Justice for All (51 page)

Nixon received the nomination, and Warren congratulated him through gritted teeth. With the train trip behind him and his chances of ever becoming president now effectively gone, Warren turned to a friend and confessed his bewilderment at what had occurred. “How do you account for him doing a thing like this?” Warren asked, speaking to himself as well as his listener. “I just can't understand anybody doing such a thing as that.”
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Warren never publicly vented his full anger at Nixon over the events of that night and the days to come. But it rankled him as few other events in his life did. The full measure of his unhappiness would come to light only in glancing admissions and occasionally unguarded remarks. In later years, Warren would grumble to his clerks and children, would complain to an occasional close friend. And he would, in time, find ways to get even. But while their feud was a long one, and did not begin in 1952, it was that night on the train that would sear Warren's impression of Nixon as untrustworthy. As with the internment, his memoirs offer a clipped version, one in which he ratcheted down his anger while still displaying a telltale sliver:

 

Those terse sentences contain hints of Warren's feelings—the indignant insistence that he would not “front for anyone,” the pointed notation that the delegate caucuses did not include Nixon “as far as I know,” even the reference to “Nixon delegates” when in fact all those aboard were at least nominally pledged to Warren. Those all suggest a still-angry Warren recalling that night nearly twenty years later. An even clearer sign comes from the reaction of one person close to him reading those same words. When Warren sent his manuscript draft to Merrell Small, an old friend and colleague from the gubernatorial years, Small read those sentences and suggested that Warren was pulling his punches:

 

Nixon came to Sacramento in August, and now it was the forty-year-old senator who held the spotlight, the governor twenty years his senior accompanying him, dutifully posing for photographs and calling on Republicans to unite.
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A few days later, Eisenhower himself, taking a break from his postconvention vacation in Colorado, arrived in Los Angeles to address a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a group naturally well disposed toward the general. Warren, still smarting, again accompanied Nixon—and this time Eisenhower, too—but the event went poorly. Eisenhower asked Warren, Warren remembered later, “to take no part in the affair,” by which he apparently meant not to take part in planning the visit. Warren held back, then watched in amusement as it flopped.

A parade was scheduled for late afternoon, when Los Angeles traffic made it impractical. The motorcade shoved off early, taking the few people lining the route by surprise. And at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a sparse crowd greeted the nominees. The
Los Angeles Times
did its best for its fellow Republicans, seeking out just the angle to make the stadium appear as full as possible. Even those efforts were not enough. The corners of its photographs on the full page devoted to pictures of Eisenhower's day showed empty bleachers, undermining the paper's insistence of an electrifying address before “thousands of cheering listeners.”
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Warren's testy recollection was closer to the truth. “The affair,” he wrote, “was a complete washout. . . . It was a humiliating and almost ludicrous experience.” Riding with Eisenhower to the airport, Warren assured him that the sparse crowd along the route and the embarrassing spectacle of speaking to a nearly empty stadium would not be repeated. “We would fill the stadium for him,” Warren said, and one can imagine him leaning on the “we” in that sentence. He then added with evident satisfaction, “We did exactly that sometime later, giving him a rousing welcome.”
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After that bumpy start, the Republican campaign settled into a more favorable rhythm in September. Running against Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower led in most polls. But Warren's friends, despite their surface support for their party's ticket, continued to nurse their convention wounds. In mid-September, they retaliated, and just as surely as June and July had launched Nixon's national political standing at the expense of Earl Warren, so did September nearly finish it, this time at the hands of Warren loyalists.

In mid-September, Nixon departed on a train trip through California, starting in the south and traveling north, heading eventually for Oregon. Warren was invited to join, but declined, citing a previous engagement.
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As Nixon's train passed through Southern California on September 18, Keith McCormac boarded and showed Nixon a copy of a newspaper. For a moment, Nixon was dumbfounded. “He was just sitting there, looking at it,” McCormac said. Nixon aides shuffled the candidate into a car by himself and canceled the next whistle-stop on the tour. It was not until Tulare that Nixon had regained enough composure to appear again in public.
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The story being carried in the nation's newspapers that day had been slow to break, and its bounce startled the Nixon team. For months, sources in California had trafficked in the rumor that Nixon kept a “secret fund,” a stash of money raised from supporters to help him make ends meet. In one sense, the fund was not secret at all. Wealthy donors, many from the well-to-do Los Angeles suburbs of Pasadena and San Marino, had been asked for contributions, and had complied, sending checks to Dana Smith, a friend of Nixon's who had the job of managing the fund. Nixon had discussed the fund with at least one reporter, Peter Edson, who had given the story a light treatment, referring to the money as “an extra expense allowance” and stressing not only that donors were not entitled to ask for favors in return for contributions but even that the names of donors were concealed from Nixon to prevent any such overtures .
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The version of the story by
New York Post
reporter Leo Katcher was notably different—in tone as well as in effect. “Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary,” the tabloid headline blared. The fund, Katcher reported, accurately if luridly, was “devoted exclusively to the financial comfort of Sen. Nixon.”
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It was that account that struck Nixon dumb that September morning. The next several days were the most agonizing of Nixon's life, up to that point at least. His handlers first tried to ignore the story, then argued that it was the sensationalized work of leftist opponents of Nixon, Communist foes afraid of what it would mean for them should he be elected. The former approach was futile—the story, with its charges that Nixon had amassed $18,000 for his personal and political benefit, now had legs, and ignoring it was doing nothing to make it go away. The latter response was disingenuous—those behind this charge were not Communists. Suddenly, the heavily favored Republican ticket was in jeopardy, and Eisenhower came under pressure to dump Nixon.
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Tom Dewey warned Nixon that his days could well be numbered. “Did Ike tell you that he went to lunch with a lot of his old friends today, and that everyone of them except one thought you ought to get off the ticket?” Dewey asked Nixon on September 20. Ike had told Nixon no such thing. In fact, he told Nixon nothing. Instead, he deliberately, cruelly, left him hanging. Days passed, and Eisenhower declined to speak with Nixon or to come to his aid. He waited, refusing to be rushed. Finally, on the twentieth, the two men spoke by phone, and Nixon snapped.

After remarking on how difficult the past couple of days had been for young Nixon, Eisenhower cautiously made clear that he remained undecided about Nixon's future. “This is an awful hard thing for me to decide,” he ventured.

For Nixon, that was too much. “Well, General,” he responded, “I know how it is, but there comes a time in matters like this when you've either got to shit or get off the pot.”
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Men did not speak that way to General Eisenhower. They did not bully him, and they did not curse at him. Faced with Nixon's impertinence as well as his advisers' conviction that the senator was fast becoming a liability, Eisenhower forced the matter back into Nixon's hands:

 

The next day brought more bad news, and a further increase in the pressure. Harold Stassen, long-standing leader of the Republican Party's liberals, wired Nixon to tell him to pull the plug. “After a thoughtful review of the entire situation, Dick, I have regretfully reached a conclusion which [I] feel that I should frankly tell you,” he wrote, forwarding along a statement for Nixon to read. Its conclusion: Nixon, Stassen felt, should offer to quit. “If [Eisenhower] decides to accept your offer,” Stassen said, “Earl Warren should be named to step in.”
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Warren was silent. Just as Warren's fall in Chicago had paved the way for Nixon's ascent, so now did Nixon's potential fall offer opportunity for Warren. He watched and waited. As late as September 22, four days after the stories had first broken, Warren remained aloof, “withholding comment . . . until all the evidence has been presented.”
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Finally, on September 23, Nixon spoke. He addressed the nation on television, speaking from Los Angeles at six-thirty that night. Forever remembered as the “Checkers” speech, Nixon's address emphasized that he had received none of the money from the fund, that it had underwritten expenses but paid him no salary, that in contrast to his well-to-do Democratic opponents, Nixon and his wife Pat were a couple of modest income. “I should say this,” he implored, “that Pat doesn't have a mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat; and I always tell her that she'd look good in anything.”
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The speech's signature passage, however, was one of mawkish defiance:

That was Nixon's touch: He was a decent, average man, and his opponents were the type of people who would take a puppy from a six-year-old. His tactical success, meanwhile, was in asking viewers to register their response to his speech by wiring the Republican National Committee. Nixon promised he would accept the committee's judgment. With that, he left the stage, angry with himself for overrunning his time, sure that he had failed.
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He had not. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured in, overwhelmingly in support of Nixon. Not everyone liked the speech; Eisenhower, for one, was furious at Nixon's demand that the Democratic candidates disclose their personal finances; the general well knew that if they complied, he would have to as well. As Nixon reached that point in his address, Eisenhower, holding a pencil and a legal pad, pressed so hard that the pencil point snapped.
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But once the public had spoken, Eisenhower had no choice. He summoned Nixon to Wheeling, West Virginia, and, when Nixon arrived, greeted him at the plane. Nixon was flustered and responded that Eisenhower had not needed to meet him.

“Why not?” Eisenhower asked. “You're my boy.”
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Nixon's future was saved, and the Checkers speech passed into history as a signature act of self-recovery. Less remembered, however, is how close Nixon's career came to ending that September. And still less recalled is the role that Warren played in it. While Warren did not himself leak the secret-fund story, people loyal to him apparently did. Leo Katcher, the
New York Post
reporter who was among the first to break the story, would later go on to write an admiring biography of the then chief justice in 1967, and Warren, alarmed that Katcher would embark on such a project, took unusual pains to make sure others knew he was not cooperating with it.
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In that book, Katcher would claim that he first heard of the fund from “an intimate of Nixon,” and would discount rumors that Warren friends were behind it,
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but years earlier, when the story was still fresh, he attributed it to a “Warren Republican”
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unhappy with Nixon's selection as vice president. Warren himself, though tactically distant from the leak, nevertheless was happy to let Nixon dangle and to let others lean on Eisenhower. When Nixon saved himself, Warren had no choice but to come back to the ticket. He had, however, enjoyed the spectacle.