Being Nixon: A Man Divided (11 page)

As he wound
up his speech, Nixon referred to his pursuit of Alger Hiss and said that he was “not a quitter.” Watching at home, his mother Hannah, normally so restrained, shouted at her television set, “No, and you never have been!”
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But, Nixon went on, “the decision, my friends, is not mine.” The candidate urged his audience to telegraph or write the Republican National Committee whether he should stay on the ticket or get off it.

Watching TV in his living room in Washington, Walter Lippmann, the most respected newspaper columnist in America, turned to his guest, John Miller of
The Times
of London, and said, “That must be the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear.”
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In the years to come, the ridicule would rain down from sophisticates like Lippmann and his fellow pundits. The “Checkers speech” was mawkish and maudlin (“And you know, the kids just love that dog and I want to say this right now,” said Nixon, his voice oozing humble sincerity, “that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it”). The chattering class verdict was unanimous: Nixon was guilty of emotional fraudulence. His delivery had been hammy, hokey, and holier-than-thou (“Now what I’m going to do—and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics,” said Nixon, all noble sacrifice, “I am going to give to this television and radio audience a complete financial history”). After the Checkers Speech, self-righteous self-pity became indelibly associated with the Nixon speaking style. Critics even pointed out that Nixon had gotten the Lincoln quote wrong. The Great Emancipator did not say, “The Lord must have loved the common people because he made so many of them.” Rather, Lincoln was talking about his own plain looks: “Common-looking people are the best in the world; that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.”
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Yet Nixon’s misquotation reveals that he was making a far more profound political pitch than Honest Abe’s self-effacing quip. Nixon’s speech was brilliant political theater. The man who had fashioned the Orthogonians’ mission statement knew his audience—knew that the Franklins might make fun of his speech but that the vastly more numerous common people would be moved. Liberal Democrats who fancied themselves as tribunes of the working man suddenly saw Nixon outfox and supplant them. It is no wonder that hating Nixon became a mantra of the liberal elite. In the Checkers Speech were seeded the roots of Nixon’s later appeals to the Silent Majority—which would again leave the chattering classes spluttering.
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Dwight Eisenhower watched his running mate’s speech with an inner circle of wise men, New York lawyers like Governor Dewey and military pals like General Lucius Clay. “Sophomoric!” “Sugary sweet!” they exclaimed.
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For a more meaningful reaction, Eisenhower had only to look to his wife, Mamie. She was crying. Eisenhower turned to Arthur Summerfield, the head of the Republican National Committee, which had paid for Nixon’s TV time. “Well,” said Ike, with cold understatement, “you certainly got your money’s worth.”
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Dazed, drenched with
sweat, Nixon stumbled off the stage. He had run out of time before he could tell viewers the address of the Republican National Committee. He feared that he had blown his only chance. He mournfully told Pat, “I was a flop.” Chotiner, who had been watching on a TV monitor, knew better. So did the cameramen, some of whom were crying. Nixon was told that the NBC switchboard was lighting up “like a Christmas tree.”
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In the car back to the hotel, Nixon saw a barking Irish setter and mordantly quipped, “Well, I won the dog vote tonight.” Only once he was at the hotel did he begin to appreciate the torrent he had unleashed. The telegrams were arriving by the basket. The Checkers speech had reached scores of millions by TV and radio, perhaps half the country; in those early days of mass media, Nixon’s audience was the largest ever for a TV broadcast.

Eisenhower sent a glowing telegram, but it got lost among the thousands pouring in. All Nixon learned was that Ike still appeared to be publicly equivocating. Nixon was crestfallen. “What more can he possibly want?” he asked Chotiner. Desolate, Nixon began dictating a telegram resigning from the ticket. Rose Woods dutifully typed up the message but wisely gave it to Chotiner. The campaign manager tore it up.

Eisenhower summoned Nixon to meet him on board the
Look Ahead, Neighbor! Special
in Wheeling, West Virginia. When the plane landed, Eisenhower himself bounded up the steps into the cabin. Nixon was taken aback. “General,” he said, “You didn’t need to come out to the airport.” Eisenhower flashed the famous smile. “Why not?” he said. “You’re my boy!”

That night, the Republican running mates, together again, spoke at a football stadium. The ovation was overpowering. “I want you to know,” Nixon told the crowd, “this is the greatest moment of my life.” Afterward, newspaper cameras caught him weeping on the shoulder of California senator Bill Knowland.
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In the freezing night air—it was still late September, but winter was coming to the West Virginia mountains—Mamie let Pat share her white fur coat. There was silence between them. Plaintively, Mamie began, “I don’t know why all this happened when we were all getting along so well.” Pat could not contain herself. “But you just don’t realize what
we’ve
been through,” she said. That ended the conversation.

In later years, Nixon would regard the fund crisis as a personal victory, the ultimate vindication of his fight-back philosophy. His daughter Julie remembered him saying during her teen years, “Did you know today is the anniversary of the fund speech?” But Pat did not wish to know. Many years later, in 1978, while writing a memoir of her mother, Julie asked Pat about those weeks in September 1952. Mrs. Nixon turned her head to the wall and said, “Do we really have to talk about this? It kills me.” When she turned back to face Julie, there was so much pain in her eyes that Julie had to look away.
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During the fund crisis, Nixon had seemed to waver, while Pat remained resolute. But Nixon had been perhaps seeking his wife’s sympathy and support, knowing that she would respond with loving firmness. After the fund crisis, Pat’s political ambition waned. She never stopped loving and supporting her husband, but she no longer quite shared his dreams.

Nixon was exhausted. “The fund crisis made me feel old and tired,” he recalled. He was shocked to learn that “my combative father had been reduced to bouts of weeping as each new smear surfaced.” But Nixon himself responded by becoming more aggressive on the campaign trail, attacking Stevenson—“Adlai the Appeaser”—as “a weakling and a waster.” Burned by Andrews of the fickle
Herald Tribune
, he no longer tried to cultivate reporters. When some newsmen were late to the campaign bus, he was overheard to say, “Fuck ’em, we don’t need them.”

The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won easily. Anxious on Election Day, Nixon joined a pick-up touch football game with some Marines on the beach near Camp Pendleton. When he dropped a pass, a Marine remarked, “You’ll make a better Vice-President than a football player.” Then the Marine caught himself: “Sir.”

On inauguration night, his mother handed him a note in her small, crabbed handwriting:

To Richard

You have gone far and we are proud of you always—I know that you will keep your relationship with your maker as it should be for after all that, as you must know, is the most important thing in this life. With love, Mother.

Nixon put the note in his wallet and kept it there for the rest of his life.
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In 1953, after
his first few months in the White House, President Eisenhower wrote out a list for PROJECT X, a secret recollection of
his presidency to be deposited in a time capsule at his Gettysburg farm. The first item was Nixon. Eisenhower wrote, “Energetic-physically strong-politically astute-ambitious-good personality. Only weakness that I can detect (or think I can) is that he is very fond of the nightlife in Washington. Sometimes has a bedraggled morning appearance.”
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In fact, Nixon actively disliked Washington nightlife, but he may have appeared a little bleary-eyed in the mornings. He had trouble sleeping, and sometimes took a drink or a pill—or both—to make himself drowsy. Nixon was not a big imbiber, but he had a notoriously low capacity for alcohol, and on occasion he let drink get the better of him. Congressman Pat Hillings, who had taken over Nixon’s California district, recalled Nixon getting tipsy at a dinner with the Eisenhowers early in the 1952 campaign. He got through the dinner all right, but in the elevator he startled his entourage by giving the wall a smack and loudly exclaiming, “I really like that Mamie. She doesn’t give a shit about anybody—not a shit!”
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In
Six Crises
, Nixon described Eisenhower as “a far more complex and devious man than most people realized,” adding, “and in the best sense of those words.” Eisenhower was a military man who delegated to his subordinates. He had been put off by the confusion that reigned when a green, unprepared Harry Truman took over from FDR, and he was determined that Nixon would not fulfill the old stereotype of a vice president as a useless appendage.
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Eisenhower ran a “hidden hand presidency”: He let Nixon and others take public roles and, when necessary, do the dirty jobs.
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In the fall of 1953, Eisenhower sent Nixon to Asia for two months. This was not a pointless vice-presidential junket. Nixon had to deliver difficult messages to Syngman Rhee of South Korea and Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, both of whom were threatening attacks on their communist neighbors that risked dragging America into World War III. Nixon skillfully handled both men and at the same time managed to like them, or at least honor their orneriness.

Nixon did not like personal confrontation. But delivering a message from the president of the United States, however unwelcome,
was different. Nixon loved politics as the exercise of power, of finding a way to get things done. While sensitive to the pride of these heads of state, Nixon saw them as pieces on a chessboard, objects that had to be moved—gently, carefully—in the greater cause of world peace. Nixon was thrilled to be acting on such an exalted stage, not as a messenger boy for the great president-general but as a superpower diplomat who could show his worldliness and finesse.

Genuinely curious and open-minded, doggedly well-prepared, the future statesman in Nixon emerged, to the surprise of some hosts. From Malaya, the British High Commissioner, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, wired Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden that Nixon was

an extremely nice man in every way. He was very anxious to learn and to help. He has got charming manners and in fact was the very reverse of everything that one had expected after reading press reports of the American election. He is easy in his conversations and got on extremely well with the many Asians he met….He seemed to me potentially to be a much bigger man than Adlai Stevenson, who, as you know, stayed with us a few months ago.
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The Nixons satisfied their childhood wanderlust. Nixon wrote disapprovingly, and also a little dreamily, about Sukarno’s gleaming white palace in Indonesia, “filled with some of the most exquisite women I have ever seen,” adding that “my briefings had stressed this side of his character.” Pat was a nonstop goodwill ambassador, gamely leaving the lavish dinners—served on gold plates in Sukarno’s palace, lit by a thousand torches—to tour hospitals and orphanages. (On a later trip in 1955, U.S. foreign service officers protested when she went to a leper colony.)
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Nixon was proud to face down anti-American demonstrators in Burma. He greeted a protester carrying a sign reading “Go Back Warmonger” by saying, “I am Mr. Nixon and I’m glad to know you. What’s your name?” The man scuttled away.

When he returned, the vice president got a glowing two-page handwritten letter from Eisenhower—gratifying indeed, Nixon noted in his memoirs, coming “from one who meted out praise in very small and careful doses.” The 1953 trip “had a tremendously important effect on my thinking and on my career,” Nixon wrote. It established him as a globetrotting foreign policy expert and put him on a familiar footing with world leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and the Shah of Iran. More important, it assured him that he had the skills and confidence to thrive in the political game that most engaged him: structuring a system of alliances and opposing interests in the cause of building a lasting foundation for peace.
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Dealing with Senator Joe McCarthy back home was more vexing. Eisenhower wanted to avoid tangling with the demagogue, whose communist witch-hunt had spun out of control. “Never get into a pissing match with a skunk,” the president told his brother, Milton.
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So he sent Nixon to be his go-between and informant. Nixon was deft with McCarthy, restraining him on occasion, then cleverly working with Ike to undermine him. Nixon persuaded McCarthy not to chase William Bundy, a CIA official and son-in-law of Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson, who had contributed to Alger Hiss’s defense fund. (“ ‘Joe,’ I said, ‘you have to understand how those people up in Cambridge think. Bundy graduated from the Harvard Law School, and Hiss was one of its most famous graduates. I think he probably just got on the bandwagon without giving any thought to where the bandwagon was heading.’ ”) When the time came to attack McCarthy openly, Eisenhower tapped Nixon to give a speech on national TV—and told him to make sure he smiled. Nixon spent four days in a hotel room trying to figure out how to ding McCarthy without alienating the anticommunist right. In his televised speech on March 13, 1954, Nixon reached for a metaphor:

Now, I can imagine some of you will say, “Why all this hullabaloo about being fair when you’re dealing with a gang of traitors?” As a matter of fact, I have heard people say, “After all,
we are dealing with a bunch of rats. What we ought to do is go out and shoot them.”

Well, I agree they are a bunch of rats. But just remember this. When you go out and shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly, it not only means the rats will get away more easily—but you make it easier on the rats. Also you might hit someone who is trying to shoot rats, too.
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