Appendix
Author’s note:
The following talk with Nixon seems to me to give a rather vivid impression of Nixon talking, off the cuff, to an audience of one. The talk was not tape-recorded (tape-recording seems to me to take all the art out of interviewing) and it is therefore not absolutely verbatim. But I wrote it all down as soon as I had left Nixon, and although my memory is notoriously bad in other ways, it is briefly phonographic, and the talk is entirely accurate in substance. Excerpts have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, but the talk seems to me to have a cumulative impact and to be worth reproducing in full.
There is no comparable talk with Rockefeller available. I have had a number of interviews with him, but he insisted that he should not be directly quoted.
S.A.
Large stone house. Pleasant porch overlooking Glover Park. Coffee. A little chitchat about how Ike likes a heaping spoonful of sugar in his coffee, and how Route 240 is going through the Park but won’t be visible. But Nixon is no small talker, so down to business.
ALSOP: The thing that’s impressed me most in my reporting on you is your extraordinary energy, ambition, drive, call it what you will. One of your law-school classmates remembers you as the hardest working man he’s ever met. Now, this is a rather introspective question and may be impossible to answer. But how did you get that way? Your Quaker background, your family, your economic circumstances as a boy, or what?
NIXON: Well, I suppose it was a mixture of all the factors you mention. There was always a tradition of hard work in my family, especially my mother’s side, the Quaker side. My grandmother on my mother’s side was an extraordinary woman. She died at ninety-two—she came all the way across the country in a 1930 Chevrolet at the age of eighty-eight to see me graduate from Duke Law School. She used to write poetry a lot—she’d make up her own poems for birthday cards and Christmas cards and so on. In a sort of gentle Quaker way she was always trying to inspire us all to amount to something.
Then there was my father. He had a tough time as a boy, very tough. He had to leave school early—fifth or sixth grade—and go to work. He worked on a farm for seven years, and he liked to tell us about it, hard work for almost nothing. But he saved everything he had—he had to, to become independent. He was a very competitive man. He always instilled this competitive feeling in all of us—I guess I acquired my competitive instinct from him. He was a fighter. He loved to argue with anybody about anything. I remember my first debate, in fifth grade at school. The subject was “Resolved, that it is better to own your own home than to rent.” I was on the renting side. Father sat down and did a lot of figuring and proved that it was more economical to rent than to own—he very much wanted me to win.
My mother had a lot to do with my doing well at school, too. She is a very capable woman. She never finished college, but she had German and Latin and she still remembers a lot of it. It was because of her that I got straight As in four years of high-school Latin.
Then there was the illness in my family. My older brother died of tuberculosis and the illness was very expensive. We all worked like hell—we had to. There was a drive to succeed, to survive almost. My mother and father instilled in us the desire to get going, to be good not just at one single thing but at everything. Take science, I hated science, not the theoretical end but the mathematical side—I liked the experiments. But I worked hard at it and did better than most. We had a disciplined family—we always had to clean up our plates at a meal. My father was a real disciplinarian.
ALSOP: I’ve heard him described as “cantankerous.”
NIXON: Yes, that’s right. My mother is the complete opposite. My mother is the gentlest, most considerate woman—I suppose everybody thinks that about his mother, but it’s true. She never turned a tramp away from the door. That was one of the things she and my dad used to argue about. My father thought they ought to be made to work before helping them out. But Mother ran the house like a charitable operation. We had to have somebody working for us, because we were all working at the store. Looking back, I think we had more people who did less, working for us, than any other house.
ALSOP: Did the fact that you grew up during the Depression have anything to do with this drive of yours?
NIXON: I suppose in some ways. It’s been said our family was poor, and maybe it was, but we never thought of ourselves as poor. We always had enough to eat, and we never had to depend on anyone else. Sure, we had to be careful. I was dressed in hand-me-downs mostly in grammar school. Once in a while we’d go to a movie, but that was a luxury. We never had any vacations—well, once in a long while we’d have a week at the beach, maybe. But I never went hunting or fishing or anything like that—there wasn’t time. We never ate out—never. We certainly had to learn the value of money. But we had a pretty good time, with it all.
Then there was the atmosphere of the times, of course. One of my jobs at the store was to add up the bills on an adding machine. We had to carry a lot of people on credit—sometimes for years—and I saw at firsthand the problem of people who couldn’t pay their bills, who were out of a job.
But it was a sort of tradition in our family that whatever you did you had to do as well as you could. I was a lousy football player, but I remember Chief Newman, our football coach, saying “there’s one thing about Nixon, he plays every scrimmage as though the championship were at stake.” That’s the competitive characteristic—I suppose it goes back to my dad.
ALSOP: Another thing about you is your instinct for politics. Mrs. Nixon once wrote in the Post that “Dick can think about politics and work at it every hour of the day”—something like that. You yourself once described yourself as “a political animal.” How did you get that way?
NIXON: Well, again, I suppose my dad had something to do with it. He had no business succeeding in business. He’d argue with anybody at the drop of a hat about politics. He used to argue with my mother because she was strong for Woodrow Wilson. She voted for Wilson in 1916, because he was for peace. My father used to point out that we got into the war anyway, but that didn’t change Mother.
In 1924 my father was very strong for La Follette. Then in 1928 he was very much for Hoover. You remember Hoover then was the liberal candidate. My family was very strong for Hoover in 1928 and in 1932.
ALSOP: Did the fact that Hoover was a Quaker have anything to do with it?
NIXON: Yes, of course. My father was a converted Quaker, became a Quaker after he married Mother. He taught Sunday school. We used to go to church four times a day on Sunday—Sunday school, then church, then Christian Education, then church in the evening. Also prohibition was an issue in 1928 and 1932, and that had an influence. My grandmother was a charter member of the WCTU. Al Smith’s religion never had anything to do with it though. I wasn’t even aware of his religion—my mother would never have permitted it. There’s the Quaker tradition of tolerance. Racial tolerance, too. We used to have Negroes and Mexicans working for us sometimes, and we always ate at the same table—never thought of anything else. A Quaker custom.
ALSOP: I’d heard your father voted for F.D.R. in 1932.
NIXON: No, not in 1932, in 1936. He was strong for Roosevelt in 1936, I remember.
ALSOP: Now here’s something of a crystal-ball question. You’re a politician, of course, a professional politician—your critics say you’re too much of a politician. Have you ever thought about the function of a politician in our kind of society?
NIXON: The function of a politician is to make a free society work. When I’ve been abroad, I’ve been impressed often how men with good intentions and high ideals without political experience often fail when they try their hand at the practical business of government—take Indonesia, for example, Burma.
When I first ran in 1946 I was a bit naïve about public service, a kind of dragon slayer, I suppose.
ALSOP: “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” sort of thing?
NIXON: Yes, yes—I remember that movie well. Jerry Voorhis was supposed to be Mr. Smith, you know. Then when I got to Washington I was soon disillusioned. You know, you come to Washington, you have great ideas, and there you are in the committees and on the floor of the House, and you have an inability to implement your ideas. You see men who are—well, I don’t want to sound pious but—less well motivated, say, and who know how to play the game, and they accomplish what they want. Then there are the Don Quixotes, who never accomplish anything, the idealistic men—like Jerry Voorhis. One of my campaign points in that first campaign was that Jerry Voorhis had introduced 126 bills and he had only one piece of legislation with his name on it. Of course, when I got to Washington I realized soon it wasn’t easy to get through legislation with your name on it.
Anyway, I suppose there was scarcely ever a man with higher ideals than Jerry Voorhis, or better motivated than Jerry Voorhis. But he couldn’t get anything through. You’ve got to learn how to play the game, if you’re going to implement your ideas, and you’ve got to fight it out.
You’ve got to be a politician before you can become a statesman—a lot of people have said that before me. You get here, and you’ve got to learn how to operate—the boring and frustrating committee system, and so on. You find often you’ve got to take a half a loaf when you want the whole loaf. There’s a quotation that expresses what I mean exactly. (Puts hand to head to try to recall it) It’s in my office, I’ll have them send it to you. Some German—was it Bismarck? No, I don’t think so. It goes something like this: “The way to punish any country or principality is to allow it to be governed by philosophers.”
The best example of a combination of idealist and practical politician is Theodore Roosevelt. When he wanted to get something done, he would compromise all over the place. Read the autobiography of Bob La Follette. He throws off on T.R., says he’s not a true liberal because he compromised too much. But who accomplished more, Roosevelt or La Follette? Or Bowers of India—he came from Indiana, so he was more practical than La Follette, but he throws off on Theodore Roosevelt, too. T.R. was always saying that men of good background—men of wealth, he called it—should not sit around in their clubs talking about how terrible things are, but should get into the hurly-burly.
Working for the OPA before the war was a great experience for me. You know the man I worked for was Dave Lloyd. I suppose he thinks I’m terrible now. But I certainly worked hard, on tire rationing, for example, trying to prevent people from getting away with murder.
You know the hardest thing for me in politics is to go and ask for a job, I just can’t do it. Political jobs come to me because I happen to be there. Back in Whittier I became a member of the board of the college after Duke Law School—it was unheard of, having anyone so young as a member of the board, but they decided they needed young blood and I was there. Then in 1940 the assemblyman from our district was retiring, this was just before Pearl Harbor. I had been president of the 20-30 Club and active in Kiwanis, and I’d made some speeches for Willkie—very bad speeches—and they talked about running me for the Assembly. Now I don’t mean I’m a shrinking violet in politics. I’m always ready—public service has always appealed to me more than making money. But I do have this aversion to going up to a stranger, or someone I don’t know well, and asking for political support or a contribution.
I remember in 1952 when Bob Taft came to my office and said he would like my support for the nomination. I explained why I was for Eisenhower, and Taft, who was a big man, didn’t resent it. But for me that would have been terribly difficult—I could never go to a senator, to his office, and ask for his support. With me, the way I work is different. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
That’s how I was elected president of the student body at Duke, for example—Leon Price was in the class ahead of me, and he was looking for a candidate to run from the Iredell Club, one of the two clubs, and he asked me if I’d like to run for the president of the Bar Association.
Now I don’t mean I’m above seeking office, or the maneuvers and machinations involved. And I’m always willing to take a chance. I think that has been the mark of my political career. In 1950, for example, all my friends, almost all, urged me not to run for the Senate, since I had a safe seat in the House. It looked as though Sheridan Downey would run again, and he looked almost impossible to beat. If I’d stayed in the House, maybe I’d have been Speaker eventually. But I decided to take the chance. Then Downey withdrew, and Helen Gahagan Douglas was easier to beat. But when I went for it, I thought it would be Downey.
Maybe it’s that old poker-playing instinct.
ALSOP: You mean, to know when to go for broke?
NIXON: Yes, that’s it.
ALSOP: Naturally I’ve done a lot of reporting about the famous fund dispute. One thing that’s impressed me is that nobody sensed that the fund might be a political booby trap. That wasn’t surprising in the case of the businessmen who contributed. But Chotiner, Jim Bassett, they knew about the fund, and they certainly aren’t politically naïve. Or yourself, for that matter.
NIXON: Yes. Most successful politicians had state committees and special funds to take care of mailings and broadcasts and so on.
ALSOP: So your first reaction when the fund story broke was simple unconcern?
NIXON: Yes, the best proof of that was when Pete Edson first asked about the fund, and I gave him the telephone number of Dana Smith, the treasurer, and told him he could get all the details from Smith.
ALSOP: Then it seems to me you had two further reactions. Your second reaction was to say you’d been smeared, after you saw signs like one Bill Rogers told me about—PAT, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE BRIBE MONEY?
NIXON: Yes, there were worse ones than that.
ALSOP: And then you realized that it wouldn’t be enough to say you’d been smeared, and you’d have to fight back.
NIXON: Yes, I guess the worst thing was when the New York Herald Tribune called on me to resign. The Washington Post didn’t bother me so much—it had been critical of me always, for example, the Alger Hiss case. But the Tribune was different—Bert Andrews’ paper, my friend. Then there were telegrams—from Harold Stassen, for example—asking me to withdraw. Have you seen Stassen’s telegrams? You ought to.
ALSOP: And Tom Dewey called you—“I hate to say this, Dick,” and so on.
NIXON: Yes, it’s been said I’d never forgive the people who wanted me to get off, but that’s not true. In perspective, you can see why they did it. The big issue was the mess in Washington, and I seemed to be blunting that issue.
I had a debate with myself those first days. I really think it was not basically personal. I put great weight on the possibility that if I did not withdraw it might result in the defeat of Eisenhower. I talked a lot with Pat, and Hillings, and Chotiner.
ALSOP: Pat wanted you to get out, didn’t she? I’ve heard that from several people.
NIXON: No, maybe later, but not then. I was discouraged and disgusted, and I told her that my withdrawing might assure Eisenhower’s election. She said two things: “Look, if you get off, you will carry the scar for the rest of your life. It will look as though you had been forced off.” That was her first point, and her second was: “If you get off, Ike will lose.”
Hillings took a different line. He’s a Catholic and strong anti-Communist, of course, and he kept saying that if I got off the ticket all my enemies who had been trying to get me—he was talking about the far left, of course—all these people would gloat.
It was a great strain. I am seldom emotional in public, it does not pay, you should never allow your temper to break, but of course it was an emotional strain privately. I did what I always do. I considered all the worst alternatives, as cold-bloodedly as I could, and I made an analytical decision—that if I withdrew, Ike would probably lose. So I decided to make the effort to stay on, if possible with honor.
ALSOP: I’ve talked to a lot of people about your telephone conversation with Eisenhower, on the Sunday before the broadcast. I think I have a pretty accurate picture of it, and I’m impressed by the fact that your attitude was certainly not meek or defensive. As I get it, you told the General that you would get off if he, and the Republican National Committee, thought you ought to, but that he and the country ought to hear your side of the case first. You warned him against listening to some of the people around him who didn’t know anything about it. You said the decision had to be made as quickly as possible, otherwise it would harm the whole ticket. And you concluded by saying, in effect, “In politics, General, the time comes when you’ve got to pee or get off the pot.”
NIXON: Well, that last sentence may be part of the mythology. After all, there were only two people who heard the conversation, me and the General.
ALSOP: I understood there were three or four people in the room with you.
NIXON: Maybe, I don’t remember. Anyway, you have it about right. I told the General, as we called him then, that, if you want, I’ll get off the ticket. He said: “This is not my decision, it is yours.” And I said I’d be glad to take the responsibility either way. I said I thought I should make my side of the case publicly, and that if after all it was decided I shouldn’t stay on the ticket, I’d take the responsibility for withdrawing. Then I did say, though I don’t remember saying exactly what you said, that the worst thing you could do was to delay, that in this sort of situation you had to kill the story as quickly as possible.
In the whole fund matter Chotiner was the strongest of all—like a rock. It was a tragedy that he had to get involved in the kind of law business that does not mix with politics.
ALSOP: I had a long talk with him in California. He’s an interesting man. A straight political technician. He has no interest at all in the issues themselves.
NIXON: No, but he knows which issues are good and bad. And he said again and again: “If you get off, Eisenhower will lose.”
ALSOP: I wanted to talk to you about another aspect of the fund row that seemed to me particularly interesting. I got this from both ends. According to this version, you were emotionally drained after the broadcast, and you got a version of Eisenhower’s telegram to you telling you to come to Wheeling as a help to him in the “formulation of his decision,” and so on. The telegram was obviously equivocal and suggested he still had not made up his mind to keep you on the ticket. According to what I heard, you then sat down and wrote out a telegram resigning, which Chotiner intercepted and tore up.
NIXON: Well, something like that might have been discussed. It’s true we were pretty emotional after the broadcast, and we got only a part of the General’s telegram over the radio, not the congratulatory part, and we were pretty distressed. But I don’t think any telegram resigning was ever sent out—I never had any serious intention of withdrawing. I knew by then the broadcast was a success—Darryl Zanuck had wired me that it was wonderful, for example, and I had a lot of confidence in his judgment. My concern throughout was motivated by a cold-blooded political judgment of what was best for the ticket, and that was why it was a pretty emotional talk.
ALSOP: You went on to Missoula, didn’t you, instead of flying right away to Wheeling.
NIXON: Yes, Chotiner insisted on that. He was even against my going to Los Angeles to make the speech. He insisted we must not make it appear that we were thrown off stride by this maneuver by the enemy—we must take it in our stride.
ALSOP: Some of your friends think that the crisis had a major effect on you—like an infantryman who’s been through a bad battle—nothing in your political life could be worse.
NIXON: Well, it was certainly an emotional load. Just before the broadcast I had my worst moment—I turned to Pat and said: “You know, I don’t think I can go through with it—I don’t think I can make the speech.”
I developed most of my ideas riding down on the plane from Portland. I remember I began to get ideas, and I reached ahead and picked out those postcards they have on planes and wrote down my ideas on them, to be sorted out later. Like the quotation from Lincoln.
ALSOP: Or the dog Checkers?
NIXON: Yes.
ALSOP: Did you have Fala in mind?
NIXON: Of course I did. I got a kind of malicious pleasure out of it. I’ll needle them on this one, I said to myself.
ALSOP: I was amused looking back through old Whittier yearbooks. It seemed to me I found the ancestor of that “respectable Republican cloth coat”—you remember the pictures of the Franklins and the Orthogonians?
NIXON: Sure, sure, the open collars. They were the haves, and we were the have nots, see? I was just a freshman then.
ALSOP: It must have been quite a trick starting a new college club as a mere freshman.
NIXON: I don’t want to take all the credit. The original idea was Dean Trigg’s a year ahead of me. I wrote the club song and the constitution and so on. But about the speech, I will say no speech could have been more difficult. After that I could never develop stage fright again. And I suppose the whole experience was aging. I was only thirty-nine then.
The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man—the President very much more so, of course. But even in my job you can’t enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships. You can’t confide absolutely in anyone. You can’t talk too much about your personal plans, your personal feelings. I believe in keeping my own counsel. It’s something like wearing clothing—if you let down your hair, you feel too naked.
I remember when I’d just started law practice, I had a divorce case to handle, and this good-looking girl, beautiful, really, began talking to me about her intimate marriage problems.
ALSOP: And you were embarrassed?
NIXON: Embarrassed? I turned fifteen colors of the rainbow. I suppose I came from a family too unmodern, really. Any kind of personal confession is embarrassing to me generally. I can discuss the issues, general subjects. I have fun playing poker, being with friends. But any letting down my hair, I find that embarrassing.
ALSOP: I was amused, because several of your law-school contemporaries wrote me that they thought you were “shy”—odd word for a successful professional politician.
NIXON: Yes, that’s still true in a way. Take raising money. I can make a speech to thousands, to ten million on television, but I can no more go up to a single individual and ask for a ten-dollar political contribution than I can fly. I can sell in the mass. But asking some individual to vote my way, for example, I’m no good at that. I suppose it is shyness, in a way.
ALSOP: Now for the case against Nixon—I couldn’t write honestly without considering the case against Nixon. Take the 1946 campaign first. The case against you in 1946 boils down to the charge that you attempted to identify Jerry Voorhis as the “PAC candidate,” when in fact he wasn’t endorsed by the California PAC, which was Communist controlled, because he was anti-Communist.
NIXON: The NC-PAC did endorse him. The NC-PAC and the CIO-PAC were almost the same thing. They shared office space here, and most of the same officers. Communism was not an issue in 1946, despite what people have said later. I remember, for example, I never raised the issue that Voorhis had voted against the Un-American Activities Committee—at that time I didn’t think too much of the committee myself.
ALSOP: But in Helen Douglas’s campaign, the charge against you, in her words, is that you tried to make people believe she was a “Communist or communistic.” There was the famous pink sheet, for example.
NIXON: You’ve got to put that campaign in the context of the time—1950 and the Korean War. I never said or implied that Helen Douglas was a Communist. I specifically said she was not. I did charge her with a lack of understanding of the basic issue of communism. I think the charge was accurate. She belonged to several Communist-front organizations—we had documentary proof. As for the pink sheet, the key vote there was her vote against Greek-Turkish aid. We really had her on the hook when Truman’s Attorney General, McGrath, came out and praised her for supporting the Truman doctrine for stopping communism. We never let her off that hook, pointing out that I had voted for Greek-Turkish aid and she against it.
Sure it was a rough campaign. It was rough two ways. They called me a tool of the vested interests, a Fascist. I was picketed by Communists—not all Communists, of course, Wallace supporters and such, they gave me a rough time. I gave it back. I believe in giving as good as you get. Take her vote against the Un-American Activities Committee. That didn’t prove she was a Communist or pro-Communist. But it did prove something else. That however well intentioned, she didn’t understand the big issue.
ALSOP: Take your famous rhetorical question about Dulles and Acheson—“Isn’t it wonderful finally to have a Secretary of State who isn’t taken in by the Communists?” That may have been legitimate as a debater’s point, but I don’t think it was legitimate coming from someone in your position.
NIXON: Don’t forget that was said in the context of a debate, when Stevenson and Acheson were going after Dulles and Eisenhower. I was defending them in the context of their foreign policies. I believe in hitting back.
ALSOP: Yes, but I believe that the case against you boils down to the fact that your experience as a college debater has carried over into your career as a politician. It is a college debater’s function to score debating points, often specious ones, against the opposition. But a politician’s function, especially a Vice-President’s, is a lot more than that.
NIXON: (thoughtfully) Yes, that may be a legitimate criticism. When somebody launches an attack, your instinct is to strike back. I think I have developed a more subtle response now, to finesse an attack. I counsel younger politicians to ignore attacks, take a positive line.
Even so, I don’t believe in letting the opposition select the battleground, either domestically or internationally.
Take Khrushchev and the leaders of international communism. How did they qualify? By clawing their way up through the Communist jungle, fighting every inch of the way. We’ve got to realize that, besides being entirely ruthless, these men are very, very able. I don’t believe in adopting their methods. But I don’t believe in adopting a strictly defensive attitude, either, letting them select the battlefield every time. We’ve got to respond in our own way. If you’re always on the defensive, you always lose in the end.
ALSOP: Tell me, how did you feel in Peru and Venezuela, when you realized you were in real physical danger? Were you scared?
NIXON: How did I feel? Well, that’s hard to describe. Generally speaking, my reaction—to stress, a challenge, some great difficulty—is sort of chemically delayed. While it is going on, I feel cold, matter of fact, analytical. At Lima, for example, when I saw the mob before the university, I made the decision to get out of the car and walk up to the mob on foot. I tried to analyze each face, to separate the Communists from the neutrals or the friendly ones. And I kept asking, “Where is your leader?” It was deliberately calculated to put the Communists on the spot. Then when I saw the soft answer would not work, that they wouldn’t let me speak, I allowed myself the luxury of showing my temper and calling them cowards. It was deliberate, letting my temper show—not that I didn’t really feel it; it was a terrible thing these Communists were doing, using these poor, often ignorant people in that way. Then after a crisis like that is over, I feel this tremendous letdown, a fatigue, as though I’d been in a battle.
ALSOP: Here’s a tough one to answer—how do you see yourself in the political spectrum, between left and right? My own view is that you’re an instinctive conservative, in terms of respect for the status quo, but at the same time a flexible and highly practical conservative.
NIXON: You’re talking about domestic affairs only, or international affairs? Because I’m not necessarily a respecter of the status quo in foreign affairs. I am a chance-taker in foreign affairs. I would take chances for peace—the Quakers have a passion for peace, you know. I think my record on foreign affairs is directed to an understanding of the meaning of international communism—I see the Communist danger at home as part of a foreign-policy threat primarily.
On domestic matters I’m, of course, partly influenced by my early upbringing. I have a strong emotional feeling for the problems of what I’d call ordinary people; I’ve known unemployed people, for example, and I know what their problems are. I’ve always taken an advanced position on medical care; we had that terrible sickness in my family, and I know the medical problems ordinary families face. Then again, because of my own experience, I feel very strongly about educational opportunities for people in the lower brackets. I would say I was not especially conservative as regards civil rights; again, that is a matter of family feelings, we have a strong family tradition against discrimination. But in some other ways I suppose I am conservative, yes.
ALSOP: Like Senator Kennedy and other Democrats, I think you would be a formidable candidate for the presidency, not only because you’re a formidable campaigner but because you’ve proved your intelligence and ability in the vice-presidency. But I think you have two weaknesses as a presidential candidate. This is only my opinion, of course, but perhaps you’d like to comment on it. One weakness is that too many people consider you an extremist, a radical—they identify you with McCarthy and the extreme right. The other is more intangible. It is that the public image of you lacks warmth, and depth, and humanness. To most people you’re too much a cardboard figure.
NIXON: I’m fatalistic about politics. You can’t go out and push for the presidency. It’s a matter of the right man in the right place at the right time. You can’t run for the presidency—look at Bob Taft, or Harold Stassen.…
ALSOP: Or Kefauver?
NIXON: Yes, the presidency seeks the man, not the other way around. Those two points you raised will be answered by what happens. On the first point, about my being an extremist, I think that has been partly answered already. I know the Democrats will try to picture me as an extremist. But you can’t go on hashing up the distant past indefinitely.
On the second point, well, there are some things you can’t do anything about. You’ve got to be what you are, you can’t pretend to be something different. Anyway, what happens is in the lap of the Fates.
It depends what the times call for. If the time comes when the Republican party and the voters are looking for an outwardly warm, gregarious, easygoing type—
ALSOP: A backslapper—
NIXON: Yes—then they will not want the sort of man I am. But these are serious times, and they may not call for that kind of personality. All our Presidents haven’t been personality boys, after all.
ALSOP: Woodrow Wilson?
NIXON: Yes, but he had a great reputation as an intellectual.
ALSOP: Or Franklin Roosevelt—he wasn’t really a warm personality, essentially a cold man.…
NIXON: Was he? I never met him. But he projected warmth.… You know, I suppose I’m about the only major public figure who’s never had a public relations expert. I write all my own speeches. I make up my own mind what to say. On my trips abroad, everything successful I did was over the objections of the State Department.
A lot of people have told me, what you need is a public relations expert. They tell me I ought to look at kinescopes of my television appearances to improve my speeches. You know, I’ve never heard a speech I’ve made played back, never seen myself on television. The reason is that I don’t want to seem artificial. I think a television speaker ought to be natural, uninhibited, as though he were having a conversation with the audience. Naturally, sometimes you talk louder than in a conversation, more earnestly, with more emphasis. But you’ve got to be natural.
I do meet a great number of people, and part of the image of me as cold or withdrawn is false, I think, partly as a result of the press. But it is true that I’m fundamentally relatively shy. It doesn’t come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy. When I meet a lot of people, I tend to seek out the shy ones. Anyway, I’m not going to have a lot of high-powered public relations people working on me to humanize me, with pictures of me doing silly things and so on.
It will depend on the times. If the times require a tough-minded, objective man—objective about the facts here and abroad—incisive, hard-working, a man who can handle himself on the international scene—now, I’m not describing myself necessarily—but if that is the public temper then, that is the kind of man the public will get.
ALSOP: Well, I’ve taken up a lot of your time already. Thanks very much—it’s been really interesting.
NIXON: (returning to former theme) You know, I try to be candid with newspapermen, but I can’t really let my hair down with anyone.
ALSOP: Not even with old friends, like the Jack Drowns, say?
NIXON: No, not really with anyone, not even with my family. But I have fun with friends like the Jack Drowns. That is one thing people are wrong about—I can have as good a time as anybody.
A little chitchat about the house at the front door—how it used to belong to Homer Cummings—and good-bys.