THROUGH THE FIRST MONTHS OF 1956, Nixon lived in an agony of suspension because the world’s most famous decision maker refused to make a decision. At any moment following his announcement that he would seek a second term, Eisenhower could have decided to dump Nixon or to keep him, and that would have been that. There was precedent aplenty, either way. But Eisenhower left the decision to others, most specifically to Nixon himself—something Nixon, like the reporters and columnists and politicians, could not believe.
Adding to Nixon’s discontent was the obvious fact that the prize was so great. Back in 1952, some of Nixon’s friends could honestly advise him to reject the Vice-Presidency in favor of staying in the Senate, but in 1956 no real friend of Nixon’s could doubt that the best possible place for him was right where he was, one (damaged) heartbeat away from the Presidency. Yet throughout the period of indecision, Eisenhower continually told him that he would be better off elsewhere, then urged him to make his own choice. It was impossible for Nixon to understand exactly what Eisenhower did want. There was good reason for Nixon’s confusion—on the subject of Nixon’s future, Eisenhower contradicted himself on an almost daily basis.
Milton Eisenhower once said that in 1956 “a more sensitive man” than Nixon would have taken Eisenhower’s hint and left the ticket.1 Perhaps. And perhaps Eisenhower felt that, as had been the case in the Army, a hint from the CO was sufficient. In addition, Eisenhower hated to fire someone who had served him loyally and to the best of his ability—that trait had been one of his weaknesses as a soldier, as he himself often confessed—and he believed that Nixon had done as good a job as possible as Vice-President. Another Eisenhower characteristic, as soldier and as President, was to keep his options open for as long as possible. He really did not know the answers to the chief questions: What would be best for Nixon? for the Republican party? for the country? The last was the most important because of the real possibility that the Republican vice-presidential nominee of 1956 could become President before 1960.
In the narrative that follows, Eisenhower will often be seen expressing doubts about Nixon. What should be noted throughout, however, is what Eisenhower kept in the forefront of his mind—the possibility that the vice-presidential nominee might well become President. Eisenhower was an old man whose love for his country, like his service to it, was unmatched. He wanted what was best for the United States. That was why he decided to run again—he was sure he was the best. That was also why he finally picked Nixon as his running mate—he thought Nixon had his shortcomings, but he would rather turn the country over to Nixon than any other possible candidate. In itself, that was the highest possible tribute he could pay Nixon.
Nevertheless, the lack of a clear-cut and enthusiastic endorsement from the President cut Nixon deeply. It forced him to circumscribe his behavior (he could not “run” for the Vice-Presidency, because only one vote counted, that of the President himself); it put him into a purgatory of “agonizing indecision”;2 it forced him to operate behind the scenes in his attempts to influence the President’s decision. Nixon campaigned hard for the vice-presidential nomination in 1956, but unlike his previous campaigns, this one had to be carried out privately.
BACK IN MARCH 1955, Nixon had told a meeting of GOP workers, “The Republican party is not strong enough to elect a President. We have to have a presidential candidate strong enough to get the Republican party elected.”3 Recognizing this fundamental truth, throughout the period when Eisenhower was making up his mind about re-election, Nixon urged him, almost begged him, to agree to run again.
On February 7, 1956, a week or so before doctors planned to run some tests and then tell Eisenhower whether he was physically capable of running again or not, Eisenhower called Nixon into the Oval Office for some political talk. The President opened by saying he had seen Len Hall the night before, and Hall had assured him that he need make only three or four speeches in the campaign. “I think Hall is wearing rose-colored glasses,” Eisenhower commented. The President was sure the RNC would be after him to do more, much more, just as it had in 1952 after giving similar promises about an easy campaign. What did Nixon think?
Nixon told the President to think back to 1944, when “Roosevelt did not make a campaign. He made certain nonpolitical swings here and there, but he pretty much won those campaigns on fireside chats, no television, and inspection tours.” Eisenhower could follow the FDR precedent, but vastly improve upon it because of the magic of television. Nixon grew expansive as he described the possibilities on TV, “this new medium that has never been used up to its potentialities.” Nixon thought that with a half-dozen television programs, well advertised in advance, “fireside chats if you will,” Eisenhower “could campaign this time and win.”
Nixon advised the President to “lay down the law right at the beginning” about not coming into any state to support any candidate. Otherwise, he would be deluged with last-minute pleas to come here or go there to save this or that seat. Five or six TV programs would be just about right. “I don’t say that because I am trying to give an argument to make your mind up; I honestly believe that that is the best kind of a campaign for you to put on at this time.”
Eisenhower said that sounded fine, but he had been through this before, and he was still dubious about the RNC’s promises—he feared they would be forgotten the minute he accepted the nomination. And besides, why should he work for Republican candidates who, when they got to Congress, would not support him? Not on his school construction bill or his health insurance bill, or on foreign aid, or on the tariff, or on immigration quotas, or on a variety of other proposals. He had even told Hall he was thinking of running as a Democrat. If he ran as a Republican, he might bring the Congress with him, and he confessed he dreaded the prospect of Republican control. “Why should I help such people as [Knowland] to get chairmanships?” he asked Hall. “It becomes a terrible thing to do to our country almost.” He preferred southern Democrats to western Republicans as committee chairmen. The Republican Party, he told Nixon, “is hopelessly split.” He could not understand why there was no teamwork among Republicans: “I am at my wit’s end to try to understand it.”
Nixon rushed to defend the party, to assure the President that it was not “so badly split” after all. He insisted that the party had grown up in the last four years, citing the number of converts to foreign aid as an example. Indeed, Nixon declared, the President had “accomplished almost a miracle in getting the Party together.” He had brought the Old Guard “a long ways,” and the Party “is more united today than it has been for twenty-five years.” Nixon said he felt “in eight years the Republican Party can be made over to a reasonably conservative progressive Party—and an internationalist Party.” Eisenhower had his doubts.4
Eisenhower told different people different things about Nixon. When Hagerty pointed out to the President that “Nixon is stymied” and urged Eisenhower to go out of his way to praise the Vice-President, Eisenhower replied that he feared Nixon would become “atrophied” if he spent eight years in the office. He should get into the Cabinet—“he has a very fine understanding in the foreign field, in the security field, he is thoroughly grounded in the workings of this government.” But—there was always a “but” when Eisenhower talked about Nixon—“people think of him as an immature boy.” Still another “but”—“but it would be difficult to find a better Vice President.”5
On February 9, Eisenhower discussed the matter with Dulles. The President said Nixon should become Secretary of Commerce. Dulles doubted that Nixon would take the post, and suggested instead that Nixon succeed him as Secretary of State. Eisenhower laughed and said Dulles was not going to get out of his job that easily, then added that “he doubted in any event that Nixon had the qualifications to be Secretary of State.”6
That same day, the President talked to Nixon again. “As one of the coming men of the party,” he said, “if we can count on me living five years, your place is not serving eight years as Vice President, but to take one of the big departments, HEW, Defense, Interior, any one of which is entirely possible. However, if you calculate that I won’t last five years, of course that is different.” Nixon was speechless—what could he possibly say? Finally, he muttered that whatever the President wanted him to do, he would do. The President replied, again, that it was Nixon’s decision to make, a proposition that no one, least of all Nixon, could accept.7
Four days later, Eisenhower talked to Hall about the Vice-Presidency. He tried out all sorts of possibilities—Earl Warren, Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio (a Democrat and a Catholic, both of which appealed to Eisenhower), Tom Dewey, former governor Dan Thornton of Colorado, Bob Anderson (“my first choice”), “any number” of southerners (but the segregation issue made that impossible, he admitted), Brownell, Milton Eisenhower, and others. But then what to do about Nixon? The obvious answer, if Eisenhower really wanted to dump Nixon, was to accept Dulles’ advice and promise Nixon the post of Secretary of State, the one Cabinet position Nixon could not have turned down. But Eisenhower wanted to keep Dulles on the job, and as noted, he did not think Nixon up to it (how then, one has to ask, could he have possibly felt Nixon was up to the Presidency itself?).
Hall said what was self-evident, that if the President wanted it done, “it was the easiest thing to get Nixon out of the picture willingly.” All the President had to do was tell him so. Instead, Eisenhower told Hall to talk to Nixon. Hall should say, “What do you want to do? What is the best thing for you to do, for yourself, and that means the good of the party.” But, Eisenhower warned, Hall should be “very, very gentle.”8
Instead, Hall presented the President’s case in a blunt manner, implying if not saying directly that Eisenhower wanted him off the ticket. Nixon’s face darkened. “He’s never liked me,” Nixon said of Eisenhower. “He’s always been against me.”9 Nevertheless, Nixon dug in. He was not about to give up his position on the basis of guarded hints from Hall or anyone else—if Eisenhower wanted him off the ticket, Eisenhower had to give the order, personally and directly.
MEANWHILE, NIXON WORKED TO SOLIDIFY his hold on the party regulars, and thus on his job. He gathered in intelligence, primarily from the conservative reporters he had cultivated over the years, and also from his friends among the Republican congressmen. As a result, he was much better informed than most of the columnists, who were doing all sorts of speculating on the manifold possibilities. Thus Nixon knew that Dewey was not interested, that Bob Anderson thought his own chances were nil, that Warren would never leave the Supreme Court, and so on. Not all his informants were conservatives; at the end of February, Kyle Palmer called with some “constructive criticism” from the chief Washington reporter of The New York Times, James Reston. Palmer said that Reston was “dispassionate, objective, friendly,” and that Reston had told him, on a confidential basis, “that there was a definite move on for Eisenhower not to go overboard” in support of Nixon. In passing this word along to Nixon, Palmer told Rose Woods, “Reston thinks that—as I do—the decision may depend upon the way in which our man handles himself.”10
Nixon knew that much already, and was in fact handling himself with great care. He held no press conferences, made no inflammatory remarks, despite provocation. On February 17, for example, Stevenson, who was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, charged that Nixon was “uniquely qualified by his experience for a campaign on the lowest level.” Two weeks earlier Truman had again upbraided Nixon for calling him a traitor in 1954; Truman said it made him “want to punch somebody.” In both cases, Nixon refused to comment.11 He continued to speak at party fund raisers, but his speeches were all positive, a defense of the Republican record rather than an attack on the opposition.12 At his forty-third birthday party, sponsored by his old friends in the Chowder and Marching Club, and at other gatherings, he quietly got commitments from delegates to the convention. By April, he had some eight hundred pledges, a comfortable majority.13
Nixon also cooperated fully with Ralph de Toledano on the production of a campaign biography. De Toledano, whose admiration for Nixon was very great, gave Nixon the manuscript, for corrections and improvements. Nixon added material on the already-long section about the smears against him, and gave even more emphasis to refuting Truman’s complaint that Nixon had called him a traitor. When the book came out, in the summer of 1956, Nixon was delighted with it, as well he might have been, since it was a piece of puffery. With his encouragement, friends did some fund raising and bought thousands of copies for free distribution.14
But neither a flattering biography nor eight hundred delegates in hand meant a thing without Eisenhower’s blessing. All Nixon could get from the President, however, was the obviously impossible advice to make his own choice. Of course, Eisenhower had his own future to think about, and until he decided what he was going to do, Nixon knew he could not expect the President to make a decision about the number-two spot. So, like everyone else in the country, including Eisenhower himself, he waited for the doctors’ report. Once that was issued, and Eisenhower had reacted to it, Nixon could expect a decision that would at least relieve the misery of not knowing, and hopefully one that would allow Nixon to hit the campaign trail as the designated running mate.
ON FEBRUARY 29, at a press conference, Eisenhower made his announcement. The doctors had told him he was capable of doing the job; he had therefore decided that he would be a candidate for re-election.
The first question was “Who will be your running mate?” Eisenhower refused to answer, “in spite of my tremendous admiration for Mr. Nixon.” The President said “it is traditional . . . to wait and see who the Republican Convention nominates” before announcing the vice-presidential candidate. That was too coy by half for the veteran reporters. One asked, “Would you like to have Nixon?” Eisenhower replied, “I will say nothing more about it. I have said that my admiration and my respect for Vice-President Nixon is unbounded. He has been for me a loyal and dedicated associate, and a successful one. I am very fond of him, but I am going to say no more about it.”15
So, after all that suspense, Nixon once again had Eisenhower’s admiration and respect, but not his endorsement. It threw him into a depression. A friend of Nixon’s remarked that Eisenhower’s refusal to come out flatly for Nixon was “one of the greatest hurts of his [Nixon’s] whole career.” The friend added, “I think the President . . . sincerely felt that Nixon had a better political future from a Cabinet post. But Nixon had a much shrewder judgment and reached the conclusion very early in the whole episode that either he had to go all the way and win . . . or get out and be finished.”16
After Eisenhower’s press conference, Nixon decided to get out. That night he told Ralph de Toledano that he had decided to quit. De Toledano told him in a March 2 letter that “it would be a calamity if you quit now. . . . Many, many people have pinned their hopes on you. If you back down, you will be letting them down.” Nixon agreed to defer a decision.17
The next week, things got worse. At the President’s March 7 press conference, Nixon was again the number-one topic. Marvin Arrowsmith of the AP asked the President about reports that his advisers wanted him to dump Nixon from the ticket and that “you yourself have suggested to Mr. Nixon that he consider . . . taking a Cabinet post. Can you tell us whether there is anything in those reports?”
Eisenhower replied that as to the “dump Nixon” reports, “I will promise you this much: if anyone ever has the effrontery to come in and urge me to dump somebody that I respect as I do Vice-President Nixon, there will be more commotion around my office than you have noticed yet.” As to the second, “I have not presumed to tell the Vice-President what he should do with his own future. . . . The only thing I have asked him to do is to chart out his own course, and tell me what he would like to do.” Did that mean “that if he elects to remain on the ticket you are content to have him as your running mate?” Evidently not: “I am not going to be pushed into corners here and say what I would do in a hypothetical question that involves about five ifs.” The most Eisenhower would say was “I have no criticism of Vice-President Nixon to make, either as a man, an associate, or as my running mate on the ticket.”18
Nixon’s unhappiness was complete. Arrowsmith’s question about the Cabinet post was based on a Newsweek story that Nixon believed had to have come as a result of a leak from the White House. It looked to Nixon as if Eisenhower really did want to get rid of him. If so, Nixon was ready to go—he had been offered the presidency of a large California firm, and a partnership in a New York law firm, either of which would pay far more than the Vice-Presidency. He felt he could not take seriously the Cabinet offer (“I would have been like Henry Wallace.”) and he could not “chart out his own course,” whatever Eisenhower said.
Nixon took out his legal pad and drafted an announcement that he would not be a candidate in 1956, and told two or three friends that he would call a press conference the next day, March 9, to announce his retirement. He mentioned it to Vic Johnston, of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, who rushed to tell Hall and Persons. Those two dashed to the Capitol, cornered Nixon, and asked him not to do it. They said his friends would call him a “quitter.” They insisted that his departure would split the Republican Party. He agreed to tear up the retirement announcement and defer his decision for a few weeks.19
EISENHOWER’S “CHART OUT HIS OWN COURSE” phrase became the subject of innumerable newspaper columns that week. Most commentators agreed with Nixon’s private judgment, that “I can only assume that if he puts it this way, this must be his way of saying he’d prefer someone else.” Disturbed by the speculation, Eisenhower made Nixon’s future the subject at one of his famous stag dinners. Some of his rich friends present thought he should make a change, on the grounds that Nixon would cost him votes. But Charles Jones, president of Richfield Oil, strongly disagreed. An old friend of the President’s, Jones looked at him and said, “Ike, what in the hell does a man have to do to get your support? Dick Nixon has done everything you asked him to do. He has taken on the hard jobs that many of your other associates have run away from. For you not to support him now would be the most ungrateful thing that I can possibly think of.”20
Still another old friend of the President’s, George Whitney, told him, “I think it is fairer to Nixon, and better for the future of the country, that he spend the next four years in some position where publicly he can demonstrate how good he is in his own right . . . where he can get administrative ability and other qualities of leadership that are so essential in the top job . . . rather than stay in a position which . . . has the outward appearance of a secondary job.”21
Eisenhower said he heartily agreed. But it was difficult to get Nixon to see that point, he added, because of “the constantly bubbling political pot.” The President explained to Whitney that “rarely does a man who is primarily a politician look ahead to the preparation of individuals for leadership in positions of great responsibility.” Alas, the politician’s attitude was “do the thing that seems most popular at the moment.”22 Eisenhower once again bemoaned Nixon’s complete lack of administrative experience.
On March 13, the day of the first 1956 primary election, in New Hampshire, Eisenhower met with Fred Seaton, Sherman Adams’ deputy. In one paragraph, the President presented all his ambiguities about Nixon. “I am happy to have him as an associate, and I am happy to have him in government,” the President said. Then the “but”—“That still doesn’t make him Vice President. He has serious problems. He has his own way to make. He has got to decide whether he puts his eggs into the basket of the improbable future four years from now. I don’t know exactly what he wants to do. I am not going to say he is the only individual I would have for Vice President. There is nothing to be gained politically by ditching him. He is going to be a ‘comer’ four years from now. I want a bevy of young fellows to be available four years from now. Nixon can’t always be the understudy to the star.”23
THAT SAME MORNING, MARCH 13, Nixon followed Seaton into the Oval Office. Eisenhower opened the conversation by complaining about columnist Bill Lawrence’s “vicious story that I am giving you the works.” The trouble with the press, Eisenhower said, was that reporters “can’t believe the unvarnished truth—they can’t believe I actually said to you, ‘Anything you want to do, I would go along with it.’ ”
Nixon could not believe it himself, but before he could say anything, Eisenhower went on. “I don’t want to influence you,” he said. “I want you to preserve your independent decision until the last minute. If you want to continue . . .”
Nixon interrupted. “As I told you before, it is a difficult decision.” He assured the President that the press was not getting this “Ike dumps Nixon” line from him or his office, that “the stories they have written are off the top of their heads.”
The President agreed that the press was impossible. Did Nixon see “our good friend Chris Herter [governor of Massachusetts]” on Meet the Press yesterday? Nixon had not. Eisenhower said the reporters had “tied Chris in knots—it was a pretty stupid performance. . . . When they asked his views on the world situation, he just didn’t know.” The President said the State Department should put out a short list of accomplishments since January 1953, so that Republican speakers could cite it when asked. He complained that Reston was always critical. Nixon agreed: “I feel Scotty Reston is very conceited, but not a great thinker.”I
Then Nixon brought the discussion back to the central point. “It’s true,” he said, “that in the last couple of weeks, there has developed some misconception in the minds of some people that there is some conflict between you and me.” Eisenhower assured him that it was not so. Nixon explained his difficulty. “What position can I take?” When the press asked about his intentions, “I can’t appear to be coy or clever.” He doubted that a move to the Cabinet “could be sold,” because the press would say “Nixon is afraid to run again, or the President is afraid to have him.”
Eisenhower said his concern was “Where are you going to be four years from now?” If Nixon stayed in the Vice-Presidency, “you will always be thought of as the understudy to the star of the team, rather than a halfback in your own right.” Nixon said he hoped he did not have to make a decision until convention time. Meanwhile, he urged Eisenhower to “look over all the available candidates, see who is the strongest. Whatever you decide, I will accept it gracefully.” He did not want the President to keep him on merely out of a sense of obligation—“we must not have that type of thing.” He continued, “These are important times; these are big decisions. I think you ought to decide it at the time—on the basis of what we think is the best thing to do.” Then he reminded the President of the probable cost of making a switch; “friendly columnists will say, ‘Nixon has done a good job; it’s a terrible thing for the President to fire him.’ ”
Eisenhower knew that would be the case, but he mused anyway: “What I would really like to do is get a good Catholic, or an outstanding Jew—but I just don’t know any good man to fit the description.’ ”
The two men engaged in further political gossip, until Nixon—for the only time in the many months devoted to this decision—brought up Pat’s feelings. “I have one serious problem,” he said, “—my family. Pat is not at all happy about the prospect of staying in Washington.” Eisenhower replied, “I like Pat so much, I do not want her to be upset.” Nixon confessed that “if she feels in August as she does now, I will have difficulty in doing anything,” i.e., even taking a Cabinet post.
Well, Eisenhower said, “I am going to tell the press, Look, I would be very happy to have Nixon on any ticket on which I happen to be. That is my final word. I will see you after the Convention.” Nixon said “that ought to settle it,” but added, “I am doubtful that a Cabinet post will work.” Eisenhower remained unconvinced: “I want to make your position very strong four years from now,” and for that purpose the Cabinet was best. He added that it was “silly for the press to try to promote a fight between us—it is like trying to promote a fight between me and my brother.”
As Nixon got up to leave, he again assured Eisenhower that “I will do whatever job is best, even though I have this serious personal problem.”25
In sum, after sixty-three minutes of intense discussion, Nixon’s status was no clearer than it had been at the beginning.
WHAT DID EISENHOWER REALLY THINK OF NIXON? Did he want him on the team or not? The questions are far more complex than they seem. Eisenhower must have answered them hundreds of times, to reporters in press conferences and to intimate friends in private, but the problem is he answered them differently on different occasions, thereby making any judgment tentative and speculative.
Eisenhower may well have wished he could rid himself of Nixon, but he had spent his career facing reality. He was stuck with Nixon, in large part because of his own decision to put Nixon on the 1952 ticket. Nixon had used the Vice-Presidency, plus the reputation he had built in the Hiss case, to establish a wide, deep, and loyal base for himself in the Republican Party. As a consequence, the Eisenhower-Nixon relationship can be compared to the Eisenhower-Montgomery or the Eisenhower-de Gaulle relationship during the war. General Eisenhower never much liked Field Marshal B. L. Montgomery or General Charles de Gaulle, but he had to work with them, and on a basis that recognized that although Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander, Monty and de Gaulle each brought his own independent strength to the relationship. President Eisenhower’s personal feelings for Nixon were ambiguous, but in the working relationship he had to deal with the fact that Nixon was the most popular politician among the party regulars, and for all that Eisenhower disliked the party regulars, he recognized that he could not get along without them, which meant he was stuck with Nixon.
IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, Senator Styles Bridges, always strong for Nixon, had made eighty-seven telephone calls the evening before the presidential primary ballot, urging his friends to write in Nixon’s name. His friends in turn made calls, and the results were impressive. Eisenhower got 56,464 votes, but almost 23,000 voters had written in Nixon’s name. As Bridges intended, it was an impressive demonstration of Nixon’s vote-getting power, at least among Republicans.26
Despite Nixon’s triumph, Eisenhower withheld his endorsement. At his next press conference, when asked to comment on the write-in vote, the President said “apparently there are lots of people in New Hampshire that agree with what I have told you about Dick Nixon. . . . I am very happy that Dick Nixon is my friend. I am very happy to have him as an associate in government. I would be happy to be on any political ticket in which I was a candidate with him. Now, if those words aren’t plain, then it is merely because people can’t understand the plain unvarnished truth”27
NIXON’S WOES WERE NOT YET OVER, despite New Hampshire. To this point, the Democrats had sat back, enjoying the spectacle of Republican infighting over their favorite man to hate, Richard Nixon. But in April they began easing themselves into the battle. They came along from the flank—with charges against Murray Chotiner, not Nixon himself.
Like Nixon, Chotiner had lots of enemies. His hard-hitting, aggressive campaigns were always on the border of unethical practices. He had left many victims in the wake. Democrats on a Senate subcommittee, investigating corruption and influence peddling in military procurement, began looking into some of Chotiner’s lawyer-client relations. The initial results of the probe were promising; it appeared they could charge him with influence peddling, through Nixon.
There was another attempt to attack Nixon through Chotiner that year, by the anti-Semitic press, which damned Nixon for having “that Jew Chotiner” as his campaign manager. Murray deftly turned that charge into an immediate asset—he managed to get editorials in the Jewish press all over the country, decrying racism and pointing with pride to Nixon’s record of fighting discrimination on the Government Contracts Committee.28
The segregationists didn’t much like Nixon either. On March 19, Hagerty reported to the President on the results of a scouting trip he had taken in the South. Things did not look good, Hagerty said, partly because “not one person was for Nixon for Vice President for a second term.” When Hagerty, who was for Nixon, pressed southerners on the cause of their attitude, they mumbled something like “too immature.” But Hagerty’s impression was that “Nixon is in some way connected in Southerners’ minds with the Negro difficulty.”II He admitted that he was “startled by the intensity of the feeling in the South over the Negro question, currently at white heat.”29
Nixon himself was heading south. Exhausted by the enforced inaction, he decided to spend two weeks at Bebe Rebozo’s place in Key Biscayne and just relax.
HE RETURNED, FOURTEEN DAYS LATER, to find that he was still hung up. At an April 9 meeting with Eisenhower, the President continued to urge him to take HEW or Commerce. But, Eisenhower added, “I still insist you must make your decision as to what you want to do. If the answer is yes, I will be happy to have you on the ticket.” Then the “but”—the President said that he kept getting reports “that in some areas there were still great oppositions to you.” Followed by another “but”—“if we start now we can do a job on this opposition.”
After Nixon left, still wondering what his boss really wanted, Hall entered the Oval Office. “I personally like and admire Dick, and he could not have done better,” the President said. “I think he is making a mistake by wanting the job. I would think he would do better by taking a Cabinet post.”30
IN HIS MEMOIRS, Eisenhower wrote that not until seven years later when he read Nixon’s own account of this period, in Six Crises, did he realize that Nixon “regarded that period as one of agonizing uncertainty.” What everyone else saw clearly and immediately, Eisenhower missed altogether, or so at least he claimed.31
Eisenhower really did believe Nixon would be better off with a Cabinet post. This did not mean he was opposed to Nixon as his successor, quite the contrary. As a man whose career had been marked by wide and deep experience in administration on an increasingly larger scale, until culmination in Overlord and the Presidency, Eisenhower naturally believed experience was essential to performance. In addition, as a man who had been a major for sixteen years, Eisenhower knew that patience was indeed a virtue.
Eisenhower felt strongly that Nixon needed administrative experience. The last time Nixon had administered anything larger than his office or campaign staff was in 1944 in the Pacific, as a junior officer commanding a small work detail. He also wished that Nixon would mature, and not be in such a hurry to do so. Eisenhower was clearly correct on both counts. To indulge in a look ahead, one of the characteristics of the Nixon Presidency, 1969–1974, was poor administration, marked by duplication of effort, vague lines of authority, and an inner staff more concerned with politics than government. And in the 1960 campaign, he did and said things that he later wished he had not, things the older and wiser Nixon of 1968 avoided.
The trouble with Eisenhower’s analysis of what was best for Nixon and the country was the President’s damaged heart. It was a subject the President tried not to think about. Nixon, however, could not get it out of his mind. If Nixon volunteered for the Cabinet, his replacement as Vice-President might well be in the White House before the 1960 Republican Convention. In that event, from the perspective of the always-in-a-hurry Nixon, his administrative experience would be worthless.
So Nixon dug in.
ON APRIL 25, two things happened. The Senate subcommittee issued a subpoena on Chotiner. Democrats explained to the press that they believed Chotiner had used his connections with Nixon on behalf of his clients. The next day, Chotiner failed to appear as ordered, risking a contempt citation.32
Also on the twenty-fifth, the President held a press conference. He used it to communicate with Nixon, more effectively than they could ever do face-to-face. Asked if Nixon had yet chartered his own course and reported back, Eisenhower replied, “Well, he hasn’t reported back in the terms in which I used the expression . . . no.”
When Nixon heard the remark, he wrote in his memoirs, “I knew the time had come to act.” He had convinced himself that if he got off the ticket he would hurt Eisenhower more than help him. He reasoned that the party regulars would be so incensed at his dumping that they would stay out of the campaign. He knew Eisenhower felt that Republican dissatisfaction would not hurt him, because the right wing had no place else to go, but Nixon convinced himself that the President “needed more than just their votes.” He needed their money, their enthusiasm, their organization. On that basis, Nixon decided he had to stay (when or how he told Pat he never revealed), and he asked for an appointment with the President the next morning, April 26.33
The meeting went well, despite the continued use of circumlocution in the Eisenhower-Nixon conversations. Nixon opened by saying that “freedom of action” should be maintained as late as possible. There should be an “open field” of candidates, “though this would perhaps create a bit of a hassle.” He explained that “Party people” were expressing concern about “having too much argument between now and Convention time.” They wanted “as much unity as possible.”
Eisenhower said nothing. Nixon plunged on. “Obviously any man would welcome the opportunity to be a Vice-Presidential candidate on this ticket,” Nixon said. Eisenhower nodded. Well, Nixon went on, “I have weighed all the considerations,” and concluded it would be best all around if he stayed on the ticket.
There it was. He had charted his own course, and reported to the President. Eisenhower, who had created the situation, now had to live with it. He suggested that Nixon go outside and announce his decision to the White House press corps. Nixon demurred—would not a statement from the President himself be better? Eisenhower thought not. He called Hagerty into the office and told him to take Nixon out to the reporters to make the announcement. “And you can tell them that I’m delighted by the news.”
But before Nixon left, he told the President that “there’s another matter” that he felt he ought to know about. “It’s the Murray Chotiner case.” Nixon explained that Murray had been accused of representing two hundred gamblers and bookmakers in Los Angeles alone, and that he had collected high fees for representing clothing manufacturers who sold uniforms to the Army, and that he had got those fees because of his connection with Nixon. “The point is,” Nixon summed up for Eisenhower, “the Democrats are going after him because he is involved with people who are bad people.”
Nixon assured the President that neither he nor any member of his staff was involved, that Chotiner was merely an employee of his, that he “is a good man, and has been completely honest through the years,” but that if “anything does turn up, the Administration has no relationship with him at all.”34
Thus reassured, Eisenhower told Nixon to go make his announcement to the press. The conference went well. Nixon said he had told the President, “I would be honored to accept the nomination,” and Hagerty added that Eisenhower had instructed him to say “that he was delighted to hear of the Vice President’s decision.” Nixon then explained that the basis of his decision had been the President’s best interests. He was asked who sought today’s meeting. “I would say that it was a mutual thing,” stretching the truth, but getting closer to the facts when he added that Eisenhower had given him a general invitation to “talk about this matter . . . when I had something to report to him. Consequently, the meeting was arranged in accordance with his wishes.”35
Time magazine called it “the most predictable announcement of the year.” Columnists sneered at Nixon’s implication that he was putting the interests of Eisenhower ahead of his own interests, and derided the notion that he had seriously considered stepping aside.36
Those judgments were probably true enough, but they failed to see a deeper truth, which was that the outcome was always very much in doubt (and indeed continued to be). In meeting this crisis, Nixon had been forced to call on talents he did not ordinarily use—patience, quiet persuasion, logical arguments—as well as some that he did habitually use—perseverance, cold calculation of the forces at work, behind-the-scenes manipulation, all based on his assurance of his solid base with the party regulars. To use a poker metaphor, he had played a game of five-stud with the President, for the highest of all possible stakes, and had won.
NIXON’S ANNOUNCEMENT, supported by Eisenhower’s apparent endorsement, appeared to settle the question of the 1956 Republican ticket. In May, Nixon had a string of successes. Almost thirty-three thousand voters wrote in his name on their ballots in the Oregon primary. The Chotiner case more or less collapsed when Chotiner refused to testify (on the grounds that his relations with his clients were privileged). Critics pointed out that Chotiner was using what amounted to a Fifth Amendment defense, and that Nixon used a different standard in judging Chotiner (innocent, because he had only taken a fee as a lawyer and was not a partner in the enterprise) than he did in judging Gabrielson (even the appearance of wrongdoing was enough to disqualify him as chairman of the RNC). In any case, the Democrats brought no indictment against Chotiner.37 As Ralph de Toledano told Rose Woods, “They sprang it too soon,” and therefore, “I don’t think it will hurt the Boss at all.”38
Nixon also began to attract bright young men, eager to serve in his campaign. On May 22, H. R. Haldeman, of the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm, wrote Nixon “to offer my assistance in the forthcoming campaign.” He assured Nixon he had “a firm belief in you and your work,” and volunteered his full-time services from the convention through the elections. There would be no charge “since my company would give me a leave of absence with salary.”39
Loie Gaunt, Nixon’s office manager at the time, had known Haldeman at UCLA and had kept up some contact since. She told Nixon she felt his offer “a genuine and sincere one,” and that “he would be a good worker.” Nixon asked her to have Ray Arbuthnot get together with Haldeman and make an evaluation. He did, was impressed, and recommended Haldeman.40 Haldeman joined the campaign staff, working full time through to the election as an advance man.
The only bad news for Nixon that May came from Sidney Weinberg, senior partner of the New York investment firm of Goldman Sachs. Weinberg was a strong Dewey man, and Dewey was strong for Nixon. So Weinberg had attempted to get Citizens for Eisenhower (which had bankrolled and managed Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign) to change its name to Citizens for Eisenhower and Nixon. But Lucius Clay, Paul Hoffman, and some others had refused.41 Not that they opposed Nixon—most of them did not—but, as Clay once put it to Eisenhower, because “I don’t care one damn about the Republican Party. I care about you.” Nixon’s supporters, nevertheless, saw the refusal as an indication that the ticket was not yet as settled as it appeared to be.
IF NOT ALREADY UNSETTLED, it became so on June 8, because Eisenhower had a two-hour early-morning operation for ileitis. It was simple, straightforward, and recovery was rapid, but nevertheless it frightened the wits out of people. The immediate concern was subjecting a recent heart-attack victim to such a long operation; the long-range question was how much of a pounding Eisenhower’s sixty-five-year-old body could take. The operation led to speculation that Eisenhower would withdraw from the contest, or even die; in the first instance, Nixon would be the front-runner for the nomination, while in the second he would be the incumbent. No one could do anything about the second possibility, but the first could be challenged. Or, as Nixon put it in his memoirs, Eisenhower’s illness “resurrected the desire to ‘dump Nixon.’ ”42
Rumors flew. According to the “What’s Happening in Washington” column of the Lawyer’s Weekly Report, a long list of prominent Republicans was suddenly working against Nixon, including Dewey, Brownell, Humphrey, Adams, Hagerty, and Clay. Next Drew Pearson reported that John J. McCloy of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Treasury Secretary Humphrey, and others were working to dump Nixon.
Every man named in these stories hastened to write Nixon, assuring him that the reports were not true. These reassurances were satisfying to Nixon, even if he knew—as they all knew that he knew—that he might become President at any moment, thus casting some suspicion on their motives, if not on the facts of their denials.43
The twenty-one Republican governors were willing to take a risk. At the Governors’ Conference in June, they all signed a pledge of support for Eisenhower, but Nixon’s name was omitted because he was “controversial,” and because one of the governors had insisted, “For God’s sake, keep Nixon’s name off it.”44
ON JUNE 30, Nixon got away from the uproar by making a thirteen-day trip to the Far East. It had long since been planned—the occasion was the tenth anniversary of Philippine independence and the upcoming second anniversary of the inauguration of South Vietnam’s President Diem.
Back in 1954, the Geneva Conference had divided Vietnam into a Communist North under Ho Chi Minh and a southern half headed by the Emperor Bao Dai. The United States had not been a signatory to the Geneva Accords, but had promised not to oppose the settlement by force. The Accords called for nationwide elections within two years, but instead Ngo Dinh Diem, the Prime Minister in the southern half, organized a plebiscite in the South only that deposed Bao Dai and created the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam. Diem then became president, and refused to hold the nationwide elections, instead proclaiming South Vietnamese sovereignty, and linking South Vietnam to the West. The Eisenhower Administration had given strong moral and some financial support to Diem. Also back in 1954, the United States had taken the lead in forming the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and pledging SEATO to the defense of South Vietnam. Thus Nixon’s trip to Saigon, Diem’s capital, was in the nature of a continued American stamp of approval of Diem.
Nixon had been a strong supporter of Diem, as he was of all Asians fighting the Communists. His interest in Asia remained high. It was a subject he had returned to time and again in Cabinet meetings. For example, in April, when Sukarno of Indonesia was planning to come to the States for a visit, Nixon had urged the Cabinet members to make every effort to attend every possible social function, because “Asians attach much importance to having persons of importance in attendance.” He persuaded Eisenhower to have the Washington schoolchildren let out for a Sukarno parade.45 In preparation for his July trip, Nixon went through another intense briefing from the State Department. He was making himself into an expert on Asia.
The trip had the benefit of generating favorable publicity. Dick and Pat got their pictures on the front page of The New York Times, meeting President and Mrs. Ramón Magsaysay, and stories about the trip stayed on the front pages for the duration. He got some headlines too. In Manila he cautioned neutral nations against thinking they could outmaneuver the Communists. Those that did “are taking a fearful risk.” He said that the United States respected neutrality, but had “no sympathy” with those nations that drew no moral distinction between the Communist and free worlds.46 (The resulting protests from India and other neutrals forced Dulles, a week later, to say there were “very few, if any,” nations of the “immoral kind.”)47 In Karachi, Pakistan, Nixon warned the nations of Asia against accepting any form of economic or military assistance from the Soviet Union, because the price of such aid was “a rope around the neck.”48 In Saigon, Nixon assured the South Vietnamese that they had the support of the American people in their fight “to make their young republic strong and safe from communist encroachment.”49
HAROLD STASSEN HAS BECOME THE GREAT COMIC FIGURE of American politics, the perennial presidential candidate, the ultimate leader of lost causes. The Washington Evening Star made the classic comment about him: “There’s one thing about Harold E. Stassen—he likes to go down with his ship, and he doesn’t care how many times it’s sunk.”50
But in the summer of 1956, Harold wasn’t so funny, at least not to Nixon. He was a presidential adviser, called by the press the “Secretary of Peace” and credited (wrongly) with the Open Skies proposal Eisenhower made to the Russians in 1955. He was thought to be a superior political manipulator, again credited (again wrongly) with blocking Taft in 1952 and seeing to it that Eisenhower got the nomination.
In early May 1956, Stassen returned to the States from a long and fruitless disarmament conference in London. Although by then Eisenhower had given his blessing to Nixon’s announcement that he would be happy to serve once again as Vice-President, Stassen immediately began a “stop Nixon” campaign. Almost no one in the party was willing to join him in a challenge to the man who might succeed to the Presidency any day, but he pushed ahead nevertheless, spurred on by Eisenhower’s ileitis operation. He took a poll, financed, according to columnist David Lawrence, by a “coterie in New York City . . . with the avowed object of developing statistical data to force Mr. Nixon out of the race.”51
Delighted with the results of the poll, on July 20 Stassen marched into the Oval Office, where he told the President that Nixon’s name on the ticket would cost the Republicans 4 to 6 percent of the electorate. Such losses, Stassen asserted, would in turn cost the Republicans control of Congress.
Eisenhower had earlier fretted over polls that roughly paralleled Stassen’s, but according to his memoirs he found Stassen’s attitude to be “astonishing.” That could hardly have been true, since the fear that Nixon would cost votes had been a regular topic of his political conversations all spring. Eisenhower wrote that he told Stassen, “You are an American citizen, Harold, and free to follow your own judgment in such matters.”52
The President’s next visitor that morning was Art Larson, director of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Eisenhower brought up the subject of Stassen’s poll, and commented that if Nixon was going to cost him 6 percent, “that’s serious.”53 Then he prepared to leave for a meeting of the Presidents of the Americas in Panama, a trip he was undertaking in order to show that his recovery from the operation was complete.
The person who was genuinely astonished by Stassen’s last-minute stop-Nixon move was Nixon. Even more astonishing to the Vice-President was the President’s failure to order Stassen to back off. What made Nixon especially fearful was the obvious unsuitability of Stassen’s proposed replacement for Nixon, Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter. Herter’s name had not appeared on any of the President’s lists of acceptable successors, nor in newspaper speculation. Herter was sixty-one years old, suffered badly from arthritis, came from Harvard, and was not a lively campaigner. All in all, he was about the worst possible choice Stassen could have made, but to Nixon that only made it more remarkable that Eisenhower had not put an immediate stop to Stassen’s ploy.
On July 23, while Eisenhower was still in Panama, Stassen sent a letter to Nixon marked “Personal and Confidential,” delivered by messenger to Rose Woods. Her boss was having lunch with Hall and Persons. She brought in Stassen’s letter. Nixon scanned it, laughed nervously, and said, “Let me read this to you.”54
Stassen had written that he was going to support Herter for Vice-President, and asked Nixon to join him—for the good of the Republican Party. That was hitting Nixon where it counted. Stassen asserted that Nixon on the ticket would cost 6 percent of the vote, which would make a “decisive difference in a number of Senatorial and House seats” and cost the Republicans control of Congress. He gave Nixon some of the details from his poll, then twisted the knife with the information that “the negative side is relatively highest among those best informed and among the younger voters,” which—Stassen explained—meant that the 6 percent figure was likely to grow as the campaign progressed and the voters became better informed.55
That was uncomfortably close to the truth, as those three professional politicians—Nixon, Hall, and Persons—immediately recognized. They agreed that “this could be serious.”56 It was true that Nixon’s position with the party assured him the nomination (unless Eisenhower himself said no at the last minute), but his identification with the party cost the party votes. To Republicans, he looked like a moderate, but to independents and Democrats, he seemed an extreme partisan. And the Democrats hated him more than the Republicans ever loved him. Further, the Republican Party was a distinct minority, which meant that without independent and Democratic votes there would not be another Republican Administration. Eisenhower had those votes, and was going to win no matter who was on the ticket. Of course he wanted as big a personal victory as possible, and even more, he wanted to bring a Republican Congress in with him.
Or so he said. On a number of occasions he told Persons and others that he did not much care who won the congressional elections. He indicated frequently that he preferred southern Democrats as committee chairmen to mossback Republicans. If the President did not care what happened to the Republicans in Congress, why should Nixon? Besides, Nixon had long since convinced himself that what he brought to the ticket—Republican enthusiasm, money, organization—more than paid for what he cost with independents and Democrats. Hall and Persons agreed.
After lunch, Hall returned to the RNC, where he met with his principal assistants, Robert Humphrey and Richard Guylay. Nixon partisans all, they agreed that “the thing had to be closed off fast.” Hall later remarked, “I didn’t think Stassen would get anywhere, but he could create doubt in people’s minds, and you’d have a lot of candidates.” Dan Thornton of Colorado, for example, or Governor Theodore McKeldin of Maryland, or Governor Goodwin Knight of California (the one prominent Republican to support Stassen), plus others who, in Nixon’s words, were “eagerly waiting in the wings.”57
That afternoon, Stassen called a press conference, where he announced his support for Herter. He claimed that Eisenhower had agreed to an open convention (which was stretching Eisenhower’s response to his dump-Nixon campaign considerably). Stassen also said he was “confident President Eisenhower will be pleased to have Chris Herter on the ticket.”58 Nixon said he would “be happy to abide by any decision the President and the delegates make with regard to the Vice Presidential nominee.” He praised Herter and promised “my full support” if Herter got the nomination.59
Stassen’s announcement, and Nixon’s reply, got a big play in the press. Reporters speculated that because Stassen was on the White House staff, Eisenhower himself must be behind this last-minute stop-Nixon drive. Eisenhower’s own comment, when he was asked in Panama about the Stassen press conference, disputed that interpretation, but still it was hardly the ringing defense of Nixon that Nixon wanted so badly to hear. Instead of repudiating Stassen on the spot, Eisenhower—who was peeved that Stassen had stolen the headlines from his Panama trip—told Hagerty to issue a statement stressing Stassen’s right as an American to campaign for whomever he wished, but that he could not conduct independent political activity and remain a member of the “official family.” Therefore, Eisenhower was going to put him on a leave-without-pay status until after the convention.60
Nixon, not knowing what to think, went off to Maryland’s Eastern Shore for two days of brooding and walking along the beach. Friends reported that he was “eating his heart out” with apprehension.61 When well-wishers called to heap scorn on Stassen, Nixon replied, “Don’t underestimate Harold. He’s smart and resourceful.”62
Eisenhower returned to Washington on July 26, where he learned that the Republican Party had rallied behind Nixon. Among numerous denunciations of Stassen that Eisenhower received from prominent Republicans, the one that stood out was an endorsement of Nixon by 180 of the 203 House Republicans. That was a statement of party preference so direct and clear that Eisenhower could not ignore it. Eisenhower decided to put an end to the Stassen business then and there, although characteristically he acted behind the scenes, meanwhile keeping Nixon in some suspense.
Eisenhower had Sherman Adams call Herter and tell him that there was a job waiting for him in the State Department (although Adams never said so directly, it was Under Secretary of State, with an implied promise of the top job after Dulles’ retirement, expected within a year or two). If Herter wanted to be a candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, Adams told him, that was his choice. However, if he did enter the race, the State Department position “would not be possible.” Herter, naturally enough, disavowed any interest in the Vice-Presidency and said he would be happy to place Nixon’s name in nomination at the San Francisco convention, less than a month away.63
AND THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THAT, and would have been had it not been for Eisenhower’s ambiguity about Nixon. The next day, July 27, Eisenhower had a telephone conversation with his close friend Cliff Roberts. Nixon’s name came up. Eisenhower said, “I get peeved about too much talk in calling the other party ‘soft on Communism.’ ” Roberts asked what Eisenhower thought of Stassen’s move. “There’s one little thing, it did stir up some interest. Our program has been so cut and dried, a little interest won’t hurt.”64
Eisenhower still held back from a public endorsement of Nixon. At an August 1 press conference, James Reston asked if it was fair to conclude that Nixon was Eisenhower’s preference. Eisenhower said that Reston could conclude whatever he pleased, “but I have said that I would not express a preference. I have said he is perfectly acceptable to me, as he was in 1952 [when] I also put down a few others that were equally acceptable to me.” He added that the Republicans were going to have an open convention and nominate the best men for the ticket. Merriman Smith reminded him that he had said some weeks earlier that if anyone came into his office to propose a “dump Nixon” move, he would create quite a commotion in his office. “Have you created such a commotion in the wake of Mr. Stassen’s recommendation?” “No,” the President replied, because “no one ever proposed to me that I dump Mr. Nixon. No one, I think, would have that effrontery.”65
That was such an outright denial of the plain truth that it left everyone puzzled. Since Eisenhower had already eliminated the Herter threat, and since there was no other possible candidate at this late date, he knew that the ticket was going to be Ike and Dick. Why, then, did he not issue a ringing endorsement rather than that awful “he is as acceptable as anyone else” business he told Reston? Did he enjoy watching Nixon dangle? Or, more likely, was he only trying to keep some suspense about the convention in order to attract more interest and more viewers?
Nixon knew where at least one Eisenhower stood. When Drew Pearson wrote in his column that Milton Eisenhower was the man who instigated the Stassen move, Milton hastened to write Nixon, telling him it was not only not so, but that “I happen to think Harold Stassen’s action was unforgivable, harmful and childish.”66 In thanking him, Nixon noted that he had received a heavy volume of mail support, “but none could mean more than the one I received from you.”67
One reason Stassen went down with so many ships was that he could never tell when they were sinking under him, indeed couldn’t even tell when the ship had hit the bottom. So in this case, he persisted in his efforts. On August 16, only days before the convention, he wrote Nixon again, asking him to step aside in the interests of the President and of the party. “It is my deep conviction that if you decide to take this step it would be best not only for our country but, in the long run, for your future career.”68
Nixon was in North Carolina at the time, as a houseguest of evangelist Billy Graham, with whom he was developing a friendship. They played some golf together, and talked about religious and moral matters. The chief topic was desegregation. Nixon made a speech on the subject in Nashville, at Graham’s request, at a major religious conference. Nixon took Graham’s line, that integration was morally right but progress toward the goal would have to be slow. Mostly Nixon just relaxed—and ignored Stassen’s letter.69
ON AUGUST 19, the Nixon family flew to California. First stop was Whittier, where Julie and Tricia stayed with their grandparents while Dick and Pat went on to San Francisco. Frank and Hannah were going to bring the girls up in a couple of days.
The Democrats, meeting a week earlier, had nominated Stevenson again; Stevenson had thrown open the vice-presidential nomination to the Convention, an unprecedented action. After a struggle, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee won the prize from Senator John Kennedy. Stevenson’s action gave Stassen one last gasp, and he fired off his final salvo, a letter to every Republican delegate urging a vote for Herter. Eisenhower finally acted directly and personally—he called Stassen into his hotel suite, told Stassen that he had to stop, and capped his humiliation by ordering Stassen to give one of the seconding speeches for Nixon. Then the President told the press that Stassen had become convinced that “the majority of the delegates want Mr. Nixon,” so he was ending his efforts.70
With that, Nixon was, at last, the nominee. He and Pat spent a delightful day in San Francisco; they rode a cable car, ate in a Chinese restaurant, and stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill. Pat held a news conference, which she opened by saying, “I don’t discuss politics,” but she would answer questions about the girls and the Nixon home life. These centered on how much help she had around the house (almost none) to who bought the girls’ clothes (she did). In the afternoon, she shook a thousand hands at a reception, and the next morning attended breakfasts with two state delegations. Finally cornered and asked directly how she felt about Stassen and the nomination, she replied that she would not be disappointed whichever way the balloting went.71
August 22 was the day for the balloting. Early that morning, Nixon got a call from Whittier. His father had suffered a ruptured abdominal artery and was not expected to live. Nixon canceled all his appointments, went with Pat to the airport, and flew down to Los Angeles. When they arrived at the Whittier hospital, Frank Nixon was in an oxygen tent, in great pain, but still able to talk. He told his son to return to San Francisco. “You get back there, Dick, and don’t let that Stassen pull any more last-minute funny business on you.”72 Instead, Nixon stayed in Whittier. He watched on television as Herter put his name into nomination, and Stassen made his seconding speech. Then Nixon was renominated by a vote of 1,323 to 1.
The news of his son’s triumph led to a rally by Frank, who was taken off the critical list. Nixon flew back to San Francisco to give his acceptance speech (which was primarily a eulogy of Eisenhower, “the man of the Century”). Then he returned to Whittier to be with his family. Frank had asked to be moved to his home, so that he could die there. He was unable to communicate, but stable, so the Nixons flew east. They spent a couple of days on the Jersey coast, where Dick played golf with Billy Graham. The Whittier doctors called—the end was near. On August 31, Nixon flew back to California. On September 4, Frank Nixon died. The funeral service was held on September 7, at the East Whittier Friends Meeting House. Nixon, Pat, Hannah, Don, and Ed attended together. They sat behind a curtain. Nixon allowed no photographs.73
HIS FATHER’S ILLNESS AND DEATH took much of the immediate pleasure and pride out of the nomination. It was not a time for celebration. Still, Nixon had much to be proud of and pleased by. He had secured his place as first in the line of succession. In addition, he had further strengthened his ties with the party regulars. He had shown that he had a power base of his own, not so great nor widespread as Eisenhower’s, to be sure, but still greater than anyone else’s.
He had survived. Now he could leave behind him the infighting with his fellow Republicans, and do what he liked to do most, take off after the Democrats.
I. Reston had just reported in the Times that Adams and Brownell were “masterminding” a White House “holding operation” to head off the Vice-President, and added, “Mr. Nixon does not like this and he is not without power to influence the outcome. . . . President Eisenhower could, of course, come out flatly against Mr. Nixon, and that would end it. But he is not yet sure he wants to do that and besides he does not like direct action.”24.
II. No matter how ineffective, Nixon’s work on the Government Contracts Committee, designed to insure minority representation in the labor force on government construction projects through persuasion and publicity, had given him a reputation as an integrationist.