IN THE SAME WEEK as the level-headed U.S. News interview, Nixon showed another side of himself in an interview with the Kansas City Star. In the Star interview, he was unreasonable and immoderate, and overstated his case—the same tactics he used in going after Voorhis and Douglas. In so doing, he pandered to the worst instincts of his most conservative backers.
Nixon began the interview by citing his favorite figure, the 600 million people lost to Communism since Truman became President, and hinted that there was something more to Truman’s failure to go after Hiss and other traitors than simple political expediency or stupidity. But he did not say directly what those other, apparently sinister, motives might have been.
He did say, “There’s one difference between the Reds and Pinks. The Pinks want to socialize America. The Reds want to socialize the world and make Moscow the world capital. Their paths are similar; they have the same bible—the teachings of Karl Marx.” He did not say that the Democrats were Pinks, only the New Deal wing of the party. Still, the logic of the statement was that Nixon had accused the liberal wing of the Democratic Party of wanting, nay plotting, to turn the United States over to Moscow’s rule.
On a personal level, Nixon said that his only income was his salary (which was not true; at least one-third came from speaking honorariums and stock-market tips), and then introduced a theme that he would play increasingly in the weeks to come. The Nixons, he said, were just ordinary folks trying to make a go of it in this era of Democratic incompetence, “as familiar as most Americans are with the household budget crimp resulting from ‘the twin pincers of high taxes and high prices.’ ”1
His self-portrait, which he built up in his press conferences, statements, and interviews, stressed the “Poor Richard” theme. The very day he was nominated he had told The New York Times proudly, “My wife has never been on the Federal payroll.”I, 2 That was not strictly true—she had worked for the OPA through the war—but it was true that she put in long hours in his Senate office without pay. He went into detail about their lack of material possessions. He drove a used car, had heavy mortgages on his home in Washington, and on a small house he had bought in Whittier, where his parents now lived (they had sold the place in Pennsylvania and gone back to California). He described his humble background, in the eyes of some of his relatives making Frank and Hannah sound much poorer than was the case.
But behind all these, and other, exaggerations there rested a basic truth. Nixon was not interested in money, not even in what it could buy. He had not entered politics to get rich. His self-portrait says he entered politics to slay dragons. Beginning with the CIO, continuing through Hiss and Douglas, on to Acheson and Truman, and now Stevenson, he was the knight on crusade. And as befit St. George, he was the embodiment of purity. He could have maintained his law practice, he said, and as a senator made handsome fees, but he had spurned that temptation. He insisted on the highest possible ethical standards. “Regardless of the merits of Mr. Gabrielson’s position,” Nixon had pontificated of the RNC chairman, “his effectiveness has been irreparably damaged because the charges against him will constantly be used to camouflage and confuse the issue and to protect those who are really guilty of corruption.”3 (Gabrielson did go, after the nominations; he was replaced by Arthur Summerfield.)
The image Nixon tried to present of himself as the most honest man in Washington, a twentieth-century Honest Abe, stuck in the craw of the Democrats. They saw him as the dirtiest man in town, worse even than McCarthy, a smear artist without parallel. Their image was nearly as wide of the mark as Nixon’s own. In the pre-Labor Day lull in late August, Ernest Brashear wrote a piece for the New Republic that managed to get just about everything wrong, beginning with the charge that Nixon was the tool of “big business and the vested interests.” In a rewrite of history that turned the facts on their head, Brashear helped establish what became a standard Democratic myth about Nixon—his reprehensible conduct in the 1950 campaign against Helen Douglas. Brashear wrote: “Helen Douglas’ heart was set on a constructive campaign, seeking solutions for the mounting urban and rural problems of California.” Poor Helen was just “heartsick” when Nixon forced her to defend herself. Brashear said all this about a woman who had started the campaign by charging that there was a Nixon-Marcantonio axis.4
ON SEPTEMBER 2, Nixon began a four-day trial run for his campaign with a barnstorming tour of Maine. He declared that he would make “Communist subversion and corruption the theme of every speech from now until the election,” and added, “If the record itself smears, let it smear. If the dry rot of corruption and communism, which has eaten deep into our body politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet—then let’s call for a hatchet.”
He was out for blood. He explicitly rejected the idea of a “nicey-nice little powder-puff duel.” He hit Stevenson for his Hiss statement, chided him for “referring to the Communist menace in America as phantoms,” charged that for every Administration scandal that had been revealed “there are ten which haven’t yet been uncovered,” insisted that respect for public officials “can only be restored by a thorough housecleaning of the sticky-fingered crew now contaminating the national capital,” claimed that Eisenhower would “liberate” the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe while Stevenson offered only “a negative policy of containment,” and warned that the American people would condemn themselves to “ultimate national suicide” if they continued to put Democrats in the White House.5
Nixon’s condemnation of containment was new. From the time of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan through the formation of NATO and the return of American troops to Europe, Nixon had been a supporter of containment. But the Republican platform for 1952 had denounced containment as the abandonment of Eastern Europe to the Russians, and promised that Republican policy would be to liberate the area. The Republicans, in other words, were ready to go over from the defensive in the Cold War to the offensive. They were aware that such a platform would have great appeal in the ethnic working-class sections of industrial cities, areas that usually voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Having failed to make foreign policy an issue in 1948 and having lost, the Republicans were determined to make something of the subject in 1952. John Foster Dulles had drafted the fire-breathing plank. Eisenhower had been upset by it, and had persuaded Dulles to add some softening words, but he was still unhappy with the plank, because he had no idea how to go about liberating Poland. Nixon, however, was eager to criticize the Democrats for having offered and administered the policy he formerly had enthusiastically endorsed.
Nixon’s supporters were not looking for consistency in his record, and his charges about the Democrats drew a good response. What Nixon did not know was that his attacks were causing Eisenhower’s closest advisers to shake their heads again. Not the politicians among them—not Lodge or Hagerty or Dewey—but the policy people, Clay, Robinson, and Hoffman. They were as unhappy as Eisenhower with Nixon’s loud call for liberation, and they cringed at the charge that the opposition would lead the country to national suicide. But the politicians in the inner circle, the men like Dewey and Brownell and Hagerty, who had lost the White House in 1948 by being too respectful of Truman and the opposition, rather liked what Nixon was saying and how he said it. “Anything to win” was not just Nixon’s motto in 1952.
Thus did the Republican Party bring out two sides of Nixon. One side, encouraged by an older, old-fashioned kind of stodgy Republican conservatism, was the moderate and reasonable Nixon who supported the Marshall Plan in the face of heavy voter opposition, the Nixon who toned down the proceedings in HUAC, the Nixon who knew the importance of NATO and was ready to accept America’s new role in the world. The other side, encouraged by some bitter losers (Dewey and his men) and by some of the new, tough, no-holds-barred Republicans coming out of the West and Midwest (Knowland, McCarthy, Jenner), was the wild slashing Nixon who drew no line in what he said about the Democrats, or at what he advocated for dealing with the Communists. Both sides of the man were authentic; both represented a part of the real Nixon.
ONE OF NIXON’S OPENING THEMES was politial corruption in the Truman Administration,6 where deepfreezes and mink coats had become symbols for gifts given to government officials for favors rendered. In going after graft, however, Nixon practically invited the Democrats to look behind his veneer. And Nixon was vulnerable, although surprisingly, for such an intelligent politician, he did not recognize the danger. The process had started at the Republican Convention, when disgruntled Warren supporters (who had previously been approached by Dana Smith as potential contributors to Nixon’s fund) had spread a rumor that the senator had a supplemental salary paid for by California millionaires. But in the excitement of the convention, none of the reporters had checked out the story.
On September 14, Nixon appeared on Meet the Press. After the program one of the interviewers, Peter Edson, a Washington political columnist, took Nixon aside. “Senator,” he said, “what is this ‘fund’ we hear about? There is a rumor to the effect that you have a supplementary salary of $20,000 a year, contributed by a hundred California businessmen. What about it?”
Nixon replied that there was no salary involved, that the fund was strictly for campaign purposes, that Dana Smith was the treasurer, and that Edson should talk to Smith about it. Edson was impressed by Nixon’s straightforwardness; he said later that Nixon “didn’t attempt to duck the question in any way.”7
Edson called Smith, who was also open in explaining the fund and its purposes; he even suggested that other states adopt the plan to keep senators who were not wealthy from having to bow to outside “pressure.” The following day, reporters Ernest Brashear and Leo Katcher called Smith about the fund. They got the same answers. Smith further explained, “We realized his salary was pitifully inadequate for a salesman of free enterprise . . . the best salesman against socialization available.” Well, one of the reporters asked, was not Governor Warren a salesman of free enterprise too? “Frankly,” Smith replied, “Warren has too much of the social point of view, and he never has gone out selling the free-enterprise system. But Dick did just what we wanted him to do.”8 If the Democrats had been smarter, they would have gone after that last line, not the fund itself.
On September 16, Nixon arrived in California, prepared to make his first major campaign swing up the West Coast in his train, the Nixon Special. Jack Drown was managing the train schedule and operation; Rose Mary Woods was in charge of preparing press releases, statements, advance copies of speeches, and general correspondence; Murray Chotiner was on board to handle strategy and tactics; Bill Rogers was there to give advice; Pat was along to supply moral support and generally to be the candidate’s wife.
Pat had already brought him some excellent publicity; on September 6 The Saturday Evening Post had done an extremely flattering story on the Nixons, under her by-line (as told to Joe Alex Morris), entitled “I Say He’s a Wonderful Guy.” In the article, she said people were always asking her if she didn’t get bored listening to the same speech over and over.
“I don’t get bored” was her reply, “because every one of Dick’s speeches is different. He talks about the same issues, of course, but not in the same words or the same way. There’s always a new angle or a local story, and I’m always eagerly waiting to see how he’ll do it this time. I haven’t been disappointed—or bored—yet.”9
ON SEPTEMBER 17, Nixon kicked off his West Coast campaign with a rally in Pomona, the place where he had started both the Voorhis and Douglas campaigns. His parents were there to lead a flag-waving delegation from Whittier; Governor Warren was there to introduce him. A week earlier, Stevenson had traveled through central California, up to Oregon and Washington, on the same route Nixon was following. Nixon promised to “nail down those lies” Stevenson had told. He lambasted the “Truman regime” for its “greedy, gouging, grumbling history.”10
The next day the whistle-stopping began. The first stop was Bakersfield, where Nixon called out to the crowd, “Who can clean up the mess in Washington?” The audience responded, “Ike can.” The next stop was Tulare, where the eleven-car train started to pull out of the station before Nixon could finish and get the crowd chanting “Ike can.” He spread his arms as the train moved out and implored, “If you believe as I believe, come along on this great Crusade. . . . ” Hundreds of people, magnetized by Nixon’s outstretched arms, followed along until the train picked up speed.
When Nixon went inside, he was furious. He cussed out Jack Drown, telling him to “never let that happen again.” Bill Rogers remarked, “I thought you planned it that way,” and assured Nixon that it was great stuff, getting the people to follow the train like that. Nixon relaxed and laughed.11
The same day, September 18, the New York Post carried a sensational banner headline, “SECRET NIXON FUND!” It was followed by a two-line banner that said, “SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY.” The Story itself, by Leo Katcher, was an account of the fund which in no way justified the headline.12 In his column that day, Peter Edson reported Smith’s explanation in a straight news story without any hint that Nixon kept the money for himself. Edson’s story was buried in the editorial pages, while the allegations implicit in the Post headline began to draw the nation’s attention.
Nixon had advance notice of the story, although not the headline, and late on the night of the seventeenth held a strategy session in the lounge of his private car. As Rogers was the only man on the team who did not know about the fund, Nixon and Chotiner explained it to him, then asked his opinion. “I don’t see anything to worry about,” Rogers said when they finished. “There is nothing illegal, unethical, or embarrassing about this fund. If your opponents try to make something out of it, they will never get anywhere. . . . ” Chotiner dismissed the whole thing as “ridiculous, a tempest in a teapot.”13
Had it been another candidate, Rogers and Chotiner almost certainly would have been correct. But Nixon had set himself up as the definition of propriety, and had made himself peculiarly vulnerable. Futhermore, Nixon had made the Democrats so mad that they had lost their perspective, and all too eagerly seized on the fund to attack him. But they made a basic mistake in charging that the money was used to “Keep Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.” Had they bothered to check, they would have known that whatever other sins Nixon was guilty of, they did not include high living.
On September 19, Nixon began to realize he was in trouble. Rose Woods reported a big upsurge in phone calls and telegrams coming into the train, raising additional questions, offering advice. Reporters from the East Coast, smelling a big story, began boarding the train. The Sacramento Bee, in an editorial, accused him of being “the pet and protege, the subsidized front man,” for a “special interest group of rich Southern Californians.” And Stephen A. Mitchell, the new chairman of the DNC, made a formal demand for Nixon’s immediate resignation from the ticket.14
Some of Eisenhower’s people thought that resignation was not a bad idea at all. Even though they knew that Nixon’s speeches, filled with ranting and raving about Trumanism, were being delivered on Eisenhower’s orders, he went too far. Eisenhower’s advisers as a whole, even the political groups, were increasingly uncomfortable with Nixon, and became acutely so when it appeared his personal integrity was suspect. These men, led by Clay, Robinson, Hoffman, Brownell, and Sherman Adams (the governor of New Hampshire who served as Eisenhower’s campaign manager), were all fiercely loyal to Ike. Their partisanship was singular—the only Republican they cared about was Eisenhower. They could not bear the thought of their hero’s reputation being besmirched, and they felt a personal responsibility for having put him into such an awkward and embarrassing position. To Clay, Robinson, and Adams the thought of Eisenhower’s being associated with, much less having picked, a man apparently guilty of two-bit graft was unacceptable. Never liking Nixon much anyway, they saw a chance to get rid of him.
When they approached Eisenhower with the thought, the general, who was a supposed political novice, immediately saw how much was at stake. His first comment to Adams was “Well, if Nixon has to resign, we can’t possibly win.”15 That seemed obvious enough—if Eisenhower’s first political decision turned out to be the selection of a cheap crook as his potential successor, how on earth could anyone vote for him? Yet almost no one else around him saw that basic truth, and Eisenhower’s advisers continued to watch for the opportunity to dump Nixon.
NIXON RESPONDED TO MITCHELL’S DEMAND with a counterattack. “It’s an attempt to pull a political smear,” he told reporters. “Why doesn’t he ask Sparkman to resign because his wife is on the government payroll?”16
That afternoon, at a whistle-stop in Marysville, he dealt with the fund. As the train getaway whistle blew, he called out, “Hold the train!” Jack Drown got it stopped.
“I heard that question,” Nixon shouted at the crowd. Pointing to a young man, Nixon declared, “He said, ‘Tell them about the $16,000.’ ”
Nixon told them, in his own way. “You folks know I did the work of investigating the Communists in the United States,” he began. “Ever since I have done that work, the Communists and the left-wingers have been fighting me with every smear they have had.
“I want you folks to know something. I’m going to reveal it today for the first time.
“After I received the nomination for the vice-presidency, I was warned that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this administration, they would smear me, and, believe me, you can expect that they will continue to do so.
“They started it yesterday. They said I had taken money—$16,000. What they didn’t point out was this: what I was doing was saving you money.” Then he explained that the money went to pay expenses in excess of the amounts allowable by law to a senator, so “rather than using taxpayers’ money for these expenses, what did I do? . . . [I had them] paid by people back home who were interested in seeing that the information about what was going on in Washington was spread among the people.
“What else would you have me do?” he asked. “Put my wife on the payroll, like Sparkman does?” Pat worked in his office, he said, long and hard hours, and never took a penny of the government’s money.
“Take fat legal fees on the side?” He could do that easily enough, he said, but it would be a violation of public trust.
“You can be sure that the smears will continue to come,” he predicted, “and the purpose of these smears is to make me, if possible, relent in my attacks on the Communists and the crooks in the present administration. As far as I am concerned, they’ve got another guess coming. What I intend to do is go up and down this land, and the more they smear me the more I’m going to expose the Communists and the crooks and those who defend them until they throw them all out of Washington.”17
It was an impromptu speech, delivered with great emotion. Nixon had had no chance to think through all his problems and possible responses. But already, in this initial reaction, he had in mind the outline of his formal response. He knew what he was going to say, he was just looking for the best platform from which to say it. Meanwhile, he was busy beating hecklers to the punch by opening his whistle-stop talks with his basic rejoinder quoted above.18
Nixon’s defense got a strong, positive response from his audiences, so much so that Chotiner told him, “Dick, all we’ve got to do is to get you before enough people talking about this fund, and we will win this election in a landslide.” Rogers agreed. He predicted that the attack would boomerang because it had come too early and had been grossly exaggerated.19
ON THE TWENTIETH, reactions across the nation began to appear in the press. Karl Mundt labeled the whole thing a “filthy left-wing smear.” Arthur Summerfield studied the procedure for replacing a nominee and discovered that the formal, legal responsibility belonged to the RNC. That piece of information put him solidly in Nixon’s camp, because he realized that the party would probably split irretrievably in a fight over Nixon’s successor. Summerfield promptly committed the RNC to a policy of “down the line support for Dick.” Taft said that Nixon had done nothing wrong and that he absolutely must stay on the ticket. In Los Angeles, Dana Smith made public the list of contributors to the fund, showing that the group was made up primarily of small-business men, not millionaires. He also listed the disbursements, which proved that Nixon was telling the truth when he said none of the money had come to him for his personal use.20
Nixon’s defense did not convince his opponents, in either party. The DNC issued a “notice” to editors and reporters, citing criminal law on “bribery and graft . . . by members of Congress.” The California franchise tax board announced that it was investigating the Nixon fund.21 Truman directed the Attorney General to study the possibility of criminal prosecution of Nixon and the contributors. This was later denied, then reconfirmed. The DNC instructed workers to gather up all the “Ike and Dick” buttons and posters they could, with the thought that after Nixon resigned, the material could be used to embarrass the Republicans.22 The Washington Post printed an editorial demanding Nixon’s resignation.23
The Post had always been a bitter enemy and its editorial did not bother Nixon. But Bill Robinson’s paper, the Herald Tribune, was another matter altogether. Robinson was known to be one of Eisenhower’s closest friends. In his editorial on September 20, Robinson concluded: “The proper course of Senator Nixon in the circumstances is to make a formal offer of withdrawal from the ticket. How this offer is acted on will be determined by an appraisal of all the facts in the light of General Eisenhower’s unsurpassed fairness of mind.”24
Robinson’s editorial nearly crushed Nixon. He had to assume that if it was not inspired by Eisenhower, it at least had been approved by the general. (In fact, Eisenhower had learned about it after it appeared; when it did, he wrote Robinson, “I have a feeling that in matters of this kind no one can afford to act on a hair-trigger. But if there is real wrong at stake, there will be prompt and conclusive action by me. That has always been my way of acting.”)25 Bert Andrews, Nixon’s old friend, was head of the Trib’s Washington bureau and close to Robinson. Altogether it looked to Nixon as if the East Coast Republicans had become a hanging jury.
He was right about that. Robinson also sent a telegram to Eisenhower that ended, “My own personal view is that Nixon’s continuation on the ticket seriously blunts the sharp edge of corruption issue and burdens you with heavy and unfair handicap.”26
Stassen, who had thrown his support to Eisenhower at the convention and who was thought to be a part of the Eisenhower team, joined the chorus. He sent Nixon a rambling two-page telegram that practically begged Nixon to leave the ticket for the good of the Republican Party.27
Sherman Adams called Paul Hoffman in California. “He asked me to begin an immediate investigation of the Nixon Fund,” Hoffman said, “to find out if it was clean.” Hoffman retained Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, a highly respected Los Angeles law firm, to give an opinion on the legality of the fund, and the well-known Price Waterhouse accounting firm to go over the books. Some fifty lawyers and accountants went to work at once.28
So far Nixon had heard nothing from Eisenhower himself. The general’s silence hurt badly. Actually, Nixon was getting a break, because if Eisenhower had sent him the letter he had drafted on what to do about the uproar, Nixon would have been even angrier and more apprehensive. In the draft, Eisenhower suggested that Nixon invite Senator Paul Douglas, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Ethics in Government, “to examine your complete records and to make his findings public.”29 But Eisenhower had second thoughts about asking Nixon to put his fate in the hands of a Democratic senator, and instead issued a statement that declared, “I believe Dick Nixon to be an honest man. I am confident that he will place all the facts before the American people fairly and squarely.” He concluded, “I intend to talk with him at the earliest time.” He did not mean it, and went to great lengths over the next couple of days to stay out of touch.30
Eisenhower wanted to wait and see. But even without talking to Nixon, he was able to get a message through. The reporters on the Eisenhower train had voted 40 to 2 that the general should dump Nixon. On September 20, he called them up to his lounge for beer and off-the-cuff remarks. “I don’t care if you fellows are forty to two,” he said. “I am taking my time on this. Nothing’s decided, contrary to your idea that this is a setup for a whitewash of Nixon.” Then he added, “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren’t clean as a hound’s tooth?” The colorful phrase made headlines across the country.31
NIXON HAD REVIEWED HIS SITUATION in a September 19 meeting with Chotiner. Murray could not contain his anger. “If those damned amateurs around Eisenhower just had the sense they were born with,” he said, “they would recognize that this is a purely political attack and they wouldn’t pop off like this.”
At 2 A.M. on the twentieth, Nixon, tired and discouraged, turned to Pat and said perhaps he should resign. She was accustomed to her husband’s dark moods in the early hours and knew that they had always been followed in the morning by a determination to fight back. More important, she immediately saw what only Eisenhower had previously seen; as Nixon recalled it, “She said flatly that if Eisenhower forced me off the ticket he would lose the election.” Pat also made the point that “unless I fought for my honor . . . I would mar not only my life but the lives of our family and particularly the girls.”32
Pat’s commonsense reply bucked up Nixon. She had to help him pay the price. The crowds in Oregon were hostile and threatening. Pat was pushed and jostled. People threw pennies into their car. Hand-held signs proclaimed “Bundles for Dick,” “Shh! Anyone who mentions $16,000 is a Communist,” and, in a reference to the Truman scandals, “No Mink Coats for Nixon, just cold cash.” Pointing to the sign, an angry Nixon said, “That’s absolutely right—there are no mink coats for the Nixons. I’m proud to say my wife, Pat, wears a good old Republican cloth coat.”33
Early in the evening of September 21, in his hotel in Portland, Nixon got a call from Tom Dewey. Dewey, always the broker, said the way to circumvent the “dump Nixon” movement on the Eisenhower train was to go on national TV to explain the fund. “At the conclusion of the program,” Dewey advised him, “ask people to wire their verdict in to you.” If the replies ran no better than sixty to forty in Nixon’s favor, he should offer his resignation; if they were ninety to ten, he could stay on. “If you stay on,” Dewey concluded, “it isn’t blamed on Ike, and if you get off, it isn’t blamed on Ike.”34
Ninety to ten! George Washington couldn’t get a ninety-to-ten vote out of the American people. Dewey’s call plunged Nixon back into depression. Chotiner tried to cheer him up; Rogers later said that at that point, “Dick was ready to chuck the whole thing, and frankly it took the toughest arguments of some of us to hold him in check.” Chotiner made the point Pat had introduced, that if Nixon were dumped the Republicans were sure to lose the election. Nixon at one stage muttered, almost to himself, “I will not crawl.”35
AT 10 P.M., SEPTEMBER 21, Eisenhower finally called Nixon. He tried to buck up Nixon, then said that he had not decided what to do. Nixon let the line hang silent. Finally Eisenhower continued. “I don’t want to be in the position of condemning an innocent man. I think you ought to go on a nationwide television program and tell them everything there is to tell, everything you can remember since the day you entered public life. Tell them about any money you have ever received.”
“General,” Nixon asked, “do you think after the television program that an announcement could then be made one way or the other?”
“Maybe,” Eisenhower said.
Nixon, furious, said that Eisenhower had to stop dawdling. “There comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot,” Nixon said. Catching himself, he added, “The great trouble here is the indecision.”
There was another long silence. Finally, Eisenhower said, “We will have to wait three or four days after the television show to see what the effect of the program is.” Then he signed off with the advice: “Keep your chin up.”36
IN HIS ACCOUNT OF THE CONVERSATION, Nixon wrote that Eisenhower “was certainly not used to being talked to in that manner,” which only showed how little Nixon knew about the general. Eisenhower was a professional soldier who had heard plenty of rough talk in his day. He himself used curse words as exclamation points, injecting them regularly into his conversation. He had been close friends for more than three decades with Generals George S. Patton and Walter B. Smith, men who were famous for their barracks-room language. No, contrary to Nixon’s image, Eisenhower was not embarrassed when Nixon said over the phone that he would have to shit or get off the pot.
Eisenhower’s face did turn red, but what the general found objectionable was not Nixon’s word choice but his brashness. In Eisenhower’s world, juniors did not tell their seniors what to do or when to do it. And Nixon was young enough to be Eisenhower’s son, or his aide.
The myth is that Eisenhower was naïve about politics. The truth was that he was a master at the game, which he played with as cold a calculation as Harry Truman or Franklin Roosevelt. In the war, if one of his subordinates had told him to shit or vacate, he would have sent that general home on a slow boat. But he knew that in politics he did not have that kind of power. In the war, every American officer in Europe had been directly under his command and dependent upon him for his continuation in office. In the campaign in 1952, no Republican officeholder owed his position to Eisenhower, with the single exception of Nixon, who was the vice-presidential candidate because of Eisenhower. Even at that, Nixon would still be a U.S. senator if the Republicans lost or he left the ticket.
It all meant that the general had to put up with Nixon, which was irritating but possible. There was precedent—during the war Eisenhower had never learned to like Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, but he had learned how to work effectively with him. In politics as in war, friendship was nice, but winning was better. Eisenhower wanted to win this contest with Stevenson, and if putting up with this young whelp Nixon was one of the costs, well then, that was a price the general was ready to pay.
At this stage in their relations, Eisenhower and Nixon knew little about each other on a personal give-and-take basis. They had not yet had an opportunity for a serious talk, alone, on any subject.
In addition, their staffs were much different and mutually antagonistic. The men around Eisenhower were the men who had helped run World War II in Europe or on the home front; the men around Nixon were the junior officers. Nixon’s advisers were outraged at Eisenhower’s advisers for their hostility to Nixon and their single-minded determination to protect the general at no matter what expense to Nixon. Eisenhower’s advisers were furious with Chotiner and Rogers for their refusal to do as they were told. Throughout the fund crisis, the relationship between the two camps was characterized by tension, hostility, and mistrust.
As for the two principals, Nixon had no choice but to swallow his anger at Eisenhower for not backing him unhesitatingly during the crisis, while Eisenhower had no choice but to swallow Nixon’s crude remark and get on with the contest.
CLICHÉS BEST DESCRIBE THE SITUATION. Everything came down to one speech, Nixon’s career hung in the balance, it was all or nothing. It came down to clichés because the whole thing was so contrived. The fund was not a real issue, and the Democrats were criminally stupid in making it into one. They might have made Nixon’s general integrity into an issue, gone after Nixon’s record, especially in the Voorhis and Douglas campaigns. They could have cited him for first supporting containment and then condemning it. They might have pinned him to the wall on the implications of some of his grosser innuendos. Instead, they charged that he had taken a few thousand dollars from his supporters and used the money to buy new drapes for Pat. It was almost as if the whole thing was a drama in which Nixon had somehow contrived to be simultaneously the playwright, the leading actor, and the director.
The first requirement was financing. The RNC was reluctant to pay for a half hour of nationwide television (cost, $75,000) just to explain the fund, but Chotiner persuaded Summerfield to come up with the money. Nixon had his stage, living rooms from coast to coast. The buildup was carried out for Nixon on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The only advertising necessary was to make certain people knew when the show would go on. The potential size of the audience was staggering.
Nixon had so managed events that he ended up getting one half hour of prime-time television, before the largest audience in the history of mankind, to speak as a man accused of being a high liver and a cheap crook. The rebuttal was an almost sure thing, but he still had to write the dialogue. On the flight to Los Angeles, where the speech would originate, Nixon jotted down some of the lines he had been using on his campaign stops. Chotiner sat down beside him. He repeated an observation he had made earlier, that in all the uproar one voice had been strangely silent. Although the fund gave Stevenson an ideal opportunity for one of his quips, he had said not a word. “I smell a rat,” Murray said. “I bet he has something to hide.”
That evening the papers reported that Stevenson had a cash fund provided by private individuals and by firms that did business with the state of Illinois. Stevenson acknowledged that such a fund did exist, and said the money was “left over” from his last campaign. It was used, according to the explanation, to supplement the salaries of state officials.37
Stevenson was not candid about his fund, but the press did not push him on his evasive replies to questions about where the money came from and what it was used for. To Nixon, this “blatant double standard” was infuriating.
In Los Angeles, Nixon took a room in the Ambassador Hotel, where he insisted on being alone as he prepared his speech. Pat stayed with Helene Drown at her home.38
GOING INTO THE SPEECH, Nixon had some great strengths. Every orator, however accomplished, needs feedback from a live audience, so that he can judge how well this or that line works. One of the most famous political speeches in American history (and one that Nixon had heard on a recording in Paul Smith’s history class at Whitter College) was William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention. Bryan had delivered it without notes, and his apparent spontaneity, as much as what he said, had swept the delegates off their feet and given him the nomination. But Bryan had been delivering the same speech to Nebraska audiences for months, and he knew exactly which lines worked. In the days before his TV talk, Nixon had tested his basic lines. The business about Sparkman’s wife being on the payroll had gotten a good response, and so had Pat’s Republican cloth coat. He spliced them in.
Nixon also had a long memory and a nice sense of how to turn the tables. He recalled FDR’s line in the 1944 campaign about how his dog, Fala, had been left behind at an overseas conference and a destroyer had been sent to the Aleutians to bring the dog back. FDR had responded to Republican cries of outrage by saying, “The Republicans are not content to attack me, or my wife, or my sons. No, not content with that, now they even attack my little dog, Fala.” Nixon had an idea about how to turn that one back around again.
But Nixon’s greatest strength going into the broadcast was the weakness of the charges. Dana Smith had done an excellent job with the books and could prove that the money had all been spent for legitimate campaign expenses. The Price Waterhouse report corroborated these facts. And the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher had given its opinion; there was nothing illegal about the fund.
Nixon was also on strong ground with regard to a broader charge, one raised by the New York Post in the original headline. He did not lead a life-style “Far Beyond His Salary.” To prove it, all he had to do was list his assets and liabilities. The trouble with a full financial disclosure, however, was that it involved an invasion of privacy that Nixon said he found repugnant. When he had told Pat that he intended to do it anyway, she had protested: “Why do you have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?”
“People in political life have to live in a fish bowl,” he had replied, a line that he confessed in his memoirs “was a weak explanation for the humiliation I was asking her to endure.”39
DNC Chairman Mitchell had also given Nixon an opportunity when he said that senators who could not afford to maintain their offices should not go into politics (one is forced to wonder sometimes whose side Mitchell was on). Nixon recalled a line of Lincoln’s and he had Pat Hillings call Paul Smith to get it exact.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23. In the morning, Nixon went for a swim, then a long walk with Rogers. He went back to his notes, although he refused to rehearse. About an hour before it was time to leave for the studio, Sherman Adams phoned Chotiner to find out what Nixon was going to say. Chotiner said he didn’t know.
Adams said, “Oh, come now, Murray, you must know . . . he has a script, doesn’t he?
“No.”
“What about the press?” Adams asked.
“We’ve set up television sets in the hotel for them, and we have shorthand reporters to take it down, page by page,” Chotiner answered.
“Look, we have to know what is going to be said,” Adams insisted.
“Sherm,” Chotiner replied, “if you want to know what’s going to be said, you do what I’m going to do. You sit in front of the television and listen.”40
That was not good enough for the Eisenhower camp. The phone rang again. This time it was Dewey; he wanted to talk to Nixon. Both Hillings and Chotiner tried to put him off, but he insisted.
Dewey got right to the point: “There has just been a meeting of all of Eisenhower’s top advisers, and they have asked me to tell you that it is their opinion that at the conclusion of the broadcast tonight you should submit your resignation to Eisenhower.”
Nixon had to assume that the word had come from Eisenhower himself. It put Eisenhower and Nixon face-to-face in a power struggle. The meaning of Dewey’s message was this: Eisenhower had not at all approved of Dewey’s earlier suggestion that Nixon ask the audience to vote. The general was determined to reserve the final decision to himself. He ordered Dewey to make the phone call because it was Dewey who had created the problem in the first place with his “let the people decide” idea.
It was a test of wills, matching two strong personalities from two very different traditions. In the general’s world, Dewey’s words to Nixon were a direct order from a commander to a subordinate. In Nixon’s world, the boss had to say it himself, without equivocation, and then hope that his running mate would respond. Furthermore, Nixon, again unlike Eisenhower’s subordinates in the Army, had his own power base, the party regulars, who were threatening a full-scale revolt if Nixon was dumped. He had just received hundreds of telegrams of support, from Jerry Ford and Warren Burger, among others.
Instead of saying, “Yes, sir!” Nixon told Dewey, “It’s kind of late for them to pass on this kind of recommendation to me now. I’ve already prepared my remarks, and it would be very difficult for me to change them now.” Dewey assured him that he did not have to change his remarks, only to put in a sentence at the end offering his resignation to Eisenhower.
When Nixon did not respond, Dewey offered another suggestion. It was that Nixon also resign his Senate seat! Then, Dewey explained, he could run in and win a special election and vindicate himself.
There was another long pause. Desperate, Dewey asked, “Well, what shall I tell them you are going to do?”
Nixon exploded. “Just tell them that I haven’t the slightest idea what I am going to do, and if they want to find out they’d better listen to the broadcast. And tell them I know something about politics too!”
He slammed down the receiver and ordered everyone out of his room. “I sat alone for at least thirty minutes,” he later confessed. “The call was really a blockbuster.
“It was Chotiner who really saved the day as far as I was concerned,” Nixon continued. “He was truly a tower of strength. He came into the room as I was shaving about ten minutes before departure time, and said, ‘Dick, a campaign manager must never be seen or heard. But if you’re kicked off this ticket, I’m going to call the biggest damn press conference that has even been held. . . . I’m going to tell everybody who called you, what was said, names and everything.’ ”
“Would you really do that?” a surprised Nixon asked.
“Sure,” Murray replied. “Hell, we’d be through with politics anyway. It wouldn’t make any difference.”
They rode over to the El Capitan theater studio with Nixon in the front seat, Pat, Hillings, and Chotiner in the back. No one spoke. They arrived fifteen minutes before air time. “Even riding over to the broadcast I still hadn’t decided for sure how I would conclude it,” Nixon later said—that is, whether to submit his resignation or call for a poll.41
The set consisted of a desk with a bookcase behind it. Nixon told the camera crew he did not know whether he would sit through the speech or get up, but in any case they should keep the camera on him. He and Pat went into a small room just off the stage. Three minutes before air time the producer, Ted Rogers, came to get him.
Nixon got cold feet. “I just don’t think I can go through with this one,” he told Pat, his voice trembling.
“Of course you can,” Pat replied, taking his hand and leading him onto the stage. He sat behind the desk, and Rogers indicated that he was on the air.
“MY FELLOW AMERICANS,” he began earnestly, “I come before you tonight as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency . . . and as a man whose honesty and integrity has been questioned.” He began his defense with a rhetorical question: Was the fund morally wrong? It was, he said, if he had used any of the $18,000 for himself, or if he had given special favors to any of the contributors. On the first point: “Not one cent of the $18,000 . . . ever went to me. . . . Every penny of it was used to pay for political expenses that I did not think should be charged to the taxpayers.” On the second point: “And I want to make this particularly clear, that no contributor . . . has ever received any [special] consideration.”
Then he listed his assets and liabilities in detail. “It isn’t very much,” he concluded, “but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this—that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.” Then he used the Lincoln quote: “The Lord must have loved the common people because he made so many of them.”
He got in the point about Sparkman’s wife, and called on Stevenson to explain his fund. He challenged Stevenson and Sparkman to make full revelations of their financial histories, as he had just done, because “a man who’s to be President and a man who’s to be Vice-President must have the confidence of all the people.” (At this point Eisenhower, watching on TV in Cleveland, jabbed his pencil into his notepad and broke it. If three out of the four candidates made their finances public property, Eisenhower knew that he would have to do so too—which he eventually did, although he complained bitterly about it.)
Nixon said he expected the smears against him to continue. To forestall one, he admitted that he had accepted a gift from a Texas supporter. Now he was ready to use the story mimicking FDR. “You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the six-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know the kids love that dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.”
Except for the Checkers bit, none of what Nixon said was new. What was new was the size of the audience. Some 58 million people watched, the largest TV audience in history (and it kept the record until 1960, when it was broken in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate). Virtually every American who was likely to vote in November was in the audience. Some viewers thought Nixon utterly sincere and completely convincing. They could identify with Nixon, with his used car and his mortgages and his wife’s cloth coat. Others in the audience thought it was one of the most sickening, disgusting, maudlin performances ever experienced. (Lucius Clay thought the speech “the corniest thing I ever heard”; he later said he realized he was wrong “when I saw the elevator operator crying.”)
Nixon got up, walked in front of the desk, and launched into his concluding remarks. “And now, finally, I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign.” In Cleveland, Eisenhower and his advisers leaned forward—they did indeed want to know. Nixon was speaking directly to the general now. “Let me say this: I don’t believe that I ought to quit, because I am not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat is not a quitter. After all, her name is Patricia Ryan, and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day [well, almost]—and you know the Irish never quit.”
Then came the direct challenge to Eisenhower. “The decision, my friends, is not mine. I would do nothing that would harm the possibilities of Dwight Eisenhower to become President; and for that reason I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight, through this television broadcast, the decision which it is theirs to make. . . . Wire and write the [RNC] whether you think I should stay or whether I should get off; and whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.”
Next a warning to the Democrats: “Just let me say this last word: Regardless of what happens, I am going to continue this fight. I am going to campaign up and down America until we drive the crooks and Communists and those that defend them out of Washington.” He clenched his fist and thrust it forward, his face and whole body breathing defiance.
A parting sentence: “And remember, folks, Eisenhower is a great man, believe me. He is a great man. . . . ” And the time was up. As the producer signaled to Nixon to cut, he was saying, “ . . . Wire and write the National Committee . . . I will abide . . .”42
PAT, CHOTINER, HILLINGS, AND ROGERS came up to congratulate Nixon, who apologized for running over. “I loused it up,” he said, shaking his head, “and I’m sorry.” Chotiner patted his back reassuringly: “Dick, you did a terrific job.” Nixon would have none of it. “No,” he insisted, “it was a flop . . . I couldn’t get off in time.”
But what really upset Nixon was his failure to give the address of the RNC. He had just taken a terrible risk by directly disobeying Eisenhower’s known wishes and attempting to remove the general from the decision-making process—and he forgot to tell people where to “wire and write.” But his friends insisted that he had been terrific, and he began to brighten when the producer ran in and said, “The telephone switchboard is lit up like a Christmas tree.”
When he returned to his hotel, there was a crowd to cheer him. Someone shouted, “The telephones are going crazy; everybody’s in your corner!” He took a call from movie producer Darryl Zanuck, who told him it was “the most tremendous performance I’ve ever seen.” He began to feel that the speech had in fact been a great success.43
It had indeed. Despite the lack of an address, tens of thousands of telegrams jammed the wires. The RNC in Washington alone reported the receipt of 300,000 letters and telegrams signed by more than a million people. Republican committees at the state levels received additional thousands of wires. They ran 350 to 1 in favor of Nixon.44
STILL ONLY EISENHOWER’S VOTE COUNTED. When Eisenhower went out to speak to the audience in Cleveland (which had listened over the radio and was chanting “We want Dick!”), he said, “I like courage. Tonight I saw an example of courage. . . . When I get in a fight, I would rather have a courageous and honest man by my side than a whole boxcar full of pussyfooters.”45
But he also told the crowd he was asking Nixon to come see him tomorrow for “a face-to-face” talk, so that he could “complete the formulation of my personal decision. It is obvious that I have to have something more than one single presentation, necessarily limited to thirty minutes, the time allowed Senator Nixon.”46
After the talk, Eisenhower sent his own telegram to Nixon. He praised him for his “magnificent” performance, but refrained from endorsing him and emphatically rejected the idea that Nixon’s fate would be decided by the RNC: “My personal decision is going to be based on personal conclusions.” In case Nixon still did not get the point as to who was in charge, Eisenhower added, “I would most appreciate it if you can fly to see me at once. Tomorrow I will be at Wheeling, W.Va.” He concluded, “Whatever personal affection and admiration I had for you—and they are very great—are undiminished.” Not enhanced, just undiminished.47
THEY WERE CELEBRATING in Nixon’s suite, banging out “Happy Days Are Here Again” on the piano, when a reporter brought in a wire story about Eisenhower’s Cleveland remarks. “What more can he possibly want from me?” Nixon demanded of Chotiner. He said he would not humiliate himself further by going to Wheeling. Instead, he would fly to his next scheduled stop, in Missoula, Montana. He called Rose Woods into his room and dictated a letter of resignation. She typed it up, but showed it to Chotiner before sending it, and he ripped it up, saying to Rose, “I don’t blame him for being mad, and it would serve them right if he resigned now and Ike lost the election. But I think we ought to let things settle a little bit longer before we do anything this final.”48
Now, instead of sending a wire resigning, Nixon decided to defy the general. He wired Eisenhower that he intended to resume his campaign tour and that he would be in Washington in five days “and will be delighted to confer with you at your convenience any time thereafter.” An hour later, Summerfield called Chotiner, urging that Nixon come to Wheeling as requested. Chotiner said he would not come until the general had bestowed his blessing. “Dick is not going to be placed in the position of a little boy coming somewhere to beg for forgiveness.”49
Nixon’s defiance might have done him in, but he was saved by the common sense of Bert Andrews. Andrews called to praise the speech, but when Nixon told him of Eisenhower’s response and his own determination not to go to Wheeling, Andrews gave him some serious advice. “Richard,” he said, “you don’t have to be concerned about what will happen when you meet Eisenhower. The broadcast decided that, and Eisenhower knows it as well as anyone else. But you must remember who he is. He is the general who led the Allied armies to victory in Europe. . . . and he is the boss of this outfit. He will make this decision, and he will make the right decision. But he has the right to make it in his own way, and you must come to Wheeling to meet him and give him an opportunity to do exactly that.”50
Nixon decided to fly to Wheeling after all. First he did some campaigning in Missoula, where his party arrived at 3 A.M. At 8 A.M. he was at Hell Gate High, where he told the students, “I know a lot of you are going to say, ‘I don’t want to go into politics, it’s a mean game, it’s a rough game, it’s a dirty game.’ But just let me tell you this . . . politics is a tough game, but if you think it’s dirty, it’s your job to clean it up.” And he said that only through politics could one “realize that in America all you have to do is to come out and tell the American people the truth; and if you do, they believe in you and they are for you.”51
He was feeling as upbeat as he sounded. All the signs pointed his way. He had the satisfaction of getting a crow-eating telegram from Stassen, and another from Dewey, each praising the speech. Indeed, as Earl Mazo wrote, “The entire Republican hierarchy was singing hosannas, including the leaders who felt the program’s emotional pitch to be revolting.”52 A wire service reported that Summerfield had been able to contact 107 of the 138-man RNC, and that they had voted 107 to 0 to keep Nixon on the ticket. The plane trip to Wheeling turned into a victory ride.
When the plane rolled to a stop at the Wheeling airport, Nixon started helping Pat put on her now famous coat. Eisenhower rushed up the steps to the plane, hand outstretched. Astonished, Nixon mumbled, “General, you didn’t need to come out to the airport.” “Why not?” Eisenhower grinned. “You’re my boy!”53
Eisenhower was a good enough general to know when he had lost a battle. He was stuck with Nixon—but then that was the outcome he had always wanted. Even if Nixon had taken the decision from him through the weight of public opinion (or at least Republican Party opinion), Eisenhower had not lost the war. Nixon was in Wheeling, and in the limousine ride to the stadium for a rally, Eisenhower took the opportunity to let Nixon know, gently but firmly, who was boss. He said he had heard rumors about Pat having paid $10,000 in cash for interior decorating at the Nixon home. Was it true?
Actually, Eisenhower already knew that it was a lie; he had checked with people who had been in the Nixon home and they had assured him the furnishings were mostly handmade by Pat and could not possibly have cost $10,000. Just asking the question, however, made the point that he had the right to do so, and Nixon had to answer.
Nixon assured him that the rumor was false. He then warned that it was only the beginning: “Our opponents are losing. . . . They will be desperate and they will throw everything at us, including the kitchen sink.”54
At the stadium, Eisenhower praised Nixon, with the emphasis on the personal pronoun: “So far as I am concerned, he has not only vindicated himself, but I feel that he has acted as a man of courage and honor and so far as I am concerned stands higher than ever before.” He then turned the mike to Nixon, who launched into a comparison of Truman and Eisenhower. When Truman’s friends were charged with corruption, Nixon said, Truman’s response was, “This is just a smear; I am not going to listen to any of them. . . . I am not even going to wait until the evidence is in before I make up my mind.” Nixon said he was “glad General Eisenhower didn’t do that. . . . I think his action was in happy contrast to what we have had in the past seven years. . . . What Eisenhower did was to say to me, ‘Dick, take your case to the American people; bring out all the facts; tell the truth; and then we will make the decision as to what should be done.” (Note the “we” instead of “I”; Nixon was not done with the power struggle yet.) “Well, folks,” Nixon continued, “if he will do that with me, just think what he is going to do when he becomes President. It is going to be the cleanest, the most honest Government America has ever had.”55
The drama was just about over. When Nixon finished, he saw Bill Knowland in the crowd gathering to congratulate him. “That was a great speech, Dick,” Knowland said, shaking his hand. Nixon’s eyes filled with tears; he put his head on Knowland’s shoulder and sobbed. The curtain came down.56
AS PLAYWRIGHT, LEADING ACTOR, and director of the drama, Nixon had achieved his first objective, holding his place on the ticket, thanks to the thousands of telegrams to the RNC. But as a gauge of public response around the country, the telegrams and letters to the RNC were wholly inadequate. They represented only that small portion of the audience which was so susceptible to Nixon’s message it was moved to send in a telegram. Less than 2 percent of the audience “voted” for Nixon. Still, given the size of the audience, that 2 percent was enough to create the impression of a landslide miraculously engineered by the embattled Nixon in one brilliant thirty-minute television presentation.
That impression is incorrect on every count. Nixon was not embattled, no matter how he felt or what his advisers perceived. His place on the ticket was secure. The Republicans in 1952 would do anything to win. Eisenhower knew that if he dumped Nixon he might well end up like Dewey, snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Given those circumstances, and adding to them the hollowness of the Democratic charges, there never was a chance that Nixon would be dumped. Indeed, insofar as this was a genuine crisis, it was one manufactured in no small part by Nixon himself.
Eisenhower played his own role in the charade. He pretended that he would be an objective judge in determining Nixon’s fitness to serve as Vice-President, which was obviously absurd. Eisenhower was not above milking the thing for all the drama it could hold either, as he managed to create an atmosphere of high stakes and great suspense around the television appearance: Would the idealistic young senator from the West prove his innocence? Could he convince the general, world famous for his Solomon-like wisdom, that it was his accusers, not he, who were cheats, liars, and crooks? But the truth was that Eisenhower no more needed convincing on these questions than he did on the cost of Nixon’s home furnishings.
The impression that the speech was a personal triumph for Nixon is also incorrect. He held on to that part of the Republican Party faithful who were always his supporters no matter what, but he failed to use his unique opportunity to win new supporters. Instead, he made new enemies.
Despite the flood of telegrams, a majority in the audience found the speech objectionable, if not nauseating. In the years that followed, one never heard Republicans bring it up, while Democrats quoted it to one another gleefully, and enjoyed heckling Nixon by calling out, “Tell us about Checkers.” What people remembered about the speech was Nixon’s corny seriousness about a dog, his Uriah Heep manner in explaining his family finances, his awkward attempts at jokes, his use of that miserable little coat to make a political point, his threatening gestures at the end as he pledged war to the death with the Communists and the crooks.
In the 1970s, an anti-Nixon documentary entitled Milhous: A White Comedy featured segments of the Checkers speech. The speech was not used in Republican campaign films. It was the Nixon haters, not his supporters, who chuckled delightedly to themselves whenever they thought of Checkers.
At the time, as later, Nixon did not get even that 60 percent approval rating that Dewey had said would be insufficient. But Dewey knew about such things. The 90-to-10 vote he had called for was not preposterous at all; it was a nearly normal response from people moved to send in wires to such appeals. In fact, even at 350 to 1 on the wires, Nixon did not win a majority of the viewers.
What did Nixon learn from the crisis? He said it had made him tough: “After it, very few, if any, difficult situations could seem insurmountable. . . . Nothing could match it. Nothing could top it because not so much could again depend on one incident.” He said he learned that “it isn’t what the facts are but what they appear to be that counts when you are under fire in a political campaign.” Finally, two central lessons: “The best advice I can give to young men entering politics is to take to heart the Caesar’s-wife admonition and to follow it to the letter” and “In politics, most people are your friends only as long as you can do something for them or something to them.”
Nixon celebrated the anniversary of the speech each year thereafter. Pat Nixon never liked to think about it, and refused to talk about it.57
BOB STRIPLING, the former HUAC counsel who had helped Nixon uncover Hiss, had gone to Texas and struck oil. In 1952, he worked for the Eisenhower campaign. Toward the end of the campaign, he visited Nixon in his New York hotel suite. “Strip,” Nixon told him, “those sons of bitches are out to get me. They got Mr. [J. Parnell] Thomas [former HUAC chairman who had gone to jail for taking kickbacks from his staff], they tried to get me, and they’ll try to get anybody that had anything to do with the Hiss case.”58
Nixon thought that the smear campaign against him resulted from the Hiss case, when in fact he had given, and would continue to give, his opponents many more immediate reasons than Hiss for wanting to get him. Moreover, since Eisenhower was adopting an above-the-partisan-battle posture, Nixon was the most visible Republican and thus the most obvious target for the Democrats.
But if Nixon was paranoid about his opponents’ motives, he was realistic about their actions. From Truman down, the Democrats turned on their chief tormentor. Truman ordered Nixon’s OPA record investigated. Nothing turned up there.59 Justice Department officials tried to substantiate a rumor that Nixon, while engaged in navy contract terminations in 1945, had shaken down one of the companies involved for a personal loan. Nothing turned up there either.60
The Democrats should have checked certain other stories as thoroughly before making their charges in public, although their timing was such that further accusations could not be rebutted and put to rest until after the election. On October 20 the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran a front-page story charging that Nixon and Dana Smith had gone to Havana six months earlier, that Smith had lost large sums of money at the gambling tables, and that he had written a check on the fund account to cover his losses. The truth was that Nixon was on vacation in Hawaii at the time.61
On October 28, the DNC charged that Nixon and his family owned real estate “conservatively valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars.” The figure included a “swanky new drive-in restaurant” owned by Don Nixon and appraised at $175,000, Frank and Hannah’s small farm in Pennsylvania, and a retirement cottage they had purchased in Florida. Nixon replied that Don was renting the restaurant, and that it was “despicable” for the Democrats to attack his parents, who had sold the farm and whose modest properties in California “reflected the sum total of an entire life of hard work.”62
Five days before the election, Drew Pearson wrote that he had gotten copies of Nixon’s tax returns. Among other things, Pearson charged that the Nixons had falsely sworn to a joint property value of less than $10,000 in order to qualify for a $50 veteran’s tax exemption on their California taxes. The outraged Nixon investigated and discovered that another California couple, coincidentally named Richard and Patricia Nixon, had filed for the exemption. Three weeks after the election Pearson printed a retraction.
Someone in the DNC tried to use two forged letters against Nixon. The letters purported to show that Nixon had taken more than $52,000 in 1950 from the oil industry. Just before the election, the DNC sent the story to the New York Post, but after its experience with the Nixon fund, the Post declined to print it. After the election, Pearson tried to revive it. Nixon demanded a full investigation by the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections; the investigation proved the letters were forgeries.63
Nixon was stung by the dirty tricks, enough so that he wrote Adela Rogers St. Johns asking her advice on how to deal with them.64 “The taste for politics soured,” he wrote in his memoirs. He realized that Pat had been put through pure hell: “I knew that from that time on, although she would do everything she could to help me and help my career, she would hate politics and dream of the day when I would leave it behind and we could have a happy and normal life for ourselves and our family.”
He had no such dreams. Painful though the experiences were, he wrote, “my only recourse—and my instinct—was to fight back.” And he quoted his favorite line from TR, the one about the man in the arena “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”65 If the Democrats wanted to fight with dirty tricks, Nixon was ready to oblige.
TERRIBLE THINGS WERE SAID in the 1952 campaign, especially by Nixon about his opponents, so terrible in fact that Nixon later apologized for his conduct—the only time in his career he did so. In his memoirs, written in 1978, he wrote, “Today I regret the intensity of those attacks.” His apology came immediately after a sentence in which he pointed out that Dean Acheson’s “clipped moustache, his British tweeds, and his haughty manner made him the perfect foil for my attacks on the snobbish kind of foreign service personality and mentality that had been taken in hook, line, and sinker by the Communists.”66
Nor could he see any redeeming features in Adlai Stevenson, a man he described as “more veneer than substance. . . . Beneath his glibness and mocking wit he was shallow, flippant, and indecisive.”67
But Stevenson had a way with words, and could sting Nixon as no other Democrat could. Nixon, Stevenson said, was “the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.”68 In his rebuttals, Nixon laid it on. He called Stevenson “a weakling, a waster, and a small-caliber Truman” who owed his career to a political organization infested with “mobsters, gangsters, and remnants of the old Capone gang.”69
As the campaign neared its end, Nixon got as wild and reckless in his general statements as the Democrats had been in their specific charges against him. He kept his material so general that his opponents could only cry foul, not prove that he had lied. Nixon was pulling huge crowds, had been ever since the Checkers speech, crowds that sometimes were larger than Stevenson had drawn. The big audiences pepped him up and he became increasingly strident.
On October 27, in Texarkana, he lumped Stevenson, Acheson, and Truman together, calling them all “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe.”II, 70 On October 30, in Los Angeles, Nixon said that “Stevenson holds a Ph.D. degree from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.”71
On October 13, Nixon went on national television for the second time. He used most of his half hour to give a detailed account of the Hiss case. Then he drew what he said was the obvious conclusion: “We can assume because of the cover-up of this administration in the Hiss case that the Communists, the fellow-travelers, have not been cleaned out of the executive branch of the government.” He said, “There is no question in my mind as to the loyalty of Mr. Stevenson,” but argued that Stevenson had disqualified himself for public trust by “going down the line for the arch-traitor of our generation,” a reference to Stevenson’s character deposition for Hiss. He was willing to grant that Stevenson “really believed Hiss was a man of loyalty, veracity, and integrity when he came to his defense in 1949,” but that only made things worse. “If Stevenson were to be taken in by Stalin as he was by Hiss, the Yalta sell-out would look like a great American diplomatic triumph by comparison.”72
TAKEN ALL IN ALL, 1952 is recalled as one of the bitterest campaigns of the twentieth century, and the one that featured the most mudslinging. Few of the participants could look back on it with pride. There was Joe McCarthy, constantly pretending to confuse the names “Alger” and “Adlai.” There was Harry Truman, a late but enthusiastic participant, denouncing Ike personally (he was the only Democrat who would do so), saying that the general didn’t know any more about politics than a pig did about Sunday, and charging that he was a “captive general” controlled by Republican big-business men. There was Eisenhower himself, usually so careful to hold to the high ground, being dragged in the mud, forced to stand next to Senator Jenner of Indiana, who had called George Marshall a traitor. Eisenhower’s closest friends hung their heads in shame when he failed to defend General Marshall, and even, at Joe McCarthy’s behest, removed a paragraph praising Marshall from a Milwaukee speech.
One participant who could take some pride in his performance was Adlai Stevenson. He was not only witty, but thoughtful, intelligent, concerned, and committed. He envisioned an America that would be caring and sharing. He offered a domestic program that would build on and extend the social gains of the New Deal. His speeches, his vision, his personality won him millions of loyal and enthusiastic followers. Many of them loved him not least because he was the most successful Democrat in getting under Nixon’s skin.
What Stevenson could not do was cut into General Ike’s tremendous popularity. The source of that popularity was, obviously, the man’s achievements, record, personality, and good looks, but it should not be overlooked that some of that popularity resulted from the programs Eisenhower was advocating. He took a firm stance in the middle of the road, rejecting the entreaties of the Old Guard that the country move to the right. He promised a balanced budget, but not a tax cut; he supported Taft-Hartley, but favored some amendments; he wanted to encourage collective bargaining and the right to strike; he pledged himself to collective security abroad, with specific guarantees to NATO and the U.N.; he would continue foreign aid; he promised to extend Social Security. In short, to the discomfort of Old Guardsmen, he was not promising to dismantle the New Deal.
Eisenhower also broke with the Old Guard over Eastern Europe. The party platform, as noted, called for liberation, but Eisenhower refused to use that word. He did, however, say he would “aid by every peaceful means, but only by peaceful means, the right to live in freedom.” He ridiculed those who wanted to invade or bomb China as people who did not know what they were talking about.73 Eisenhower was evidently unaware that Nixon had called loudly for liberation, and for bombing China. The two men almost never came together during the campaign.
The big issue in 1952 was the increasingly unpopular Korean War. Eisenhower took a moderate position, rejecting either escalation or abandonment of the South Koreans. The high point of his campaign came in Detroit, on October 24, when he announced that, immediately after his election, “I shall go to Korea.” He never said what he would do there, but the announcement itself electrified a nation that was already strongly pro-Eisenhower.
AFTER THE CHECKERS SPEECH, Nixon might have calculated that the middle of the high road was now the place for him to travel, right beside General Eisenhower. But that was neither his style nor his role. He wanted to lash out, and Eisenhower privately encouraged him to do it. He continued to say things that should not have been said, to make his enemies more bitter than he needed to.
ON ELECTION DAY, Nixon voted early, then went for a car ride with Bill Rogers. They drove down to Laguna Beach, parked, and took a long walk along the ocean shore. In the afternoon, they returned to Nixon’s suite in the Ambassador Hotel. By 6 P.M. in California, Nixon knew that the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket had won an overwhelming victory.
Eisenhower had 34 million votes to Stevenson’s 27 million, or 55 percent to 44 percent. The Republicans had taken control of the House, 221 to 213, and of the Senate, where Nixon’s vote would break a 48-to-48 tie in favor of the Republicans. In House elections, the Republicans got 28,470,000 votes, the Democrats 28,715,000 votes.III Eisenhower ran almost 6 million votes, or 10 percent, ahead of his party.
What effect did Nixon’s position on the ticket have on the election? No exact answer is possible, since no one had an opportunity to vote directly for or against him. Nixon may have attracted Eastern European voters in Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere to the Republican Party, with his call for liberation and his anti-Communism. In general, however, he did not attract Democrats to the ticket, and he may have repelled some Republicans. Anti-Communism in its extreme form, as practiced by McCarthy, was not a vote getter in 1952, as shown by the results in Wisconsin, where McCarthy ran a full 100,000 votes (7 percent) behind Eisenhower. As the most partisan Republican, Nixon had to take some of the blame for the failure of the party to use Ike’s coattails to sweep to commanding majorities in Congress.
Nixon nevertheless made a contribution to Eisenhower’s victory. It was Nixon who made the ticket acceptable to the Old Guard. Men who were threatening to sit out the campaign got behind the Republicans with their money and enthusiasm because Dick Nixon was the vice-presidential nominee. Still, overall, if Nixon had any effect on the presidential election, it was to cost Eisenhower some votes.
In Eisenhower’s view there were pluses and minuses about Nixon’s performance in the campaign. The pluses were his service as a bridge to the Old Guard, his eagerness to blast the Democrats, and his image as St. George. The minuses were that Nixon was too right-wing and irresponsible in his views (“immature” was the word Eisenhower most often used), that Nixon was too strident in attacking the Democrats, and that he made himself too squeaky clean in his Checkers speech. In short, Eisenhower was ambivalent about Nixon, liking him for some of the same things he disliked about him.
Nixon was equally ambivalent about Eisenhower. He was awed by General Eisenhower, as everyone else was, but more than a bit suspicious about Eisenhower the politician. He also had major foreign-policy differences with the President-elect, such as what to do in Korea and China, where Eisenhower’s program was much closer to that followed by Truman and Acheson than it was to the one advocated by MacArthur and Nixon. For six years Nixon had habitually criticized presidential announcements; now he would have to learn to bite his tongue and support policies he did not believe in.
As had been the case since the nominating convention in July, the relationship between Eisenhower and Nixon was dominated by a fact neither of the two men ever mentioned. Nixon needed Eisenhower but Eisenhower did not need Nixon. Whether said aloud or not, Nixon knew it to be the case, and prepared to calculate his actions on the basis of that fact.
I. A reference to Democratic vice-presidential nominee Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, whose wife worked in his office.
II. The remark made Truman furious and he never got over it. He insisted that Nixon had called him a traitor. Nixon always denied it by pointing to the exact language he had used, but as Truman once snapped, “I can read, can’t I?” In 1961, Truman told Merle Miller that Nixon was “a shifty-eyed, goddamn liar.” “All the time I’ve been in politics, there’s only two people I hate, and he’s one. He not only doesn’t give a damn about the people; he doesn’t know . . . the difference between telling the truth and lying.”
III. There was no Republican Party in the South, which was the cause of the Democrats getting the most votes but fewer seats—the Republicans got no votes in the South in House elections.