FROM THE BEGINNING, ’58 looked as if it was going to be a bad year for the Republicans. In Nixon’s long, solitary walks along the Florida beaches, Republican prospects in the off-year elections were the main subject he brooded over.
He was alone by choice and by need. Earlier in his career he had been a man who could—sometimes—listen to and take advice from people he respected, like Roy Day of the Committee of 100 back in 1946, or Bert Andrews and Bob Stripling in 1948, or Murray Chotiner in 1950 and 1952. But increasingly he liked thinking his own way through problems. When he sought other people’s views, he did so to gauge public opinion, or to flatter them, not to find new solutions.
He made up his own mind; however, he almost never stuck to it. On the important issues of his era, except foreign aid and civil rights, at one time or another he came down squarely on both sides. This led one set of observers to conclude that he was the ultimate pragmatist, while another set saw him as the ultimate cynic. The first group claimed that he made up his mind on the basis of what was good for the country, and that changing circumstances caused his changes of mind. The second group charged that he made up his mind on the basis of what was good for Richard Nixon, and that he changed his mind as a part of his constant pursuit of the Presidency.
Because Nixon himself was so given to epigrams, he brought out the best—and the worst—in retaliation. “When Nixon’s public and private personalities meet,” said one such epigram, “they shake hands.” If he ever wrestled with his conscience, said another, “the match was fixed.” Even when his critics agreed with his conclusions, as in foreign aid or on civil rights, they charged that his motives were wrong, based as they were—so it was said—on his obsessive drive for the Presidency.
Nixon himself maintained that he was not obsessed with the Presidency. He had a highly realistic view of politics and his own position in the political world. In a series of interviews with Earl Mazo in 1958, he was both candid and insightful in speculating on his prospects for the 1960 nomination.
“No one can tell in advance what the issues will be six months later,” he said, dismissing the idea that he took this or that position because of its possible effect on 1960.1 “The only thing certain about a public figure’s popularity . . . is that it is never stable, never static. It varies very greatly, up and down, sometimes very violently.” He was a fatalist, he said, and he recognized that “the one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up,” which was as prophetic a line as ever he uttered.2
“I don’t think that a leader can control to any great extent his destiny,” Nixon said. “Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction. That is why men like Taft, Clay, Webster . . . never made it, much as they wanted to be president, though all of them had leadership qualities that would have made them good presidents. They never made it because circumstances, in each case, called for somebody else.” The same might well happen to him in 1960.3
Nixon recognized that he did not control events, that luck, chance, or fate could throw him up to the top or cast him down to the bottom. But he also recognized that if circumstances were such that he did become the nominee, the nomination would be worthless unless the Republican Party was revived.
As he walked the beaches, he reflected on the sad shape of the party. First of all, it was leaderless. Taft was dead, Dewey had retired from national politics, and Eisenhower was infinitely more concerned with the arms race and a balanced budget than he was with the fortunes of the Republican Party. Khrushchev, not Kennedy, occupied Eisenhower’s mind.
“Frankly,” Eisenhower told Arthur Larson early in the 1958 campaign, “I don’t care too much about the congressional elections.” Come to that, he added, “I’d just as soon see [Republican Senator Karl] Mundt get beat.”4 He certainly was not going to lift a finger to help Bill Knowland in his campaign for governor of California. Until the party made its 1960 nomination, no one could step forward to fill the vacuum in party leadership.
Adding to Nixon’s frustration was his deep disagreement with the President over some basic policy issues, especially taxes, public works spending during the mild 1958 recession, the budget in general and spending on missiles and DOD in particular. He was coming to regard Eisenhower as an old fogy stuck in standpattism. So did many of his friends. In April 1958, Joe Alsop wrote his friend Isaiah Berlin, “One prays—how odd it seems!—for the course of nature to transfer the burden to Nixon (who exactly resembles an heir to a very rich family . . . now utterly distraught because Papa has grown a little senile and spends his time throwing the family fortune out the window—really he is like that. I lunched with him the other day, and he all but asked me how it was possible to argue with a ramolli papa without getting disinherited yourself!)”5
Others shared Alsop’s view. In March, Charlie McWhorter had lunch with Carroll Kilpatrick of the Washington Post. In a memo McWhorter reported to Nixon that “Senator Fulbright told Kilpatrick confidentially that he never knew anyone who could so quickly see the point at issue in a problem, and that he, Fulbright, wishes you were President right now.”6
The issues were all running against the Republicans, adding to Nixon’s woes. Sometimes it was their own fault. John Bricker in Ohio, Bill Knowland in California, and others were campaigning on a right-to-work platform, which was rousing organized labor against them as nothing else could. Recession and its consequences, a falling GNP with a rising unemployment rate, also were hurting the Republicans badly. So was their farm policy—Benson’s attempts to get the government out of farming, to reduce the stockpile, and to lower the parity rate were widely resented in the farm belt, and widely blamed for falling commodity prices.
In the face of the recession, Eisenhower refused either to cut taxes, as many Republicans urged, or to appreciably speed up the Interstate Highway program, defense spending, and the missile program. Eisenhower’s standpat approach to the economy satisfied no one except Treasury Secretary Anderson, who was as fanatically devoted to a balanced budget as Eisenhower was.
Nixon thought Eisenhower was badly mistaken, but he never attempted to change the President’s mind in any direct confrontation. Nor did he, nor could he, attempt to build a political movement to undercut Eisenhower. But he did give a public hint here and there of his disagreement, to indicate both that he was his own man and that things would be different if he were to become President. In private, outside the White House, he pushed as hard as he dared for new policies.
“I AM CONCERNED ABOUT THE TENDENCY in this Administration to be sort of a care-taker,” Nixon wrote Father Cronin in August, to “keep the best of the past—things are good—let’s don’t rock the boat.” Nixon believed “we must not approach the problems with resistance to change—etc.—we must go out and look for new ideas. We talk all about finding the way to the moon and the exploration of outer space—let’s do a little exploration in the economic field.”
Nixon was providing Cronin with notes for a speech Cronin was writing. Nixon told him, “This is a speech which I will pitch to the business community—one which I will circulate as being my economic philosophy but in addition to that it will have a progress touch to it other than the stand-pat conservative economics that Anderson and his crowd are constantly parrotting.” And again, “I want to give Republicans something so that they can say this is the philosophy that we have. This is something we have to offer—it is not just a stand-pat philosophy.”7
The philosophy was free enterprise unleashed. Major tax cuts, he had come to believe, especially in the higher brackets, would unloose a flood of investment capital, which would provide new jobs and pull the country out of the recession. The basic idea eventually became commonplace (and indeed became policy under Jack Kennedy and again with Ronald Reagan). But in 1958 the idea of cutting taxes at a time that government revenues were down because of a recession was unthinkable to Eisenhower and Anderson.
“While popular politically,” Nixon said, “the idea that we can get more tax revenue simply by soaking the rich is phony and unworkable because the tax rates now are at such a level that we have dried up that source. You couldn’t squeeze any more taxes out of the people in the higher brackets at this point than you could get juice out of a cueball.” Lowering taxes “would have the effect of stimulating economic growth by unleashing capital and encouraging new capital. This, in turn, would lead not only to more revenue for the government, but even more important, it would inevitably produce more and better jobs for our people.”8
In September, he unveiled his plan in a speech at Harvard University. He was careful in proposing it; he did not call for an immediate tax cut, which would have infuriated Anderson and Eisenhower, but only suggested revisions in the tax code, to be studied when the new Congress went to work in January 1959. He also had Charlie McWhorter call Anderson. “Tell him I am making this speech at Harvard and that I am projecting for the future and suggesting certain tax reforms—not as Administration policies but as matters that should be considered in the next session. I have deliberately not cleared it with Anderson because I did not want him to be on the spot. Anderson can say anything he wants—that Treasury has under continuing study this whole issue of tax reform.”9
He was just as careful in preparing the speech. His instructions to Cronin were detailed and extensive. He said he wanted a “frontal attack on reducing the take from the higher brackets—immediately this is political—most people say privately it is right—point out that if our economy is going to grow, if we are going to have the incentives—if we are going to have the capital we have to move. Point out the barrenness of the New Deal, Fair Deal, ADA approach to economics.” The Democrats said they wanted to raise the floor. Fine, responded Nixon, “but you cannot raise the floor without raising the ceiling as well or you get in a squeeze.”
He wanted to go after labor, using West Germany as an example. “They have encouraged private enterprise and they have not had runaway labor. I want to hit this spiral of wage increases without increased productivity. I have to hit it frontally and make a positive suggestion or two. The approach I don’t like and one that intends [sic] to backfire is I am appealing to the labor workers over the head of the union bosses.”
He wanted to create a Republican philosophy, one that people could rally around, one that emphasized growth and progress in the economy and in national defense. “This idea that you can’t do things—that we can’t afford things—constantly in national defense we are always coming up to this we can’t afford this.” Nixon thought the nation could afford it, but he could not say so publicly: “At this point I can’t have a break with the President on national defense but on the other hand I would go further than he does in saying that we do considerably more.”10
In the speech, delivered on September 6, Nixon asserted that “there are strong reasons to believe that the stimulating effects of even a small cut in the corporate tax rate would lead to more rather than less revenue. . . . In the area of personal income the almost confiscatory rates in the highest brackets stifle and prevent risk-taking and encourage tax avoidance devices. The small loss of revenue caused by some reduction in these rates would inevitably be offset by the new investment and business expansion which would result.” In a direct criticism of the Eisenhower/Anderson position on the budget, he declared, “We must not allow the fear of a temporary budget deficit to put us in a strait jacket which will keep us from doing what we ought to do to insure economic growth.”11
NIXON WANTED WIDE DISTRIBUTION OF HIS HARVARD SPEECH. He told Cronin to “submit a prospective list for mailing this speech to people on the economic side—the egghead group—the business mailing list—the Young Republican Presidents—NAM—etc.”12 He sent it out, with a covering letter, to editors around the country.13 On September 23, two weeks after delivering the speech, he wrote Henry Luce, reminding him that in recent discussions “we talked about the need for more Republicans getting out in public with an affirmative approach to our national problems.” He said he had made his Harvard speech in that spirit, called it “one of the most important speeches I have ever made,” and then complained that “not a solitary line about that speech has appeared in either Time or Life.” Businessmen all over the country had heard about it, Nixon claimed, and were ordering multiple copies—one industrialist was going to distribute 150,000 copies in booklet form. “Even The Washington Post produced a highly favorable editorial in probably the first kind words they have had for me in the past six years.”14 But not a word from the Luce empire. Nor was there to be any—for the good reason that what Nixon was suggesting Eisenhower was ignoring. Nixon’s ideas on taxation policy, strong as they were—as time showed—were not brutally rejected by the Administration. Rather, they were coldly ignored.
ONE OF THE CRITICAL ISSUES IN ’58 was right-to-work. Taft-Hartley had given states the opportunity to outlaw the closed shop, and a number were seeking to do so, most importantly Ohio and California. Republicans in those states thought the issue was a winner. Nixon’s instincts told him that right-to-work, at least that year, was a loser. But Chotiner was the only Republican in California who agreed with him.15 The others wanted him to support right-to-work. Nixon had an aide call Kyle Palmer of the Los Angeles Times. “Tell him that I do not plan to say anything one way or the other. Will stay with position that I voted for Taft-Hartley bill which leaves this decision up to the states, would be improper for a federal official to take a position other than that.”16
That was not good enough for the fat cats who paid for the campaigns. Chotiner wrote Nixon to warn him that NAM (National Association of Manufacturers) people in California wanted to know the answer to two questions: Would Dick support right-to-work? Would he stump the state for Bill Knowland? “If the answer is no to either one,” Murray warned, “the group is supposed to be of a mind to write you off.”17
Nixon remained neutral. Three days after Chotiner wrote, Nixon told Father Cronin, “Obviously I am not going to take a position on right-to-work—I am going to avoid that. I can’t say I am for it or against it because if I say I am against it they will say I am against Knowland.”18 He never did say whether he was for it or against it, but he did insist that it was a loser for ’58. And he deplored the split it was causing in the Republican Party.
THE REPUBLICANS WERE ALSO TEARING THEMSELVES APART over Sherman Adams, who became an even bigger issue than right-to-work that summer. In a neat reversal of what the Republicans had done to them in 1947 and 1948, the Democrats used their control of the congressional committees to uncover a little corruption in the Eisenhower Administration. Their target was Adams, and they hit him in June, with an investigation into his relations with Bernard Goldfine, a New England industrialist who had given Adams small presents (a vicuña coat became the most famous) and paid his hotel bills when he was in Boston. Adams, in turn (in return, the Democrats charged), made some phone calls to federal agencies in Goldfine’s behalf.
The whole Adams furor had a surreal quality to it. What Adams did for Goldfine was the small change of politics. The total worth of the bills paid over five years amounted to little more than $3,000. It also turned out that Goldfine had given equal or greater amounts to a number of congressmen. But naturally enough, a balanced and relative view of the matter was not the Democrats’ view.
A number of things made Adams particularly vulnerable and thus a profitable target. First and foremost, nobody liked the man. He was incapable of small talk and had never learned how to use the words that everyone else uses to make conversation possible, words like “hello” and “thank you” and “goodbye.” Eisenhower once painted a portrait of Adams, done from a photograph as a surprise. When Eisenhower presented it to Adams, the chief of staff had not so much as a word of praise for the effort. “Mr. President,” he muttered, “. . . you flattered me.” He then turned on his heel and walked out of the Oval Office.19
Adams’ role added to his unpopularity. He was the manager of the door, the one who decided who got in to see the President. Or rather, announced, because in fact the President made the decision, which Adams merely implemented. But congressmen and politicians ascribed absolute powers to Adams, calling him the most powerful man in Washington. This was so far from the truth that it is hard to figure out how such a view became so popular. Clearly one reason was Adams himself, who not only shared the view but promoted it. Another was Eisenhower’s leadership style, what Fred Greenstein has so nicely characterized as “hidden-hand leadership.”
Republican vulnerability on any corruption issue was obvious. Nixon and his friends had hit the Democrats so hard on corruption in 1952 that they had invited a counterattack. When it came, Nixon’s first impulse was to open an offensive. As he remarked that summer, “I don’t think anybody ever is as good on the defense as on the offense, but whenever anybody attacks, I believe the way to answer is not simply to defend, but to take the offensive.”20 In this case, he put his staff to work on reseaching gifts given to FDR and Harry Truman. The lists they worked up were quite impressive, but it turned out they could not be used. Despite coats (including a mink for Eleanor), jewels, and other valuable items, Eisenhower let Nixon know he didn’t want a word of criticism. The reason was that Eisenhower himself had accepted lots of valuable gifts from his rich friends.21
Other Republicans sensed that there could be no effective counterattack and were prepared to retreat. A number of senators called for Adams’ resignation, including Knowland and Barry Gold-water, Republican of Arizona. In the case of Guy Gabrielson back in 1951, Nixon had been alone in demanding the RNC chairman’s resignation, and had at that time insisted on absolute purity as a prerequisite for a Republican officeholder. But in 1958 he knew how much Adams meant to Eisenhower, so he joined the save-Adams wing of the party. He accused Goldwater, Knowland, and the other critics of “acting like a bunch of cannibals.” He charged that they were only helping the Democrats, and that “it doesn’t take much guts to kick a guy when he is down.”22
But defending Adams proved impossible. As the Democrats continued to hit the headlines with new accusations, Republican morale sank, and contributions all but disappeared. The polls predicted disaster for the Republicans. They would have anyway, but Adams made the perfect scapegoat. That he had to resign, for the good of the party, was obvious to every Republican in the country—except Adams. And Eisenhower was not the man to fire anyone who had been loyal to him and served him well, an Eisenhower characteristic that had worked to Nixon’s advantage back in ’56. The trick became how to get Adams to resign. The amount of time and effort that went into this simple proposition was quite incredible. One would have thought, from the way it was handled, that Adams was being asked to renounce the throne of England.
ON JULY 15, Nixon had breakfast with Eisenhower. The President never mentioned Adams by name, but he did bemoan the state of the party. Nixon then had a long talk with Adams. Emphasizing that he was not speaking for Eisenhower, he tried to talk Adams into resigning. Adams made it clear that if Eisenhower asked for his resignation, he would have it, but only if Eisenhower asked.23
Eisenhower could not bring himself to ask, and the issue stayed alive. In late August, just before Congress adjourned, Eisenhower and Nixon talked. It was the beginning of a complex minuet. Nixon explained to the President that the party could not stand up for Adams because he was going to hurt the candidates badly in the election. Eisenhower thought that “Sherm could use that as a good reason for his resigning” (which ignored the fact that Sherm had already rejected it as a reason for resigning), and hoped that Nixon could “have a talk with Sherm after Congress adjourns.”
When Congress adjourned, on August 24, Nixon, Pat, and the girls took the train to The Greenbrier in West Virginia. Every vacation they had taken since 1947 had been cut short by politics, but Nixon promised this time would be different.24
The next morning, he got a call from the White House. Ann Whitman took notes: “The President reminded the Vice President of a long talk they had had about a certain individual; he said he did not think their plan should be forgotten. The President said ‘Of course I could do it but I thought we had agreed that you should.’ ” Nixon said that he had heard the Democrats planned to reopen the Adams hearings in late September, “a move that was of course flagrantly political.” Eisenhower sighed. “I was really hoping,” he said, “that we could get the matter resolved before then.”25
This last expression, Ann Whitman wrote in her diary, “the Vice President took (as did I) to be an order.” Nixon was back in Washington that afternoon, leaving Pat and the girls in West Virginia. He saw Adams, then reported the results to Whitman: “He said he was as blunt as it was possible to be; that he had appealed to Governor Adams on the basis that the Republicans were going to lose seats in the Congress and they were going to blame loss on Governor Adams, that he would therefore find it more difficult to operate.” But Adams rejected the arguments, saw Eisenhower himself, and convinced the President that he should stay.26
The following day, Eisenhower asked Nixon to play golf with him. On the course, Eisenhower explained, “I can’t fire a man who is sincere just for political reasons. He must resign in a way I can’t refuse.” Then the President mused, “I think Sherm must have misunderstood what you said.” Nixon thought he had understood well enough, it was just that he would respond only to word from the man himself. Nixon also quoted Adams’ remark: “ ‘Who will take my place? I’ve never heard anyone suggested’ ” Eisenhower flushed, then said curtly and coldly, “That’s my problem, not his.”27
Over the next few days, Eisenhower’s determination hardened. One of his closest friends, Cliff Roberts, told him the affair was the cause of Republican “hopelessness,” and Winthrop Aldrich told him that Goldfine really was a crook, that he was tarnishing the White House itself, and that “this man [Adams] has got to go or we [the Republican Party] are done.”28
Nixon having failed to persuade Adams to resign, Eisenhower turned to Meade Alcorn, the new chairman of the RNC. Alcorn met with Nixon to plan a strategy. He wanted Nixon to join him and Persons in the confrontation with Adams, but Nixon excused himself. He did offer a suggestion—that Alcorn find some way to convince Adams that he was speaking for the President.
Evidently Alcorn did, because on September 17 Adams called the President. He said he was thinking of resigning but needed some time to think over his method and statement—he thought he would be ready in a month. Eisenhower replied with a lovely example of his jumbled syntax and contradictory meanings within one sentence that nevertheless got the point across: “If anything is done and we make any critical decision, as I have always said, you will have to take the initiative yourself.” He did not want to put any pressure on Adams, or do “anything that looks cold and indifferent.” Finally, he dropped the ax—he read Adams the statement he intended to issue when he accepted the resignation, a statement full of praise for Adams’ integrity, ability, and devotion to his country. Less than a week later, Eisenhower accepted Adams’ resignation. The boil had been lanced, but too late to do the Republicans any good in the ’58 elections.29
AS CONGRESS WOUND DOWN, politics heated up. The campaign was under way. It was obvious that Eisenhower was not going to participate; except for Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, no one on the Cabinet was going to participate; if the Republicans were to have a national leader, it had to be Nixon.
His friends nevertheless urged him to stay out. General Douglas MacArthur wrote, “If I had one word of advice, it would be to abstain. . . . You have established an invincible position that time and your own immediate silence will immeasurably strengthen.”30 Tom Dewey told him, “I know that all those old party wheelhorses will tell you stories that will pluck your heartstrings, but you’re toying with your chance to be President. Don’t do it, Dick. You’ve already done enough, and 1960 is what counts now.”31
Such advice—and it came from many others—was predicated on the assumption that the Republicans were going to take a bad licking, and that if Nixon entered the campaign with his usual stumping across the country, he would be blamed for the loss and branded a loser. That was true enough, but it ignored other facts. After six years of the Eisenhower Presidency, the Republican Party was in disarray. It had no genuine leadership. Its percentage of the vote had fallen off in every election since 1946, with the single exception of 1952, and was now at its lowest ebb. It could no longer draw on Ike’s popularity, which in any case had fallen for the first time below a 50 percent approval rating. Unless the party was revived, its 1960 nomination would be worthless.
In his memoirs, Nixon explained his decision to once again hit the campaign trail—“I was deluged by appeals from across the country to appear on behalf of Republican candidates. In the end, I took on the task because it had to be done, and because there wasn’t anyone else to do it.”32 The further truth was that he never thought seriously of not doing it.
On August 22, Nixon and Dulles had one of their long telephone conversations. “N said this is the political season and Kennedy and the boys are starting on the [missile] gap. N suspects they may try to make an issue of defense policy in the campaign.” That was going to hurt, Nixon knew, especially because Eisenhower was talking about suspending nuclear testing, not spending more on defense. “The Sec thinks the suspension of testing will be well regarded in the country. N agreed hesitatingly and said you can’t tell—might get a mixed reaction on that.” When Congress adjourned, Nixon added, “there will be an interval of a couple of weeks and then we will be in the middle of rough politics. The Sec has to stay out of it but would not rule out the possibility that he make a couple of good ringing defenses of our policies. N said that would be good. The Sec asked re foreign aid and N said they would pass it—how much? N said a lot has been done and he thinks we will get ¾s of the difference. N will be going away with his family and then to a beach alone later. And then on to the campaign. N said we don’t want people to keep us on the defensive. Agreed. N will let them have it between the eyes if they get too tough.”33
Nixon’s problem was that he had to defend the Eisenhower Administration. It was difficult to attack the Democrats after six years of Republican rule. Nixon could not charge them with various and sundry errors and shortcomings; the only way he could take the offensive was to warn about what would happen in the event of a Democratic victory.
His basic speech, drafted by Cronin and extensively revised by Nixon, began with the question, “What would happen if the Democrats swept Congress?” Nixon’s reply was a question of his own: “Which Democratic Party do you mean?” The southern conservatives, he said, “have a good record on foreign policy and government spending,” but “their record is bad on civil rights.” Then there was “the radical-ADA wing of the Democratic Party, which dominates the national organization.” This wing “consists largely of a group whose thinking was solidified in the first four years of the New Deal. Since 1936, they have stopped thinking. But they have been planning and plotting to take over again and give us another dish of deficit hash on boondoggle bread.”
Nixon claimed there were two divisions to the radical wing. “There is the ADA group with both feet planted firmly on Cloud Nine. On the next cloud are the labor politicians.” What would happen if the radical Democrats took over? “It would be the end to government economy for the next two years. . . . Any hope of bringing the budget into balance will be gone. Taxes would have to go up sharply. Prices would again get out of hand. In the area of foreign policy, the appetite for appeasement would dominate.” A Democratic victory, in short, would be a disaster.34
Nixon’s emphasis on the two wings of the Democratic Party allowed him to make private appeals to the southern senators. After Little Rock, the Republican Party had little hope of breaking up the Solid South anytime soon, but Eisenhower and Nixon wanted to retain and solidify the alliance with southern conservatives. So Nixon told one of his aides to “call Bebe [Rebozo] and ask him to tell Senators Smathers and Johnson that although it isn’t always carried in the papers, RN has been careful in every instance to make a distinction between the radical Democrats and the real Democrats.” Bebe should remind them that Nixon often said nice things about southern senators, and warn them that “if the radical Democrat candidates are elected the real Democrats will no longer be able to control the party.” In addition, “if Bebe thinks it advisable,” he should tell them that “RN of course understands that they have to take him on. Also, Smathers might want to pass along to Symington, Mansfield, and Kennedy that under no circumstances is RN coming into their states, even tho he has been asked to many times.” Nixon summed up: “It’s just like Smathers privately says—he doesn’t want too many [Democrats] to win because of the radicals. Naturally, Smathers can’t say that publicly.”35
Not all southern senators were on Nixon’s “good guy” list. Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, for example, was suspect. Nixon wanted to put his feet to the fire, because Fulbright voted a liberal line when in Washington, while talking a conservative line back home. “Last year in the Little Rock crisis,” Nixon noted in a memo to an aide, “both Senators Fulbright and [John] McClellan [also of Arkansas] were absent and silent during most of the time, particularly the otherwise vocal Fulbright. We should put these Senators on the spot. To deal only with Governor Faubus gives him too much of a build-up, and even if Fulbright lines up with Faubus, it will help to tarnish him for future attacks on the Administration.”36
ON CIVIL RIGHTS, Nixon and the Repubicans were caught in a hopeless situation. Neither Eisenhower’s dramatic and decisive action at Little Rock nor the passage of the Administration’s 1957 Civil Rights Act had drawn any appreciable number of Negro voters out of the party of FDR and back to the party of Lincoln, but they had seriously set back progress toward the creation of a Republican Party in the South. There was a widespread suspicion in Washington “that Nixon would welcome racial antagonisms to split the Democratic party and win in Eastern and Western states the Negro votes which could decide the presidential election.”37 The suspicion was unfounded. Nixon knew there was no profit for him or his party in racial antagonism. As to the split in the Democratic party, he did not have to lift a finger to bring it about or to maintain it, not when northern Democrats were calling for “freedom now” and southerners were responding “resistance forever.”
As befit the moderate that he was on the race issue, Nixon did his best to keep it out of the campaign. Privately, he explained, “I feel strongly that civil rights is primarily a moral rather than a legal question. Laws play a necessary part, of course. But the approach of those who say ‘Education alone is the answer’ and ‘Leave us alone and this thing will eventually work out’ is not adequate. It is just as unrealistic to assume that passing a law or handing down a court decision will solve this problem. Where human relations are concerned, a law isn’t worth the paper it is written on unless it has the moral support of the majority of the people. . . . Just passing laws and trying to enforce them isn’t going to work any better than prohibition did.” He thought the place to start mobilizing the moral conscience of the nation was among the young, because “they have a minimum of prejudice.” Thus he believed that a moderate implementation of school desegregation was the “constructive” way.38
WHAT NIXON DID TALK ABOUT IN THE CAMPAIGN, aside from the catastrophes that would befall the country in the event of a Democratic victory, was the need for Republicans to get to work. In so doing, he was taking on a virtually impossible task, because Republican demoralization was so bad, Republican coffers so low, that there was a feeling of total hopelessness. Nixon shared it.39 Nevertheless he assumed the responsibility of acting as party prod and cheerleader. It was a bit like being on the third string at Whittier College football games, when Whittier was playing Southern Cal. Although there was no hope for Whittier, Nixon was up and down the sidelines, encouraging the players, slapping them on the back, telling them to get out there and fight.
He was alone in making optimistic forecasts. In Wyoming: “I find increasing evidence that the political pollsters and prophets who have been predicting a decisive Democratic victory are in for the surprise of their lives on November 4.” In Wisconsin: “Thousands of moderate Democrats will turn the tide in close races in the Northern and Western states by voting for Republican candidates.”40
On October 19, he sent all GOP candidates a telegram. “The tide that was running so strongly against us has taken a sharp turn in our favor,” he said, without a shred of evidence. But he needed to exhort, not predict. “If we make the fight of our lives and mount a massive offensive . . . we can turn what appeared to be a certain defeat into victory. . . . All Republican candidates and spokesmen should radiate optimism and should be on the offensive.”41
He undercut himself, however, by insisting on telling his audiences about the great sacrifice he was making for them. In Indianapolis on September 29: “Some of my Republican friends have even urged me to do as little as possible in this campaign so as to avoid being associated with a losing cause.” In Garden City, Long Island, October 23: “Many friends have warned me of the political risks involved in being associated with a losing campaign.” Then the reassurance that it did not matter: “What happens to me in this campaign is relatively unimportant. What happens to the Republican party is more important.” Finally the explanation: “Win or lose, it is unforgivable to lack the courage to fight for the principles we believe in.”42
Insofar as it reminded the Republicans of how much they owed to Dick Nixon, and how much he was sacrificing for their sake, the theme was helpful to Nixon. But insofar as it made Republicans wonder why they should exert themselves when the top people in the party were whispering to Nixon that he should stay away from a certain losing cause, it was bad for Republicn morale. Making things worse, with one exception the members of the Cabinet were sitting this one out, to Nixon’s disgust, which only added to the impression that anyone with any brains was saving his money, time, and reputation in ’58 and staying out. Adding to the malaise was the fact that the exception was Ezra Taft Benson, the most unpopular man in the Cabinet. Each time he spoke in the farm belt he lost more votes.
WHATEVER THE DIFFICULTIES AND COMPLEXITIES, Nixon plunged ahead, campaigning across twenty-five states and making innumerable speeches. Except when forecasting what the “radical-ADA wing” would do once in power, he was positive and upbeat, stressing Republican gains. Once again repporters began writing about a new Nixon. Cabell Phillips of The New York Times thought he had “matured.” To Phillips, “He no longer has the unctuous countenance of a superannuated ‘All-American Boy,’ and has acquired instead a certain sedateness that better becomes his age and his station.” Still, Phillips was not ready to forget the old Nixon, “a crafty, shrewd politician whose disarming youthfulness masks a ruthless ambition, for whom expedience takes the place of principles, and whose most effective weapon is the imputation of dubious loyalty to his opponents.”
Phillips gives a word picture of Nixon on the campaign trail: “The brisk, buoyant march to the head table, the exaggerated handshaking with the other guests, follow a ritual pattern not unlike that used to show off a fighter in the prize ring. Mrs. Nixon, fragile and shy, is an important prop in this pageantry; there is always an extra measure of applause when the crowd recognizes her. His platform manner is that of a sales promotion manager pepping up his sales force. . . . His posture is mobile and expressive, and he scowls or smiles or betrays indignation or whips the air with a clenched fist, at precisely the right moment and with good elocutionary effect. His mood is earnest and evangelical and tinged now and then with righteous anger.”43
AS A MEMBER OF CONGRESS IN 1948, when he was investigating Alger Hiss, Nixon lived on leaks from federal bureaucrats. As a member of the Eisenhower Administration, he detested leaks. He hated them so much, in fact, that he let his emotions show, and thereby damaged the image of the new Nixon, recalling to Phillips’ mind the old Nixon.
The incident concerned American policy in the Far East. The Chinese Communists were shelling the tiny offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which were held by the Chinese Nationalists. War threatened. Eisenhower’s policy, as in an earlier crisis in the same place, was to defend Quemoy and Matsu. Many Democrats, John Kennedy among them, were questioning his wisdom of risking a world war over such a minuscule matter. Nixon had supported the President.
On September 27, someone in the State Department leaked a story to The New York Times. It was not much of a story—the gist was that the department had received five thousand letters on the Quemoy-Matsu situation and that 80 percent of them were critical of Administration policy. Although it was a common practice for the Administration to release mail counts when they were favorable, the leak of this adverse count made Nixon furious. On his own, he undertook to counter and denounce it.
The day of the leak, Nixon issued a statement. “I am shocked,” he began. “What concerns me primarily is not the patent and deliberate effort of a State Department subordinate to undercut the Secretary of State and sabotage his policy. What is of far greater concern is the apparent assumption that the weight of the mail rather than the weight of the evidence should be the controlling factor in determining American foreign policy. . . . If we indulge in the kind of thinking which assumes that foreign policy decisions should be made on the basis of opinion polls, we might as well decide now to surrender our position of world leadership to the Communists and to become a second-rate nation.”44
Nixon’s overreaction, and his implicit threat to government employees who “sabotaged” policy decisions through leaks, caused not only Phillips but a number of other reporters to recall the old Nixon. Costello wrote, “It was a deliberate attempt to intimidate federal workers [which] exposed [him] again to a charge of ‘fascist tendencies’ for no one could escape the inference that, if it were his administration, anyone running afoul of policy, even inadvertently, could expect only the swiftest and most merciless reprisals.”45
Dulles was alarmed too. He told reporters he did not think there had been deliberate sabotage. Then he called Nixon, who got him to agree that “the man who put it out should have cleared it.” Nixon urged Dulles to have a full-fledged press conference. Dulles thought he might, because otherwise “the Communists may conclude we may have reached the point where we are not able to take forcible action against them.” That was a gross exaggeration too, but Nixon liked it. “N said to say that and also N understands it is the case a lot of it [the five thousand letters] was stimulated. N said could the Sec say that. . . . The Sec said he did not make the sabotage the burden of his argument. N said the Sec might at least indicate he thinks it was unauthorized and unwise. . . . The Sec said he can’t say he has proof. . . . N said no, but that was the intent—say the Sec has no proof but that the effect was to undercut. . . . They agreed he could say that.”46
But Dulles’ attempts at explanation did little good. Over the following week, newspapers asserted that “Nixon goofed,” that the incident unmasked his “fascist tendencies,” and so on. He received nearly a thousand letters, 60 percent of them hostile, some violently so. A New York businessman wrote that he had felt the only hope for the nation was “the election of Dick Nixon in 1960, [but] now I am not so sure. You have committed an egregious blunder. . . . My advice to you, sir, is to eat crow promptly and in a big way.”47
In response to the criticisms, Nixon prepared a long, defensive form letter. “Let me make two points very clear,” he wrote. “I uphold without reservation the right and duty of Americans to express their views to government officials. I equally defend the right of our free press to seek out and publish such information as legitimate news.” Then he made two more points clear. First, the mail should never decide policy—“For example, the fact that my mail at times has run as high as ten to one against integration has not caused me to change my view that fighting for racial justice is for me a moral as well as a legal obligation.” Second: “For us to yield in the face of Communist pressures in Formosa would be disastrous,” not because of any strategic importance “but because we must always fight for the principle that use of force to accomplish international objectives can never be condoned or rewarded.”48
But the statement was not directed at the Communists, nor at public opinion. Shortly after the 1958 elections, Nixon confessed his real—many would have thought obvious—motive. He said that his statement was directed at “a group in the State Department that keeps trying to undercut Dulles’ Far Eastern policies.” He said he weighed the risk of “saying what I did” and decided he had to do it. “I believe the statement had the effect I intended it to have.” Nixon argued that the warning implicit in his statement “will discourage State Department personnel who disagree with administration policy from assuming the right to buck it publicly.”49
THE TEMPEST OVER NIXON’S STATEMENT on disloyal State Department employees had barely subsided when he was in trouble again. On October 13, he switched from defending the Administration’s policy of defending Quemoy and Matsu to attacking his favorite enemies, Harry Truman and Dean Acheson. He denounced the Democratic Party’s “sorry record of retreat and appeasement” and compared Eisenhower’s foreign-policy record “with the record of failure of the seven years that preceded it.” He damned the “defensive, defeatist fuzzy-headed thinking which contributed to the loss of China and led to the Korean war.
“In a nutshell,” he concluded, “the Acheson foreign policy resulted in war and the Eisenhower-Dulles policy resulted in peace.”50
Dulles was unhappy with Nixon’s speech. He did not want the tense and complex Quemoy-Matsu situation made into a campaign issue. At a press conference the next morning, a reporter asked Dulles whether current aspects of foreign policy should be debated on the stump. Dulles answered that the practice was “highly undesirable” and added, “I would hope that both sides would calm down on this aspect of the debate.” This was widely regarded as a rebuke to Nixon.
Nixon called Dulles. The Secretary agreed to issue a clarifying statement to the effect that of course when the Democrats attacked Eisenhower’s foreign policy, someone had to reply. But that same morning, October 15, Eisenhower had his own press conference. The President said, “I do subscribe to this theory: foreign policy ought to be kept out of partisan debate. . . . I realize that when someone makes a charge another individual is going to reply. I deplore that. . . . America’s best interests in the world will be served if we do not indulge in this kind of thing.” The President’s rebuke made headlines.51
It was a storm that could have broken only over Nixon’s head. It was not his words but his theme that caused such an uproar. Many politicians and political observers were highly suspicious of the new Nixon, and always on the lookout for traces of the old Nixon, which was the reason for the reaction to his earlier statement. In his attack on Truman/Acheson he accused them of “retreat and appeasement,” not “surrender and treason,” as he had in 1952. Similarly, he charged that Democratic policies “contributed” to the loss of China—back in ’52 the word was “led.”
But however much Nixon moderated his words, the theme was still the same, the reaction as strong. Eisenhower and Dulles were resigned to a Democratic victory in November, and knew they would have to work with a Democratic Congress the next two years. Getting the Democrats all riled up over Nixon’s irresponsible innuendos about their loyalty was exactly what they did not want.
But what was good for the country was not good for the Republican Party—at least as Nixon saw it. At a press conference in San Francisco, reporters asked him to comment on Eisenhower’s statement earlier that day about the need to keep foreign policy out of the campaign. “This, I think, is a proper position for the President,” he said, but added that “for us who have the responsibility of carrying the weight of this campaign to stand by and to allow our policies to be attacked with impunity by our opponents without reply would lead to inevitable defeat.” Nixon went on: “One of the reasons the Republican party is in trouble today is because we have allowed people to criticize our policies and we have not stood up and answered effectively. . . . I intend to continue to answer the attacks. . . . That’s my view of a political campaign.”
Good enough, but it did not speak to the real point, which was that Nixon had not defended the Quemoy-Matsu policy, he had attacked Truman and Acheson. So when Eisenhower learned of Nixon’s press conference, he sent the Vice-President a telegram to clarify things. “I want to point out the following,” he began. “Both political parties have taken a common stand on the essential foundation of a foreign policy. Both of us are dedicated to peace, to the renunciation of force except for defense, to the principles of the United Nations Charter, to opposing Communist expansion, to promoting the defensive and economic strength of the free world through cooperative action.” Such matters, the President declared, “do not lend themselves to political argument.”
But, Eisenhower continued, when the Democrats attacked the “administrative operation of foreign policy,” why then “these need to be answered whenever they occur.” The President was specific; with regard to American policy in Lebanon and Formosa, “these actions, when criticized, should be supported by our side. No one can do this more effectively than you.”52
In a separate telegram, the President told Nixon, “If there exists in your mind any possible misunderstanding, please call me on the telephone at your convenience.”53
Nixon understood well enough. Four days later, in Baltimore, he declared, “I do not question the sincerity or patriotism of those who criticize our policies. Our differences are not in ends but in means.
“There is no war party in the United States. All Americans want peace.
“There is no party of surrender in the United States. . . .
“There is only one party of treason in the United States—the Communist party. . . . ”54
He even reached out to Harry Truman. As always, they talked to each other through the newspapers. On the campaign trail, Nixon praised Truman’s decisive response to the North Korean invasion, and for his sponsorship of the Marshall Plan. He called Truman “a gallant warrior.” In Sioux Falls, on October 25, newsmen reported that Nixon’s “cordiality towards Truman reached such a peak this week that Mr. Nixon was asked when and where the final peace would be made. The Vice President—who plays the piano too—replied, ‘The hatchet will be buried when the National Press Club gets us up there to play a duet.’ ” The club immediately called Truman. Harry would have nothing to do with the proposal. “He has called me a traitor,” Truman said, “and I don’t like that. Why would I do a thing like this? I’ve refused to enter the Senate when he was there.”55
THERE WAS ONE MORE FLAP TO ENDURE in the ’58 campaign, this last one centering around Nelson Rockefeller. He was running for governor on the Republican ticket in New York, and beyond that, almost everyone assumed, for the Republican nomination for President in 1960. The common assumption was that a big win by Rockefeller in New York, coupled with a Democratic sweep in California, would make him the leading contender for the ’60 nomination. Rockefeller’s strategy in New York was to stick strictly to local issues. He not only would not defend Eisenhower’s policies, he went out of his way to dissociate himself from them (on precisely the same issues—taxes and defense spending—that Nixon privately also disagreed with the President), to the point that he turned down an opportunity to appear on television with Eisenhower.
On October 23, Nixon came to New York for a major fund-raising speech. Rockefeller decided to keep his distance, saying he would not campaign with Nixon and did not want Nixon campaigning for him. He had heard that the New York Post, a Democratic paper influential with New York’s liberals, was going to endorse him, but that the endorsement hinged on his attitude toward Nixon. At the dinner, a Theodore Roosevelt anniversary at Garden City, Long Island, Nixon denounced the “defeatist” mood in the Repubican Party and gave his usual pep talk. He knew he was in liberal country, where the only hope Republicans had was to attract independent and Democratic voters, so as Harrison Salisbury noted in The New York Times, “he dulled the sharpness of some of the barbs that he has directed against the ‘radicals’ and the ‘radical wing’ of the Democratic party.” Dewey thought it was a “tour de force of the first magnitude,” and told Nixon so, but the Times headline was “ROCKEFELLER FAILS TO SEE NIXON,” and Salisbury’s story emphasized that Nixon had mentioned Rocky only twice, while he praised Republican senatorial candidate Kenneth Keating on seven occasions.56
Dewey and other Republicans in New York began putting pressure on Rockefeller to patch up the apparent rift in the party. Rockefeller, whose political career was characterized by indecision, changed his mind about seeing Nixon. He arranged for a breakfast meeting. This too became headlines. It also enraged Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the Post. She wrote in her column that her newspaper “might well have endorsed Nelson Rockefeller” had he not broken bread with Richard Nixon. “To us,” she explained, “Nixonism has replaced McCarthyism as the greatest threat to the prestige of our nation today.”57
DESPITE ALL HIS CHEERLEADING, right down to the wire, Nixon tried to prepare himself for the worst on election night. But no one could have anticipated just how bad it was going to be. The Republicans suffered a massive defeat, unprecedented, and decisive. The ’58 election gave the Democrats control of the government so completely that they held it for the next decade. They increased their majority in the Senate by thirteen seats, bringing the proportion to 62 to 34. They won forty-seven additional seats in the House, where they now had a 292 to 153 majority. They won thirteen of the twenty-one gubernatorial races, and thus controlled thirty-four of the forty-eight statehouses. Senators Bricker in Ohio and Knowland in California had lost badly, as had right-to-work. Among the few bright spots for the Republicans were Goldwater’s victory in Arizona, Rockefeller’s big win in New York (where Keating also won), and Hugh Scott’s Senate win in Pennsylvania. But overall, the Republicans share of the vote had dropped precipitously. In 1956, Republican congressional candidates had run almost even with the Democrats—28.7 million Republican votes to 29.8 million Democratic—but in 1958, the Democrats had a margin of more than 5 million.
The morning after this doleful news, Dulles called Nixon. “The Sec said he is proud to be a New Yorker. N said he would add to that Oregon, R.I. and Arizona. The Sec does not feel discouraged about 1960 and N said you don’t? The Sec said it seems to him it demonstrates there are not any national issues that predominated. N said it was all local. Right-to-work lost us 4 states, something else lost us 4 more and the recession lost us 2. N said the farm thing cost us. N said we kept the House losses to less than 50. The Sec said we need to be thinking pretty hard pretty soon about 1960 and what we are going to do in the meantime because there is a lot of work to be done.” Naturally enough, Nixon agreed.
Dulles tried to buck up Nixon. “The Sec said N did a wonderful job. N felt he helped Keating. Keating and Scott will be helpful to the Sec.” Then Nixon got back to the issue at hand. “N said this party has to be remade. There is one asset—a lot who were reelected are all right on foreign aid—those [Democrats] elected are spenders and Rayburn and Johnson will not be able to control them and the Pres can make an issue by vetoing some of these bills.”58
That was thin gruel indeed, and failed to cheer Nixon for any length of time. Even when he wrote his memoirs, twenty years later, the thought of that election night made him “wince.” So did the postmortems by the commentators, who were saying that the big winner among Republicans in 1958 was Rockefeller, and Nixon was the big loser. “It seemed that the worst fears of my friends and advisers had been realized,” Nixon wrote. “My campaigning had had little visible effect, had gained me little thanks or credit, and had tarred me with the brush of partisan defeat at a time when . . . Rockefeller [was] basking in the glory of victory. Perhaps Dewey had been right; I should have sat it out.”59
Of course he knew that the party regulars would not forget that Dick was the only national figure to hit the campaign trail for the Republicans, but he also knew that the number of Republicans was relatively small and by all indications growing smaller. He could not see how Dulles could say that the results did not worry him with regard to 1960.
NO MATTER HOW BAD THE NEWS, it was not in Nixon’s character to remain enshrouded in gloom. The day after the election, he went back to work. He began by sending a form letter to every successful Republican candidate, telling them that “I only wish that I, personally, could have done more.” He claimed that the party “came out of this campaign stronger than we went in because of the very fact that we went down fighting.”60 To the losers he wrote that “I felt the losses we suffered this year as much as if I had been on the ballot.” To both winners and losers, he said, “I look forward to working with you in rebuilding our Republican Party strength at every level over the next two years.”61
Nixon wrote one letter to a Democratic loser, Congressman Brooks Hays of Arkansas, a moderate who had tried to broker between the President and Governor Faubus in the Little Rock crisis and had become a target of the segregationists as a consequence. Nixon paid Hays some handsome compliments: “I can say without qualification that there was no more tragic result of this last election, from the standpoint of the nation, than your defeat. When statesmanship of the type you represent in such an exemplary way becomes the victim of demagoguery and prejudice, it is time for men of good will to exert more positive leadership.”62
Shortly thereafter, the New York Herald Tribune ran an article on the letter. The next day, Charlie McWhorter had a memo for Nixon. “Scotty Reston called; his remarks were as follows: ‘Charlie—this is in the nature of an unfriendly call. We who work on The New York Times are well aware of the Republican propensities of the Herald Tribune and their reasons for giving excellent coverage to the activities of the Vice President. We of the Times are also ready and willing to cover activities of the Vice President. But we don’t seem to be getting any cooperation’ ” Then Reston mentioned the “Brooks Hays letter which was given to the Trib.” Reston said there were times when he would be willing to help Nixon, “but this can not be played both ways. I am deadly serious about this, Charlie, and if he (the VP) wants to play it that way, then we want to know it.”63
Nixon sent a memo back. Tell Scotty, he said, that it was just good reporting, not favoritism. A reporter from the Herald Tribune had asked Nixon if he had talked to Hays after the election. Nixon said he had not, but indicated that he had written. The reporter then asked Hays for a copy of the letter. “Above all,” Nixon concluded his memo, “don’t complain about the lack of coverage in the Times—just give Scotty the straight story.”64
HAROLD STASSEN, who had lost a primary election for governor of Pennsylvania, blamed Nixon for the party debacle. On November 12, Stassen had a short meeting with Eisenhower in the Oval Office. When he emerged, he told reporters it was time to dump Nixon and embrace Rockefeller. Because he was in the White House when he said it, and had just met with the President, Stassen’s remarks made headlines. Nixon was in Key Biscayne at the time; Eisenhower called him on the telephone to apologize.65 Nixon had just had a wisdom tooth pulled. While under sedation he had mumbled a campaign speech, part of which was high praise for Pat for her behavior in Caracas, so he was too groggy to do more than mumble a reply.66 Bob Donovan of the Herald Tribune, meanwhile, called Charlie McWhorter to say “that if the President had had the same ‘guts’ as FDR, he would have blasted Stassen out of the White House.”67
But Nixon had to undertake his own defense. He wrote Charles Wilson, former Secretary of Defense, “As you have no doubt noted, some of the politicians like Harold Stassen, and political pundits like Scotty Reston, now claim that I was the ‘architect of the Republican defeat.’ I, personally, however, do not see how I could have followed any other course. It seemed vitally important to me, even though I knew we were going to lose, that we go down fighting. Had we done otherwise, our losses probably would have been even greater, and what spirit there was in the Party Faithful would have been completely killed.”68
Barry Goldwater stood by Nixon. On December 16, he wrote, “I believe you are the person who must select the spot on which the party is going to stand; put the flag there; and then rally the forces around it.” Not surprisingly, Goldwater thought “that spot must be to the right of center.” Goldwater assured Nixon that if he did that, “then I can assure you that your team will begin to build, its strength will grow, and in 1960, not only you, but the party will be successful.”69
Nixon’s reply was noncommittal about where he was going to put the flag, but realistic about the prospects: “At this time the nomination in 1960 is not going to be worth anything to any Republican and I think you will agree there is considerable chance that nothing we can do will save the situation.” He did promise to “make an all out fight,” because “we owe it to the Party.”70
The gossip, meanwhile, had it that the men who had backed Eisenhower in 1952 were now organizing behind Rockefeller for 1960. But Rockefeller himself denied any presidential ambitions. In December, he told Meade Alcorn (who he knew was Nixon’s friend and would pass it along) that his only concern was in doing a good job for New York, and in helping the Republican Party. He also said some nice things about Nixon. Neither Nixon nor his friends believed a word of this.71
IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME since Eisenhower had done anything helpful for Nixon, but he made up for it in late November, when he sent the Vice-President to England to represent the United States at the dedicaton of the American Chapel in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The chapel, built with pennies contributed by British schoolchildren (no large donations were accepted), was dedicated to American servicemen killed in action while stationed in Britain during the war. A glorious piece of religious architecture, it is virtually impossible for any American to visit it without shedding at least a few tears. This was a choice assignment, and Nixon made the most of it.
His major speech was before the English-Speaking Union at London’s Guildhall, where Woodrow Wilson and Eisenhower had previously spoken. Nixon was appropriately eloquent. He called for “a great offensive against the evils of poverty, disease and misery” in the underdeveloped areas of the world, on a scale far greater “than any the American people or Congress have ever yet dared to contemplate.”
“What must be made clear and unmistakable for all the world to see,” said the Vice-President, “is that free peoples can compete with and surpass totalitarian nations in producing economic progress. No people in the world today should be forced to choose between bread and freedom.”72
The British were impressed, and for their part they went out of their way to impress Nixon, who for all they knew might well be the next American President. At cocktail parties, dinners, and private meetings, the British put forward their best people, from Churchill through Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to junior members of the Labour Party (to his great surprise, Nixon was much impressed by the Labour politicians he met). The only sour note came at Thanksgiving dinner at the American Embassy. Nixon sat next to Queen Elizabeth II, but he sat uncomfortably, because his tuxedo did not fit. It seemed that he only discovered someone had forgotten to pack his tux forty-five minutes before the queen arrived, and had to borrow one. Pat was chagrined. “I’ll never let anybody else pack Richard’s clothes again,” she told reporters. “This is the first trip he ever went on that I didn’t pack for him. It will never happen again.”73
Drew Middleton did a wrap-up on the trip for The New York Times. Nixon, he wrote, “who arrived billed as an uncouth adventurer in the political jungles, departed trailing clouds of statesmanship and esteem. . . . In the higher echelons of government, the British found Mr. Nixon well informed—which they do not always expect in American politicians—ready to listen and a good but not over-eager expositor of United States policies.” Middleton’s summary was as grand as the occasion for the trip: “No man of imagination can go through a ceremony like a dedication of the American Memorial Chapel in St. Paul’s without being deeply impressed by the stability of Britain. There he was, Richard Milhous Nixon from Yorba Linda, Calif., standing next to a Queen whose throne has existed for more than a thousand years on a site where Christians have worshipped for thirteen and a half centuries.”74
When he returned, Nixon wrote Pat Hillings (who had left his seat from Nixon’s old congressional district to run, unsuccessfully, for Attorney General of California). Nixon said the trip had been “pretty rugged,” especially a half-hour question period with the students at Oxford, a press conference with the international press corps, and a Meet the Press–type program on BBC. “All in all, it was quite an intellectual exercise. I was, frankly, lucky to come out alive when you consider the number of mistakes I might have made!” Still, he complained about the press coverage, both in Britain and at home. He told Hillings, “I am more and more coming to your conclusion that greater use of television is the only answer to combat this type of activity and to keep the press honest. . . . The image that commentators and the cartoonists (Herblock, et al) have in the main painted of me is generally such an unfavorable one that I can’t see how letting people look at the subject himself could be harmful!”75
To Herb Klein, Nixon complained that “our so-called ‘liberal’ friends will never say die. Now the thing they seem to find wrong about me is that I didn’t do anything wrong! For example, the Manchester Guardian said ‘the Vice President never put a foot wrong. The question is whether he did not put it right a little too often. Many people prefer to the smooth competence of a Nixon the impulsive mistakes of a Truman—that it is a matter of political psychology of the elusive quality that makes people trust a man.’ I guess you just can’t win!”
IN THE SECOND PAGE OF HIS LETTER to Klein about his British trip, Nixon returned to reality and got down to business. “I would be interested in having your appraisal of the Gallup polls which showed considerable strength for Rockefeller as against me and also a sharp increase in Kennedy’s strength in his trial heat with me. I anticipated some falloff as a result of the campaign but I was somewhat surprised that it was as heavy as this. Your expert analysis would be welcome!”76
It was time to start gearing up for the 1960 Republican Convention. One thing about politics—so long as a man has the stamina, no defeat is final. There is always the next campaign.