Being Nixon: A Man Divided (8 page)

But then, with a sickening lurch, the balloon plummeted: An expert from Eastman Kodak, the film’s manufacturer, reported that the film had been manufactured in 1945—seven years
after
Chambers had allegedly photographed the incriminating documents as an insurance policy against assassination, as he had explained with his typical penchant for drama.

“The news jolted us into almost complete shock,” Nixon later wrote. “We sat looking at each other without saying a word. This meant that Chambers was, after all, a liar.” Nixon called Chambers and told him what the committee had just learned from Eastman Kodak. “What is your answer to that?” Nixon demanded. There was a long silence over the phone. Nixon wondered if Chambers had hung up. Finally, Nixon recalled, Chambers answered in a “voice full of despair and resignation: ‘I can’t understand it. God must be against me.’ ” Nixon exploded “with all the fury and frustration that had built up within me, ‘You’d better have a better answer than that!’ ”

Gloomily, Nixon braced himself for “the biggest crow-eating performance in the history of Capitol Hill.” But five minutes before the scheduled mea culpa press conference, the man from Eastman Kodak called back to say there had been a mistake, the film had been manufactured in 1938 after all. Chambers was vindicated. Stripling, a Southerner, let out a rebel yell, grabbed Nixon’s arms, and began to dance him around the room. Extricating himself, Nixon tried to call Chambers but couldn’t reach him. It later turned out that the despairing Chambers had tried to poison himself. Fortunately, he failed.
³⁴

The Hiss case dragged through the courts for months before Hiss was finally convicted of perjury—for lying that he was not a spy—and sent to jail (the statute of limitations for treason had run out). Years later, documents declassified from American and Soviet archives seemed to prove that Hiss had been feeding State Department secrets to the Soviets. Right up to his death in 1996, Hiss steadfastly maintained his innocence. He told author Herbert Parmet that although Nixon was not a “yahoo” he was “crude” and “crass.” Hiss allowed, “From time to time I was guilty of a certain snobbishness toward him. He may have sensed some of that, and it may have annoyed him.”
³⁵

For the nation, as well as Nixon, the Hiss case was a turning point and a catalyst. If someone as reputable as Alger Hiss could be a Soviet spy, who was to say where the subversion ended? America entered a fearful age. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully exploded an atomic
bomb; it was soon learned that spies had given the Soviets some of America’s nuclear secrets. In 1950, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, sallied forth on a reckless witch-hunt that exposed no real Reds but fomented widespread suspicion, even panic, for the next four years until McCarthy collapsed under the weight of his own scurrility.

It can be argued that the decades-long culture war that divided the “Silent Majority” from the Establishment, Middle America from the East Coast elite, commenced with the case of
Richard Nixon v. Alger Hiss
. For Nixon, the Hiss case became an almost sacred touchstone. He would, in almost any situation and seemingly for almost any reason, urge his followers to read the Hiss chapter in
Six Crises
. At the same time, he always considered his victory to be a Pyrrhic one. He claimed that the East Coast elite and its minions in the press never recovered from the embarrassment of backing the gentlemanly but Kremlin-serving Hiss against the lowly but righteous Nixon.
³⁶

After the Pumpkin Papers came out, Nixon was invited to a dinner party at the home of Virginia Bacon, an in-crowd Washington hostess whose father-in-law had been a contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt. After dinner, Paul Porter, a leader in the Washington legal establishment, was getting needled for his support of Hiss. Didn’t he think that HUAC had done a good job exposing Hiss? “No!” declared Porter. The hearings should be stopped because they were reflecting badly on FDR’s foreign policy, he insisted. Years later, Nixon contemptuously recalled Porter’s stubborn refusal to concede:

Well, there you had it. That was perhaps typical, typical of people in the foreign service, typical of people closely associated with Harvard and other great universities. They couldn’t bear to find one of their own like Hiss being involved in this kind of thing. They considered the Hiss case as being an attack on the whole elite establishment, an attack on the foreign service, an attack on those who were there for the UN, and even an attack
on Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Those attitudes were all crap, but that was what I had to fight against.
³⁷

In
Six Crises
, Nixon claimed that after the Hiss case, he was “subjected to an utterly unprincipled and vicious smear campaign. Bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole gamut of misconduct in public life, ranging from the unethical to downright criminal activities—all these were among the charges hurled at me, some publicly and others through whispering campaigns which were even more difficult to counteract.”
³⁸
Nixon was exaggerating; with the possible exception of the far-left press or some way-out Drew Pearson columns, the public record does not support this litany of slander (the whispering is unverifiable, of course). Indeed, Nixon’s press was mostly positive. At the start of 1950,
Newsweek
called Nixon “the most outstanding member of the present Congress,” and the
Saturday Evening Post
, another mass-circulation mainstay, featured him as an up-and-comer to watch. But Nixon, ever alert to put-downs, sensed that liberal columnists and opinion-makers and their social friends in Georgetown and on Capitol Hill were beginning to privately sneer at him as a charlatan and demagogue. There is no doubt that Nixon regarded himself as an object of scorn and calumny. So did Pat. When Julie was asking her mother about the Hiss case in 1979, her answers were “brief and strained.” When Julie changed the subject, Pat interrupted her “with an edge of vehemence in her voice.” She said that after Hiss, her husband became a “target.”
³⁹

Frank Gannon, who worked closely with the Nixons on
RN
, Nixon’s massive 1978 memoir, believed that the Nixons had enjoyed Washington in the early years—Pat even got Dick out on the dance floor at the Shoreham Hotel—but that “Hiss queered it all. Doors closed on them. Invitations were withdrawn. She discovered that politicians were weasels.”
⁴⁰
At the time, even as he became a national figure for “getting Hiss,” Nixon was so downcast that he was considering
giving up his congressional seat to go back to practicing law, recalled Herb Klein, a young newsman who had covered Nixon on the Herter Committee trip (he astutely observed that Nixon avidly plunged into street crowds partly to avoid going to embassy cocktail parties).
⁴¹

But Nixon did not quit Congress. He doubled down and ran for the U.S. Senate.

F
or all his feeling that reporters were out to get him, Nixon still had more friends than enemies in the press, particularly back home on the West Coast. His most powerful ally was Kyle Palmer, the political editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. In the fall of 1949, Palmer called Nixon and asked, “Dick, have you thought of running for the Senate?” Nixon answered that he had not, which, as David Halberstam wrote, “was not exactly true.” Ever since the Democrats had taken back the House on the coattails of Truman’s surprise victory in 1948, Nixon had realized that in the House of Representatives he was, as he put it in his memoirs, “a comer with no place to go.”

Palmer pressed Nixon on a run for the U.S. Senate: “Well, I wish you’d give it some thought because we’ll all support you if you do.”
¹
The backing of the
Los Angeles Times
was a major boon: It meant no primary challenger and instant access to deep pocket contributors. On November 3, Nixon announced his candidacy for the Senate. Picking up his cudgel as champion for the “forgotten man,” he warned of an immense “slush fund” controlled by a “clique of labor lobbyists” and vowed, with words that would later be used against him, “We must put on a fighting, rocking, socking campaign.” At the time, it worked: “ ‘Fighting, rocking, socking campaign.’ The phase has caught on,” Murray Chotiner wrote Nixon. “It is one of our greatest assets. It would be a colossal blunder to revert to the conventional campaign. Scores of people have written and asked if
YOU
REALLY MEAN IT
?…
NOW YOU HAVE TO SHOW THEM
.” Nixon wrote “yes” in the margin.
²

Ike and Dick.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

In the early going, Nixon and Pat drove around small towns in a beat-up station wagon with a loudspeaker on top. His opponent, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, bought up radio and TV ads across the state. (Ultimately, Nixon would raise and spend much more money than Douglas.) A rarity as a woman in politics, Douglas, wife of the famous actor Melvyn Douglas, was a high-cheekbone dish, a former actress and light opera star who attracted the wandering eye of Congressman Lyndon Johnson of Texas, among others. She was a bleeding heart liberal, an early model of radical chic (she once stood in a pulpit of a black church and simpered, “I just love the Negro people”).
³
She was also, fortunately for Nixon, a poor politician.

Nixon would later be pilloried by his media critics for smearing Douglas as “the Pink Lady.” Actually, he didn’t have to. Her opponents in the Democratic primary had called her that, as well as “a pinko” and “the red queen,” while spreading anti-Semitic taunts against her husband. In the edgy, wide-open, media-driven world of California politics, the incentives to sling mud were great, and Douglas slung back, eagerly and indiscriminately.

Amazingly, she attacked Nixon as soft on communism. She distributed a leaflet shouting “
THE BIG LIE
! (Hitler invented it. Stalin perfected it. Nixon uses it…)” and claimed that Nixon—not she—was the congressman “the Kremlin loves.”

For Chotiner, now Nixon’s campaign manager, this was too good to be true. He countered with a flyer comparing Mrs. Douglas’s voting record with that of Congressman Vito Marcantonio, a notorious communist sympathizer from New York. The pamphlet described the “Douglas-Marcantonio Axis.” Douglas’s flyer had been printed on yellow paper. Chotiner had an inspiration, and printed the attack on Douglas on pink paper.

The “pink sheet” became notorious in campaign lore. Chotiner had to increase the press run from 50,000 to 500,000 copies. Douglas
spluttered that the leaflet was misleading (it did, in fact, exaggerate her ties to the left) and bought a series of newspaper ads declaring,
THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS
, in which she foolishly, and baselessly, reiterated her charge that Nixon was a fellow traveler in the Marxist cause. She also called Nixon a “pipsqueak,” “Pee Wee,” and, most lastingly, “Tricky Dick.”
⁴

Nixon was later said to have remarked that Douglas was “pink right down to her underwear.” The line, which Nixon never uttered publicly and perhaps not even privately, has entered the Nixon lore, along with the Tricky Dick label.
⁵
In the Eastern press, especially, Nixon was constantly described as a schemer and a bully. In his memoirs, Nixon complained about the unfairness of it all, pointing out that the Douglas campaign repeatedly recruited hecklers to shout him down.
⁶

Nixon may have acted and looked peevish from time to time, but he was, for the most part, having a good time. People generally like to do what they are good at, and Nixon was very good at electoral politics. Hecklers were just an opportunity to stand up for free speech. Besides, he liked being the center of attention. Driving their dented, yellow, wood-paneled Mercury station wagon, Nixon and Pat traveled ten thousand miles around the state of California, stopping wherever they could attract a crowd. Pat handed out sewing thimbles printed with the words
SAFEGUARD THE AMERICAN FAMILY
. Nixon speechified, scowled, smiled, and shook hands. He was hardly a natural at pressing the flesh, but he had an attribute far more important than a hearty handshake: an amazing memory for names. He worked at it, compiling thousands of note cards with the identities of supporters and small personal details about each person. He routinely astounded small-town politicians, businessmen, and shopkeepers by calling them by name and asking after their children, also by name. In time, these note cards, which he studied at night and filled with notations about favors earned and expended, became a “cash register of political memory,” noted Irwin Gellman.

Nixon micromanaged his own campaigns, to the frustration of
Murray Chotiner, but he enjoyed Chotiner’s darkly mischievous turn of mind. The two men talked about ways to set traps for the clumsy Mrs. Douglas, who talked too much and could be bombastic. Feeling increasingly excluded, Pat disapproved of Chotiner’s tactics and manner. On the other hand, she was not shy about wanting to hit back at Douglas’s personal attacks. “How can you let them do that?” she would demand of her husband.
⁷

Nixon was outraged, or perhaps pretended to be, when Douglas hinted strongly that he was a fascist, surrounded by men in “dark shirts.” He kept his temper. He told his advisers that he must not appear “ungallant” to a woman, and he demurred when Chotiner wanted to print a flyer on even brighter red paper. Better to let voters think that
she
was the smear artist.
⁸

Nixon tended to turn pessimistic just when things were looking up, and Election Day, November 7, 1950, gave him a chance to sulk—at least at first. Nixon went to the beach with Pat and the girls, but the day turned gloomy and overcast. He was shivering and morose, sure that voter turnout would be low and that he would lose. With his family, he retreated to a nearly empty movie theater to brood some more. Meanwhile, at the polls, he was clobbering Mrs. Douglas. His nearly twenty-point margin of victory was the biggest in the country for any senatorial candidate. Nixon was only thirty-seven years old, and he was already a senator from one of the largest and most powerful states in the union. That night, he moved from one victory party to another, playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the Democratic theme song—which he appropriated—on the piano. Nothing pleased him more than outfoxing his enemies.

Among the smart
set back East, “Tricky Dick” became a favorite object of derision. The lead satirist was Herbert Block, whose “Herblock” cartoon appeared daily on the editorial page of
The Washington Post
. More than anyone else, it was Herblock who created the physical caricature of Nixon—the dark jowls, the ski-jump nose, the beady eyes. Liberal journals
—The New Republic, The Progressive
,
The Nation
—seemed to delight in poking fun at Nixon as a morality-free parvenu. “If he did wrestle with his conscience,” William Costello wrote mockingly in
The New Republic
, “the match was fixed.” The magazines were small but influential among intellectuals and academics, particularly Ivy Leaguers.
⁹

“Eggheads,” they were called; an egghead was a pretentious highbrow, out of touch with the common man. In later years, the term would be used effectively by Nixon himself against Adlai Stevenson (who was bald), but it first showed up in the widely read column of Joseph and Stewart Alsop.
¹⁰
The Alsops were pure-blooded scions of the establishment, products of Groton and Harvard and Yale, related by marriage to Theodore Roosevelt. Joe Alsop, the older brother, was regarded as effete by the standards of the time—he collected art and was a closeted homosexual—but there was nothing soft about his politics. On foreign policy, he was a hard-liner who preached toughness and interventionism. In 1949, when the Red Chinese triumphed in their civil war, Alsop led the cry, absurd but maddening to the Truman administration, of “Who lost China?”

Alsop was a powerful Washington figure during the early Cold War, a high age of punditry, and he cultivated leaders whom he could lecture in return for scoops. Right from the beginning he spotted Nixon as a Republican internationalist—and a potential source—writing him letters and offering to share with Nixon his interviews with ambassadors from Iron Curtain countries.
¹¹
A few weeks after Nixon won his senate seat in November 1950, Alsop invited the Nixons to dinner at one of his famous “Sunday Night Suppers.”

The Sunday Night Supper, which became a Georgetown institution, was informal. “We’d get bored with our children on Sundays and abandon them and have dinner with each other,” recalled Tish Alsop, Stewart’s wife. But this supposedly casual maid’s-night-out potluck supper became a prized invitation in the insular world of postwar Washington.
¹²
Senators and statesmen were flattered to join the Alsops’ in-crowd circle for boisterous, alcohol-fueled debate and conviviality.

When they arrived at 2720 Dumbarton Street on a Sunday night in early December 1950, the Nixons may have been a little puzzled by Alsop’s quirky abode amid the gracious Federalist and Greek Revival houses in Georgetown. It was severely modern—“garage Palladian,” Alsop joked.
¹³
But within, beneath ancestral portraits, the atmosphere was old-school and genteel. Tish Alsop observed that Nixon was ill at ease from the moment he walked in. He did not mingle but “sank quickly into a big wing chair,” she recalled. His discomfort became acute embarrassment at dinner. At the table across from Nixon sat Ambassador Averell Harriman, also Groton and Yale, but not exactly a gracious gentleman on this night. “The Crocodile,” as he was known for his habit of snapping at people, looked straight at Nixon and announced in a loud voice (he was slightly deaf), “I will not break bread with this man!” Harriman had been a supporter of Helen Gahagan Douglas and regarded Nixon as an inferior being. He turned off his hearing aid, refused to eat anything, and shortly left the dinner.

The Nixons left no record of the evening, but it is not hard to imagine how they felt. It probably did not help that Alsop, confused, called his guest “Russell Nixon.” Tish Alsop, the Nixons’ hostess at a dance party on another occasion, was almost as judgmental as Harriman. She found both Nixons “wooden and stiff” and “terribly difficult to talk to,” she told historian Fawn Brodie. “Nixon danced only one dance, with me. He’s a terrible dancer. Pat didn’t dance at all. They stayed only half an hour. It was as if the high school monitor had suddenly appeared. I couldn’t wait for him to go.”
¹⁴

The Georgetown set was influential and would become more so as Washington emerged as a superpower capital. Joe Alsop’s closest female friends were Polly Wisner, wife of the chief of operations at the CIA, and Katharine Graham, daughter of the owner of
The Washington Post
. They were bonded by ties of school and club, class and ritual. There was the “nine o’clock network,” as Phil Graham, Kay’s husband, called the three-way phone conversation and gossip exchange that took place every morning among Mrs. Graham, Mrs. Wisner, and Evangeline Bruce, wife of America’s most worldly diplomat,
David Bruce. At the Cooking Class, the same three women joined the wives of several top CIA and State Department officials to learn how to cook French cuisine with a Foreign Service wife named Julia Child. “Dancing Class” was what the set called the triannual formal balls at the posh Sulgrave Club (politicians were generally excluded).
¹⁵
Social Georgetown was not the Nixons’ world; indeed, in Nixon’s mind and in truth, it was to become the enemy camp.

The Nixons were hardly social outcasts, but getting on with the swells was never easy. That same December of 1950, they were invited to a dance at the Sulgrave Club hosted by Luvie Pearson, the wife of Drew Pearson, the muckraking columnist who was socially well connected. During the Senate campaign, Pearson had written that Pat had to wear costly dresses because she was too bony to wear regular sizes. “I thought that was the height of viciousness,” Pat wrote a friend. About the Pearsons’ party at the Sulgrave, she wrote, “They had the nerve to invite us.”
¹⁶

The Sulgrave party turned into a near-brawl. Pearson, who liked to stir the pot with his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, also invited Senator Joe McCarthy, the Red baiter whom Pearson had attacked in his columns. At the end of the evening, Nixon came into the coatroom to find McCarthy with his hands around Pearson’s throat. Seeing Nixon enter, McCarthy gave Pearson a hard slap for good measure. “That one was for you, Dick,” said McCarthy. “Let a good Quaker stop this fight,” said Nixon (according to his memoirs) and pulled the two apart. He later said that he thought McCarthy was going to kill Pearson.
¹⁷