The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

Bassett had thought Nixon “quietly intense” but “affable” when he first met him six years earlier and had jokingly used his minuscule seniority to address Nixon as “son.” Now, he reflected, he barely recognized him. Nixon, he wrote his wife, had become “the oldest young man I ever saw. . . . Sometimes I feel like a doggoned kid when I’m around him.”

  Nixon preferred to do his real work not in his ceremonial headquarters or in his staff suite in the Senate complex but in P-55, a remote room in the Capitol building that few knew how to find. While Bassett had always respected his “judgment and ability,” he thought he had grown more intense than ever. “The man never rests, relaxes—I guess he takes politics through his pores, the way a leaf gets chlorophyll.”

  Nixon told Bassett he was one of those politicians with “ice water in our veins,” but he sometimes showed a “subliminal sentimental streak.” “I’d met him for lunch somewhere in uptown Washington,” Bassett wrote, “and he was carrying with him a clumsily wrapped paper parcel. ‘It’s a doll,’ he explained, although I hadn’t asked. ‘For Julie and Tricia?’ ‘No,” Nixon frowned. ‘It’s actually for a little crippled kid I happened to read about in the paper this morning. She’s in a charity hospital. It said she wanted a doll. So I’m going to take this out to her after we’ve finished.’ ”

  Ever the PR man, Bassett thought the gift would make good press. But Nixon would have none of it. “If you ever leak this to the newspapers,” he threatened, “I’ll cut your balls off.”

  Nixon seemed to Bassett to be a loner with a tendency to “retreat deeper into that almost mystic shell.” He rarely went home in the evening and, because Bassett was living in Washington away from his own wife and family, would call him on the spur of the moment to suggest dinner. In these, his “lonesome lost moods,” Nixon shed some of his “grimness and glacial determination” and did some companionable drinking.

  Bassett’s account establishes that Nixon’s somewhat pious writing about drink in later years and loyalists’ protestations that he rarely drank are hypocritical. Himself no stranger to liquor, Bassett recalled their bibulous nights. “We ordered extra dry Gibsons (with Nixon darkly muttering it was a ‘great mistake’). Then a second round. Then RN, having relaxed enthusiastically, briskly demanded a third, all his darkling fears apparently gone. Then a sound California Inglenook white Pinot, oysters and baked pompano. . . . In RN’s fabulous Cad, we tooled out to a place called Martin’s in old Georgetown, a saloon-type café, where we feasted on corned beef, cabbage, and great drafts of Michelob. . . . We had Scotches. RN took two of them fast, heavy and straight, thereby heightening his curious mood.”

  Sometimes the drinking was a feature of the working day. Bassett again: “We’d arrived earlier for lunch than usual, and prowled through his desk for a jug of Scotch, but finding only a platoon of very defunct soldiers; then RN arriving with Rose Woods in tow, and she laden with a small box in which nestled the necessaries of any decent midday confab.”

  In 1952, the year Time reported the official line that Nixon “rarely takes a drink,” the Democrats’ financial wizard Carmine Bellino had visited him. “At about 5 P.M.,” he recalled, “Nixon stated it was cocktail hour. He pulled open his desk drawer, took out a bottle of scotch, and called Rose Woods to bring three glasses. After pouring scotch into the glasses, he offered us a drink without ice. . . .”

  Elmer Bobst, the pharmaceutical tycoon, advised Nixon in the fifties to put a bottle of scotch in his briefcase if he wanted to avoid losing it. “Scotch, or perchance gin,” he wrote, “are [sic] wonderful catalysts blending together memory and briefcases.” Nixon apparently did develop a liking for gin. Bobst recalled how they once both pretended to order plain tonic water to avoid offending an accompanying cleric; that the well-trained barman would add gin to it.

  In 1954, the year Bassett spent the most time with Nixon, an article based on a personal interview with the vice president reported that he “won’t drink at all if he’s tangling with a problem.” However, Bassett’s accounts suggest that like other mortals, Nixon used alcohol precisely when he was confronting a difficult issue.

  Drink affected him easily and perhaps more so as time passed. Bassett remembered spending “a most curiously interesting couple of hours” with his boss in the late fifties, when he “let his thinning hair way down over a few Scotches.” Bassett reported, as did others, that “after two Martinis he’d be very garrulous . . . two drinks and he’s off to the races.”

  Nixon on occasion became obviously the worse for wear in lofty company. “Nixon had a glass or two more than he should have done,” Pat Hillings recalled of an evening with the Eisenhowers shortly before the start of his vice presidency. “It didn’t really show until he came down in the elevator, but then he startled everyone by giving the wall a smack and saying at the top of his voice, ‘I really like that Mamie. She doesn’t give a shit for anybody—not a shit!’ ”

  Nixon may have genuinely liked Mamie, but his relationship with Ike remained ambivalent.

  _____

  At the start of the Eisenhower administration some dubbed Nixon “Ike’s errand boy.” The sneer was not unexpected because the post of vice president of the United States had traditionally been one with an imposing name but no real power. Eisenhower needed Nixon to keep the Republican right on his side and, not least, to help contain the erratic Joe McCarthy. At sixty-three, he also needed a younger man to carry the burden of hard campaigning and foreign travel. Nixon took on all those responsibilities, and his marathon trips abroad were the foundation of the foreign policy expertise that remains his most positive legacy. What Eisenhower did not want, however, was for Nixon to be perceived as playing the role Life magazine proposed early on: “Assistant President.”

  While the two men were publicly civil to each other, Eisenhower went out of his way to keep Nixon at arm’s length. Lyndon Johnson, then a rising power in the Senate, recalled Eisenhower’s resentment when Nixon tried discreetly to influence policy. According to James Reston, the New York Times journalist, Eisenhower “simply was not interested in Nixon’s view of things.” He reportedly found him “immature” and would still be describing him as such as late as the sixties, after Nixon had turned fifty.

  Some at the White House thought Nixon more liability than asset, and the scorn was reciprocated. In private, drinking with Bassett, Nixon spoke contemptuously of the “tea drinkers” surrounding the president. He dismissed the cabinet as “dumb.” When he went on television to help distance the White House from Joe McCarthy, though, he smiled for the camera as Eisenhower had urged him to.

  Shortly before that speech, while quaffing bourbon with Bassett, Nixon had made a remark that today resonates with irony. “He said wistfully,” Bassett recalled, “that he’d love to slip a secret recording gadget into the President’s office, to capture some of those warm, offhand, greathearted things the Man says, play ’em back, then get them press-released. . . .” Curiously enough, two decades before Nixon was to install secret recording equipment in his White House, Eisenhower had recording equipment set up in the Oval Office, a device he activated with the flip of an unseen switch under his desk.

  With Nixon present, Eisenhower urged senior colleagues to tape their phone calls. “You know, boys,” he said, “it’s a good thing, when you’re talking to someone you don’t trust, to get a record made of it. There are some guys I just don’t trust in Washington, and I want to have myself protected so that they can’t later report that I said something else.” According to one Nixon biographer, Eisenhower “nearly always remembered to turn on the machine when he was talking to Nixon.”1

  The transcript of one such recording, made in June 1954, shows Eisenhower castigating his vice president for a speech in which he had attacked Democratic foreign policy. The president bluntly told Nixon that he was wrong on his facts and was compromising White House efforts to build bipartisan support. Having promised to be more circumspect in future, Nixon was so depressed afterward that Bassett
thought him “lower than a snake’s belly.” In his memoirs Nixon would suggest he had had a collegial relationship with Eisenhower. Privately he told Haldeman that he “saw Dwight D. Eisenhower alone about six times in the whole deal. . . .”

  Political issues aside, Nixon suffered many small humiliations. Eisenhower loved golf and often played at the exclusive Burning Tree Club in the Maryland countryside. Nixon, usually more spectator than sportsman, now took up golf energetically. While he reportedly played with “furious dedication,” he lacked skill or finesse. It was even reported that he cheated on occasion, by throwing the ball out of the rough back onto the fairway.

  Once, on an excursion with Bassett, Nixon went to Burning Tree on a day Eisenhower was playing. “Nixon fired off the tee first—a wobbly shot into the woods. He hit six in all. Then the others, and by this time Ike and his party were breathing on our group’s necks. So, after some slight Alphonse and Gastoning, the presidential group went through. . . . We lunched at one of the long communal tables. . . . The president sat at the adjoining table, grinning, laughing and joking, with his foursome.”

  “Nixon complained to me,” recalled Walter Trohan, “that Ike didn’t have him in to play golf—I guess his game wasn’t good enough. Ike played with pros.”2 Nor were invitations extended to play bridge with the president or to attend social evenings in the private quarters of the White House.3 Four years into the presidency, out at the president’s Gettysburg farm, Nixon watched as Eisenhower escorted other guests indoors. “Do you know,” he told a companion bitterly, “he’s never asked me into that house yet.”4

  Nixon spoke to Dr. Hutschnecker, the psychotherapist, about his resentment. According to the doctor, “Eisenhower was always telling Nixon to straighten his tie or pull back his shoulders, or speak up or shut up.”

  The conservative writer Ralph de Toledano thought Eisenhower was a “complete sadist” toward Nixon. “He would cut him up just for the fun of it. . . . Nixon would come back from the White House and, as much as he ever showed emotion, you’d think he was on the verge of tears.”

  Not only the president spurned Nixon at this time. In the spring of 1954 he was rebuffed by both the educational institutions at which he had once excelled. The Duke University faculty, in its first ever such action, turned down a trustees’ proposal that Nixon be awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws. When officials called a second meeting, in hopes of getting the decision reversed, Nixon was again rejected. Weeks later, when he gave the commencement address at his alma mater, Whittier College, students formed two reception lines: one for those who refused to shake Nixon’s hand, one for those willing to greet him. Only two were in the latter group, and Nixon’s mother declared herself “pained.”

  In Washington, meanwhile, Nixon was making few friends. At a party the Nixons gave, CBS reporter Nancy Dickerson recalled, “he was an uncomfortable host, disappearing from time to time, only to return to urge guests to have another drink, with a vigorous show at being friendly. Being a host did not come easy for him.”

  Patricia Alsop, the English wife of columnist Stewart Alsop, found the Nixons “wooden and stiff . . . terribly difficult to talk to” when she invited them to one of her soirees. “Nixon danced only one dance, with me. He was a terrible dancer, and Pat didn’t dance at all. They stayed only half an hour. It was like having two little dolls—or as if the school monitor had suddenly appeared at the dance. I couldn’t wait for him to go.”

  Stewart Alsop noted that Nixon often sparked an almost allergic dislike in people, including many Republicans. Those who did not think Nixon worthy of a halo, the columnist observed, tended to ascribe to him cloven hooves and a tail. Alsop coined a term for this condition, one that remained chronic for forty years to come: Nixonophobia.

  By the end of the 1954 congressional campaign Nixon was at a low ebb. “I am tired, bone tired,” he said privately. “My heart’s not in it.” He told Chotiner he was “through with politics” and assured Pat that he would retire when his term as vice president ended. Bassett bet him ten dollars that he would run again, and he took the bet. Then came a sudden, unexpected event that changed his mind.

  Nixon had just returned home from a Washington wedding reception on a September afternoon in 1955 when he learned that he might become president of the United States within hours. In far-off Colorado, after a day of travel, work, and twenty-seven holes of golf, Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack. Informed by phone, Nixon responded, “Oh, my God! How bad is it?” and then fell silent for so long that the aide thought he had been cut off. When he finally spoke, Nixon pointed out that many people made full recoveries from coronaries. He agreed to stay near the phone and await more news.

  To ascend to the presidency had always been the logical goal of Nixon’s struggle. Now that the prospect was upon him, at the age of forty-two, he was stunned. “For fully ten minutes I sat alone,” he recalled, “and to this day I cannot remember the thoughts that flowed through my mind. The only accurate description is that I probably was in a momentary state of shock. . . . I realized what a tremendous responsibility had descended upon me. It was like a great physical weight holding me down in the chair.”

  In Nixon’s version, he quickly gathered his wits and faced the crisis. Friends thought his reaction less poised. “His voice was hoarse and charged with emotion. ‘It’s terrible, it’s terrible!’ he said over and over. . . . [He] was trying to keep his composure, but he was in semishock. His eyes were red and his face drawn and pale. . . . he aged the equivalent of quite a few years during those three months—in his own estimation, as well of those with whom he worked.”

  Eisenhower did recover, of course, but it was nearly two months before he returned to Washington, and Nixon meanwhile presided over meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council.

  Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, asserted that Nixon “leaned over backward to avoid any appearance of assuming presidential authority.” John Foster Dulles’s biographer, on the other hand, concluded that Adams and the secretary of state strove “to retain control in trusted hands and to avoid delivering political power to an ambitious Richard Nixon.” Adams was reportedly “doing everything he can to cut Mr. Nixon down to size.”

  There were two more Eisenhower health crises during his presidency: an intestinal operation the following year and in 1957 a minor stroke that affected the president’s speech. Nixon “did not preside very well,” noted economic adviser Clarence Randall after a cabinet meeting the vice president chaired during the second hospitalization. “He let the discussion get way out of hand. . . .” Another participant passed a note to a colleague during the same meeting. “I shall pray harder than ever,” it read, “for the President’s recovery.”

  It was the situation created by Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack, Nixon noted, that made him hesitate about quitting politics. For if Ike did not run for a second term, he figured, “I would be next in line for the presidential nomination.” The prospect appalled many. Asked what the Republicans would do should Eisenhower die, party chairman Leonard Hall replied with black humor: “We would run him anyway. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the President must be alive.”

  As the recovering Eisenhower pondered whether to face a reelection campaign, he had a long conversation about political successors with his press secretary, James Hagerty. Nixon did not feature on a shortlist of four people he deemed “mentally qualified for the presidency.” “The fact is,” he told speechwriter Emmet Hughes, “I’ve watched Dick a long time, and he just hasn’t grown. So I just haven’t been able to believe that he is presidential timber.”

  Should he run again, Eisenhower later told Nixon at a face-to-face meeting, he thought it might be better for Nixon to take a cabinet post rather than be his running mate. While some later insisted that Eisenhower was merely offering Nixon a better long-term stepping-stone to power, it may be that he simply had other preferences. Notes of a meeting with Len Hall reflect discussion about �
�getting Nixon out of the picture” and end with the president’s instructing Hall to see Nixon but “be very, very, gentle.” In fact, Eisenhower remained noncommittal for months to come.

  Nixon and those close to him variously described his reaction to Eisenhower’s ambivalence as “agonizing,” “absolutely indescribable anguish,” “one of the greatest hurts of his entire career,” and “fury.” Pat Nixon said the episode made her husband “more depressed than she ever remembered.”

  An additional reason for Eisenhower to be hesitant about having Nixon on the ticket again emerged at an April meeting when Nixon, according to contemporary notes, tackled what he called “another matter . . . the Murray Chotiner case.” Nixon’s close associate’s criminal links had first emerged four days before Eisenhower suggested that Nixon might quit the vice presidency for a cabinet post and more revelations followed, some of them leading to the involvement of the FBI. There was a furor over an article labeling Chotiner “Dick Nixon’s Secret Link to the Underworld,” and the Washington Post reported Chotiner’s untrue claim to have had no contact with Nixon since he became vice president. A congressional probe was getting under way.*

  Nixon’s fund scandal had threatened not only Nixon but the entire Republican campaign, and the Chotiner revelations must have filled the president with foreboding. Eisenhower wanted Nixon’s assurances that the charges had no basis, and he needed the record to show that those assurances had been given. With that accomplished, he cleared Nixon to announce to the press that he would again be on the ticket.

  Bassett had won his ten-dollar bet, and Nixon was running again. Again he bore the brunt of the campaign, this time setting out on a whirlwind marathon run with efficiency and flair. He covered forty-two thousand miles, barnstorming thirty-six states in less than two months. His use of a campaign plane, a DC-6B dubbed the Dick Nixon Special, was an innovation. While traveling between cities, Nixon hunched in his private cabin, working with his briefing sheets to tailor the Speech—the boilerplate text used throughout the tour—to suit the next destination.