The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  On the eve of the trip, when Nixon was already in Bogotá—the stop before Caracas—Esterline had tried one final time to stop the visit.4 Dulles, a Nixon friend, again told Esterline Nixon had gone ahead “for his own political purposes.” “It soured me on Nixon,” recalled Esterline, “I realized that he was driven above all by his ambition, his single-minded ambition to become president.”

  Neither grave risk to the lives of others nor the questionable effect the tour had on U.S. foreign relations was, surely, justified by Nixon’s demonstration of his bravery. “The possession of guts,” Stewart Alsop pointed out, “obviously does not in itself qualify a man for the presidency.” “As an exercise in national self-bamboozlement,” James Reston wrote less gently, “the reaction to Nixon’s trip was a classic.” “A national defeat has been parlayed into a personal political triumph. . . .” Nixon had virtually incited disorder in pursuit of political victory, a pattern he would play out in his future career.

  During the 1960 presidential campaign, he would order the Secret Service to limit crowd control measures in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a way that—in the words of Secret Service chief Baughman—“rendered our protective strategy useless.” The result, a field agent reported, was that “orderly crowds immediately deteriorated into an ever-growing, mad mauling melee.”

  In 1970, before a rally in California, reporters were tipped that there was likely to be trouble. As if in a deliberate re-creation of the Lima confrontation, Nixon climbed onto the hood of his car and gave the V sign to a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War. Stones and missiles began flying, and the president’s aides were jubilant. “It looked like he deliberately provoked that crowd,” said James Wrightson, editor of the Sacramento Bee. “It was like Caracas, which he liked to brag about.”

  _____

  On July 23, 1959, Nixon flew into another foreign airport, one where the “ominous unfriendliness” reminded him of his arrival in Caracas. This time, though, no crowd had assembled to scream abuse; in fact there was no crowd at all. The motorcade sped into town through almost empty streets, and the few passersby barely turned their heads. At the U.S. ambassador’s residence Nixon was briefed in a small sitting room, the only place deemed free of hidden microphones. He had arrived in Moscow, on the most significant mission of his vice presidency.

  For the Americans on the trip, as President Eisenhower’s brother Milton put it, this was a journey of “hope, mystery, and fear.” Since the end of World War II and the fall of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had become not only a military threat but also a land unknown and virtually inaccessible to Americans. For years the two countries had been rattling their nuclear weapons and fighting a protracted war of espionage and propaganda.

  Less than three years earlier, after Moscow’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising, Eisenhower had sent Nixon to neighboring Austria to report on the refugee crisis. He had traveled in a hay wagon right up to the border, seen the misery of the refugees, and called Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev the Butcher of Budapest. Now, although the occasion for the Moscow trip was to open an exhibition displaying American products, a breakthrough in itself, the real challenge was to be his encounter with Khrushchev.

  Characteristically Nixon was to remember having felt “keyed up and ready for battle.” Before leaving Washington, he had had lengthy briefings from the CIA and the State Department and had spoken to everyone he could find who had met the Soviet leader. He had perused the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and even—along with Pat—learned a little Russian. In Moscow, the night before the first meeting with Khrushchev, he could not sleep.

  Contemporary headlines and the folklore that followed have portrayed the encounter between the aging Bolshevik and America’s leading anti-Communist as a furious, chest-thumping confrontation. Khrushchev did do some crude blustering and famously did wave his finger in Nixon’s face, and Nixon answered back. In one of their first exchanges the Russian ranted on about the U.S. Congress’s Captive Nations resolution, which called for support for all peoples under Soviet rule. “It stinks like fresh horse shit,” he said, “and nothing smells worse than that!” Nixon replied that he knew from experience that pig shit smelled worse. Khrushchev retorted that he had shoveled the human version.

  The polemics continued, for public consumption, at the American Exhibition. At an exhibit featuring the wondrous development of videotape, the two men sparred in front of a TV camera. Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States technologically within seven years. “You don’t know anything about communism,” he told Nixon, “except fear of it.” He browbeat his opponent, even—although only a few of the Americans present heard it—bad-mouthing him with a contemptuous “Go fuck my grandmother. . . .” Sweating profusely, Nixon found no effective way to respond and felt he had lost the round.

  The vice president regained his composure in the kitchen of the “typical American house” exhibit, a visit engineered by a young press agent named William Safire, later to become a prominent columnist and—during the Nixon presidency—a White House speechwriter. The Soviet press had been ridiculing the exhibit, claiming it was no more typical of a worker’s home than England’s Buckingham Palace or India’s Taj Mahal. Nixon scotched Khrushchev’s argument, then lectured him on the futility and peril of one nation trying to impose its will on another.

  Photographs of the scene showed Nixon gesturing sternly and jabbing a finger in the Soviet leader’s chest. No longer did he seem on the defensive, let alone browbeaten. Overall, thought Harrison Salisbury, one of the few reporters present who spoke Russian and understood what Khrushchev was saying, “It was a remarkably able presentation by each man of his viewpoint. . . . I was surprised at how well Nixon handled himself.”

  A few nights later, in American company, he disgraced himself. Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, recalled his behavior upon his return from making a broadcast on Soviet television. “He came back terribly upset, terribly nervous. . . . So he drank about six martinis before we sat down for dinner. . . . As soon as we sat down, he started going around the table to see what everyone thinks about the speech. And he’d keep interrupting the person: ‘Did you hear me say this? Did you hear me say this?’ Then he began using abusive—well, not abusive, but vulgar swearwords in this mixed company. . . . He was a strange character.”

  “The fact that he had a couple of extra drinks didn’t bother me,” recalled U.S. official Vladimir Toumanoff, “so much as the fact that . . . he was vicious . . . riddled with anger and hostility and self-praise and arrogance.” That Nixon drank and could not hold his drink was a concern. That he crumbled under pressure did not bode well in a man with presidential ambitions. When Milton Eisenhower returned to Washington, he reported to his brother what he had seen that evening.

  The public Nixon, though, had done himself no harm in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev might disdainfully recall him as “a typical middle-class American businessman,” a “son of a bitch,” and claim that he later did what he could to help John F. Kennedy defeat him the following year. Many Americans, on the contrary, thought that Nixon’s showing on the Soviet trip won him votes.

  In a letter before he left for Moscow the wealthy Elmer Bobst had written to advise him that his primary purpose on the trip should be “to stick your fist under Khrushchev’s nose and become President of the United States.” For Nixon, poking his finger at the Soviet leader may have been the result as much of advance planning as of spleen.

  Other elements of the Moscow visit were contrived, and some of those who participated were significant to Nixon in ways outsiders could not appreciate. Nixon had acted on the telephoned suggestion of “Mr. Thomas,” aka the helpful millionaire Howard Hughes, that the latest American airliners, including one of his own TWA 707 jets, carry the U.S. contingent on the journey. The TWA plane set a new speed record for the Moscow flight and received massive publicity in return.* 5 Also along was TWA�
��s president, Charles Thomas, who had contributed to Nixon’s fund.

  Not mentioned in Nixon’s account of the Moscow visit was his initiative on behalf of PepsiCo Inc. Donald Kendall, head of Pepsi’s overseas operations and a Nixon friend, had asked him beforehand to bring Khrushchev over to the company stand at the trade exhibit. “I had to get a Pepsi in Khrushchev’s hands,” Kendall remembered. “I had to get a picture.”

  Nixon duly obliged. Kendall served the Soviet leader Pepsi, asking whether he preferred a bottle of the drink as produced in New York or one made using local Moscow water. Khrushchev said, predictably, that he preferred the local version. Kendall meanwhile had thus obtained his coveted photograph of the leader of the Communist bloc clutching a drink symbolic of “decadent” American society. The picture was disseminated around the world, to become a major feature of Pepsi’s advertising campaign. It not only represented a victory over the company’s market rival, Coca-Cola, but also massively boosted Kendall’s career—he soon moved up to become Pepsi’s president—and sealed a mutually beneficial long-term bond with Nixon.

  _____

  The Khrushchev encounter had been a benchmark in the maturing of Richard Nixon. He had stepped onto the world stage with the leader of America’s most feared enemy and had held his own. The words he had spoken embodied the thinking that was to direct his policies for years to come, defining attitudes that shaped the foreign policy of his presidency and his country in the last half of the century.

  Just before flying to Moscow, Nixon had issued a stern edict to his speechwriters that they must never use the statement “We endorse the principle of coexistence.” “Tell all of them,” he wrote his national security aide Robert Cushman, “it is never to be used again . . . whoever does it will be shipped [out] on the next plane.”

  Before leaving Russia, in an unprecedented broadcast by an American politician to the Soviet people, he explained his position. “To me,” Nixon said, “the concept of peaceful coexistence is completely inadequate and negative. Coexistence implies that the world must be divided into two hostile camps with a wall of hate and fear between. What we need today is not two worlds but one world, where different peoples choose the economic and political systems which they want. . . . Let us have peaceful competition.”

  “Mr. Khrushchev predicted that our grandchildren would live under Communism. . . . We do not object to his saying this will happen. We only object if he tries to bring it about. And this is my answer to him. I do not say that your grandchildren will live under capitalism. We prefer our system. But the very essence of our belief is that we do not and will not try to impose our system on anyone else. . . . You and all other peoples on this earth should have the right to chose the kind of economic and political system which best fits your particular problems, without any foreign intervention. I pledge to you that in the years to come I shall devote my best efforts to the cause of peace. . . .”

  When he was selected to run for the presidency a year later, Nixon rearranged the verbiage for domestic consumption. “When Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under Communism,” he now told fellow Republicans, “let us say his grandchildren will live in freedom.” Absent, then, would be the assurance that Washington had no wish to impose its system on any other nation. Gone too was the promise of “no foreign intervention.”

  Although Nixon may have been more or less sincere when he addressed the Soviet people, there were key exceptions to the assurances he gave them. Foremost among them were the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, a region the United States regarded as its own backyard. In those countries what Washington could not be seen to do by open intervention it sought to achieve by pressure, intrigue, and, when necessary, covert action.

  Five years before the Moscow visit a young CIA agent named Howard Hunt had been briefed on a new mission by the agency’s psychological warfare chief. He “swore me to secrecy,” the future Watergate burglar recalled, “and revealed that the National Security Council under Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon had ordered the overthrow of Guatemala’s Communist regime.” The Guatemalan government, which some argue was not in fact Communist but which had had the temerity to seize some of the vast holdings of the United Fruit Company, the American-owned banana corporation,6 had duly been toppled by the CIA in the early summer of 1954.

  It had been a cunning operation, achieved with a great deal of bluff and comparatively little bloodshed. President Eisenhower had been pleased and summoned senior agency officers to the White House to brief him on how they had accomplished the task. That morning, when the lights were turned off for a slide show, one of the officers had an odd encounter.

  “A door opened near me,” recalled propaganda specialist David Phillips. “In the darkness I could see only the silhouette of the person entering the room; when the door closed, it was dark again, and I could not make out the features of the man standing next to me. He whispered a number of questions: ‘Who is that? Who made that decision?’ I was vaguely uncomfortable. The questions from the unknown man next to me were insistent, furtive. . . . The lights went up. The man moved away. He was Richard Nixon, the vice president.”

  Six years later Phillips, Hunt, and other members of the Guatemala team would convene again in Washington, this time at a shabby CIA building opposite the Lincoln Memorial. They knew a new project was underway, but had not yet been told what it involved. Given three guesses, though, as to why they had been summoned, Phillips had a ready response. The explanation, he said, was: “Cuba, Cuba. And Cuba.”

  Fidel Castro had come to power in Havana on New Year’s Day 1959. His revolution, he promised in his victory speech, would not be like the events in 1898, “when the North Americans came and made themselves masters of our country.” When Castro visited Washington four months later, the senior official Eisenhower chose to meet with him was Nixon. From that time on, Nixon remembered, he became “the strongest and most persistent advocate” of efforts to overthrow the new Cuban regime and replace it with one acceptable to Washington.

  Those efforts of course ultimately led to the botched invasion at the Bahía de los Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. That military fiasco, performed by ill-starred Cuban exiles but orchestrated by the CIA, would occur in 1961 at the start of President Kennedy’s term. Its prelude, though, took place during a year of messy machinations under the auspices of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. Just what role Nixon played in those machinations has remained uncertain. Not least among the uncertainties has been the question of whether he was involved in the plotting at the dark heart of the Cuba story: American state-sponsored attempts to murder Castro.

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  * * *

  Cuba was a neuralgic problem for Nixon . . . a raw nerve.

  —Henry Kissinger

  “Obsession,” said James Schlesinger in 1996, “may be the correct word.” Nixon’s second CIA director was attempting to describe the persistence with which Nixon, as president, was to press the agency for its records on the Bay of Pigs. As soon as he assumed office, according to Bob Haldeman, Nixon demanded “all the facts and documents the CIA had . . . a complete report on the whole project.” He was “really distressed” when nothing was forthcoming.

  Two years later he renewed his efforts with even greater intensity. The White House tapes alone indicate that Nixon demanded the Bay of Pigs documents—“for me personally”—four times in as many weeks. In September 1971, frustrated and angry, he ordered John Ehrlichman to press the CIA for the material. “Get started right in on this. . . . I don’t want to discuss it. We are entitled to the facts. . . . I’m going to have it.”

  In his handwritten records of White House meetings, Ehrlichman referred to the president with the Greek letter π (p). His note on this instruction read:

  Bay of Pigs—

  π order to CIA

  π is to have the full file

  or else

  Nothing w/held

  Richard Helms, director of central intelligence in
the early part of the Nixon presidency, could hardly send over the agency’s thirty-thousand-page archive on the Cuba project. Nor did he produce either of the two bulky internal studies that had been generated within the CIA since 1961.1 What he did do, on a visit to the Oval Office, was hand Nixon a slender report by a marine colonel who had been seconded to the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs. The president complained in his memoirs that what Helms had given him was “incomplete. . . . The CIA protects itself, even from presidents.”

  That may be an accurate assessment, but the question remains precisely why Nixon was so keen to examine what the agency had on the Bay of Pigs. One reason is that he wanted access to anything that might reflect badly on the Kennedy brothers. As early as 1968 Nixon had said that Robert Kennedy’s presidential bid that year offered “the chance to indict the whole JFK-LBJ tenure, right back to the Bay of Pigs.”

  In 1971, when Nixon urged aides to unearth material likely to damage his predecessors’ reputations, the Bay of Pigs topped his priority list.2 Two years later, as Watergate engulfed him, he demanded the file again. Meanwhile his lawyer Fred Buzhardt went out at dead of night to try to get a journalist to part with other Bay of Pigs information supposedly compromising to the Kennedys.3

  Close study, however, suggests there was more to Nixon’s persistence than presidential malevolence. Nixon’s memoirs, which sometimes reveal more about him than he may have intended, refer to his “imperative need” to get the facts on the Bay of Pigs. Why was it so vital to see the files, a decade after a military failure for which President Kennedy had after all publicly accepted responsibility? What was the basis for the “preoccupation” and “concern” that John Ehrlichman noted?