I saw him closer up in 1948, when he briefed the members of the House of Representatives on the situation in Europe at a meeting held in the Library of Congress. In the summer of 1950, I saw him at even closer quarters at the Bohemian Grove, the site of the annual summer retreat of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, where each year members of this prestigious private men’s club and their guests from all over the country gather amidst California’s beautiful redwoods. Herbert Hoover used to invite some of the most distinguished of the 1,400 men at the Grove to join him at his “Cave Man Camp” for lunch each day. On this occasion Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, was the honored guest. Hoover sat at the head of the table as usual, with Eisenhower at his right. As the Republican nominee in an uphill Senate battle, I was about two places from the bottom.
Eisenhower was deferential to Hoover but not obsequious. He responded to Hoover’s toast with a very gracious one of his own. I am sure he was aware that he was in enemy territory among this generally conservative group. Hoover and most of his friends favored Taft and hoped that Eisenhower would not become a candidate.
Later that day, Eisenhower spoke at the beautiful lakeside amphitheatre. It was not a polished speech, but he delivered it without notes and he had the good sense not to speak too long. The only line that drew significant applause was his comment that he did not see why anyone who refused to sign a loyalty oath should have the right to teach in a state university.
After Eisenhower’s speech we went back to Cave Man Camp and sat around the campfire appraising it. Everyone liked Eisenhower, but the feeling was that he had a long way to go before he would have the experience, the depth, and the understanding to be President. But it struck me forcibly that Eisenhower’s personality and personal mystique had deeply impressed the skeptical and critical Cave Man audience.
In May 1951 I went as a Senate observer to the World Health Organization conference in Geneva. Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, one of Eisenhower’s early supporters, arranged for me to meet Eisenhower at NATO headquarters in Paris. An aide ushered me into Eisenhower’s office, and he rose from his desk to greet me. He was erect and vital and impeccably tailored, wearing his famous waist-length uniform jacket, popularly known as the “Eisenhower jacket.” He motioned me to a large sofa against the wall, and his informality put me so completely at ease that we were able to talk very freely.
He spoke optimistically about the prospects for European recovery and development. Warming to the topic, he said, “What we need over here and what we need in the States is more optimism in order to combat the defeatist attitude that too many people seem to have.”
He carefully steered away from American politics, but it was clear he had done his homework. He said that he had read about the Hiss case in Seeds of Treason by Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky. “The thing that most impressed me was that you not only got Hiss, but you got him fairly,” he said. He also liked the emphasis I placed in some of my speeches on the need to take into account economic and ideological as well as military factors in fashioning foreign policy. “Being strong militarily just isn’t enough in the kind of battle we are fighting now,” he said. This impressed me because, then as now, it was unusual to hear a military man emphasize the importance of non-military strength.
It was not the substance of Eisenhower’s conversation so much as his manner that most impressed me that afternoon. It was easy to see how he had been able to bring the leaders of the great wartime alliance together despite their many differences. I felt that in terms of experience and ability in handling foreign policy, Eisenhower was by far the best qualified of the potential presidential candidates. I felt that I was in the presence of a genuine statesman, and I came away convinced that he should be the next President. I also decided that if he ran for the nomination I would do everything I could to help him get it.
I did not know Bob Taft well, although I had met him several times while I was in the House of Representatives, particularly during the debates on the Taft–Hartley bill. He was highly respected in Washington, but even his strongest supporters acknowledged that he lacked some of the personality traits needed by a presidential candidate. He was an intelligent, high-minded patriot, but he was also very proud and very shy. This combination unfortunately made many people feel that he was arrogant. Taft was visibly uncomfortable with the personal “small change” of presidential politics—the handshaking and backslapping and endless importuning of local party leaders, and he was honest in a way that could be painfully blunt. I shall never forget seeing him on television during the New Hampshire primary. As he emerged from a building he began shaking hands. A little girl held out a pen and a piece of paper and asked for his autograph. Right on camera, he explained to her with devastating reasonableness that handshaking took less time than signing autographs, and since he had a very busy schedule he could not interrupt it to sign anything for her.
I think that next to Pat, Martha Taft was the most exceptional political wife I have ever known. She was as gracious and vivacious as her husband was shy and stiff. She had suffered a crippling stroke in 1950 and was confined to a wheelchair; Taft, who was completely devoted to her, took her everywhere with him, and at a dinner party it was a touching sight to see him cut her food and help feed it to her. People in Washington who knew these things about Taft admired him and made allowances because of them. But when it came to choosing a nominee the fact had to be faced that his abrasive personality would be a serious disadvantage in a presidential campaign.
I believed that the President elected in 1952 had first and foremost to be an expert in dealing with the serious international challenges facing America, and I had some serious reservations about Taft in this regard.
Before the elections in 1950 I had been invited to be the major speaker at the 36th Annual McKinley Day Dinner in Dayton, Ohio. My subject was the threat of communism at home and abroad. Taft had followed me with a short speech in which he said that, as he saw it, the greatest problem facing America at home or abroad was not communism but socialism. He urged therefore that we concentrate our efforts on fighting and defeating socialism. I did not like socialism any more than he did. What concerned me was his failure to recognize that many socialists were dedicated anticommunists. The major threat we faced was not socialism, but communist subversion supported by the international Communist movement, and Taft’s failure to understand this distinction raised questions in my mind about his grasp of the whole international situation.
One day early in 1952, Taft came to see me. He was a man no more interested in small talk than I was, so he got right to the point. He said that we had many mutual friends in California and some of them had urged him to drop by and simply ask me for my support for his candidacy. “It wasn’t something I felt I ought to do,” he added with complete sincerity, “but I don’t want to have any misunderstanding about my desire to have your support if you feel that my candidacy is consistent with your point of view.”
I told him that I had enormous respect for his leadership in the Senate and had no doubt that in terms of domestic affairs he was the best qualified man to lead the country. It was with a great deal of sadness that I told him I personally felt that international affairs would be more important for the next President and that I had concluded Eisenhower was the best qualified in that area. Therefore I would be supporting his candidacy. I said I had already informed Knowland and Warren of my decision. I added that if Taft won the nomination he would have my wholehearted support and assured him that under no circumstances would I lend myself to a “stop Taft” movement at the convention.
He said that although he was naturally disappointed with my decision, he appreciated my frankness, and he was generous and respectful in his comments about Eisenhower. Bob Taft was a fine gentleman, and it was a great loss to the party, the Congress, and the nation when he died of cancer just a few months after Eisenhower was inaugurated.
On July 1, I flew to Chicago to take part in the platform he
arings being held the week before the Republican National Convention.
I had first become aware that I might be considered as the nominee for Vice President a few months earlier when clues and signs began appearing in the press and the political rumor mills. However, I considered my chances almost impossibly remote. In retrospect, I see that the road to the ticket had begun on May 8, 1952, when, at Governor Dewey’s invitation, I was the main speaker at the New York State Republican Party’s annual fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Because it was a presidential year, and because Dewey was both the former standard-bearer and one of the principal people behind Eisenhower, the dinner was a major occasion, and my speech would be broadcast on radio. I spent several hours making outlines, to be sure that I could say everything within the allotted half-hour radio time. I delivered it without notes in exactly twenty-nine minutes, and the audience gave me a standing ovation when it was over.
When I sat down next to Dewey after acknowledging the applause, he very deliberately snuffed out his cigarette, which he always held in a cigarette holder, grasped my hand, and earnestly said, “That was a terrific speech. Make me a promise: don’t get fat, don’t lose your zeal, and you can be President someday.” I did not take him seriously, much less literally, because such compliments are commonplace in politics. But later that evening, during a small reception in his suite for some of his close friends, he asked me if I would object to his suggesting my name as a possible candidate for Vice President.
A few weeks later I was invited to meet with Eisenhower’s inner circle of advisers in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The group included Herbert Brownell, the lawyer whom Eisenhower was later to name Attorney General, General Lucius Clay, and Harold Talbott, Dewey’s chief fund-raiser. We had a wide-ranging discussion of foreign and domestic policy that lasted most of the afternoon. Nothing was said about the vice presidency, but it was clear that they were trying to get to know me better and to size me up.
Word of this meeting quickly made its way through the Washington grapevine, and rumors that I might be Eisenhower’s running mate began to appear in the papers. One evening a few weeks before the convention, Pat and I had dinner with Alice Longworth, the witty, acerbic daughter of Teddy Roosevelt. I asked her if she thought I should take the nomination if Eisenhower offered it to me. I knew that Mrs. Longworth was an all-out Taft supporter. She did not like Eisenhower, and as far as I could tell she never did develop any liking for him.
In her typically outspoken way, she said, “Father used to tell me that being Vice President was the most boring job in the world. However,” she added, “if Eisenhower gets the nomination, someone will have to go on that ticket who can reassure the party regulars and particularly the conservatives that he won’t take everyone to hell in a handcart, and you are the best man to do it.”
As we were leaving, Mrs. Longworth brought up the subject again and asked me whether I was giving it serious thought. I said that the prospect was too unlikely for me to take it very seriously. “I thought as much,” she said disapprovingly. “You should be giving it a lot of thought, and you should talk to Pat about it so that just in case it does happen you aren’t caught with your drawers down! If you ask me, and since you did I’ll tell you again, if you’re thinking of your own good and your own career you are probably better off to stay in the Senate and not go down in history as another nonentity who served as Vice President. Of course, Father’s experience was different, and by some act of God you might become President too, but you shouldn’t plan on it. For the good of the party, however, I think that you should take it if you have the chance.”
Until this conversation, I had never taken the possibility of nomination seriously enough to consider that I might not want the job. The vice presidency had traditionally been a political dead end, and most Vice Presidents were old party wheelhorses or regional politicians added to balance the ticket. Theodore Roosevelt referred to the vice presidency as “taking the veil,” and Harry Truman described the office as being about as useful as a fifth teat on a cow. Until Eisenhower completely changed the concept of the office, the Vice President was almost exclusively a ceremonial figure who went to the receptions and dedicated the dams the President didn’t have time for. His only important functions were to cast occasional tie-breaking votes in the Senate and to be constantly ready to take over if the President died or were incapacitated. Today we think of the vice presidency as a stepping-stone to the presidency, but before 1952 it was more often a stepping-stone to political oblivion.
I did not have to know Eisenhower well to know that he would expect his Vice President to subordinate any personal ambitions to the President’s programs and policies. It was one thing for me to believe that Eisenhower was the best man for the job; it was quite another to renounce my own political career just as it reached a national stage in the Senate. If I had had presidential ambitions—which I did not at that point—I probably would not have considered becoming Vice President.
When the Republican National Convention opened in Chicago on July 7, Bill Knowland, Minnesota Congressman Walter Judd, Colorado Governor Dan Thornton, and I were being touted as the most likely running mates for Eisenhower. Two days before the nominating session, Jack Knight, publisher and editor of the Chicago Daily News, went out on a political limb and predicted that Eisenhower and I would be the Republican nominees. A headline across the top of page one proclaimed: GOP Ticket: Ike and Nixon, Predicts Knight. I still considered this so unlikely that I sent someone out to buy a half a dozen copies of the paper. I said, “That will probably be the last time we’ll see that headline, and I want to be able to show it to my grandchildren.”
When I got back to the hotel around midnight, Pat was waiting up for me. For her, the worst part of politics was campaigning, and through two strenuous California campaigns in 1946 and 1950 she had been at my side every step of the way and took it all with good grace. Although campaigning did not come easily to her because of her deep-rooted sense of privacy, she did it superbly. But now that we actually had to consider the possibility of a long and grueling nationwide campaign, she was having second thoughts about what accepting the nomination could mean to us and to our young daughters.
About 4 A.M., after we had talked for hours, I suggested that we talk to Murray Chotiner. As a political professional, he might have a different perspective about the whole question.
When he arrived at our room I filled him in on our discussion and asked for his opinion. He answered in his usual blunt way. “There comes a point,” he said, “when you have to go up or go out.” He pointed out that even if I ran for Vice President and lost, I would still have my Senate seat. Or, if I became Vice President and did not like it, I could step down after the first term. “Think of it, Dick,” he said, “any man who quits political life as Vice President as young as you are certainly hasn’t lost a thing.”
After Murray left, Pat and I talked about what he had said and we agreed that he was right. “I guess I can make it through another campaign,” she said.
Eisenhower was nominated on the first ballot. The Taft forces were unhappy not just because they had been defeated but because of the strong-arm tactics they felt had been used on many delegates by Eisenhower’s supporters under the direction of his floor manager, Governor Sherman Adams of New Hampshire.
When the convention adjourned for lunch, I decided to go back to my room at the Stock Yard Inn and sleep until the evening session when Eisenhower and his running mate would make their acceptance speeches. I had been up nearly all night talking to Pat and Murray, and the morning had been tiring because of the final frantic shiftings and maneuverings before the balloting. The room was not air-conditioned, and the temperature must have been 100 degrees when I opened the door. I stripped down to my shorts and lay on top of the covers, trying to think cool thoughts. Chotiner arrived a few minutes later, and he could scarcely contain his excitement. He told me that Eisenhower had approved a final list of acceptable
running mates and then turned the actual selection over to his inner circle of advisers. One of them, Herb Brownell, had told Chotiner that I was on the list and asked where I could be reached if the need arose.
“It’s still wishful thinking, Murray,” I said.
I had just started to drift to sleep when the bedside phone rang. I could recognize Brownell’s voice coming over the line, but it sounded very distant. I pressed the receiver against my ear and realized that he was talking to someone else.
“Yes, General,” he was saying, “we have agreed unanimously, and it’s Dick Nixon.”
Then Brownell came on the line with me. He said simply, “We picked you.”
For one of the few times I can remember, I was speechless.
“The general asked if you could come see him right away in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel,” Brownell continued. “That is, assuming you want it!”
I felt hot, sleepy, and grubby, but there wasn’t even time to shower or shave. I pulled my clothes on again and started down to the lobby. The ever-resourceful Chotiner somehow produced a limousine and a police motorcycle escort which sped us across town to Eisenhower’s headquarters at the Blackstone.
Eisenhower beamed as he shook my hand and led me into the large sitting room of his suite. He introduced me to Mrs. Eisenhower, and the three of us chatted for a few minutes before she left us.
Almost immediately Eisenhower seemed to shift gears. He became very serious and formal. He said that he wanted his campaign to be a crusade for the things he believed in and the things he believed America stood for. “Will you join me in such a campaign?” he asked. I was a little taken aback by his formality, but I answered, “I would be proud and happy to.”
“I’m glad you are going to be on the team, Dick,” he said. “I think that we can win, and I know that we can do the right things for this country.”
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