Being Nixon: A Man Divided (9 page)

In February 1951, the Nixons settled in Spring Valley, a new development several miles north of Georgetown. For the first time, Pat could afford a decorator. A reporter from the
Christian Science Monitor
described the living room of the Nixons’ Spring Valley house as having “a bright California look with its cheerful aqua walls.”
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Pat Nixon often went to her husband’s office on Capitol Hill to help with the mail, and while there she became close to Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. In time, Woods, smart, tough, tight-lipped and utterly
loyal, would become almost a member of the family, “Aunt Rose” to Julie and Tricia. His staff regarded Nixon as a considerate, kind boss, although given to occasional fits of temper. “He was very thoughtful and private,” recalled Marjorie Acker, an assistant to Woods.
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Rose Woods was a true believer. At the beginning of one political campaign (1956), she would write Nixon’s mother: “The next few months will be hard to take when we read things about the Boss that are entirely untrue and, in many cases, vicious lies. I know it is particularly hard on you and Mr. Nixon, but just remember that most of the people who are against him, whether they are aware of it or not, are being led around by propaganda which was originally started by the decidedly left-wing element of the country.”
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Nixon worked incessantly. On weekends, Pat and the girls would take picnics to the office in order to see him. During the first six months of 1951, he crisscrossed the country, visiting twenty-five states to tell the tale of how he had exposed Alger Hiss. In September, Pat wrote a friend that “Dick is more tired than I have ever seen him.”
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For some months, Nixon had been suffering from neck and back pains. During one speech, he had felt like passing out, and he began to feel twinges near his heart and a twitch in his eye. Seeking relief, he had heard about a New York doctor named Arnold Hutschnecker, and in January of 1952, he traveled to New York City to visit Hutschnecker’s Park Avenue office. In later years, Hutschnecker would be known, erroneously, as “Nixon’s psychiatrist.” At the time, he was an internist with an interest in psychosomatic illness.
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During Nixon’s four appointments with Hutschnecker in 1952, doctor and patient talked about healthy living habits and discussed politics and the search for world peace. “I was so, so careful not give him the feeling that he was being analyzed,” Hutschnecker told Jonathan Aitken some forty years later. “And it was true. I never analyzed him. But naturally, I did form my own private theories about him. In a nutshell, these were that he felt he owed everything to his mother—his superior intellect, his success, and his ideals. The driving force in his
life was that he wanted to prove to his mother that he was a good boy. He could not be a loser because this would mean letting his mother down.”
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Hutschnecker, finding nothing physically wrong with his patient, prescribed strong barbiturate-based sedatives, a common treatment for anxiety at the time. Nixon tried to relax by following the sun. In December 1951, he was invited to Miami by the junior Democratic senator from Florida, George Smathers, who was worried that Nixon was having a “nervous breakdown.” An affable, hard-partying playboy, Smathers was known as “the Collector” because he collected friends—among them, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—whom he would take on bacchanals to Miami.

It was Smathers who introduced Nixon to the man who would become his best, lifelong friend, Charles Gregory “Bebe” Rebozo. A Cuban immigrant’s son who had attended Miami High School with Smathers and once worked as a steward on Pan American Airways, Rebozo had made a fortune on leveraged real estate. He and Smathers tried to help Nixon unwind with speedboat trips around Miami. Smathers recalled that Rebozo was, at first, put off by Nixon. “Don’t ever send another dull fellow like that down here again,” Rebozo wrote him, according to Smathers. “He doesn’t drink whiskey; he doesn’t chase women; he doesn’t even play golf.” Rebozo’s recollection of their first meeting was kinder: “He had a depth and genuineness about him which didn’t come through because of his shyness, but I saw it.” Nixon and Rebozo were both, at heart, lonely men who had to work at being part of the crowd. They found comfort and companionship in each other’s silence.
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Back in Washington, Nixon gamely joined in the tomfoolery and boozy camaraderie of his old pals in the Chowder and Marching Society, but his recreation wasn’t limited to boys’ nights out. In April 1952, the Nixons stole away for a second honeymoon in Hawaii. They went dancing every evening at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, wrote Julie Nixon Eisenhower, “even taking one hula lesson at the Queen Surf Hotel.” They took a midnight swim and “thought nothing of going through
the staid, formal lobby swathed in towels. Looking back, my mother recalls, ‘It was the last carefree vacation I ever had.’ ”
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Richard Nixon admired
Dwight Eisenhower, and he would come to feel warmly toward him. But Nixon was never entirely comfortable around the five-star general and former Supreme Allied Commander. Ike had a sunny, winning smile, but he could be aloof, even to those closest to him.

As a junior officer doing navy contract termination work in New York City after V-E Day in May of 1945, Nixon had looked down from his twentieth-floor window to witness General Eisenhower welcomed home by a tremendous ticker-tape confetti parade. Nearly four million people had turned out that warm spring day to see the returning hero. In his memoirs, Nixon recalled that he could see that “Eisenhower’s arms were raised high over his head in the gesture that soon would become his trademark.” Nixon would make that gesture—arms outstretched, fingers forming the V-for-victory sign—his own.
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Nixon met Eisenhower, for a moment or two, in 1948 when Ike briefed Nixon and the other members of the Herter Committee on the military situation in Europe. Then, in July of 1950, Nixon was invited to Bohemian Grove, the summer encampment of a men’s club in a redwood forest north of San Francisco. At the time, Nixon was in the midst of his fierce election campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, but ambitious men did not often decline invitations to Bohemian Grove.

The two-week all-men’s party at “the Grove”—with its “Low Jinks” opening party, “Hi Jinks” closing ceremony, and an elaborate ritual conducted by hooded, torch-bearing figures to “cremate Care”—was a chance for high-powered businessmen and political figures to unwind in a private, sylvan setting. Bohemian Grove has a rule, “weaving spiders come not here,” a line from Shakespeare warning visitors against making deals and promoting oneself—but the real sin was to be too obvious about it.
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Nixon was invited by former president Herbert Hoover, who presided over one of the Grove’s camps, each with its own rustic bar and dining room. Hoover’s camp was known as “Cave Man,” and President Hoover, also known as “Chief,” was “Number One Cave Man.” Every day, Hoover invited important men to lunch in a scene that was as informal, intimate, and thoroughly intimidating as the Alsops’ Sunday Night Supper. Hoover sat at the head of the table. “As the Republican nominee in an uphill Senate battle, I was about two places from the bottom,” Nixon recalled. The guest of honor, seated at Hoover’s right, was Dwight Eisenhower.

Nixon watched Eisenhower closely. He noted that the general was deferential but not obsequious with the former president and that he responded to Hoover’s toast with a gracious one of his own. At his “Lakeside Talk” to the encampment later that afternoon, Eisenhower spoke without notes. Later, around the campfire, the men of Cave Man weren’t quite sure that Ike was ready 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,” Nixon wrote.
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Nixon again met Eisenhower in May 1951 on a congressional junket to Europe, where the general was reprising his Supreme Commander role. Nixon observed that Eisenhower was “erect and vital and impeccably tailored.” He “carefully steered away from American politics, but it was clear he had done his homework.” Ike had read about the Hiss case. “The thing that most impressed me was that you not only got Hiss, but you got him fairly,” he told Nixon, whose heart swelled and whose political support swung into the Eisenhower column.
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By the spring of 1952, Nixon was hearing rumors that he might be Ike’s running mate if Eisenhower secured the Republican nomination. “I considered my chances almost impossibly remote,” he recalled. But he got a strong hint that he was a contender on May 8, 1952. Nixon had been invited by Governor Thomas Dewey, the Republican nominee for president in 1948, to address a hundred-dollar-a-plate
GOP fundraiser at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. Nixon—speaking without notes—finished his tough-on-communism national radio broadcast speech in twenty-nine minutes, leaving time for thunderous applause. When he sat down, Dewey snuffed his ever-present cigarette and grasped Nixon’s hand. “That was a terrific speech,” he said. “Make me a promise: don’t get fat, don’t lose your zeal, and you can be president some day.”
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Dewey was one of several close advisers to Eisenhower who quietly plotted and planned his entry into the race, while their duty-honor-country hero pretended, for as long as possible, to remain above politics. After the dinner, Dewey said to Herbert Brownell, a New York lawyer who was in Eisenhower’s inner circle, “We’ve found our man for vice president.”

Nixon was young, not yet forty and still only six years past his first congressional campaign. But he was, in fact, a logical running mate for Ike. Eisenhower was tied to the East Coast foreign policy establishment. Nixon was an internationalist, too, but he was close to the grass roots. He could bash communists and political opponents with equal fervor—letting Ike float above the fray. And he could deliver California.

Nixon needed some private advice. Though Washington cocktail parties put him off, there was one in-crowd hostess he admired and liked and who very much liked him. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt—“Princess Alice” to the press—had sat through every day of the Alger Hiss hearings, rooting Nixon on from the front row. Mrs. Longworth was a pureblood but also a provocateur. She liked troublemakers, and she liked making trouble. Her cousin Franklin Roosevelt finally banned her from the White House in 1940 after she publicly, for outrageous effect, likened FDR to Hitler. “Stalin is my pin-up boy,” she’d say to get a rise out of a dinner guest. She admired Joe McCarthy—“You’re wonderful,” she once told him. She asked him to tea—until he became a drunk and she tired of him.
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Despite the social gulf between them, Mrs. Longworth had an affinity
for Nixon. “Princess Alice” had been a lonely girl. For all her pedigree, she had felt alienated from the Roosevelt family; after the death of Alice’s mother, her father had remarried and had had five more children.
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She was teasing and blunt with Nixon, who could almost relax with her. In the late spring of 1952, Dick and Pat went to dinner at her ghostly mansion near Dupont Circle, and he asked what he should do if Eisenhower offered him a place on the ticket.

“Father used to tell me that being vice president was the most boring job in the world,” she said. But, she added, Nixon was the best man Ike could pick. Nixon protested that the whole prospect was so unlikely that he couldn’t take it seriously. She looked at him skeptically and said, “You and Pat should talk about it so that just in case it does happen you aren’t caught with your drawers down!”
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At midnight on
the night of July 10, 1952, in an un-air-conditioned hotel room near the Chicago Stockyards, Dick and Pat began a conversation that would take all night. Dick had just returned from the Republican National Convention at the nearby International Amphitheatre. There had been rumors in the newspapers that Ike would pick Nixon when the party chose its nominees the next evening, but Nixon professed to be doubtful. He wanted to save the newspapers, he told Pat, as a souvenir “for the grand children.”
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For the next four hours, Pat and Dick talked. If the call came, what would he say? Pat was uneasy, still bruised by the Hiss case and the donnybrook with Helen Gahagan Douglas. Finally, shortly before dawn, Nixon summoned Murray Chotiner to his room. “As a political professional, he might have a different perspective about the whole question,” is the way Nixon explained the call to Chotiner in his memoirs. It’s doubtful that Pat was eager to countenance Chotiner and his cigar-smoke cynicism.

Nixon recalled that he “filled him [Chotiner] in on our discussion and asked for his opinion. He answered in his usual blunt way, ‘There comes a point when you go up or go out.’ ” If Nixon lost, he’d still have his Senate seat; if he won and didn’t like it, he could quit after a
term and still be a young man. After Chotiner left, Nixon and his wife continued to talk. Any arguments were likely quiet ones. “Tricia and I rarely heard voices raised at home because both parents had memories of angry verbal clashes and they cherished harmony,” wrote Julie Nixon Eisenhower.
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Pat was resigned—or pretended to be. “I guess I can make it through one more campaign,” she finally said. Her true feelings were probably ambivalent. She must have known that at least two more campaigns lay ahead. If Eisenhower won and ran again in 1956, Nixon would then be positioned to run for president in 1960. She understood and shared her husband’s ambition to keep on going. After all, before they were even engaged, she had told her friends, “He’s going to be president some day.”

With little or no sleep, Nixon stumbled off to the GOP convention that morning and staggered back to take a nap until the evening session, when the balloting would commence. The temperature outside was 98 degrees, and inside the hotel room it was about the same. Nixon stripped down to his underwear and lay on the bed, “trying to think cool thoughts.” Chotiner burst through the door—Nixon was on Eisenhower’s short list! “It’s still wishful thinking,” replied Nixon. He had just started to drift off to sleep when the phone rang. It was Herbert Brownell Jr. “We picked you,” said the New York lawyer and future attorney general.