Being Nixon: A Man Divided (21 page)

The loud angry voice of the 1968 campaign belonged to Governor Wallace. He was running as an independent, attacking both the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Nixon as tools of the establishment: “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them!” With a gleeful snarl, Wallace played the defender of the ordinary folks, railing against the “swaydo-intellectual morons tellin’ ’em how to live their lives.”
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Wallace was so brazen in his attacks on “them”—the government, the media, the universities, the blacks, the students—that he left ample space for Nixon to be the sober, responsible leader who only subtly, indirectly played to people’s pervasive fear of disorder. Nixon could see that with all the fist-shaking and shouting (and bombing and burning) most voters wanted someone who was calm, grown-up, seasoned. He was all those things, more or less, but he needed a good packager who could smooth down the rough spots.

On January 9, 1968, Nixon was a guest on the
Mike Douglas Show
, an afternoon TV talk show that reached a large audience of housewives. The candidate was introduced to the show’s producer, an unusually confident young man named Roger Ailes. “Mr. Nixon, you need a media adviser,” said Ailes. “What’s a media adviser?” asked Nixon. “I am,” said Ailes.
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In
The Selling of the President
, as Joe McGinniss entitled his 1969 bestseller, Ailes is portrayed as a Svengali figure.
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Mythmaking aside, Ailes was smart enough to see that Nixon—sweaty and earnest on the stump—was not a natural at TV, and Nixon was smart enough to hire Ailes, almost immediately, to fix the problem. Ailes developed a series of televised citizen forums called “Man in the Arena,” after Nixon’s hero Teddy Roosevelt. They were highly controlled, right down to the makeup (more white on Nixon’s upper eyelid, to lessen the glower), and there was nothing spontaneous about the handpicked audience (no psychiatrists, Nixon decreed). The press was kept in a separate room.
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The Nixon campaign staff loved the productions; Pat Nixon, less
so. McGinniss described an encounter between the media adviser and the candidate’s wife on the elevator:

“Hello, Mrs. Nixon,” Roger Ailes said.

She nodded. She had known him for months.

“How did you like the show?” he asked.

She nodded very slowly; her mouth was drawn in a thin, straight line.
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“
R
ichard Nixon used to disappear in the middle of the night during campaign trips,” Haldeman would later recall. “I would call for him at his hotel room in a small Midwestern city in the morning and find that he was missing. Some time in the early dawn he had gotten out of bed and slipped away, with a nervous Secret Service man tailing him. We’d search all over town until we found the candidate looking haggard and wan in a flea-bitten coffee shop.” One wonders what the Republican candidate for president was thinking on these occasional pre-dawn walkabouts.
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Haldeman wanted to protect Nixon: from the stresses of campaigning, from his enemies, from his own family—or so it seemed to them—and from Nixon himself. Haldeman, who would later describe Nixon as the “strangest man I ever met,” admired his lonely courage, his vision for the country, and his devotion to duty, but he knew that the candidate was vulnerable.
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Nixon was tough and prized his toughness, but like anyone, perhaps more than most, he was susceptible to emotional outbursts. Dwight Chapin recalled a trip on a small jet from Wisconsin to Florida. Nixon was talking to his chief speechwriter, Ray Price, discussing his acceptance speech at the GOP convention. Reminiscing about his mother, father, and two dead brothers, Nixon consumed “one or two little bottles of scotch” and began to cry—perfectly understandable, but awkward for Nixon, who liked to say that he never cried.
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The campaigner, 1968.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

On September 18, as the campaign plane landed in Peoria, Illinois, Bill Safire asked Nixon if he was enjoying the campaign. “Never do,” Nixon responded. He was looking out at the crowd lined up along the airport fence, the politicians waiting to shake his hand. “Campaigns are something to get over with.” Nixon relished plunging into crowds, especially when he was showing defiance, but day after day of airport rallies wore him out. He wearied of the hangers-on and glad-handers and favor-seekers, even the ministers and priests who went on too long in God’s name. After one windy prayer, he turned to Safire and said, “No more goddamned benedictions.” On the same plane ride to Peoria, he vented at his favorite target, the press: “You see the way they hate to get up and look at the size of the crowds? Remember, the press is the enemy.”
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The New Nixon had made some gains with the members of the Fourth Estate, but the old Nixon knew they were temporary. The anti-Nixon bias was too deeply rooted. While Nixon still enjoyed the support of the conservative press—the Hearst papers, the
Chicago Tribune
, many small and medium-sized city newspaper publishers—reporters on the political beat were becoming increasingly liberal. In 1960, reporters leaving the Nixon plane for the Kennedy plane felt they were “coming home,” wrote Teddy White. Jack Kennedy had asked Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
what the Nixon plane was like. “Different, joyless, strangely dull,” was the answer.
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Nixon’s well-run, highly punctual campaign plane in 1968 fared better against Hubert Humphrey’s chaotic, shambling operation. “In 1968, one left the Nixon tour to join the Humphrey tour as if leaving a well-ordered and comfortable mansion for a gypsy encampment,” wrote White, the most prominent New Nixon convert.
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Yet, with the press, as with so much else, Nixon could not escape Kennedy’s shadow. Looking back, Tom Brokaw, an up-and-coming TV newsman in 1968, recalled, “Developing a style, I wanted to be JFK, not Richard Nixon.” He recalled meeting Nixon outside a hotel in San Francisco, where Nixon had been talking with former California lieutenant governor Bob Finch in preparation for a meeting with Governor Reagan. “Did
you discuss 1968?” Brokaw asked. “No, we’re just old friends,” Nixon answered, looking at Brokaw with “flat eyes, through the heavy pancake makeup,” Brokaw recalled (Nixon had started wearing makeup when there were TV cameras around). “I thought to myself, he’s lying through his teeth—but it seemed so unnecessary. Why didn’t he just say, ‘We’re all interested in 1968?’ ”
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(Actually, given Nixon’s indirect style, it’s possible that they didn’t discuss 1968.)

Only very rarely, and poignantly, could Nixon let down his guard around staff and newsmen. Jack Carley, the advance man who had driven Mrs. Nixon in 1962, recalled Nixon trying to be thoughtful and considerate in his way. As their plane bounced through a storm to the Westchester County Airport, he reached into a bag of gifts he had been given at the last stop in New Hampshire. He pulled out some golf tees. “Anyone want these?” he asked. He offered some to Bob Semple of
The New York Times
. Then some golf socks. “Want these, Jack?” he asked his advance man. Startled, Carley said, “What size?” “Fits any size!” Nixon exclaimed, pulling on the socks. “They’re stretchable!”
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His stamina was extraordinary. Always grinding, speaking without notes or from a teleprompter, he could carry reams of minute information in his capacious political brain. His memory store compensated for his shyness. “He had connections everywhere,” recalled a political adviser, Stuart Spencer. “He always knew the guy’s button. Oil, water, whatever. He could talk about it.” Spencer remembered Nixon standing in 110-degree heat in Arizona, dressed as usual in a dark suit, scribbling away on his yellow pad. “He was oblivious,” Spencer recalled. “But then he’d drink a little scotch and a switch would click and he’d get paranoid.”
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The Haldeman operation tried to keep Nixon healthy and rested, scheduling downtime, which Nixon preferred to think of as “sacred thinking time.” Chapin’s travel bag carried a sunlamp to refresh Nixon’s tan (just like JFK’s) and a bottle of sleeping pills, carefully counted out by Rose Woods.
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For stress, Nixon took an anti-seizure medicine called Dilantin. He had learned about the drug from Jack
Dreyfus, a mutual fund operator to whom Nixon had confided that he could not sleep and that he was too “excitable.” When Dreyfus told him he would need a prescription for Dilantin, Nixon said, “Screw the doctors.” Through his medical research foundation, Dreyfus had a vast store of “the wonder drug,” as he called it, and he gave Nixon a thousand pills. Whether Nixon took them is not a matter of record, but in October 1968, three weeks before the election, Nixon asked Dreyfus, “Is it all right if I take two pills every day?” Dreyfus told him yes.
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Dilantin, which suppresses nerve impulses, may or may not have relieved Nixon’s stress, but its side effects include slurred speech, especially when combined with alcohol. There is debate about how much Nixon drank, but none about his tendency to sound inebriated after only a drink or two. Len Garment recalled that Nixon would call him late at night from the campaign trail and talk until he drifted off. Ehrlichman later told Garment that, at around midnight, he would hand the candidate a scotch and a sleeping pill (Seconal) as well as the telephone to call Garment. The cocktail would kick in after twenty minutes or so, sometimes in mid-sentence.
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(Chapin has disputed this version, telling the author that, as Nixon’s body man, he would retire for the night with two beers, one for him, one for Nixon. “That was it. No more,” he said.)
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In trying to monitor and shield Nixon, the campaign sometimes marginalized his wife. Haldeman and Ehrlichman took their cues partly from Nixon, who could be aloof from Pat, even though he was devoted to her.
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In his book, Ehrlichman wrote that Nixon “seldom included [Mrs. Nixon] in his deliberations on strategy or scheduling. He treated her as a respected but limited partner.” Haldeman did not need much encouraging from Nixon to believe that, on the campaign
trail, women were to be seen but not heard. “It was clear that Haldeman gave little weight to her opinions,” observed Ehrlichman. But Pat, an old campaign trooper, had decided opinions of her own, and her skin was not as thick as it appeared. She “was not slow to read others’ feelings towards her,” Ehrlichman recalled.
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On the plane, she and Haldeman were cool and correct with each other, but behind her back, the chief of staff referred to the candidate’s wife as “Thelma,” her real name, which she disliked and dropped as a girl. She, in turn, complained bitingly about Haldeman to her daughters and to Rose Mary Woods, who was also feeling the chief of staff’s sangfroid. Shortly after Haldeman took over in the summer of 1968, Pat was offended that she was not introduced at one of her husband’s speeches. Then it happened a second time. “My father noticed also and gave orders that it not happen again,” daughter Julie wrote.
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Like many in their generation (including Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy), the Nixons were not physically demonstrative. Nixon’s handlers would have to continue to remind the president to attend to his First Lady: “I think it is important for the President to show more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he walks through the crowd. At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her. Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public. The more attention she gets, the happier they are,” Roger Ailes wrote Haldeman in May 1970.
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Political spying is
as old as politics. In America, certainly in the big time, nearly all campaigns spy on their opponents, some more effectively (or more brazenly) than others. Dirty tricks are also a hallowed, if disreputable tradition. In 1960, recalled Ehrlichman, the Nixon campaign staff had “always felt a little outclassed; the Kennedy fellows were really much better at the dirty stuff than we were.” Indeed, it’s not clear that the Nixon campaign did any “dirty stuff” in 1960. By 1968, “Nixon demanded that his staff conduct his campaign as if we were an all-out war,” wrote Ehrlichman, and that meant air war,
ground war, and covert war. As tour manager, Ehrlichman had “countless talks” with the candidate about the orchestrated jeering and heckling at Nixon’s speeches, which grew worse as the campaign wore on. Nixon appeared calm in public, but in the privacy of the airplane cabin, “it was obvious that he was extremely upset by the opposition’s tactics.” The Secret Service refused to quash “legitimate political dissent.” Frustrated by bureaucratic foot-dragging, Nixon looked for other ways to work his will. He declared that he wanted, as Ehrlichman put it, “some kind of flying goon squad of our own to rough up hecklers.” Mostly by borrowing or renting local cops, his campaign tried to weed out “the weirdos and beardos,” as Nixon called the hecklers. Ehrlichman knew Nixon’s history of defying crowds. He worried that, fatigued and under assault, he might do something “unpredictable and dangerous.”
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Jack Carley recalled, “We were asked to recruit some beefy types who would surround the protesters, and, without touching them, outshout them and try to intimidate them into silence. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.”
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Partly rehabilitated from his influence-peddling scandal by the passage of time, Murray Chotiner was put in charge of minor skulduggery. He recruited a “mole” to look and act like a reporter on the Humphrey campaign. Daily reports would come in from “Chapman’s Friend,” as the spy was code-named, detailing internal squabbles and snafus in the Humphrey campaign. There was some “tasty gossip,” Ehrlichman recalled, but nothing earth-shattering.
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Intelligence could come from many sources. At the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami during the Republican Convention, Nixon’s national security adviser, Richard Allen, was spotted by reporters speaking to a short, roundish man with curly hair and black-framed glasses. The man was Henry Kissinger, the Harvard professor who was at the time a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller. For the reporters, Allen staged an elaborate pantomime to pretend that Kissinger was a long-lost friend, lest the press suspect any collusion between the campaigns. They were, in fact, trying to work out a deal on the GOP
foreign policy platform. (At other times, to avoid being overheard, they spoke in German.)
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After the convention and Rockefeller’s defeat, Allen asked Kissinger to serve on Nixon’s foreign policy advisory board. Kissinger demurred, saying, “I can help you more if I work behind the scenes.” Kissinger was playing both sides: He was hoping to get a high-ranking job in the Humphrey administration if the Democrats won. Kissinger was already consulting with the Johnson administration on its secret attempts to negotiate peace with the North Vietnamese. With his Harvard peers and quite a few others, Kissinger was scathing about Nixon.
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“Six days a week I’m for Hubert,” he told Daniel Davidson, a young lawyer on Averell Harriman’s negotiating team in Paris, “but on the seventh day I think they’re both awful.”
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“Like millions of
other Americans watching television that night,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, he had been amazed by the violent scenes at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August.
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The riots in the streets, the protesters shouting “Dump the Hump” and “Sieg Heil,” the images of police beating demonstrators with nightsticks on national television all seemed to fulfill the vision of a nation spinning out of control. The political impact was devastating to the Democrats. Days later, their candidate, Vice President Humphrey, trailed Nixon by twelve points in the polls. On September 4, with just the sort of jiu-jitsu he prized, Nixon stood in an open car in a motorcade making its way through the Loop of Chicago and over to Michigan Avenue, the same street that, only a few days before, had been the scene of pitched battle between cops and Yippies, as a crowd of four hundred thousand cheered. Nixon was greeted respectfully by Mayor Richard Daley—the same Mayor Daley, Nixon believed, who had stolen the 1960 election from him.
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By mid-September, Nixon was ahead of Humphrey by fifteen points.