8

The Case Against

Politics is the most unfair of callings. In no other vocation do professionalism and experience count for so little. The senior partner of an important law firm is not, after all, in danger of being shouldered aside by some upstart who never got a law degree. A poet or a potato-peeler manufacturer is not likely to be given precedence over an experienced financier for the presidency of a bank. And yet the professional politician always hears at his back the winged chariot of the rank amateur, hurrying near.

Twice in the last twenty years—in 1940 and in 1952—the Republican party has turned down the professional and offered its greatest prize to an amateur of the rankest sort. And now the professional, Nixon, hears at his back the winged chariot of the amateur, Rockefeller—although, as this is written, the Rockefeller chariot has a long way to go.

Not that Nelson Rockefeller is an amateur in the sense that Wendell Willkie was an amateur in 1940, or Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Unlike them, he has been elected to office, and to what is usually regarded as the second most important elective office in the United States. In that office he has handled himself in a decidedly unamateurish manner. Early in his first year as governor of New York, when State Chairman Judson Morhouse reported to Rockefeller the bitter opposition in Republican ranks to his proposed tax increase, Rockefeller remarked with a grin: “Tell them I’m just an amateur in politics, Jud, and maybe they’ll go easy on me.” Morhouse replied: “I’ll tell them that, Nelson, but I don’t know how I can keep my face straight.” All present guffawed knowingly.

There was nothing amateurish about the way Rockefeller went about getting the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1958, nor about his campaign against Averell Harriman, which was calculated in a most professional manner to cut heavily into the normal Democratic majority in New York City. And there is nothing amateurish either about the way in which Rockefeller, as this is written, is preparing to challenge Nixon. It has been cynically remarked that only one episode in Rockefeller’s presidential candidacy was the result of pure chance—his son’s fortuitous marriage to the Norwegian Cinderella, Miss Rasmussen. Everything else was planned in advance with the most consummate attention to detail. If the challenge to Nixon is never issued—on this point the reader is better able to judge than the writer—it will be for one reason only. It will be because a highly professional assessment of the real political situation has led Rockefeller to the conclusion that Nixon cannot be beaten for the nomination.

And yet Rockefeller is not a professional politician, all the same, in the sense that Nixon is a professional politician. He has held elective office only since January 1959—far too briefly to attain the professional aura. Unlike the true professional, he has decidedly never had to depend on politics for his daily bread, nor has politics been, all his adult life, his chief raison d’être, as it has been Nixon’s reason for being.

Any attempt to summarize the case against Rockefeller side by side with the case against Nixon suggests why politics is the only profession in which it is a positive advantage not to be a professional. The case against Rockefeller is vague, fuzzy, and largely a matter of personal opinion or prejudice. The case against Nixon is detailed, specific, and, to at least some intelligent and fair-minded people, convincing.

It is not very hard, to be sure, to find people who know Rockefeller and who believe that he would make a disastrous President. One of those who came to know him and dislike him intensely in the wartime days, and who is now a respected back-room boy in Democratic affairs, has said flatly that he would far prefer Nixon to Rockefeller as President, if there had to be a choice. “You know how I feel about Nixon,” he says, “but at least with him we’d know where we stood, and you never know where you stand with Rockefeller. I’d rather ‘bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.’”

Here is an anti-Rockefellerite who saw Rockefeller in action in Eisenhower’s Washington: “Because Nelson’s never had to worry about money, he has no real idea of its value. And he’s just as extravagant with people as he is with money. He had something like eighty people working for him in that cold-war adviser’s job—Bill Jackson, who succeeded him, found there wasn’t enough work for half a dozen. The budget and the bureaucracy would both get out of hand if he ever became President.”

Even some of those who know him well and admire him have their private doubts about a Rockefeller presidency. “Nelson has only one real fault, but it’s a serious one,” says one friend. “He has no real critical faculty. I’ve seen him rubbing his hands with enthusiasm over half a dozen wild-eyed schemes. In the White House, that could be a dangerous business.”

Another, and closer, friend has this to say: “Nelson’s one great weakness is that, because of his circumstances, he has never known real pain, real suffering, real defeat. As a result, his world is an unreal world, a lopsided world. He is the embodiment of the great American illusion that all problems are soluble, that if you devote enough brain power and enough money to a problem, you always come up with the answer. He does not realize that there are some problems which have no answer, and that worries me when I think he might be President.”

There may be some truth in all these opinions, even the harshest. But they are opinions, nothing more, and it is easy to unearth hostile opinions of any man in public life. It is not possible to point to something Rockefeller has done or said which a man who aspires to the awful power of the presidency ought not to have done or said. It is entirely possible to point to things that Nixon has said (not done) which a man who aspires to the presidency ought not to have said.

Part of the case against Nixon is, quite simply, untrue. For example, there is the story that in his 1946 campaign against Jerry Voorhis, an anonymous telephone-call drive was organized by Nixon. According to the story, vast numbers of voters answered the telephone and heard: “This is a friend of yours. I just wanted you to know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist.” The caller would then hang up immediately.

The story, which has also been told about Nixon’s campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, is devoutly believed by many intelligent people. It has been frequently repeated in print—for example, in the Democratic Fact Book in 1956. But it is not true. Murray Chotiner once explained to me why it was not true. To have any appreciable effect on the outcome of an election in a large congressional district, Chotiner pointed out calmly, such a drive would have to be highly organized, with a large work force daily telephoning thousands of names. It would be impossible to keep secret an operation organized on such a basis. Even if it were possible, he said in effect, the operation would be self-defeating in the end—sooner or later one of those involved would turn on the candidate and would be willing to describe the whole operation in print, and if necessary under oath. This would ruin the candidate politically, and incidentally his political manager. For such practical reasons, no political manager in his senses would organize such an operation.

If only because it was based on such highly practical considerations, the explanation seemed to me wholly convincing. No doubt some people got anonymous telephone calls.¹ Such calls are a regular feature of any heated political situation. But if the story about Nixon’s anonymous telephone drive were true, it would be easy to prove, and a lot of powerful people would give their eyeteeth to prove it. No real evidence to support it has ever been produced.

Among other flatly untrue stories about Nixon is the charge that “the slush fund enabled Nixon to make the down payment on his Washington home”—this appeared in The Nixon Record published by the Democratic National Committee in 1956. What really made it possible for Nixon to make the down payment on his house was his remarkable proficiency as a poker player. In the fund speech Nixon said, “My service record was not particularly unusual—I was just there when the bombs were falling.” The statement was accurate enough, although, since Nixon had a non-combat job far from the battle lines, there presumably were not many bombs.² All the same, Nixon’s war career was unusual in one way. He became an unusually proficient poker player, and as a result he came back from the wars with a useful nest egg—about $10,000, according to the report of one Nixon intimate. The nest egg has provided him with the wherewithal for such personal capital expenditures as the down payment on his house.

There are other items in the case against Nixon which are unquestionably true, but which are not really as damning as they are supposed to be (or at least they do not seem so to me). For example, there is the famous “pink sheet,” printed on orders from Murray Chotiner in the 1950 campaign for the Senate, in which Helen Gahagan Douglas’s voting record was compared with that of the pro-Communist Representative Vito Marcantonio. Certainly this was hardly an admirable political technique. But it is true that Mrs. Douglas started the game of “you’re another” by comparing Nixon’s voting record on Korean aid to Marcantonio’s. It is also true that Mrs. Douglas was in fact vulnerable on certain issues, like her vote against Greek-Turkish aid.

But the real reason I have never been able to get very excited about the pink sheet is that the idea was first thought up by none other than my brother and myself. Early in the summer of 1950 we wrote a column, called “The Republican Party Line,” which achieved a certain réclame at the time. The column compared the voting records of such Republican isolationists as Senators Taft, Wherry, and Kem, on foreign and defense issues, with the record of Marcantonio on the same issues. We noted that Taft scored an eighty-five per cent, and Wherry and Kem scored one hundred per cent. As I wrote to the Louisville Courier-Journal, which had accused me in an editorial of softness toward Nixon, “I do not recall any violent outcry from liberals when that piece was published.”

All this is not meant to suggest that Nixon’s campaigns in 1946 and 1950 were “elevated democratic dialogues,” to borrow a Stevensonian phrase. They were very rough campaigns indeed, and in some ways they were worse than rough. But the roughness was on both sides, especially in the 1950 campaign, as Earl Mazo’s factual and heavily documented account of that campaign makes clear. And in both campaigns the fact is that Nixon simply adopted the basic Republican line, with variations of his own. In 1946 Republicans all over the country were running, like Nixon, against the meat shortage and the CIO-PAC. In 1950, again like Nixon, Republicans all over the country were running against communism and corruption (Nixon, unlike many other Republicans, did not run against the Korean War).

It is in this sense that the fact that Nixon has been a professional politician since 1946 is like an albatross around his neck—and Nelson Rockefeller, a non-professional, wears no such albatross. A lot of the things that the Republican professionals all over the country were saying in 1946 or 1950 or 1952 were silly, or extreme, or both. But in retrospect they seem even sillier and more extreme. Nixon’s position is further compromised by the fact that, before he became Vice-President, he served in the House and Senate. A member of Congress must cast dozens of votes which inevitably alienate large voting groups, which is one reason why only one sitting member of Congress has been nominated and elected President in all our history, the disastrous Warren G. Harding.

“I know the Democrats will try to picture me as an extremist,” Nixon has said, “but you can’t go on hashing up the distant past indefinitely.” You can go on hashing up the distant past for a good long time, though—some Republicans are still running against Yalta, and some Democrats are still running against Herbert Hoover. And Nixon’s past provides a rich gold mine of direct quotations calculated to alienate and embitter almost all Democrats and a great many independents. Partly because he has never run for office as a professional party-line Republican—and partly also because, unlike Nixon, he is not an instinctively partisan man—Rockefeller’s past provides no such gold mine.

But the case against Nixon by no means rests entirely on the fact that he is and has long been a professional, party-line Republican. For, at least until 1954, Nixon displayed what sometimes seems almost a compulsion to use specious and sleazy debating tricks in order to “make the worse appear the better reason.”

Consider a few of these debating tricks. There is the juxta-position of words, as when Nixon, in 1952, in the course of accusing Truman and Stevenson of tolerating Communists in the government, called them “traitors to the high principles of the Democratic party.” In the context of those days when McCarthy rode high, the words “traitor” and “democratic party” were the words that remained in his hearers’ minds.

There is the use of the undeniable statement with a false implication. An example from the fund speech: “Every penny of it was used to pay for political expenses that I did not think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States.” In fact, the purpose of the fund was to meet expenses which could not be charged to the taxpayers of the United States.

There is the trick of the coupling of categories, as in the 1954 campaign statement: “We have driven the Communists, the fellow travellers, and the security risks out of government by thousands.” It is true that several thousand so-called “security risks” were dropped in the early Eisenhower years to appease McCarthy. But Nixon failed to point out that the vast majority of these people were fired for reasons having nothing to do with subversion, that many of them were hired initially by the Eisenhower administration itself, and that the total included not a single known Communist. Thus again, the implication of what he said was false.

The year 1954 was a bad year for Nixon. In that year, Nixon came closest to justifying Walter Lippmann’s description of him as a “ruthless partisan … (who) does not have within his conscience those scruples which the country has the right to expect in the President of the United States.” Two statements Nixon made in 1954 best sum up the case against Nixon.

In a speech in Los Angeles, Nixon quoted Adlai Stevenson as saying that “while the American economy has been shrinking, the Soviet economy has been growing fast.” On that basis he accused Stevenson of being “guilty without being aware that he was doing so of spreading pro-Communist propaganda.” Again there is the old debater’s trick, in the phrase “without being aware that he was doing so,” which simultaneously suggests that the speaker is being fair-minded and that his victim is too stupid to know what he is doing. It was a disgraceful thing to say, the more so because Nixon, who does his homework, must have known that Stevenson’s warnings were fully justified. In the spring of 1958, indeed, in an admirable speech, Nixon warned of the deadly challenge implicit in the extraordinarily rapid growth of the Soviet economy. He was thus guilty, by his own definition, of “spreading pro-Communist propaganda.”

But if there is any one sentence which best sums up the case against Nixon it is the famous aside in a 1954 telecast defending the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policies. Nixon looked up from his script and asked, as though on the spur of the moment: “And incidentally, in mentioning Secretary Dulles, isn’t it wonderful finally to have a Secretary of State who isn’t taken in by the Communists?”

Nixon didn’t say that Dean G. Acheson and George Marshall were “taken in by the Communists.” But he very clearly implied it, and the implication is grossly misleading. To make his implication, Nixon made use of both an essentially specious “Communist issue” and a sleazy debater’s trick, the rhetorical question. He asked his rhetorical question, moreover, not when he was a young congressman engaged in what he has called a “rocking, socking campaign,” but when he had already been Vice-President of the United States for two years. Even better than the disgraceful statement about Stevenson, in short, that rhetorical question explains why, to some reasonable and fair-minded people, the case against Nixon is a convincing case.

To understand all is not necessarily to forgive all. Even so, it is worth trying to understand why Nixon was, even as late as 1954, the kind of politician who could ask that rhetorical question. And to one familiar with Nixon’s early history, understanding is not really so very difficult.

There were the circumstances to which he was born. There was the Irish ancestry, and Nixon’s inborn “instinct to strike back.” There were the parents who wanted him to be “good, not just at one thing, but at everything”—and especially the cantankerous, ulcer-ridden father, urging him to win at all costs. And there were also Nixon’s years as a champion college debater, years which formed his speaking style. The object of college debating, after all, is quite simply to win the debate, just as it is the object of college football to win the game. The debate is won by scoring points off the opposition, using whatever debating techniques come to hand. The championship debater need not, and indeed should not, concern himself with the merits of the issues, since he must be prepared to defend either side.

It may seem farfetched to try to explain Nixon the politician in terms of Nixon the champion boy debater of southern California. Yet I am convinced that Nixon’s training as a debater really is an important part of the explanation. Remember that Nixon’s first great triumphs centered around debating—debating made him a big man on the Whittier campus, and debating got his name and picture in the august Los Angeles Times. In the course of my reporting I have collected a vast anti-Nixon dossier. Ninety-eight per cent of the dossier consists of examples of tricky debating techniques like those cited above. And in case after case it seems almost inconceivable that Nixon’s use of such techniques had any important impact on the voting. He used them, one suspects, simply because he was trained in their use.

At any rate, at least half the case against Nixon rests on the fact that even until 1954 he seemed to see nothing wrong in using such debating tricks in his public speeches. But that is not the whole case against Nixon. The other half of the case against Nixon is that, at least until 1954, he was the sort of politician who saw winning elections as the first, and in a sense the only, function of a politician.

The way Nixon became a politician is as important as the circumstances to which he was born, in any attempt to understand why he became the kind of politician he did become. In 1945 Nixon was renegotiating Navy contracts in Baltimore and, like thousands of other veterans, worrying unhappily about his future, when he got a telegram from Herbert Perry, a family friend who managed the Whittier branch of the Bank of America. Perry suggested that Nixon might like to come back to Whittier to address a Republican committee which was fruitlessly searching for a candidate to oppose the well-entrenched Jerry Voorhis. Nixon accepted the unexpected invitation, and his earnest clichés convinced the committee members that he was their man. So the Nixon political career was launched.

Nixon became a politician, in short, more because it seemed a good idea at the time than because of any profound, political convictions. Having thus entered politics more or less by accident, one suspects that at first he thought of a political career much as another young veteran back from the wars might think of advertising, or meat packing, or bond selling—as a way to make a living and get ahead. In politics, obviously, you don’t get ahead unless you get elected—and then re-elected. And Nixon soon acquired a political mentor in the person of the astute Murray Chotiner, that expert in the art of winning elections at all costs and by any means. The way to win is to beat your opponent, and one way to beat your opponent is to develop a fine instinct for his weakest point, his Achilles’ heel, his political jugular vein.

There is no doubt that Nixon became adept at finding the opposition’s political jugular, and often the jugular was the “Communist issue.” Often enough, in turn, the “Communist issue” was essentially specious, a debating trick, as in that famous rhetorical question. And yet, in all fairness, Nixon’s experience in the Hiss case ought to be considered in any rational attempt to weigh the case against Nixon.

Before the Hiss case, Nixon’s only unusual experience in Congress had been his service on the Herter committee on foreign aid, which persuaded Nixon that it was wholly in this country’s interest to make a serious effort to shore up the free world. (He has acted and voted consistently on that conviction ever since.) But it was the Hiss case that first made Nixon’s face visible in the faceless mass in the House. Nixon was just another congressman until 1948, when Alger Hiss came along—indeed, he largely owes his present eminence to his fellow Quaker, Hiss.

This is not the place to rehash the old, complex, tragic story of Alger Hiss. But although there are still odd mysteries clinging to the story, few fair-minded persons who have read the record have any serious doubt that Hiss was guilty. And there is equally little serious doubt that Nixon, on the whole, behaved intelligently and responsibly, and that, if it had not been for his stubborn efforts, Hiss in all likelihood would not have been brought to justice. At any rate, the Hiss case was Nixon’s first really important political experience. In human terms, it thus seems natural enough that Nixon should develop something of an obsession about communism. And in the McCarthy era, plenty of politicians suddenly developed an obsession about communism with far less excuse for doing so.

Nixon’s relationship with McCarthy, as well as his often specious political use of the “Communist issue,” is usually cited as part of the case against Nixon. And it is true that Nixon never took a stand against McCarthy until the Wisconsin demagogue had been politically destroyed. But it is worth recalling, again in all fairness, that with a handful of honorable exceptions, every Republican politician was in the early days either gleefully pro-McCarthy or carefully noncommittal; that the entire Eisenhower administration quivered with collective fear at mention of the dreaded McCarthy name; and that not more than one Democrat out of five had dared to speak out against the Great Inquisitor.

Nixon’s actual role in the early McCarthy days was to act as the Eisenhower administration’s ambassador to McCarthy, and for a time, as in the matter of the confirmation of Charles E. Bohlen, he performed rather usefully in that role. In any case, if Nixon is to be condemned because he failed to fight McCarthy, a very large number of politicians in both parties should beware of casting the first stone.

All this is not to suggest that there is no case against Nixon. The case against Nixon is real, and it can be simply summarized. Until 1954, Nixon was the sort of politician who regarded winning elections as a politician’s first and most important function, and who was willing to use to that end the tricky debating techniques he had learned as a boy. A President who regarded winning elections as his first function, and who was willing to use sleazy debating tricks to that end, would be a disastrous President. Therefore, it is important to ask whether Nixon is still the same sort of politician he once was.

Nixon’s numerous enemies scoff at the notion that Nixon has changed in any way. To elicit howls of derision where two or three Democrats are gathered together in one place, it is only necessary to utter the phrase, “the new Nixon.” And in one sense the howls of derision are justified. There are ways in which men do not change. A boy’s intelligence quotient at the age of nine will be about the same when he is forty-five. A born fool or a born coward will so remain. As the Bible warns, a man cannot “by taking thought … add one cubit unto his stature.”

Yet time and experience do change a man, not in his inner nature but rather as saline deposits change the size and shape of a barnacle exposed to the sea. It is silly to suppose that a man of Nixon’s intelligence and capacity to learn has been in no way affected by the extraordinary experiences through which he has passed.

And one fact can be proved on the record. In his style as a politician, if not in his character as a human being, Nixon has changed. The change started in 1954. For after 1954 the anti-Nixon dossier suddenly dwindles away into almost nothing at all. Indeed, there are only two items worth mentioning. One was his reference in 1956 to Chief Justice Earl Warren as a “great Republican Chief Justice.” This was no doubt very naughty, although the notion that Supreme Court justices become political eunuchs at the moment of their appointment is rather sillier than most of our national myths.

The other major item in the post-1954 dossier consists of Nixon’s reaction to a New York Times story in 1958. The story was to the effect that letters to the State Department were running four to one against the Administration’s firm stand in the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. When Nixon read the story, he issued an angry statement. The main point of the statement was Nixon’s attack on “the apparent assumption that … the weight of the mail rather than the weight of the evidence should be the controlling factor in determining American foreign policy.” In this respect, surely, Nixon was eternally right. But he also professed to discern a “patent and deliberate effort of a State Department subordinate to undercut the Secretary of State and sabotage his policy.”

This statement caused many ghosts which had long been laid to walk again. For here, suddenly, was “the old Nixon,” seeing “deliberate sabotage” in the State Department where there was nothing more than enterprising reporting; the old Nixon who interpreted complex situations in terms of individual villains. “Oh dear,” one of Nixon’s admirers sighed on that occasion, “why does Dick always have to go too far?”

And yet, the fact is that, since 1954, Nixon has very rarely gone too far, although the provocation has often been great. In 1956, for example, Adlai Stevenson’s campaign strategists quite frankly hoped to drive Nixon to extremes by brutal attacks on his integrity and past record. To their profound disappointment, Nixon, who was of course quite aware of what they were up to, built his campaign around the ticket’s “positive” asset—the President’s personal popularity. He “finessed,” to use his own word, the attacks on him, as he now advises younger politicians to do. In the 1958 non-presidential election, there were those who professed to see “the old Nixon” in some of Nixon’s more partisan statements. In fact, Nixon said no more than what party-line Republicans were saying everywhere in the country.

The change in Nixon’s political style since 1954 is, in short, obvious and on the record. It may be possible to pinpoint the moment when he decided to change his style.

In his early years in Washington, especially during the Hiss case era, Nixon was extremely sensitive to criticism. When criticized, he was likely to fly into a Black Irish temper. (I have never seen him angry, but his temper is said to be very violent on the rare occasions when he loses control of it.) In the last several years, however, Nixon has come to regard criticism as a useful means of improving the public performance of Richard Nixon, and he is oddly dispassionate about it. From certain friends, Nixon nowadays asks for candid criticism.

One of these friends is Philip Watts, an able banker and former State Department official, whom Nixon first met when Watts was secretary of the Herter committee. Nixon’s friends and associates are apt to be shrewdly practical men with a talent for realpolitik, but Watts is quite different. He is idealistic to the point of naïveté, and one suspects that Nixon has quite consciously used him as a sort of perambulating conscience, a counterweight to his more practical advisers. In the McCarthy era, Watts was the only really passionate anti-McCarthyite who was close to Nixon. The strong anti-McCarthy line Watts took with Nixon may have helped prevent Nixon from becoming more closely identified with McCarthy than he did become.

It is at least possible that Watts had an important influence on Nixon’s post-McCarthy career. When Nixon asked his famous rhetorical question, Watts heard the telecast, and at nine-thirty the next morning he was in Nixon’s office asking to see the Vice-President. At eleven he was shown into the Nixon inner sanctum. He wasted no time in telling Nixon what he thought of his remark. The implications of Nixon’s aside were wholly specious, he said—he had worked for Dean Acheson, and it was disgraceful to imply that Acheson had been “taken in by the Communists.” Moreover, if Nixon wanted the respect of honorable men, he should promptly abandon his habit of making his points by indirection, especially by the sly debater’s trick of the rhetorical question.

“I expected to be thrown bodily out of the office,” Watts recalls. For a time, Nixon had obvious difficulty in controlling his temper. But both men calmed down in the end, and they talked for a long time, with Nixon citing the Hiss case to defend the implications of his question, while Watts begged him, as a friend, to drop his technique of scoring points off the opposition by indirection. “He never admitted for a moment that he was wrong,” Watts recalls, “but I think he thought about what I said.”

Whether or not the talk with Watts had anything to do with it, the change in Nixon’s political style since 1954 has been quite obvious to anyone not blinded by bitterness toward him. For the cynical, there is an easy explanation to hand. In 1954, Nixon did not want to be President—or at least he did not think he had any chance to be President. He had seriously promised Pat Nixon that he would never run for office again. (He still owes his friend James Bassett ten dollars, for in 1954 Bassett bet him that he would run again.) By 1956 and thereafter, Nixon did want to be President. He wanted to be President very much, and he knew that he had a chance, perhaps a good chance, to become President. But he also knew—for he is anything but a fool—that a reputation as an extremist and partisan would sharply reduce that chance. Hence his change of political style.

A man’s motives are always mixed, and no doubt it is true that Nixon changed his political style after 1954 in part for purely practical political reasons. But does the change go deeper than that?

The reader is in just about as good a position to answer that question as the writer, for of course any answer is sheer guesswork, a matter of instinct. It may be that those who instinctively distrust Nixon are right in supposing that he has simply put on another mask, more suited to his presidential ambitions than the mask of the pre-1954 Nixon. At least there is no way to prove that they are wrong. But my guess, for what it is worth, is that they are wrong, nevertheless.

Nixon unquestionably wants very much to be President. But it seems to me that he also wants very much to be a good President. To suppose otherwise of the product of the prim Quaker household, whose parents spurred him on to be “good at everything,” to suppose that Nixon wants to be President out of a cynical love of power and for no other reason, is to suppose that Nixon is some sort of monster, which he is not. It is because he not only wants to be President but also wants to be a good President that Nixon has worked harder than any Vice-President in history at his job.

Moreover, the evidence suggests that his attitude toward the presidency has changed. To any Vice-President, the thought must sometimes occur that he might wake up President tomorrow. As long as the President is in rude health, the thought is casual and fleeting, as distant and unreal as the thought of a man’s own death. But the President’s heart attack in September 1955 certainly made the thought that he might become President real, and vivid, and immediate, to Nixon. Since then, Nixon has not only thought with his brain that he might succeed to the presidency—he has known it in his heart. The magnifying and transforming effect of the presidential office has often been noted. Even at one remove, the office has had an effect on Nixon.

When he became Vice-President in 1952, and for some time thereafter, Nixon thought of the presidency, one suspects, primarily as the first prize in the political game. He thought of the office, perhaps, rather as an ambitious young Detroit executive might think of the presidency of General Motors, as ambition’s final crown. But there is a lot more to the presidency than simply reaching the top of the heap, and it seems silly to suppose that Nixon, a highly intelligent and perceptive man, still regards the presidency simply as the first prize in politics, after so many years of intimate exposure to the terrible responsibilities of that office. One of those responsibilities is to be right on the basic life-and-death issues, even when it is politically unwise to be right, and Nixon, in recent years, has been right rather often.

Nixon instantly recognized and publicly acknowledged the real significance of the Soviet Sputniks when other Administration officials were trying to laugh it off with weak jokes. Both in the pre-Sputnik and post-Sputnik era, Nixon strongly opposed the policy of defense cutback and slowdown—that kind of economy, he warned, might be good politics in the short run, but it would be bad politics in the long run. When the President overruled him on the issue, he supported the President, to be sure—he felt that, as Vice-President, he had no alternative, and perhaps he was right. At least he understood the nature of the threat inherent in the growing Soviet preponderance of power. Nixon has also loudly and consistently advocated an adequate foreign-aid program. Indeed, in Nelson Rockefeller’s struggle with the Four H Club on this issue he was Rockefeller’s strongest, and almost his only, ally. Since almost all politicians agree that foreign aid is political poison, it is difficult even for the cynical to detect the political motivation in Nixon’s stand on the issue.

It is true that a man cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to his stature, or increase his intelligence quotient, or substitute courage for cowardice in his character. But we do grow up, and the growing-up process does not necessarily end when we reach our prescribed height. Few men in their forties or fifties would defend everything they said or did in their twenties and thirties. Nixon’s job has provided as good a medium of forced growth as there is, short of the presidency itself. Perhaps the best evidence that he has grown was provided by his famous tour of the Soviet Union and Poland in the summer of 1959.

It would be excessively naïve to suggest that the trip was not in part politically motivated, of course. Nixon’s aides were candidly rueful, indeed, that the trip had to be almost a year in advance of the Republican convention—the impact would have been far greater if the convention had assembled with Nixon’s triumph still fresh in the delegates’ minds. But just because the political implications of Nixon’s tour were so obvious, there were sensible people who feared that Nixon would again “go too far,” by making grandstand plays for the huge Polish-American voting bloc, for example. Instead, even his critics were impressed by his performance. It was indeed a remarkable performance, by a mature and responsible politician. It is hard to imagine the Nixon of ten years ago performing in the same way.

What kind of President, then, might Nixon be? And what kind of President might Rockefeller be?

These questions are, of course, inherently unanswerable, since there are too many imponderables involved. But it is possible to make at least a sensible guess at the answers from what we know about the two men. An attempt at such a guess will be made in the final chapter of this book.

¹ When my younger brother John Alsop persuaded a Republican town caucus in Avon, Connecticut, unanimously to condemn Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, he got anonymous calls accusing him of being a Communist for some time thereafter.

² Of all the current crop of candidates, the only genuine war hero is Senator Kennedy.