The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  As soon as he and Pat had voted and smiled for the cameras, Nixon eluded reporters and sped south down the Pacific Coast Highway to Mexico, where he lunched on enchiladas and beer in the border town of Tijuana. He is said to have prayed on the way back at what he called “one of my favorite Catholic places,” the mission chapel at San Juan Capistrano.

  That evening Nixon sat in the Royal Suite of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, monitoring what turned out to be a cliff-hanger of an election. He isolated himself in front of the television, accepting occasional visits from Pat and his daughters and a select few associates, including Murray Chotiner and Rebozo.

  By 11:00 P.M. California time Nixon deemed his chances of winning “remote.” At 11:30 he prepared to make a statement, telling his daughter Tricia, “I’m afraid we’ve lost, honey.” At 12:15, in front of the cameras in the hotel bedroom, he announced to supporters that “if the present trend continues,” Kennedy would win. He never did verbally and publicly concede defeat.18

  Millions of viewers had watched Pat, standing beside Nixon as he spoke, struggle to keep from crying. Then she broke, the tears flooding down her face. As they walked away, out of sight of the cameras, she darted from her husband’s side and ran for the privacy of her separate bedroom. Jim Bassett’s wife, Wilma, recalled how soon after, as she walked along the hall, Pat’s door opened and “a long, bony arm reached out and drew me in.” “Now,” Pat sobbed as Wilma tried to comfort her, “I’ll never get to be First Lady.” She had not wanted her husband to run but was distraught at the prospect of defeat. Nixon meanwhile prowled the corridors far into the night. There was still a chance he might win.

  The result, when it came, was too close for any man to bear with equanimity. Kennedy became president with 49.71 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.55 percent, with 303 electoral votes to 219 for Nixon. Translated into voter numbers, Kennedy had won by a tiny margin of a mere 113,057 votes out of a turnout of nearly 69 million people. If 28,000 Texan voters had cast their ballots differently, along with 4,500 in Illinois, they would have shifted enough electoral votes to Nixon to elect him president.19

  There was the immediate suspicion of election fraud, and those who questioned the outcome focused on Illinois, one of the last state tallies to come in. A shift of just 4,480 votes from Nixon to Kennedy there would have left neither man with an electoral majority and thrown the decision on who was to be the victor to the House of Representatives.20 From Illinois came rumors of legitimate voters’ having been denied a vote, of votes cast by nonexistent voters, of manipulation of the count, even photographs of voters being slipped money after voting. “With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” archetypal power broker Mayor Daley of Chicago had told Kennedy by telephone when the vote hung in the balance, “you’re going to carry Illinois.”

  As documented once and for all in Richard Mahoney’s masterful 1999 study of the Kennedys, Sons and Brothers, the “friends” were the local mafiosi. “If it wasn’t for me,” Chicago mob boss Giancana would brag later, Kennedy “wouldn’t even be in the White House.” While that was an overblown boast, the Mafia chief’s brother Chuck has recalled how “guys stood menacingly alongside the voting booths, where they made it clear to prospective voters that all ballots were to be cast for Kennedy . . . more than a few arms and legs were broken before the polls closed.” “I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get Kennedy in,” claimed Mickey Cohen, who had ties to the Chicago mob. “The presidency really was stolen in Chicago, without question, by the Democratic machine.” Even Notre Dame law professor Robert Blakey, who once worked in the Kennedy Justice Department, has used the word “stolen” to describe the Democratic victory in Illinois.

  The situation was not entirely one-sided, however. Republicans may also have cheated in the election, though obviously not with the same happy result as the Democrats’. “The point,” the New York Times’ Tom Wicker wrote years later, “is not that the election was stolen from Nixon but that it might have been, since it was so close. Republicans had ample reason to think it had been stolen.”

  For several anxious days, the Democrats worried that Nixon would challenge the result. He did not, and later claimed he chose not to do so because he felt he “could not subject the country to such a situation.” Although some considered this Nixon’s “finest hour,” his friend writer Ralph de Toledano claimed the opposite was true. “Nixon was bitter,” he said. “I discussed it with him. . . . He pressed for the investigation, and it was Eisenhower who said, ‘No, it will tear the country apart.’ At the time, Nixon and the people around him were absolutely furious at Eisenhower.” To have taken the credit for not challenging Kennedy’s victory, said de Toledano, was “the first time I caught Nixon in what you might call a lie.”

  In private Nixon never did accept that Kennedy had defeated him. “I lost,” he started to say at the age of eighty, then added hurriedly, “Well, not really . . . everyone around me, including Mrs. Nixon, believed that the election had been stolen and that I should have demanded a recount.” At the time he was shattered. “He started to sob, and he couldn’t stop . . . he had to be led out of the room,” recalled campaign chairman Len Hall. Days later, in Florida, Herb Klein thought his boss “completely depressed. . . . Nixon found it difficult even to speak.”

  His spirits lifted somewhat when Kennedy, urged by his father to mend fences in the name of national unity, helicoptered in from Palm Beach to see him. Later he would claim Kennedy had offered him a post abroad and that he had turned it down, a story that Kennedy denied. In private the president-elect just shook his head and said, “It was just as well for all of us that he didn’t quite make it.” “If I’ve done nothing for this country,” he told an old friend, “I’ve saved them from Dick Nixon.”

  For Nixon, it was the bitter start to a resentment that festered for the rest of his life. “I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money . . .” he was to write. “I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.”

  One longtime aide, however, took a different view. “Dick didn’t lose this election,” he told Theodore White off the record. “Dick blew this election.” Another said thoughtfully “Maybe Dick was never cut out to be a top banana, from the very beginning.”

  Two years before the 1960 election, the author Margaret Halsey had written a strangely prescient article for the New Republic, looking ahead to the day when Nixon might become president. In that event, Halsey wrote, “Many people will automatically develop a sort of selective morality. They will have one set of ethics—the one they were taught as children and have been used to all their lives—for judging themselves and their friends. They will have another, and a much lower one, for the President of the United States.”

  _____

  Soon after Watergate, Charles Colson ran into former Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell at an airport. “How did you ever stand working for Nixon?” O’Donnell asked. “JFK never trusted his mental ability.” According to former Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee, Kennedy came to regard Nixon as “sick,” “mentally unsound.” Less harshly, he said he thought his former opponent “did not know who he was.”

  Kennedy’s comments had probably been based on more than just personal observation, for Nixon’s use of the New York psychotherapist Dr. Hutschnecker had come close to exposure in 1960. Joseph Kennedy told a female friend that his people had “a whole dossier” on the matter. Frank Sinatra, who was in touch with Kennedy Sr. and campaigning for his son, tried to get publicity for a private investigator’s report revealing that Nixon was Hutschnecker’s patient. Gossip columnist Walter Winchell ran veiled references to that effect. Two days before the election, sitting at home with his wife, the doctor took a call from an Associated Press reporter wanting to know if Nixon was “in good health.” Hutschnecker fende
d him off.

  Those who watched Nixon that year worried about his ability to cope with pressure. “It was this lack of an over-all structure of thought, of a personal vision of the world that a major statesman must possess,” wrote Theodore White, “that explained so many of those instances of the campaign when he broke under pressure.” “The presidency, of course,” Nixon’s own mother said, “is such a great responsibility that I often wonder whether any man could survive under the pressure of that office. I have, however, faith in Richard. . . .”

  Nixon found the day of Kennedy’s inauguration, in January 1961, “one of the most trying days in my life.” He sat through his former opponent’s speech, then went home. That night, knowing that he had the use of his official limousine for only a few more hours, he asked his driver to take him on a last tour around Washington. Nixon no longer had a Secret Service escort. When he tried to enter his Senate office, to take a last look out the window at the view down the Mall, he found it locked. The prestige and power of the vice presidency, such as it was, were already passing.

  “I opened a door,” Nixon remembered, “and went out onto the balcony that looks out across the west grounds of the Capitol. . . . It never seemed more beautiful than at this moment. The Washington Monument stood out stark and clear against the luminous gray sky, and in the distance I could see the Lincoln Memorial. . . . I thought about the great experiences of the past fourteen years. Now all that was over. . . .”

  Then he was driven home through the snow-shrouded streets, clogged with traffic taking guests to inaugural balls celebrating another man’s victory, the victory Nixon believed should have been his.

  On the last day of the contest, aboard his campaign plane, John Kennedy had been asked by a journalist how he expected he would cope were he to lose. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he had replied, “I won’t take it nearly as hard as Nixon will.” Because Nixon did not have much “inner resource,” Kennedy thought, it would be a “terrible blow.”

  Even before the campaign started, a more sympathetic observer had weighed the same prospect. “Suppose he misses it,” Whittaker Chambers had written in a letter to a friend. “I cannot imagine what such a defeat will do to him.”

  1. Nixon’s father Frank and his mother Hannah, on their wedding day in 1908. Richard described her as a “saint.”

  2. Richard, age nine, (standing at left) at play with three of his four brothers—two were to die young.

  3. Richard was a star student at school and at college, and later when he studied at Duke University.

  4. Richard (left) with his mother and brothers Harold and Donald. Of the latter, only Donald was to survive.

  5. With his first love, Ola Welch—she left him to marry another man.

  6. Pat Ryan, soon after her 1940 marriage to Nixon— theirs would be a rocky relationship.

  7. A First Family-to-be. Nixon with Pat and their two daughters, Tricia (right) and Julie (left), in the early days in Washington.

  8. The campaign propaganda that helped win the first election.

  9. Murray Chotiner (left), Nixon’s election strategist—his guiding principle was “hit ’em, hit ’em, hit ’em again.”

  10. Mobster Mickey Cohen (left). He met with Nixon and, he claimed, raised money from the criminal fraternity in two election campaigns.

  11. Meyer Lansky (right). “If you were Meyer, who would you invest in? Some politician named Clams Linguini? Or a nice Protestant boy from Whittier, California?”

  12. Alger Hiss. A Communist traitor who committed perjury, or the victim of a frame-up?

  13. After the Pumpkin Papers were produced, Nixon made a dramatic return from a sea cruise. The Hiss case gave him national prominence.

  14. In 1950, on the way to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

  15. Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, the Park Avenue psychotherapist. Nixon’s people obscured the truth about their relationship.

  16. Nixon at ease. Bebe Rebozo’s home territory, on Key Biscayne, became the site of the “Florida White House.”

  17. Best friends to the end. Nixon said Rebozo was a man of “great character.”

  18. The Checkers speech, in 1952—a plea to the nation to believe he was innocent of financial wrongdoing.

  19. Nixon weeps on a senior colleague’s shoulder on learning that he will remain Eisenhower’s running mate.

  20. Nixon with Ike—he became vice president at forty.

  21. A close call in Caracas. Nixon narrowly escaped a leftist mob.

  22. With Cuban dictator Batista, 1955. “He admires the American way of life.”

  23. A talk with Fidel Castro four months after the revolution. Nixon would soon be White House point man, planning Castro’s overthrow.

  24. Debating John F. Kennedy on television—a public relations calamity.

  25. Narrowly defeated by Kennedy. Nixon believed the election had been stolen, and a long-burning resentment of the Kennedys began.

  26. The second defeat, in the election for California governor in 1962. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

  27. The family afterward. Away from the cameras, it is alleged, he got drunk and physically abused Pat.

  28. Climbing back. Nixon became a top-flight New York attorney, but was already planning a political recovery.

  29. During the wilderness years, in Hong Kong with Hilton Hotel hostess Marianna Liu—the only woman, other than Pat, with whom he has been linked.

  30, 31. Howard Hughes. The billionaire loaned $205,000 to Nixon’s brother Donald (right). Was he, in fact, buying influence with the vice president?

  32, 33. The toll bridge at Paradise Island— a source of secret income for Nixon? James Crosby (right), the mob-linked owner of the island, became a key contributor to the l968 campaign.

  34. At the Raspoutine Restaurant in Paris—the friends included Saudi entrepreneur Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi has admitted to having given jewelry worth thousands to Nixon’s daughters. Did he also donate $1 million for the l972 campaign?

  35. A contentious Life magazine photograph taken in Florida in 1969. Is the man behind Rebozo (arrowed) a gold and silver dealer who claimed he made millions for Nixon and the Republican party in an insider dealing scam? Or a Secret Service agent?

  Perfidy over the Vietnam War?

  36. Anna Chennault said Nixon asked her to carry messages to South Vietnam’s President Thieu during the l968 campaign.

  37. President Johnson received Nixon at the White House after the election, but reportedly believed he had sabotaged the peace initiative.

  38. On the way to victory in l968—the trademark pose.

  39. January 1969: inaugurated as the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

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  He can’t help it. He must always have a crusade. . . . So I said to our dog Checkers this morning, “Well, Checkers, here we go again. I am once more a candidate’s wife and proud to be one.”

  —Pat, in 1962, weeks before her husband reportedly beat her up

  The damage from Richard Nixon’s loss in the 1960 presidential election went beyond politics. In 1961, journalists in search of a “human interest story” got more than they bargained for. On the day the moving van was being loaded for the family’s return to California, Pat suddenly came rushing out of the house. She was “screaming like a banshee,” recalled Washington Daily News reporter Tom Kelly, “completely out of control. Her hair was disheveled, her face red, and her eyes were wild.”

  Kelly and an Associated Press colleague quickly discovered that it was they who were the targets of Pat’s rage. She stood cursing them, claiming that a hostile press had caused her husband’s defeat, until Nixon himself appeared. “She had just snapped,” Kelly said. “Nixon had to lead her back into the house, apologizing to us all the while. . . .”

  This was a Pat the public had never seen, a Pat embittered by the experience of the previous year. “I’ve given up everything I loved,” she had said even before the campai
gn, referring to the loss of privacy and family time. “Mother took the defeat even harder than he did,” her daughter Julie would recall. Years later Pat, like her husband, would still be insisting, “We won in 1960, but the election was stolen from us.”

  The months afterward, Julie said, marked a “turning point in my mother’s attitude toward politics. 1960 disillusioned her beyond redemption.” What Julie did not reveal was what other intimates noted: that much of Pat’s rage was directed against her husband, the husband who had ignored her appeals to quit politics. Even when Nixon had been in the hospital after the knee injury, Pat had not exuded sympathy. “Pat, who seems to feel that Dick is having a wonderful jolly time in the hospital,” Jim Bassett noted in a letter home, “is in one of her ‘moods.’ . . . nobody else in the U.S. would believe it, would they?”

  In early 1961 before leaving the capital, the couple took a vacation in the Bahamas, planned to last a month but cut short by Nixon after two weeks. “The shallow talk, the lack of interest in subjects of importance,” he remembered, “grew more and more boring. . . . I could hardly wait to get back to work.”

  Pat and the children spent the next six months in Washington, “in limbo,” as she put it, while Nixon began work with a Los Angeles law firm. “To be alone,” he would recall, he rented a “small bachelor apartment” in which he learned to fix TV dinners—not mentioning the fact that the apartment was at a very exclusive address across from the Ambassador Hotel.