Richard M. Nixon

In the years during and immediately following the war, as prosperity returned, the influx of newcomers to California tended to be less John Steinbeck’s Okies, seeking the finest citadels of the New Deal and bearing westward likenesses of Franklin D. Roosevelt like the Infant of Prague. They tended to be conventional southerners well to the right politically of the egalitarian EPIC group, which had believed in collective economics and the absence of complexional distinctions.

As the election year 1950 began, there was speculation about Downey’s health. There was also concern that he could face a liberal Democratic challenger. He would have no difficulty bringing cross-over Republicans on to the Democratic side to retain the nomination, unless the Republican candidate was as popular as Downey with conservative voters. If he was, the danger for Downey would be either losing so many liberal votes to his Democratic rival that he lost the nomination or making an implausible move to the left that sent the conservative Democrats to the Republican challenger. The thirty-seven-year-old Richard Nixon was precisely the personification of the dangers to the reelection of the sixty-five-year-old Downey.

Nixon had been looking at this prospect all through 1949. In 1944, the Republican candidate against Downey, the lackluster Frederick F. Houser, who had lost to Voorhis in 1936, had lost by only 52 percent to 48 percent, and would have won if Downey had not been pulled in on the long coattails of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carried the state by about half a million votes. Republican analysts thought that without Roosevelt, and given the change in the political horizon as communist and other issues intruded, and with Nixon in place of Houser and Downey six years slower, Nixon could win. He wanted to be president, and if he could get to senator, he would be within striking distance. His Twelfth District coterie wanted him to stay where he was, because they wanted a world-famous congressman, not a senator they would have to share with the rest of the state.

In April 1949, Nixon spoke to the Los Angeles County Republican Central Committee. He warned them about complacent assurances that they had lost only narrowly in the last election, something they had not managed to do in their four defeats at the hands of Roosevelt. He said that Truman had moved well to the left of where he had run, that Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace and their Dixiecrat and liberal followers had been given a good trip to the woodshed and were back in the Democratic house, and that there was no reason to imagine that the Republicans could not be in the wilderness for a long while yet if they did not do things differently. Though he did not personalize it, Nixon felt a bitter grievance against the smugness, which amounted to defeatism, of Warren, Dewey, Taft, and the other party elders. They might be content to be noted provincial officials while their enemies ran the country and changed, even imperiled, the world. But settling for this status was not why Nixon had bustled into public life.

He enunciated a skillful program that covered all the Republican sensibilities, without painting them into the corner of reaction. He wanted reduction of government and of taxes to pay for government; a crackdown on the abuses of both management and labor, which he specified in appropriate detail; tax incentives for small business; and, little publicized subsequently, serious remedial action about civil rights and not just window dressing, which is what he accused Truman and Hubert Humphrey of producing. Nixon wanted a rollback of the socialization of services, but their assured and affordable provision through the private sector, and generalized profit sharing for unionized labor to give it a stake in the employer companies. He advocated comprehensive government-guaranteed but private-sector-provided medical insurance. He demanded a serious attack on loyalty risks in government, and the restoration of a bipartisan foreign policy pledged to a worldwide defense of the security interests of the United States. He wanted Truman to show as much determination fighting communism in Asia as in Europe.

Nixon was only a second-term congressman, but he wasn’t just any two-term congressman. Except for Sam Rayburn and possibly Joe Martin, he was probably the most famous member of the House of Representatives, and he was a greyhound pawing in the slips. Following the 1948 Republican debacle, there was a sizable number of Californians who were disgusted with Earl Warren’s masquerade as an allegory of good government above it all, in partisan terms, and they resolved, very publicly, that their governor was “wishy-washy and namby-pamby.”² (Warren was not used to such lèse-majesté, and had convinced himself that the electoral disaster was Dewey’s fault. It had been, but Warren had his share of it.)

Nixon met privately with some of the leading financial influences in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and engaged Murray Chotiner as manager, before more or less publicly declaring his candidacy for the Senate on May 20, 1949, eighteen months before the election. The Nixon campaign, with the usual dissembling in these matters, was called California Volunteers for Good Government. Apart from the identity of the state, and that only as a stepping-stone to the White House, the title gave no hint of its real nature or purpose. Nixon oscillated between confidence that the Democrats could be finally defeated and concern that if he and like-minded people could not get control of it, the Republican Party would continue to be a doormat for the Democrats for another twenty years. That had almost been the fate of the Democrats, from Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson (the Republicans won eleven of thirteen presidential elections from 1860 to 1908, inclusive, and lost to Wilson only when Theodore Roosevelt and Taft split the party).

Nixon did not manage the natural indignities of political ambition as well as some others did. Roosevelt looked and sounded apostolic, no matter what political skulduggery he was engaged in. Truman came from the other stylistic end to Roosevelt’s, and seemed to treat grubby politics and the dropping of the atomic bomb all with the same directness and absence of histrionics. Dwight Eisenhower managed to seem above much of it, or at least a politician ennobled by his uniform. Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy offered witticisms that were actually amusing, and were able to send the message that they would rather be doing something else without offending their audiences. When Nixon, as he toured California preparing for his Senate campaign, was asked if he was running for the Senate, he actually said, “I will pray about it.” This wasn’t a self-inflicted wound, but it was a lost opportunity for self-deprecation. Nixon probably had prayed about it, and not at all to his discredit, but he was certainly confident of the response to his request for divine guidance by then.

Nixon formally announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for U.S. senator in Pomona on November 3, 1949, in an address broadcast throughout the state. He warned that the country was facing a choice between freedom and “state socialism,” and that the Republicans could not win by “pussyfooting.” He said, “They can call it planned economy, the Fair Deal, or social welfare. It’s still the same old socialist baloney any way you slice it.” He warned of an immense Democratic “slush fund” that would be deployed against them by a “clique of labor lobbyists.” The only way to win was to “put on a fighting, rocking, socking campaign.” In this, even his enemies would agree, he would be as good as his word.

By this time, a formidable and glamorous opponent to Downey had attacked from the left, seeking to wrest the Democratic nomination from Downey as he had taken it from McAdoo twelve years before. Helen Gahagan Douglas, actress, wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, congresswoman, national committeewoman, and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, announced her candidacy on October 5. This doubtless assisted Nixon in his religious devotions on the subject.

Helen Douglas, forty-nine, was a New York-born, upper-income, private-school, and Barnard woman who went on to the stage and enjoyed early and continuous success, in the theater, opera, and her one film, in the title role of She. She married Melvyn Douglas in 1931, and was reckoned to be one of America’s most beautiful women. Once installed in California, she became an ardent advocate for the migrant workers and the displaced fugitives from the Dust Bowl. John Steinbeck wrote his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath about such people and formed a committee to help them, which Helen Douglas happily joined. In this capacity, she met Eleanor Roosevelt, and eventually the president, and became friendly with them. Helen Douglas had had a torrid and rather public affair with congressman and then senator Lyndon B. Johnson, from shortly after she arrived in Washington. They publicly lived together, drove to work together, and held hands even in the corridors of the Congress.³

She was the prototypical energetic bleeding heart, aggressively full of good intentions but somewhat impractical in her political methods. She fought Taft-Hartley but had an impeccable record in foreign policy, including voting with Nixon for the Marshall Plan, until she voted against the Truman administration on aid to Greece and Turkey. She felt that the United States must not allow its hostility to communism to drive it into support for regimes that were themselves undemocratic. It was not going to be possible to conduct the Cold War that way, but Douglas did not grasp that. (She should have listened when Franklin D. Roosevelt said of a notorious Latin American dictator, Anastasio Somoza García of Nicaragua, that he was “a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”)

She was unambiguously anti-communist, but felt that communism posed no threat at all to the United States internally, and that abroad, the United States should only embrace countries that were reasonably democratic. She was right in the first point, and not completely mistaken in the second, but had no strategic sense and made no effort to package her views in a way not guaranteed to attract the animosity of most of her listeners. In one of her early addresses, as a congressional candidate, to an African-American church, she exclaimed, “I love the Negro people.”⁴ Her effusions were always well-intentioned but not always well-received.

A turn-of-the-century law had confined public-assisted irrigation in California to properties not exceeding 160 acres. Many got around this by jointly operating connected properties as if they were one, or incorporating properties and spreading the shares adequately to keep within the 160-acre limit. Downey wished to repeal the law, but Helen Douglas was a passionate retentionist. She was similarly adamant in opposing transferring control of offshore oil to the state, which was much more likely to be influenced by the oil companies than was the federal government, despite Earl Warren’s occupancy of the governor’s mansion.

Nixon and Warren agreed that they would run separate campaigns. Since Warren was going to do that anyway, it gave Nixon some pleasure to trek up to Sacramento and tell the governor that this was his, Nixon’s, intention. Chotiner had already begun to canvass the state’s newspapers. His standard gambit was not to ask for support on the first visit but to lay out the candidate’s views in the manner best-suited to attract support and then to inquire about advertising rates. Chotiner considered almost all the press, except the very largest outlets, to be for sale.

Sheridan Downey, despite a severe ulcer, ended speculation that he would retire by telling a Democratic Party dinner in Los Angeles in December 1949 that he would be running for a third term. He attacked Helen Douglas forcefully and scarcely mentioned Nixon. The Downey campaign was instantly well lubricated with oil and rancher and developer money. Douglas accused her own party of trying to strangle her financially. Downey accused her of being an extremist, and she accused Downey of being a lackey of monopolists and a part-time senator.

The California Republican Assembly (CRA), an association of party regulars, met at Pebble Beach on January 27, the day after Nixon gave his marathon speech in Congress on the Hiss case. A former candidate, Frederick Houser, now a superior court judge, had let it be known that he wanted to run again for senator. Nixon, because of Washington commitments, was unable to get to the CRA meeting, but Chotiner had persuaded the Los Angeles Times to write a strong endorsement of Nixon on the day the CRA would be meeting, and had had delivered to the CRA executive committee on the morning of the CRA vote a recording of Nixon’s powerful speech.⁵ The combined effect was as had been desired, and Nixon was endorsed unanimously by the committee. Thus was Houser disposed of. Even easier to deal with was the Los Angeles supervisor, Raymond V. Darby, who went for lieutenant governor against the incumbent Goodwin J. Knight. To get him out of the Senate race, the Times agreed to endorse him against Knight, but this was another put-up job, as the Times presented a small, tepid endorsement but plastered headlines and flattering photographs of Knight through the paper. To take the Republican nomination for U.S. senator from California, Nixon would only have to face an obscure anti-Catholic candidate and dating-agency owner who rejoiced in the name of Ulysses Grant Bixby Meyers.

Gerald L.K. Smith, the ancient plowhorse of downmarket American politics, a raving racist evangelical clergyman from Shreveport, Louisiana, and former sidekick of Huey Long and Dr. Francis Townsend, entered the California campaign in Nixon’s favor. He declared that the uncoverer of Alger Hiss would “get rid of the Jew-Communists.” (After the assassination of Huey Long in 1935, Smith had publicly implied that Roosevelt was responsible for murdering Long. He tried to carry on Long’s Share the Wealth campaign, but Long’s entourage made a deal with Roosevelt and returned to the Democratic fold. This was known in the Roosevelt camp as “the Second Louisiana Purchase,” making Smith a political orphan. He had been drifting for fifteen years.)

Nixon was careful to stay clear of the extreme Republicans; he voted with the Democrats in distributing two billion dollars’ worth of food in domestic aid in March 1950, and he called for a bipartisan foreign policy and general support for the president. He suggested that Truman consult such Republicans as Dewey, Warren, Dulles, Stassen, and Eisenhower on foreign policy matters, and left the Red-baiters out. Nixon took his distance from McCarthy, saying that there should be an impartial investigation of the State Department - not by McCarthy or HUAC or any congressional committee. He de-emphasized his HUAC connection and was conspicuously absent when the new chairman, the nonentity John Wood, who had rarely raised his voice when Nixon was active on HUAC, informed the House that HUAC was assembling a blacklist of one million subversives.

On April 15, 1950, he told a press conference that only the Communist Party was profiting from McCarthy’s charges.⁶ Nixon also staunchly defended Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal scientist on the Manhattan (atomic) Project, who had been accused of being a communist before a California legislative committee that mimicked HUAC.⁷ Nixon later identified Owen Lattimore and Philip Jessop as the principal supporters in the State Department of the pro-Mao Tse-tung view of the Chinese debacle but stopped well short of calling them communists or “commie” agents.⁸ (Privately he was astounded at how ignorant McCarthy was. He allegedly did not even know that the American CP leader was Earl Browder.)⁹ Nixon gave a Lincoln Day address in which he said the U.S.S.R. was the ultimate version of the slave state and Britain, because of its socialism, was a half-slave state - pretty severe treatment of Clement Attlee.

The Democratic primary was still heating up, with Nixon waiting to see from which angle he should attack his opponent, when Downey’s ulcer spiked up again and he withdrew from the race on March 28, 1950. His statement, which he left to a reporter to draft, said that he did not want to have to reply to the “vicious and unethical propaganda” of Helen Douglas. She didn’t bother wishing him a quick recovery as he checked into Bethesda Naval Hospital; rather she accused Downey of chickening out and implied that he wasn’t sick at all. This assured Downey’s support for Nixon, who graciously wished the outgoing senator well. Nixon had thought all along that Douglas would be a much easier opponent than Downey, who had made many rich friends, and with whom most California voters were comfortable.

The day after Downey’s withdrawal, the publisher of the quirky Los Angeles Daily News (much smaller than the market-leading Times and Hearst’s Herald-Examiner), Manchester Boddy, threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination. Boddy, a former encyclopedia salesman who had come to California in 1920 after being gassed on the Western Front in 1918, was a self-educated philosopher and literary scholar who frequently wrote columns in his often racy tabloid about Plutarch, Plato, and fin de siècle French novelists. Boddy had been friendly with and supportive of Douglas but hit the ground running as a primary candidate, calling her an extremist.

Helen Douglas counterattacked, but on March 30, presumably trying to move from internecine to partisan attack, she called Nixon a “demagogue” selling “fear and hysteria . . . [and] nice, unadulterated fascism.” It was already known that when Nixon promised a “rocking, socking campaign,” as he had when he announced in November, it was likely to be pretty rough. But when Douglas, who was no tactical genius, not content with denying that her late opponent was really unwell, opened fire on Nixon as a fascist, she was almost sure to get more than she bargained for. She went on to call Nixon a “Peewee trying to frighten people so that they are too afraid to turn out the lights.”¹⁰ Beautiful and intelligent woman as she was, had she stopped dissenting from the bipartisan, Truman-sponsored consensus on Greece and Turkey and run a moderate and tasteful campaign, she could have exploited a great deal of underdog and chivalrous sentiment if Nixon and Chotiner had tried the Red or Pink scare on her. Instead she fired the first shot at an opponent who deployed far heavier artillery with much better marksmanship than she did. The Nixon-Douglas campaign is well-remembered, but it is little remembered that Helen Douglas started the mudslinging.

At the beginning of April, Dick and Pat Nixon set out in a “woody,” a paneled station wagon loaded with loudspeaking equipment and donated by a supportive car dealer, to tour the state. He stopped every ten or twenty miles and spoke from on top of or beside the car, after handing out placards to the first ten or so people to arrive. Pat would distribute little red Nixon thimbles, as they had in their first campaign four years before. Nixon claimed the mantle of Downey for himself, and said the dispute over the 160-acre limit for federal irrigation subsidies was a phony issue designed to sow division in the state. He claimed, in effect, that everybody who needed irrigation should have it, and those who needed financial assistance should have that too. Accompanying reporters got tired of it, as they always do following candidates, but Nixon always allowed for questions and always handled them adroitly.

He continued to put blue water between McCarthy and himself, repeating that the “communists profit” from excessive charges, that he was neutral about McCarthy’s ever-mounting allegations, and that if they were false, McCarthy should be “forced to pay the political penalty for making false charges.” He referred repeatedly to the dangers of “wild, unsubstantiated charges . . . [and] indiscriminate anti-communist name-calling.” Helen Douglas repeatedly said she had “utter scorn for pip-squeaks like Nixon and McCarthy.”¹¹ Nixon’s enemies have tried to tar him with the McCarthy brush. The suggestion that they were interchangeable was not true at the start of McCarthy’s rise as the self-nominated scourge of communists, and it certainly did not approach the truth as McCarthy’s wild assault on perceived loyalty risks continued.

Nixon was happy to throw a certain amount of raw meat to the Red-baiters and was not prepared to allow an issue he had burnished to its present intensity to get away from him; but, having ridden the rocket to a great altitude, neither was he going to stay with it as it descended into perfidy. He called for the deportation of Australian-born fellow traveler Harry Bridges, leader of the longshoremen’s union, a reasonable proposition, and laced his speeches with exhortations to preparedness against Soviet aggression. He repeatedly stated that the U.S.S.R. would unleash war if it thought that it could win, but that was nothing more than Winston Churchill and others had been saying for several years, and was almost certainly true.

Across the country, the anti-Red message was selling well. John Foster Dulles, one of the least gregarious men in modern American public life, ran for senator from New York against Roosevelt’s successor (and Dewey’s predecessor), as governor of New York, Herbert H. Lehman. Dulles said, “I know that he is not a communist, but I also know that the communists are in his corner.” In Florida, John F. Kennedy’s closest carousing companion, George Smathers, defeated old-time New Dealer Claude Pepper in the Democratic primary, calling him the “Red Pepper.” Helen Douglas called this “the dirtiest campaign” in the country. She would help to assure that that dubious honor would not stand for long.

The attacks on Helen Douglas began with the pro-Nixon press. The general line was that whether she was a communist was irrelevant, as she had been giving aid and comfort to the communists for years.¹² Nixon sailed fairly serenely through the primary. There was one joint meeting with Helen Douglas at San Francisco’s Press Club. He began by reading a telegram of endorsement from Eleanor Roosevelt, which startled Douglas and astounded the audience. Nixon then acknowledged that in fact this was Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., a substantial woman in her own right and the widow of a general, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, former governor of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and unsuccessful candidate for governor of New York (against Alfred E. Smith). Like his cousin Franklin and his father TR, her husband, too, had been assistant secretary of the navy.¹³

Helen Douglas proclaimed her loyalty to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt and said that those who were always crying “communist” and had reactionary political careers were fomenting communism. This was true, but she should have borrowed from some key parts of her mentor’s political repertoire. When FDR was attacked as a leftist or communist, he struck back witheringly at the Republican Flat Earth Society, the “Old Guard Republicans in their entrenched positions,” “the malefactors of great wealth . . . economic royalists . . . monopolists, war profiteers, class antagonists . . . who tried to thwart and block nearly every attempt that this administration made to warn our people and arm our nation” against the Nazis and the Japanese. She was like a dead ventriloquist’s dummy (in drag) who was programmed to give only half of the departed master’s message, and refused to be coached by capable continuators like Truman and Rayburn.

Roosevelt was never on the defensive and never took long to paint his opponents as Stone Age exploiters, snobs, crooks, and Nazi sympathizers. For good measure, he would recite their names in rhymes (“Martin, Barton, and Fish”), recalling their ill-considered congressional votes, and comment on their more insane accusations, such as that he had sent a destroyer to the Aleutian Islands to retrieve his dog: “He’s a Scottie, and he has not been the same dog since.” Harry Truman, though not a great orator like Roosevelt, didn’t pull any punches, and showed in the 1948 campaign how effective he could be. But Helen Douglas didn’t have the knack of claiming to be a victorious veteran in a war with greedy and unworthy men; she recited the great but fading name of Roosevelt, did not stay in lockstep with Truman, and tried to reason with her impatient listeners rather than serving into their faces the red-hot counterfire that would have won the argument.

Nixon had cross-filed, as he had in his previous congressional races, and he tried to put out an advertising campaign that would attract Democrats. This was a much more charged atmosphere than the one that had existed in the Voorhis and Zetterberg campaigns, and Douglas and Boddy, and the Democratic organization generally, rebuffed Nixon’s blandishments. In advertisements warning Democrats not to be taken in by Nixon was born the phrase this campaign would popularize: “Tricky Dick.”

Vito Marcantonio was the congressman from East Harlem from 1935 to 1950. He claimed to be a follower of Fiorello La Guardia and was sometimes treated as the son the mayor never had, but he was far to the left of La Guardia and did espouse an overtly pro-Russian line. He was admirably progressive in civil rights matters, an orthodox socialist in economic policy, but an outright Soviet supporter in foreign policy. He was pushed out of the Democratic Party, forced to run as an American Labor candidate, and gerrymandered out of his district, finally losing in 1950. He was fanatically devoted to the interests of his multi-ethnic constituents, who mourned him in huge numbers when he died in 1954. By 1950, he was almost everywhere branded a communist, a slight liberty with the facts, in that there is no reason to believe that he was a Soviet agent or that he favored the end of the democratic system in the United States. (For some reason, he intensely disliked Helen Douglas, but his relations with “Nicky,” as he called Nixon, were cordial, and he sent him good wishes in the campaign.)¹⁵

The North Koreans had taken the United States completely by surprise and hurled the small American force helping the South Koreans steadily back toward the southern port of Pusan. With each reversal, alarm on the home front increased and anti-communist attitudes hardened even from where they had been. Nixon had become an anti-communist icon to respectable elements wary of McCarthy. In this campaign, he developed contacts with many wealthy contributors who would stay with him throughout his career, including California’s greatest rancher, Robert Di Giorgio; Dean Witter (stock brokerage); Steve Bechtel (engineering); Walter Haas (Levi Strauss); Howard Ahmanson (insurance and savings and loan); Henry Salvatori (oil); Justin Dart (Rexall Drugs); Louis B. Mayer and other Hollywood executives, past and present, including Joseph P. Kennedy, who had not forgiven Melvyn Douglas’s pro-labor agitations at the studios; and Harry F. Haldeman (automobile dealerships and father of Nixon’s future chief of staff).

Money poured in in such quantities that Nixon was able to contribute some of it to other candidates in California, boot-strapping himself up as a potential rival to Earl Warren as leader of the California Republicans at a national convention if he was victorious in his Senate race. Press support remained solid, and in one of the last political acts of his eventful eighty-eight years, William Randolph Hearst directed that all aid be given to Nixon not only editorially, but in archival and research support in anti-communist matters.¹⁶

The Democratic leadership did their best for Helen Douglas. President Truman personally asked Sheridan Downey, whom he had known well in the Senate, to heal party wounds and support Douglas. Downey refused. Sam Rayburn strenuously urged her to do everything possible to rid the Congress of Nixon: “His is the most devious face of all those who have served in the Congress in all the years I’ve been here,” he said.¹⁷

In July, Nixon was Herbert Hoover’s guest at the Bohemian Grove, north of San Francisco, the ultimate hangout of the California establishment, where for a weekend men dressed in old clothes and lived in camps and urinated on the bases of the vast redwood trees, and talked business and politics. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was the club’s principal guest, and he came to lunch at Hoover’s camp. The consensus, in which Nixon participated, was that Eisenhower had great appeal, charm, and mystique, but it was not clear that he possessed the considered judgment to be president. (There is rarely so arch a judge of presidential qualities as someone who has been ejected from the office as Hoover had, and businessmen are usually well behind the public in evaluating presidential qualities.)

Helen Douglas was one of only twenty congressmen to vote against the McCarran-Wood bill, which updated Mundt-Nixon in forcing registration of communists and vaguely defined affiliations of communists. Her vote was an admirable position of principle, but it was, in the circumstances, handing a great deal of ammunition to her opponent. “I will not be stampeded by hysteria. Nor will I waver for political expediency.”¹⁸ The next day, the Nixon campaign finally launched its long-awaited attack on Douglas, publishing a lengthy statement accusing her of voting 353 times with Vito Marcantonio, mentioning her votes against aid to Greece and Turkey and funding for HUAC, along with other indications of her softness on communism, and quoting the Daily Worker’s description of her as a “hero.” The Nixon statement was run extensively in the Los Angeles Times and received heavy coverage throughout California. The Hearst press and Manchester Boddy had described her as “pink” already, but the description “the pink lady” caught on in the Nixon-friendly press.

There was a good deal of self-righteous flummery for many years about the “mordant comment of the color of the paper,” as Nixon subsequently wrote.¹⁹ Over half a million copies of “the pink sheet” were distributed. Helen Douglas was the first to escalate the campaign to ad hominem imputations of political extremism; Nixon can be faulted for overachieving as he joined in the spirit of it, but not more than that. Nixon did veto circulating a further version of “the pink sheet” in bright red late in the campaign. Marcantonio had been hung like an albatross around Voorhis’s neck in 1946, and Douglas’s campaign team should have been ready for this. As it was, they never really responded.

Douglas kicked off the final round of her campaign with a radio address just after Labor Day, proclaiming grandiloquently that “the future course of the world” depended upon her winning. Nixon launched the final phase of his campaign on September 18, moving by airplane from San Diego to Los Angeles to Fresno to San Francisco and giving a state-wide radio address that was, in its way, a classic. In a reasonable and measured voice, he sanctimoniously assured his listeners that there would be no smears or name-calling (two months after “the pink sheet” debuted) and then gave the campaign litany. His opponent had said that “communism is no real threat,” she had let down “our troops in Korea,” and, inexorably: “It just so happens that my opponent is a member of a small clique which joins the notorious Communist Party-liner Vito Marcantonio of New York, in voting time after time against measures that are for the security of this country.”²⁰

Helen Douglas went on describing Nixon as “Tricky Dick” and accusing him of selling fascism, ensuring a uniformly base tone to the campaign, but she did not put her message across as skillfully as he did. They were supposed to have a joint meeting on September 20 in Los Angeles to discuss communism in the United States, but she remained in Washington to try to sustain Truman’s veto of McCarran-Wood. In her place was the Democratic candidate for governor against Warren, FDR’s oldest son, James Roosevelt. Nixon regretted the absence of his opponent and said that she “should speak for herself so that every person in California may know just why she has followed the Communist Party line so many times.” It was a clear-cut victory; Jimmy Roosevelt replicated none of the powerful leadership qualities of his father.

Interestingly, Nixon staked out, starting in his September 18 speech, a demand for “complete victory” in Korea: “I believe we should not stop at the thirty-eighth parallel unless a complete military capitulation is inflicted on the North Koreans.” Obviously, if such a defeat were inflicted, there would be no reason to stop there, so he was, even at this early date, an advocate of the destruction of North Korea and an unambiguous victory. This would become a burning issue in the next few years, as some wanted to minimize the risk of war with China or the Soviet Union and save South Korea and go no further; and others wanted a decisive victory over international communism, even if it meant administering a severe military thrashing to Red China at this first opportunity. These were competing strategic visions, which Nixon himself would ultimately largely resolve. Helen Douglas didn’t help herself in continuing to advocate giving Red China the Security Council seat held by Chiang. Nixon called this the last straw of appeasement toward communism.²¹

At the end of September, with great fanfare, alliances of putative Democrats began emerging in support of Nixon. While Downey retained a public silence after saying that Douglas was not qualified to be a U.S. senator, it was well-known that he was a Nixon supporter. A Field poll in early October showed Nixon leading by eight points, with a third of the voters undecided. It was still thought to be a tight race, and Nixon was constitutionally incapable of overconfidence. Both candidates performed prodigies of physical and vocal endurance.

There were two more joint meetings, both in Los Angeles, and both clear-cut Nixon victories. In the first, he decisively defeated Helen Douglas in simple debating fluency and mastery of facts. There was no incivility. And in the second, to frustrate her attempts to avoid debating him, he had claimed to be unable to make it, and then arrived unexpectedly just after she had finished speaking at what she thought was a meeting of her partisans only. Douglas stalked out and Nixon gave a powerful address to a packed house and an empty opponent’s chair. She avoided the successive debating disasters of Jerry Voorhis in 1946, but for all her courage and outspokenness, she was clearly afraid of Nixon’s debating skill.

Senator Joe McCarthy came to California in early October and, in an address in San Diego, cordially endorsed Nixon. He denounced Acheson and referred to the “Commicrat” Party and engaged in his usual fireworks. Nixon did not meet him on this trip and asked his friends in the press to downplay the references to himself. Nixon already knew that rhetoric as explosive as this would put McCarthy on a path to self-destruction. Douglas, however, claimed that McCarthy was stumping the state for her opponent, allegations the Republicans easily debunked.

President Truman, who reportedly found Mrs. Douglas a “nuisance,” canceled plans to campaign in California, though he sent the vice president, Alben W. Barkley, Averell Harriman, and, except for Acheson, most of the cabinet. Nixon referred to them mockingly as “Mrs. Douglas’s foreign legion.” The only one of them who was effective was the young Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who toiled through the interior of the state on Douglas’s behalf, unlike John F. Kennedy, who, assured of easy reelection in his Boston congressional district, made a private visit in mid-campaign with no political overtones.

In the last few weeks of the campaign, before the most reliably partisan audiences, Nixon used one of his most imaginative lines, referring to his opponent as “pink down to her underwear.” This not only put across the subversive allegation; in the prurient bourgeois California of 1950, it titillated the men and made Nixon seem like the king of the political locker room.

Less innocuous was the Gerald L.K. Smith anti-Semitic campaign, which made much of the fact that Melvyn Douglas’s original name had been Hesselberg. Nixon expressly repudiated this support on August 31, and it is unlikely that ant-Semitism was a particularly strong political motivation in California at this time, but it added to the nasty aftertaste of the campaign. Douglas was then in a touring play that frequently attracted anti-communist pickets around the country. None of his travails can be blamed on Nixon, but it was an ugly and demeaning episode. For their part, the Douglas camp, probably without the agreement or even knowledge of the candidate, tried to put it about that Pat Nixon was a lapsed Roman Catholic. This was not true, and, in any case, in such a febrile atmosphere, not a very scorching allegation.²²

Helen Douglas carried on gamely and tried to return Nixon’s well-aimed fire. She brought out her own flyers with titles like “Expose the Big Lie” and “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness.” The latter Nixon unctuously dismissed as sacrilege. Douglas kept referring to “Tricky Dick” as a “fascist” and to “the backwash of Republican young men in dark shirts,” evoking a black-shirt image. Nixon’s spokesmen replied that he wore a dark shirt as a lieutenant commander in the navy, fighting fascists. This sort of exchange did not come easily to Douglas, while Nixon and Chotiner were very expert at it. The distinction between the two was not one of moral or ethical quality; they were both mudslinging more or less full-time. The difference was that Nixon and his entourage were good at it, and Helen Douglas was a spontaneous, sincere, emotional woman who wasn’t good at tactical calculation and did not have an entourage who thought in these terms.

Douglas did not pull in the film community behind her. Not only the studio bosses, but all the actors and other film personnel who were concerned about leftist inroads in Hollywood went for Nixon. Among the more prominent of these were Hedda Hopper, Irene Dunne, George Murphy (who was so ungentlemanly as to denigrate Helen Douglas as an actress), Zasu Pitts (who called Douglas “the pink lady who would allow the communists to take over our land and homes as well”), Dick Powell, June Allyson, and, discreetly, former Democrat and influential Screen Actors’ Guild president Ronald Reagan.²³

Nixon led in California newspaper endorsements by about twenty to one, and the endorsements often included partial blackouts on Douglas, and pretty unprofessionally biased choices of photographs, cut-lines, headlines, and story introductions (though Mrs. Douglas was such an attractive woman, almost any photograph of her was bound to be positive). Drew Pearson denounced the Nixon campaign, and his column ran in a number of places. Raymond Moley, disillusioned former braintruster of FDR’s, writing in Newsweek, attacked Helen Douglas with uncharacteristic violence; dragging out the worm-eaten chestnut of solidarity with Marcantonio, Moley referred to Douglas’s degree from Barnard as “a somewhat sketchy college education not too far from Marcantonio’s district.”²⁴ President Truman finally attacked the conduct of the California publishers in a White House press conference on November 3. It was too late and too distant to have any useful impact.²⁵

Nixon had tried to enlist Warren after his primary victory, but Warren wasn’t having it, and withheld an endorsement of Nixon almost to the end. Chotiner had Nixon operatives at Douglas’s meetings and taunted her to endorse James Roosevelt. Finally, on the last weekend of the campaign, Helen Douglas, showing her amateurism, but also the courage and spontaneity that had helped make her something of a minor American political folk heroine, said, “I hope and pray that Jimmy Roosevelt will be the next governor.” When this was shown to Warren, he responded that her statement “does not change my position. In view of her statement, however, I might ask her how she expects I will vote when I mark my ballot for U.S. senator next Tuesday.”²⁶

Nixon wound up his campaign with a speech at the Hollywood American Legion Stadium on November 2, where he arrived in a torchlight parade. Dick Powell moderated, and for the benefit of the live and radio audiences, there was a mystery acted out over the Hiss apprehension, gripping entertainment provided by Nixon’s Hollywood supporters but pretty indifferent history. Nixon’s speech was the usual hard-hitting late-campaign effort, long on innuendo and self-righteousness, but staying clear of full-blooded McCarthyism.

On November 6, the Red Chinese, as they were then known, officially crossed the Yalu River between China and Korea, drastically escalating the war. (They already had about two hundred thousand soldiers in North Korea, but U.S. and allied intelligence had not detected them.) This was a final, end-of-campaign illustration of the tortured state of the struggle with the worldwide Red Menace. The war in Korea had seesawed dramatically. Reduced to a southern pocket around Pusan, General Douglas MacArthur made a daring amphibious landing at Seoul’s port, Inchon, on September 15, captured Seoul ten days later, virtually annihilated the North Korean Army, and surged northward.

The main Chinese attack on November 25 would send the Allied forces reeling, and the peninsula became a bloody stalemate near the original demarcation between North and South Korea. MacArthur and Nixon and many others wanted to insert greater forces, especially Chiang Kai-shek’s five-hundred-thousand-man Kuomintang Army, as a response to the Red Chinese Army; attack China from the air, especially in Manchuria; smash the Red Chinese Army in Korea; and threaten use of the atomic bomb. Truman, Eisenhower, and the Joint Chiefs did not think Korea worth such a risk and expense; it was enough to salvage South Korea. This strategic disagreement between MacArthur and Truman would have a dramatic climax, and the debate would go on through the fifties, and after.

On November 7, 1950, Richard Nixon was nervous and fidgety to the end, but it was soon clear that his massive onslaught had harvested a huge majority. He won by nineteen points, nearly 700,000 votes (2,183,454 to 1,502,507), and ran ahead of almost all California Republican congressional candidates in their own districts. His majority was about 350,000 votes less than Earl Warren’s over the ineffectual Jimmy Roosevelt, but Warren was seeking a third term; Nixon had the greatest senatorial majority in the country as a thirty-seven-year-old first-time candidate. He had changed the correlation of forces in the California Republican Party and henceforth Warren could no longer treat him as an insignificant and distasteful little harpy, as he had been in the habit of doing.

The Republicans picked up five Senate and twenty-eight House seats, fairly normal for off-year elections, and some of the campaigns were rougher than that in California. Everett Dirksen, winning the first of four Senate terms in Illinois, had announced he was running against Stalin. The Democratic incumbent in Maryland, Millard E. Tydings, whom Roosevelt had tried to purge as insubordinate in 1938, was defeated in part by the circulation of a doctored photograph showing him in animated conversation with the U.S. Communist Party leader, Earl Browder. Nixon’s victory was widely acclaimed. Vito Marcantonio was defeated by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats in East Harlem. Herbert Hoover, Allen Dulles, Herbert Brownell, twice Dewey’s presidential campaign manager, and Harold Stassen were among Nixon’s congratulators. John F. Kennedy privately expressed great pleasure at Nixon’s defeat of Douglas.

Downey announced his retirement from the Senate, facilitating the appointment of Nixon by Warren, giving him seniority over the other senators just elected for the first time. As an apparent quid pro quo, Nixon had agreed to support as federal judges two nominees of Downey’s who had been anti-Douglas Democrats. He attended upon Warren on November 22 in Sacramento, and was confirmed as the senator-designate and elect, and was sworn in in the old Capitol chamber on December 4, 1950. Only Huey Long’s son Russell, a senator from Louisiana, would be a younger member of the Senate than Nixon.

The rules governing revelation of campaign expenses were very loose and don’t provide much guidance to what really happened. A consensus seems to be that Nixon spent around $1.5 million and that Helen Douglas would have spent a little less than half that. There is no doubt that Nixon’s campaign was magnificently organized and skillfully executed. It was a dirty campaign, but Helen Douglas, having blundered artlessly into the denigration of her opponent, had no right to expect that her rival would be no nastier nor more effective at it than she was herself.

The great hostility to her in Hollywood was not entirely ideological, and the indifference to her of the Democratic leaders, including President Truman, a gallant man in all respects, indicates that her interpersonal skills were seriously deficient. And support for Nixon was not just because of, and probably had little to do with, his “Pink” smear campaign against her. He was a dynamic, intelligent young politician who dispatched Helen Douglas with humiliating ease when they debated, and gave promise of a great career in national politics. He had been an extremely effective congressman, was well-spoken, blended liberal goals and conservative means with great agility, and was even thought to be physically attractive, as Alistair Cooke attested (Chapter 2), in the state that put the greatest premium on such things.

It is hard not to like and admire Helen Douglas at a distance; glamorous, courageous, and principled, she fought gamely against lengthening odds, and was soundly defeated by a politician who has received little subsequent approbation. But she had made herself vulnerable, did nothing to reunite her party behind her, opened the floodgates of negative campaigning, was thoroughly disorganized, and ran a sophomoric campaign. She also had a number of rather prissy, soft-left views that were unsound in themselves and wildly out of concert with the place and times.

The legend of Nixon’s unacceptable campaigning methods spread from this campaign, and magnified both the Voorhis and Alger Hiss legends. The editor of the London Observer, David Astor, later claimed that Nixon expressed regret about how he had conducted his campaign in 1950. Nixon denied this and never expressed such sentiments to anyone else. It must have been a misunderstanding on the part of the leftish Astor, who was later unable to recall it himself.²⁷ Nixon had earned widespread respect by his qualities as a winner, a congressional prosecutor, a legislator. But he was an indistinct personality, and one that it was possible to represent as slightly mechanical, almost bloodless, and therefore unpredictable and sinister. He had won an astonishing series of hard-fought victories and had gone from being a completely obscure small-town lawyer to a very prominent U.S. senator representing the second state in the country, and a power in the Republican Party, as history might be about to turn. But he had also created a large number of enemies, who, now silent or invisible, would attack him savagely if they detected he was vulnerable. They were motivated by envy, ideology, sentiment, traditional partisanship, and, in some cases, an irrational and visceral animus. He had moved so quickly, he had no obvious base of support. For the upwardly mobile, admiration is as durable, and as fleeting, as momentum.

While Nixon was not on this occasion taking out exclusively after Dean Acheson, the secretary of state was always a tempting target, with his striped trousers and bowler hat, supercilious airs, luxuriant mustache, and slightly absurd pseudo-British accent. It also fell to him to explain why containment would work in Europe but not in China, and why, with the resources it was prepared to deploy, the United States could not simply “roll back” all the forces of adversity. Unlike the immensely esteemed General George C. Marshall (whom he succeeded in early 1949) and future secretaries of state of great public relations ability, such as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, James Baker, and Condoleezza Rice, Acheson, though very intelligent, articulate, courageous, and sound in his views and talented in their execution, was a sitting duck for the administration’s foes. It was in this session of the Senate that McCarthy crossed what ultimately proved to be his Rubicon of general toleration by accusing General George C. Marshall, one of the greatest soldiers and statesmen of American and modern world history, of “treason.” Nixon always upheld Marshall, long before he was associated with Eisenhower, who was Marshall’s foremost protégé.

While Nixon, as has been recorded, kept his distance from McCarthy, accusing the Truman-Acheson foreign policy of “whining, whimpering, and groveling” was preposterous. Harry Truman, fearlessly combative, and Dean Acheson, an incandescent, but relatively well-qualified snob, never whined, whimpered, or groveled, even, so far as is known, as infants. And Nixon was speaking, again, of the administration that had bundled the U.S.S.R. out of Iran and Greece, protected Turkey, West Berlin, and South Korea, co-founded NATO, put Western Europe back on its economic and military feet, and brought Germany out of its post-Nazi purgatory and into the respectability and fellowship of the democratic West.

Nixon dragooned John Foster Dulles, who had served briefly in the Senate when Dewey named him to fill a vacancy, but had been narrowly defeated by Herbert Lehman, to join him for the fiftieth anniversary of Whittier College in March 1951. Dulles was the Republicans’ leading authority on foreign policy and was friendly with Dewey and, increasingly, with Eisenhower. Though Dulles was a hard-line anti-communist, he was a convinced internationalist. Getting close to him was an astute maneuver by Nixon.

Nixon covered the other wing of the party as well, and McCarthy put him on his (McCarthy’s) permanent investigations sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Expenditures. Nixon replaced Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who had made an admirable “declaration of conscience” aimed at McCarthy, and warned against a campaign of “the four horsemen of fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”²⁹

On April 11, 1951, the long-simmering dispute between MacArthur and Truman finally blew up when Truman sacked the five-star, much-decorated general as UN commander in Korea and governor of Japan, and terminated his military career of fifty-two years, one of the most distinguished in the country’s history. MacArthur had been insubordinate and had publicly criticized the administration’s war policy. When he had heard in early 1951 that Truman was contemplating opening negotiations for a truce, MacArthur made public his appraisal of the war, disparaging the Chinese Red Army and stating that they should come to terms with the UN. This enraged Moscow and Beijing and delayed the start of negotiations. Republican House Leader Joe Martin had written MacArthur asking if he thought Chiang Kai-shek’s army should be thrown into the war. He replied that it should, and Martin, rather mischievously, read his letter to the House. For the commander in chief, this was the last straw. Civilian control of the military required that Truman resolve the dispute in favor of the president.

However, the termination was extremely abrupt treatment for one of the nation’s greatest heroes, and a drastic escalation of their differences. When MacArthur had been Roosevelt’s army chief of staff and they had differed, Roosevelt tamed the general with his lofty, almost aristocratic self-confidence. Truman, the natty but less exalted ex-haberdasher from Kansas City, did not have the same natural authority, nor the devious subtlety, of his predecessor, and MacArthur did not tender him the same level of personal respect. Roosevelt found MacArthur’s political ambitions sinister but amateurish, and thought his personal affectations amusing, almost endearing: his elaborate speech, eccentric costume, and evident vanity. Truman bitterly resented them and was hostile to MacArthur before they had ever met.

Yet, when they did meet, on Wake Island on October 15, 1950, when it seemed the Korean War was almost won, they got on well. Truman, who was there, as Nixon later wrote, solely to shore up his own popularity,³⁰ thought MacArthur “a most stimulating and interesting person . . . very friendly - I might say much more so than I had expected.” And MacArthur, even in the retrospect of his memoirs, thought Truman “radiated nothing but courtesy and good humor . . . He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue, and I liked him from the start.”³¹ MacArthur had assured Truman that the Chinese would not intervene, and when they did a month later, this brief flowering rapport reverted to the negative impressions the two men had had of each other at a distance.

Vastly more important than these personal abrasions was the underlying strategic difference between them. Truman, contrary to partisan Republican cant, was the originator and, in tandem with Stalin, the chief escalator of the Cold War. But he was in favor of a defensive alliance of non-communist states and a policy of containment against communism. MacArthur, as the general told the Congress in one of the great orations of the era, April 19, 1951, believed that “In war, there is no substitute for victory,” that American and Allied soldiers could not be asked to risk or sacrifice their lives for any objective less than victory.

He further believed that wherever the communists gave aggressive battle, they had to be severely punished. He considered Korea an opportunity to suck into the peninsula and destroy the Chinese Communist army, to bomb China’s industrial areas to rubble, and so to weaken the People’s Republic that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who had just been chased off the mainland to Taiwan, could return. MacArthur would tell Richard Nixon in the later fifties that if he had had five hundred thousand soldiers of Chiang’s army with him at the Yalu (the river that was the border between China and Korea), he would have “split China in two, and in one stroke, have changed the world’s balance of power.” It is not clear that Chiang’s soldiers were especially battle-worthy, but under MacArthur’s command and with American close air support, they would certainly have broken the stalemate in Korea, with interesting results.³² MacArthur did not believe for an instant that Stalin would resort to nuclear war.

He tended to regard communism as a fairly unitary phenomenon, directed from Moscow, though he knew that Mao Tse-tung was no puppet like the East European satellite leaders whose countries were occupied by the Soviet Army. MacArthur was caricatured, then and subsequently. “It has been said, in effect, that I was a warmonger. Nothing could be further from the truth; I know war as few other men now living have known it, and nothing to me is more revolting,” he told the cheering Congress.

There was more basis to his argument than posterity has generally conceded. A severe humiliation of Communist China could have been inflicted, at a high cost (though under MacArthur’s scenario, much of this would have been in the lives of Nationalist Chinese). If the United States had been prepared to use nuclear weapons, which would have been unwise, as well as inhuman and provocative, it would have been easier, at least theoretically, to tame Red China. But not even MacArthur, at this point, was advocating that. Eisenhower would discreetly threaten this, to his and America’s profit - a policy option MacArthur was accused of advocating but never did. It is unlikely that Chiang, a corrupt and largely inept Nationalist leader and generalissimo, would have politically resurrected himself, no matter what MacArthur had done to the Red Army, though his forces would have been useful in Korea. Chiang, after twenty-five years of misrule, did not have a great deal of support in China. (He fared rather better with the famous China Lobby in the United States.)

Such a course would have been a salutary lesson to the new regime in Peking and would have got rid of North Korea, which proved to have astonishing durability as a trouble-making, unreconstructed communist state. General Charles de Gaulle, a MacArthur admirer, though they did not know each other, said in a speech on April 15, 1951, that MacArthur was a “soldier whose boldness was feared after full advantage had been taken of it.”³³ There was more truth to this than most American historians of the period have admitted.

The containment policy was ultimately successful, and the United States eventually developed a civilized relationship with the People’s Republic, thanks largely to Nixon, without a wider war. On balance, Truman’s policy was probably correct, but the MacArthur alternative was a viable option, and at time of writing, the last word in North Korea’s provocations as an enduring nuisance is not in.

MacArthur memorably concluded his remarks to the Congress: “I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day [when he was a West Point cadet at the end of the nineteenth century], which proclaimed, most proudly, that ‘old soldiers never die, they just fade away.’ And, like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.” It was splendid oratory, eloquently delivered, and Truman was a little harsh in judging it “a lot of damn bullshit.” But the general had taken some liberties, including his false and unqualified assertion that the Joint Chiefs of Staff shared his opinions about how to conduct the Korean War. They emphatically did not.

If Truman had terminated MacArthur’s career, the general had come home to massive outpourings of public goodwill, determined to return the blow and avenge himself on Truman. He did not distinguish himself in hearings before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, but he did lethal damage to Truman’s standing in the country. The Los Angeles City Council ordered flags lowered and declared the city in mourning “in sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination of General MacArthur.”³⁴ Initially, polls indicated 69 percent of Americans agreed with MacArthur rather than Truman. These numbers evened out, but Truman still suffered a mortal political wound as a result of his treatment of MacArthur. The general toured much of the country and stirred up great sympathy, and corresponding antagonism to Truman.

In the ensuing debate, Nixon clearly supported the general, and even proposed a rather fatuous bill reversing the president’s recall of MacArthur, an unconstitutional usurpation of the prerogatives of the commander in chief. Writing thirty years later, Nixon defended his initiative by citing his explanatory speech in the Senate, which, he wrote, distributed blame fairly to the president and the general. That is a reinterpretive reading of his remarks, and says nothing about the absurdity of the Congress trying to reinstate officers whom the commander in chief has removed. MacArthur should not have been insubordinate; he should have carried out orders without indiscretion, or voluntarily retired. Truman should have summoned him to the West Coast and privately warned him, and if he had to pull the trigger, there would have been no harm in leaving him as governor of Japan, where his services have been universally admired. This would also have blunted the domestic political impact of MacArthur’s removal. (The general was seventy-one and retirement, if decorously executed, would not have been premature.)

Nixon claimed to find the rationale for the unjust treatment of MacArthur in the “Europe-first” policy and in Truman’s appeasement of Attlee’s Labour government in Britain. Attlee, terrified of what China could do to Hong Kong and Malaysia, had offered to mediate U.S. withdrawal from Korea even as British forces were engaged with Americans and others in fighting the Chinese. Truman declined and said that he would rather be driven out of Korea by the Chinese, though he did not expect that to happen, than to accept the dishonorable course proposed by Attlee.

Nixon wanted to use Chiang’s forces, as they were available, in Korea. He wanted strategic bombing of Red China, a naval blockade of the country, and an effort to make the UN allies put in serious forces or stop their tokenism and get out (it was technically a UN mission, voted while the U.S.S.R. was boycotting the UN and unable to veto it). Nixon and many other Republicans were exasperated with nominal allies using their presence to urge excessive caution on the United States, and especially, in this regard, with Britain. Privately, Truman and Acheson agreed with many of these concerns, but in Britain, Attlee, whom Acheson had compared to a “woodchuck chewing on a log,” was about to give way to the legendary and revered Winston Churchill, leading his party to victory for the first time at the age of seventy-six. Churchill, as he had demonstrated many times in the previous forty years, was made of sterner stuff.

The Democrats replied to Nixon and other sensible Republicans that blockading China would achieve nothing, bombing it would bring in the Soviets (questionable), and that forcing the Europeans to choose so abruptly, since most of them had no Far Eastern interests, and the position of the French was ambiguous, would make Korea, as Eisenhower’s replacement as chief of staff, Omar N. Bradley, said, “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time against the wrong enemy.” The Europeans, including the British, in a pattern that would be repeated, were irritating in their ambivalence and tepidity, but essentially General Bradley was correct. Nixon asked, “What would be the right war?” Bradley’s and Truman’s unspoken answer was a geopolitical region of decisive importance - Western Europe or Japan - but not a quarter or a third of the Korean Peninsula. But the MacArthur-Nixon counter was that this would be a relatively cheap and easy way to humble the Chinese before that genie emerged from its huge bottle, and that North Korea could be a terrible nuisance, which it has been. Nixon believed an armistice would hand Formosa to Red China and give China a UN Security Council seat. He put the Republican side very effectively and Taft, as Republican Senate leader, encouraged him to speak for their party, which he did more persuasively than Taft and his senior colleagues did.

Nixon, unwavering in his support of administration policy in Europe, even managed a cordial exchange of correspondence with Averell Harriman, Truman’s director of the Mutual Security Agency.³⁵ He joined the administration’s supporters in advocating higher appropriations for NATO and for the Voice of America, and vigorously defended the president for assigning Secret Service protection to his daughter, Margaret, which some Republican legislators had criticized.³⁶

The sacking of MacArthur opened wide the prospects of the Republicans. After twenty years, the country was tiring of the Democrats, and this was accentuated by a series of rather undignified scandals, to which Truman seemed relatively indifferent, although his own probity was never questioned. Beset by such embarrassments, tormented by allegations of failure in the communist issues, including tolerating loyalty risks in government, and explicitly, according to Nixon, “losing China” through the blunders of the State Department, the Democrats were finally vulnerable provided the Republicans presented believable candidates on a sensible platform. Senator Nixon, not slow to see and seek a key role for himself, would pitch in and do his part, which he could be counted on to define quite ambitiously.

A fund was set up by Herman Perry and Dana Smith and other early Whittier backers to help Nixon pay for the activities of a national politician. There has long been controversy about this money, which came on top of a senator’s $12,500 salary and $75,000 for staff and other expenses. It was presented to potential contributors as irreproachable and ethically bulletproof, and there has never been a serious suggestion that Nixon personally trousered any of it himself. The argument has been over the appropriateness of financially prominent people contributing to assist Nixon in building his standing as a national figure by endless touring and speechmaking. Smith’s budget in this fund for 1951 was $21,000, devoted to Christmas cards, mailings, and radio advertising. Despite frenzied efforts of Nixon’s enemies, no connection has ever been made between Nixon’s Senate votes or public policy positions and contributions to Nixon through this fund or otherwise.

Nixon’s office grew to twelve assistants and secretaries, including the redoubtable Rose Mary Woods, who would be with him for the balance of his career. She was the ultimate devoted office wife, single, competent, and discreet, and she enjoyed and maintained an excellent relationship with Pat. Her quiet but unflagging Roman Catholicism added, over coming decades, to the mystique of her single-minded devotion to the interests of her employer. Nixon decreed that there always be a man in the office, as unannounced visitors might feel short-changed otherwise. (Women were generally considered less substantial than men as representatives of important people and organizations in these times.) He cautioned that even the “crackpots” had to be received, because after Whittaker Chambers, it was impossible to be sure whether a “crackpot” would be of no value. Nixon took rather overbearing measures to make sure that mail was answered promptly, requiring unanswered letters to be left in baskets on top of desks, and any mail unanswered after two weeks reported to him. From the early days, he was a martinet, authoritarian and slightly compulsive in his efficiency, but considerate of staff.³⁷

Harry Truman, a man of impenetrable integrity personally, was a product of the Tom Pendergast machine in Kansas City, Missouri. After his haberdashery failed, Truman worked for six years to pay off all creditors. He went to law school at night, became a machine-nominated judge, and was elected U.S. senator from Missouri in 1934 and reelected in 1940. He was personally selected by Roosevelt as vice president, on the recommendation of the party chairman, Robert E. Hannegan of Missouri, in 1944, when it was determined by the president and the party elders that the erratic and faddish Henry Wallace had to be replaced in that role.

Truman had served as vice president only from January 20 to April 12, 1945, when Roosevelt died, having done nothing to prepare his chosen successor for the great burdens of office. Upon him fell the responsibility to use the atomic bomb, to discern Stalin’s motives and nature and prepare the defense of Western civilization against a new enemy, and to protect American public policy from a Republican Party that had been so shattered by Roosevelt’s electoral invincibility that it was inhabited largely by reactionaries and isolationists. The grandest Republican traditions of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were hard to excavate from the primitivism of “Martin, Barton, and Fish.” And from the antediluvian rump of dispossessed office-seekers that Nixon set out to join and reorient and energize in 1946.

Harry Truman is generally reckoned a distinguished president, but the nature of his political formation made him fairly casual about the self-indulgences of his cronies. He carried to a fault his loyalty to the people who came up with him. These were admirable traits, but they opened vulnerabilities more legitimate than his casualness about subversives in government. There was very little outright disloyalty and betrayal by government officials, despite the Hiss affair and other causes célèbres. But the incidence of improper gifts to officials, kickbacks, selective prosecutions, and blatant patronage in the Truman administration stung and irritated the sometimes dormant, but never extinguished, puritanical conscience of America.

Never one to leave a partisan opportunity unexploited, Nixon leapt to the attack over the Truman administration scandals. In 1951, he presented Senate bills to extend the statute of limitations on all offenses in the conduct of federal positions, including senators and congressmen, and to give grand juries the right to special counsel in investigations of public officeholders, and security from dismissal by federal judges. These were not completely unreasonable proposals, though the Democratic majority caused them to die with dignity. Nixon made no exception for legislators and implied, which was not an unfounded claim, that the Democrats were so long in office in both the White House that nominated judges, and the Senate that confirmed them, that partisanship had permeated the bench and the Democratic administration was signing its own expense account.

As in the House of Representatives, Nixon had no notion of sitting on his hands until he had gained some seniority. His reputation and celebrity now preceded him, and he hit the ground running as a sword-bearer for the renovation of the Republicans and the closure of the great Roosevelt-Truman ascendancy. The Democratic National Committee chairman, William Boyle, was exposed for influence peddling with Hoover and Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and while the Republicans ululated about this, it came to light that there was a lesser question about the Republican National Committee chairman, Guy Gabrielson, continuing as president of the Carthage Hydrocol Corporation.

This momentarily neutralized the controversy, but Nixon, the intrepid and cunning emancipator of all traditional notions of the reticence of fresh-men in all spheres, since he was in elementary school, proposed that both chairmen resign. He followed this up in the investigations subcommittee, managing to asperse the vice president, Alben Barkley, a congressional warhorse even longer in the tooth than Truman, as he had been the Democratic leader of the Senate from 1937 until he came to preside over it as Truman’s vice president. Nixon said that it was unacceptable that there should be any doubt that the chairman of either party be immune to using his influence and power in exchange for personal gain.

To the public, this reinforced Nixon’s image as a questing young man of pure motive, a believable bipartisan on issues of broad public-sector integrity. To the Republicans, it was a factional move as well. Gabrielson was a protégé of Senator Robert A. Taft, and a close friend of Senator William Knowland, who would clearly be a rival to Nixon in any upward career move. Nixon, by his anti-communist exertions, had earned the support of a good deal of the Republican right, but he was not going to paint himself into the corner of parochialism, and endless national defeat, of the Taft right, whom Roosevelt had endlessly caricatured with great mirth and effect. (In this, FDR was carrying his cousin TR’s flag as well as his own.)

And to the professional political community in both parties, Nixon was a young fox who moved forward with agility, and with utter ruthlessness, toward well-liked opponents such as Voorhis, a somewhat naive but brave woman, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and now the chairman of his own party. Such people attract a great deal more popularity among those who don’t know them, as members of the public, than among those who do. Nixon had made his big play in the public arena, and had been too calculating for the clubbiness - to which, in any case, his personality was ill-suited - necessary to build loyalties among his peers. His was a high-octane, high-risk, maximum-thrust career plan. In 1951, it still seemed to be working. (The Democratic chairman retired; Gabrielson remained for another year.)

He continued to walk the tightrope on the subversion issue, excoriating the administration for softness, voting to override Truman’s admirable veto of the restrictive and paranoid McCarran-Walter Act (sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran and Congressman Francis Walter),which reaffirmed the 1924 measure that stranded many victims of the Nazis when they would have made a fine addition to the United States. In November 1951 in Boston, he warned against “indiscriminate name-calling and professional Red-baiting [that] can hurt our cause more than it can help it.” He obviously was referring to McCarthy and his claque but told the press he had no one “in particular in mind.”³⁹

Throughout his public career, Nixon had a weakness for strange or unsavory characters. One was Nicolae Malaxa, a former pillar of the fascist Iron Guard in Romania, and then an industrialist sheltered by the communist regime in that country. Nixon helped him gain entry to the United States to build a seamless-pipe factory for the oil industry in Whittier. Malaxa became a permanent U.S. resident, on Nixon’s and Knowland’s application (Knowland having been recruited by Nixon), but the plant was never built. Nixon never became an intimate of Malaxa’s but had a rather undiscriminating approach to such people, even after the allowance for the need of a politician to help his constituents. Some critics and historians have made something of the fact that he sent in a bill to enable two contributors to his fund to drill for oil on federal land in California. Nixon did not push hard for the bill, which died. Nixon didn’t lift a finger for the people who had given him a few thousand dollars, which were uncontroversially spent.

Nixon’s general voting record was against price and other controls, public power, and illegal immigration; and for civil rights (against the poll tax), statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, foreign aid, and emergency food and disaster relief for India and Yugoslavia. He was in favor of the deployment of troops to Europe but voted to restrict the president’s power to make treaties and foreign troop deployments without congressional approval. He was close to the Taft bloc on most domestic issues but generally voted with moderate Republicans and the administration on foreign questions.

The Nixons were prospering. Don now operated Frank’s flourishing business, and Frank and Hannah retained their Maryland, Florida, and California homes. The senator sold his Whittier house and his war bonds and with the proceeds paid for about half the cost of a fine new suburban house in Spring Valley, in northwest Washington. Pat, who still came in to help out in the office, indulged herself for the first time with an interior decorator. Nixon drove a comfortable new Oldsmobile, bought from the dealership of a Whittier College classmate, and supplemented his senatorial pay by about 60 percent with speaking fees. As a family, the Nixons had come a long way from the grinding poverty Frank and Pat had known as youths and from the poor but respectable circumstances of Dick’s early years.

But by late 1951, Nixon’s health was deteriorating, apparently as a result of tension and overwork. He did not relax well, had no hobbies or sports, and was an indifferent sleeper. Sheridan Downey, Nixon’s predecessor in the Senate, had given him a book called The Will to Live, advice on how to counteract stress and strain, because Nixon was suffering from backaches as well as sleeplessness. Nixon visited the author, a doctor, Arnold Hutschnecker, on Park Avenue in New York. He continued to have appointments with him for four years, and stopped only when there was some danger of his being accused by the press of being under psychiatric care, although Hutschnecker was not in fact a psychiatrist but an internist specializing in psychosomatic medicine.

The Republicans agreed with him. Dewey was not presentable after two defeats, the last a historic case of snatching defeat from the stomach of victory. Taft was back again in 1952, as in 1948, as in 1944, as in 1940, stolid but courageously honest and principled, “Mr. Republican,” respected by all his colleagues but no great vote-getter. Earl Warren was hovering about, hoping lightning would strike him but not doing much to attract it. The great hope of the Republican moderates was Eisenhower, who was being entreated but had not publicly decided to run, though by the end of March 1952, he had gone so far as to consent to be nominated.

Taft decided every issue on the principles as he saw them. He had been an isolationist since he came to the Senate in 1938 but had supported Lend-Lease aid to Britain in 1941. He had opposed the Nuremberg Trials as ex post facto justice meted out in suspect fashion by a tribunal that included Russians, who represented a power that had committed atrocities comparable to Germany’s. Though a conservative and the author of the Senate version of Taft-Hartley, he was a compassionate supporter of sensible social welfare programs. He cared tenderly for his paralyzed wife and explained with exquisite courtesy to a little girl, in front of cameras, why he would not give her an autograph. ⁴¹ Nixon was concerned that Taft took American socialists for communists, as McCarthyites tended to do, and didn’t recognize that most American socialists and leftists were dedicated anti-communists. Nixon thought that Taft seriously misjudged the international situation and that, in both policy and electoral terms, he was not the right candidate. Taft had remarkable qualities, but no galvanizing appeal to voters, and was essentially an isolationist and in other policy respects was rather quirky. He was a good man but was mistaken at least half the time in major policy questions and had little ability or desire to attract large number of voters.

Nixon was approached for his support in 1951 by Tom Shroyer of the Taft camp, a committee aide and one of the authors of Taft-Hartley. Nixon was friendly but noncommittal,⁴² and he let it be known that he doubted Taft could win. Besides that, Taft had virtually adopted William Knowland, and it was widely thought that Knowland would be his vice presidential candidate if Taft were nominated.

The serious possible alternative to Taft was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was a much more personable man than Taft, with an expressive face and pleasant smile and piercing blue eyes. Behind his masquerade as a pleasant and politically unworldly officer, he was a very astute political operator. He had been brought up in the nondescript prairie town of Abilene, Kansas, had an unremarkable time at West Point, was in a staff position in the First World War on the Western Front, and made inching progress between the wars.

When Douglas MacArthur retired as chief of staff of the army in 1935 and went to the Philippines to set up that country’s army, preparatory to independence, he took Eisenhower with him as an aide. Eisenhower subsequently claimed that he had spent his time there studying “dramatics” under MacArthur. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Eisenhower returned to Washington and caught the eye of the incoming chief of staff, General George C. Marshall. He was promoted rapidly, became the Allied commander in the Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942, and in December 1943 was named supreme commander for the invasion and liberation of Western Europe. He supervised the planning of, and successfully commanded, the greatest military operation in the history of the world with the invasion of Normandy, and commanded the liberation of France and the invasion of western Germany.

As Supreme Allied Commander in Northwest Africa and Western Europe, he conciliated the interests of Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, and coordinated the disparate and rivalry-riven efforts of such temperamental army commanders as George S. Patton and Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery. He mastered the politics of both military and alliance bureaucracy. Beneath his cordial exterior, he was a man of calculation, a politician in a uniform. He did not mind being thought affable, guileless, or even syntactically incomprehensible. He knew what he wanted and, after a slow start in life, had made a howling success of everything he had done since he left the Philippines in 1939. He was impressive in person: ramrod straight, the fierce but inscrutable gaze of his pale blue eyes, well tailored, and always a razor edge on a crease and shoes polished to a mirror (typical of generals, having strong-armed young men to shine them).

He had not been partisan, though he did not care for the Democrats, and thought Roosevelt an exalted political trickster. He came to disdain Truman for his cronyism, though their relations started out well and warmed in their latter years. He once described the Democrats as “a mixture of extremes on the left, extremes on the right, with political chicanery and expedience shot through the whole business.”⁴³ He was, in fact, rather liberal, and had no illusions about repealing most of Roosevelt’s reforms. He did believe in balancing the budget, had no notion of economics except a Dickensian idea of matching spending and revenue closely, but was a determined internationalist.

He attracted, and was attracted to, successful businessmen. He liked their efficiency, organizational ability, and wealth, and especially their great deference to him. They admired and supported him, and he believed successful American business executives to be a great pool of talent, as well as conviviality. And many of them came to see him as the man who could end the Democratic monopoly of the federal government. Eisenhower cultivated the support of the leaders of American finance and industry, who showered him with favors, and he seemed to rise serenely, ineluctably, toward the presidency, as if above the political fray, in which he was, in fact, a consummate manipulator.

In his diaries, and in his memoirs, Eisenhower recounts the history of discussions of his political future. A political career was first suggested to him in June 1943, when he was in Algiers. It was raised again in the summer of 1945. He claimed a desire to retire from the military, with no hint of what he would retire to; he was only fifty-five. If not politics, what would be appropriate for so eminent a figure as Eisenhower had justly become? Eisenhower claimed that he did not wish to be army chief of staff when Truman appointed him to that position, but that Truman prevailed upon him to take the post until General Omar N. Bradley, Eisenhower’s senior army group commander on the Western Front, had finished a two-year tour as head of the Veterans’ Administration, a very important position as twelve million American servicemen were demobilized and were eligible for the benefits of Roosevelt’s generous GI Bill of Rights. Eisenhower was army chief of staff until 1948 and then relinquished the post to Bradley.

Overtures from both parties continued throughout this time, and after Eisenhower retired and became president of Columbia University in May 1948, the parties continued to pursue him. He fended them off. But when Thomas E. Dewey ran successfully for a third term as governor of New York in 1950, he denied any further interest in the White House and said he was supporting Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952. In December 1950, Truman telephoned Eisenhower and asked if he would take over the founding command of NATO. “He and I both knew that this was a thankless job,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. “But I was in complete agreement with the president that collective security arrangements for Western Europe had to be worked out in the least possible time and that America had to participate in the effort. By this time I had become deeply interested in my work at Columbia University and it was a tremendous personal disappointment to me to have to give it up.”⁴⁴ (There is little evidence that he and Columbia had particularly taken to each other.)

He claimed to be about to forswear any political ambition if Taft had assured him, as he departed to take over NATO at the beginning of 1951, that he, Taft, wholeheartedly supported the alliance. Taft declined to do this, and Eisenhower promised no such abstention. He knew what Taft’s answer would be; it was all part of his carefully prepared campaign to appear to be drafted, almost like General Washington (except that Washington’s draft was genuine). He took up his NATO post but retained incessant contact with politically useful figures at home throughout his seventeen months in Paris.

Eisenhower wrote that Taft was unsure whether he supported the dispatch of four or six divisions to Europe but “repeated his refusal to make the point clear . . . [of] his support in the work for which I was called back to active duty.” Eisenhower claims that he had intended, if Taft had responded positively, to tell him that he, Eisenhower, would then make a public statement that in returning to military service he unconditionally renounced any thought of ever seeking political office . . . “Of course, I did not go through with that part of my plan that would have depended upon his affirmative reply.”⁴⁵

As usual with claims of disinterest from subsequently elected figures (writing about conversations with deceased people), this is not entirely believable, especially since it lays on his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination the responsibility for Eisenhower running at all. It invites the question of what nature of support Eisenhower was seeking and not receiving from Taft if the senator was prepared to send at least four divisions to Europe. It also raises the question of why, if he was so reluctant to throw his well-decorated hat in the ring, he didn’t hint to Taft that he could secure a clear run at the White House, in which the general was not really interested, if Taft would become a little more enthusiastic about the mission Eisenhower was about to undertake. Upright man though Taft was, this bargain could not have failed to interest him.⁴⁶

Eisenhower continued to receive appeals from both parties while in Europe, and claims to have concluded that he was probably a Republican, since he had always voted Republican and was concerned that the Democrats had won for twenty years by “spend and spend, and elect and elect . . . We were coming to the point where we looked toward a paternalistic state to guide our steps from cradle to grave.”⁴⁷ Presumably, these were not piercing conscientious revelations that came to him as he commanded the organization of NATO forces from Paris at the age of sixty-two. In any case, he did not propose, then or subsequently, the repeal of any significant Roosevelt or Truman social measure, and made it clear that he was well to the left of Taft on these matters. “I still hoped and believed that someone else could lead the Republican Party much more effectively and to a better result than I could.” He never made any suggestions of who that mystery leader might be, and half a century of energetic retrospection has failed to produce a plausible candidate.

The usual sequence occurred: “What impressed me more than anything else was the extent of real grassroots sentiment for me to become a candidate,” etc.⁴⁸ On New Year’s Day 1952, Eisenhower wrote to Truman, who had asked him, most amicably, what his intentions were. In a longhand letter, Eisenhower replied that he would not seek the presidency: “You know, far better than I that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”

Five days later, Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge announced the Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the following day Eisenhower announced that he was prepared to accept the Republican nomination. Truman, with admirable restraint, told the press he thought Eisenhower “a grand man . . . I am just as fond of General Eisenhower as I can be. I think he is one of the great men produced by World War II.”⁴⁹ Astonishingly, Stephen Ambrose, a respected biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon, claimed that Eisenhower was “furious” at Lodge’s action.⁵⁰

To believe Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, two of the distinguished leaders of American history, the one was as eager to quit the White House in 1953 as the other was to avoid it. Both versions strain credulity and are largely humbug. However, the champion of such posturing was FDR’s orchestrated draft for a third term in 1940. Necessary though it was to the world to reelect the president who would become a supposedly neutral semi-combatant against the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists, the hokey Democratic convention in Chicago in 1940 must rank as one of the great monuments to political cynicism of American history.

Compared with Franklin Roosevelt, the leader who elevated them both (though neither liked him very much and it’s not clear that he much cared for them either), Truman and Eisenhower were earnest political amateurs. Compared with all of them, Nixon’s rather naked ambition, and that of his most important and talented contemporaries, Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan, would be almost refreshing. (The first three were born between 1882 and 1890, the last four between 1908 and 1917.)

Truman told his staff that the Republican bosses were showing Ike “gates of gold and silver that will turn out copper and tin.”⁵¹ Truman underestimated Eisenhower’s worldliness, not to say, duplicity. The general had written to one of his army comrades: “so-called drafts . . . have been nurtured, with the full, even though undercover support of the ‘victim.’”⁵²

Eisenhower’s political cunning would be an element of both common interest and friction with Nixon. As Ike presented himself as the reluctant hero, Nixon strove to be Mr. Clean. Eisenhower would admire Nixon’s intelligence, courage, and determination but disapprove his Cassius-like appetite for power. He would affect the avuncular grandeur of the spontaneously elevated hero, but was made uneasy by Nixon’s knowledge that with Eisenhower, all was not what it seemed. At the end, after Nixon had made it to the White House on his own, Eisenhower would be gratified by the success of the man he would then claim as his understudy, and Nixon would be delighted with the approbation of the soldier-statesman he would acknowledge as his mentor. Both roles were largely a fiction. It would be a tortured script with, as between these protagonists, a happy ending.

Richard Nixon had seen Dwight D. Eisenhower six times before the general declared his availability for the Republican nomination. He had looked down on the general’s tickertape parade through lower Manhattan in the spring of 1945 and had seen him when Eisenhower marched with Marshall and others in the funeral cortege of General John J. Pershing, Ike’s precursor as commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France in the First World War. This was in 1948. He met Eisenhower for the first time in 1948, when the general briefed Nixon and other congressmen on European security matters. They met one-on-one for the first time when Nixon gave Eisenhower a briefing on the Hiss affair and related matters in 1949. Nixon was present when Eisenhower addressed Congress in February 1951. Nixon attended a World Health Conference in Geneva in the spring of 1951, and made an official and an unofficial request to visit Eisenhower while the senator was in Europe. Eisenhower received Nixon for over an hour on the morning of May 18, 1951. Ike had promised his backers that, opposite American politicians, he would “maintain silence in every language known to man.”⁵³

Eisenhower was more forthcoming than that. He railed against defeatism and lamented that American opinion did not realize the gains that had been made in shaping up Western Europe to resist the communists. He impressed Nixon as the first military person the senator had met who stressed factors other than armed force; Eisenhower called for a commercial, cultural, and ideological offensive against the communists. The general had read Ralph de Toledano’s Seeds of Treason, an admiring study of Nixon in the Hiss case. Eisenhower congratulated Nixon on getting Hiss “fairly.” He later wrote admiringly of Nixon’s earned reputation for “fairness . . . Not once had he overstepped the limits proscribed by the American sense of fair play. . . . He did not persecute or defame. This I greatly admired.” His admiration was not altogether misplaced, but it was perhaps exaggerated. Whether it was flattery or naivety on the general’s part is not clear, but he was more given to the first than the second.

Nixon came away convinced that Eisenhower should be the next president. He detected behind “a warm smile and icy blue eyes . . . a lot of finely tempered hard steel.” He would soon get past the facade and to grips with what was behind it. A month after the Paris meeting, Nixon was one of a group of Eisenhower backers who met June 23-24, 1951, at Clarksboro, New Jersey, at the home of a Stassen backer, Amos J. Peaslee, to launch Stassen’s campaign as a holding operation on behalf of Eisenhower. Joe McCarthy, Congressman Walter Judd, and Stassen’s manager, Warren Burger, were among the participants. A paper was drawn up that Stassen signed, promising that he would not be a candidate against Eisenhower and that if Ike ran Stassen would withdraw. Dewey described Stassen, his former rival, with his usual asperity, as a “useful . . . counterirritant.”

One of Eisenhower’s wealthy business friends, Ellis Slater, a liquor executive, attended the Bohemian Grove in July 1951 and gave the Eisenhower message to Herbert Hoover and his friends that Taft could not win and only Eisenhower could round up enough floating votes to put the Republicans across. A week later, in the Bohemian Grove’s San Francisco clubhouse, July 28, 1951, the same group of Hoover’s close collaborators, Slater representing Eisenhower, and some wealthy California businessmen, met and pursued the idea of the Eisenhower nomination to the point of the vice presidency. Slater proposed Nixon, because he was young, a navy man, could bring California, had an excellent record on the communist issue, and shared Ike’s internationalist views. Knowland was the only rival, and he was not thought to have any of Nixon’s advantages except that he too might pull California and some younger voters generally. Slater reported his conversations to Eisenhower in Paris five days later, and Nixon’s informants would certainly have advised him of the clubhouse discussion promptly. Nixon was a logical vice presidential candidate.

In the autumn of 1951, Dewey took charge of the prenatal Eisenhower campaign, set up an office in the Commodore Hotel, and put in hand a massive fund-raising effort led by John Hay Whitney that produced $4 million for the non-candidate, an unprecedentedly lavish pre-launch war chest. Southern California fund-raising was taken over by Nixon’s own fund treasurer, Dana Smith. Dewey formed up an Eisenhower committee. The chairman was Henry Cabot Lodge, who was judged a perfectly adequate fig leaf for Eisenhower, but not a strategist or commanding political eminence, despite his Boston Back Bay airs and name made famous by his grandfather, Woodrow Wilson’s bête-noire.

Dewey’s campaign manager in his two presidential bids, Herbert Brownell, a wily New York lawyer; General Lucius D. Clay, Ike’s closest army confidant and former chief occupation official in Germany; former Marshall Plan administrator Paul Hoffman; and Kansas senators Frank Carlson and Harry Darby (Kansas was Ike’s native state) were in the group. One of their first challenges was to prevent the publication by General George Patton’s widow of her husband’s papers that revealed the torrid affair Eisenhower had had from 1943 until after the war with Kay Summersby, his attractive female British chauffeur. Lodge got Mrs. Patton’s lawyer a plum appointment and headed off what in the prim postwar times could have been a public relations disaster.

California posed a special problem, because its large delegation, second only to New York’s, was being held by Earl Warren, who entertained his own presidential ambitions. Warren did not want to be an overt candidate and felt that such an endeavor would require him to compromise his honor beyond what he was prepared to do. The California delegation had to be infiltrated and undermined, but not so that Warren, who ruled in Sacramento as an emperor - in his third term, like Dewey - would notice. The delegation had to respect the governor’s sensibilities but be capable of being snaffled up for Eisenhower if need arose. And the need was likely, because Taft had built up a large delegate lead after more than a decade of diligent and distinguished service as Mr. Republican. Richard Nixon was an expert at this sort of Machiavellian maneuver, and he would undertake to subvert Warren’s position without greatly offending him, while maintaining good relations with the Taft Old Guard, by whom he was generally well-liked in the Senate. Chotiner had discussed the vice presidency for Nixon with Dewey and Brownell, as Nixon was being entrusted with his delicate, vital, and slightly unseemly mission.⁵⁴

Earl Warren was an impressive governor but an eccentric national politician. He took positions that were, on the whole, commendable, but he paid no attention to where the chips fell within his own party. Warren was an implacable foe of McCarthyism, a champion of civil rights who warned Republicans not to stray from the principles of Lincoln, a public supporter of Secretary of State Acheson and of Truman over MacArthur, a supporter of public utilities, and even a critic of unfocused criticism of the scandals in the Truman administration, implicitly criticizing Nixon’s efforts to capitalize on them for the benefit of the Republicans. He thus managed to annoy virtually all Republicans, and it was a matter of some mystery what he was doing in that party, other than as a traditional Theodore Roosevelt-Hiram Johnson Progressive. He was popular with the California public, as much with Democrats as Republicans, but apart from Knowland, whom he had appointed to the Senate when Hiram Johnson died, he had no friends in the higher reaches of his ostensible party. Even Knowland, though conspicuously pro-Warren, was really for Taft and hoping to be his vice presidential nominee.⁵⁵

Chotiner, on Nixon’s behalf, met with the Taft California delegates, who were itching to bolt from Warren’s control and challenge him in the primary for control of California’s convention delegation, on June 29, 1951, in Fresno. Chotiner was encouraging to the Taftites but did not commit Nixon to challenge Warren for control of the California delegation. In October, the Taftites moved a resolution at a California Young Republicans convention opposing any Republican candidate “who has a reputation of having given ground to creeping socialism.” This was not only a clear sniping at Warren, it had more than a whiff of effulgent McCarthyism, since it attacked a reputation rather than a substantive fact. Nixon’s followers joined with Warren’s to defeat the motion and pass a rather sycophantic motion in favor of Warren. ⁵⁶

Warren announced his candidacy for president on November 14, 1951, and Nixon gave a rather tepid comment about Warren “certainly” being one of the “good men” possibly seeking the nomination. Nixon had said that he and Warren were “not unfriendly. We are two individuals going our own ways.”⁵⁷ The following day, at a press conference in Los Angeles, Nixon claimed he had discovered as he had toured around the country that Warren had “surprisingly” strong support. He commended Warren as “completely honest” and “electable” but an unknown quantity in policy terms. Nixon then shifted gears and tried to prod Eisenhower by saying that the general “has been playing it a little too coy and people are beginning to lose some of their enthusiasm,” though he would be a vote-getter .⁵⁸

At the Republican State Central Committee meeting in San Diego on November 21, despite Nixon’s public personal endorsement of Warren, the Taft and Nixon forces united to prevent an endorsement of Warren. Nixon told Taftites who were annoyed at his having joined the endorsement of Warren that he had done it for party unity, but that even if he ended up being on the Warren delegation, he would still be for Taft. Nixon was now ostensibly supporting all three candidates, including the undeclared Eisenhower, while assuring the Taft faction that he was really for them, and the Eisenhower faction that he was merely following Dewey’s advice in avoiding an open party schism in working for the general inside the Warren camp, while encouraging the Taftites against Warren. Knowland, supporting Warren, but secretly ineffectually for Taft, was no more honorable than Nixon and blunderingly inept.

Warren mistrusted Nixon but had no idea what an intricate game he was playing. Taft, a guileless man, believed Nixon was a supporter with reservations, while Dewey, the tactical manager for Eisenhower, was satisfied that however devious Nixon became, he was executing a plan that in concept had been generated by Dewey himself, avenging himself for having been defeated by both Roosevelt and Truman. Nixon was deftly playing on the complacence of Warren, the trusting integrity of Taft, and the vanity and cynicism of Dewey, and behind him the self-importance and tactical political inexperience of Eisenhower himself. This gave Nixon lots of room to work in.

The California Taftites, in search of someone to head an alternate delegation opposed to Warren, after Nixon demurred, offered the honor to Herbert Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, and Joe Martin, none of whom was really a Californian and all of whom declined. They should have gone with Adolphe Menjou, who was a conservative Republican California activist. Instead they ended up with kooky-right congressman Thomas H. Werdel of Bakersfield. Nixon loyalists completely infiltrated this group, and Nixon’s original benefactor, Herman Perry of the Bank of America in Whittier, even became their treasurer. Werdel would denounce Warren as “atheistic, materialistic, socialistic,” with such vehemence that even the Los Angeles Times would come to the governor’s defense.⁵⁹

Nixon covered off another flank by calling, December 12, for an hour each, on Hoover and MacArthur; they both lived in the Waldorf Towers in New York. This was rather exalted lobbying for a thirty-eight-year-old in his first year in the Senate. Nixon had become a serious participant in a drama that involved a number of world historic American personalities, well before he had become one himself. Both men preferred Taft, and MacArthur was astounded and dismayed by the popularity of Eisenhower, whom he affected to regard as a “clerk” and “the best second lieutenant I ever had.” Eisenhower thought MacArthur a vainglorious fraud addicted to “bootlickers.” (Nixon claimed in his book Leaders, in the chapter on MacArthur, that he met the general for the first time at Taft’s funeral in 1953.⁶¹)

At the same time, Stassen had been calling upon Eisenhower in Paris and returned excitedly claiming that the general would not run, and saying that he was rethinking his Clarksboro pledge of less than six months before. Stassen called upon Nixon and offered him the vice presidential nomination in exchange for Nixon’s support with California delegates. It was only seven years since the boy wonder of the Republicans had met Nixon in the South Pacific. Nixon had refined his noncommittal answers to a high art, and did not take Stassen seriously enough to give him the most sophisticated version of his stock response.

Nixon’s duplicity achieved a new depth with his assurance to the Los Angeles Times on February 21, 1952, that he was an unambiguous Warren supporter and that “none of the Warren delegates will be pledged to any other candidates as their second choice.” Nixon had gone one better and pledged himself to Eisenhower, who had now said he would accept the nomination, as of January 7, and implied support of Taft, on the second ballot, if not the first.

In February, some of Eisenhower’s backers staged a rally for thirty thousand people in Madison Square Garden after the Friday-night prize fights. It was a rather fatuous festivity of maudlin and idolatrous laudations, but Ike and Mamie watched a film of it in their Paris residence and were moved to “a sniffle once or twice.”⁶³ Eisenhower won the New Hampshire primary, organizationally assisted by Henry Cabot Lodge as neighboring senator, and won a big victory with a write-in ballot in Minnesota, assisted by Harold Stassen’s local followers. The general’s popularity was incontestable. Still, he waited for a consensus, as if it were Taft’s duty simply to melt away.

To be fair to Eisenhower, he was clearly somewhat ambivalent about a presidential candidacy, in that he wanted to be president but wanted the office virtually handed to him. If Dewey had won in 1948 as he should have, he would presumably have been the candidate again in 1952, and Eisenhower would probably not have much regretted never having been a politician. But after the 1948 debacle, he was, as Nixon said, bitten by the bug, and his desire to be president was contending with his desire to seem to be reluctant. By April 1952, he was running the danger of seeming indecisive; he had not discouraged a huge groundswell in his favor, but if he didn’t move soon, the whole movement could collapse, and despite popular sentiment, Taft had earned the affection of the party rank and file. Where Truman looked for decisions to make and was happy that “The buck stops here,” the cautious Eisenhower left his options open until they almost foreclosed themselves. Both approaches worked for these practitioners, but they both had their hazards.

On March 22, Nixon signed the pledge of loyalty as a Warren delegate, as the California Election Code required, and swore that “I, Richard Nixon, personally prefer Earl Warren as nominee . . . and hereby declare I shall, to the best of my judgment and ability, support Earl Warren.” Airtight though it seemed, Nixon would interpret the oath rather idiosyncratically. More important, Nixon had bargained his signature for important concessions. He had initially declined to be a delegate, to avoid such a pledge, and Warren sent Knowland to attract him to the slate. There were several conversations, as Warren knew that an unpledged Nixon could be a serious weakness in his status as a favorite-son candidate of California. Nixon agreed only when Knowland, on the governor’s behalf, agreed to allow Nixon to name at least twenty-three of the seventy delegates, a third of the total. In fact, he packed the delegation with unidentified ringers.

Nixon’s adherence seemed an act of obeisance by Nixon to Warren, but the Warren native-son campaign was a hollowed-out shell before its delegates had even been identified. Nixon was able to continue to assure the Taft forces that he was still open-minded after the first ballot, and the Eisenhower camp that he was carrying out the cunning plan he and Dewey had broadly agreed. Indeed, he was carrying it out with a cynical finesse that Dewey, a rather blunt and impatient ex-prosecutor, could not have imagined or executed. Nixon now adopted the unctuous posture of seeking party unity and a civilized nominating process, because “one of [the candidates] is needed in Washington to put an end to communism, crime, and corruption.”

Whatever Dewey’s failings as a presidential candidate, he unlocked the key to the reluctant general. He sent a handwritten note to Eisenhower in April - given personally, coincidentally, to a TWA pilot named Nixon⁶⁴ - stating that if Eisenhower did not return and enter the race officially, the Republican Party might well turn to MacArthur. This was nonsense, since Eisenhower’s supporters would not have gone to the other, more conservative general, and MacArthur would not have run against Taft. He might have accepted the vice presidency, largely to stick his thumb in Truman’s eye, and would have been a scene-stealing holder of that position. Indeed, he would have made a contribution to a Taft election, and since Taft died in August 1953, MacArthur would have succeeded him as president, at the unprecedented age of seventy-three. MacArthur was a great talent, but the thought of him as president is disquieting. But Dewey’s stratagem worked: to no one was the prospect of a President MacArthur more disquieting than to his former aide. Eisenhower prepared to return to the United States and enter the campaign at last.

Dewey invited Nixon to speak at the New York State Republican Party’s annual dinner in early May 1952, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. This was a great opportunity, broadcast nationally. Nixon rehearsed and prepared his remarks for a week, and after Dewey and liberal New York Republican senator Irving Ives had spoken briefly, Nixon filled the time slot exactly, leaving the last minute for the prodigious applause that he received. He spoke without notes and without any hesitation or grammatical problems, and it was a notable address. His themes were very familiar to him, having been his staple through his recent speaking tour: the need to avoid divisions, attract sensible Democrats, wage a “rocking, socking” campaign, and turn the (subversive) rascals out. It made a tremendous impression and Dewey was generous in his praise. Dewey told him when he finished speaking and the house rose to applaud that if he didn’t “get fat” or “lose your zeal” he could be president. (Dewey had had a great grievance against his former rival, the 1940 Republican presidential nominee, Wendell Willkie, for being overweight.) Nixon went with Dewey after dinner to the governor’s suite in the Commodore Hotel and met with him and Brownell and Russell Sprague, Dewey’s principal aide and Republican boss in Nassau County. They met for ninety minutes before Nixon returned by train to Washington. Dewey offered to support Nixon for the vice presidency with Eisenhower. Dewey implied confidence that this was almost within his gift and that Eisenhower, if nominated, would owe the governor a great debt. Nixon said he would be “greatly honored.”⁶⁵ Ten days later, at the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, Brownell took Nixon aside and confirmed that he and Dewey were supporting him as the vice presidential nominee with Eisenhower.

A few days later, Nixon had another meeting with General Lucius D. Clay, Herbert Brownell (former Republican National Committee chairman), and some fund-raisers. Nixon later wrote that these people were “sizing me up,”⁶⁶ but they were more likely talking about how to integrate Nixon’s California and Texas fund-raising apparatus with Eisenhower’s, and preliminary strategizing for the convention against Taft and the election beyond. Truman had withdrawn and the Democratic field was wide open. There was no obvious successor to Roosevelt and Truman. Henry Cabot Lodge told Nixon on the Senate floor that he should be the vice presidential nominee with Eisenhower, and informed Eisenhower that he had said so. Eisenhower declared himself “entirely favorable.”⁶⁷

Nixon consulted his Washington social patroness, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter and the widow of the last Republican House Speaker before Joe Martin. Although her own father got to be president only by succeeding the assassinated McKinley from the vice presidency, she did not think much of that position. However, she thought conservative Republicans would need Nixon to prevent Eisenhower from compounding what she considered to be the errors of her cousin, Franklin (who finally banned her from the White House in 1940 for saying she would prefer to vote for Hitler than a third term for FDR).⁶⁸

The fix was in for Nixon, if he could bring his infiltration of Warren’s supposed delegation to fruition. It was a subplot of Eisenhower’s elaborate charade of replicating the popular draft of George Washington, that he professed to believe that the vice presidential selection was within the gift of the party organizers. He had seen the presidential nominees of both parties select the vice presidential candidates for at least twenty years, and especially Roosevelt’s spectacular imposition of Wallace in 1940 and Truman in 1944, and cannot have been under any illusions about whose prerogative it was to make the choice. He just didn’t want to be connected to an arrangement that antedated his reluctant consent to be conscripted by the nation to the White House boot camp for the commander in chief.

Party regulars took note of Eisenhower’s great popularity, but they resented the manipulations of the twice-failed Dewey faction and had become a little tired of Eisenhower’s insistence that the great Republican Party come, (private’s) cap in hand, to Paris to beg the general to accept all that they had to give. Taft, the scion of a Republican presidential family, had worked heart and soul through difficult times for their party, and was supported by a greater and more eloquent, if also rather more temperamental, general than Eisenhower, who was conspicuously available to help the Republicans without George Washingtonian posturing. At the end of May 1952, with the convention only six weeks off, though polls showed Eisenhower as much as ten points ahead of Taft, the Ohio senator seemed to be leading, approximately 460 delegates to 390. Warren, whom his former ticket-mate Dewey had taken with his usual brusqueness to calling “that big dumb Swede,”⁶⁹ was under the impression he had about 100. For some time, Nixon had been on his auto-cue of declaring himself a Warren delegate, while saying how important it was to attract independent and soft Democratic voters (deferential bow to Eisenhower) and quietly telling the Taftites that he was open after the first ballot and the Eisenhowerites that he would produce astounding permutations in the Warren delegation.

To shake the Taft momentum in delegate accumulation, there needed to be a cause, a moral issue that would enable the Eisenhowerites to galvanize Republican opinion. Their man had the people and was clearly the strongest candidate, and he was being sandbagged by the Flat Earth Society within the Republican Party, which had taken to reviling Ike, to the general’s considerable irritation, as a stooge of New Dealers and Reds. This was not quite the Hallelujah chorus the general had been hoping for, but it offended the average reasonable Republican and was helpful to the Eisenhower cause. ⁷⁰

The flashpoint came when the Texas Republicans chose their convention delegates at Mineral Wells on May 27. There had been a big upsurge of Eisenhower support, and a large number of new Texas Republican adherents materialized. The Taft supporters used their control of the credentials committee and other levers and simply elected their own slate to the Chicago convention, slamming the door on Eisenhower.

Brownell and Lodge erupted in moral outrage at the “theft” of the Texas delegation. It was a theft, but this was hardly unprecedented in these matters in either party. However, it was a possible theft of the entire nomination, and that was not so common, and it was not usual for someone other than a grubby politician to be both the author and the victim of such a move. Taft was Mr. Integrity, and Eisenhower had not led the Western Allies to the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and founded the military structure of NATO, which would prove the most successful alliance in world history, in order to be consigned to the ash heap by a handful of backwoods Texas political hucksters.

William Rogers was placed by Brownell at the head of a group of lawyers to mount a challenge at the convention, and major Madison Avenue agencies were engaged to generate a fierce public relations outcry. A Pennsylvania congressman, Hugh Scott (eventually Republican Senate leader), proposed a “Fair Play” amendment to the convention rules. This was the device for mobilizing opinion. The uncommitted delegates, especially California’s, would be necessary to put it over. Among the most knowledgeable insiders, as the race came down to the wire, all eyes turned to Nixon.

As the heavy battalions formed up, Earl Warren had the uneasy sensation that his candidacy was less appreciated than he had hoped. The Werdel slate, well financed, attacked him around the state in the most inflammatory terms, which in these febrile times rarely excluded some unflattering application of the word Red. He might already have had some premonitions of the antlike movements of Nixon and his supporters within the California delegation. Warren’s great capacity for self-righteousness had been admired in California, especially given the chicanery of many prominent California politicians, but he was playing Little League rules in a rough-house league. He excoriated his critics on the right as “scurrilous . . . venomous [participants in] a coalition of hate, backed by enormous sums of money.” There was some truth to this, but they were a sideshow, and Warren’s candidacy was an exercise in delusional vanity. He didn’t have any real support as a presidential candidate, and instead of maximizing his influence as he could have done, he imagined that he was on the same historic plane as Eisenhower, Taft, Dewey, MacArthur, and Truman. He would make a great contribution to U.S. history yet, but not in politics, where he was now completely out of his depth. By contrast, the junior senator from California was already too clever and powerful for the small pond to which Warren tried to confine him. The brutal meritocracy of American presidential politics was separating strivers from achievers.

Warren was moved to concede that if he could not win the nomination, his delegates would be released - not a bulletin, exactly, but an acknowledgment of where events were going. Nixon followed with a statement that was, in its way, a masterpiece. He assured everyone that he was “not a rubber-stamp,” noted that there appeared to be a near deadlock between the Taft and Eisenhower forces, and that the California delegation “is in a position to name the Republican nominee for president . . . [and] holds the key to the situation.” He expressed his personal respect for Werdel, but stated that the “Warren delegation is better qualified to represent California. Once Governor Warren releases the delegation, we shall be free to look over the field and select the man best qualified . . . the very strongest possible nominee.” He was clinging to the fig leaf of loyalty to Warren, debunking in advance the nonsensical pretense of Warren having any chance to achieve anything for himself as a nominee, and laying claim to the title of kingmaker for himself. It was a stunning feat of political leverage, giving himself in a few months a remarkable purchase on the torrent of events.

Warren, even at this late date, could have got himself in as vice president, the position for which he had been nominated four years before, if he had thrown his delegates behind either candidate. Nixon was allowed to exercise the influence he did only because of Warren’s inflated notions of his own stature and prospects. As it turned out, by sheer luck, he did better than his pre-convention performance merited, but not because of any aptitude of his for presidential politics.

Neither Warren nor Thomas H. Werdel was pleased with Nixon’s statement, but he had not written it for their benefit. Warren won about two-thirds of the vote in the presidential primary in California on June 3. This was well behind his primary performance running for a third term as governor two years before and a serious blow to Warren’s prestige as Mr. California, when a bigoted nonentity like Werdel could take a third of the vote and sweep much of the southern part of the state. As Warren shrank, Nixon grew. Grumpy though the governor and his people were at Nixon’s statement, and at his devious tactics, their position had become too tenuous for Warren to adopt his headmasterly posture toward Nixon again. Knowland had won both the Republican and Democratic primaries, an impressive showing in a presidential election year, and was touted by many as a vice presidential candidate. He was a large, confident, and hale man, but he was not particularly intelligent and, as events would prove, not a strong character. He appeared plausible enough, but he had done nothing for Eisenhower, for whom Nixon was about to try to deliver the prize.

Nixon now reached more deeply into his bag of tricks, and on June 11 his office sent out under his senatorial frank, because his fund was exhausted, twenty-three thousand letters to known California Republicans, ostensibly asking guidance for what should be done when Warren released his delegates. Nixon promised confidentiality on the answers, but news of his poll, which is what it was, leaked at once. He alone would count the vote. Warren became so aroused that Nixon agreed not to release the results, but he did not seriously discourage rumors that Eisenhower had run well ahead of Taft. Nixon, under pressure even from the Los Angeles Times, which thought he had gone too far with this shabby ploy, reaffirmed his fidelity to Warren.

In the Eisenhower camp, Nixon’s gesture was greatly appreciated. He had done all he could while remaining outwardly loyal to Warren and without burning bridges with Taft. He spoke at the Massachusetts Republican convention in Worcester at the end of June and commended the renomination of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who would be running against the attractive John F. Kennedy. He told reporters that it was level pegging between Taft and Eisenhower, and that he was for Knowland for vice president. It is conceivable that Knowland believed him.

Warren and Knowland asked Nixon to be California’s representative on the Platform Committee at the Chicago convention. Nixon arrived in Chicago on July 1 and began lobbying for Eisenhower, and himself. The Taftites barred Eisenhower delegates from Florida, replicating Texas, and for good measure barred the media from national committee hearings. Lodge became extremely demonstrative, and Taft had no choice but to back down on the media. The Warren delegates voted with the Eisenhowerites on the seating of the Florida delegation.

At the national governors’ conference in Houston just before the Chicago convention, Dewey managed to get all twenty-three Republican governors, including Warren, to sign a statement that no contested delegates should be allowed to vote on any substantive matter at the convention. This became known as the “Houston Manifesto” and was much commented on in Chicago, where it was correctly interpreted as a victory for Eisenhower. The Taftites replicated their Texas and Florida performances by seating the Taft delegation from Georgia. With this indication of where the winds were blowing in cross-currents, Nixon took it upon himself to say to the press that the Eisenhower delegation from Texas had to be seated. He cleared this statement in advance with the general’s headquarters and explained that it was a matter of the survival of the Republican Party. They could not run against Democratic “corruption” without “clean hands . . . If the Republican Party approves the Texas grab, we will be announcing to the country that we believe ruthless machine politics is wrong only when the Democrats use it.”⁷¹

Chotiner urged Nixon on July 2 to fly to meet in mid-journey the train bringing the California delegation to Chicago, and to convince the delegates that the balance of forces had turned against Taft and that California, to retain influence, had to drop the Warren nonsense and support Eisenhower. Knowland continued to be the press favorite for the vice presidential nomination. Nixon had kept his operation completely secret from everyone except the Eisenhower insiders.

Meanwhile, as delegates and alternates dropped off with the normal attrition, the Nixon forces further packed the California delegation, Chotiner even being named an alternate, which completely scandalized Warren when he looked over the final list. Chotiner was then put in charge of political signage, transport, accommodation, and accreditation of press people. The fox was truly managing the chicken coop.

In Chicago, as the California delegation left Sacramento by train on July 3 and rode north and east toward the convention, the Taft camp had seated their delegates from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri, and had a delegate lead of 510 to 414, with 132 pledged to Warren and other favorite sons and 151 being disputed. Eisenhower’s idyll of an uncontested convention drafting him to lead the nation was turning into a bare-knuckle fight, as Nixon flew from Chicago to Denver to join Warren’s train.

The Taft camp announced informally that it was thinking of asking MacArthur to be vice president, and that the general was not averse to such an invitation. Nixon boarded a train in Denver whose passengers, having been traveling for a day, were out of touch with what was really happening in Chicago, and began circulating a very pro-Eisenhower line. Nixon paid his respects to Warren and repeated his loyalty to the governor. Nixon then went right through the train, speaking with all the delegates and alternates and their families, and selling the Eisenhower message. The latest compromise he had conceived was that the delegation would vote for Warren on the first ballot as pledged, but would announce even before the first ballot that it would go to Eisenhower on the second ballot. He gave an impassioned statement to everyone as he went through the train that California had to vote to seat the Eisenhower supporters among the contested delegates in the interests of fairness and political democracy. Nixon’s entourage following through the train behind him suggested selectively that California’s reward for delivering for Eisenhower would be to name Nixon for vice president. As the train sped through the Colorado night and Warren sat in his car in mounting irritation at reports of Nixon’s astounding evangelization of his delegates, Nixon completed the hijacking of his supporters. The Nixonian cat was now finally emerging from the bag, and his performance on the trip from Denver would become known as “the great train robbery.”

Earl Warren, a conscientious if self-important man, then spoke briefly and, to the astonishment of both Knowland and Nixon, said that it was a legitimate ethical issue, that they all would have to return to the Californians who had sent them, and that everyone should vote his conscience. The delegation voted 62-8 for Fair Play. This may not have been quite as disinterested behavior by Warren as his admirers have claimed. Given the feebleness of Knowland’s argument, Warren might have completely lost control of his delegation if he and Knowland had tried to impose an artificial ambiguity on the views of the delegates. The vote showed how far Lodge and Brownell and Nixon had got with their argument about the attempted suppression of democracy by the Taft faction.

Lodge had presented Eisenhower as an underdog, even as Nixon had worked the Warren train describing him as a virtual shoo-in. Depending on which version was believed, some delegates who voted for Fair Play would have thought they were leveling the playing field and improving the chances of a deadlock, and others would have thought they were getting on a bandwagon that was coming in to win anyway. Nixon had emphasized on the train that though he greatly liked and admired Taft, the Ohio senator could not win a presidential election; that he, Nixon, could not abide the thought of a sixth consecutive Republican loss in a presidential election; that it was now or never; and that Ike was the winning candidate and everyone knew it. This resonated with all serious Republicans.

That night and the next morning, Knowland labored to agree a compromise. The Taft forces accepted that the disputed delegates would abstain until their status was resolved. This was presented to Lodge, who passed it on to Brownell, who rejected it. It would not have saved the day for Taft anyway, and the floor fight, with the Taft forces singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and the Eisenhower forces using bullhorns to chant “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” became acrimonious. The Eisenhower forces won, 658 to 548; California was decisive, and the effect on the morale of the Taftites was devastating.

As the Fair Play vote went through, Eisenhower met Warren for a goodwill session in the general’s suite. Warren was unpleasantly startled when the gatekeeper of the suite proved to be none other than Murray Chotiner, a Wagnerian Loge figure who was starting to obsess Warren by his nemesistic ubiquity. Chotiner, who wore loud ties and clock-face cufflinks, conducted Warren to Eisenhower with a nonchalance that set the governor’s teeth on edge. After a lengthy meeting, the two candidates emerged and Ike declared, “Neither Warren nor I am going to get involved with a lot of pinkos, but we’re not going to be dragged back by a lot of old reactionaries either.” This was rather peppy politicalese for the general; there were few pinkos to be found at this convention.

The next day, Warren mobilized his friend Paul Davis, who had been Eisenhower’s vice president at Columbia, and whom Warren had been holding in reserve in a non-convention hotel. He asked Davis to call on Eisenhower at once and say that Nixon was a traitor in the Warren delegation, trying to bring the delegation to Eisenhower, and that he wished Eisenhower would order Nixon to desist. It is not clear why Warren didn’t say this to Eisenhower himself when he had the chance.

There was an unspecified element of threat in this, and Davis delivered the message at once to Eisenhower in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel. Eisenhower replied in what would become a familiar manner: “Well, I’m not at all sure that his information is correct,” he told Davis about Nixon. He reasserted that he thought his people were not interfering in any way in the Warren campaign (which he knew to be a complete falsehood), and said that he wanted Warren’s campaign to retain its strength, and that he hoped that in the event of deadlock Warren would be the nominee. Ike added a reference to the nightmare scenario that had brought him back from Paris to receive his severely contested “acclamation”: if Warren’s candidacy deteriorated and there was a deadlock, MacArthur might win, and this would be a disaster. The general was giving the Dewey-Nixon script with the full authority of his military prestige and the enhanced credibility of his supposed political innocence.

Eisenhower concluded the interview by saying that he thought Nixon would make a good vice presidential nominee, completely ignoring Warren’s allegation that he had been a traitor. He said that Nixon was the sort of solid, aggressive young person needed in the Republican leadership, and said that he or Warren should call him if there were any more suggestions of his campaign interfering in that of the California governor.

The night before, July 6, MacArthur had failed to electrify the delegates with his keynote speech. The usually brilliant orator got his signals crossed and gave a rather flaccid address. The letdown sense of the delegates was enhanced by Dewey and other Eisenhower supporters’ telling their delegates not to applaud MacArthur, because of Eisenhower’s paranoid fear of a MacArthur boom generated by his riveting talents as a public tribune.⁷³

Intensive politicking continued, though Eisenhower was now in the lead. Taft offered Knowland the vice presidential nomination and, if the convention deadlocked despite Knowland’s delivering the California delegation, Taft’s support for the presidential nomination. Knowland was interested, but was unable to deliver what was asked of him. If he didn’t hold the Californians for Warren, they would certainly go, under Nixon’s influence, to Eisenhower.⁷⁴

Joe McCarthy and Everett Dirksen did a better job of stirring the delegates than MacArthur had. McCarthy gave his usual litany: “One communist [wherever] is one communist too many.” Dirksen, speaking on the issue of the competing Georgia delegations, turned to Dewey, pointed at him, and exclaimed, “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat. Don’t do this to us again.” There was a tremendous demonstration and near bedlam in parts of the hall. Some Taft delegates approached the New York governor and shook their fists at him. Dewey, smiling slightly, was impassive and unimpressed, and when the tumult subsided, the convention voted by heavy margins to seat the Eisenhower delegates from Georgia and Texas. Taft called on Warren, offering anything Warren or Knowland wanted, in exchange for his support, including the vice presidency, which he confirmed MacArthur wanted. It might all have been different if only Taft had thought in these terms when he visited Eisenhower at the beginning of 1951 and Ike had asked for his support for NATO; though, as mentioned, Eisenhower’s account is not entirely believable.

Stassen, too, called on Warren and suggested that they play the role of kingmakers for Eisenhower together, though he implied his own availability. Warren didn’t pay much attention to this. In effect, on the eve of the voting, it was shaping up as Eisenhower-Nixon versus Taft-MacArthur, versus Warren-Stassen in the event of a deadlock, with Knowland as the man with no chair when the music stopped. Apart from Stassen, it was an impressive group of potential nominees, all of whom rendered great service in high office.

Herbert Brownell was almost constantly with Eisenhower, and by the end of the long battles for delegate selection on July 9, he and Dewey were confident enough of victory that Brownell pressed Nixon on Eisenhower. The general allegedly claimed that he thought it was up to the convention to choose the vice presidential nominee. It is unlikely he believed anything of the kind; though an indecisive man up to the point where he had to decide, he was rarely unaware of his prerogatives. Brownell consulted Chotiner about the comparative merits of Nixon and Knowland, and Chotiner naturally upheld Nixon, but did so very contemplatively and by a supposedly narrow margin in order to enhance the credibility of his answer.

While Brownell had dinner with Eisenhower on the evening of July 10 and talked about the vice presidency, Nixon, who had told his wife that the press speculation the day before was nonsense, sat up with Pat until after 4 A.M. trying to persuade her that accepting the position, which had suddenly become a live possibility, was the best thing to do. He even summoned Chotiner, whom Pat despised as an evil little hack, in his dressing gown, to make the case. Chotiner did so, pointing out that Nixon would always be the junior senator to Knowland, but that as vice president he could be president, or retire and do very well. Pat finally acknowledged that she could stand another campaign if she had to.

On Friday, July 11, the voting for the presidential nomination began just before noon and ended after thirty-five minutes. Stassen sent his manager, Warren Burger, to ask Knowland if Earl Warren, who had held California’s seventy delegates, would join Minnesota in delivering the convention to Eisenhower, as it became clear during the voting that Ike was coming to the brink of victory. The vote was Eisenhower 595, Taft 500, Warren 81, Stassen 20, and MacArthur 10. Knowland could not reach Warren, so Stassen acted alone and Burger put Eisenhower over the top by switching Minnesota’s 19 votes to him. He thus had 614 votes to a combined total of 592.

Eisenhower, with a trace of tears in his eyes, went to the bedroom of his suite to be with his wife, who was recovering from emergency dental work. Taft, in his suite, allowed that he was accustomed to defeat in these contests. Warren professed to be proud of being no one’s “patsy.” In fact, he had been a patsy; he had been complicit in the fiasco of 1948 and his candidacy in 1952 was a charade. (In one of the convention’s interesting twists, either Warren or Stassen’s manager, Warren Burger, would be chief justice of the country for almost all of the next thirty-four years, better consolation prizes than other losers would receive.⁷⁵) Eisenhower graciously crossed the street to visit Taft and called him a “very great American,” one of the few superlatives of the convention that was not outrageous hyperbole. Cyrus Sulzberger of the New York Times reported that when Eisenhower returned to his own suite and his celebrating supporters, he sat alone for a time, with his thoughts “far, far away.”⁷⁶

As the voting ended, Lodge told Nixon he was the vice presidential choice. Eisenhower confirmed this to his immediate entourage a few minutes after returning from his visit to Taft. Brownell invited a group of about thirty party elders, including Earl Warren, to meet to discuss the vice presidency. Earl Warren, finally figuring out what had happened, declined to be part of a coronation of Nixon as dauphin. Brownell said that no deals had been made, which was only true in the sense that if Nixon had been jettisoned at this point, there would not have been much he could do about it. There was a brief suggestion of Taft, but it was agreed that he would be needed in the Senate, and Sprague said that his presence would lose New York State to the Democrats. Dirksen was suggested, but after his attack on Dewey, that was out of the question. Dewey eventually proposed Nixon; there was an enumeration of good points, no demurral. Nixon it was.

Dewey dispatched someone to find Pat Nixon, to warn her to look cheerful through what was about to come. Brownell telephoned Eisenhower and Nixon. Nixon had returned to his hotel, where the air conditioner had broken on this stifling day, and he stripped down to his underwear and lay down on the bed “trying to think cool thoughts.”⁷⁷ Nixon was half asleep when Brownell called and asked him to come to see Eisenhower right away, “if you want it.” Nixon did not shower, shave, or put on an unwrinkled suit. The ever-ingenious Chotiner managed to get a motorcycle escort for them. Pat Nixon, Helene Drown, and Chotiner’s wife were having lunch together when the news flashed across a television screen, placed in the restaurant for the delegates, that Nixon was Eisenhower’s choice. Clare Booth Luce, in the press box, was surprised by “shouts of rage and disbelief” from some journalists when Nixon’s name was announced as nominee.⁷⁸

Nixon finally put a foot wrong on entering Eisenhower’s suite, when he said, “Congratulations, Chief,” and patted him on the shoulder. Eisenhower, stiffer than a ramrod and full of the protocol due a five-star general and twice former theater commander, looked piercingly and silently at the young senator. Nixon must have felt entitled to a little familiarity after carrying water on both shoulders for Eisenhower all through the farce of the general’s supposed period of possible, and then confirmed, availability, when he was supposedly not seeking the nomination. And Nixon had had the raw task of subverting the delegation of his own state. The candidate introduced Nixon to his wife, Mamie, and said that the campaign would be a “crusade” (as Eisenhower had described the campaign in Western Europe in the title of his best-selling book on the subject). It would be a crusade “for ideals.” He asked if Nixon would join him and got the instant reply: “I would be proud and happy to.” Ike said that he wanted the vice presidency to be a serious position. It became clear that, as in the run-up to the nomination, Ike wanted Nixon to do the dirty work while he rose above it all. Nixon, Eisenhower said, should campaign on communism, corruption, and Korea.⁷⁹

Eisenhower and his aides did ask Nixon to put more distance between himself and McCarthy, and get his views on Korea in conformity with Eisenhower’s and not MacArthur’s. Nixon effortlessly obliged by saying Truman’s lassitude had spawned McCarthyism, and had made it too late to go for a full victory in Korea after eighteen months of dithering in which the Chinese had strengthened their position. Nixon’s talents at improvisation were considerable.

Dewey had wished to nominate Nixon, but the bruises of the convention were too raw for that, so Knowland was asked. Deeply unenthused, Knowland agreed and gave a tepid speech. Nixon had asked blowhard McCarthyite Senator John Bricker, the 1944 vice presidential candidate against Truman, when Roosevelt was reelected over Dewey, to be seconder, but Bricker was so upset over the treatment of Taft that he declined. The governor of New Jersey, Alfred Driscoll, seconded. Governor Fine of Pennsylvania moved to make the vote unanimous. Pat made a fine entry, and Nixon gave a floor interview to legendary newsmen Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Ike spoke again of his crusade. Nixon closed out the convention with a brief address, praising Eisenhower and Taft, bringing the greatest ovation of the entire convention for Mr. Republican. While this was happening, photographers massed at the Nixon home in Washington, rang the doorbell, rushed past the babysitter popping flashbulbs, and frightened Tricia and Julie Nixon in their beds.⁸⁰ This proved something of a foretaste of what the Nixons might expect from the media for most of the next thirty years.

It had been one of the cameo masterpieces of maneuver of American political history. Six years before, Richard Nixon was an unheard-of lawyer from the unheard-of town of Whittier, starting out on an uphill fight against a five-term congressman. Four years before, he had not even been a delegate or had a floor pass at the Philadelphia convention. Now he had been associate kingmaker to Dewey, ostensible party leader and governor of the nation’s premier state, in the elevation of one of America’s greatest heroes. He was almost certain to come into the second office in the nation, still only thirty-nine. Dewey’s race was run; Nixon’s had just begun. He had shown the artistry of a seasoned and cunning master of the political arts. And he had been instrumental in rescuing the Republican Party from the lobotomous right, which except for the aberrant Willkie moment in 1940, had controlled it almost uninterruptedly since the premature retirement of Theodore Roosevelt in 1909. For Richard Nixon, all seemed possible.

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