The Arrogance of Power (88 page)

Nixon quoted Theodore Roosevelt on the death of his young wife: “And when my heart's dearest died, the light went out of my life forever.” Another man's personal grief, borrowed to evoke the loss of the presidency.

From the inappropriate to the almost inevitable—recourse once to TR's line about the man in the arena who fails while daring greatly.
¹³

Then: “We think that when we suffer a defeat, that all is ended. . . . Not true. It is only a beginning, always. . . .”

By the time he finished, many of those present were weeping. Those at center stage held back the tears. Ford's wife Betty said, “Have a nice trip, Dick.” Then Nixon was walking with Pat to the helicopter that would take them to Andrews Air Force Base, to Air Force One, and so on to California.

Looking back at the White House, at the door of the helicopter, the man who had failed greatly smiled hugely, made the V for Victory sign with both hands, arms spread wide. As the plane took off, Pat murmured, “It's so sad. It's so sad.”

Technically the presidency remained Nixon's until noon eastern standard time. Air Force One was somewhere over Missouri when Gerald Ford took the oath of office and told the nation, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Nixon was sipping a martini as the new president spoke, with not Pat but Ziegler at his side.

At that moment of transition Air Force One lost its presidential call sign. Protocol had already changed. As Nixon boarded the plane, he had been seen off not by a saluting general, as was customary, but by a mere colonel. It rankled, and a complaint was sent to a high-level Defense Department official as the aircraft flew west.

Then there was the matter of the “nuclear football,” the “black box”—in reality a briefcase—that then, as now, remained close to the president at all times. On the ground it was chained to the wrist of an army warrant officer. In flight aboard Air Force One, it was stored in a safe just forward of the president's compartment. The black box had traveled with Nixon to China, to the Soviet Union, and everywhere else he had gone.

It contained the nuclear launch codes, in those days printed on plastic-encased rectangles the size and shape of playing cards. When bent, and the plastic popped open, the cards would reveal the digits that authenticated presidential approval for a nuclear strike. Given the other precautions Defense Secretary Schlesinger had taken, it seems possible that Nixon's black box had probably been effectively disarmed for some time. Alexander Haig reportedly confided as much to the special prosecutor.

Nixon apparently was not aware of that precaution. The night before he left the White House, it is said, he had told his visitors from Congress that the black box would travel with him as usual on the flight to California. It had not. The secure briefcase was not on board, not resting in the safe a few feet away from the man sipping a martini in the presidential compartment.

The power had gone from Richard Nixon. When Air Force One set down at El Toro Marine Air Station, near San Clemente, a sizable crowd was waiting. As the fallen president walked over to shake hands, a humming—at first indistinct, hesitant—began to arise from the throng. Gradually it became clearer, more confident.

The people were singing, “God Bless America.”

_____

T
wo decades later, a seventy-three-year-old man sat at the piano in the embassy of the United States in Moscow, giving an impromptu rendition of that same tune. Everyone sang along. The pianist was Richard Nixon, on a “private visit” that included meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Two months earlier,
Newsweek
had run a cover story on him headlined, “
HE
'
S BACK
:
THE REHABILITATION OF RICHARD NIXON
.” The feature was a public endorsement of the recognition President Jimmy Carter had long since given him by quietly consulting him on foreign affairs. Every president that followed—Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—did likewise. After the scandal of Watergate, Nixon had found for himself a role of eminent respectability, that of the nation's elder statesman. Once again he had achieved a degree of resurrection, if not a full return from the political dead.

The story of that remarkable, carefully paced recovery is not the subject of this book. As one observer put it, the disgraced leader of the United States spent the years that remained to him “running for the ex-presidency.” If proof was needed that he had achieved that goal, it came at his death in 1994, when all his successors saw him to his rest as a national hero.

A month after Nixon's resignation, President Gerald Ford had granted his predecessor a blanket pardon for all crimes he had committed or possibly committed during the presidency. There had been a real likelihood he would be prosecuted, and the foreman of the Watergate grand jury has recalled ruefully that Ford's action “shortcircuited our efforts to get to the bottom of the thing.” “This is justice?” asked another.

Nixon's former aide Egil Krogh, himself just recently released from jail, had visited San Clemente before the pardon came through. “Do you feel guilty, Mr. President?” he had asked. Nixon answered, “No I don't. I just don't.” When Ford required him to issue a statement of contrition, he offered only “regret and pain” at the anguish his “mistakes and misjudgments” had caused. Later, laying the ground rules for the writing of his memoirs, he told his staff, “We won't grovel, we won't confess, we won't do a
mea culpa
.”

It is said that Nixon once admitted to a Quaker pastor, in private: “I did wrong, but I'll live with it.” Publicly, he never offered a clear-cut apology. Watergate, he had assured Charles Colson in a letter before the resignation, would become “only a footnote in history.” Asked by ABC television's Barbara Walters whether he thought history would be kind to him, he responded with a
quotation from Winston Churchill: “History will be very kind to me, because I intend to write it.” Nixon had by that time already written his memoirs, a thousand pages long and with the imperial title
RN
inscribed on its cover with a grand flourish. Eight more books were to follow.

In retirement in North Carolina, former Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin had a characteristic comment on the autobiography. Nixon, he declared, had “obeyed Mark Twain's injunction in writing about Watergate: ‘The truth is very precious; use it sparingly.' ”

One of Nixon's own, who had himself served time in prison for perjury, sounded a warning note even before the memoirs came out. “Someday,” Jeb Magruder wrote, “Richard Nixon and his apologists will try to rewrite history, claiming that this tragic president was betrayed by his underlings and railroaded out of office by his enemies. When that time comes . . . it would help to have the record at hand.”

“If there was any dominant sentiment,” historian Barbara Tuchman recalled of the first phase of Watergate, “it was reluctance to believe ill of the President and a desperate desire to sweep all the horrid doings under the rug and let him maintain his fiction of untainted rectitude. Americans have an over-developed tendency to president-worship. The public
wants
to believe the president—any president—is good . . . we put worship where the power is, which is an unwise arrangement.”

Since Tuchman wrote those words, and because of what they learned at Watergate, Americans are perhaps today less ready to trust blindly in their leaders. This may be a positive outcome of a melancholy time. The downside, however, is that Richard Nixon's abuses and deceptions may have led many citizens not to trust their leaders at all.

See list of abbreviations on pages 609–610.

1.
Nixon claimed more than once that his father sold the Yorba Linda land only to learn later that “oil that would have made us millionaires” was discovered on it. His mother made the same claim. In 1970, on a drive with Henry Kissinger, Nixon said oil had been found after his parents sold the Whittier property they had operated as a store and gas station from 1922 until the forties. In fact, oil was found only on a site Nixon's father considered, but decided against, purchasing in 1922. (
FB,
p. 30–;
Good Housekeeping,
June 1960; Kissinger,
Years of Upheaval,
op. cit., p. 1185;
MO,
p. 6–; Earl Mazo, op. cit., p. 14 fn.)

2.
Nixon's statements on the Vietnam War and related issues will be assessed in chapter 23.

1.
Exactly what he had dreamed of and when is not clear. The Jonathan Aitken biography, which had Nixon's full cooperation, cites an eighth-grade school essay in which Nixon said he hoped to attend Whittier College, then do a postgraduate course at Columbia University, in New York. A reference a few pages later cites the same essay as indicating merely that Nixon longed to “go East” for his university education. (
Pat,
p. 85;
JA,
p. 30, and see
MEM,
p. 14.)

2.
The Lois Elliott story seemed uncertain when first mentioned in a 1970
Life
article. Later, by interviewing Elliott for his book
Nixon vs. Nixon,
Dr. David Abrahamsen was able to verify it. (
Life,
Nov. 6, 1970; Abrahamsen, op. cit., pp. 111, 250, line 1.)

3.
Hannah Nixon claimed he made this remark to her. She dated it, however, to 1922 and in Yorba Linda. Yet the long-running investigation of Teapot Dome did not start until late 1923, and the family was living in Whittier by that time. Nixon's aunt Jane Beeson was certain he made the declaration to her, in her house, and she was probably right. Nixon's mother, who told the story as political propaganda for her son, may have thought it would play better as a “mother-son” conversation. (Kenneth Harris int. of RN,
SF Chronicle,
Nov. 24, 1968;
Good Housekeeping,
Gardner, op. cit., p. 24–;
FB,
p. 523, n. 13;
MO,
p. 881, n. 83.)

4.
Duke University proposed the honorary doctorate again in 1961. Still smarting from the previous rebuff, however, Nixon declined to accept. (
Durham Morning Herald,
June 15, 1961.)

1.
Ola Welsh did marry the man for whom she left Nixon, Gail Jobe, and was still married to him when interviewed for this book in 1996. She quoted Nixon as saying he loved her in an interview for Jonathan Aitken's biography of Nixon. Roger Morris's biography, however, reports that she could not remember if he ever said, “I love you.” Ola told Dr. David Abrahamsen she could not recall if he even said he liked her. The author has credited her remarks on the subject to Aitken, who appears to have interviewed her most extensively. (
JA,
p. 61;
MO,
p. 169; Abrahamsen, op. cit., p. 107.)

2.
Pat Nixon also said Nixon proposed that first night. Nevertheless, while one might expect the couple themselves to have the story right, the author believes in this case that Elizabeth Cloes's account is more likely to be credible. (Mazo, op. cit., p. 31; Kenneth Harris int.
Miami Herald,
Jan. 19, 1969.)

3.
In letters home Pat Ryan was specifically referring to herself as
not
married as late as February 1934. If there was a first marriage in the New York period, it was almost certainly not to Dr. Francis Vincent Duke, the Irish-born suitor mentioned in this chapter. There is no reference to a first marriage in Dr. Duke's 1965 obituary, and unlike the putative husband interviewed by Maxine Cheshire, Duke never lived in New Orleans. It is clear that Pat dated several different men while in New York. She returned to California in August 1934. (Duke:
NYT,
March 24, 1965;
Journal of the American Medical Association,
June 21, 1965, p. 1115; NY dates:
Pat,
p. 38.)

4.
The case was
Schee v. Holt,
a family dispute case that began in the fall of 1937, when Marie Schee sued to get back money she had lent to her uncle, Otto Steuer. She was awarded judgment, with the right to demand the sale of Steuer's house, a sale that went wrong under Nixon's supervision. As a result, Schee found herself liable to lose all she had won and sued Wingert and Bewley for malpractice. The firm settled out of court. The process dragged on until 1942. (The most detailed coverage of the case is in
FB;
David Abrahamsen, op. cit., p. 123–, and
MO,
p. 189–; case files are listed at
FB,
p. 527.)

5.
American organized crime, in the person of Meyer Lansky, had taken over Havana's two casinos and its racetrack in 1938. According to sources interviewed for this book, including Lansky's close associate Vincent Alo, Nixon met Lansky in Cuba, perhaps initially on the 1941 visit. This alleged connection will be probed in chapter 12. (Robert Lacey,
Little Man,
Boston: Little, Brown, 1991, pp. 108–, 469, n. 23; Charles Rappeleye and Ed Becker,
All American Mafioso,
New York: Doubleday, 1991, p. 144; ints. Vincent Alo, Jack Clarke.)

6.
Nixon's Navy record indicates that he went to the South Pacific in the spring of 1943 and served first in New Caledonia and then in Vella Lavella, not under Japanese attack at the time. He was transferred to the Northern Solomons in January 1944. His first posting there, the island of Bougainville, was largely in U.S. hands when he arrived. Fighting did continue for a month or so, though it was not concentrated on the area where Nixon was stationed. In his memoirs Nixon mentioned a Japanese assault during which he had to shelter in a bunker. There were some bombing raids on Green Island, his next posting, but fewer than at Bougainville. One of Nixon's friends said, “The only real danger was the possibility of a banyan tree falling on you during a storm.” Nixon's lasting memory was of the carnage when a B-29 bomber exploded on landing. Two authors, Fawn Brodie and Dr. David Abrahamsen, have critically examined Nixon's war record. Although Brodie, like Abrahamsen, was generally unfriendly toward Nixon, she argued convincingly that he was not guilty of intentionally fabricating his military experiences during his early political campaigning. Rather, he “blurred and embroidered and failed to correct exaggerations he encouraged among friendly biographers and journalists.” On the available evidence, this author agrees with Brodie's view. (
FB,
ch. XII; Abrahamsen, op. cit., ch. 8;
MEM,
p. 28.)

7.
Steward Alsop, writing in 1960, cites an intimate as saying Nixon saved ten thousand dollars from his wartime winnings. A fellow officer, Jim Stewart, said: “I know for a fact he sent home sixty-eight hundred dollars, from Green Island.” Nixon's daughter, citing one of his last letters home, suggested it was only one thousand dollars. In his memoirs Nixon said both his skill and his winnings had been exaggerated. He added that Pat and he wound up with some ten thousand dollars at the end of the war, taking together his pay, her salary, and his poker winnings. (Stewart Alsop, op. cit., p. 144;
JA,
p. 108;
Pat,
p. 85;
MEM,
pp. 29, 34.)

1.
Secret Service agents usually prefer to remain anonymous. The author accepts that this interview, conducted by the experienced former
Washington Post
reporter and author Ronald Kessler, is authentic. (Int. Ronald Kessler.)

1.
According to a Voorhis worker in Alhambra, Zita Remley, she arranged for a relative to apply for paid work in the local Nixon office as a ploy to learn what the Republicans were up to. The relative, she said, reported back that “they had a whole boiler room with phones going all the time.” She was told to dial numbers and ask just one question: whether the person answering knew Voorhis was a Communist. Nixon defender Irwin Gellman, a history professor at Chapman University in Orange, California, claimed recently that such accounts were “tales”—not to be relied upon. (Remley: Bullock, op. cit., p. 276; “tales”: Gellman, op. cit., p. 84–.)

2.
C. Arnholt Smith, the San Diego banker and entrepreneur, who knew Nixon as a child and supported him until as late as 1972, told the author before his death in 1996 that he contributed ten thousand dollars to Nixon's first campaign.

1.
In his 1975 memoir Cohen said the required figure was seventy-five thousand dollars, while his 1962 prison statement gives a figure of twenty-five thousand. The higher figure is used here because the 1975 memoir is a long, detailed account given to an experienced coauthor. On the other hand, the more formal 1962 statement may be more accurate; there is no way to know now. Similarly, the 1962 statement suggests Cohen could not recall for certain whether the Knickerbocker Hotel fund-raiser took place in 1950 or during the 1948 congressional election. The 1975 memoir places it firmly in 1950. The latter is surely the correct date; the Republicans spent a fortune on the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, by one estimate perhaps as much as two million dollars, while the 1948 election was a walkover for Nixon. (1950 estimate:
MO,
p. 616.)

2.
Cohen gives the address as Eighth and Olive in his 1962 statement but as Ninth and Hill in his 1975 memoir, in which he also names the building as the Guarantee Finance Building (as opposed to the Pacific Finance Building). The most authoritative source on the 1950 campaign, Roger Morris's book (see Bibliography), refers to a Nixon campaign headquarters in the “Garland Building at Ninth and Spring.” Confusion over the address need not diminish belief in Cohen's claims; he said he paid for a Nixon office for only “three or four weeks.” The author guesses he helped out in this way during an early stage of the twelve-month 1950 campaign. (Garland Building:
MO,
p. 536.)

3.
After his defeat by Nixon, former Congressman Voorhis recalled, he was told that “organized liquor interests [in New York] were claiming credit for my defeat. It was some satisfaction to have the right people against me.” Mickey Cohen, who had begun his mob career in bootlegging days, was close to Art Samish, the mob's political front man in California. Samish had links to underworld liquor and racing interests dating back to Prohibition and was still involved with the Schenley liquor tycoon, Lewis Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel had long been close to Cohen's ultimate gangster masters, Lansky and Costello. His right-hand man, from 1958, was former FBI Assistant Director Lou Nichols, later an adviser to Nixon in the 1968 campaign. (“liquor interests”: Voorhis, op. cit., p. 346; close to Samish: Cohen, op. cit., p. 2–; Samish, Rosenstiel: Fox, op. cit., p. 229–; Rosenstiel, Lansky: Summers,
Hoover,
op. cit., p. 248; Nichols: ibid., p. 369.)

1.
Depending on which source one credits, Eisler was either a leading Soviet agent in the United States or a lowlier figure. His former wife, Hede, who with her next husband, Paul Massing, also had links to Soviet espionage, told the FBI she had known Hiss as an active Communist operative in the mid-1930s. See later references. (
PERJ,
p. 176–.)

2.
According to Loftus, the allegation came to him in interviews with former members of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps and of Military Intelligence. He also cites interviews with members of the Strategic Services Unit, the Central Intelligence Group, and the Office of Policy Coordination. (John Loftus and Mark Aarons,
The Secret War against the Jews,
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994, pp. 221, 557; ints. John Loftus.)

3.
Peter Grose's biography of Allen Dulles, published in 1994, the same year as the Loftus and Aarons book, appears to reject suggestions that Allen Dulles was less than honorable in his relations with his German contacts. (Grose, op. cit., p. 264–, and see refs. in Townsend Hoopes,
The Devil and John Foster Dulles
Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.)

4.
With Representative Charles Kersten, a HUAC colleague, Nixon met the Dulles brothers to discuss the Hiss case at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, on August 11, 1948. Foster had previously backed Hiss but later testified for the government, in court. See also Note 10, below. (Allen Weinstein article,
Esquire,
Nov. 1975, p. 79, and
MO,
p. 414.)

5.
Whittaker Chambers, for his part, had done work during the War for ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence. (Ralph de Toledano, ed.,
Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers–Ralph de Toledano Letters: 1948–1960,
Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1997, p. 18.)

6.
According to the journalist Howard Kohn, citing CIA sources, Dulles gave Nixon this confirmation at their meeting in New York on August 11, 1948. (See Note 4,
supra.
) That meeting has long been public knowledge, but it was characterized by Nixon purely as one at which he laid out the known facts and persuaded the Dulles brothers that Hiss was a liar. However, that Allen Dulles was privy to information on Hiss, and that he shared it with Nixon, is entirely plausible. (Howard Kohn article,
Rolling Stone,
May 20, 1976, and see limited retraction,
Rolling Stone,
Apr. 28, 1983;
MEM,
p. 57.) Kohn is a former staff writer for
Rolling Stone,
and bureau chief of the Center for Investigative Reporting. He wrote the book
Who Killed Karen Silkwood?,
which exposed unsafe practices at the nuclear fuel plant where Silkwood worked and was the basis for the movie
Silkwood.