The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  When the rest of the family reached California, they lived first in a borrowed mansion, then in a house they built in Bel Air. The new home had a panoramic view of the city, four bedrooms, a library, guest and servants’ quarters, a swimming pool, and a bathroom for every day of the week. The Nixons’ new neighbors included Groucho Marx, Dinah Shore, and the actor Cesar Romero.

  More interesting than the house itself was the property’s cost and ownership background. The regular listed price for the lot had been $104,250, about $600,000 at today’s rates, but Nixon paid only $35,000 because, the real estate agent explained, “he was a celebrity who would spur sales.”

  The development on which the property was located was owned by Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison, a campaign contributor who had long wooed Nixon with gifts and hosted him at his luxury retreat south of Los Angeles. Murchison had purchased the development with financing from the Teamsters Union pension fund, soon to be the subject of a criminal probe. Only months before Nixon bought the house, of course, Teamsters leader Hoffa had been the conduit for a massive Mafia contribution to Nixon’s campaign chest.

  “After eight years in Washington,” Nixon was to tell Charles Colson, “I left the White House with $38,000 in my savings account and a four-year-old Oldsmobile. Don’t you make that mistake.” If that accounting was true, Nixon improved his financial situation rapidly. Back in 1946 Earl Adams, senior partner in a top Los Angeles law firm and one of his original supporters, had guaranteed him a job should he fail to win a seat in Congress. Now that Nixon had missed the most glittering of all political prizes, Adams made good on the promise, handing Nixon a position worth one hundred thousand dollars a year. Nixon was also given a large percentage of any business he brought to the firm and also had income from writing contracts. The first contract alone was worth forty thousand dollars.

  These were riches indeed in 1961. After twelve months, having installed a butler named Reeves—a moniker as close as a man could wish to Jeeves—at home and having purchased a sleek new convertible to convey him around Los Angeles, Nixon was able to give his family even better news. He had made $350,000 that year, the equivalent of $2 million today, more than the total of all his earnings as a politician since 1946. Pat’s response was to throw up her hands and cry “Hallelujah!”

  On the surface all seemed well with the Nixons in the late summer of 1961. Friends said they had never seen Pat so relaxed and apparently happy. One close friend, however, the writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, overheard a searing quarrel between husband and wife. “If you ever run for office again,” the Nixons’ old confidante recalled Pat threatening, “I’ll kill myself.”

  As one who had been close to the family for years, St. Johns thought the threat sounded genuine. Yet running for office again was exactly what Nixon intended.1

  _____

  Nixon had never truly abandoned politics, nor politics him. Within twenty-four hours of leaving the vice presidency, when he had left for the vacation in the Bahamas, his hosts had been a former assistant secretary of defense and a property magnate. Nixon named them in his memoirs as Perkins McGuire and Lindsay Hopkins, without identifying them. In fact, McGuire owned Southern Air Transport, a “spook airline” that had for months been flying CIA missions in the secret war against Castro, while Hopkins was a director of Zenith Technical Enterprises, the main dummy company that provided cover for the CIA’s massive anti-Castro operation in Florida.

  Three months later, over drinks at Nixon’s Washington house, a distraught Allen Dulles told him that the Cuba project was about to end in disaster at the Bay of Pigs. Nixon’s daughter Tricia, now fifteen, left a message by the telephone in the hall the following day: “J.F.K. called. I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.

  We have only Nixon’s account of what passed between the two men when they discussed Cuba later in the Oval Office. A biographer who saw his contemporary notes reported that Nixon wrote at the top of the page that Kennedy had “said ‘shit’ six times!” The president was furious at what he viewed as the useless assurances he had been given about the invasion and called the debacle “the worst experience of my life.”

  Nixon’s published account of the meeting makes no mention of matters that must surely have been covered, including the exile politics in which Nixon had dabbled and the CIA activity to which he had been privy. Least of all did he mention the plots to kill Castro, of which both men were probably aware.

  After leaving the White House, Nixon made numerous calls to fellow Republicans, cajoling, even threatening them, not to attack Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs. It is not likely he did so in a burst of fellow feeling. Nixon well knew that a full exposure of the poor decisions, misadventures, and conspiracies that had led to the Bay of Pigs would indicate that all had had their genesis in the previous administration and that he had been involved.

  Whatever the potential risk, however, Nixon himself would soon enough find an opportunity to criticize Kennedy’s Cuba policy. In the short term he contented himself with declaring publicly that the United States “should not start things in the world unless we are prepared to finish them.” Later he would shift to, “Jack handled Cuba badly.” In his memoirs he would insist it was Kennedy who “doomed the operation” by withholding air support. As late as 1992 he would be lashing out at the dead president on the subject in a bizarre way yet to be explained. “Do you think he ran the Bay of Pigs plan past Congress?” he asked. “Or his plans to knock off Castro? Money changed hands on that score, don’t fool yourself.”

  After Eisenhower’s death Nixon would heap blame on him as well, reportedly telling Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo that Eisenhower had “let Cuba go down the drain.” He was to state six years later that he would have gone in with whatever force was necessary to win, “probably in the last month of 1960. . . . I was hard line on Cuba and would have wanted to go ahead without delay.”

  The only way to have provided “the force necessary to win” by December would have been to mount a full-scale American invasion—probably some sixty thousand troops strong—and advance planning for such an operation would have to have started many weeks earlier.2 For a multitude of political reasons, this option seems to have been rejected—except perhaps by Nixon. He later recalled telling Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs that had he been president, he would have found “a proper legal cover”—namely, a pretext—to invade Cuba. Kennedy replied that he could not have risked provoking the Soviet Union with such an action.

  Criticism of Kennedy’s management of the Bay of Pigs is said to have been especially strong within the CIA. It is instructive, then, to discover that the man who headed the CIA’s preparations, Cuba Task Force head Jacob Esterline, assigned the blame not so much to Kennedy as to Richard Nixon.

  “It is very wrong to pick too much on Jack Kennedy,” Esterline said in 1975 in a taped interview for a CIA in-house history. Both then and in a 1998 interview, the former task force chief faulted Nixon for having put selfish political motives above operational priorities. “It came down to us by way of Dulles,” Esterline explained, that it was Nixon who had “canceled the timetable.” In the weeks before the Nixon-Kennedy election, in November 1960, CIA trainers had still been working on the insertion of guerrilla teams into a region of Cuba where they were likely to have strong popular support and where it was hoped that they could start a groundswell of counterrevolution to topple the Castro regime.

  “It might not have worked,” Esterline said, “but it would not have been a major disaster. It would just have been another little thing. . . . But I am told Nixon thought, ‘Well, they had better wait until the election before they mounted anything of the sort.’ . . . Nixon may have thought that, with the action taking place—especially if not successful—the resultant fallout might negatively affect his presidential aspirations. . . . And after he lost the election, they felt they didn’t know whether they wanted to do it or not. The end was that it just kept escal
ating and turning into the nightmares that became the Bay of Pigs, which they then dumped on Jack Kennedy’s lap.”3

  “Of course,” Nixon was still complaining in rancorous old age, President Kennedy “was never held accountable” for the Bay of Pigs. Nor of course was Nixon himself. History may one day change that if the full CIA record has been preserved. Until we know more, the “Bay of Pigs thing” Nixon was to fret about as president must mark his reputation as least as much as it did that of John F. Kennedy.4

  _____

  The perks of life as a top-flight attorney had rapidly palled for Nixon. “I found it difficult to concentrate,” he recalled, “almost impossible to work up much enthusiasm.” Nixon missed Washington, so much so that he commissioned a weekly report on goings-on in the capital. As titular head of the Republican party he crisscrossed the country making speeches. He also set about writing a book.

  This was Six Crises, Nixon’s personal account of his political career, from the Hiss case to his defeat at Kennedy’s hands, presented as the self-portrait of a battler against life’s tough odds. Producing the book, he claimed in its introduction, was such a great ordeal that it rated as “the seventh major crisis of my life.” Told of a weeklong session during which Nixon “barricaded himself with groceries, long yellow pads, a tape recorder and reels of tape,” one reporter wrote in awed tones of his “fierce self-discipline.”

  In a new 1990 edition of Six Crises, Nixon credited two colleagues with “editorial and research assistance” but gave the impression that most of the writing had been his. One of these colleagues, his former special assistant Alvin Moscow, said in 1998, “I was hired, I wrote the first five chapters, of the total of six. Nixon didn’t want to go over each one. . . . Between you and me I thought I’d been had. He waited until I’d written the whole thing, and then he went back and put in a lot of his Nixonian expressions. . . . The sixth chapter he did write, the one on the election of 1960.”

  Nixon’s friend Adela Rogers St. Johns also claimed to have done much of the writing. Years later, when the author Seymour Hersh asked Nixon for an advance blurb on one of his books, a spokesman phoned with regrets. “Mr. Nixon,” he said, “only comments on his own books, the ones written for him.”

  Six Crises was not written merely for the financial reward—Nixon received an estimated advance of $345,000 in 1962 dollars, which he agreed was “too much, really”—but with a shrewd eye to timing. The book was to be published in the spring of 1962, touted as “the mature wisdom and courage of a great American statesman,” and sent to political writers throughout California just as Nixon embarked on a new political campaign. Dropping any pretense that the attorney’s job was more than a stopgap, he had begun running for governor of the state against the Democratic incumbent, Edmund (“Pat”) Brown.

  If Nixon was to return to politics at that point, the California race was his only viable option. Given recent historical precedent, a sitting president was likely to be reelected, so it would have been folly to plan another run against Kennedy in 1964. The gubernatorial contest in the nation’s most populous state, which had voted by a small margin for Nixon in 1960, was the one race on the horizon worth his running.

  Nixon had mentioned the possibility of running for governor during his vacation after Kennedy’s inauguration. The pharmaceuticals tycoon Elmer Bobst had warned him then, as they cruised in the Caribbean aboard Bobst’s yacht, that the race would do nothing to help him reach his ultimate goal, the presidency. Yet Nixon came home to a letter from Whittaker Chambers—the last one, as it turned out, for Chambers died that summer—that urged him to run. Tom Dewey, the old warhorse, also encouraged him. Longtime colleagues were divided on the subject.

  Herb Klein cited polls indicating Nixon would beat Brown. Jim Bassett told him he would be “out of his mind to run,” that in California he would get tripped up by local issues while his expertise was in foreign affairs and that the Democratic legislature would “cut [his] balls off.” Nixon did not heed the warnings. The thought that he might lose, Bassett said, seemed not to have occurred to him.

  “As nearly as I can define my attitude,” Pat Nixon said later, “it was: ‘Let’s not run! Let’s stay home. Let’s be a private family.’ ” Her feelings changed, she recalled, when fifteen-year-old Tricia put her arms around her father and said, “Daddy, come on—let’s show ’em!” No mention was made publicly, of course, of the Pat who had said she would commit suicide should Nixon return to politics. The nearest a relative came to expressing that sentiment was her brother Tom, when he said: “Pat told me that if Dick ran for Governor she was going to take her shoe to him.” Nixon merely remembered Pat’s promising, “If you run, I’m not going to be out campaigning with you. . . .”5

  There are varying versions of her reactions during dinner at a restaurant in late September 1961, the night Nixon publicly announced he would run. Bob Finch’s wife, Carol, recalled Pat’s saying suddenly, “I’m trapped. Which way can I go?” Another account had her fleeing to the rest room in tears.

  Nixon’s opponent, in contrast, relished the contest that faced him. “I welcome the opportunity,” Governor Brown said when Nixon declared, “to confront Richard Nixon in a campaign that once and for all will return him to private life.” Whatever Brown’s own merits, he was to benefit from his challenger’s mistakes. Nixon ranted on about the perils of domestic communism, a war cry that by now sounded dated. He campaigned largely on the strength of his international experience, while Californians cared most about state matters. He spoke of the “mess” in state government when few could see much wrong with it.

  Word got around that Nixon disdained the “little people” of his home state. “That’s what you have to expect from these fucking local yokels,” he told a reporter commiserating with him when attendance was poor at a rural rally. Advised to drop in to talk with representatives of a local newspaper, he responded, “I wouldn’t give them the sweat off my balls.” As the editor of the Sacramento Bee put it dryly, “This kind of thing turned people off.”

  Democrats and Republicans alike indulged in dirty tricks and personal slurs both petty and serious, sometimes disinterring ancient charges. The Democrats harped on about a covenant Nixon had signed when buying one of his homes, a racist pledge binding him not to sell it to “negroes, . . . Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians, and Syrians. . . .” The clause was indefensible, but commonplace enough at the time. Leading Democrats had signed similar agreements. The press meanwhile questioned the circumstances of Nixon’s purchase of his new house in Bel Air, pointing up the Teamsters’ involvement in the development.

  President Kennedy threw his clout behind Pat Brown by campaigning for him. Behind the scenes his people helped dig out Nixonian dirt relevant to California. It was now that, apparently armed with Kennedy’s authorization, a Brown official gained access to Mickey Cohen in Alcatraz. The gangster signed a statement admitting that mob money had helped elect Nixon in past campaigns.6

  The campaign also returned to the matter of the Hughes Loan. Although Kennedy Justice Department officials had investigated but discarded the possibility of bringing prosecutions over the billionaire’s handout to Nixon’s brother, California Democrats now found ways to use it against Nixon. At a Chinatown rally, when the Republican candidate posed with Chinese children holding signs reading WELCOME NIXON in English, he was helping in his own ambush. Beneath the greeting, in Chinese characters that the locals could understand, was a very different message: WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN? The photograph, plus the translation, duly appeared in the newspapers. Dick Tuck, the ubiquitous Democratic prankster, was up to his tricks again.

  When Tom Braden, a Brown appointee on the Board of Education, raised the Hughes issue before a group of newspaper executives, Nixon challenged his rival to “stand up as a man and charge me with misconduct.” “Do it, sir!” he cried, apparently hoping for a repeat of the Checkers speech effect. Brown did not respond, and Nixon found himself forced to discuss the matter again
a few days later on Meet the Press.

  Nixon would eventually conclude that the Hughes Loan had been one of his biggest handicaps of the election, while Brown thought that it had given him a key advantage. Years later, after Nixon had become president, the impertinent Tom Braden would himself being audited by the Internal Revenue Service year after year. He did not think it was a chance occurrence.

  Governor Brown publicly denied having “ever said anything” about the Hughes matter “other than in casual conversation.” That was not true, according to an electronics expert, interviewed in 1999, who had direct contact with Brown on the subject. The expert has requested anonymity because he still sometimes works for federal agencies, but has long proved a reliable source.7 By 1962 his clients had included the military, politicians, and several large companies, including the Hughes organization. “Probably in the late summer of that year,” he recalled, “I got a call from a top man on Brown’s campaign. He set up a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles and before we talked introduced me to Governor Brown himself. Brown told me: ‘You come well recommended. I want you to know that talking to him is like talking to me.’

  “Then Brown went off, and the campaign official and I talked. They wanted dirt on Nixon and specifically wanted me to get them to whoever at Hughes had firsthand knowledge of Nixon’s involvement in the Hughes loan. I said there could be stiff fees involved. And he said, ‘I’ve got twenty thousand dollars right here, and I can go up another twenty—no, make that fifty.’ ”

  What Brown’s people did not know was that the electronics man was at that very time conducting “defensive” operations on behalf of Richard Nixon and some of his closest aides. He had met Nixon at Republican headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard and swept the office—and Nixon’s home in Bel Air—for bugs almost every day.