This was less successful. “My goodness!” said one of the girls, breaking the silence. “Eight o’clock, did you say? That’s only about seven hours from now!” I stood and looked at my watch. “And people are probably going there right now to get the best places!”
“All right,” I laughed in a yielding manner, “I can take a hint! Go ahead and cancel all my afternoon appointments and take the rest, uh, of the day off.” Things were working out better than I might have hoped. I felt freer now—I’d be alone, and alone I could work this thing out, bring it all to some kind of summation, find the words I’d need tonight at the ceremonies. I sat down. But I didn’t mean to. I got up again. I chuckled. I tried on the beanie with the five fingers and then handed it back. I strode cheerfully, chin high, into the maelstrom of my office, threw open the heavy red drapes, turned upon the debris as a manager might turn upon his ballplayers—trailing, exhausted, dispirited, but not yet defeated—in the bottom of the seventh. All right, boys, they’re all watching us now, let’s pick it up and put it together.
While the girls bustled about in the other rooms, tidying up their desks, freshening their makeup, making the necessary phone calls, I pretended to clean up my own office, snatching up the papers disinterestedly from the floor and chairs, stacking them more or less by date, dumping part of them as though carelessly into the wastebasket. “Early hath Life’s mighty question thrilled within the heart of youth,” I mused, recalling that Whittier quotation from over the mantel outside the President’s office back at college, “with a deep and strong beseeching…what and where is—?”
“Shall I empty that wastebasket for you, sir, before I go?”
“What? No! Er, I mean, no, thank you, Rose, that’s very kind, but I’ll take care of it.” I gave her a fatherly look. “You can run along and, uh, enjoy yourself.”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“Of course, I’m sure.” I forced a smile and gestured casually—wrong arm, it was the shoulder I’d struck the cab door with. I winced.
“Oh, Mr. Nixon,” she sighed, “you’re just going to make yourself sick again!”
“If you believe in certain principles of government,” I said in all seriousness—I remembered having said this to my mother once, “you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself if necessary.”
She looked at me. The coffee tasted sour, but I sipped at it nervously. In the outer office there were drawers opening and closing, filing cabinets clicking shut, low hushed titters. “And, uh, anyway…” But she was gone from the room. Well, let them giggle. We all have our liabilities, I thought, I know I won’t win any personality contests, each man has his strong points and his weak points. Public-relations experts have advised me to take speaking lessons, to get in more quips and so forth, but like Lincoln I’m at my best when I’m using the language of the people. Only the people aren’t the same as in his day, they’ve all been to college for one thing, and I don’t have his appetite for building up to climaxes, I hate all those heroics, those fancy rhythms. Anyway, when you really have a crunch, when it is really tough, when the decision to be made may determine the future of war and peace, not just now but for generations to come, people are going to make the choice in terms of an individual who is totally cool, detached, and with some experience, like me, and not some breezy Adlai Stevenson type or his gag writer. And that goes for my goddamn secretaries as much as anybody else.
Charisma, basically, I think most sophisticates say, is style, and mine is robust, intelligent, determined, articulate, aggressive, clinical, thorough, industrious, conscientious, courageous, and cool. This is not merely my opinion, others have said this of me—I have a rule that I’ve always followed in political life, never to attempt to rate myself. That sort of juvenile self-analysis is something I’ve never done. I think that’s the responsibility of others. That feature article planned as a wedding-anniversary gift for Pat and me in the Sunday Post, for example: I could see that it focused on my long workweeks, my coolness under pressure, my popularity as a public speaker, my modesty, and my trouble-shooting talents on behalf of Ike’s amateurs: “catching foul balls and line drives for the administration on the Hill, so quickly that few knew he was in the Capitol outfield.” But especially the workweeks, the discipline: there’s no public-relations gimmick, in school, politics, or just growing up, that will take the place of hard work. In order to pass an exam or make a decision, one must sit on his rear end and dig into the books. In this respect, I was like Stevenson: he was an intellectual and he needed time to contemplate. People liked that “old shoe” image of his—the sole with a hole in it—because it reminded them of a butt worn raw by a lot of laborious and conscientious sitting. But there was no iron there, beneath the hard leather surface Stevenson had a butt of cork, a butt of soft rubber, of warm oatmeal, he was all veneer and no substance, a man plagued with indecision who could speak beautifully but could not act decisively. I could do both, and if my style wasn’t as euphonious as Stevenson’s, it wasn’t as phony either: and it got the votes. I’d won oratorical contests, debates, and extemporaneous speaking contests from grade school to law school, and I was, in effect, still winning them.
This was not to be sneered at. I learned a lot from those debates and contests, the plays I was in, too. You’re not born with “character,” you create this as you go along, and acting parts in plays helps you recognize some of the alternative options—most people don’t realize this, and that’s why they end up with such shabby characters. We’re all conscious of the audience from an early age—but we’re not always aware of the footlights between us. The extempore contests taught me agility, coolness in crisis situations, and how to manipulate ambiguities when you don’t have the facts and aren’t even sure what the subject matter is. I learned in debates that the topic didn’t count for shit, the important thing was strategy, strategy and preparation: to marshal your facts, an army of facts, present them in pyramidal fashion to overwhelm your enemy, undercut his pyramid with slashing attacks on his facts or reasoning, pull off a climactic surprise if possible, and then, win or lose, forget everything and start over again the next morning. Voorhis and Douglas didn’t stand a chance against me. Neither did the Republicans, for that matter, when I got invited to give the main speech at their fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria a year ago. Our dinner, I should say. I knew what was at stake. I knew Dewey had his eye on me. I devoted a full week to preparing that speech, and it turned out to be one of my more successful efforts. When I concluded, the audience gave me a standing ovation. As I sat down, the old kingmaker Tom Dewey grasped my hand and said: “That was a terrific speech. Make me a promise: don’t get fat; don’t lose your zeal. And you can be President some day.”
Me, lose my zeal? Zeal is my charisma! Coolidge liked to say that “four-fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would only sit down and keep still”—but I could never understand why anybody would want them to disappear. I‘m like Teddy Roosevelt, I like to be down in the arena. They used to say of Roosevelt that “when Theodore attends a wedding he wants to be a bride; when he attends a funeral he wants to be the corpse.” I‘m like that. And what’s most important, I have the faith: I believe in the American dream, I believe in it because I have seen it come true in my own life. TIME has said that I‘ve had “a Horatio Alger-like career,” but not even Horatio Alger could have dreamed up a life so American—in the best sense—as mine.
Boy, just thinking about this got me all fired up. As soon as the girls had vacated the place, I locked the door, switched off the airconditioner, threw open the windows, emptied the pockets of my jacket and hung it neatly up, put the cigar in the fridge, loosened my tie, removed my cufflinks and folded up my shirtsleeves, unbuckled my belt, retrieved the notes and letters from the wastebasket, spread everything around me again, and sat back to contemplate it all. Outside, I knew, the tensions were building. The streets were filling up fast, Inspiration House was leaking demonstrators like some kind
of insidious spore, the city was becoming a thicket of angry placards, a forest of diatribe—reaching the center today had been like negotiating some terrible free-fire zone, and my own home out in Spring Valley now seemed far away across an impassable no-man’s-land. Vengeance Valley. The Badlands. Which existed, I knew, not here in the Capital alone, but wound its serpentine way through the whole world, coiling about our periphery, dripping poison as it slithered through the more vulnerable points in the Free World, threatening now to strike at the very heart. Uncle Sam’s countermoves had been dramatic and effective, momentous even, but the Phantom was still dangerous—maybe, backed up like this, more dangerous than ever. This was bigger than anyone had anticipated, perhaps even a tactical mistake, but we were committed now, there was no turning back. It was exactly the kind of desperate situation I was best suited for. I began to understand that Uncle Sam had until the last few weeks protected me from this case so as to maneuver me first into this key role, but that now he needed me, needed my skills and talents, my rhetoric—there was something he wanted from me up there tonight that only I could provide.
A cold chill passed through me: was Eisenhower’s life in danger? Was the Incarnation to come to me even sooner than I had expected? I sat there for a moment in a kind of mindless shock, staring blankly into space, unable to think of anything but the Inauguration ceremonies, Pat at my side, Mom in the front row, my hand on the family Bible, the blinding light…and then slowly I calmed down. I realized that this was not the best way to get started. I recalled that I was fatalistic about politics, I made myself remember that. I brought my attention carefully back to the Rosenberg papers, my speech for the ceremonies. I picked up a letter from Julius to Ethel. I read: “Somewhere in the long ago I had a normal life with a sweet wife and two fine children and now all is gone and we’re facing death….”
I stood, stretched, went to gaze out the open window, get my thoughts in order. I knew better than to try to psyche out Uncle Sam. The important thing was to do my duty here, be prepared, know the facts, find the phrases. I recalled my high-school paper on the Constitution: “There are those who, under the pretense of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, have incited riots, assailed our patriotism, and denounced the Constitution….” Yes, I should look that up, get back to the origins—and I should read the Rosenberg letters again, more seriously this time, also the FBI dossiers, the news clippings. Some mosaic out of all that, a succinct rebuttal, something on brainwashing maybe (I was watching the demonstrators down below), “the deadly danger of the propaganda that warps the mind…destroys the will of a people to resist tyranny….” Needed to rethink the trial through from some fresh angle, too, assimilate more of the background material, examine the Death House years, get an overview. Why, for example, was the campaign to save the Rosenbergs so designed by the Phantom’s agents as virtually to ensure their deaths? What was the Phantom up to? Was this some kind of trap?
The people down below seemed to be having a picnic, listening to popular songs on their portable radios, eating ice cream and box lunches, playing checkers, sunbathing. Some of them had placards protesting the executions. Were they all dupes? And the Rosenbergs? Who was behind them? Were they really as transparent as they seemed? Or were there strange patterns of depravity concealed behind the middle-class clichés of their trial testimony, secret messages buried in the banalities of their Death House letters? How had their son managed to get elected president of his fifth-grade class in the middle of all this, and what did this signify? Was he on his way to a Horatio Alger-like career, too? All these questions: why did I feel I had to ask them? Why did I have to keep going back over this material, starting over, driving myself? I felt caught up in some endless quest, a martyr to duty…but duty to what? My self perhaps, its creation and improvement, the need to show I had what it takes, that I deserved, no matter what I got….
This dogged sense of purpose, this conviction that easy wins are tainted, lay behind most of my difficulties with girls, I realized. The problem was, all the girls I met when I was young seemed to be living lives that were out of mesh with my own. Out of sync, I think they say in the movies. They seemed to be on some other plane, moving at some other angle. Not that I understood much about where I was going, I admit. I never thought about national politics, for example, didn’t even vote when I was old enough, in spite of all the preaching I used to do in high-school essays about it, had no idea I’d be where I am today, nor even had any specific ambition to be here. Yet I knew instinctively that those girls weren’t going where I was going. I was driving toward the center, they were spinning around on some merry-go-round out at the edges. And because of that, I was afraid of too much intimacy with them, more afraid than they were, afraid of getting lost in some maze of emotions, of surrendering my self-control, afraid of…afraid of exile. From myself. Even though I craved that surrender, ached for release from my inordinate sense of mission. Those long lonely nights up in the bell tower, dreams deep and dangerous…
My weakness, I knew, was an extreme susceptibility to love, to passion. This is not obvious, but it is true. A politician cannot display his emotions in public, this is part of the job. Nor can you enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships. You can’t confide absolutely in anyone. You can’t talk too much about your personal plans, your personal feelings. I believe in keeping my own counsel. It’s something like wearing clothing—if you let your hair down, you feel too naked. Yet, I longed for this nakedness. My testing ground was Ola, the only steady girlfriend I had before Pat. She was pretty, lively, exciting, she brought out my more reckless side, in fact I loved her, but she wouldn’t get off the merry-go-round, and I couldn’t get on it. It took me six years to realize that—we went together, off and on, all through my senior year in high school, four years of college, and my first year at Duke—or maybe I realized it all the time, maybe the six years was for something else….
Ola was the daughter of the local police chief, and maybe that was why I started going with her. However far we went, I thought, it would be somehow legal. Under the arm of the law. At the same time, it seemed dangerous, dating a cop’s kid like that, a challenge worthy of the class president and wingading honors man. Sometimes I walked around school feeling a little bit like Douglas Fairbanks slipping into the caliph’s harem. I admit, I knew nothing about girls, I had only brothers, I didn’t even know what their underside looked like or what you were supposed to do when you got there. “Menstruation” was a distant rumor. I expected holes of some kind, but I wasn’t sure how many—at the burlesque shows, all you saw were tits and bottoms, and even then we were too nervous to sit down in the front rows. I didn’t know what a clitoris was until years after I was married. In fact, I’m still not sure I’d know one if I saw one. Ola had no brothers, perhaps we started even, but I supposed at the time she knew everything, she was cute and popular and very self-confident. And a Democrat besides, which suggested a lot to me at the time. Also, she liked all the dangerous things—which in those days were the movies with their “jazz babies” and “red-hot mamas,” beach parties, and dancing—I was clumsy as hell at dancing, but it always made me hot, I could see why the wild people liked it.
We got off to a terrific start, playing the romantic leads in a high-school Latin Club production of Aeneas and Dido. There were omens in this: Dido was abandoned by Aeneas and killed herself. Not that Ola had it in her to kill herself, far from it—but she did marry a guy who locked her into that small town forever, a kind of suicide, and I’ve always thought she did it to spite me. On the other hand, to be accurate, it was really she who abandoned me. But that was years later; the end came slowly. At the time, the play gave me a vocabulary different from my own that I was able to use for a while with great success. And those white togas, they were like flimsy nightshirts, like bedsheets—I had to wear a jockstrap so as not to make a spectacle of myself. Those goddamn Greeks and Romans, they must have been at it all the time. I got a handful myself every time I thr
ew myself on Queen Dido’s bier at the end, best part I ever had. Everything was great—but only so long as the play lasted. Then she fell into the same clichés about me as all the other girls. Maybe they’d been talking to her too much. I fought against this, acted silly or loud or flirtatious or belligerent. I hated myself at these times. I assumed an air of possession wherever we went, looking old and already half-married, hoping she would fall into the same patterns and find herself past the barrier without remembering when she’d crossed it. She looked up to me, more than any other girl, even Pat, she went with me everywhere, said I was a man of the world and she felt so stupid around me, sometimes even almost afraid, but she wouldn’t give in, stop being frivolous, and just be mine. She was even more goddamn stubborn than I was.
We had arguments. About religion, politics, friends, what to do. But we didn’t argue about what was really the problem. We didn’t even mention it. I tried everything. When my brother Harold died, I even suggested I might get TB too, might be dead soon… This was even less successful than the political arguments. Each day the opportunity receded. I had black moods and unhealthy imaginings—I felt she knew what was wrong and was only taunting me. And it wasn’t her virginity I wanted, no, I was frightened in fact by the prospect—what I wanted was her surrender. I wanted her to give herself to me, utterly, abjectly, deliriously. That was all. She had nothing to fear. And perhaps much to gain. Our political arguments were surface manifestations of this deeper struggle. I thought if I could so break her self-assurance as to make a Republican of her, the rest would follow. She did not understand the importance of these arguments. She would get flippant about them, make fun of my seriousness. I would become ill-tempered and bark at her. She’d start to cry. But I wasn’t being doctrinaire—all of us Quakers were for Hoover in 1932, that was natural, but I hardly noticed when Roosevelt smashed him that fall. We were in the middle of final rehearsals for Bird-in-Hand and I gave the greatest performance of my life on opening night, just two days after the elections (admittedly, I got a certain perverse pleasure out of the line about what kind of Conservative I was: “Governing folks as isn’t fit to govern themselves!”). And then a week later I entertained my entire fraternity in Grandma Milhous’s home, the whole football team was in the fraternity and the party was to celebrate the Poets’ victory over Loyola, forty guys were there—Christ, what the hell did we care about politics? Couldn’t Ola see this?
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