’s car following behind us.” Mazo of the Herald Tribune was on that truck, however, and in his memory, just as the violence seemed to be reaching a murderous climax, “some Venezuelan soldiers showed up. They made a narrow opening in the traffic tie-up. Mrs. Nixon’s car followed close behind.”
The limousines at that time were still headed for the Panteón Plaza. In the last block before reaching it the Vice President told the chauffeur to swerve down an alley and take off in the opposite direction. The foreign minister cried, “We can’t leave our protection!” Nixon said, “If that’s the kind of protection we’re going to get, we’re better off going it alone.” Once they were safe on another main boulevard he ordered a stop so that he could talk to Pat and take stock. The lead car was a wreck; all its windows were broken and its fenders smashed, and everyone in it had been scratched or cut. At the same time, no one had been seriously injured. The ladies were unhurt and the way ahead was clear. They drove directly to the U.S. embassy residence, located on the top of a steep, easily defensible hill in Caracas’s exclusive Las Lomas neighborhood. Nixon took his first nap in twelve years of public life, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted; the rest of the men turned the hill into a fortress. The embassy’s marine detachment and the Secret Service agents were reinforced by sixty American military men who were in the country as instructors of the Venezuelan armed forces. All messages, packages, and letters coming to the embassy were screened by security men. Plans were secretly drawn to leave Caracas at 3 P.M. the following day, nine hours ahead of schedule, and at Maiquetía Airport other guards prepared to defend the vice-presidential aircraft against possible attack.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, orders had been cut for a fantastic rescue mission. Lacking information about the Nixon party and warned to expect the worst, President Eisenhower had dispatched to Venezuela six destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, and an aircraft carrier equipped to land marines by helicopter. A thousand marines and paratroopers were suiting up at Guantánamo Bay and on Puerto Rico, and Air Force fighters and bombers had, been alerted to stand by. Nixon himself knew nothing of this. Dulles had cabled him the details, but this message, like the others that day, never reached its destination. The Nixons were dining alone in the privacy of their room at the embassy when the ambassador interrupted them. Word of the sensational new development had just reached him via a news report. The Pentagon had announced it at 6:05 P.M., explaining in a communiqué that “The movement is being undertaken so these troops will be in a position to cooperate with the Venezuelan government if assistance is requested.”
This was an unexpected propaganda gift to the Venezuelan extremists responsible for the mobs. They had been in disgrace, but now they were almost forgotten as all Latin America protested the armada, which awakened in them the worst fears of North American imperialism. Nixon and the ambassador quickly issued a joint statement explaining that everyone was safe and there was no need for outside help. Next morning, when communications had been restored, the President was able to telephone the Vice President, who reassured him.
At Washington National Airport fifteen thousand people cheered Nixon as he came down the ramp. Eisenhower was there, accompanied by his entire cabinet. Nixon spoke briefly, saying that the best part of going away was coming home and that most of the people he had seen in his South American travels had been friendly.
Lima and Caracas had tested the Vice President and tempered him, but the effect of the incident on Nixon’s popularity was as brief as it was immense. In June 1958, a month later, the Gallup poll showed him leading Adlai Stevenson for the first time and running a dead heat with Kennedy. It was the high point of his popularity in the 1950s. By the end of autumn it would be a memory. The Republicans were in trouble, and as their ranking politician he was, too.
***
Society knows few greater satisfactions than the discovery of a puritan caught practicing what he has preached against, and rarely does it happen so startingly as in the month after Richard Nixon’s return from Venezuela. The scandal was accompanied by a symbol as memorable as any in the influence-peddling 1940s. For 1958 not only produced the hula hoop, the big TV quiz shows, and Alec Guinness in neighborhood theaters showing the Japs how to build that bridge over the River Kwai; it was also the year of the vicuna coat. Before that summer possibly one American in ten thousand could have told you that the vicuna is a small fleet-footed hoofed mammal found in the Andes from Ecuador to Bolivia and much hunted for the wool of its fine lustrous undercoat, which is woven into fine cloth. By July 4 every taxpayer knew that a vicuna topcoat was to men what mink was to women—warm, handsome, stylish, and a status symbol. The taxpayer knew, if for no other reason, because every Democrat running for office was telling the vicuna story.
It is a curious fact that no one ever cleared up the question of how much vicuna wool there was in the vicuna coat, although that was one reason the government had brought the manufacturer, Bernard Goldfine, to book; he had been putting a “90% wool, 10% vicuña” label on cloth that actually contained some nylon. This and all other aspects of the story were eclipsed by testimony that the White House had intervened in Goldfine’s behalf and that he, in appreciation, had seen to it that one of his top-quality, five-hundred-dollar coats hung in the closet of the assistant to the President of the United States, the former governor of New Hampshire, Sherman Adams. Other expressions of Goldfine’s gratitude had included the gift to Adams of a $2,400 Oriental rug from Macy’s and picking up the tab on twenty-one occasions between 1955 and May 1958 when members of the Adams family had stayed at Boston’s elegant Sheraton Plaza Hotel, running up bills totaling $3,096.56. He had also paid for Adams’s stays at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. Goldfine had then claimed all of these expensive favors as business expenses on his tax returns.
They were deductible, under Internal Revenue regulations, provided some “ordinary and necessary” benefit or advantage had flowed to Goldfine businesses from the expenditure. It had, and he could prove it. The two men were very close. Subpoenaed telephone records were to reveal that over a six-month period Goldfine had placed 43 long distance calls to Adams, about one every four days. Adams had made countless others to the textile manufacturer and in his behalf. On December 30, 1953, the President’s chief of staff had called Federal Trade Commission chairman Edward F. Howrey—who owed his appointment to Adams—to ask the source for the complaint against Goldfine for mislabeling textiles. On April 14, 1955, when the manufacturer was again under investigation for the same charge, Adams used his influence to get Goldfine an appointment with Howrey. During it, Goldfine wielded the name of his friend in a heavy-handed manner. “Please get me Sherman Adams on the line,” he ordered a secretary in a voice loud enough to be heard in the next office. “Sherm, I’m over here at the FTC,” he said on the phone. “I was well treated over here.”
The following year Adams had asked Gerald Morgan, the White House special counsel, to ask Security and Exchange lawyers for confidential information about an SEC investigation of Goldfine’s East Boston Company—a violation of the commission’s rules. Later John Fox, publisher of the Boston Post, was an especially damaging witness. He testified that Gol
dfine regarded his friendship with the President’s assistant as a license to make deals. “He told me,” Fox said in one of his less plausible moments, “that as long as he had Sherman Adams in his pocket he could do it.” Fox further testified, “I asked Mr. Goldfine just what his trouble… was and he told me they had accused him of mislabeling.” Later, “as a matter of idle curiosity,” Fox asked if Adams had taken care of the FTC matter, and Goldfine “told me that he had.”
On that rare afternoon in June when the first choice Adams-Goldfine revelations were entered into the record of the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, the presidential aide was delivering a baccalaureate address to the Holderness School for boys in New Hampshire on “the questions the Bible tells us shall be asked on Judgment Day.” Adams had long been interested in what was going to happen to sinners on that Day. Democrats knew him as the stern moralist who had decried minks, freezers, and influence peddling during Truman’s tenure, calling that administration an “Augean stables” in a memorable January 1952 speech and promising that Eisenhower would end such corruption. “Here is the man to do it,” he had said. “The kind of people with whom he has surrounded himself is answer enough for that.”
Conservative Republicans also resented Adams. They remembered his accusations that Taft was stealing GOP delegate votes in Texas. “Thou shalt not steal,” he had cried; wagging a finger at them. To them he was the man who had delivered a ruthless judgment against Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott because he had solicited business for his efficiency-engineering firm on official Air Force stationery. One of the bitterest ironies of the Goldfine disclosures was that White House secretaries, one of whom worked within seventy-five feet of President Eisenhower’s desk, had accepted cash gifts from the textile manufacturer ranging from $35 to $150. Until now that would have been enough to bring instant dismissal from Eisenhower’s chief of staff, who had warned them to be on the lookout for improper requests for influence. Now they could not even be reprimanded. In the West Wing of the White House members of the President’s staff moved on tiptoe and spoke in whispers, as though someone in the First Family were gravely ill.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 125
