Six Crises (38 page)

Pat and I walked down the steps of the ramp, greeted the welcoming committee, and I proceeded to inspect the military guard of honor. As I was doing so, I noticed twenty or thirty mechanics standing in a group nearby. They seemed friendly in contrast to the mob so I walked over and shook hands with them. This brief period gave me time to think. I decided then that I would dispense with the rest of the formalities at the airport. As I walked back to the official welcoming committee, the mob took out its wrath on the mechanics in particularly vicious and filthy language, which Walters interpreted to me.

“Let's dispense with the customary speeches here and go directly to our cars,” I told the ranking member of the official host committee, Foreign Minister Oscar Garcia Velutini. “No one could possibly hear what we said over the noise of this mob.” Before he had a chance to reply, I took Pat's arm and led the way down the plush red carpet leading from the plane to the terminal building. The Foreign Minister and his wife followed behind us. Our cars for some inexplicable reason were on the other side of the terminal building rather than on the airfield, which would have made far better sense. Just as we reached the terminal door, the band once again struck up the
Venezuelan National Anthem. We stopped and stood at attention. But the mob continued to scream so loudly that they almost drowned out the music. Then as we stood there I had the sensation that rain was falling—but it was an absolutely clear day, without a cloud in the sky. I looked up. The rain was coming down from the mob leaning over the rail of the observation deck above us. I had my first experience as a target for spit in Lima. But this was a real baptism. Not just one but hundreds of people were there on the balcony spitting down on us as we stood listening to their national anthem.

I saw Pat's new red suit, which she had purchased especially for this trip, being splotched, and what made it worse was that some of the spit was dirty brown, coming from a tobacco-chewing crowd. But we stuck it out until the anthem was completed. We preferred the indignity of spit to that of letting the mob see the Vice President of the United States duck and run away. And we also wanted to show them that we respected their national anthem even if they did not. As we started to move on into the airport lobby, an object hit my face. It was a whistle thrown or dropped by one of those on the balcony. I bent down, picked it up, thought for a moment of throwing it back and then dropped it. I realized that even if I were to toss back this little trinket I might lay myself open to charges that I was throwing things at the people of Venezuela.

The police did absolutely nothing, and this made those in the crowd all the more aggressive. Standing there for those few seconds was, from the standpoint of temper control, one of my most difficult experiences. Honoré de Balzac once wrote that politicians are “monsters of self-possession.” Yet while we may show this veneer on the outside, inside the turmoil becomes almost unbearable.

Pat shared this trial at my side. In one sense, I was horrified that she should be subjected to it. In another sense, I was proud that she was with me. As we walked toward the car, she reached through a nearby barricade to pat a girl's shoulder and shake her hand. The girl, who had been one of those shouting and spitting, turned her head and wept in shame.

After we had passed through the terminal and came out the door in front, we were surrounded by a throng of people who had rushed down from the observation deck. There were no Venezuelan police in sight. Our own Secret Service men helped us push our way to the closed limousines awaiting us. Standard operating procedure was to have both an open and a closed car at the airport so that either one
could be used. The determining factor usually was the weather. But in this case Sherwood wisely decided upon the closed car for obvious security reasons. As events turned out, if he had chosen otherwise, it probably would have cost us our lives.

It was a wild and weird ride along the Autopista from the airport to Caracas. The windows of the car were rolled up, the doors were locked, and it was hot and stuffy inside. Outside some of the mob who had automobiles “buzzed” the motorcade, zig-zagging between the official cars. In our car, the Foreign Minister sat at my left, Sherwood and Walters sat on the two jump seats in front of us, and Secret Service agent Wade Rodham sat up front with our Venezuelan driver. Mrs. Nixon was in the car behind us with the Foreign Minister's wife, Major Hughes, and two Secret Service agents.

The Foreign Minister, a gentle, well-intentioned man, was terribly upset. He kept wringing his hands, apologizing for what had happened. He took a neat white handkerchief from his pocket and tried to wipe the spit from my suit and shirt.

“Don't bother,” I told him somewhat irritably. “I am going to burn these clothes as soon as I can get out of them.” He tried to explain. “The Venezuelan people have been without freedom so long that they tend now to express themselves more vigorously perhaps than they should. In our new government we do not want to do anything which would be interpreted as a suppression of freedom.”

I could see that he believed what he was saying and I dropped the diplomatic double-talk and let him have it with both barrels. “If your new government,” I said, “doesn't have the guts and good sense to control a mob like the one at the airport, there soon will be no freedom for anyone in Venezuela. Freedom does not mean the right to engage in mob action. Don't you realize that that mob was Communist-led? Didn't the mob at the airport deny free speech to you and to me? Didn't they shout and spit during the playing of your own national anthem as well as mine?”

The Foreign Minister replied that he agreed with me. But then he went on, “I hope you won't say that publicly because our government is fearful of doing anything which might embarrass or anger the Venezuelan Communists. They helped us overthrow Perez Jimenez and we are trying to find a way to work with them.”

This was too much. I sat back in silence and watched the cars of the mob buzz in and out of our motorcade like a swarm of angry bees. I realized that I had spoken to him rather brutally. But I felt that some shock treatment was necessary for one who was so naïve as
to believe that the answer to the complex problem of government is simply to give the people freedom to do anything that they please, without any rules of conduct and order.

Then, just as we reached the city limits, I heard a dull thud and thought for a moment that we had hit a chuck hole in the road. But then another and another followed and I realized that rocks were hitting our car. A moment later our driver slammed on the brakes. We had come upon an ambush, which was one of four, we learned afterwards, which had been planned for us. A mass of people rushed into the street from their hiding places, spitting, throwing rocks, waving placards, and shouting obscenities.

Somehow the driver steered his way through this group and our motorcade sped on up Avenida Sucre, a six-lane highway, toward the Panteon Nacional in the center of Caracas where I was to lay a wreath at the tomb of Simon Bolivar, the great liberator of South America. As I looked out the window, I saw that the sidewalks were virtually empty, the stores locked and shuttered. The inside of the car, which was now stifling hot, made me think of a tank, battened down and ready for combat. But while there were no pedestrians in sight on the avenue itself, traffic seemed heavy despite the fact that I had been told the route would be cleared for the motorcade.

Then we hit our first real traffic jam, a roadblock of buses and automobiles backed up behind a huge dump truck which had been deliberately parked in the center of the street. We barely came to a stop when a crowd seemed to materialize out of nowhere. The Venezuelan and U. S. flags were ripped from the front of our car. Several men began kicking the fenders and doors of the car and one huge fat character threw himself over the hood. Then six Secret Service men jumped out of a car behind us and went to work on the men surrounding our limousine. Not one of the Venezuelan police officers got off his motorcycle to join in. I was told later that only one Caracas detective, who was a refugee from one of the Central European countries, worked with skill and effectiveness alongside our Secret Service men. After two or three minutes they had cleared away the obstructors and we moved on again.

We ran into our third blockade only four blocks from the Bolivar Tomb. Three banks of buses, trucks, and automobiles had been parked directly in the path of our motorcade. We could not cross the center island because of the traffic coming down the other side of the street. Looking ahead at the traffic jam, I could see that we were really stuck here. For a moment nothing happened and then Sherwood said, “Here
they come.” Out of the alleys and the side streets poured a screaming mob of two to three hundred, throwing rocks, brandishing sticks and pieces of steel pipe. They swarmed around our car. A large rock smashed against the shatterproof window and stuck there, spraying glass into the Foreign Minister's face.

“It's my eye, my eye,” he moaned.

For twelve minutes, which seemed like twelve hours, we sat there, the crowd milling about, shouting, screaming, and attacking. The leaders were easy to identify because they rode piggy-back so that they could see and be seen by the mob they were directing. They hit the windows and doors of our car with pipes and sticks and those who had no weapons used their feet and bare fists to beat upon the car. The spit was flying so fast that the driver turned on his windshield wipers.

Again our Secret Service agents moved into action.
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Never once using their weapons, they pushed and shoved the attackers from our doors but just as soon as one agent pushed someone away another would slip behind and attack again. As they beat upon the limousine and tried to open its doors, I could hear the shouts.
“Muera Nixon, Muera Nixon.”
Now it was Death to Nixon rather than Go Home Nixon.

This crowd was out for blood. I sat there as stoically as possible, knowing that the last thing I should do would be to show fear to a mob like this. Several times I glanced back at the car behind us. Pat appeared to be talking to the Foreign Minister's wife as calmly as though the trouble was no worse than an afternoon traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway. Her driver had shown the good judgment to jam his front bumper against our car so that none of the mob could get at our back window. Looking ahead I could see the truck filled with reporters and cameramen in action. One man in the mob tried to scramble onto the truck and Hank Griffin, the Associated Press photographer, slugged him back to the street with his camera.

By this time the Foreign Minister was close to hysterics. He kept repeating, “This is terrible. This is terrible.”

What does a man think of at a time like this? I can testify that he certainly does not think of the problems of the world; he thinks only
of what he can do to get out of the danger he is in. I knew that above all I had to control my emotions and think calmly: I must be as cold as the mob was hot. The test of leadership is whether one has the ability, as Kipling once said, to keep his head while others are losing theirs.

One thought flashed through my mind which was not related to the immediate danger. It made me almost physically ill to see the fanatical frenzy in the eyes of teenagers—boys and girls who were very little older than my twelve-year-old daughter, Tricia. My reaction was a feeling of absolute hatred for the tough Communist agitators who were driving children to this irrational state.

But there was little time for thoughts like this. One of the ringleaders—a typical tough thug started to bash in the window next to me with a big iron pipe. The shatterproof glass did not break but it splattered into the car. Walters got a mouthful and I thought for an instant, “There goes my interpreter.” Sherwood was hit. Some of it nicked me in the face.

Then we heard the attacker shout a command and our car began to rock. I knew now what was happening. It was a common tactic for mobs throughout the world to rock a car, turn it over, set it afire. For an instant, the realization passed through my mind—we might be killed—and then it was gone.

Sherwood must have had the same thought. He pulled his revolver and said, “Let's get some of these sons-of-bitches.” I could see Rodham in the front seat with the sweat pouring down his neck as he pulled his revolver and faced the attackers on my side of the car. “I figured we were goners and I was determined to get six of those bastards before they got us,” he was to tell me later.

At this point I made a quick decision. I reached forward, put my hand on Sherwood's arm and told him to hold fire. Why I did this at the time, I cannot say, except that I knew intuitively that the firing of a gun would be the excuse for the mob to get completely out of hand. I also was aware of the Communist tactic of engaging in violence up to the point of forcing their opponents to react. Then when the victim tries to defend himself, the Communists blame him for starting the whole affair. I was determined that we not get caught in this position.

The mob rocked the car more and more vigorously and then suddenly our car began to move forward and we were off. The driver of the newsmen's truck in front of us somehow had edged his way into the oncoming lane of traffic, clearing a path for us like a football blocker
leading a ball carrier. Our driver took off down the wrong side of the street with Mrs. Nixon's car following behind us.

As the remnants of our motorcade swung up the narrow street toward the Panteon Plaza for the scheduled wreath-laying, I made another spot decision which proved to be providential for our physical safety. If the Communists had prepared roadblocks on the Avenida Sucre, I assumed they certainly would have something planned for the ceremony at the Bolivar Tomb, I ordered the driver to turn down the next side street in the opposite direction from the Plaza. As he turned from the scheduled route, the Foreign Minister became hysterical. “We can't leave our protection,” he cried, “we've got to follow the police escort.”