The Arrogance of Power (20 page)

But a failure it was not. In response to the speech, some four million telegrams flooded in, the vast majority of them in Nixon's favor. Many were euphoric, describing him as “a great man,” “dynamic,” even “a modern-day Lincoln.” Both he and Pat were eulogized. A woman with two fur coats offered Pat one of them. Another sent twenty-five dollars she had saved toward a new coat for herself.

Nixon had struck a valuable populist chord. He had “stripped himself naked,” one columnist reported, “for all the world to see, and he brought the missus and the kids and the dog and his war record into the act. . . . The sophisticates sneer, but this came closer to humanizing the Republican Party than anything that has happened in my memory.”

Eisenhower had watched the speech with his wife, Mamie, at his Cleveland, Ohio, hotel. Mamie, like so many others, was weeping by its end. The general realized how effective it had been and sent Nixon a congratulatory telegram, which ironically was temporarily lost in the torrent of cable traffic. He went out to tell supporters he admired Nixon's courage and would decide about keeping him on as running mate as soon as they could get together.

In Los Angeles, hearing of this new delay, Nixon exploded with rage and wrote a letter of resignation, which Murray Chotiner intercepted and tore up. Mollified only by a series of wheedling phone calls from Eisenhower's staff, he agreed to fly to meet the general in West Virginia. On his arrival Nixon was rewarded by Eisenhower's coming on board his plane to greet him in person with a firm handclasp and the greeting “You're my boy.” The crisis was over, and that night the Republican National Committee endorsed Nixon once again as its vice presidential candidate and “a truly great American.”

Reporters watched and cameras clicked as Nixon burst into tears and hid his face on the shoulder of a fellow U.S. senator.
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Back in Whittier his old drama coach remembered how he had once taught Nixon the trick of crying “buckets of tears” by concentrating on getting a lump in the throat. “I was inclined to say to myself, ‘Here goes my actor!' But it was a sincere performance,” the teacher hurried to add. “There is nothing perfidious or immoral about being a good actor.”

“Overnight,” Nixon's friend Bryce Harlow said thirty years later, “he turned an extreme negative into a positive. How many people do you know who could have pulled it off? He was amazing.”

Even Checkers became a hero in his own right. For weeks after the speech dog lovers swamped the Nixons with collars, hand-woven dog blankets, and enough dog food to last a year. The cocker spaniel lived on, first as a pet for Tricia and Julie and then, even after he had been laid to rest in New York's
Bide-a-Wee cemetery, as an enduring symbol of Nixon's triumph. In 1997 it was reported that the dog was to be exhumed and reburied near the tomb of the former president and his wife, on the grounds of the Nixon Library.

Eisenhower can hardly have had Checkers in mind when, during the fund crisis, he declared that the Republicans had to be as “clean as a hound's tooth.” Nixon surely did, however, when he agreed a few days later to a suggestion that members of his entourage who had lived through the crisis should form a group called the Order of the Hound's Tooth. Pat was to be president and he vice president. Nixon later sent each member a key ring sporting a sliver of ivory symbolizing the immaculate canine tooth and a photograph of himself, signed and inscribed cryptically “I.N.C.” The abbreviation stood for the order's secret motto in pseudo-Latin: “Illegitimis non carborundum,” which translates as “Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

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Every year, to his dying day, Nixon would remind people of the anniversary of his victory in 1952. In 1992, when Democratic candidate Bill Clinton was scheduled to appear on
60 Minutes
to respond to allegations of marital infidelity, some likened the appearance to the Checkers speech. Nixon disagreed. “Any comparisons,” he said, “are misleading. . . . I had the truth on my side.”

But did he? The fund crisis was in some measure resolved in Nixon's favor because of the emotional appeal of his speech, and the fact that the press had not properly covered the original allegation. A survey of seventy daily newspapers in forty-eight states revealed that all but seven delayed running the fund story after it had broken in the
New York Post
and, when they did finally run coverage, at first devoted little space to it. The
Los Angeles Times,
which had boosted Nixon politically from the start, featured the story with a headline and copy slanted to favor Nixon's denials. The vast majority of papers likewise tended to back the Republican side uncritically.

Nixon's response to the allegations that had been made, moreover, were less than accurate. It was not true that “not one cent” of the fund money had gone to his personal use. One of the contributors, interviewed by the press, revealed that the appeal for funds had been pitched in part on the grounds that the Nixons needed a larger home and were “so poor they haven't got a maid.” Nixon had indeed put twenty thousand dollars down on a forty-one-thousand-dollar Washington house soon after becoming senator, and had hired an interior decorator to refurbish it in style. He even admitted to one reporter that without the fund he could not have made the down payment. (The Nixons had also acquired a full-time maid.)

Later reports commented archly on the apparent increased prosperity of the extended Nixon family, including the fact that Nixon's brother Donald—by now running both his parents' former grocery and a drive-in restaurant—was talking of setting up another restaurant on land owned by a contributor to Richard's fund.

In the Checkers speech Nixon had also made much of the claim that every cent of fund cash had been spent on items he thought should not be charged to American taxpayers. This defense ignored the fact that the money had gone toward purchases that could not legally have been charged to the taxpayers in any case. He had told a newsman that while in Washington he had no income except his Senate salary. This was not true: Money from the fund aside, Nixon had earned $6,611.45 from speech-making fees—about $44,000 at today's rates and about half as much again as a senator's salary in those days—in 1951 alone.

The fund money admitted by Nixon and formally audited may in fact not have represented the only fund in existence or all the money. When journalists first interviewed fund organizer Dana Smith before the story broke, one of them spotted on his desk a sheet of paper headed “Nixon Fund No. 2.” Another journalist discovered that Smith had paid a bill for Nixon using checks on two accounts: the trust fund and a special account. Later still it was reported that
three
separate funds were involved.

These leads were never investigated, nor was the remark made by one of the fund's contributors to a journalist that “we've been paying his expenses for sometime now.” No one knew then that as revealed in this book,
*
Nixon had let it be known to his supporters as early as 1946 that he could not live on a congressional salary and needed “a lot more than that” to match what he could expect to make as an attorney. The response of his big business backers, as described by corporation financial officer William Ackerman, had been to make a long-term financial commitment.

In 1952, as in the past, the driving force behind Nixon's campaign was Murray Chotiner. Years later Chotiner admitted that the fund had been his idea, with Dana Smith. He saw it as “a necessary source of the money Nixon needed to advance his career.”

The seventy-six known fund contributors were as the
New York Times
put it, “an abbreviated Who's Who of wealthy and influential southern California business figures.” Most reportedly were big-league millionaires, the majority being from the world of real estate, followed by oil magnates and manufacturers.

Why did they reach into their pockets? Smith, the fund's organizer, was disarmingly open about their motives when he first met with reporters before the scandal broke and damage control began. “We realized,” he said of Nixon, “that his salary was pitifully inadequate for a salesman of free enterprise for his people in California. . . . [Earl] Warren never has gone out selling the free enterprise system. But Dick did just what we wanted him to.”

No one seriously questioned another of Nixon's assertions: that none of the fund contributors had ever asked for or received a special favor in return. Again, that representation was less than the truth.

Solicitations for money had begun within a week of Nixon's election to the Senate. Two of the oilmen who responded were Tyler Woodward and William Anderson, who had been unsuccessfully trying to get clearance to drill for oil on government land in California. A dairy industry man who contributed, Alford Ghormley, wanted continued restrictions on European cheese imports. Others, including savings and loan executive Joseph Crail, Morgan Adams (chairman of a mortgage corporation), and the Rowan brothers (real estate brokers), all were vocal campaigners against public housing.

Within months of arriving in the Senate, Nixon had introduced a bill designed to allow precisely the sort of oil exploration that Woodward and Anderson wanted. He voted for strict limits on dairy trade with Europe, in contrast with his usual record of support for aid to the Continent. He was outspoken in opposing an increase in public housing, and voted for an amendment to a tax bill that favored building and loan associations.
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“Never, so far as the people that contributed to this fund are concerned,” Nixon said in the Checkers speech, “have I made a telephone call for them to an agency.” Here, again, he was skirting the truth. In February 1952 he had reportedly telephoned the secretary of the air force, Thomas Finletter, to arrange an interview for the head of Hammond Manufacturing. Hammond's bid for a half-million-dollar contract, previously rejected, was accepted soon afterward. The manufacturer was not known to have contributed to the Nixon fund, but he was a registered client of the law firm of which Dana Smith was a partner.
⁷

Smith was a friend of Nixon's, and had often played host to him in his home. Not only did he manage the fund, but he and his law partner were contributors. He had also received two favors from Nixon, both of which place in doubt Nixon's claim that he had never phoned or “gone down to an agency” on behalf of his financial supporters. One of these episodes is an instance of questionable behavior, while the other suggests serious deception.

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Not six months into Nixon's Senate term Smith had written to him asking for help with a long-standing tax problem, a wrangle with the IRS involving more than half a million dollars. The letter got results, including a meeting with Nixon in Washington and a phone call by Nixon's administrative assistant to arrange a half-hour interview with an IRS attorney. The outcome was “progress” for Smith with his tax problems, and eventually a settlement was reached.

In early August 1952 Nixon had written on Smith's behalf to the State Department, a curious intercession given that the matter concerned a gambling debt, a mob-run casino in Havana, Cuba, and controversy about the involvement not only of Smith but of Nixon himself.

Nixon's letter, according to the State Department, stated that Smith was “a highly respected member of his community” and that “the Senator would appreciate anything which the Embassy might be able to do to assist Mr. Smith in
his problem.” The enclosure, a letter from Smith himself, explained the nature of the problem. The previous April, on a visit to Havana's Sans Souci casino, he had lost forty-two hundred dollars—more than twenty-five thousand dollars in modern terms—while playing a dice game. He had then written a check to cover the losses, but subsequently put a stop on it. The casino management was considering legal action to recover the money.

Since it came from a senator, Nixon's request received attention. In Havana it was handled by the ambassador himself, who ordered local diplomats to respond immediately, within hours if possible, and department records show that they did so. They obtained a legal opinion from an outside attorney to answer Smith's queries as to whether the game in question was legal in Cuba and whether Smith would be held liable for the debt under Cuban law. The attorney responded with a yes on both counts.
⁸

Later, when it emerged that Nixon had pressed the government to help his friend, his staff downplayed the story. An aide acknowledged that he had written the letter, while insisting that it had been a “routine service for a constituent.” Later still his office claimed that the letter had in fact been written and signed by a secretary—an odd procedure, if true—and that Nixon did not know it had been sent or indeed anything at all about the case. The senator's staff was doing everything possible to disassociate him from Smith's run-in at the Sans Souci, and for good reason.

On October 30, a month after Nixon had survived the fund crisis and just days before the presidential election, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
added an intriguing detail to the affair: Nixon, it said, had been with his friend Smith at the Havana casino the night of the gambling incident.

While “in Miami on a combined holiday and political trip” and staying at the exclusive Quarter Deck Yacht Club on Pirate's Key, the paper reported, the two men had “decided to visit Havana,” an hour's trip away by airplane. To take care of the embarrassing matter, Smith had since been trying to settle the dispute by offering to pay half the sum owed. The casino operator, Norman Rothman, was insisting on full payment.