The Arrogance of Power (14 page)

Nixon himself bore ultimate responsibility for the campaign against Douglas. Chotiner recalled him as having been “a perfectionist . . . a general who demanded absolute precision and carefully planned coordination in every move. . . .” “Nixon knew everything that was going on,” said Tom Dixon, who as in the past traveled with him as radio announcer and warm-up man. Interviewed in 1997, Dixon and his wife recalled a Nixon who demanded that an audience be “screaming ecstatically” before he would go onstage. Occasionally he had to delay facing the audience until he had recovered from tantrums so violent he seemed “out of control” to Dixon. In 1946 Dixon had voted for his employer. In 1950 Nixon's conduct of the campaign so disillusioned him that he voted for no one.

Further testimony suggesting that Nixon personally favored malicious attacks on Douglas comes from a memoir by the press aide who traveled with him during the campaign, William Arnold. Arnold recalled his employer's reaction when told that his opponent had made “somewhat unflattering” remarks about him in a speech. “Did she say that?” Nixon asked. “Why, I'll castrate her.” Arnold commented sardonically that such retribution would be difficult, since Douglas was a woman. “I don't care,” riposted Nixon. “I'll do it anyway.”

It was Nixon who lowered the already abysmal tone of the contest by telling audiences that Douglas was “pink right down to her underpants.” He even resorted to a sexual smear, insinuating that she had slept with President Truman. Nixon was careful to make such pronouncements at gatherings away from the press or at least from the tiny portion of the press that opposed him. He was equally guarded about ethnic slurs. Douglas's husband, the actor Melvyn Douglas, had been born Hesselberg, of a Jewish father. When an extremist, Gerald Smith, goaded Douglas for being married to a Jew, Nixon disassociated himself.

The Nixon anonymous phone call campaign did however include “Did you know?” messages that whispered about Douglas's Jewish connection. Nixon also sometimes referred to his opponent disingenuously as Helen Hesselberg, a name that neither she nor her husband used. He would then correct himself, as though it had been an unintentional slip. He did this at his sole platform appearance with Douglas, but only after his opponent had left the meeting.

As the campaign went into top gear, during a brief visit to New York, Nixon had sat drinking whiskey into the small hours with the columnist Murray Kempton. Kempton was to recall Nixon's saying how he hated having to end Helen Douglas's political career, because he admired her so much. Years
later, asked by the British publisher David Astor to explain his campaign tactics, Nixon reportedly “cast down his eyes with a look of modest contrition” and explained, “I want you to understand. I was a very young man.”
⁴
In 1950 he was thirty-seven and a veteran of four years in the House of Representatives.

And now he was a U.S. senator, and his star continued to rise. Yet for all his success, or perhaps because of it, Nixon was starting to lose his balance.

His fragile masculine self-image always drew him to the strong and the tough—and the ultimate power of the presidency.

—Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, psychosomatic medicine specialist and psychotherapist consulted by Richard Nixon

T
he strain on Nixon had started to show long before he reached the Senate. There had been the twenty-hour workdays during the Hiss case, the skipped meals, the refusal to take time out for relaxation. It made him quick-tempered with colleagues, as well as “mean” with his family. When he had trouble sleeping, he resorted to sleeping pills. The campaign against Helen Douglas had only driven him to greater limits.

As a senator he continued to work obsessively. When his secretaries left for the day—Nixon had nine—their boss regularly went on working into the evening. He often did not get home for dinner, if at all. “Many times,” said Earl Chapman, a friend in whom Pat confided, he worked “until the small hours. . . . Maybe if he gets through early enough he'll come back home, but many times he'll curl up on the couch and get a few hours' sleep. Then he'll get a little breakfast and shave, and go right down to the Senate chambers. . . .”

A month or two into this punishing schedule Nixon began to be plagued with persistent back and neck pain. The first doctors he consulted were no help, and he found himself perusing a book on psychosomatic illness pressed on him by the outgoing senator from California, Sheridan Downey. The book was
The Will to Live,
by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, an easy-to-read best-seller
written for people “in the grips of acute conflict.” It emphasized “the interaction of the human psyche and bodily reactions.”

Hutschnecker was described by one academic as “a sort of Pavlovian and Freudian synthesizer.” He himself professed that he “treated my patients as if they are my children.” Famous clients over the years reportedly included the actresses Elizabeth Taylor, Celeste Holm, and Rita Hayworth and the novelist Erich Maria Remarque. An Austrian emigré who graduated in Berlin soon after World War I, he had been working in New York City since 1936.

While he practiced internal medicine, he had early in his career been interested in the way mental and emotional disturbances affect health. By 1951, this topic had become the primary focus of his work. He dropped internal medicine completely by 1955, to specialize exclusively as a psychotherapist engaged in what he called “psychoanalytically oriented treatment of emotional problems.”
¹

Dr. Hutschnecker had, in the words of one interviewer, “a touch of the missionary zeal of a Billy Graham, of the cheery optimism of a Norman Vincent Peale, of the psychic beliefs of a Jeane Dixon, and an accent a bit reminiscent of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove.” Nixon, as we have seen, publicly associated himself with both Graham and Peale, and, according to one close aide, credited the prophecies of Dixon, the popular astrologer.

In
The Will to Live,
Hutschnecker dealt with a range of human complaints: chronic fatigue, hypertension, ulcers, insomnia, the inability to love, aggression, impotence in men and frigidity in women. On reading it, Nixon took a step that was to lead to a long and trusting relationship with the doctor—as well as to future political embarrassment. He asked one of his new secretaries, Rose Mary Woods, to telephone Hutschnecker and ask if he would take on a new private patient. Woods, just starting the loyal service to Nixon that would one day give her a notorious role in the Watergate saga, told Hutschnecker her boss was “really interested in something in
The Will to Live
that related to himself.”

So it was that, probably in the early fall of 1951, Nixon went to New York and presented himself at Dr. Hutschnecker's imposing office at 829 Park Avenue. The doctor's wife, acting as his receptionist that day, entered the inner sanctum to announce that the young senator had arrived—and looked “very tense.” He was to see Hutschnecker several times that first year and in the four years that followed.

From 1952, when he became vice president, Nixon arrived for his consultations—five that year—openly, in the official limousine, and with a Secret Service escort. In 1955, though, when Hutschnecker began to specialize solely in psychotherapy, Nixon became worried about publicity. After Walter Winchell had made a snide reference to the visits in one of his columns, he began taking his physical ailments to a military doctor in Washington.

By that time he and Hutschnecker had established a close relationship and met privately whenever Nixon came to New York. “I remember going to his
suite in the Waldorf,” the doctor recalled, “and hearing him singing so happily in the shower. And I said to myself, ‘Aha, my treatment is working.' ”

The discreet meetings continued throughout the fifties. When Nixon called, said Hutschnecker, “He'd never say: ‘I have a problem.' He'd say, ‘Could we have breakfast?' And I'd go.” “He needed me. It was what we call a transference, a trust. He came to me when he had decisions to make. Or when something was pending, and it troubled him.”

Nixon did not always reveal what was on his mind. After one 1952 visit Hutschnecker was astonished to learn from the press of his patient's possible selection as Eisenhower's vice presidential running mate. It must have been the matter uppermost in Nixon's mind during the consultation, yet he had failed to mention it. Later the same year, however, when enmeshed in allegations of having taken under-the-table money—the fund scandal
*
—Nixon tried frantically to reach the doctor.

“I went out for a while one day, and when I came back, my wife said, ‘Where were you? The senator's office was calling every ten minutes.' They had been holding the plane, and the last call had been just a few minutes before, but Mr. Nixon could not wait any longer. . . . I learned later about the secret fund charges.”

The psychotherapist also made a number of trips to see Nixon in his Washington office. During one lunch he astonished the senator by declaring that he considered both Joe McCarthy and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles mentally disturbed. “Dr. Hutschnecker . . .” Nixon wrote in a 1959 note to Rose Woods, “I want to have him come down . . . check with me as to whether I want it before we go on vacation.” The following year, during the campaign against John F. Kennedy, there was another summons.

In early 1961, within weeks of the Republican handover of the White House, Nixon was back at the doctor's office. The following year he consulted Hutschnecker before his disastrous bid for the governorship of California, having ignored the doctor's advice not to run. A journalist who happened to live next door to the building that housed Hutschnecker's Park Avenue offices, Harriet Van Horne, recalled seeing Nixon's “grim visage” passing beneath the canopy. “I once asked a building employee,” Horne recalled, “ ‘Does Mr. Nixon visit friends at 829?' ‘Naw,' came the reply. ‘He comes to see the shrink.' ”

During the presidency, however, Nixon's aides saw to it that the link to Hutschnecker was virtually severed, though he would make two visits to the White House, the first to discuss violent crime and the second after the U.S. incursion into Cambodia in 1970. The doctor had long hoped that Nixon would swiftly get the United States out of Vietnam, and a friend quoted him as saying, “Pavlovian technique had been helping him brainwash Nixon into becoming a
better person.” He believed he could “remake the man into a dove” on Southeast Asia. But the second trip was to misfire. As reported in context later, Nixon would end the meeting in frustration after a few minutes. There were a number of other meetings outside the White House, though, but only when Nixon felt he could avoid detection—not only by the press but, the doctor implied, by his own aides.

Later, after the resignation, the doctor would visit Nixon at San Clemente. By then he seemed, Hutschnecker thought, “like a confessant.” They met for the last time in 1993, when Nixon asked the doctor to accompany him to Pat's funeral. He was seated, at Nixon's request, in the area allotted to the family. The doctor did not attend the former president's own funeral the following year because, as he put it, there was no one left for him to help.

A few cautious comments aside, Dr. Hutschnecker did not speak publicly about his patient over the years. He avoided putting Nixon's name on prescriptions, kept his name out of the appointment book, and apparently did not ask for payment. Although he is said to have been less guarded in private—snippets of his dinner party asides leaked out on occasion—the doctor was careful to shield Nixon as medical ethics required.

In 1995, however, he gave the first of three lengthy interviews for this book. Toward the end of the former president's life, Hutschnecker said, he had written authorizing him to write about their relationship, assuming Hutschnecker would survive him. It must have seemed a reasonable gamble that he would not, for the doctor was nearly ninety at the time. Yet Nixon did die first, and Hutschnecker wrote the draft of a manuscript about his experiences with his patient, though he kept it at home unpublished. He had felt constrained, he said, to “leave out a lot.”

Astonishingly sprightly at ninety-seven and living testimony to his own advice on how to achieve longevity, Dr. Hutschnecker received his interviewer at his home in sylvan northern Connecticut. He answered questions in a study cluttered with the bric-a-brac of a long professional life, including a photograph of Richard Nixon—inscribed in 1977 “in appreciation of friendship”—and a Nixon gift of ivory elephants. Later, on the veranda, over tea laced with Irish whiskey, he talked on in his heavily German-accented English about the politician to whom he had had such exclusive access.

Restricting himself to what he felt ethically acceptable, Dr. Hutschnecker said little of Nixon's first visit, in 1951. His patient's initial complaint, he said, had been of feeling “a little nervous, irritable, and not sleeping so good. I gave him a mild sedative and told him to come back in two weeks.”

Nixon, however, did not travel from Washington to New York merely to obtain a prescription for insomnia. In a brief response to a question posed by
Newsweek,
Hutschnecker once let slip that “Nixon wondered if there was an emotional cause” for what was bothering him physically. Nixon, for his part, said years later that he always believed there was a direct relation between physical and mental health.

One aspect of Nixon's problem, the doctor revealed years later, was depression. Pat Nixon spoke of her husband's having been “more depressed than she ever remembered” early in the election year of 1956. The eminent
New York Times
journalist Harrison Salisbury recalled a meeting in early 1960, the year of the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, with a businessman who had served with Nixon in the war, who, like other acquaintances in the service, knew him as Nick. “Say,” the businessman asked Salisbury, “is Nick still seeing that shrink of his in New York?” He then explained to a surprised Salisbury that Nixon “had severe ups and downs, and it was not easy to pull him up when he fell into depression”—as he had, the businessmen said, at the time of the conversation with Salisbury.
²
Len Garment, a Nixon colleague from the mid-sixties—himself no stranger to the malady—said Nixon suffered from “powerful depression.”

Hutschnecker told the author that his patient had at first been reluctant to talk about himself but gradually became more open. As the doctor put it, he prided himself on being able to “lure patients into therapy.” He eventually built up enough trust that—some four years into their relationship—Nixon “said he could really tell me everything. It was safe.” The doctor never did get Nixon to accept a full course of psychotherapy, but they seem to have found some sort of mutually acceptable middle ground.

As early as the end of the second session, Hutschnecker said, he was certain his patient's sharp intellect and outward self-confidence masked “deep-seated inhibitions.” He thought “Nixon was an enigma, not just to me but to himself. And I . . . had to try to understand what motivated his superdrive, and—paradoxically—his inhibitions.”

As other information suggests, Hutschnecker believed that Frank Nixon had been a “brutal and cruel” man who had beaten his sons and “brutalized” his wife. While the doctor viewed this as an enormously important factor in Nixon's makeup, the heart of the problem, he believed, was Hannah herself. “Clinically,” Hutschnecker said, “it started with the mother. Nixon's mother was
so
religious he was trapped in many ways. I wouldn't say that he was really religious but he was totally devoted to his mother—like a robot if you want. Even to the last, you know, he was kneeling down to pray every day. He was completely smothered. His mother was really his downfall.”

While Nixon's father died in 1956, Hannah lived on until 1967, passing away just a year before her son was elected president. In 1960, during his losing fight against Kennedy, she had still been very active. Hutschnecker thought Nixon's performance in the televised debates then—as well as earlier, in his self-revealing 1952 TV speech answering charges about illicit funds—was affected by the notion that his mother could see him. “I was convinced,” he said, “of the connection between being in front of the camera and being in front of his mother. . . . Multiply the singular face of a critical mother watching the flaws, to the flaws seen by millions, then one can better comprehend the telegenic awkwardness of Nixon. . . . I believe that the image of the saintly but
stern face of his mother defeated him more than any other factor. . . . He wanted his mother to believe him perfect. That was his problem.”