The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  At the end of his tour, Nixon spoke to the Soviet people on nationwide television. The first draft of his speech was belligerent, and clearly for American consumption. The U.S. ambassador urged him to tone it down. “You are the first American Vice President to address the Soviet people. You’ve got to make sure you are not the last,” he said. Nixon was “upset, terribly nervous and high-strung” from the situation, and according to Milton Eisenhower, he drank six martinis before dinner. Nixon solicited opinions on his speech, and then, Eisenhower noted, he used “vulgar swear words and everything else in this mixed company.” Altogether, the President’s brother thought Nixon “a strange character.”31

  The Vice President, however, never doubted his success. The media widely reported the Kitchen Debate, portraying Nixon as the man who “had stood up to Khrushchev.” Nixon had in one sense elevated his California style to the international arena, and the supposedly hostile media had credited him with a triumph. Some, however, saw the trip as confirming that Nixon could never successfully negotiate with the Soviets. The net result—as was often the case for Nixon—was a grab bag of pluses and minuses.

  The succession was Richard Nixon’s. As the Eisenhower presidency wound down, Nixon emerged as the only serious contender for the Republican nomination. That was the easy part.

  The contest for the presidency consisted of two campaigns. The first involved Nixon’s long, painful pursuit of Dwight Eisenhower’s blessing. The second was against his opponent, John F. Kennedy, a onetime friendly rival, but now a formidable obstacle. Nixon’s problems with Eisenhower were psychologically simple and classic. Developing a working relationship of mutual respect could not come easily, given the age difference between the two men and Eisenhower’s accomplishments and prestige. Kennedy was another matter altogether. Nixon was only a few years older than Kennedy; they had entered public life together in 1946. Politically, they were peers. But Kennedy was many things that Nixon was not, much to Nixon’s envy. Kennedy had those links to the eastern bastions of power and intellectuality that Nixon himself had courted with limited results; Kennedy was wealthy, with a successful, even appealing, family; and finally, Kennedy exuded an easygoing affability and charm that obviously contrasted to Nixon’s shyness and public awkwardness.

  Nixon just barely won the first campaign, but he lost the one that really counted. And it was so close: Kennedy won with a popular margin of 113,000 votes out of more than 68 million cast. Nixon was devastated. “Of the five presidential campaigns in which I was a direct participant,” Nixon recalled, “none affected me more personally.… It was a campaign of unusual intensity.” And it was bitter: “[T]he way the Kennedys played politics and the way the media let them get away with it left me angry and frustrated.”32 Through the following years, the memories of “the Kennedys” and “the media” festered in Nixon like an angry boil. The memory was Nixon’s nemesis. It periodically engulfed him, diverted him, and led him to rash, ill-considered action—eventually with tragic results.

  The Eisenhower–Nixon relationship offers a veritable playground for psychohistorical speculations. The essential elements are enough to show that Eisenhower’s behavior undoubtedly heightened Nixon’s periodic anxieties and doubts about their relationship and his own future. But the experience also demonstrated Nixon’s special qualities of resilience and fortitude. His relations with the President had been at stake, or at least at issue, since the slush-fund episode of 1952. The public speculation surrounding Eisenhower’s desire for a new running mate in 1956 fueled Nixon’s insecurities. At that time, Eisenhower referred to Nixon only in “generally cold and indifferent” terms; he told a speechwriter that Nixon “just hasn’t grown [and] … I just haven’t honestly been able to believe that he is presidential timber.” A few years later, Ike, referring to Nixon, complained to his secretary that “it is terrible when people get politically ambitious.” He also told her that he could not understand how a man such as Nixon could have so few personal friends. The secretary summed up the views of Eisenhower’s closest associates (views that might well have been Ike’s as well): the President, she wrote, “is a man of integrity and sincere in his every action.… [E]verybody trusts and loves him. But the Vice-President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”33 Those were private remarks. Perhaps in that cloying, close world of Washington, the Vice President heard about them. But the public statements, whether cryptic or garbled, deeply injured Nixon politically; we can only speculate as to their personal effect.

  If Nixon was Eisenhower’s preferred heir, the President hardly made that perfectly clear. Eisenhower nursed fantasies that the Republican Party would rise above simple political considerations and choose a candidate for his achievements and intellectual skills—men such as his Secretary of the Treasury, Texan Robert Anderson, or even his brother, Milton. The President had numerous objections to Nelson Rockefeller, the apparent alternative to Nixon. At one point, Eisenhower told a press conference that the Republicans had numerous “eminent men, big men” who could succeed him. Eisenhower would not identify them, but as if suddenly remembering who was going to gain the nomination, he lamely stated that he was “not dissatisfied with the individual that looks like he will get it.”34 With such endorsements, the Vice President needed no enemies.

  After the Republican Convention, reporters pressed Eisenhower as to Nixon’s role in the Administration. Ike insisted that Nixon had taken an active part in discussions, had expressed his opinions openly, and when asked, had offered numerous recommendations for decisions. Reporters persisted, asking the President for a specific instance of a Nixon proposal that the Administration had adopted. Eisenhower snapped: “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” Fittingly, the news conference ended on that note, giving the remark an air of finality.35 Nixon never escaped its apparent meaning.

  The campaign itself strained this already delicate relationship. An Eisenhower biographer has perceptively noted that Nixon’s emphasis on his experience and participation in the Administration inadvertently reinforced the notion that Eisenhower reigned but did not rule. Furthermore, Nixon needed the Republican Party far more than did Eisenhower. Consequently, he made the usual concessions and compromises to attain measures of party support. This included appeasing Rockefeller on reducing defense spending and other issues. The press dubbed the Nixon-Rockefeller agreement the “Compact of Fifth Avenue,” but Barry Goldwater angrily denounced it as the “Munich of the Republican party.” The President complained to Nixon, saying that it might be difficult for him to support a platform that failed to wholeheartedly endorse his Administration. Near the end of the campaign, Ike was frustrated by Nixon’s apparent indecisiveness in giving the President an expanded schedule of speeches. “Goddammit,” he told staff members, “he looks like a loser to me!” Eisenhower campaigned vigorously at the end, but the general consensus was that it was too little, too late.36 His late intervention has been variously blamed on his own inertia, his wife’s adamant opposition to his campaigning, and Nixon’s tardiness in asking for the President’s aid. More than two decades later, Nixon omitted any chapter on Eisenhower in Leaders, his reminiscence of prominent world leaders he had known.

  The Kennedy-Nixon debates highlighted the 1960 campaign. These so-called “Great Debates” were neither great nor real debates. To compare them—as contemporaries did—to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 only mocks history and trivializes political discourse at its best. The 1960 debates offered a preview to an unsuspecting America of the years to come, when style, format, and media, rather than issues and substance, would prevail in political campaigns. Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan learned vastly more from the Kennedy-Nixon exchanges than did the electorate.37

  In retrospect, Nixon, Eisenhower, and Nixon’s supporters regarded the decision to debate Kennedy as misguided, and, of course, fatal. But Nixon fancied himself at the time as the skillful forensic competitor; debate was his tur
f. After all, he had challenged Jerry Voorhis to the debate platform and immediately put his opponent on the defensive. His debater’s skills had proven effective in his campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, and the “Checkers” speech represented a classic illustration of rhetorical technique. The temptation to debate again must have been compelling. Besides, by debating Kennedy, Nixon could demonstrate being “on his own.”

  The story of the four debates is familiar. The first apparently damaged Nixon, perhaps irreparably. He appeared without make-up, highlighting his famous “five o’clock shadow.” He recently had been ill, and the combination made him appear haggard, nervous, and ill-kempt, particularly next to the handsome, neatly groomed, coolly poised Kennedy. Perhaps even more damaging, a reporter resurrected Eisenhower’s remark that he would need a week to think of Nixon’s contributions in the White House. Nixon stumbled through an understandably lame response.

  Interestingly, those who heard the first debate on radio thought Nixon had done quite well. But Nixon recognized his basic mistake—and long before Marshall McLuhan: “I had concentrated too much on substance and not enough on appearance.”38 The Day of the Package had arrived in American politics.

  In subsequent debates, Nixon seemed polished and informed. During the third encounter, on October 13, 1960, Nixon satisfied his rightist constituency when he berated Kennedy’s apparent unwillingness to defend the Chinese Nationalist–held offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. In the finale, on October 21, Nixon managed to reach out in the other direction and cast Kennedy as the adventurist Cold Warrior. He chided the Senator for his proposal to assist anti-Castro elements, noting that the charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States prohibited such intervention in Cuban internal affairs. If we followed Kennedy’s policy, he warned, “we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective.”39 At that moment, of course, Nixon was privy to the Eisenhower Administration’s efforts to organize military intervention in Cuba. In any event, his remarks were profoundly prophetic.

  The third debate also revealed much about the comparative styles of the candidates. A reporter asked Senator Kennedy if he would apologize to the Vice President for former President Truman’s blunt remarks as to where Nixon and the Republican Party “could go.” Kennedy at first appeared taken aback, but his face quickly betrayed a wry amusement. No, he wouldn’t apologize; and it was a little late in the day to persuade the seventy-six-year-old Truman to change his “particular speaking manner.” Perhaps, Kennedy playfully countered, Mrs. Truman could deal with the problem. It was Kennedy’s moment, but Nixon clumsily groped for one of his own. The Vice President solemnly intoned that a president or former president had “an obligation not to lose his temper in public.” One must think of the mothers and children who were in the presence of presidential candidates; America, said Nixon, needed a man to respect. He was “very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States.” And if elected, Nixon promised, he would maintain the dignity of the office. Parents would be able to tell their children: “Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.”40 Fourteen years later, when Nixon’s tapes revealed his own salty vocabulary, the hypocrisy of his comments about Truman and Eisenhower finally triumphed over their banality.

  Kennedy’s election hurt Nixon deeply. Its close outcome inevitably led to second-guessing of might-have-beens or should-have-dones. But the answers were painfully concrete for Nixon. First, he believed that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the Democratic organization in that city had stolen the election to give Kennedy the important state of Illinois. Periodic tidbits through the years have lent credence to the possibility. A Kennedy confidant has recorded that Daley telephoned the Democratic candidate on election night, saying: “With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.” But the charges have remained just that. It is important to note that the Illinois election board, dominated four-to-one by Republicans, did not hesitate to certify Kennedy’s election. Furthermore, whatever the truth of the Illinois situation—and opinion is decidedly divided—the fact is that Illinois alone would not have given Nixon an Electoral College majority.

  Richard Nixon believed (or chose to believe) that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. Supporters and friendly biographers generally have praised him for not challenging the outcome, thus sparing the nation a great deal of anguish and difficulty. But Nixon’s outward magnanimity and graciousness masked his faith in the relativeness of political morality. Privately, he seethed over Kennedy’s tactics and behavior. A dozen years later, President Nixon repeatedly invoked the behavior of others to defend his own actions.

  The loser’s rationalizations in 1960 were vintage Nixon. He believed that Kennedy had unfairly exploited his intelligence briefings to raise the issue—and promise—of military intervention in Cuba. The Kennedys also had blatantly exploited the Catholic issue. (Actually, Kennedy’s approach to the problem of his religion was also a favored Nixon device; turn a negative to one’s own advantage.) The Kennedys had lavished money and other favors in the right places. But most of all, Kennedy had seduced the media, which gave him excessive and favorable attention largely at Nixon’s expense. The Kennedy camp had “bred an unusual mutuality of interests that replaced the more traditional skepticism of the press toward politicians,” Nixon later wrote. In less personal reasoning, Nixon also pointed to other factors that contributed to his loss: the recession, the U-2 affair and the failure of the Paris Summit in 1960, and the CIA’s mishandling of the alleged “missile gap.” Years later, as President, Nixon regularly berated CIA Director Richard Helms and the agency for giving Kennedy advice on Soviet missile strength which the Democrat had exploited.41 Nixon was not alone in such judgments. But they offered small comfort at best: defeat was still defeat.

  The letdown must have been excruciating. A few weeks before he left office, the Vice President fulfilled his constitutional duty by formally counting the electoral votes in the Senate and declared Kennedy the victor. Nixon was gracious in performing this function as the first Vice President since 1861 to confirm his opponent’s victory. That seemed to be his last hurrah. “I found that virtually everything I did seemed unexciting and unimportant by comparison with national office,” Nixon later wrote. Ironically, the Kennedy Administration’s disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure brought Nixon briefly back into the national limelight, but given his own identification with anti-Castro policies, his public statements mostly were confined to the usual bland recommendations for nonpartisanship in foreign policy.42

  Once again, Nixon returned to his native California following a failure to “make his fortune” in the East. Not for the last time did he return in shame. He accepted a partnership in a California law firm, but only for its promised income, not for its challenges. After fourteen years in public life, Nixon and Nixon-watchers alike seemed uncertain, even confused, over his future course. Certainly, he remained a public figure. Almost from the moment of his defeat, speculation centered on whether Nixon would challenge California Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown in 1962. The reasoning was simple: Nixon had to have a political base if he were to maintain any leadership role in the party and the nation.43 But the reasoning was flawed: Brown was fairly popular, with a long record of state electoral success, and he had done a creditable job as governor. Most important, Richard Nixon knew precious little about the special problems confronting state governments, particularly in the burgeoning principality of California.

  The California gubernatorial campaign in 1962 had a surrealistic quality. Nixon’s familiar campaign methods seemed irrelevant, if nothing else. Californians confronted enormous problems and challenges peculiar to their rapidly expanding society. Water, education, land use, environmental controls, roads,
and, of course, taxes—these were the issues. Nixon’s references to his experience with the National Security Council, his exchange with Khrushchev, his visits to Latin America and other places throughout the world—all this provided no insight into controlling smog or allocating scarce water resources. Brown was expert and knowledgeable about state issues, and he defeated the former Vice President. Brown’s margin of victory was only a bit more than a quarter-million out of six million votes; nevertheless, given his national prominence, Nixon had been outclassed, even humiliated.

  The humiliation led to Nixon’s extraordinary post-election press conference—which he promised would be his last. The morning after his defeat, Nixon had his Press Secretary read his concession statement. Reporters asked why Nixon did not publicly read the statement himself. Watching the proceedings on television, Nixon decided to confront those he regarded as his longtime antagonists. Nixon berated the reporters, charging that they had treated him unfairly. He “recognized” the media’s “right and responsibility” to give a candidate “the shaft” if they opposed him, but he insisted they still had a responsibility to provide coverage of what the candidate said. Unlike “other people” (that is, President Kennedy), Nixon said he had never canceled a newspaper subscription. But seemingly it was the end: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

  The event may have been contrived; in the end, it proved Nixon to be alive and well. As soon as it was over, he told his young campaign aide, H. R. Haldeman: “I finally told those bastards off, and every goddamned thing I said was true.” Haldeman has recalled Nixon as “delighted.”44 At last he had used the media; his performance was the news, not his defeat. California television stations replayed filmed coverage of the press conference several times throughout the day and evening. Audiences watched and watched again with almost morbid fascination. Nationally, ABC News offered an instant analysis entitled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” But ABC used Alger Hiss as a commentator—and that itself quickly became the news, even creating a backlash of sympathy for Nixon. With or without Hiss, ABC, along with those other media pundits who cogitated about the political death of Richard Nixon, would have been better advised to read the story of Lazarus.