The Arrogance of Power (24 page)

By the end of the 1954 congressional campaign Nixon was at a low ebb. “I am tired, bone tired,” he said privately. “My heart's not in it.” He told Chotiner he was “through with politics” and assured Pat that he would retire when his term as vice president ended. Bassett bet him ten dollars that he would run again, and he took the bet. Then came a sudden, unexpected event that changed his mind.

Nixon had just returned home from a Washington wedding reception on a September afternoon in 1955 when he learned that he might become president of the United States within hours. In far-off Colorado, after a day of travel, work, and twenty-seven holes of golf, Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack. Informed by phone, Nixon responded, “Oh, my God! How bad is it?” and then fell silent for so long that the aide thought he had been cut off. When he finally spoke, Nixon pointed out that many people made full recoveries from coronaries. He agreed to stay near the phone and await more news.

To ascend to the presidency had always been the logical goal of Nixon's struggle. Now that the prospect was upon him, at the age of forty-two, he was stunned. “For fully ten minutes I sat alone,” he recalled, “and to this day I cannot remember the thoughts that flowed through my mind. The only accurate description is that I probably was in a momentary state of shock. . . . I realized what a tremendous responsibility had descended upon me. It was like a great physical weight holding me down in the chair.”

In Nixon's version, he quickly gathered his wits and faced the crisis. Friends thought his reaction less poised. “His voice was hoarse and charged with emotion. ‘It's terrible, it's terrible!' he said over and over. . . . [He] was trying to keep his composure, but he was in semishock. His eyes were red and his face drawn and pale. . . . he aged the equivalent of quite a few years during those three months—in his own estimation, as well of those with whom he worked.”

Eisenhower did recover, of course, but it was nearly two months before he returned to Washington, and Nixon meanwhile presided over meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council.

Eisenhower's chief of staff, Sherman Adams, asserted that Nixon “leaned over backward to avoid any appearance of assuming presidential authority.” John Foster Dulles's biographer, on the other hand, concluded that Adams and the secretary of state strove “to retain control in trusted hands and to avoid delivering political power to an ambitious Richard Nixon.” Adams was reportedly “doing everything he can to cut Mr. Nixon down to size.”

There were two more Eisenhower health crises during his presidency: an intestinal operation the following year and in 1957 a minor stroke that affected the president's speech. Nixon “did not preside very well,” noted economic adviser Clarence Randall after a cabinet meeting the vice president chaired during the second hospitalization. “He let the discussion get way out of hand. . . .” Another participant passed a note to a colleague during the same meeting. “I shall pray harder than ever,” it read, “for the President's recovery.”

It was the situation created by Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, Nixon noted, that made him hesitate about quitting politics. For if Ike did not run for a second term, he figured, “I would be next in line for the presidential nomination.” The prospect appalled many. Asked what the Republicans would do should Eisenhower die, party chairman Leonard Hall replied with black humor: “We would run him anyway. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the President must be alive.”

As the recovering Eisenhower pondered whether to face a reelection campaign, he had a long conversation about political successors with his press secretary, James Hagerty. Nixon did not feature on a shortlist of four people he deemed “mentally qualified for the presidency.” “The fact is,” he told speechwriter Emmet Hughes, “I've watched Dick a long time, and he just hasn't grown. So I just haven't been able to believe that he
is
presidential timber.”

Should he run again, Eisenhower later told Nixon at a face-to-face meeting, he thought it might be better for Nixon to take a cabinet post rather than be his running mate. While some later insisted that Eisenhower was merely offering Nixon a better long-term stepping-stone to power, it may be that he simply had other preferences. Notes of a meeting with Len Hall reflect discussion about “getting Nixon out of the picture” and end with the president's instructing Hall to see Nixon but “be very, very, gentle.” In fact, Eisenhower remained noncommittal for months to come.

Nixon and those close to him variously described his reaction to Eisenhower's ambivalence as “agonizing,” “absolutely indescribable anguish,” “one of the greatest hurts of his entire career,” and “fury.” Pat Nixon said the episode made her husband “more depressed than she ever remembered.”

An additional reason for Eisenhower to be hesitant about having Nixon on the ticket again emerged at an April meeting when Nixon, according to contemporary notes, tackled what he called “another matter . . . the Murray Chotiner case.” Nixon's close associate's criminal links had first emerged four days before Eisenhower suggested that Nixon might quit the vice presidency for a cabinet post and more revelations followed, some of them leading to the involvement of the FBI. There was a furor over an article labeling Chotiner “Dick Nixon's Secret Link to the Underworld,” and the
Washington Post
reported Chotiner's untrue claim to have had no contact with Nixon since he became vice president. A congressional probe was getting under way.
*

Nixon's fund scandal had threatened not only Nixon but the entire Republican campaign, and the Chotiner revelations must have filled the president with foreboding. Eisenhower wanted Nixon's assurances that the charges had no basis, and he needed the record to show that those assurances had been given. With that accomplished, he cleared Nixon to announce to the press that he would again be on the ticket.

Bassett had won his ten-dollar bet, and Nixon was running again. Again he bore the brunt of the campaign, this time setting out on a whirlwind marathon run with efficiency and flair. He covered forty-two thousand miles, barnstorming thirty-six states in less than two months. His use of a campaign plane, a DC-6B dubbed the Dick Nixon Special, was an innovation. While traveling between cities, Nixon hunched in his private cabin, working with his briefing sheets to tailor the Speech—the boilerplate text used throughout the tour—to suit the next destination.

Some campaign days began at 7:00
A
.
M
. and ended at 3:00
A
.
M
. the following day, only to start again at 7:00. Pat, described by the press as “always cheery, never weary,” traveled with her husband. She packed for him, readers were told, making sure he had a plaid smoking jacket to work in—“to keep his suits unwrinkled for the day's appearances.” When Nixon got a throat infection, he pushed on with the help of antibiotics and a cortisone throat spray. When he lost his voice, Pat stepped up to the mike and finished a speech for him.

A tour manager, press aides, and secretaries with typewriters and a duplicating machine manned the work area in Nixon's flying headquarters. A corps of advance men ranged ahead, preparing the way at each new stop. One of them was a thirty-year-old advertising man on leave of absence from J. Walter Thompson, Bob Haldeman. It was now, he would recall, that the future chief of staff began to be “closer to Nixon than just a casual constituent.”

As the Republicans rode to victory that November, Murray Chotiner had virtually disappeared from the scene. Forced from public view since the negative headlines in the spring, he was to function for years to come strictly from the shadows.

Even as Nixon managed to escape the taint of the Chotiner connection, he was stepping into another snare. This time the stakes—and the dollar figures—were higher than ever before. So were the risks, and the long-term damage would be horrendous. Still, Nixon seemed especially beguiled by this new association and would return to it until it inflicted one of his most grievous wounds at Watergate. The fatal attraction in this case was the helping hand, and the money, of the man one of America's most accomplished historians has called “the most powerful and dangerous fat cat of them all”
⁵
: Howard Hughes.

_____

In 1956, as Eisenhower dithered over whether Nixon should again be given the vice presidential slot, Hughes had just turned fifty. The spoiled heir of a Texan who had invented a revolutionary oil-drilling tool, he was afflicted with deafness, was hypochondriacal, drug-addicted, bisexual, and—it was evident even then—eccentric to the point of being mentally disturbed. He was also brilliant, a record-breaking flier, a prolific filmmaker, the owner of Trans World Airlines, and a major government defense contractor operating principally out of California. He had a fortune somewhere in the range of $350 million, making him one of the richest men on the planet.

Howard Hughes was also utterly unscrupulous, concerned above all with getting his own way. Senate investigators, probing his squandering of millions of dollars in government money during World War II, had uncovered massive evidence of influence buying. One of Hughes's targets had been President Roosevelt's son Elliott. In 1944, when Vice President Harry Truman was on the campaign trail for the ailing FDR, Hughes had himself gone to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to give Truman a cash contribution. Four years later he sent an emissary to New York with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash for Truman's Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey.

Hughes was passionately anti-Communist but otherwise apolitical. His senior aide for thirty-two years, Noah Dietrich, never learned whether his boss considered himself a Republican or a Democrat. Party affiliation mattered little to Hughes, so long as he could bend politicians to his will.

“I can buy any man in the world,” he boasted, and operated on that principle. “He figured he could buy his way to favor,” Dietrich said years later. “ ‘Everybody has a price,' he always said. And he was willing to offer that price. . . . He financed Los Angeles councilmen and county supervisors, tax assessors, sheriffs, state senators and assemblymen, district attorneys, governors, congressmen and senators, judges—yes, and vice presidents. . . .”

“I never met Hughes,” Richard Nixon said in a taped interview in 1988, admitting only that he had twice spoken with the billionaire on the telephone. He had made the same claim in 1972, to Bob Haldeman, adding that one of the phone calls concerned Hughes's suggestion that Nixon use a 707 Superjet to impress the Soviets on his 1959 visit to Moscow.

Nixon was almost certainly lying about the extent of his relationship with Hughes. Adela Rogers St. Johns, a veteran writer who supported and advised Nixon in the fifties, said she introduced the two men. Her association with Nixon dated back to the time that the young Nixon had delivered groceries to the ranch near Whittier owned by St. Johns's first husband. Nixon's nephew Don, son of his brother Donald, said in 1996 that Hughes was “an old buddy of my dad's.” He remembered, as a boy, meeting Hughes. “He was a strange-looking guy, tall, quiet, drove a white, two-door Chevy. . . . My dad used to meet him in parking lots, places like that. . . .”

Herb Klein, the longtime Nixon press aide, told the author that Richard Nixon first “personally encountered” Hughes in either the forties or fifties. If there had ever been documentation of the relationship, though, it has long since been been removed from available files. One telltale memo, however, survives in the records of the Nixon vice presidency at the National Archives. (See facsimile on following page.) Written on January 23, 1959, by Nixon's military aide Don Hughes (no relation to Howard), it reads: “I spoke with Howard Hughes and relayed your message. He was most happy and enthusiastic over seeing you in California. He cannot come East at this time. I'll arrange an appointment when your California plans are firm.”

“I don't remember what it was about,” General Hughes said in a recent interview. “As I remember it, Howard Hughes called the vice president. They talked, and the boss put me on the phone, and introduced me to him. The vice president said, ‘Anytime you want to get ahold of me call Don Hughes.' . . . I got three or four calls from Howard Hughes. He would call using the name Mr. Thomas. . . . He was very, very polite, had a high, whiny voice, very low-key, very solicitous. . . . I think Hughes wanted to feel that he could reach out whenever he wanted. . . .”