A man’s philosophy is his autobiography. You may read it in the story of his conflict with life.
—WALTER LIPPMANN, The New Republic, JULY 17, 1915
In the nearly twenty years following his resignation from the presidency in 1974, Richard Nixon struggled to reestablish himself as a well-regarded public figure. He tried to counter negative views of himself by writing seven books, mostly about international relations, which could sustain and increase his reputation as a world statesman. Yet as late as 1992, he complained to Monica Crowley, a young postpresidential aide: “‘We have taken…shit ever since—insulted by the media as the disgraced former president.’”
Above all, he craved public attention from his successors in the White House. The reluctance of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to invite him back to the Oval Office for advice, particularly on foreign policy, incensed him. When Bush sent him national security form letters, “he erupted in fury. ‘I will not give them [the Bush advisers] any advice unless they are willing to thank me publicly,’” he told Crowley. “‘I’m tired of being taken for granted…. No more going in the back door of the White House—middle of the night—under the cloak-of-darkness crap. Either they want me or they don’t.’”
At the 1992 Republican Convention, after Bush publicly praised Nixon’s contribution to America’s Cold War victory, Nixon exclaimed, “‘It took guts for him to say that…. It’s the first time that anyone has referred to me at a convention. Reagan never did. It was gutsy.’” After Bill Clinton invited him to the White House to discuss Russia, Nixon declared it the best meeting “‘I have had since I was president.’” He was gratified that Clinton addressed him as “‘Mr. President.’” But when he saw his advice to Clinton being “diluted,” it “inspired rage, disappointment and frustration.”
Nixon’s postpresidential resentments were of a piece with long-standing sensitivity to personal slights. His biography is in significant part the story of an introspective man whose inner demons both lifted him up and brought him down. It is the history of an exceptional man whose unhappy childhood and lifelong personal tensions propelled him toward success and failure.
It may be that Winston Churchill was right when he said that behind every extraordinary man is an unhappy childhood. But because there are so many unhappy children and so few exceptional men, it invites speculation on what else went into Nixon’s rise to fame as a congressman, senator, vice president, and president. Surely, not the least of Nixon’s motives in his drive for public visibility was an insatiable appetite for distinction—a need, perhaps, to make up for psychic wounds that produced an unrelenting determination to elevate himself to the front rank of America’s competitors for status, wealth, and influence. Like Lincoln, in the words of law partner William Herndon, Nixon’s ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.
Like most political memoirists who romanticize the realities of their upbringing, Nixon painted a portrait of an “idyllic” childhood in Yorba Linda, California, a rural town of two hundred about thirty miles northeast of Los Angeles, and Whittier, a small city of about five thousand east of Long Beach. He remembered “the rich scent of orange blossoms in the spring…glimpses of the Pacific Ocean to the west [and] the San Bernardino Mountains to the north,” and the allure of “far-off places” stimulated by train whistles in the night that made him want to become a railroad engineer. “Life in Yorba Linda was hard but happy.” His father worked at odd jobs, but a vegetable garden, fruit trees, and a cow provided the family with plenty to eat.
When Richard was nine, the family moved to Whittier, where his mother’s Milhous family lived. He described growing up there in three words: “family, church and school.” There was an extended family with scores of people, including his grandmother, Almira Burdg Milhous, who inspired him on his thirteenth birthday in 1926 with a gift of a framed Lincoln portrait and a Longfellow poem, “Psalm of Life”: “Lives of great men oft remind us/We can make our lives sublime/And departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time.” Nixon cherished the picture and inscription, which he kept hung over his bed while in high school and college.
Richard remembered his parents as models of honest decency who endowed him with attributes every youngster might wish to have. “My father,” Nixon wrote, “was a scrappy, belligerent fighter with a quick, wide-ranging raw intellect. He left me a respect for learning and hard work, and the will to keep fighting no matter what the odds. My mother loved me completely and selflessly, and her special legacy was a quiet, inner peace, and the determination never to despair.”
But in fact, Nixon’s childhood was much more tumultuous and troubling than he let on. Frank Nixon, his father, was a boisterous, unpleasant man who needed to dominate everyone—“a ‘punishing and often brutal’ father.” Edward Nixon, the youngest of the Nixon children described his “mother as the judge and my father as the executioner.” Frank’s social skills left a lot to be desired; he offended most people with displays of temper and argumentativeness. As a trolley car conductor, farmer, gas station owner, and small grocer, he never made a particularly good living. Nixon biographers have painted unsympathetic portraits of Frank as a difficult, abrasive character with few redeeming qualities. Though Nixon would never openly acknowledge it, he saw his father as a harsh, unlikable man whose weaknesses eclipsed his strengths.
Frank was a standing example of what Richard hoped not to be—a largely inconsequential figure in a universe that valued material success and social standing. Richard was driven to do better than his father, but he also struggled with painful inner doubts about his worthiness. Despite his striving, Richard initially doubted that he had the wherewithal to surpass his father. Frank was not someone who either by example or direct messages to his sons communicated much faith in their worth. At the same time, however, Richard was his father’s son: his later readiness to run roughshod over opponents and his mean-spiritedness in political combat said as much about Frank as it did about Richard.
Richard felt much more kindly toward his mother, Hannah. But for all the descriptions of her as a “saint,” to which her son always subscribed, she was a remote person whom Richard saw as “intensely private in her feelings and emotions.” She was not the sort, in biographer Tom Wicker’s words, to offer “a close embrace, a kiss, a rollicking bounce on a mother’s lap.”
And Hannah was repeatedly absent during Richard’s early years. In 1913, nine months after Richard’s birth in Yorba Linda, she was hospitalized for mastoid surgery, followed by a period of recovery at her parents’ Whittier home. Richard’s maternal grandmother Almira cared for him and an older brother, but he felt his mother’s absence nevertheless. In subsequent years, when her demanding husband and their hard life in a bungalow house, where she and Frank lived with four small boys, overwhelmed her, she repeatedly returned home to Whittier for sometimes brief and sometimes lengthy stays. Hannah’s burdens, including two sickly sons, one of whom, Arthur, died at age seven in 1925, while the other, Harold, died in 1930 at age twenty-one, were reasons for her to give Richard less than full attention during his childhood and adolescence.
Although Richard sympathized with his mother’s need to attend principally to his afflicted brothers, his understanding could not fill the void he felt from her occasional physical, and more important, emotional absences. “‘My Dear Master,’” he wrote Hannah at the age of ten, in what biographer Roger Morris calls “the pitiable cry and fantasy of a lonely boy,” who disguised his unhappiness in a dog story. “‘I wish you would come home right now. Your good dog Richard.’” Hannah remembered that “as a youngster, Richard seemed to need me more than my other sons did. As a schoolboy, he used to like to have me sit with him when he studied…. It wasn’t that Richard needed my help with his work…. Rather it was that he just liked to have me around.”
As a boy and young man, Nixon impressed most classmates and teachers as a well-adjusted, socially engaged activist. At Whittier College, he was a class leader: a strong student with a record of campus activism as an actor, member of the debate and football teams. Those who got closer to him, however, recall “a solitary, shy, painfully uncertain boy amid all the apparent energy and versatility…Many saw him as strained and tightly strung.” A classmate recalled that “Dick was a very tense person.” Another schoolmate said, “He never had any close friends in college. He was a loner.” His Whittier debate coach thought “there was something mean in him, mean in the way he put his questions, argued his points.” Ola Florence Welch, Richard’s college girlfriend, with whom he had a stormy on-and-off again relationship, believed he suffered from “an underlying unease and awkwardness, a deeper unfulfilled need. ‘He seemed lonely and so solemn at school. He didn’t know how to mix. He was smart and sort of set apart. I think he was unsure of himself, deep down.’”
During his three years at Duke Law School between 1934 and 1937, he was nicknamed “gloomy Gus.” This was less because he was so glum as because he was a workaholic who strictly limited his participation in the social life of the campus. One classmate considered him “something of an oddball” and “slightly paranoid.” He was a compulsive student who spent most of his time in the law library “hunched over his books.” Only at Duke football games, to which he came and went by himself, did he give public vent to his emotions, yelling himself hoarse in support of the team.
When Tom Wicker first encountered the forty-four-year-old Nixon in the U.S. Senate lobby in 1957, five years after he had been elected vice president, he was “walking along rather slowly, shoulders slumped, hands jammed in his trouser pockets, head down and his eyes apparently fixed…on the ornate Capitol floor. What I could see of his face seemed darker than could be accounted for by the trademark five o’clock shadow; it was preoccupied, brooding, gloomy, whether angry or merely disconsolate I was unable to tell.” Wicker believed that he “had glimpsed a profoundly unhappy man,” and “found it hard to fathom why” a vice president, who might someday become president, “should appear so desolate and so alone.”
To Adlai Stevenson, one of Nixon’s principal 1950s political opponents, the man’s character registered clearly on his politics: “Nixonland—a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of a poison pen, the anonymous phone call, and hustling, pushing, shoving—the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” For Garry Wills, Nixon was “a brooding Irish puritan. And a lonely man.” Not the qualities one would normally expect in a president, but then “Lincoln was even more melancholy, and downright neurotic,” Wills believes. “I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession,” Nixon said of himself.
Like Nixon, who obviously puzzled over his success in a profession seemingly little suited to his temperament, his biographers will always wonder about Nixon’s career choice and how someone with limited affinity for small talk and so little personal charm could have run so often and so successfully for high office. In an age when personality had replaced character as the ostensible measuring rod for political advance, Nixon seems to have defied the odds.
His considerable intelligence, knowledge of American history, and ability to measure the current state of the nation were certainly attributes that served his career. But so did his work ethic and tireless efforts during the forty-two years he campaigned for everything from high school student body president to chief executive of the United States. Circumstance may have schooled him in the need to work hard: At the age of fifteen, he was responsible for buying and setting out vegetables at his parents’ grocery. He would begin work at 4 A.M., driving twelve miles to a Los Angeles market, where he could purchase the best and cheapest produce.
More was in play here than the need to ensure the success of the family store. Richard saw hard work as the means to make something of himself—to get beyond his parents’ cloistered world and break the chains that bound them to a life of relative drudgery in a small town. More than that, work seemed the best way to raise his self-esteem—to give him a sense of accomplishment and importance, to make him feel worthwhile, valued, and admired, even loved.
Involvement in productive activities became a mainstay of his life, but not just schoolwork, which as a teenager occupied his afternoons, nights, and weekends. In high school, he also devoted himself to acting, debate, football, and school governance. He attended to all these commitments as if his existence depended on it. In college, the pace became even more frenetic. “I won my share of scholarships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school,” he said later about his four years at Whittier, “not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my gifted colleagues.” In addition to the constant attention to his classes, which earned him second place in a class of eighty-five Whittier graduates, he played football and basketball, ran track, joined the debate team, acted in theater productions, participated in campus politics, and helped organize and lead a men’s society, the Orthogonians.
In law school at Duke, he displayed a “single-minded, often fierce diligence” he believed required to keep pace with his forty-three classmates, many of whom came from more prestigious institutions than Whittier. During his first year, when he confided to a third-year student his concern that he could not compete effectively against his better prepared colleagues, the older student, who observed him at the library seven days and five nights a week, advised him not “to worry. You have what it takes to learn the law—an iron butt.”
Although intelligence and high energy were essential elements in Nixon’s rise to political power, they were not enough to explain his extraordinary success. A visceral feel for what voters wanted to hear—expressions of shared values—also brilliantly served his political ambition.
Between 1946 and 1972, when he ran for high office seven times, the issues were no longer principally about the economic security of the middle-and workingclass voters he had to win over; years after the Depression, amid a booming economy, fears of economic problems and job loss were diminished concerns. Instead, public debate focused on the Communist threat. Below the surface was a concern with what the historian Richard Hofstadter called status politics. As in the progressive era at the start of the twentieth century, when politics revolved less around ensuring national prosperity than restoring “morality” to civic life, politics after 1945 centered on “status anxieties” and “status resentments…issues of religion, morals, personal style, and culture.” It was not the politics of who got what but of insistence on deference—the anger of ordinary citizens toward elites, the most privileged members of society who impressed less sophisticated, conventional-thinking folks as disrespectful of their standards. As Hofstadter stated it, these Americans “believe that their prestige in the community, even indeed their self-esteem, depends on having their values honored in public.”
Dick Nixon’s early life is a textbook example of status strivings. When he was a young man growing up in the 1920s and 1930s in Southern California, a developing region removed from the country’s power centers in the Northeast and Middle West, the recent migrants to the area were ambitious not only for economic success but also for recognition as valued members of American society. The status concerns of Nixon’s contemporaries in Yorba Linda and Whittier reinforced the intense desire for personal recognition of a boy from an unexceptional lower-middle-class family whose ownership of a grocery and a gas station gave it limited status in the community. A cousin remembered how Dick’s work at the store embarrassed him: “He didn’t want anybody to see him go get vegetables, so he got up real early and then got back real quick,” she said. “And he didn’t like to wait on people in the store.”
In college, Richard gave clear expression to his status concerns when he took a central part in creating and advancing the Orthogonians. Although he quickly established himself as someone of importance on campus by being elected president of his freshman class, the unwillingness of the Franklins, the leading campus men’s society, to offer him membership incensed him. When another new student responded to the same slight by proposing the organization of a competing society, Dick was so eager to help that the group made him its first president. The Orthogonians distinguished themselves from the Franklins, who were notable for their elitism, by emphasizing the square shooting unpretentious qualities of student athletes, its principal members. “They were the haves and we were the have-nots,” Nixon said later of the two groups. But others remember that the Orthogonians quickly took on the pretensions of the Franklins, asserting political influence, setting social standards, and excluding most of the college’s athletes and everyone else from its ranks.
Nixon later rationalized the snobbery of arrivistes by making a distinction between inherited and earned exclusivity. Reflecting on the status strivings of young people, he said, “What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. Sometimes it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.” During a 1968 interview, asked if he had a special affinity for Theodore Roosevelt, Nixon replied: “‘I guess I’m like him in one way only: I like to be in the arena. I have seen those who have nothing to do—I could be one of them if I wanted—the people just lying around at Palm Beach. Nothing could be more pitiful.’ His voice,” Garry Wills said, “had contempt in it, not pity.”
A winning campaign for student body president at the end of his junior year, in the spring of 1933, was his first schooling in the use of status politics. Although a Quaker, whose strict religious upbringing forbade dancing, Richard made a fuller campus social life, including monthly dance parties, his platform. The proposal appealed to a student majority which, unlike members of the elite campus societies, lacked a sense of belonging or involvement in the college. Although he raised other issues during the campaign, “the promise of dance parties on campus,” Roger Morris wrote, “inexpensive and open to all students, continued to be his main appeal…. The dance issue also pitted the less affluent, non-organization students who lived at home against the wealthier dormitory residents.” After he won, his student opponent said, “He knew what issue to use to get support…He’s a real smart politician.”
When Richard began at Duke Law School in September 1934, it was with a sense of exhilaration that he was entering a larger world in which he could achieve big things. But his law degree in 1937 did not immediately satisfy his yearning for greater distinction. Although he would hold third place in his graduating class, he could not land a job at either of the two prestigious New York law firms to which he applied. The rejections, especially alongside of the fact that one classmate with lower grades received a position at another desirable New York firm, left him feeling “bitterly defeated.” He returned to Whittier, where he spent weeks in “a petulant, stubborn pout.” Invitations from a local firm to discuss a position went unanswered for over a month. When he finally accepted an appointment with Wingert and Bewley, he wrote Duke’s law school dean, “I’ve convinced myself that it is right.” Nixon felt humiliated by having to take a job in a local Whittier law firm rather than in a more prestigious one in a major metropolis. But the “defeat,” as Nixon saw it, strengthened his determination to make something more of himself than a small-town lawyer.
During his first two years at Wingert and Bewley, where he became a partner in 1939, Nixon’s strivings began to find an outlet in local politics, especially a campaign to win a Republican nomination for an assembly seat, which collapsed when the incumbent decided to run again. In October 1941, sixteen months after he had married Patricia Ryan, a secondary-school teacher of commercial subjects, he accepted a job at the Office of Price Administration in Washington, D.C. The Nixons saw the job as a way to escape Whittier for a more interesting life in the capital. They also hoped Dick might contribute something to America’s nonbelligerent war effort against Hitler. Pat, whose ambitions, as with so many other middle-class women at that time, were entirely invested in her husband’s career, was more than happy to move anyplace that might broaden Dick’s opportunities.
In August 1942, with the United States now in the fighting after Pearl Harbor, Richard joined the Navy. He became a lieutenant commander and served in the southwest Pacific in the Combat Air Transport Command arranging supply shipments from island to island and the removal of wounded troops. After returning to the States in July 1944 and completing his Navy service over the next fourteen months in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore overseeing Navy contract terminations, Dick accepted an invitation from a college classmate and local Republican leader, who saw him as a representative figure in California’s Twelfth Congressional District and a combative fellow willing to do political battle, to run for the area’s House seat. Nixon’s intelligence, competitive drive, skills as a debater, and commitment to conservative shibboleths convinced the district’s Republican committee that he would make a strong candidate against Jerry Voorhis, a five-term New Deal Democrat.
Nixon’s campaign was a combination of old-fashioned sleazy politics and high-minded rhetoric appealing to the ideals of a wide array of voters. In an era when political leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill inspired young men to reach for high office, Nixon could imagine himself doing great things for his country and even the world. Yet the give and take of local politics for a House seat did not encourage Nixon’s idealistic side.
The premium was on winning by fair means and foul. And the need to outspend an entrenched opponent came first. Nixon’s backers spent more than three times what Voorhis did. The thousands of dollars poured into the campaign came in significant part from big oil, which was eager to beat a liberal who had joined President Harry Truman in opposing a tidelands bill permitting offshore drilling. Former president Herbert Hoover saw Voorhis as emblematic of the Democratic party’s big-government philosophy. He put his not inconsiderable support behind someone who promised to become an opponent of everything Voorhis stood for. The twelfth district’s newspapers gave Nixon another big advantage. He held a monopoly on editorial support for his candidacy. Local businesses backed him with billboard ads all over the district; Voorhis had none.
Nixon also gained an edge over Voorhis by besting him in a series of five debates and spending more time in the district wooing voters. Voorhis did not match Nixon’s fastidiousness about seeing constituents; he assumed that his ten years of service to the district made renewed contacts with voters superfluous.
Yet neither the money nor the backing of old-line conservative Republicans, nor Nixon’s forensic skills and hard work, however considerable, were enough to ensure him the decisive 57 percent majority he won in November 1946. His appeal rested primarily on a message of shared principles with the district’s voters, who were increasingly concerned about the Communist threat to America’s way of life. Communism’s antagonism to all organized religions, commitment to state planning, and suppression of freedoms, especially to enjoy the fruits of a free enterprise system in which twelfth-district voters were prospering, made any candidate even vaguely identified with such an outlook more than suspect.
Nixon’s campaign was much less about what he would do in Congress than an effective assault on Voorhis’s reliability as an anti-Communist defender of American institutions and traditions. As Nixon told his campaign manager after being nominated, “We definitely should not come out on issues too early…. We thereby avoid giving Voorhis anything to shoot at.”
Instead, the objective was to reflect the country’s and district’s growing fear of communism. At a time when the Soviets were asserting their dominance over Eastern Europe and a civil war in China threatened a Communist takeover of a former ally, a handful of New Dealers remained sympathetic to Moscow, despite its transparent abuse of democratic freedoms. “Radical” labor unions antagonized millions of middle-class citizens by disrupting the economy with work stoppages, and Americans were drawn to candidates promising to defeat the Communist threat at home and abroad.
Jerry Voorhis was a perfect target for an aspiring challenger like Nixon. A privileged American from a wealthy family who had earned a Yale degree, been a youthful member of the Socialist party, and supported every major New Deal program since his election in 1936, including its close alliance with the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Voorhis was an exemplar of what Republicans trying to unseat Democrats were aiming at in the 1946 elections. Nixon attacked Voorhis in their first debate as the candidate of the CIO’s political action committee, which the Los Angeles Times speculated was under Communist influence. Although Voorhis denied Nixon’s charges of his ties to the CIO-PAC, the smear stuck. It persuaded Nixon that false accusations against political opponents for weakness in response to communism or insufficient commitment to “American values” was an irresistible means to defeat them.
Nixon’s speeches during the campaign echoed the theme of standing up for America against the ideas that Jerry Voorhis supported. “The Republican party must again take a stand for freedom,” Nixon declared in a Lincoln day address. The Democrats have “led us far on the road to socialism and communism.” In August, he “welcome[d] the opposition of the PAC, with its communist principles and its huge [labor union] slush fund.” At their first debate in September, Nixon supporters handed out a two-page “fact sheet” stating that Voorhis “votes straight down the line for the SOCIALIZATION OF OUR COUNTRY.” A few days later, Nixon warned a rally against those in office “who would destroy our constitutional principles through the socialization of American free institutions. These are people who front for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise.” Nixon predicted that his opponents would “deprive the people of liberty.” He intended to “return the government to the people.”
Pro-Nixon newspapers denounced Voorhis as casting “pro-Russian votes” and votes against “measures the communists vigorously oppose.” One newspaper ad for Nixon described Voorhis as “a former registered Socialist” with a “voting record in Congress more Socialistic and Communistic than Democratic.” During the last month of the campaign, Nixon repeatedly warned against “extreme left-wingers…sboring from within, striving…to bring about the socialization of America’s basic institutions.” He saw radicals in government set upon giving “the American people a communist form of government.”
The day before the election, newspapers urged a “vote against New Deal communism. Vote Republican. Vote American!” The campaign generated exceptional enthusiasm from Nixon’s backers who felt themselves part of a crusade to save America. As one of Nixon’s businessmen supporters put it, “Roosevelt’s era was fading. All of the various government agencies that had been created were having their problems and the government…was flailing in the air.” The historian David Greenberg concludes that Nixon won “because he had aligned himself with the people and Voorhis with the federal bureaucracy.”
Because Nixon later had a reputation as “tricky Dick,” a man constantly reinventing himself to serve the political moment, biographers have wondered what, at any given time, did he really believe? “Nixon watchers have long debated whether the candidate’s man-of-the-people self-portrait was genuine or a cynical contrivance,” Greenberg says of the 1946 campaign. “To his critics, who didn’t emerge as an identifiable bloc until some years later, Nixon’s presentation was thoroughly phony, a guise assumed by a lackey of oilmen and fat cats. His defenders have argued otherwise, seeking to show that his advocates were not plutocrats but ‘small-business men’ or ‘entrepreneurs.’”
It is conceivable, and indeed likely, that Nixon, with his eagerness to win and genuine idealism infused in him by his moralistic Quaker mother, was both an opportunist exaggerating Voorhis’s affinity for radicalism and an honest reflector of the district’s ethics. As has been the case with so many other American politicians throughout the country’s history, candidates for low and high offices have rationalized cutting corners with self-assurances that opponents genuinely posed a threat to the national well-being and that political hyperbole and insincerity are commonplace devices for winning office.
For the ambitious Richard Nixon, his performance in the 1946 campaign was not all that different from what other successful political candidates challenging incumbents for House seats did that year. Nixon knew that his campaign rhetoric was hyperbolic and that he was encouraging current irrational fears about the Communist threat in the United States. “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis was not a communist,” Nixon said later, “[but] I had to win.” At the same time, however, he had genuine concerns about the danger to American institutions from Communist subversion. And so he justified his campaign as an expression of democracy—a reflection of what he and a majority of Southern California voters believed were essential for the country’s future.
Nevertheless, his eagerness to win a House seat was more at the center of his overstatements than any genuine fear that Voorhis’s return to the House would seriously jeopardize the national well-being. He comforted himself with the rationalization that becoming a profile in political courage could come later.
As a congressman between 1947 and 1950, he seized several opportunities to act boldly on behalf of larger national purposes. The first of these came in 1947 when he was chosen to serve on a House Select Committee on Foreign Aid. Although Republican leaders in the twelfth district warned him against “an unworkable” and inflationary foreign aid policy, Nixon felt compelled to rise above such partisanship to back the Truman administration’s Marshall Plan for reconstructing Western Europe. A visit to the Balkans to assess Communist dangers convinced him that the United States had no choice but to supply the economic wherewithal to combat Moscow’s political assault on the West. It was the beginning of his schooling in matters he believed essential to the country’s national security.
At the same time, a House proposal to rein in labor union excesses seemed like an opportunity not only to serve the country’s domestic well-being but also to give him instant visibility as a potential political star. “I was elected to smash the labor bosses and my one principle is to accept no dictation from the CIO-PAC,” Nixon declared melodramatically upon entering Congress. He promptly took a prominent place among supporters of the controversial anti-Union Taft-Hartley legislation that became law over Truman’s veto.
But it was his role in the Alger Hiss case that brought him national fame on a grand scale. A former high state department official under suspicion as a Soviet agent, Hiss and his alleged record of wrongdoing impressed Nixon as a chance to educate the public about the Communist danger in the United States. The case also struck him as an irresistible chance to assert himself against someone who seemed like a perfect stand-in for all those self-important people who he believed looked down on him, and to advance his political career by making headlines in a high-profile spy case.
In his 1962 book, Six Crises, Nixon explained that going after Hiss meant “opposing the President of the United States and the majority of press corps opinion, which is so important to the career of anyone in elective office.” His “stand, which was based on my own opinion and judgment, placed me more or less in the corner of a former Communist functionary [Whitaker Chambers, who was Hiss’s principal accuser] and against one of the brightest, most respected young men following a public career. Yet I could not go against my own conscience and my conscience told me that, in this case, the rather unsavory-looking Chambers was telling the truth and the honest-looking Hiss was lying.”
In insisting on the need for an investigation of Hiss, Nixon saw the stakes for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), on which he was serving, and more important, the nation, as terribly high. The principal object of such an investigation was, as Nixon remembered Woodrow Wilson’s view, “to inform the public on great national and international issues…. More important by far than the fate of the Committee,” Nixon concluded, “was the national interest.”
Aside from assumptions about serving the country, Nixon took satisfaction from the thought of bringing down Hiss and vindicating Chambers. Hiss, with his degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard and credentials as a lawyer associated with Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter, two of the country’s most distinguished jurists, was everything Nixon envied and longed to be, but could only attain vicariously by eclipsing Hiss.
Nixon’s personal antagonism to Hiss expressed itself in a memo to a journalist describing Hiss as “rather insolent toward me…and from that time my suspicion concerning him continued to grow.” Nixon later described Hiss as “too suave, too smooth, and too self-confident to be an entirely trustworthy witness.” Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator, believed that Nixon’s eagerness to expose Hiss as a spy was “a personal thing.” Stripling concluded that after Hiss said to Nixon, “I graduated from Harvard, I heard your school was Whittier,” Nixon was determined to get him.
Political ambition, of course, was also at work. In promoting the Hiss investigation in the summer of 1948, Nixon may have felt some trepidation at taking on the President of the United States, who had called HUAC’s probe of Hiss a “red herring,” but he also knew that it was a relatively easy way to generate substantial personal publicity. If he could show up the president by proving Hiss a liar, or better yet, a secret Soviet agent, it would make him an overnight political star. And even if he couldn’t make any charges stick against Hiss, it would still give Richard Nixon a degree of national visibility that would be the envy of more senior congressmen.
The more Nixon became identified with the case, however, the more he saw it as essential to demonstrate Hiss’s guilt—as a liar and a perjurer, if not a spy. During the investigation, when Nixon believed he had nailed Hiss, he told the press that he had “conclusive proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in the nation’s history…proof that cannot be denied [and] puncturing the myth of the ‘red herring’ President Truman had created.” When the reliability of this “proof” came under temporary suspicion and it appeared that Chambers would be discredited and Hiss exonerated, Nixon exploded: “Oh, my God, this is the end of my political career! My whole career is ruined.” But of course it wasn’t, and with Hiss’s conviction as a perjurer, Nixon gained everything he hoped for—personal notoriety and the humiliation of someone considered his better.
Nixon’s success in the Hiss case made him a viable candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from California in 1950. (Hiss was convicted in January 1950 of lying about stealing state department documents and contacts with Chambers. The statute of limitations had expired on espionage charges.) After the Republicans lost control of the House in the Truman victory over New York Governor Tom Dewey in 1948, Nixon bristled at the thought of being “‘a comer with no place to go.’” He didn’t want to be part of “a vocal but ineffective minority.” Like John F. Kennedy, who found membership in the House too narrow a venue for his ambitions, Nixon was eager for greater political influence. When it appeared that Sheridan Downey, the incumbent Democrat, would not run because of health problems and that the Democrats would make Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas the nominee, Nixon entered the Senate race.
Douglas impressed him as more beatable than Downey or almost any other Democrat who might run that year. A beautiful former stage and movie actress and wife of movie star Melvyn Douglas, Mrs. Douglas was, like Voorhis, a down-the-line liberal Democrat with ties to Eleanor Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities known for their leftist politics. She was also the offspring of an elite New York family and a privileged woman who had attended private East Coast schools and gained enough public notoriety to make her a three-term member of Congress. Her superior social standing made her all the more appealing to Nixon as an opponent he would take special pleasure in defeating.
But what made her vulnerable in a 1950 statewide race was her seeming casualness about the Communist threat. She had voted against funding HUAC, declared on the floor of the House in 1946, “Mr. Speaker, I think we all know that communism is no real threat to the democratic institutions of this country,” and in 1947, opposed the Truman Doctrine aiding Greece and Turkey as likely to prop up undemocratic regimes and undermine the United Nations by substituting American power for collective security. Although she deplored the Soviet system as “the cruelest, most barbaric autocracy in world history” and saw no place for communism in America, she had opened herself to charges of being insufficiently concerned about the Soviet menace and, perhaps worse, of being more sympathetic to Moscow’s brand of politics and governance than she let on.
Douglas failed to realize how much worldwide Communist gains had frightened the great majority of Americans. Soviet control of Eastern Europe, a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin, the vulnerability of an economically unstable Western Europe to Communist subversion, allegations about spy rings in Canada and the United States, Moscow’s detonation of an atomic bomb, Communist control of China, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s assertions about subversives in the State Department, and a North Korean attack on the South convinced millions of Americans that the United States was locked in a life-and-death struggle with radicals at home and abroad intent on destroying the American way of life.
Douglas was also unprepared for how ruthless Nixon might be in attacking her ideas, party, and loyalty to American political and economic traditions. He declared the election a contest between “freedom and state socialism.” He characterized the Democrats as “a group of ruthless, cynical seekers-after-power” who had committed themselves “to policies and principles which are completely foreign to” the country and their party.
The assault on Douglas was, if anything, even more overstated. Nixon identified her with New York Representative Vito Marcantonio, “an admitted friend of the Communist Party,” labeled her an appeaser of hostile forces, issued over five hundred thousand copies of a “pink sheet,” detailing her shared votes in the House with Marcantonio, “the notorious Communist party-liner,” and labeled her “the pink lady,” who was “pink down to her underwear,” a pejorative image that sunk her campaign. The challenge, Nixon declared throughout the election, was preserving American institutions against alien ideas and influences. Hundreds of billboards across the state described Nixon as “On Guard for America.”
Although House Speaker Sam Rayburn warned Douglas about Nixon, describing him as a man with “the most devious face of all those who have served in Congress in all the years I’ve been here,” she later acknowledged that she had “failed to take his attacks seriously enough.” She dismissed the pink sheet as “ridiculous, absolutely absurd.” And when she responded to Nixon’s charges, it was an ineffective attempt to identify him with Hitler and Stalin, who, she asserted, had also gained power by using “the Big Lie.”
Nixon won by a landslide, 59 percent to 40 percent, the largest victory margin in any 1950 U.S. Senate race. His success had almost nothing to do with interest politics or the economic well-being of Californians. In fact, there was hardly a mention of how occupants of the state would personally gain from Nixon’s election. To be sure, big oil and agribusiness as well as wealthy banking, realty, brokerage, construction, and chemical executives saw Nixon as more likely to serve their interests than Douglas and the Democrats. But the great majority of voters never showed any sustained concern with how the election would affect their jobs or the state’s economic future. Everywhere Nixon spoke in the state, he told a campaign manager, he was asked about communism and Hiss. “There’s no use trying to talk about anything else,” Nixon said, “because it’s all the people want to hear about.”
Nixon’s appeal rested on his ability to reflect voter fears and principles. He described himself as determined to “resist the socialization of free American institutions…[to] take a clear, aggressive stand against communist infiltration…[and to] place national security above partisanship in foreign policy.” Mrs. Douglas and the Democrats could call their program a “Fair Deal or social welfare,” Nixon said. “It’s still the same old socialist baloney any way you slice it.”
Nixon repeatedly said, “I have been advised not to talk about communism, but I’m going to tell the people of California the truth.” No one in Nixon’s campaign was urging him to mute the Red threat. But saying so, suggested that he was fearless in taking on forces that might personally punish him. He described the great issue in the campaign as “whether the American system of government can be maintained.” He explained that American Communists had been “given a virtual blueprint for revolution” that included plans, as reported in the press, “to contaminate food supplies, wreck trains, seize arsenals and cities…sabotage defense plants, and deprive major industrial cities of lights, power, and gas.” His campaign ads announced, “If you want to work for Uncle Sam instead of slave for Uncle Joe, vote for Dick Nixon. Don’t be left, be right, with Nixon. Don’t vote the Red ticket, vote the Red, White, and Blue ticket. Be an American, vote for Nixon.”
Nixon would later acknowledge that his campaign was regrettable. “I’m sorry about that episode,” he told a publisher in 1957, “I was a very young man.” But his later regrets for what one biographer described as “the most notorious, controversial campaign in American political history” was no doubt tied to hopes of portraying himself as more moderate in a coming presidential contest. Although the 1950 election would permanently fix him in the minds of millions of Americans as “Tricky Dick,” the campaign would also school him in the importance of foreign relations and stimulate an interest in finding realistic responses to national security threats. Nixon entirely agreed when President John F. Kennedy rhetorically asked him in 1961, “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like” the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs? Kennedy added.
Less than two years after entering the Senate, in 1953, Nixon became Dwight Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate. Eager to appease the conservative wing of the Republican party, which had hoped to make Senator Robert Taft of Ohio the nominee, Ike gave the nod to the party’s poster boy for anticommunism at home and abroad. Nixon’s preconvention support of Eisenhower over Taft and Governor Earl Warren, his fellow Californian, demonstrated Nixon’s consistent talent for sensing the country’s political direction, which saw Eisenhower’s military credentials as highly appealing in the intensifying Cold War.
Nixon began the campaign by reiterating his conservative credentials. After a leading party conservative refused to second Nixon’s nomination because of the party’s treatment of Taft, Nixon used his vice-presidential acceptance speech to strongly praise Taft. The warmth of his language touched off a demonstration for “Mr. Republican” that embarrassed Eisenhower’s supporters. When the Taft demonstration subsided, Nixon underscored his conservative credentials by predicting that the party’s success in the coming election would depend on convincing voters that the Republicans would be more effective than the Democrats in “destroying the forces of communism at home and abroad.” It was a restatement of the “Americanism” issue that had carried Nixon so far so quickly in national politics.
Nixon intended to make his defense of American institutions against Communist dangers the centerpiece of his vice-presidential campaign. Eisenhower shared Nixon’s conviction that this was not only essential for national security but also good electoral politics. As president, Ike declared, he would “get out of the governmental offices…people who have been weak enough to embrace communism.”
But allegations beginning in mid-September 1952 that wealthy supporters had set up a secret fund to allow Nixon’s family to live lavishly beyond his senator’s salary distracted the public from his anti-Communist appeal. Columnist Drew Pearson’s assertion that Nixon’s aides threatened to attack him as a Communist if he publicized the fund story helped make the charges against Nixon an irresistible issue. The press reported that the inches of newspaper columns discussing Nixon’s fund “now exceeded those for both Eisenhower and [Adlai] Stevenson [the Democratic candidate] throughout the country.”
Believing that the accusations could jeopardize Eisenhower’s candidacy, Ike’s aides pressured Nixon to leave the ticket or at the very least defend himself before a national television audience. Eisenhower himself urged Nixon to “tell them [the public] everything there is tell, everything you can remember since the day you entered public life. Tell them about any money you have ever received.” Because the charges of corruption were unmerited (the fund consisted of only $18,000 that had been reported as legitimate campaign contributions) and because Nixon had no intention of stepping down and giving up his long-term political ambitions, he agreed to offer a public defense of himself. Angered and frustrated by what he saw as an unwarranted attack on his integrity, Nixon initially responded that the charges against him were Communist-inspired. After deciding that he would have to meet the accusations head-on, he privately criticized Eisenhower for refusing to take a stand in his defense. “After the television program,” he told Ike, “if you think I should stay on or get off, I think you should say so either way. There comes a time in matters like these when you have to shit or get off the pot!”
On September 23, from the El Capitan Theatre near the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles, Nixon spoke to sixty million Americans, the largest TV audience to that point in the nation’s history. The setting for the speech was an invented den with an armchair and a desk against a backdrop of “a bookcase with wooden prop books with painted titles, one of them captioned Roosevelt Letters.” A journalist reported, “The spectacle was stage managed by Hollywood soap opera experts.”
Nixon’s speech was a masterpiece of political showmanship that appealed to millions of Americans. The address was especially effective in reaching out to voters who had never seen or heard Nixon before. A youthful-looking thirty-nine-year-old with dark hair and plain features, distinguished by what cartoonists portrayed as a “ski-slope” nose, Nixon seemed like an ordinary American. Speaking from an outline, his speech came across as an unrehearsed spontaneous explanation. His apparent openness and sincerity seemed to belie complaints that he was an untrustworthy, even ruthless politician dubbed “Tricky Dick.”
He began his talk by acknowledging that his “honesty and integrity” were in question. The charges were “a smear” that he would refute by telling “the truth.” There was no “secret fund,” the $18,000 was strictly for “political expenses that I did not think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States.” Moreover, “no contributor to any of my campaigns has ever received any consideration that he would not have received as an ordinary constituent.” Nor had he ever had his wife on his office payroll as other elected officials had. The fund was for expenses essential to exposing the Truman administration’s communism and corruption.
Mindful that it was insufficient to explain the fund’s legitimacy, Nixon provided “a complete financial history; everything I’ve earned; everything I’ve spent; everything I owe.” Recounting his family’s modest circumstances, he provided a detailed accounting of his and Pat’s assets and debts. “Every dime we have is honestly ours,” he assured his audience. “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat,” he added. “But she does have a respectable cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.” To demonstrate his qualities as a loving family man, he described how a man in Texas sent his two little girls a cocker spaniel. Tricia, the six-year-old, had named him Checkers. “And you know the kids love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”
Nixon was determined to use the speech not only to defend himself but also to gain an edge in the campaign. He drew comparisons between Adlai Stevenson’s privileged social position as the inheritor of a family fortune and his emergence from “modest means.” Quoting Lincoln, “God must have loved the common people—he made so many of them,” Nixon suggested that Honest Abe would have been on his side.
Nixon’s performance stirred strong viewer emotions. To those who were already Nixon antagonists, the speech was at a minimum “tasteless” and “histrionic.” New Yorker columnist Richard Rovere complained that Nixon’s language formed a striking contradiction with his Quaker faith: “It would be hard to think of anything more wildly at variance with the spirit of the Society of Friends,” Rovere wrote, “than his appeal for the pity and sympathy of his countrymen…on the ground that his wife didn’t own a mink coat.” To most Nixon critics, the speech was “a sort of comic and demeaning public striptease that cast Nixon forever as a vulgar political trickster who would disclose the most intimate private details and stoop even to exploiting his wife and his children’s dog to grub votes.”
Most of the response, however, was decidedly positive. Of the approximately four million written and telephoned messages, favorable reactions outran negative ones by a seventy-five to one margin. The reaction was less to the substantive issue of personal corruption or to the campaign issues of communism and Korea than to the man himself. A scholar who studied the messages concluded that Nixon “had succeeded in projecting an image of himself to which they [writers and callers] could respond…. As a man who shared their own feelings, thought as they thought, and valued what they valued…a reflection of themselves, and in their responses they seemed to say ‘We trust him; we believe in him because he is one of us.’”
Nixon’s defense of his financial history and his appeal to American egalitarianism put him back in Eisenhower’s good graces and secured his place on the ticket. But his humiliation at having to defend his integrity intensified the “partisan zeal and harshness” that were the hallmarks of his past political campaigns. In speech after speech, he described Adlai Stevenson and the Democrats as “spineless” dupes taken in by Communist trickery. “Nothing would please the Kremlin more” than a Stevenson presidency, Nixon declared. The Democratic candidate held “a Ph.D. degree from [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” In appealing to the cranky, frightened, paranoid side of the American character, Nixon provoked counterattacks that intensified his own feelings of persecution and made him all the more inclined to see opponents as agents of sinister forces out to destroy him.
Nixon’s eight years as vice president were in part a continuation of his unrestrained rhetoric about political foes. During the 1954 mid-term elections, with congressional control at stake, he pummeled the Democrats for losing China, causing the Korean War, and jeopardizing Indochina. He also claimed that Eisenhower’s election in 1952 saved the country from a Democratic “blueprint for socializing America.” Everything from medicine to housing and atomic energy was supposed to come under state control. Nixon’s “ill-will campaign,” Stevenson said, was “McCarthyism in a white collar,” associating Nixon with Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reckless indifference to the truth in pursuit of political advantage.
The most memorable moments in Nixon’s vice presidential term came in the spring of 1958 when he visited Latin America, and in the summer of 1959 when he debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in an American model kitchen at an exhibition in Moscow. The climax of the eighteen-day tour of South America occurred in Caracas, Venezuela, where Nixon was mobbed, spat on, stoned, and almost killed. He portrayed the attacks as a “firsthand demonstration of the ruthlessness, fanaticism and determination of the enemy we face in the world struggle.” After this, Nixon believed, no one could describe Latin American Communists as “merely ‘harmless radicals.’” They were not nationalists with justifiable grievances against their respective governments but tools of the “international Communist conspiracy.”
The Caracas confrontation had substantial political benefits: millions of Americans rallied behind their vice president and boosted his chances of becoming Eisenhower’s White House successor. (Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Senate majority leader, who had described Nixon to a reporter as nothing but “chicken shit,” led a crowd of dignitaries welcoming Nixon back to Washington. “In politics,” Johnson now told the journalist, “overnight, chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.”)
Nixon’s political stock, however, took a sharp tumble in November 1958 when big Democratic gains in the House and the Senate defeated his high-profile campaign to restore Republican control of Congress. The upturn in his approval ratings after the Caracas episode seemed only temporary.
But his confrontation with Khrushchev gave renewed luster to his public standing. A fierce argument with Khrushchev—the “kitchen debate”—over the virtues of their respective economic and political systems, including finger-poking exchanges before TV cameras, once again showed Nixon as a devoted spokesman for American values. A televised address to the Russian people, in which Nixon extolled the superiority of the American way of life, “was designed to make everyone wish he or she had been born in the U.S.A.” Quoting statistics about home, auto, TV, and radio ownership in the United States, Nixon implicitly emphasized the superior standard of living produced by a free-enterprise system. But more important than the material benefits of capitalism, he said, were the freedoms Americans enjoyed—of speech, religion, press, and movement within and outside the United States.
At the height of the Cold War competition with Soviet communism, a contest millions of Americans feared might end in disaster, Nixon gave the country fresh hope that it would come out on top, and, not incidentally, renewed the conviction that Richard Nixon might be the best public official to secure the victory.
Nixon viewed his vice presidency as preparing him for a presidential campaign and the presidency. It was a difficult challenge. Vice presidents traditionally played a distinctly minor role in both domestic and foreign affairs. There’s nothing to be said about the vice presidency, Woodrow Wilson declared, and after you’ve said that, there’s nothing more to say. Eisenhower echoed the point during the 1960 campaign when he answered a query about Nixon’s involvement in a major administration decision by asking for a week to come up with an example.
Nixon understood that he would not be able to rely on past campaign strategies to win the White House. Eight years of Republican rule foreclosed renewed attacks against Democrats for failing national security tests. Moreover, a Democratic opponent might effectively match appeals to national standards that Nixon had used so successfully in the past. Consequently, he aimed to establish himself as a statesman with unmatched foreign policy credentials in a time of continuing overseas dangers. He used the vice presidency to school himself in the major challenges the United States seemed certain to face in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. He took six high-visibility trips abroad, traveling nearly 160,000 miles to fifty-eight countries and four U.S. possessions.
But more than a strategy for the 1960 campaign shaped Nixon’s focus on foreign affairs during his vice presidency. He believed himself temperamentally best suited to making foreign policy. Becoming a successful executive legislator, as Lyndon Johnson would prove to be as president, was nothing Nixon relished. He did not find the give and take with congressmen and senators very appealing. Instead, he preferred to fix his attention on foreign affairs, where “he could engage his intelligence more than his personality” and enjoy greater freedom to assert leadership.
BETWEEN 1960 AND 1964, however, Nixon seemed to lose his political magic: whether because his personal failings as a slash-and-burn politician had alienated some voters or because he was out of sync with the current public mood, he suffered the first major electoral defeats in his career and had to temporarily sit on his ambition for the White House.
Since unrelenting effort had been a mainstay of his earlier victories, Nixon planned to work harder in the 1960 presidential contest than ever before. But a jam-packed schedule, including a pledge to campaign in all fifty states, proved to be a serious mistake. Instead of appearing relaxed and vibrant, his Herculean exertions made him seem exhausted and unprepared to bring fresh energy to the presidency. One adviser accurately warned him that it would be a fatal error to project less than a “relaxed, confident, fresh and unwearied” image, which was exactly what his Democratic opponent, the youthful Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, was doing.
Because nonstop campaigning combined with a two-week hospital stay for an infected knee left him thin and pale, Nixon came across as scrawny, listless, and far less presidential than Kennedy, during an initial television debate. (“My, God!” Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley quipped. “They’ve embalmed him before he even died.”) Nixon’s exhaustion registered on aides during a motorcade through Iowa, where he was sick with flu and small crowds at crossroads in farm communities frustrated him. Losing self-control on the drive between towns, Nixon, like an enraged child, began kicking the driver’s seat in front of him until the car stopped and his fellow passengers could calm him down.
Nixon hoped to use the Eisenhower foreign policy record to make his case for the presidency. But the “missile gap,” allegedly favoring the Soviet Union, and the rise of a hostile pro-Communist government in Cuba made it difficult for Nixon to take the high ground in arguing his superior credentials as a foreign policy leader. Nixon found it hard to play the anti-Communist card that had served him so well in past campaigns. Instead, he emphasized his superior executive experience to Kennedy’s and his greater knowledge of the crucial foreign policy challenges that would face the nation over the next four years.
But Nixon’s rhetoric lacked the sort of bite that had previously made him successful. The columnist Joseph Alsop, who had been a Nixon admirer, called his speeches “a steady diet of pap and soothing syrup,” more like a TV commercial than a statement of how he would actually lead the country. Imitating Nixon’s earlier use of anticommunism, Kennedy emphasized not only Moscow’s apparent advantage in missile technology but the Eisenhower-Nixon failure to support the Hungarian revolution or prevent expanded Communist influence in Tibet, Laos, Guinea, Ghana, and Cuba.
Unlike the campaigns against Voorhis, Douglas, and Stevenson, in which Nixon could present himself as an aspiring middle American battling elitists, he could not draw a similar contrast to Kennedy. True, Nixon had known poverty as a youngster, and Kennedy, the son of one of America’s richest men, was more privileged than any other opponent Nixon had ever faced. But as a senator, Kennedy stood lower in the political pecking order than Vice President Nixon, and as a Catholic representing an underrepresented minority, Kennedy was more the man on the make than Nixon. Moreover, Nixon’s identification with the Republican party and Kennedy’s with the Democrats allowed JFK to declare the election a contest “between the comfortable and the concerned.”
Nixon’s defeat by a scant 118,000 popular votes and a controversy over whether Illinois and Texas were lost because of ballot-box stuffing gave Nixon hope that he could win the White House after a second Kennedy term, which Nixon believed JFK would get. So he returned to California, where he could run for governor in 1962 and position himself for a possible race in 1968, when he would still be only fifty-five years old. Yet he knew that the odds of defeating incumbent Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown were not especially good. It would not be like 1950, when he could win a Senate seat with little discussion of California’s issues, which Nixon freely acknowledged in private he had little acquaintance with or interest in mastering. Moreover, having presided over the state’s growing prosperity, Brown enjoyed the backing of a solid majority, who shared his outlook and party politics.
Nevertheless, Nixon decided to run. The appeal of another campaign with a chance to vindicate his loss in 1960 and position himself for another presidential bid was too attractive to ignore. His whole life had been given over to politics and he could not sit on the sidelines for seven years before running again.
He might have improved his chances of a political comeback by running for a congressional office. But winning a House or Senate seat would have been a retreat into the past, a repeat of what he had done before. The governorship of the country’s second-largest state would mean breaking new ground—a chance to perform executive duties as a prelude to being president.
But more like 1960 than in any of his earlier campaigns, it was difficult to find the traction to make him a winner. Right-wing Republicans led by John Birch Society members co-opted anticommunism in the campaign; nor could Nixon outdo Brown as someone more in tune with voter concerns than the affable, homey governor. In addition, Nixon could not shake the public conviction that his chief interest in the governorship was as a stepping-stone to the presidency. When the Cuban Missile Crisis focused attention on Kennedy’s success in October, it partly rubbed off on Brown and other Democrats and ensured that Nixon lost by close to three hundred thousand votes out of six million.
Angered and frustrated by another defeat and smarting over what he saw as the hostility of a liberal press to his candidacy, Nixon used a post-election press conference to lambaste his tormentors. “As I leave you,” he said, “I want you to know—just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
But of course it wasn’t. Like Lyndon Johnson, who would sink into a depression after being compelled to give up the presidency in 1968, Nixon’s life was bound up with politics. As he acknowledged in his memoirs, “there was no other life for me but politics and public service. Even when my legal work [which he performed with a New York firm between 1963 and 1968] was at its most interesting I never found it truly fulfilling. I told some friends at this time that if all I had was my legal work, I would be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four.”
During his time in New York, he consulted Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, who, according to the New York Times, “for many years served as Richard Nixon’s psychotherapist.” Hutschnecker could at times be indiscreet about his relationship with Nixon. During the sixties, Hutschnecker boasted to an analyst in training that he was treating the former vice president who, Hutschnecker related, complained that he was nobody, that he felt empty. When he looked in the mirror each morning, it was as if there were nobody there. The analyst who related the discussion with Hutschnecker to me explained that Nixon’s unquenchable ambition was a product of his drive for a sense of self or to create a persona. It was Hutschnecker’s opinion that Nixon “didn’t have a serious psychiatric diagnosis,” although he had “a good portion of neurotic symptoms,” including “anxiety and sleeplessness.”
WITHIN HOURS of his setback in California, Nixon was already planning another presidential campaign. Though he would later claim that it was fate alone that brought him back into the political arena, his biographer Stephen Ambrose said that “from the beginning of 1963 to the spring of 1968, his actions could not have been better calculated to put him in sight of the [presidential] nomination.” His 1962 press conference, with criticism of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban crisis and an attack on the press, his two principal political enemies, Democrats and liberal journalists, was a tip-off that he was running again. Nixon “had known no other life since 1946, and wanted no other, short of occupying the ultimate seat of power itself,” Ambrose added. Nixon also knew that “his fate rested to a large degree on chance, accident, and luck…but…the point was to be ready to seize opportunities.”
And so he spent the next five years cultivating Republican leaders in every part of the country. After eight years as vice president and five more maintaining party contacts, he knew every important GOP leader in America. Circumstances and political calculation now came together to propel him toward another nomination. To gain the prize, Nixon stood aside in 1964 while Barry Goldwater, an ultraconservative, led the party into a disastrous defeat against a majority left-center coalition backing LBJ. Nixon shrewdly anticipated that strong support for Goldwater would allow him to become the party’s unifier after so great a failure. “This he would accomplish,” a journalist predicted in the summer of 1964, “by persuasion, by conferences, by speech-making, by traveling and by writing, without seeking interim public office as he did, regrettably, two years ago in California.” A big Republican victory in the 1966 congressional elections, for which Nixon, who campaigned tirelessly, received considerable credit also reestablished him at the head of the party.
But preparing to win the nomination was only step one. If he was to be elected, he needed to design a political strategy that could bring a majority of voters to his side. As with the nomination, he knew that this would partly depend on unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances. But even if these were in his favor, he would still need a compelling appeal.
The vehicle for selling himself to the country was his mastery of foreign affairs. As the Johnson administration expanded the war in Vietnam, first with a sustained bombing campaign beginning in March 1965 and then with the introduction of combat troops in July, Nixon foresaw that overseas events would eclipse LBJ’s Great Society as the central issue in the next campaign. The commitment of over five hundred thousand troops by 1968 in what was rapidly becoming the greatest foreign policy disaster in the country’s history vindicated Nixon’s judgment about what would count most in the coming election.
His use of world politics was a satisfying marriage of personal interest and political expediency. Between 1963 and 1968, Nixon traveled abroad constantly, ostensibly for corporations, which paid his way, but chiefly to promote his public image as a world statesman. Six trips to Europe, four to Asia, two to the Middle East, and one to Africa, where he met most of the world’s important government officials and political leaders, expanded his understanding of international problems. But it also allowed him to command considerable press attention and make headlines in the United States.
Nixon did not formally decide to run until the beginning of 1968. True, he had been working toward this for five years, but the prospect of another possible defeat was painful for him to contemplate and made him hesitant about entering another campaign. In December 1967, he had to convince himself that running was a good idea. In a revealing note, he declared he “did not want to be President in order to be someone…. ‘I don’t give a damn,’” he said defensively. But politics was the only way he had ever been “someone,” and though the risks of permanently losing that identity were considerable, he could not give up a last chance to reach his life’s goal. “I have decided to go,” he told his family in January 1968. “I have decided to run again.”