The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

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  All you have got to do in this country of ours is just to tell the people the truth, and not hide anything from them

  —Richard Nixon, September 1952

  “For Richard Nixon,” wrote Stephen Hess, an aide in both the Eisenhower and Nixon presidencies, “the end is power.” Not content with having become a representative at thirty-three and a senator at thirty-seven, the political comer from California did not pause in his rush to rise higher.

  Legislative activity was evidently not a priority. No sooner had Nixon taken his seat in the Senate than he began crisscrossing the nation making speeches—forty-nine of them in 1951, and only three of those in his home state. On the tour he projected an image, as Earl Mazo saw it, of part revolutionary hero and part doomsday preacher. Nixon explained the purpose of these travels in a letter home to Herman Perry, the Whittier bank manager who had first urged him into politics: “A few friends in other states may prove to be of considerable value in the future.”

  In fact, national power brokers by now had come to see in Nixon a man who could spearhead the Republican party’s comeback from two decades of drift and defeat. The currents of history were about to whirl him to the center of the stream, beside the man whom just six years earlier, as a junior naval officer, Nixon had watched parading through Manhattan as the conquering hero of World War II.

  General Dwight Eisenhower, now supreme commander of NATO, had been courted by American big business interests since 1948. Eisenhower had met secretly with Nixon two years earlier, for a briefing on the Hiss case and the extent of domestic communism. Nixon had been present in 1950, when Eisenhower auditioned at Bohemian Grove, one of those curious gatherings in the California redwoods at which wealthy patrons inspect politicians with promise. When they met again in Paris, six months into Nixon’s Senate tenure, they discussed matters on which they were unlikely to disagree. Nixon felt a certain “aloofness” in the general and in time was to feel he was “just Ike’s prat boy.”1 For now, though, a connection had been made.

  Two months before the 1952 Republican convention, New York Governor Thomas Dewey summoned Nixon to Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel. Dewey, a two-time presidential contender, had looked favorably on the younger man for a long time; now he was the party’s senior kingmaker.

  In his suite on the twenty-fourth floor, Dewey revealed to Nixon that there was “a possibility of him becoming the Vice President.” Earlier that evening, after Nixon had made a rousing speech at a political dinner, Dewey had taken his trademark cigarette holder from his mouth, reached for the younger man’s hand, and exhorted him: “Make me a promise. Don’t get fat, don’t lose your zeal, and you can be President someday.” The two men never divulged the finer details of their conversation that night, but later speculation suggested that Dewey had tempted Nixon with the vice presidency on condition that he woo the California delegation over to Eisenhower at the convention. To do so would involve treachery, but Nixon complied.

  Weeks before the meeting with Dewey, Nixon had signed a legally binding pledge to support California Governor Earl Warren for the presidential nomination. But now he proceeded to mail to twenty-four thousand Californians a cunningly phrased questionnaire, the cost of which, about one thousand dollars, was charged illegally to the government—inquiring whom they would prefer as the Republican presidential candidate. The questions in the mailing were worded to suggest strongly that Warren’s candidacy was doomed. At the convention in Chicago, Nixon and Murray Chotiner, well aware of the damage they were doing to Warren, intrigued busily on Eisenhower’s behalf.

  Warren behaved with dignity at the time, but never forgot the disloyalty. “He hated Nixon,” said Californian John Rothmann, keeper of the finest private archive of Nixonia and for a long time a Nixon supporter. “The most distasteful moment in Warren’s career would come in 1969, when as Chief Justice he had to swear Nixon in as President.” “Tricky,” Warren said in old age, when he was no longer concerned with party niceties and when Nixon was sinking beneath the waves of Watergate, was “despicable . . . a cheat, a liar, and a crook . . . he abused the American people.”2

  When the 1952 convention ended with Eisenhower emerging as the candidate for the White House, the nominee wrote down a list of six potential vice presidents, with Nixon’s name at the top. After a smoke-filled room session and with key support from Tom Dewey, Nixon was picked as the running mate. He was lying in his shorts in his hotel room when the news reached him and was said to be “surprised as hell.”

  The previous night he and his wife had argued into the small hours over whether he should accept the nomination. Pat was voicing “second thoughts,” and Chotiner was enlisted at 4:00 A.M. to change her mind. “I guess,” she said when Chotiner had finished talking, “I can make it through another campaign.” But she dreaded the prospect.

  Pat was to claim that she too was surprised to hear the next day, over lunch, that her husband had been nominated. “The bite of sandwich popped right out of my mouth,” she recalled. She joined her husband on the victory platform, with instructions to be sure to smile for the cameras. That night in Washington photographers burst into the Nixons’ home, brushed past the baby-sitter, and insisted on waking their sleeping daughters to pose them for photographs.

  The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket did not begin auspiciously. As the crowd acclaimed the general, Nixon had grabbed the older man’s wrist and pulled his arm above his head as though he were some pugilist’s manager. It was not Eisenhower’s style, and the expression on his face showed it. The incident marked the beginning of a long and chilly relationship.

  The following week a smiling, idealized picture of Nixon was featured on the cover of Time magazine, the first of a staggering fifty-six such appearances. He had been picked for the candidacy, readers were told, because he was young and a proved vote getter and because he had “fought government corruption.” A series of scandals concerning tax fraud, kickbacks, influence peddling, and lax prosecution of top Democrats had plagued President Truman’s administration, giving the Republicans a ready-made election issue. “When we are through,” Eisenhower told voters, “the experts in shady and shoddy government operations will be on the way back to the shadowy haunts in the shadowy sub-cellars of American politics from which they came.” Then, within two months of the convention, a corruption scandal exploded around Nixon himself.

  The allegations first appeared in a story by Leo Katcher, in the New York Post in mid-September, with a headline charging, SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY. Katcher and three other journalists had conducted an investigation based on an original tip from embittered supporters of Earl Warren. They established that wealthy California supporters had supplied Nixon with thousands of dollars to supplement his Senate pay. Dana Smith, the corporation attorney who had raised the money and kept it in a Pasadena bank, was to say it amounted to about eighteen thousand dollars.3 The money, Smith explained, had been used to compensate for Nixon’s “personal lack of funds,” office expenses—including the mailing of twenty-five thousand Christmas cards—production of material for radio and television broadcasts, airfares, and hotel costs.

  Notified of the story before it broke, Nixon had responded with apparent nonchalance. Rumors of impropriety, he said, were “all wrong”; the money was just a “political fund . . . used to pay expenses.” He did not know the contributors’ names, he claimed, and none of them had enjoyed any special favors. He put the reporter who interviewed him, the conservative columnist Peter Edson, in touch with fund organizer Smith.4 Nixon had told his colleagues privately that the charges were “nothing to worry about.”

  As it turned out, the Katcher story caused a sensation. In a campaign in which the Republicans were trumpeting their probity in contrast with Democratic corruption, it was an incendiary revelation. Within days, as Eisenhower and Nixon moved about the country on separate campaign trains—in those days a factor that made communication
difficult—it became a full-fledged scandal impossible to ignore.

  Eisenhower did not rush to Nixon’s defense but instead instructed him to make an immediate and fully documented disclosure of how much money he had received and how he had spent it. The Republicans, he added at a press briefing, must be “as clean as a hound’s tooth.”

  Halfway across the country Nixon claimed the whole affair was a Communist smear and, when heckled, blamed “the Alger Hiss crowd.” Eisenhower in turn found himself confronted by pickets, and some papers began calling for Nixon to withdraw from the election. Four days into the crisis, from New York, Dewey informed Nixon that most of the general’s advisers thought he should resign.

  Late the same day Eisenhower himself called Nixon and urged him to appear on national television to tell the public “everything there is to tell.” Would the general then announce his own view on the matter? Nixon asked. “Maybe” was the most Eisenhower would promise. Nixon had been alternately angry or despairing for days, and now he lashed out. “General,” he burst out, “there comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot. The great trouble here is the indecision.” Eisenhower remained cool in the face of the insolence. Go on the television show, he repeated, and then he would decide.

  On September 23, five days into the scandal, Nixon went to the NBC studios in Los Angeles to deliver the make-or-break performance of his career, the Checkers speech. He was scheduled to speak for half an hour at prime time, immediately after The Milton Berle Show, from the theater that was normally home to The Colgate Comedy Hour and This Is Your Life.

  Long after the event he was to insist there had been no rehearsal, no run-through of movements or facial expressions. A witness, however, reported that—prompted by a professional director and advertising executives—he had practiced poses and smiles. In a later talk to broadcasting executives, Nixon acknowledged that he had delayed the broadcast for two days in order to “build an audience.”

  Sixty million Americans, linked by more than eight hundred television stations, watched and listened that night. Not a cent of the disputed eighteen thousand dollars, Nixon said during the speech, had gone to his personal use, only to political expenses. The fund had not been secret. No contributor had received “any consideration” he would not have received as an ordinary citizen. Independent accountants and attorneys had formally reported that Nixon had neither profited nor broken any law. Nixon next appealed to the hearts of ordinary people. He offered his version of his life, of a childhood spent in modest circumstances, of his hardworking “Mother and Dad,” and of “the best thing that ever happened to me,” his marriage. Pat sat close by throughout the broadcast, her face immobile whenever the camera cut away to capture her reaction. Her eyes were fixed on Nixon as he told the nation, “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she looks good in anything.” He cataloged their apparently insignificant income, the mortgages on their homes in Washington and California, their 1950 Oldsmobile.

  Then came the pull on the heartstrings that gave the speech its familiar name, when Nixon admitted that the family had accepted a gift after the last election, a cocker spaniel sent to his daughters by a man in Texas. It was black and white, and Tricia had named it Checkers. “And you know,” he went on, “the kids, like all kids, loved the dog. And I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”

  As he approached the final part of his address, Nixon turned to a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “God must have loved the common people—he made so many of them.” (Nixon later said he had fortuitously remembered the quote, when in fact he had earlier phoned two of his former Whittier College teachers to request a number of Lincoln samples.) That reference led him on to politics: to the fund enjoyed by Eisenhower’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, a man who had “inherited a fortune” and was thus clearly not one of the common people; to Truman, who had failed to clean up corruption and expose the Communists and who was not fit to be president; and finally, back to his own predicament. “I don’t believe I ought to quit, because I am not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat is not a quitter. After all, her name was Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day,* and you know the Irish never quit.”

  Then came the conclusion: “But the decision, my friends, is not mine. . . . I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight through this television broadcast the decision which is theirs to make. Let them decide. . . . Regardless of what happens, I am going to continue this fight. I am going to campaign up and down America until we drive the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them out of Washington. And remember, folks, Eisenhower is a great man. Folks, he is a great man, and a vote for Eisenhower is a vote for what is good for America.”

  Nixon was still talking, his hands spread and reaching out to the viewers, as the picture faded. Realizing the program was over, he stumbled into a camera, began stacking his notes, then hurled them to the floor and buried his head in the stage drapes. “I was a failure,” he muttered to his television adviser. “I loused it up. . . . Let’s get out of here and get a fast one. I need it.”

  But a failure it was not. In response to the speech, some four million telegrams flooded in, the vast majority of them in Nixon’s favor. Many were euphoric, describing him as “a great man,” “dynamic,” even “a modern-day Lincoln.” Both he and Pat were eulogized. A woman with two fur coats offered Pat one of them. Another sent twenty-five dollars she had saved toward a new coat for herself.

  Nixon had struck a valuable populist chord. He had “stripped himself naked,” one columnist reported, “for all the world to see, and he brought the missus and the kids and the dog and his war record into the act. . . . The sophisticates sneer, but this came closer to humanizing the Republican Party than anything that has happened in my memory.”

  Eisenhower had watched the speech with his wife, Mamie, at his Cleveland, Ohio, hotel. Mamie, like so many others, was weeping by its end. The general realized how effective it had been and sent Nixon a congratulatory telegram, which ironically was temporarily lost in the torrent of cable traffic. He went out to tell supporters he admired Nixon’s courage and would decide about keeping him on as running mate as soon as they could get together.

  In Los Angeles, hearing of this new delay, Nixon exploded with rage and wrote a letter of resignation, which Murray Chotiner intercepted and tore up. Mollified only by a series of wheedling phone calls from Eisenhower’s staff, he agreed to fly to meet the general in West Virginia. On his arrival Nixon was rewarded by Eisenhower’s coming on board his plane to greet him in person with a firm handclasp and the greeting “You’re my boy.” The crisis was over, and that night the Republican National Committee endorsed Nixon once again as its vice presidential candidate and “a truly great American.”

  Reporters watched and cameras clicked as Nixon burst into tears and hid his face on the shoulder of a fellow U.S. senator.5 Back in Whittier his old drama coach remembered how he had once taught Nixon the trick of crying “buckets of tears” by concentrating on getting a lump in the throat. “I was inclined to say to myself, ‘Here goes my actor!’ But it was a sincere performance,” the teacher hurried to add. “There is nothing perfidious or immoral about being a good actor.”

  “Overnight,” Nixon’s friend Bryce Harlow said thirty years later, “he turned an extreme negative into a positive. How many people do you know who could have pulled it off? He was amazing.”

  Even Checkers became a hero in his own right. For weeks after the speech dog lovers swamped the Nixons with collars, hand-woven dog blankets, and enough dog food to last a year. The cocker spaniel lived on, first as a pet for Tricia and Julie and then, even after he had been laid to rest in New York’s Bide-a-Wee cemetery, as an enduring symbol of Nixon’s triumph. In 1997 it was reported that the dog was to be exhumed and reburied near the tomb of the former president and his wife
, on the grounds of the Nixon Library.

  Eisenhower can hardly have had Checkers in mind when, during the fund crisis, he declared that the Republicans had to be as “clean as a hound’s tooth.” Nixon surely did, however, when he agreed a few days later to a suggestion that members of his entourage who had lived through the crisis should form a group called the Order of the Hound’s Tooth. Pat was to be president and he vice president. Nixon later sent each member a key ring sporting a sliver of ivory symbolizing the immaculate canine tooth and a photograph of himself, signed and inscribed cryptically “I.N.C.” The abbreviation stood for the order’s secret motto in pseudo-Latin: “Illegitimis non carborundum,” which translates as “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

  _____

  Every year, to his dying day, Nixon would remind people of the anniversary of his victory in 1952. In 1992, when Democratic candidate Bill Clinton was scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes to respond to allegations of marital infidelity, some likened the appearance to the Checkers speech. Nixon disagreed. “Any comparisons,” he said, “are misleading. . . . I had the truth on my side.”

  But did he? The fund crisis was in some measure resolved in Nixon’s favor because of the emotional appeal of his speech, and the fact that the press had not properly covered the original allegation. A survey of seventy daily newspapers in forty-eight states revealed that all but seven delayed running the fund story after it had broken in the New York Post and, when they did finally run coverage, at first devoted little space to it. The Los Angeles Times, which had boosted Nixon politically from the start, featured the story with a headline and copy slanted to favor Nixon’s denials. The vast majority of papers likewise tended to back the Republican side uncritically.