The Arrogance of Power (40 page)

If Nixon was to return to politics at that point, the California race was his only viable option. Given recent historical precedent, a sitting president was likely to be reelected, so it would have been folly to plan another run against Kennedy in 1964. The gubernatorial contest in the nation's most populous state, which had voted by a small margin for Nixon in 1960, was the one race on the horizon worth his running.

Nixon had mentioned the possibility of running for governor during his vacation after Kennedy's inauguration. The pharmaceuticals tycoon Elmer Bobst had warned him then, as they cruised in the Caribbean aboard Bobst's yacht, that the race would do nothing to help him reach his ultimate goal, the presidency. Yet Nixon came home to a letter from Whittaker Chambers—the last one, as it turned out, for Chambers died that summer—that urged him to run. Tom Dewey, the old warhorse, also encouraged him. Longtime colleagues were divided on the subject.

Herb Klein cited polls indicating Nixon would beat Brown. Jim Bassett told him he would be “out of his mind to run,” that in California he would get tripped up by local issues while his expertise was in foreign affairs and that the Democratic legislature would “cut [his] balls off.” Nixon did not heed the warnings. The thought that he might lose, Bassett said, seemed not to have occurred to him.

“As nearly as I can define my attitude,” Pat Nixon said later, “it was: ‘Let's not run! Let's stay home. Let's be a private family.' ” Her feelings changed, she recalled, when fifteen-year-old Tricia put her arms around her father and said, “Daddy, come on—
let's show 'em!
” No mention was made publicly, of course, of the Pat who had said she would commit suicide should Nixon return to politics. The nearest a relative came to expressing that sentiment was her brother Tom, when he said: “Pat told me that if Dick ran for Governor she was going to take her shoe to him.” Nixon merely remembered Pat's promising, “If you run, I'm not going to be out campaigning with you. . . .”
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There are varying versions of her reactions during dinner at a restaurant in late September 1961, the night Nixon publicly announced he would run. Bob Finch's wife, Carol, recalled Pat's saying suddenly, “I'm trapped. Which way can I go?” Another account had her fleeing to the rest room in tears.

Nixon's opponent, in contrast, relished the contest that faced him. “I welcome the opportunity,” Governor Brown said when Nixon declared, “to confront Richard Nixon in a campaign that once and for all will return him to private life.” Whatever Brown's own merits, he was to benefit from his challenger's mistakes. Nixon ranted on about the perils of domestic communism, a war cry that by now sounded dated. He campaigned largely on the strength of his international experience, while Californians cared most about state matters. He spoke of the “mess” in state government when few could see much wrong with it.

Word got around that Nixon disdained the “little people” of his home state. “That's what you have to expect from these fucking local yokels,” he told a reporter commiserating with him when attendance was poor at a rural rally. Advised to drop in to talk with representatives of a local newspaper, he responded, “I wouldn't give them the sweat off my balls.” As the editor of the
Sacramento Bee
put it dryly, “This kind of thing turned people off.”

Democrats and Republicans alike indulged in dirty tricks and personal slurs both petty and serious, sometimes disinterring ancient charges. The Democrats harped on about a covenant Nixon had signed when buying one of his homes, a racist pledge binding him not to sell it to “negroes, . . . Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians, and Syrians. . . .” The clause was indefensible, but commonplace enough at the time. Leading Democrats had signed similar agreements. The press meanwhile questioned the circumstances of Nixon's purchase of his new house in Bel Air, pointing up the Teamsters' involvement in the development.

President Kennedy threw his clout behind Pat Brown by campaigning for him. Behind the scenes his people helped dig out Nixonian dirt relevant to California. It was now that, apparently armed with Kennedy's authorization, a Brown official gained access to Mickey Cohen in Alcatraz. The gangster signed a statement admitting that mob money had helped elect Nixon in past campaigns.
⁶

The campaign also returned to the matter of the Hughes Loan. Although Kennedy Justice Department officials had investigated but discarded the possibility of bringing prosecutions over the billionaire's handout to Nixon's brother, California Democrats now found ways to use it against Nixon. At a Chinatown rally, when the Republican candidate posed with Chinese children holding signs reading
WELCOME NIXON
in English, he was helping in his own ambush. Beneath the greeting, in Chinese characters that the locals could understand, was a very different message:
WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN
? The photograph, plus the translation, duly appeared in the newspapers. Dick Tuck, the ubiquitous Democratic prankster, was up to his tricks again.

When Tom Braden, a Brown appointee on the Board of Education, raised the Hughes issue before a group of newspaper executives, Nixon challenged his rival to “stand up as a man and charge me with misconduct.” “Do it, sir!” he cried, apparently hoping for a repeat of the Checkers speech effect. Brown
did not respond, and Nixon found himself forced to discuss the matter again a few days later on
Meet the Press.

Nixon would eventually conclude that the Hughes Loan had been one of his biggest handicaps of the election, while Brown thought that it had given him a key advantage. Years later, after Nixon had become president, the impertinent Tom Braden would himself being audited by the Internal Revenue Service year after year. He did not think it was a chance occurrence.

Governor Brown publicly denied having “ever said anything” about the Hughes matter “other than in casual conversation.” That was not true, according to an electronics expert, interviewed in 1999, who had direct contact with Brown on the subject. The expert has requested anonymity because he still sometimes works for federal agencies, but has long proved a reliable source.
⁷
By 1962 his clients had included the military, politicians, and several large companies, including the Hughes organization. “Probably in the late summer of that year,” he recalled, “I got a call from a top man on Brown's campaign. He set up a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles and before we talked introduced me to Governor Brown himself. Brown told me: ‘You come well recommended. I want you to know that talking to him is like talking to me.'

“Then Brown went off, and the campaign official and I talked. They wanted dirt on Nixon and specifically wanted me to get them to whoever at Hughes had firsthand knowledge of Nixon's involvement in the Hughes loan. I said there could be stiff fees involved. And he said, ‘I've got twenty thousand dollars right here, and I can go up another twenty—no, make that fifty.' ”

What Brown's people did not know was that the electronics man was at that very time conducting “defensive” operations on behalf of Richard Nixon and some of his closest aides. He had met Nixon at Republican headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard and swept the office—and Nixon's home in Bel Air—for bugs almost every day.

Far from assisting the Brown campaign, the specialist informed Hughes executives of the Democratic probe. By the time Brown's people discovered his true loyalty, it was too late: A key Hughes man privy to the Nixon Loan had been spirited out of town. “The people around the governor,” the specialist remembered, “were furious that I'd pulled the wool over their eyes.”

In his work for the Republicans, the electronics man discovered their suspicions were justified: that the Nixon headquarters was indeed being bugged, not by local Democrats, but under the direction of Robert Kennedy.

“There was a phone box on the side of the Republican building,” the specialist recalled in the 1999 interview, “and when I checked it from time to time, I'd leave one screw slightly raised or something, a sign for myself so I could see at a glance if anyone else had tampered with it since my last visit. One day I saw that it had been opened, and I found the transmission equipment right away. There were a couple of bugs, one of them on Haldeman's phone.”

Former campaign aide Alvin Moscow has confirmed that the Republican
phones were checked, under the supervision of Nixon's friend John Davies, an executive with Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Moscow also remembered that a bug was found.

“We spotted the guys who were doing the bugging,” the electronics man said. “They were monitoring the transmission from a car. For a while we used the bug to feed them a whole lot of false information, just bullshit. Then we were able to follow them when they flew back East; I figured they had their tapes with them. We were able to tail them on the plane, and there were guys waiting for them in Washington with a car. Then we tailed them right to Bobby Kennedy's place in Virginia, saw them going through the gates.”

Nixon and his senior staff ruled that this Democratic snooping was not to be made public. “Although we had a good deal of proof,” the electronics man said, “Murray Chotiner thought the last thing they needed was to get into a public fight with the Kennedys. The Kennedys were very popular then, remember.”

The electronics man recalled his frustration over his discoveries being hushed up in 1962. “The dirty shit that was done to Nixon during the Kennedy presidency! We knew the Kennedys were bankrolling this, putting money behind a load of smear stuff against Nixon. . . . But we couldn't use any of it. What an irony, looking back now! Here were the Kennedys bugging Nixon in 1962, and in 1974 Nixon's going to go down the tubes for bugging. . . . No wonder he was so bitter. . . .”

“We were bugged in '62 running for governor,” Nixon would one day claim in a recorded Oval Office conversation. “Goddamndest thing you ever saw!” The electronics man's account is the first credible corroboration of that claim.

On the same White House tape, Nixon quoted Senator Barry Goldwater as having put Watergate in context when he said, “For Christ's sake, everybody bugs everybody else!” As late as 1994, aged eighty-one, Nixon would still be complaining that he had been “victimized by all kinds of dirty tricks—everything from being wiretapped by Bobby Kennedy and Johnson and having my tax returns audited by Kennedy—I understood how the game was played.”
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The assertion that “everybody does it” is of course no justification for such surveillance. In 1962, moreover, Nixon had good reason not to try to expose the fact that he had once caught the Democrats bugging him, for he and his aides had also been playing the “game” in other ways.

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The men who were to become notorious during Watergate were gathering around Nixon in 1962: Haldeman had been promoted to campaign manager. John Ehrlichman, who had worked temporarily as an advance man in 1960, was now fully on board. Nixon's finance chairman was Maurice Stans, who after Watergate would plead guilty to campaign finance violations. Herb Kalmbach, who would one day go to jail for finance irregularities, was brought in to
manage the southern part of the state. Ron Ziegler had been hired as a press aide for the first time. Rose Woods was by now formally billed as Nixon's Girl Friday. And Chotiner was back on the team as a “volunteer”—though in fact, he functioned as the key strategist—presumably in the hope that his role in the 1956 Senate influence-peddling probe had been forgotten. A constituent wrote to warn Pat Brown that in private Chotiner talked of starting “a hate movement against the governor.”

The first dirt to fly in the campaign, though, was internecine, from within Republican ranks. Former Governor Goodwin Knight accused Nixon of secretly trying to get him out of the race by promising him the chief justiceship of California should Nixon win. When Nixon denied the charge, Knight produced witnesses who said they had heard the offer being made by a Nixon emissary. “I don't want to call Mr. Nixon a liar,” Knight told the press, “but he is not telling the truth.”

Underhanded tricks against Brown involved false propaganda accusing him of being soft on communism. Nixon was able to disown one pamphlet, which featured a doctored photograph showing the governor kowtowing to Khrushchev, as the work of an extremist. It remained available, though, in Republican outlets.

Another photograph, purporting to show Brown applauding a call for Communist China's admission to the United Nations, was cropped from a picture that in fact showed him watching a crippled child's attempt to walk. This ploy was the creation of a group formed and financed by Nixon's people. (In fact, Brown was on record as opposing China's admission to the UN.) When the Democrats went to court on the matter, a judge stopped distribution of the pamphlet in which the photograph appeared.

Another massive illegal fabrication was exposed and stopped late in the campaign. The Republicans had created a fake Committee for the Preservation of the Democratic Party in California and mounted a mailing campaign designed to persuade conservative Democrats to vote for Nixon. It did so by maligning a genuine Democratic organization, the California Democratic Council (CDC), which supported the reelection of all Democratic officials, including Governor Brown. The mailer spoke of a “left-wing takeover of California's political leadership” and claimed falsely that nine out of ten registered Democrats rejected the CDC and were pouring in funds to fight it.