The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  15. In 1996 and 1997 the author wrote to Rebozo asking for an interview in connection with this book. He had already suffered a stroke and sent a message declining. In 1971, when fit, he had refused to speak with reporters preparing the Newsday series cited in this chapter. Bebe Rebozo died in 1998. (Author’s letters to Rebozo, May 25, 1996, Feb 20, 1997, and Rebozo office phone message to author, March 7, 1997.)

  Chapter 12

  1. As in one who takes a pratfall. Nixon probably meant that he had to take the rap.

  2. Four months before his death in 1974, Warren told Alden Whitman of the New York Times he thought Nixon “the most reprehensible” president in the nation’s history, one who had abused not only the office but the American people. In 1974, after Warren died, it was reported that in his last illness he had been denied admission to Bethesda Naval Hospital, which has traditionally cared for the nation’s most distinguished citizens. According to Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg, Nixon’s “inaction” may have been responsible for this. As a retired justice Warren needed White House approval to be received at Bethesda. (Miller, ed., Breaking of the President, op. cit., p. 536.)

  3. Smith told the journalists it was $16,000. The figure later used, and reviewed by accountants and lawyers hired by the Republicans, was $18,235, almost all of which had been supplied to Nixon and spent. A further $11,000 had been collected since the convention and was still on deposit. (Price Waterhouse report, U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 3, 1952.)

  4. In his memoirs Nixon mentions having told Edson to phone Smith, as though to indicate that, as Edson put it in his article, he had “nothing to hide.” One of Nixon’s principal reasons for allowing publication of this information at this time,” Edson wrote, “is to offset rumors about his finances.” Since such rumors had been current for months, Nixon may have prepared Smith in advance to receive such a call, as a ploy to preempt stories by less friendly journalists. He was to praise Edson’s story as “objective,” as against the New York Post’s “bombastic fantasy.” Edson would be manipulated in exactly that way ten years later, when he was fed the Nixon version of an impending story on Howard Hughes’s $205,000 loan to Nixon’s brother Donald. Then Nixon aides characterized him as “a friend.” According to press aide Herb Klein, “Nixon decided [it was] the best way to defuse such a story.” (MEM, p. 93; Nixon, Six Crises, op. cit., p. 754; Chicago Daily News, Sept. 18, 1952; Mazo, op. cit., p. 106–; Klein, op. cit., p. 415; Maheu and Hack, op. cit., p. 84.)

  5. The senator was California’s William Knowland.

  6. On August 21, 1951, Nixon voted for the basing point bill, which the oil companies wanted, and the following month he voted against cutting the oil depletion allowance from 27 percent to 14 percent. As in the past, he energetically championed the oil companies’ efforts to get access to tidelands (offshore) oil. So far as the dairy industry is concerned, one should note that by voting the way contributor Ghormley and other dairymen wanted, Nixon did not oblige Danish-born contributor Thomas Knudsen, who had hoped the United States would lift the quota on Danish cheese imports. (Oil: Drew Pearson column text, Box G 281, DPP, New Republic, Sept. 29, 1952; Knudsen: Kornitzer, op. cit., p. 189–.)

  7. Nixon was to deny having telephoned Finletter, but Drew Pearson noted privately that his research confirmed that the call was made. (Thomas Harrington telegram to DP, including message from RN, Nov. 3, DP to Harry Hoyt, Nov. 4, 1952, Box G281, DPP.)

  8. The casino management, however, was to fail in its suit against Smith in the United States. He claimed that the debts were uncollectable under U.S. law and, contrary to the advice of the embassy’s attorney, under Cuban law. (NYT, Jan. 30, 1963; MO, p. 941; DP memo, Sept. 26, 1952, Box G 281, DPP; Pearson column, Oct. 29, 1962.)

  9. The denial, cited in Look magazine, did not detail the documentation that was supposedly available. Published references to the Hawaii trip do not settle the matter, although it is clear that Nixon arrived in Honolulu on April 4. The author has been unable to establish how long he stayed. Meanwhile available information on Smith’s canceled check does not pin down the date of the Havana visit. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch indicated it was written on April 15, while the New York Times quoted Smith as saying he stopped it on April 4, an obvious chronological impossibility. It is not even clear that the check was written by Smith while he was in Havana; one document suggests he may have done so later, in Florida. In the absence of full documentation of Nixon’s movements and given the rather strong human testimony that he was in Havana, it is reasonable to conclude that he could have been there in either March or April. (Look: Look, Feb. 24, 1953; Hawaii: Honolulu Advertiser, Apr. 5, 1952, JA, pp. 198, 529, n. 19, citing Jack Drown letter of Apr. 30; and PAT, p. 112; check: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 30; Miami Herald, Sept. 26, 1952, and NYT, Jan. 30, 1953; check written in Florida?: Thomas Gaddis to DP, Sept. 28, 1952, Box G 281, DPP.)

  10. Rothman names the member of Congress only as “Johnson.” Representative Justin Johnson, a Republican from California, served from 1943 to 1957. (Rothman named: Norman Rothman, Internal Security—Cuba, June 26, 1961, in FBI Cosa Nostra files supplied to House Select Committee on Assassinations, released 1998, JFK Collection, NA.)

  11. According to his close associate Joseph Stacher, Lansky was one of the first to propose the assassination of Castro and discussed it with CIA contacts as early as 1959. It was at this time, Stacher said, that Lansky reached out to Dana Smith and Senator Smathers, in the hopes of getting the administration to “accept his assassination plan.” In 1960, according to exile leader Antonio de Varona, Lansky discussed “destroying Castro” at a meeting in Miami. Norman Rothman, for his part, said that he too was involved in discussions about killing Castro. (First: Eisenberg, Dan, and Landau, op. cit., p. 257; Varona, Rothman: House Select Committee on Assassinations, vol. X, pp. 171, 183 and corr. Michael Ewing; int. Gerry Hemming.)

  12. In his interview for this book, Clarke did not recall the date on the document he filched. Before the 1960 election, at a time he was doing work for Democrats and Republicans alike, he provided it to Robert Kennedy. The document showed Nixon had stayed at the Nacional, expenses paid, according to Clarke. Kennedy did not use the information.

  13. Dewey had made his name as a crime-fighting special prosecutor in the thirties. This author has seen no evidence demonstrating that he was ever corrupt. He did, however, have a long-term social relationship with the liquor millionaire Lewis Rosentiel, who was involved with the Mafia and specifically with Lansky. Later Dewey was reportedly involved in efforts to help crooked Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa get out of jail. (Not corrupt: Block, op. cit., p. 189; Rosenstiel: Dewey-Rosenthiel corr., Series 5, Box 163, Dewey Papers, University of Rochester, and Summers, Official & Confidential, op. cit., p. 248; Hoffa: Block, op. cit., pp. 133, 310.)

  14. Before the 1952 election the New York Post was passed a letter purportedly written by a Union Oil vice president, referring to an alleged 1950 payment to Nixon of fifty thousand dollars. The money had supposedly been provided by the oil industry and its associates. The Post could not authenticate the document and printed nothing, while Drew Pearson referred to it obliquely after the election. A Senate subcommittee later concluded that the letter was forged. Look magazine linked the affair to an alleged campaign of “forgeries, false charges, innuendoes” in which President Truman had himself participated. (NYT, Feb. 10, 12, 1953; Look, Feb. 24, 1953; copies of documents in Box G 281, DPP; Abell, ed., op. cit., pp. 237, 238, 239.)

  Chapter 13

  1. Columnist Drew Pearson failed to get representatives of the Anti-Defamation League to back the claim that Malaxa was anti-Semitic. In the course of a long-running libel suit against Pearson, however, Malaxa admitted on oath that he had paid one of the ADL leaders, Rabbi Paul Richman, to help with his immigration problems. When the case was called for trial, Malaxa’s lawyers withdrew the action against Pearson and agreed to pay his legal costs. (Pilat, op. cit., p. 17–; Pearson memo to editors, June 5, 1962, Box G 192, 2
/3, DPP.)

  2. Nixon’s benign attitude to Romanian exiles with unsavory war records was not limited to Malaxa. In 1955, as vice president, he invited an émigré named Viorel Trifa, who at the time styled himself a bishop in the Romanian Orthodox Church in exile, to offer the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Trifa was tied to the Nazis and involved in the murder of Jews in Romania in World War II. The Institute for the Study of Genocide described him as a “prime mover” of the 1941 massacre of Jews, the pogrom in which Malaxa had also been implicated. Trifa was eventually deported from the United States in 1984 because of his background. (Trifa prayer: Blum, op. cit., p. 116; Wiesenthal Center: Aaron Brietbart, of Wiesenthal Center to author, May 26, 1999; background: origins of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, by Richard Korn, Korn Archive, Web site, 1997; “10th Anniversary of the Death of Archbishop Valerian,” ed. Rev. Vasile Hategan, Jan. 14, www.roca.org; Loftus and Aarons: op. cit., p. 224; Hazard, op. cit., p. 203, Blum, op. cit., p. 114–; deported: NYT, Feb. 2, Aug. 15, 1984.)

  3. Lyman Kirkpatrick, who had been chief of operations under Frank Wisner in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, would formally advise the INS that Malaxa was “considered entirely unscrupulous . . . a dangerous type of man. . . .” (WP, Nov. 16, 1979; John Ranelagh, The Agency, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 191.)

  4. According to an AP dispatch on October 2, 1952, Nixon did say Truman, Acheson, and Stevenson all were three “traitors of [sic] the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe.” He claimed that a tape recording confirmed this, although the author has been unable to locate such evidence. Truman’s biographer Merle Miller made the point that in the absence of such electronic proof, what Nixon really said must remain as uncertain as Joseph McCarthy’s precise words in February 1950, when he made claims about Communist penetration of the State Department. “No matter really,” wrote Miller. “Traitors was the operative word”—and Truman never forgave Nixon for using it. (Miller, Plain Speaking, op. cit., p. 178, fn.; MEM, p. 112.)

  5. The other man Truman said he could not stand was former Missouri Governor Lloyd Stark, who had fawned on him to get his support, then turned on him during a Senate campaign. (Miller, Plain Speaking, op. cit., p. 178.)

  6. Truman refused even to enter the Senate while Nixon was present and was still lambasting him in speeches in 1960. Backstage at New York’s Shubert Theater, at Christmas 1963, Nixon made his way to Truman and shook his hand. Truman accepted the gesture but said, “The hell with it,” when a photographer asked for a repeat performance. He did allow Nixon to bring him a drink at a Gridiron Dinner in Washington some months later. In 1969, when Truman was eighty-four and Nixon president, Nixon came to the Truman Library in Missouri to present the former president with the piano his predecessor had once used in the White House. He then sat down at the piano to play “The Missouri Waltz,” perhaps unaware that Truman hated the tune. When Nixon finished playing, the old man turned to his wife and in a loud stage whisper asked, “What was that?” (Truman refused to enter Senate: UPI, Oct. 28, 1958; 1960: Houston Post, Oct. 11, 1960; handshake: Newsweek, Jan. 6, 1964; AP photo, Dec. 1963; drink: Kansas City Times, Apr. 28, 1964, Robert Ferrell, Harry S. Truman, Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1994, p. 392; “Waltz”: ibid., and Miller, Plain Speaking, op. cit., p. 358.)

  7. The struggle “in the arena” was an image Nixon used in public and in private over a long period: in a late-night dialogue with Len Garment; at a dinner honoring Mamie Eisenhower; in his farewell talk at the White House when he resigned the presidency. He quoted the Theodore Roosevelt reference at length in the frontispiece to his 1990 book, entitled In the Arena. (Garment, op. cit., p. 85; Remarks at 75th Birthday Dinner Honoring Mamie Doud Eisenhower, Sept. 27, 1971, cited in Public Papers of the Presidents, 1971, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973; MEM, pp. 1076, 1089; Nixon, Arena, op. cit., and see Safire, op. cit., p. 364.)

  8. The activist Zita Remley had been a perennial anti-Nixon whistle-blower since 1946, when she reportedly learned of an anonymous phone call offensive on Nixon’s behalf during the congressional campaign. In 1952 she plied the columnist Drew Pearson with tips, one of them a claim that Nixon had made a false statement in order to obtain a veteran’s tax exemption. Pearson published the story, only to issue a retraction when it seemed that another couple called Richard and Pat Nixon had applied for the exemption. Nixon was still angry enough to tell the story in his 1978 memoirs. Remley, for her part, was still telling the story in 1980; she said it had come to her directly in her work as a deputy assessor for Los Angeles County. (Anonymous calls: chapter 5, Note 1, above; tips: Remley to DP, Oct. 7, 1952, Box G 281, DPP; exemption: MEM, p. 109; FB, p. 236; int. Zita Remley by FB, FBP.)

  9. The outcome of the suit is unknown to the author.

  10. In 1952 Nixon also frequently turned for “counsel and support” to Whittaker Chambers, his star witness in the Hiss case. It was an odd choice considering that Chambers was a notoriously unstable personality. (De Toledano, ed., Notes from the Underground, op. cit., p. 87, MEM, p. 102; unstable: see Weinstein, Perjury, op. cit., especially re: suicidal tendencies.)

  11. In at least one Nixon biography it has been suggested that Hunt, who served in Mexico City from about 1950 to 1953, gave Nixon his card when he visited Mexico as vice president in late 1952. Copies of the card, bearing the handwritten notation “RN saw in Mexico 1952?,” are in both the Mexico visit and Howard Hunt correspondence files in the vice presidential papers at the National Archives. Hunt, however, said in an interview for this book that he passed the card to Nixon somewhat earlier: at the meeting in Harvey’s Restaurant. (Mexico trip and Hunt corr. files, VP, NA; int. Howard Hunt, and Hunt, Undercover, op. cit., p. 127, and see MO, p. 865.)

  Chapter 14

  1. Eisenhower’s Oval Office recordings, made on Dictabelts, are apparently of poor quality and often incomprehensible. Only one intelligible conversation with Nixon, the one referred to in the text, has been reported. (AP, Oct. 24, 1979; AMI, p. 334, fn; and corr. Sandra Feldstein/Dwight Standberg, Archivist, DDEL, Aug. 1999.)

  2. According to Earl Mazo, Eisenhower did occasionally invite Nixon to join him on the course. Another writer who knew Nixon well, Frank Holeman, however, said otherwise. It seems they played together once in a while during Eisenhower’s second term. (Mazo: Mazo, op. cit., p. 196; Holeman: Sevareid, ed., op. cit., p. 140, and see AMI, p. 428.)

  3. Nixon does refer in his memoirs to visiting the family quarters in early 1956, but this was apparently as part of a group. (MEM, p. 168.)

  4. By one account, Eisenhower became aware of Nixon’s resentment. On his wife’s initiative, the Nixons were then given a perfunctory tour of the Gettysburg house. (Costello, op. cit., p. 230.)

  5. The historian was Herbert Parmet, author of seven political biographies, including Richard Nixon and His America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), especially p. 402. As in the past, the author is indebted to Professor Parmet for his help.

  6. For a discussion of the loan that argues against the suspicion that it was a quid pro quo for Nixon’s intervention on Hughes’s behalf, see Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Nixon. (AMI,p. 597–; and Justice Dept. statement, Oct. 27, 1960, Nixon-Hughes Loan file, Campaign Numerical file 804, Box 92, WSPF, NA.)

  BOOKMARK

  Chapter 15

  1. The figure rose to about seven hundred during the Eisenhower presidency. (Manchester, op. cit., p. 918, but see Karnow, op. cit., p. 267.)

  2. Eisler and Dennis both appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the two were cited for contempt of Congress, Eisler at Nixon’s personal urging. (Caute, op. cit., pp. 90–, 210; re: Eisler: see p. 60 supra.)

  3. Nixon wrote scornfully in his memoirs of the Venezuelan security effort, crediting the driver of the press truck with effecting the escape from the crowd. His army interpreter, Lieutenant Colonel Walters, said he did not know who moved the roadblock, comp
osed of vehicles parked across the highway, out of the way. Former CIA station chief Jacob Esterline said in 1998 that Venezuelan security chief Jorge Moldonado, acting on his own initiative, organized the extraction. Earl Mazo, who was present, noted that “soldiers” came to the rescue. So did Secret Service agent Dennis McCarthy, citing a colleague who was on the Caracas detail. (Nixon, Six Crises, op. cit., p. 219; MEM, p. 191; Walters: Walters, op. cit., p. 332; ints. Jacob Esterline; Mazo, op. cit., p. 235; Dennis McCarthy and Philip Smith, Protecting the President, New York: Morrow, 1985, p. 46.)

  4. Nixon would later acknowledge having received both early and last-minute warnings but said security decisions were “outside my domain.” It is clear the decision to go to Caracas was entirely his own. (MEM, p. 186; Nixon, Six Crises, op. cit., pp. 186, 210–; Rufus Youngblood, 20 Years in the Secret Service, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973, p. 69.)

  5. TWA and its aircraft were plugged five times in one newspaper alone, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. (Times-Picayune, Aug. 8, 9, 17, 19, 20, 1959.)

  6. Evan Thomas, in his 1995 book on early CIA chiefs, presents both views: that Guatemala’s president Jacobo Arbenz considered himself a Communist and harbored Communists and that he was merely a reformer who posed no security risk. Christopher Andrew, in his 1995 book on intelligence, took the latter view. (Thomas, op. cit., pp. 112, 370, n. 7 and n. 8; Andrew, op. cit., p. 206.)