The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  As the fall campaign began, running mate Nixon quickly embraced the traditional role as attack dog, referring to the Democratic presidential nominee, Stevenson, as “sidesaddle Adlai,” who “like all sidesaddle riders, his feet hang well out to the left.”15 Soon, however, he was to take center stage with the disclosure of and intense news-media focus on that little fund from California helpmates. When a panelist on Meet the Press in mid-September asked Nixon about it, he referred the questioner to the Californian handling the fund.

  By this time, word of the slush fund had been trumpeted by the then-liberal New York Post under the headline “SECRET NIXON FUND!” Based on a report that some of the money went to hire the Nixons a maid, the subhead read, “Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far beyond His Salary.”16 Back in California the Nixon campaign train was now wending its way through the Central Valley and just pulling out of the small town of Marysville when a voice called out to the candidate, “Tell ’em about the $16,000!”—the amount reported in some of the newspaper accounts.17 Nixon, hearing it, ordered the train halted and made a full-throated defense of the fund on the grounds that his use of it actually saved taxpayers’ money.

  Meanwhile, the Democratic National Chairman, Stephen Mitchell, called on Eisenhower to demand Nixon’s resignation from the ticket. The general, fighting on a battlefield unfamiliar to him, expressed to reporters on his train his confidence that Nixon was an honest man, but added, “Of what avail is it to carry on this crusade against this business of what has been going on in Washington if we ourselves aren’t clean as a hound’s tooth?”18

  Under pressure from both Dewey and Eisenhower to tell his side of the story, Nixon agreed, and the result was the famous “Checkers speech,” which ultimately prevented the expulsion of young Julie’s spaniel and kept her father on the 1952 Republican ticket. With wife Pat sitting just to his side, Nixon proceeded to lay out his personal financial history, mixing facts and figures with a heavy dose of sentimentality that included his disclosure: “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.”19 Nixon called on viewers to write to the Republican National Committee—notably, not to Eisenhower—and say whether they thought he should stay on the ticket or resign.20 Soon after, a telegram finally arrived from Eisenhower urging him to meet the presidential candidate’s entourage in Wheeling, West Virginia, for a dramatic, heavily photographed reunion. Ike read a wire from the party national chairman, Arthur Summerfield, reporting overwhelming support for keeping Nixon on the ticket. The Eisenhower-Nixon team would remain intact.

  With his place on the Republican ticket assured, Nixon resumed his campaign with a vengeance. He labeled Stevenson “Mr. Truman’s stooge” and “a graduate of Dean Acheson’s spineless school of diplomacy which cost the free world six million former allies in the past seven years of Trumanism.” He reminded voters of his own role in the Hiss case whenever possible, characterizing Stevenson’s defense of the former State Department official as “going down the line for the arch traitor of our generation.” Nixon topped even himself by blasting Stevenson as having “a Ph.D. degree from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.”21 Stevenson responded by accusing Nixon of practicing “McCarthyism in a white collar.”22 On the positive side, all the Republicans needed was their indisputable slogan: “I Like Ike.” By Election Night, the results were predictable: an Eisenhower-Nixon landslide.

  Once in office, Eisenhower made Nixon chairman of a committee overseeing government contracts, invited him to sit with the cabinet, and asked him to intervene with his friend Joe McCarthy to try to moderate his behavior. In part to get Nixon away from Red-hunting and in part to educate him in foreign policy, Eisenhower sent him on a seventy-day tour of Asia, during which he visited nineteen countries for substantive talks with national leaders.

  In the second year, however, with important congressional elections approaching, Eisenhower put Nixon back on the campaign trail as the administration’s designated hitter. McCarthy made clear, with polls indicating a spurt in his popularity, that he had no intention of keeping his promise to Nixon to cool down his politically advantageous hunt for communist subversion. In time, however, when McCarthy tried to subpoena a key White House aide and Eisenhower asserted executive privilege against it, the Senate voted to “condemn” its surly member, sending him into political oblivion. Two years later, he died of alcoholism. Not until the second half of October 1954 did Eisenhower stir himself to hit the campaign trail for the midterm congressional elections, and for all of Nixon’s energies, the Republicans lost seventeen House seats, two in the Senate, and control of both chambers.

  In 1955, Eisenhower sent Nixon on a second foreign trip, to Central America and the Caribbean, and when Eisenhower himself went to Geneva for a summit on arms control, he asked Nixon to preside over a cabinet meeting and another with the legislative leaders. Meanwhile, Ike mused about possible successors if he didn’t seek reelection, and Nixon was among four men on the list, although behind the secretary of the navy and former Texas banker Robert B. Anderson. But Eisenhower was in apparent good health and on the top of his game.

  On the afternoon of September 24, 1955, Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, called Nixon from Denver, where the president had been vacationing, telling him, “The President has had a coronary.”23 Hagerty passed on Ike’s orders that Nixon was to continue to run cabinet and National Security Council meetings in his absence, to demonstrate the government was functioning without letup. In the cabinet room, Nixon purposely took his regular chair, not the president’s, and gave the Oval Office a wide berth, operating out of his office as president of the Senate on Capitol Hill. As for the conduct of foreign policy, Eisenhower pointedly informed Nixon that Secretary of State Dulles was to remain in charge.24

  The Eisenhower men did not want to encourage any talk other than that their leader would make a full recovery and run again. When he rebounded and finally agreed to seek a second term, it became known he was considering a new running mate for 1956, with the focus again on Bob Anderson of Texas. The Eisenhower speechwriter Emmet Hughes wrote that the president had told him of Nixon, “I’ve watched Dick a long time and he just hasn’t grown. So I just haven’t honestly been able to believe that he is presidential timber.”25

  In December, Eisenhower had a three-hour conversation with Hagerty about possible successors, throwing out such names as Tom Dewey, Earl Warren, and the president’s brother Milton. Ike finally asked his press secretary, “What about Nixon?” Hagerty told him he thought he was fine as his running mate but not as a president. So on the day after Christmas, the president called Nixon in and dropped a political bomb on him. In deciding whether to seek a second term and taking note of his recent heart attack, he said he had hoped that after four years the Republican Party would be strong enough to elect someone else. But it hadn’t happened and that Nixon’s own popularity had not climbed “as high as he had hoped it would.” Therefore, he said, it might be better for Nixon to get off the ticket for 1956 and accept a Cabinet post that would boost his standing in the country.26 Nixon was dumbstruck.

  Eisenhower told him he could have any job except secretary of state or attorney general, which were secure for Dulles and Brownell. What about secretary of defense? Nixon said he would agree only if Ike thought his administration would be better served if Nixon got off the ticket. But obviously he was of no mind to cut his own political throat. After New Year’s, Eisenhower brought up the subject several other times, and when Nixon responded the same way each time, Ike would patronizingly say only, “I think we’ve got to do what’s best for you.”27

  The matter dragged on until the end of February, when Eisenhower finally announced he would run again, with his doctors’ blessing. He ducked on whether Nixon would be his running mate. At his next weekly news conference, he dodged again, saying, “I told him he would have to chart his own course and tel
l me what he would like to do.”28 The awkward situation dragged on for another two months. Finally in late April, Nixon bit the bullet and told Ike he believed the best course for both of them was for him to be his running mate again, and Eisenhower, perhaps trapped by his own indecision, acceded.

  In early June, Nixon’s position of being “a heartbeat away from the presidency” raised some more temporary concern when Eisenhower suffered a sudden attack of ileitis, an intestinal affliction that required a two-hour surgical procedure. But the patient recovered rapidly, and Nixon replicated his role as a benign standby, which had won him praise during Ike’s coronary experience.

  Still, Nixon was not in the clear. Harold Stassen, now an Eisenhower aide on arms control, suddenly launched a stop-Nixon effort. But the president cut it off, and Eisenhower and Nixon were easily renominated. Ike gave Nixon his marching orders to defend the administration against the renominated Stevenson’s attacks but with the caution that it wasn’t necessary to attack him personally.

  When for the most part Nixon complied, the traveling press corps began writing about a “New Nixon.” When Stevenson derided him as “a man of many masks” who “has put away his switchblade and now assumes the aspect of an Eagle Scout,” Nixon simply turned the other cheek,29 speaking of the economic prosperity and the booming stock market of the first Eisenhower years, the peace achieved in Korea, and the lull in the Cold War.

  In the last week of the campaign, when the British, French, and Israelis attacked Egypt and the Soviet Union suppressed a people’s uprising in Hungary, support for Eisenhower as a military hero surged. The most Stevenson was able to make out of the situation was to raise the specter of a Nixon presidency if Eisenhower were reelected. “Distasteful as this matter is,” he said in allusion to Eisenhower’s health and age, “I must say that every piece of scientific evidence we have, every lesson of history and experience, indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard M. Nixon would probably be president of this country within the next four years.”30 But voters again were focused on and enamored of Eisenhower, not Nixon, and the Republican ticket won a second landslide victory, though the Democrats retained control of Congress by a slightly larger margin.

  The second Eisenhower-Nixon term began quietly, though jolted by the sudden emergence of a space race with the Soviet Union. The firing of the first man-made satellite, called Sputnik, challenged the assumed American technological superiority. Nine months into the term, however, presidential succession intruded again. Nixon was summoned to the White House and informed that Eisenhower had suffered a stroke and was “confused and disoriented.” Aide Sherman Adams told him, “You may be president in twenty-four hours.” But the next morning Nixon and Adams called on Eisenhower at his bedside and found him stable and alert. Nixon held his first press conference at the White House, saying, “I would like to scotch once and for all any reports that the President is in a condition that would make it necessary for him to consider resigning.”31

  The matter of succession now had Ike’s attention. He wrote a draft letter of resignation and gave copies to Nixon, Dulles, and Rogers, saying that if he were disabled and aware of it, he would simply direct Nixon to take over. If he were too disabled, Nixon would make the determination and “serve as Acting President until the disability had ended.” The president wrote he hoped Nixon would consult with Adams, Dulles, and his doctors but that Nixon would be “the individual explicitly and exclusively responsible,” then added, “I will be the one to determine if and when it is proper for me to resume the full exercise of the powers and duties of the office.”32

  In all it was a remarkable assignment of power to Nixon. Eisenhower intended that the letter be secret, but when he told the press of its existence there was such a clamor that Hagerty finally released pertinent segments. The letter raised more questions about legality and implementation than it answered. Fortunately the president recovered without the plan having to be followed.

  Meanwhile, Nixon agreed to undertake an eighteen-day tour of South America. In late April 1958, his traveling party was well received in the first stops, until Caracas, Venezuela. Riding in a closed limousine, the Nixons were pelted with rocks and other objects, forcing the motorcade to stop. The mob rocked Nixon’s limo, forcing them to take refuge in the American Embassy. There, apologetic Venezuelan government officials called on a cool and controlled American vice president, who made the most politically of the imbroglio.

  The trip alerted the administration to the need for a more vigorous diplomacy in South America and was a major boost for Nixon. The Gallup Poll in June showed him leading Stevenson as a potential foe in 1960 and running close to Senator John F. Kennedy. On the eve of the 1958 congressional elections, Dewey for one advised Nixon to stay out of them: “Your conduct in South America finally has taken the blinders from eyes of many Democrats.… You are a national asset that should not be wasted.” But when Eisenhower told him, “I would give a year of my salary if we could win either the House or the Senate,”33 Nixon had no choice. He campaigned in twenty-five states, covering twenty-five thousand miles, yet the Republicans lost forty-eight seats in the House and twelve in the Senate.

  In 1959, Eisenhower’s brother Milton dreamed up an idea that the president embraced as a means to lighten his workload—the creation of two assistant presidents, one in charge of foreign policy and the other of domestic affairs. But Nixon and Dulles both saw it as a means of putting another layer between the president and the cabinet, and Nixon particularly viewed such a development as a diminution of his influence. The idea was dropped.

  In July, Nixon went to Moscow to open an exhibition on American life as part of a cultural exchange program and to meet with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Part of the Nixon visit was to be shown on Russian television. At an exhibition including a model American home, the two men heatedly argued the comparative merits of their countries’ technological and economic advances, in what came to be known as “the kitchen debate.” Nixon was captured on camera pointing his finger aggressively at Khrushchev.34 The Nixons spent five more days touring the Soviet Union and returned to a hearty Washington reception and wave of public approval.

  It was now the fall of 1959, approaching the last year of Eisenhower’s final term under the Twenty-Second Amendment’s two-term limit, and Eisenhower was still silent on his choice for a successor. The only credible potential challenger to Nixon was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, elected by a landslide the previous November. But he turned down entreaties of New Hampshire Republicans to challenge Nixon in their first-in-the-nation presidential primary, which Nixon won easily. With Rockefeller in the wings, Nixon flew to New York for a late-night dinner at which he made a direct pitch to Rocky to run with him. The governor repeated that he had no interest in being vice president, later arguing that he was not built “to be standby equipment.” After more than six hours of negotiation over various convention platform planks, they signed what came to be known as the “Compact of Fifth Avenue.” Conservative Republicans, distressed that Nixon had made a secret pilgrimage to the liberal New York governor, called it “surrender.” But Nixon insisted he had won out by getting the governor to drop certain language critical of Eisenhower’s defense policy. Most important politically, the trip erased the last potential barrier to Nixon’s nomination.35

  The convention chose Nixon by acclamation, and, after meeting with a host of party leaders, he announced that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would be his running mate. Lodge was Eisenhower’s favorite for the nomination, but the president in all was not of much material help to Nixon. In an August news conference, when asked to give an example of a Nixon idea that he had adopted, Eisenhower replied, “If you give me a week I might think of one. I don’t remember.”36 Interestingly at the next presidential press conference, nobody asked.

  The highlight of the fall campaign against the Democratic team of Kennedy and Johnson was a series of four nationally televised
debates between the presidential nominees. Eisenhower had advised Nixon not to debate Kennedy, but his vice president was extremely confident of his debating skills, especially after his encounter with Khrushchev, so he ignored the counsel.37 The first debate was on foreign policy, and on the basis of his globe-trotting experience, Nixon was generally seen to have an advantage going in. But Kennedy’s strong self-confidence and grasp of the issues, coupled with a visibly weary and deferential performance by Nixon, turned the tables. Nixon had unwisely pledged to visit all fifty states, and the ordeal had left him ragged before the television cameras compared with the alert, fresh, and handsome Kennedy. Television viewers polled afterward rated Kennedy the winner, even though many radio listeners thought Nixon had the better answers.

  The remaining three televised debates were anti-climactic, now that Kennedy had demonstrated that his youth, at forty-three, and his lack of comparable experience were not handicaps. In a nail-biting Election Night, Nixon went down to defeat by three-tenths of 1 percent of the vote—49.9 for Kennedy, 49.6 for Nixon—but by 303–219 in the electoral college. As the most visible of all vice presidents up to that time, Nixon licked his wounds and two years later ran for governor of California but lost again, leading him to tell reporters memorably in Los Angeles, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”38

  It was, of course, not his last. Six years later he ran for the presidency again and was elected in 1968 and reelected in 1972, until brought down by the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in 1972 and the subsequent White House cover-up. These events led to his resignation on August 8, 1974, after which Nixon went into virtual exile in California. Thereafter, however, he wrote several books on public policy and a long memoir that kept his ideas before the country, even as he remained out of party and public affairs until his death on April 22, 1994.