The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In the most dramatic whistle-stop presidential campaign up to this time, Truman rode the rails across the nation attacking the Republican “donothing Congress.” Barkley saw him off from Union Station with “Mow ’em down!” to which Truman replied, “I’ll mow ’em down, Alben, and I’ll give ’em hell!” which became his campaign battle cry.27 At the same time, Barkley tirelessly introduced the prop-stop campaign, flying in a chartered DC-3 nicknamed The Bluegrass across thirty-six states in six weeks in support of the winning ticket in November.

  As vice president, Barkley undertook presiding over the Senate he had for so long and so recently ruled as the Democratic leader. He had less influence in its deliberations than he had had as its majority leader, but his experience in the Senate made him a valuable aide to Truman, through his long personal friendships and associations. He attended Democratic committee meetings, sat in on Truman cabinet sessions, and was the first vice president to be made a member of the National Security Council under the 1947 act creating it.

  During Barkley’s vice presidency, however, the Democratic majority had shrunk to only two seats, and his parliamentary rulings from the chair were sometimes challenged successfully. In 1949, when he ruled against a point of order by the segregationist Democratic senator Richard B. Russell in a civil rights debate, he was overridden by the Senate. But other senators lauded him for taking a principled stand to end the southern filibuster.28

  In the summer of 1949, Barkley, a widower, suddenly electrified and entertained social Washington with a whirlwind courtship, after which he married a widow, Jane Rucker Hadley of St. Louis, thirty-four years his junior. They had met at a dinner party given by her friends Clark Clifford, the Truman counsel, and his wife, Marny. They became favored guests on the capital social circuit.

  In 1950, Barkley was making a speech in Illinois when he was notified of the attempted assassination of Truman by Puerto Rican nationalists while he stayed temporarily at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. As a consequence, Truman ordered Secret Service protection for the vice president, and five agents were assigned. Barkley balked and got the squad reduced to two, playing games with them, once eluding their shadow by hopping on a Washington bus just to take a ride.29

  During the Korean War, Truman left the congressional campaigning of 1950 to Barkley, and although the Democrats suffered some losses, they retained control of both the House and Senate. In 1952, before Truman said whether he would seek another term, which was possible under an exemption in the Twenty-Second Amendment, Barkley actively pondered a presidential candidacy of his own. Truman expressed his affection for “Old Barkley” but noted that at seventy-four his age was a factor against him.

  At the time, however, Truman apparently had two other men in mind for the Democratic presidential nomination. One was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Great Crusade in Europe, which had vanquished Nazi Germany. The other was a rising political star, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson II of Illinois, grandson of a previous vice president under Grover Cleveland and, as it happened, a distant cousin of Barkley. Eisenhower, courted by both major parties, finally decided to run for the presidency as a Republican. Stevenson, while having announced he would run for reelection as governor, was called to the White House by Truman to consider seeking it in the event that Truman decided not to run for another term. Afterward, Stevenson called Barkley, told the vice president of his visit to Truman, and sought his advice. Barkley quickly informed him that he was thinking of running for the presidency himself.

  In late March of the presidential election year, Truman announced he would not run. The other leading Democrat was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Barkley didn’t believe Kefauver could win and finally decided to announce that while he would not actively seek the nomination, he would accept it. About a week before the opening of the convention, Barkley got a call in Paducah to attend a “must” conference in Washington. The party chairman Frank McKinney opened the session, according to Barkley, by telling him, directly in the president’s presence, that Truman had decided to back him for the nomination. McKinney said the president would not make a public statement to that effect but would urge his Missouri delegation to support Barkley. At this point, Barkley wrote later, he asked, “What about Governor Stevenson?” He was told that it was certain he would not run.

  In the end, Barkley met at the convention with sixteen top labor leaders, asking their support. They all turned him down, saying they still liked and admired him, but he was now too old for the job. That afternoon, he called Truman and told him he was withdrawing from the race.30

  In the ensuing campaign Barkley backed the nomination of his distant cousin Stevenson and his running mate, Senator John J. Sparkman of Alabama, in their futile effort to beat the national hero Eisenhower and his ticket mate, Senator Richard M. Nixon of California. After the inauguration of the Republicans, the Barkleys attended a reception at the home of the former secretary of state Dean Acheson. The gathering of the defeated Democrats occasioned Barkley to recall the story of the French husband whose wife had died and her paramour cried broken-heartedly at her funeral, at which the husband consoled, “Don’t take it so hard, my friend. I shall marry again.”31

  Two years after retiring to Kentucky at age seventy-six, Barkley won back his old Senate seat from the incumbent Republican. His victory contributed to a one-seat Democratic majority that made Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas the majority leader. On April 30, 1956, Barkley delivered another keynote address with his customary gusto, this time to a mock convention at Washington and Lee University. He ended by saying that after all his years in the Senate, he had become a freshman again and was “glad to sit on the back row,” adding, “for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty.” Thereupon, as the student audience heartily applauded, Alben W. Barkley collapsed on the spot and died of a massive heart attack at age seventy-nine.32

  As “the Veep,” he may have been the most publicly beloved of all the men to serve in the office, but few would argue he was very influential. Barkley’s advanced age and inexperience in foreign policy left questions concerning the wisdom of Truman’s selection in terms of potential presidential succession, barely three years after he himself had experienced having “the moon, the stars, and all the planets” dropped on him.

  RICHARD M. NIXON

  OF CALIFORNIA

  Seldom was the selection of a vice presidential nominee less relevant to the outcome of an election than was that of the Republican Richard Milhous Nixon in 1952. The huge popularity of the party’s presidential nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, leader of the Great Crusade against Nazi Germany during 1941–45, assured a landslide victory for the Eisenhower-Nixon team.

  In that 1952 election, as a junior senator from California, Nixon rode Eisenhower’s coattails into national prominence. What little drama there was in the campaign came from a controversy surrounding Nixon’s financial support. He deftly extricated himself and the GOP ticket from it with a television performance for which long afterward he has been remembered.

  This controversy, the only perceived threat to Eisenhower’s election, involved the disclosure of a “secret Nixon fund” raised by wealthy Californians to cover the travels of Eisenhower’s running mate, seized upon by the Democrats to cast the vice presidential nominee as a bought candidate. Nixon confronted the allegations by going on national television with a plea of middle-class frugality, capped by his defense of keeping his daughter Julie’s dog, Checkers, the gift of a political contributor. Nixon urged viewers to call or write the Republication National Committee to say whether he should withdraw from the ticket, and predictably the vote was overwhelmingly in his favor, effectively taking the decision on his fate from Eisenhower’s hand.

  The maneuver was in keeping with Nixon’s skill in political self-preservation up to that time and long thereafter, in the vice presidency and in his public career that followed. Only the c
rimes of the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee in 1972, whose cover-up was engineered by Nixon and exposed in a tenacious Senate committee investigation, dramatically drove him into political exile.

  Richard Nixon was born in the small Southern California town of Yorba Linda, in suburban Los Angeles, on the morning of January 9, 1913, the second son of Frank and Hannah Milhous Nixon. The father was a onetime trolley driver and fruit ranch hand, and the mother a devout Quaker and graduate of nearby Whittier College. They lived in a small clapboard bungalow built by Frank the year before Nixon’s birth, and a year later a third son, Francis Donald, was born, joining Richard and Harold, then five years old.

  The Milhous clan was of German-Irish Quaker stock who settled in the William Penn colony in eastern Pennsylvania in 1729, migrated to Indiana in 1854, and moved to Southern California in the late 1880s. The Nixon side, of English, Scottish, and Irish roots, first settled in northern Delaware in 1731 and fought in the Revolutionary War. Frank Nixon was born in Ohio in 1878 and became a motorman in Los Angeles in 1907.1 After a failed effort to raise lemon trees, Frank abandoned the orchard in 1919, as well as subsequent hopes to find oil on the land. The father took the setbacks hard. He was a stern disciplinarian with his sons, but Richard earned a reputation as an intelligent, studious, and solitary young man.2 With his mother’s encouragement, he took piano lessons, maintained excellent grades in school, and helped at the grocery the family ran for a time. He had his first involvement in politics at Whittier High School, where he won an oratorical contest as part of a debating team. Later when he attended the local Whittier College, he was on the football team but played little as a third-stringer. He was, however, elected student president in his senior year, graduated second in his class, and went on to Duke Law School on a scholarship. He passed the California bar in 1937 and joined a Whittier law firm. In the meantime he had met Thelma Ryan, called Patricia or Pat, a graduate of the University of Southern California, a fellow amateur among the Whittier Community Players, and a new teacher at Whittier Union High School. In 1940 they married.3

  By the time war came with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nixon had already been recruited through a Duke faculty member to join the Office of Price Administration in Washington. But in mid-August 1942 he quit that position, enlisted in the navy, and handled transportation duties in the South Pacific, in Bougainville and on Green Island in New Guinea. He returned to San Diego in 1944 and then finished out his enlistment at a naval facility in Maryland. In September 1945 some Whittier Republican businessmen summoned him from Maryland to California to consider running for Congress against the five-term incumbent Democrat, Jerry Voorhis. Nixon showed up wearing his naval uniform and was chosen to take on the liberal Voorhis in 1946. In a debate, Nixon attacked Voorhis as the tool of a labor political action committee that Nixon described as communist-infiltrated—establishing a pattern of negative campaigning that would mark much of his career.

  There actually were two such labor groups, the one supporting Voorhis not a union offshoot and not targeted by critics for communist ties. Nixon’s campaign manager, Murray Chotiner, intentionally tied Voorhis to the suspected communist front, and in the debate Nixon confronted Voorhis with a mimeographed copy of that labor group’s endorsement of the Democratic candidate. On Election Night, Nixon won 57 percent of the vote, part of a nationwide Republican sweep of Congress.4

  Sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives in January 1947, Nixon was placed on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Amid the growing public fears of communism, which were raised by the right wing of the GOP, the committee was made to order for Nixon, fresh from his exploitation of the “Red Scare” in the campaign against Voorhis. He gained central stage in the case of the State Department official Alger Hiss, who was brought before the committee and accused of past communist affiliations by a Time magazine editor and former member of the Communist Party, Whittaker Chambers. Before a subcommittee chaired by Nixon, Hiss first denied having ever met Chambers but then acknowledged he had met him by another name. Chambers accompanied HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he extracted from a hollowed-out pumpkin some undeveloped films of State Department documents and other material—the soon-famous Pumpkin Papers. The sensational story kept Nixon in the headlines into early 1950, when Hiss was indicted and finally convicted of perjury. With the statute of limitations having run out on any possible espionage charges, Hiss served forty-four months of a five-year jail sentence.5

  After only four years in the House, Nixon decided to run for the Senate seat against the three-term Democratic congresswoman and glamorous actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, wife of the Broadway and Hollywood star Melvyn Douglas. She was an aggressive critic of HUAC and of Nixon’s methods, and her staunchly liberal views made her an obvious target for Nixon’s aggressive tactics. Her attacks on HUAC’s Red-baiting and on a loyalty oath that California required from its state university faculty cemented her nickname as “the pink lady,” which the Nixon campaign adopted. The Nixon headquarters then widely circulated what came to be known as “the Pink Sheet,” a flyer printed on pink paper detailing the most prominent votes she shared with the left-wing New Yorker Vito Marcantonio, while boasting that Nixon had “voted exactly opposite to the Douglas-Marcantonio Axis!”6 Douglas took to referring to Nixon as “Tricky Dick,” the label destined to stick to him the rest of his political career. Nixon insisted, “If there is a smear involved, let it be remembered that the record itself is doing the smearing.”7 But many years later in a memoir, Nixon’s longtime press adviser Herb Klein acknowledged, “The pink sheet was a smearing distortion.”8 Nonetheless, on Election Night, Nixon routed the actress-politician by nearly seven hundred thousand votes.

  Shortly after Nixon’s victory, his finance chairman for that campaign began soliciting prominent California supporters for a bank account to help pay for expenses in an active incumbency, just as had been done for Nixon when he was in the House. Known simply as “the fund,” its donors were mainly Southern California oil and manufacturing men who had been in on the ground floor of Nixon’s political career.9 He used the money for travel, mail, and other practical expenses, including Christmas cards to donors.

  Many of Nixon’s California enthusiasts reasoned that his next political step might well be the governorship, with the incumbent, Earl Warren, considered unlikely to seek a fourth term and instead to pursue a presidential bid in 1952. Nixon was committed to Warren, the state’s favorite son, but had his eye on another prospective presidential candidate, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon attended a secret meeting of Eisenhower supporters at which the former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen was urged to run for president as a stalking horse against the other leading prospect, Senator Robert A. Taft, to ease the path for Eisenhower if he could be persuaded to run as a Republican.10 Earl Warren’s own presidential hopes would ride on a Taft-Eisenhower deadlock at the Republican convention. Nixon repeated his endorsement of Warren while also urging Eisenhower to get into the race, saying, “He owes it to his party to state his views before the nominations are made.”11

  Tom Dewey, keeping Nixon secretly onboard, dangled the vice presidential nomination with Eisenhower under his nose. In late May at the Texas party convention, the Taft forces elected their slate to the Chicago convention, obliging the Ike supporters to send a competing delegation. The Eisenhower strategists raised an issue of “fair play” that would appeal to delegations with favorite-son candidates, like California, joining in.

  When Warren and the state delegation boarded the train from Sacramento to Chicago on July 3, Nixon was not aboard. He joined it in Denver and set out on what later was dubbed “the great train robbery” of separating the California delegation from its unwitting governor. For his own “guidance,” Nixon undertook a secret poll of California delegates’ preference for an alternative if Warren were to bow out. Warren was furious at the gambit and demanded that t
he poll results, indicating stronger support for Eisenhower than for Taft, not be published, and Nixon was so “ordered,” but inevitably they were leaked.

  With Nixon functioning as what Dewey later called a “fifth column” within the California delegation, Nixon declared the nomination “still wide open,” adding with feigned detachment that if either Taft or Eisenhower was nominated, the delegation would press for the state’s more conservative senior senator, William F. Knowland, for the vice presidency.12

  Having completed his undercover work aboard the train, Nixon slipped off at Cicero, outside Chicago, and was taken by car into the city. When the train pulled into Union Station, the waiting buses, which earlier had been decked out with banners reading “Warren for President,” now read “Eisenhower for President,” with the switch suspected as Murray Chotiner’s handiwork, adding to Warren’s agitation and anger at Nixon.13 The California delegation caucused on the proposed “fair play amendment,” which would prevent previously seated Taft delegates from voting on more than a hundred contested delegates. Nixon seized the microphone, arguing that the Taft delegates be excluded on the grounds that they had been illegally chosen. The fair play amendment easily carried. Many Californians thought they were helping Warren’s cause, and the Texas delegates for Eisenhower were seated.

  Later, the Dewey associate Herb Brownell asked Eisenhower whether he had a preference for his running mate. “I thought the convention had to do that,” he replied, apparently unaware he had any say in the matter.14 After briefly mentioning some other names, they agreed on Nixon. The next day, for all the maneuvering over the California delegation, it held firm for Warren on the first ballot, which ended with Eisenhower leading with 595 delegates compared with 500 for Taft. Then Minnesota, previously behind Stassen, switched to the general, and he was nominated. Henry Cabot Lodge walked over to the California delegation and informed Nixon that the vice presidential nomination was his, and he immediately accepted.