One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  Nixon believed that “it was ‘me against the world,’” said Robert Finch, who served him for many years as a campaign manager, Cabinet officer, and presidential counselor.

  The president, the pillar of national security, was undermined by his own political insecurity. Against all evidence that he would win an overwhelming reelection, he compulsively spied on his political opponents and sought secret cash contributions to shore up his campaign coffers. Against the law, he paid hush money to the crew of washed-up CIA and FBI agents arrested for the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. Against all logic, he wiretapped his loyal aides and compulsively tape-recorded his own complicity in the concomitant crimes, conspiracies, and cover-ups that destroyed him.

  What drove him to political suicide? That was one secret Nixon hoped he might take to the grave.

  * * *

  He is buried next to the tiny wooden house where he was raised in Yorba Linda, California, amid what once were citrus groves coaxed from the dry land roughly forty miles southeast of Los Angeles, enclosed on the grounds of his presidential memorial and library. He was born more than a century ago, in 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Fewer than three hundred souls then inhabited Yorba Linda, most barely scraping by on what little the land could provide. Today it is a well-to-do suburb with landscaped lawns; the median household income exceeds one hundred twenty thousand dollars. One thing is unchanged: a railroad line runs through the heart of town, and as a child, Richard Nixon heard a locomotive’s lonesome whistle, and he wondered if that train would carry him away and where it might take him.

  “He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go,” Nixon said, in a rare invocation of his childhood memories. “It seems like an impossible dream.”

  He and his four brothers were named after British kings by a pious mother and a hot-tempered father with a sixth-grade education who barely made a go of it as a greengrocer. “He had a lemon ranch,” Nixon remembered. “It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it.” Richard’s childhood was unhappy. Two of his siblings died young. He strove with quiet desperation to escape the depths of the Depression, to invent a new life outside the dusty and desolate confines of his youth.

  Twenty years old when President Franklin D. Roosevelt first took office in 1933, Nixon put himself through the local college in Whittier. He tried out for the football team, but was consigned to the bench as a water boy. He won a full scholarship to Duke University’s law school by dint of hard work and ambition, but no great opportunity awaited him after his 1937 graduation. He sought positions at prestigious New York law firms, but received no offers. He applied to be an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but received no reply. Only one man, a twenty-seven-year-old assistant law professor at Duke named Kenneth Rush, saw the potential in Nixon. Rush advised his student to go back to California and get into politics.*

  Nixon suffered another series of humiliations after returning home. He established a small law practice in Whittier, but writing wills and contracts bored him. His political aspirations were diminished. “The last thing my mother, a devout Quaker, wanted me to do was to go into the warfare of politics,” Nixon recounted. (She dreamed he would become a missionary in Central America.) He courted the woman he would marry one day, Thelma “Pat” Ryan, but that day was long in coming.

  She turned him down repeatedly when he asked for a first date; two years passed before his immediate attraction to her became mutual. They married in 1940 and their union lasted more than fifty years. Though she despised the darker side of politics, detested pressing the flesh on the campaign trail, and despaired at the pain her husband suffered in pursuit of power, she stayed with him in victory and defeat, stoic and steadfast in the solitary confinement of their marriage.

  Commissioned as a navy lieutenant after Pearl Harbor, Richard Nixon served as a supply officer in the South Pacific, but never saw a moment of combat. When the war ended in 1945, he had no great prospects. Seven years later, he was on the way to the White House as the running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s greatest military hero.

  * * *

  Nixon’s rise has few parallels in American politics. A member of a local Republican committee who knew Nixon from college urged him to run for Congress. Nixon challenged a popular Democratic incumbent in the November 1946 election. The contest coincided with the rising dawn of a great fear: that the Soviet Union would challenge Christian civilization in the United States, its spies and subversives burrowing into American institutions from college campuses to the chambers of the State Department and the corridors of the Pentagon.

  Nixon ran as one of the first cold warriors. He fiercely attacked his opponent as the tool of Communist-controlled labor unions. He won handily. So did Republicans across the country: the party took control of both the Senate and the House for the first time in two decades.

  By the time Nixon arrived in Washington, the war on communism was on in full. He sought and won membership on the newly revitalized House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon and the committee’s Republican staff would be supplied, in secret, with information from the FBI. That information, once Nixon grasped its significance, would soon propel him to power.

  On March 26, 1947, the committee’s members heard rare public testimony from the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who already had run the Bureau for twenty-three years. He called upon them to summon “the zeal, the fervor, the persistence, and the industry to learn about this menace of Red fascism,” and to beware “the liberal and the progressive who have been hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists.”

  Nixon took these words as his political credo. He and Hoover spoke one on one at the hearing’s conclusion. They had an instant and instinctive meeting of the minds. The director urged Nixon to be on the lookout for Communist infiltration of the American government. Heeding Hoover, Nixon soon rose to nationwide fame hunting traitors and spies. Thus began an alliance that would last a quarter century. Nixon became a leading figure in the Cold War’s culture of espionage and counterespionage, where bugging, break-ins, and wiretaps without warrants were weapons of political warfare. As president, Nixon would call Hoover “my closest friend in all of political life.”

  As the Cold War intensified and the Korean War erupted, Nixon won election to the U.S. Senate in 1950, catapulted upward by his relentless pursuit of Alger Hiss, a hunt for which Nixon received great acclaim and immense publicity. Hiss was a pillar of the Eastern Establishment, that congregation of well-raised, well-educated men who had ruled much of Washington for a generation; Nixon despised them by instinct. Hiss had been a standout at the State Department during World War II; he helped organize the Yalta Conference, where President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin met for the last time in the closing months of the war; he was a political architect of the blueprint for the United Nations.

  When Nixon began hunting him, Hiss was running the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The endowment’s chairman was John Foster Dulles, a Republican stalwart who would become President Eisenhower’s secretary of state and, in time, a confidant to Richard Nixon.

  The Hiss case was the first crisis by which Nixon defined his political life. The accusation that Alger Hiss had been a secret agent of the Soviet intelligence service seemed incredible. Nixon hunted him relentlessly, often ruthlessly, with the single-minded determination of a Hollywood homicide detective. He was convinced that the case involved “the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere.”

  Hiss faced one hostile witness, Whittaker Chambers (a Time magazine editor who had worked for the Soviet underground in the 1930s), and one deeply hidden shred of evidence that could condemn him as a spy. As a witness, in the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover, Chambers had three strikes against him: his past life as a Communist spy, his secret life as
a homosexual, and his occasional mistruths under oath. The evidence of Chambers’s espionage was too important a secret to reveal. And though Hiss had been mentioned under a code name in a Soviet intelligence communiqué decoded by the military intelligence service that evolved into today’s National Security Agency, the existence of that service and its work could not be disclosed in open court.

  Hiss never could be tried for espionage. So Nixon, in his own words, convicted him in the press. He set a perjury trap for Hiss. In sworn testimony, Nixon caught him in a series of seemingly evasive statements about the most obscure details of his relationship with Chambers. Then he used his allies among the corps of Washington reporters and his contacts in the FBI to smear Hiss in the newspapers. Hiss was indicted for perjury by a federal grand jury in December 1948 after denying under oath that he had given State Department documents to Chambers. The jury was hung. Hiss was convicted at a second trial in January 1950.

  The publicity was priceless for Nixon. And he was right about Hiss. Soviet intelligence records released sixty years later established that Hiss had worked with the Communist underground before World War II. Chambers had lied to the grand jury, too, but without penalty. No prosecutor would take the political heat of a perjury case against Nixon’s star witness.

  “The Hiss case brought me national fame,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “Two years after that, General Eisenhower introduced me as his running mate to the Republican National Convention as ‘a man who has a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence wherever it may be found, and the strength and persistence to get rid of it.’” By November 1952, still shy of forty, Nixon was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. Six years later he decided to seek the presidency himself.

  That was the sixth crisis.

  Nixon believed to his dying day that Senator John F. Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election from him. Nixon lost by 118,550 votes among 69 million cast. A shift of fewer than 14,000 votes in three crucial states could have given him a political victory in the Electoral College. In two of those states, Illinois and Texas—where powerful Democratic political machines were controlled by Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, and Kennedy’s running mate, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson—the Republicans claimed evidence of vote fraud.

  Nixon was convinced that Kennedy’s millions and political manipulations had provided the margin of victory. Nixon’s supporters urged him to mount a legal challenge to the election. But he decided, after agonizing, that “even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen at the ballot box” would do “incalculable and lasting damage throughout the country.”

  He vowed he would not be outdone again. But he would suffer one final humiliation when he returned to his home state of California to run for governor in 1962. He lost convincingly, by nearly three times the number of voters who had opposed him for the presidency.

  He had been up all night and he had been drinking when he conceded defeat. “For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of—a lot of fun—that you’ve had an opportunity to attack me,” he told the reporters gathered around him. “But as I leave you I want you to know—just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

  After that, Nixon’s daughter Tricia wrote, there was a terrible sadness in him, and the sadness went on for years.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “This is treason”

  POLITICS WAS war for Richard Nixon, a war in which all was fair. He came back from defeat and exile by his force of will and his taste for vengeance. He won the presidency in 1968 after an act of treachery unparalleled in American politics.

  Nixon left California after his “last press conference” and moved to New York, where he joined a Wall Street law firm. He brought the firm what remained of his political cachet and a handful of wealthy corporate clients who were longtime Nixon backers. The firm made him rich enough to afford a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park.

  He did not make a political move until after President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. In January 1964 a national poll by the Gallup organization showed Nixon resurrected as a potential presidential candidate. He appeared to lead the pack in his support among the party’s rank and file. This news was a ray of light, but not enough to dissipate the darkness. Nixon did not think the time was ripe, and he was right. Lyndon B. Johnson, elevated to the White House from the doghouse of his vice presidency when Kennedy died, won an overwhelming victory in 1964.

  Historians almost always describe Nixon’s time of political exile as a wandering in the wilderness. Nixon wasn’t wandering. He began ceaselessly cultivating future campaign supporters: corporate kingpins and foreign rulers, county chairmen and congressional leaders. He was blazing a trail back to power. “In those years in limbo,” said William Watts, a future Nixon National Security Council aide, “he traveled around the world, and lined up delegates. His time in the U.S. was spent going to every graduation, bar mitzvah, christening ceremony for every Republican potential delegate that he could. He lined up votes all over the country. It was an incredible job that he did. The other side was that he traveled all over the world and met everybody.”

  Marshall Green was the American ambassador in Indonesia when Nixon came to visit the nation’s military ruler in April 1967. “When Mr. Nixon and I called on President Suharto,” said Ambassador Green, who became Nixon’s State Department overseer for East Asia, “Mr. Nixon took down notes on key points they made and when we got back to my residence, we had a long conversation on events in Indonesia and the rest of East Asia, especially China. Our conversation was tape-recorded by Mr. Nixon, and when I asked him what he did with all these notes and tapes, he replied that he had them transcribed, filed and cross-filed for later reference.”

  By then it was becoming clear that Nixon would run once again for president, and that the key issue in the campaign would be the war in Vietnam.

  * * *

  The first months of 1968 were among the most brutal passages in American history. In February, more than 500 U.S. soldiers died in combat in a single week in Vietnam. In all, 16,592 Americans were killed and 87,388 wounded that year, along with 27,915 South Vietnamese killed and perhaps a quarter of a million military and civilian deaths among the enemy. On March 31, President Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection but would devote the rest of his presidency to seeking peace. Four days later, in April, came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The streets of Washington burned with rage. Seventy percent of the people living in the nation’s capital were black, and their anger turned to arson. Flying back from King’s funeral in Atlanta, the president’s entourage looked down upon a city in flames. In June the murder of Bobby Kennedy on the campaign trail left millions of Americans in despair. Nixon was not among them: Kennedy was the potential opponent he’d feared the most. Nixon swept all the 1968 Republican primaries and faced a fractured Democratic field after President Johnson announced he would leave the Oval Office. Vietnam had splintered the Democrats and poisoned Johnson’s presidency from the moment he sent troops into battle back in 1965. The war and its political fallout crushed his hopes of creating the “Great Society,” a nation where peace, justice, and equality might prevail.

  “I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” LBJ told his biographer. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.… All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams.… But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.” In his nightmares, he saw himself tied to the ground as a great mob ran at him screaming, “Traitor!”

&nb
sp; Now 549,500 Americans were in Vietnam, and hundreds were dying every week at the hands of the Communists. The dead haunted Lyndon Johnson to the depths of his soul. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching 30,000; three years of conflict had cost the United States roughly $330 billion in today’s dollars. Polls showed that popular opinion had turned against the war policies of the White House; a majority of Americans thought that going into combat had been a mistake.

  Yet Nixon rarely spoke of Vietnam as he secured the Republican nomination and as LBJ’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, emerged as his opponent, after a tumultuous Democratic convention featuring the Chicago police clubbing demonstrators. Nixon pledged a program for peace without saying what his plan might be. Then he flooded the airwaves with television ads depicting dead American soldiers. In public, he justified his evasions by saying he wanted to avoid interfering with peace negotiations begun in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam. In private, he aimed to make sure that there would be no peace deal without his foreknowledge.

  * * *

  On July 12, 1968, Nixon welcomed the ambassador of South Vietnam to his campaign suite at the Hotel Pierre in New York. In the elegant room that served as Nixon’s base of operations, he and Ambassador Bui Diem spent ninety minutes talking about the war and the peace talks. Alongside Nixon sat his law partner and campaign manager, John N. Mitchell, who in his accustomed style puffed his pipe, listened intently, and said little. Mitchell was accompanied by the most famous Asian anticommunist in the United States, Anna Chennault, the widow of the aviator who had created the CIA’s private air force, Air America, a linchpin for secret operations in the Vietnam War. Madame Chennault, born Chen Xiangmei, was an influential Washington lobbyist who cultivated an air of intrigue with a hint of danger; she was known as the Dragon Lady.