“There is a person who goes all the way back through this thing,” Nixon aide Chapin reflected in 1994, “and that is Murray Chotiner. He was in the White House . . . he leaves; the break-in happens. Murray was the operator for Nixon on God only knows what. . . .”
Nixon had known as early as 1946 that Chotiner was a shady character. He ignored Pat when she voiced her disapproval of the man, yet he knew the connection was better kept hidden. When Nixon saw the draft of the first campaign press release, bearing the letterhead “Murray M. Chotiner and Associates,” he scored the letterhead through in blue ink, noting “Do not use—R.N.”
If Nixon was aware even then that to be linked to Chotiner was synonymous with being linked to organized crime, it was precisely because he was himself similarly involved. That first campaign involved a relationship that has been little reported and never analyzed. At the very start of his political career, Nixon had met with a leading criminal and taken his money. Years later, seated in the governor’s office in Alcatraz prison, Mickey Cohen, the man who had once dominated the mob scene in Los Angeles, signed a statement detailing his role in two Nixon elections, for the House in 1946 and for the Senate in 1950.
Cohen was a flamboyant gangster who had originally been sent to California in the early forties to join Benjamin Siegel—the infamous Bugsy—in the effort to take over the rackets in the West. Siegel and Cohen, both Jews, worked uneasily and often violently alongside the Italian criminals already in place. By 1945, when Siegel began to open up Las Vegas, Cohen was already established, as he put it, as a “power” in Los Angeles. When Richard Nixon was picked as the Republican candidate for the Twelfth District, an area Cohen regarded as his territory, a meeting was arranged. It took place, Cohen said, at Goodfellow’s Grotto, “a little fish house where the politicians met and where they pull the screens across the booths for these kinds of talks. . . . The meeting was arranged by Murray Chotiner.
“It was a matter of one situation leading to another,” as Cohen explained, “Like somebody would say, ‘Well, ya ought to get together with Dick’ or ‘You ought to know Dick.’ He was just starting to get his foot into the door, and Orange County, where he was from, was important to my bookmaking program. I think all I really said to him was something like ‘We got some ideas, we may put some things in motion.’ ”
For his House campaign, Cohen gave Nixon a check for five thousand dollars—that would be about forty-four thousand dollars today—an amount he had negotiated with Myford Irvine of the Irvine Ranch, a huge agricultural concern in Orange County. “The contribution,” according to Cohen, “was important for me and for the County. . . . Irvine was powerful, in as far as he was instrumental and a part and parcel of me running out there. So when he asked, I gave . . . I think a bigger amount was asked, but I Jewed him down to $5,000. . . . Irvine was my man in Orange County on certain propositions.”
Cohen’s connection with Nixon did not end in 1946, for Chotiner sought his help again four years later, during the 1950 Senate race. “I was again asked by Murray Chotiner to raise funds,” Cohen recalled “. . . we had to. . . . See, Chotiner had a brother, Jack, that was a lawyer, one of the guys with the programs with the bookmakers, that also defended some of my guys. . . . I reserved the Banquet Room in the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel for a dinner meeting to which I invited approximately two hundred and fifty persons who were working with me in the gambling fraternity. . . . Everybody from around here that was on the pad naturally had to go to the dinner. It was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money; there wasn’t a legitimate person in the room.”
Among those present, Cohen said, were Joe and Fred Sica, George Capri, Hy Goldbaum, and Jack Dragna. The Sicas were Cohen henchmen. George Capri and Hy Goldbaum ran Las Vegas casinos, representing respectively the interests of Meyer Lansky and the Cleveland mob. Jack Dragna, once known as the Al Capone of Los Angeles, was running the local rackets in reluctant collaboration with the eastern syndicate.
“There was a certain figure we had to raise for that night,” Cohen recalled, “$75,000, a considerable piece of money in those days.* . . . I’m sitting at the affair with a group of my guys from Vegas when my business manager, Mike Howard, says, ‘Mick, we didn’t raise the quota. We’re short $20,000.’ I said, ‘Tell ya what ya do, Mike.’ There were three entrances to this banquet room. I says, ‘Close them.’ Then I got up and I said, ‘Lookit, everybody enjoyed their dinner, everybody happy? Well, we’re short for this quota, and nobody’s going home till this quota’s met.’ ”
According to Cohen, the mobsters quickly rediscovered their generosity. “All the guests seen the doors were being closed, so the quota was met over and above, and that was it.1 Then Nixon made a speech. He made a hop, skip, and jump speech . . . [but] the guy that really done all the speaking was Murray Chotiner.
“In addition to helping Mr. Nixon financially,” said Cohen, “I made arrangements to rent a headquarters for Nixon in the Pacific Finance Building at Eighth and Olive Streets in Los Angeles. . . . My attorney, Sam Rummel, leased the space, but I put up the bankroll, all the money for the printing material and everything. . . . We posted Nixon signs and literature. . . .”2 Cohen said he continued to make large contributions to the Nixon campaign, sometimes through the notorious liquor industry lobbyist Art Samish.
However damning, is this account by a criminal really credible? Did Nixon and Chotiner ask one of the leading mobsters in Los Angeles, a man notorious for his crimes even then, for cash contributions—and in not one but two election campaigns?
The Cohen story was first aired by the columnist Drew Pearson, best known as originator of “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” the nationally syndicated feature carried on in recent times by Jack Anderson. Given its authors, some might argue it was false propaganda, circulated to discredit Nixon and to benefit his Democratic opponents. Pearson, for decades a scourge of corrupt politicians, primarily targeted conservatives and often harried Nixon in the fifties and sixties.
In the spring of 1956, when Chotiner’s links to organized crime were emerging in the Senate hearings, Pearson touched on the Nixon-Cohen connection in his regular radio broadcast. In a one-minute segment he said Cohen had “collected money from the underworld” for Nixon, with Chotiner as the contact man. In a 1959 broadcast he repeated the allegation.
It was in October 1962, only weeks before incumbent California Governor Pat Brown was to face Nixon in the gubernatorial election, that Cohen gave his long statement in prison—the statement from which much of the account in this chapter is taken—to an attorney named Richard Rogan. Rogan was the chief deputy attorney general at the time, as well as a leading Democrat close to the Kennedy brothers. In his autobiography, published in the mid-seventies, Cohen claimed Rogan’s visit was approved in advance by President Kennedy himself. The Democrats, Cohen said, wanted to use his information to discredit Nixon and help Brown. As it turned out, they did not use his statement that year, and Nixon of course lost that election anyway. Pearson got hold of the information, though, and ran it at length in 1968, just before the election that took Nixon to the White House.
The fact that the story was valuable to Nixon’s political enemies does not necessarily make it untrue. But what of the mobster’s own motives? His memoir makes it clear that while he had no use for Nixon—Cohen characterized him as being “like the newspapers stigmatized him . . . a used-car salesman or a three-card monte dealer . . . a hustler”—he also thought Bobby Kennedy was a “vicious little bastard.” The pragmatic Cohen believed that one used whichever politician appeared to offer “the best of what you’ve got going.” In 1968 he hoped his statement would help him obtain parole if the Democrats won, as of course they did not.
The breaking of the story cannot be attributed to any vengeful motive on Cohen’s part. Pearson’s earliest information, in 1956, came not from Cohen but from an informant who in turn had heard it from one of Cohen’s friends, Luis Saldana. Saldana apparently never cooperated with Pearson
, nor at the time did Cohen, who refused to tell his story to the press and resisted testifying to the Senate committee that year, claiming, “I don’t know what it’s all about. . . . I’ve never been mixed up in politics.” Even earlier, in 1952, he would not discuss the episode with Democratic emissaries because, he said, it would be like “ratting.”
Finally, to gauge the truth about the relationship between Cohen and Murray Chotiner, one must consider what happened when—after Pearson’s 1959 broadcast—Chotiner demanded a retraction from him and threatened to sue. The columnist’s private files, examined by the author, reveal that the worried Pearson telephoned Cohen and pressed him for more details. The mobster declined to help but said he thought Chotiner was foolish to be mentioning a lawsuit. “I’ll talk to him,” promised Cohen, “and tell him to forget about it.” The very next day the mobster called back to say that he had indeed spoken with Chotiner, who agreed to drop the matter. Chotiner never did sue—even when Pearson ran Cohen’s full statement in 1968.
Mickey Cohen’s support operation on Nixon’s behalf was no philanthropic initiative undertaken by Cohen alone. The orders came, he made clear in his memoir, from “the proper persons from back East.” The “proper persons,” he explained, were Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, the men who founded the national syndicate, the emperors of American organized crime.3
To Costello and Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen, and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. It was Lansky’s expertise in such areas that established him as the nearest there ever was to a national godfather of organized crime. As reported later in these pages, Lansky encountered Richard Nixon—as he encountered John F. Kennedy—early in his career, probably even before the 1946 election that gave Nixon his start.
“If you were Meyer,” Walter Sheridan, the renowned Senate rackets investigator, once said, “who would you invest your money in? Some politician named Clams Linguini? Or a nice Protestant boy from Whittier, California?”
_____
“I want you to know,” Nixon told a cheering crowd during the Voorhis election, “that I am your candidate primarily because there are no special strings attached to me. I have no support from any special interest or pressure group.” Whatever the extent of his links to organized crime, it is clear that Nixon was very much tied to the world of big money, the banks, and the oilmen. Harry Schuyler, a prominent businessman and mayor of East Whittier, who knew the young Nixon and his backers well, was clear about the relationship. Nixon, he said, was “a natural” for the moneymen who picked him. “The minute he became available he was told in no uncertain terms of what he was offered, a political life that he must accept.”
Osmyn Stout, who had gone to Whittier College with Nixon and watched him being launched in politics, put it another way. “I could see who the Republican committee were,” said Stout, “and I knew he had sold his soul.”
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* * *
Intrigue was second nature to him, an exercise he went through without thinking.
—William Safire, Nixon speechwriter
“He looks like the boy who lived down the block from all of us,” a Washington Times-Herald columnist enthused in January 1947, soon after freshman Representative Richard Nixon had been sworn in. “He’s as typically American as Thanksgiving.” Nixon’s face stared from the page in an idealized portrait next to the report, which praised the “clean” campaign that had brought him victory.
George Reedy, the UPI’s congressional correspondent,* saw another aspect of Nixon. Invited for drinks, he found the congressman sitting with his feet on the desk, coat off, sleeves rolled up. This was rare informality in a man who in the future seemed inseparable from his dark suits, who wore business shoes even for walks on the beach. “It was a very uneasy feeling,” Reedy recalled. “He sort of pulled himself up, as though he had rehearsed the gesture, then told some masculine story—No. 347 out of 500 stories appropriate for all occasions. Not dirty—Pat was standing there with her very tight-lipped smile. It wasn’t an unpleasant afternoon, but there was something weird about it. . . . It was a feeling that we weren’t talking to a human being. Seeing him walk and hearing him talk was like watching a doll, like a Barbie doll. . . .”
The Chicago Tribune’s Walter Trohan, the conservative journalist who became close to the Nixons—close enough to help with the baby-sitting—experienced a similar unease. “From the very beginning,” he said, “I found Nixon more calculating than warm, more self-centered than outgiving, more petty than generous, and more inclined to say what a listener might want to hear than frank enough to reveal his own stand.”
The authorized version of Nixon’s Washington debut is straightforward enough: An earnest young couple drives across the continent and finds an apartment in the suburbs. They wrestle with social etiquette, discovering the hard way that on Capitol Hill “informal” means tuxedo and ballgown. Pat becomes pregnant with their second and last child, another daughter, Julie, born in July 1948. She begins to “despair” that her husband’s work means the early joys of married life are a thing of the past. Richard’s mother and father meanwhile follow him east. Retired and in their sixties, the Nixons take on a Pennsylvania dairy farm. Frank Nixon names his cattle after movie stars, Dorothy Lamour, Loretta Young, and Gary Cooper. Hannah is once again within driving distance of their successful son.
Nixon is ensconced in an office called the attic, a bit of a hike from the chamber, but a sumptuous suite. “I suppose I feel elated,” he says, when fellow freshman John F. Kennedy asks his reaction to having toppled Jerry Voorhis. He tells a writer he has “a lost feeling.” Asked if he has a pet project, he replies, “No, nothing in particular. I was elected to smash the labor bosses. . . .” He is given a job on the Education and Labor Committee, and champions a bill to curb unions.
While most newcomers were appointed to only one committee, Nixon was also named to the House Un-American Activities Committee.* He was reported to have struggled with himself over whether to accept the appointment to such a controversial body, “pacing up and down, lighting one cigarette after another, talking to the ceiling.” Within a month of joining the committee, though, he had become a zealous HUAC activist. His maiden speech was a demand for a contempt of Congress citation against a German Communist active in the United States, Gerhart Eisler. Sentenced to a year in jail, Eisler jumped bail and fled to East Germany. His name has long faded from public memory, but he was a peripheral character in the affair that shot Nixon to national prominence, the Alger Hiss case.1
The Case, as it is known to some aficionados, is a pivotal episode of twentieth-century American history. Anyone with a grounding in modern politics is familiar with its basic elements: Hiss, a handsome forty-three-year-old lawyer and State Department official, was publicly accused in 1948 by Whittaker Chambers, a rumpled former Communist turned Time journalist, of having been not only a secret Communist in the late thirties, but also a Soviet spy.
Chambers claimed Hiss had removed documents from the State Department, had his wife type copies, and then passed them to him for transmission to the Soviets. To support his charges, Chambers produced papers and microfilm—some of it from a hollowed-out pumpkin, hence the popular name Pumpkin Papers—that seemed to be damning evidence against Hiss. They included sixty-four pages that had apparently been copied from 1938-vintage State Department documents by someone using the Hiss family typewriter. Chambers asserted that while he had passed many such packages on to the Russians, he had kept these back by way of insurance against the future.
Because the statute of limitations in the case had expired, Hiss could no longer be tried for espionage. He was charged instead with perjury, for allegedly having lied to a grand jury when he denied both having known Chambers at the relevant time and having supplied him with documents. Although a first trial ended with a hung jury, in 1949, Hiss was found guilty at a second. Sentenced to five years in jail, he remained adamant that he was innocent. He fought to clear his name u
ntil his death in 1996, at the age of ninety-two.
For the right, The Case vindicated the notion that domestic communism was a potent danger, a threat to the country’s security by the Soviet foe. For the left, it marked the start of the period one historian dubbed the Great Fear, infamous for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against American Communists, real or imagined. Central to the left’s mindset was the theory, believed or at least suspected by millions, that Alger Hiss had been the victim of a diabolical frame-up.
It was the young congressman Richard Nixon who spearheaded the pursuit of Hiss. Headline after headline built up the image of the principled crusader who stayed on the trail when others concluded it was leading nowhere, who fought on relentlessly until Hiss was shamed, ruined, and imprisoned. Without The Case, the McCarthy nightmare might have been stillborn, and Nixon, to whom it brought lasting fame, might have remained a relatively obscure politician. It is at the very least highly unlikely that he would have advanced from freshman congressman to vice president in only six years.
After Hiss had been sentenced, Nixon made a four-hour victory speech in the House. He gave it the title “A Lesson for the American People,” and it was a lesson he returned to for the rest of his life. He picked The Case as the opening chapter, the first crisis, of his 1962 book Six Crises, his eulogy to himself. As president, a decade later, he would instruct at least six senior White House aides to read the book. Haldeman, who said he had already read it, was told to read it again. “How he loved that case!” Haldeman recalled. “He was able, somehow, to compare every tough situation we ever encountered, even Watergate, to his handling of the Hiss case.” Charles Colson was to claim he had read Six Crises fourteen times. Nixon referred to the case three times in one conversation with John Dean in 1973, during Watergate. “I conducted that investigation . . .” Nixon told Dean. “We broke that thing without any help.”
The Arrogance of Power Page 10