The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  A similar comment on the Nixon-McCarthy relationship comes from a leader of the Soviet Union, but it was perceptive even considering the source. “When McCarthy’s star started to fade,” Nikita Khrushchev told an American visitor in the sixties, “Nixon turned his back on him. So he was an unprincipled puppet, the most dangerous kind.”

  In 1954 Nixon asked a colleague, James Bassett, to dine with him at a favorite Washington restaurant, La Salle de Bois. He downed three gins, followed by white wine with oysters, guffawed at a dirty joke, and then said brusquely of McCarthy: “It’s probably time we dumped him.” In the same conversation, Bassett noted in his journal, “RN said he’s 100% for the President, and will do anything needed. But anything!” Even so, as presiding officer when the Senate finally brought McCarthy’s antics to an end a few months later, Nixon used his prerogative to sweeten the pill, striking out the word “censure” from the wording of a motion condemning McCarthy. He also was among the mourners at the funeral when McCarthy died of drink in 1957.

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  One day in 1950, a congresswoman from California found herself being warned about Nixon by the venerable Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. Rayburn, who thought him “the next thing to McCarthy in the United States,” warned his colleague “not to make any mistakes.” The warning was timely, for the congresswoman was Helen Gahagan Douglas, then about to battle Nixon for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

  Nixon’s run for the Senate was a virtual replay of the 1946 campaign against Voorhis—this time with even cruder use of dirty tricks and inflammatory rhetoric. His tactics reflected the fact that he knew precisely why he had decided to run against Representative Douglas. “The House,” he told a friend, “offered too slow a road to leadership, and I went for broke.”

  Kyle Palmer, the power broker at the Los Angeles Times, claimed it was he who first pitched the Senate idea to Nixon, and certainly the Times and most of the California press gave him unconditional support. Of twelve papers in the state, nine backed Nixon. The Times did not run a single picture of Douglas during the campaign. The press baron who ran most of the other papers in the state, William Randolph Hearst, arranged for the planting of pro-Nixon articles. Orchestrated “letters” were placed in the correspondence columns. A search began for any photographs of Douglas that might help brand her as a leftist.

  Douglas, a forty-nine-year-old former Broadway star and opera singer, had begun her political career as a left-wing Democrat. She was both a supporter of the New Deal and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. While outspokenly anti-Communist, she was also—to her detriment—in favor of reining in big business, not least the oil industry. She proved no match for the Nixon operation, once again managed by Murray Chotiner.

  Along with his other functions, Chotiner masterminded a public relations blitz similar to the one during the congressional campaign of 1946. Skywriting planes traced out Nixon’s name over California’s beaches. A blimp pelted the Los Angeles city streets with leaflets promising voters that if they answered the phone with the magic mantra “Vote for Nixon,” and if the call came from Nixon headquarters, then they could win:

  PRIZES GALORE!!!

  Electric clocks, Silex coffee makers with heating units—General Electric automatic toasters—silver salt and pepper shakers, sugar and creamer sets, candy and butter dishes, etc., etc.

  The Republicans were especially proud of a four-page ad that resembled a photo spread in Life magazine. “Practically nothing but pictures,” said a grinning Chotiner. Nixon was sold aggressively as “an ardent American,” “the perfect example of the Uncommon Man.”

  The Los Angeles Daily News had dubbed Douglas the Pink Lady, and more than half a million of Nixon’s anti-Douglas leaflets were printed on pink paper. In public Chotiner was to claim that the color of the paper had been fortuitous, that pink had been the only choice available. In private, in the company of fellow Republicans, he would say, “It just seemed to appeal to us.” Then he would smile sardonically.

  Nixon’s people seized Douglas’s own flyers by the thousands and dumped them in the ocean. Meanwhile they produced phony Douglas propaganda purporting to have been issued by the “Communist League of Negro Women,” a surefire way to alienate white middle-class voters.

  Flying squads of pickets pursued Douglas at her speaking engagements, heckling her at every stop. During a speech at the University of Southern California “students” let fly with water siphons, drenching the Democrat. One of the ringleaders was reportedly Patrick Hillings, a young man soon to become Nixon’s close associate; another, Joe Holt, later joined Nixon’s staff. At times the contest turned violent. Douglas’s San Diego organizer was forced off the road by other drivers. She herself was pelted with red ink, and even stones, and began traveling with bodyguards.

  The Democrats also resorted to questionable tactics, but they occurred late in the campaign and were primarily an effort to strike back. A student named Dick Tuck, who later became a specialist in anti-Nixon pranks,1 posed as an advance man for a Nixon speech and ensured that only a handful of people turned up. Pat Nixon, who again went on the stump with her husband, claimed he was often prevented from speaking by labor union members. Enraged Douglas workers once overturned a Nixon campaign car.

  Douglas eventually tried to lash back at Nixon by “Red-baiting” him—a nonsensical ploy that failed—and by talking about Republican “young men in dark shirts,” evoking fascism. Such efforts were not only wrongheaded but pointless, for nothing the Democrats could muster could outdo the scale of the propaganda pumped out by the Nixon side.

  According to Douglas supporters, the last days of the campaign brought an onslaught of anonymous phone calls to voters, just as in the Nixon push against Voorhis. “Did you know that Helen Douglas is a Communist?” a caller would ask, then hang up. It was later claimed that this was a massive, statewide operation allegedly involving more than half a million calls.

  Pat Nixon’s account of the campaign, published later in a homey story in the Saturday Evening Post, suggested, without stating it directly, that her husband had been short of funds. “A friend who is an automobile dealer lent us a used station wagon,” she wrote, “and we painted it with big signs . . . and with it we covered California.” The Nixons did have a station wagon, in which they drove massive distances, but the vehicle was only a few months old and came with a chauffeur. The friend who provided it, Henry Kearns, was one of Nixon’s wealthy backers.

  Once again, Nixon had heavy financial backing from power brokers in the oil business—Nixon was pushing for the oil policy that best favored their interests—and from big industry, real estate, and banking. One supporter, another car dealer, was Henry Haldeman, father of Nixon’s future White House chief of staff.

  To fund this campaign, the net was also cast outside the state, among the oil tycoons of Texas. Two of them, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, soon welcomed Nixon to Del Charro, the luxury California resort Murchison owned. “They spoke to Nixon like he was an office boy,” recalled the resort’s manager, Allan Witwer.

  Serving on Nixon’s finance committee was Dana Smith, heir to a lumber fortune and a Pasadena attorney who within two years would be at the center of the furor that nearly cost Nixon the vice presidency, the scandal over behind-the-scenes cash supplied to Nixon by California businessmen.

  There was, too, illicit money: five thousand dollars funneled to Nixon, against Senate rules and through a crooked fixer, by Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, and seventy-five thousand dollars strong-armed out of the gambling fraternity by the mobster Mickey Cohen.*

  There is no knowing now how much money was poured into the Nixon campaign. Figures available at the Nixon Library suggest that it received more than two hundred thousand dollars. This, however, may be a fraction of the true amount. Billboards alone, by Chotiner’s reckoning, cost “around $50,000.” Some estimates suggest that the real expenditure may have been between $1 million and nearly $2 million, fabulous sums by the standards of the time, wh
ichever was correct. The Nixon people had generated so much money that they gave away cash to Republican candidates in other contests. The Douglas campaign, by contrast, was impoverished, so much so that at one point it had no money to pay printers for brochures.

  In such a situation, in the anti-Communist ferment of 1950, with the Korean War in its first months and American casualties mounting daily, the “Pink Lady” was doomed. Yet Nixon did not behave as though he expected to triumph. On election day he sat on the beach in the drizzle with Pat, then went to the movies by himself. He emerged “sure that we were licked,” only to learn that he had won a fabulous victory.

  Nixon made light in his memoirs of the fact that the Senate fight earned him the nickname that stuck with him for the rest of his life, “Tricky Dick.”2 He made no mention of the huge funding, the one-sided media barrage, or the organized heckling by his supporters. Instead, he wrote plaintively of Democratic heckling, casting himself as the offended party.3

  Nixon himself bore ultimate responsibility for the campaign against Douglas. Chotiner recalled him as having been “a perfectionist . . . a general who demanded absolute precision and carefully planned coordination in every move. . . .” “Nixon knew everything that was going on,” said Tom Dixon, who as in the past traveled with him as radio announcer and warm-up man. Interviewed in 1997, Dixon and his wife recalled a Nixon who demanded that an audience be “screaming ecstatically” before he would go onstage. Occasionally he had to delay facing the audience until he had recovered from tantrums so violent he seemed “out of control” to Dixon. In 1946 Dixon had voted for his employer. In 1950 Nixon’s conduct of the campaign so disillusioned him that he voted for no one.

  Further testimony suggesting that Nixon personally favored malicious attacks on Douglas comes from a memoir by the press aide who traveled with him during the campaign, William Arnold. Arnold recalled his employer’s reaction when told that his opponent had made “somewhat unflattering” remarks about him in a speech. “Did she say that?” Nixon asked. “Why, I’ll castrate her.” Arnold commented sardonically that such retribution would be difficult, since Douglas was a woman. “I don’t care,” riposted Nixon. “I’ll do it anyway.”

  It was Nixon who lowered the already abysmal tone of the contest by telling audiences that Douglas was “pink right down to her underpants.” He even resorted to a sexual smear, insinuating that she had slept with President Truman. Nixon was careful to make such pronouncements at gatherings away from the press or at least from the tiny portion of the press that opposed him. He was equally guarded about ethnic slurs. Douglas’s husband, the actor Melvyn Douglas, had been born Hesselberg, of a Jewish father. When an extremist, Gerald Smith, goaded Douglas for being married to a Jew, Nixon disassociated himself.

  The Nixon anonymous phone call campaign did however include “Did you know?” messages that whispered about Douglas’s Jewish connection. Nixon also sometimes referred to his opponent disingenuously as Helen Hesselberg, a name that neither she nor her husband used. He would then correct himself, as though it had been an unintentional slip. He did this at his sole platform appearance with Douglas, but only after his opponent had left the meeting.

  As the campaign went into top gear, during a brief visit to New York, Nixon had sat drinking whiskey into the small hours with the columnist Murray Kempton. Kempton was to recall Nixon’s saying how he hated having to end Helen Douglas’s political career, because he admired her so much. Years later, asked by the British publisher David Astor to explain his campaign tactics, Nixon reportedly “cast down his eyes with a look of modest contrition” and explained, “I want you to understand. I was a very young man.”4 In 1950 he was thirty-seven and a veteran of four years in the House of Representatives.

  And now he was a U.S. senator, and his star continued to rise. Yet for all his success, or perhaps because of it, Nixon was starting to lose his balance.

  10

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  His fragile masculine self-image always drew him to the strong and the tough—and the ultimate power of the presidency.

  —Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, psychosomatic medicine specialist and psychotherapist consulted by Richard Nixon

  The strain on Nixon had started to show long before he reached the Senate. There had been the twenty-hour workdays during the Hiss case, the skipped meals, the refusal to take time out for relaxation. It made him quick-tempered with colleagues, as well as “mean” with his family. When he had trouble sleeping, he resorted to sleeping pills. The campaign against Helen Douglas had only driven him to greater limits.

  As a senator he continued to work obsessively. When his secretaries left for the day—Nixon had nine—their boss regularly went on working into the evening. He often did not get home for dinner, if at all. “Many times,” said Earl Chapman, a friend in whom Pat confided, he worked “until the small hours. . . . Maybe if he gets through early enough he’ll come back home, but many times he’ll curl up on the couch and get a few hours’ sleep. Then he’ll get a little breakfast and shave, and go right down to the Senate chambers. . . .”

  A month or two into this punishing schedule Nixon began to be plagued with persistent back and neck pain. The first doctors he consulted were no help, and he found himself perusing a book on psychosomatic illness pressed on him by the outgoing senator from California, Sheridan Downey. The book was The Will to Live, by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, an easy-to-read best-seller written for people “in the grips of acute conflict.” It emphasized “the interaction of the human psyche and bodily reactions.”

  Hutschnecker was described by one academic as “a sort of Pavlovian and Freudian synthesizer.” He himself professed that he “treated my patients as if they are my children.” Famous clients over the years reportedly included the actresses Elizabeth Taylor, Celeste Holm, and Rita Hayworth and the novelist Erich Maria Remarque. An Austrian emigré who graduated in Berlin soon after World War I, he had been working in New York City since 1936.

  While he practiced internal medicine, he had early in his career been interested in the way mental and emotional disturbances affect health. By 1951, this topic had become the primary focus of his work. He dropped internal medicine completely by 1955, to specialize exclusively as a psychotherapist engaged in what he called “psychoanalytically oriented treatment of emotional problems.”1

  Dr. Hutschnecker had, in the words of one interviewer, “a touch of the missionary zeal of a Billy Graham, of the cheery optimism of a Norman Vincent Peale, of the psychic beliefs of a Jeane Dixon, and an accent a bit reminiscent of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove.” Nixon, as we have seen, publicly associated himself with both Graham and Peale, and, according to one close aide, credited the prophecies of Dixon, the popular astrologer.

  In The Will to Live, Hutschnecker dealt with a range of human complaints: chronic fatigue, hypertension, ulcers, insomnia, the inability to love, aggression, impotence in men and frigidity in women. On reading it, Nixon took a step that was to lead to a long and trusting relationship with the doctor—as well as to future political embarrassment. He asked one of his new secretaries, Rose Mary Woods, to telephone Hutschnecker and ask if he would take on a new private patient. Woods, just starting the loyal service to Nixon that would one day give her a notorious role in the Watergate saga, told Hutschnecker her boss was “really interested in something in The Will to Live that related to himself.”

  So it was that, probably in the early fall of 1951, Nixon went to New York and presented himself at Dr. Hutschnecker’s imposing office at 829 Park Avenue. The doctor’s wife, acting as his receptionist that day, entered the inner sanctum to announce that the young senator had arrived—and looked “very tense.” He was to see Hutschnecker several times that first year and in the four years that followed.

  From 1952, when he became vice president, Nixon arrived for his consultations—five that year—openly, in the official limousine, and with a Secret Service escort. In 1955, though, when Hutschnecker began to specialize solely in psy
chotherapy, Nixon became worried about publicity. After Walter Winchell had made a snide reference to the visits in one of his columns, he began taking his physical ailments to a military doctor in Washington.

  By that time he and Hutschnecker had established a close relationship and met privately whenever Nixon came to New York. “I remember going to his suite in the Waldorf,” the doctor recalled, “and hearing him singing so happily in the shower. And I said to myself, ‘Aha, my treatment is working.’ ”

  The discreet meetings continued throughout the fifties. When Nixon called, said Hutschnecker, “He’d never say: ‘I have a problem.’ He’d say, ‘Could we have breakfast?’ And I’d go.” “He needed me. It was what we call a transference, a trust. He came to me when he had decisions to make. Or when something was pending, and it troubled him.”

  Nixon did not always reveal what was on his mind. After one 1952 visit Hutschnecker was astonished to learn from the press of his patient’s possible selection as Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate. It must have been the matter uppermost in Nixon’s mind during the consultation, yet he had failed to mention it. Later the same year, however, when enmeshed in allegations of having taken under-the-table money—the fund scandal*—Nixon tried frantically to reach the doctor.

  “I went out for a while one day, and when I came back, my wife said, ‘Where were you? The senator’s office was calling every ten minutes.’ They had been holding the plane, and the last call had been just a few minutes before, but Mr. Nixon could not wait any longer. . . . I learned later about the secret fund charges.”