The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  Late in 1967, Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy decided to challenge President Johnson in the forthcoming spring primaries. What at first seemed like nothing more than a quixotic gesture soon offered a channel for the public’s growing disaffection with the President. Everything about McCarthy seemed ambivalent: his liberal commitments, his interest in being a senator, and even his sincerity in challenging the President. But the mistake was to take him at less than his word. Whatever his original intentions in entering the primaries, McCarthy proved to be a formidable David in the classic confrontation against Goliath.

  McCarthy may have fashioned himself in the mold of Thomas More, ready to risk disfavor with the King rather than submit to his heresies. McCarthy’s importance in the days following Tet, however, lay not in offering any stark contrast to Johnson—indeed, the Senator opposed unilateral withdrawal—but rather in the fact that he dared to confront the President and publicly question his authority. The anti-authoritarian mood of that “Age of Aquarius” gave McCarthy an aura and legitimacy for the disaffected and alienated. His detachment and deliberately muted criticisms served him well (at least until June) and struck many as refreshingly cool, given the overheated political climate. McCarthy moved quietly but emphatically against an imperious ruler and his obsequious retainers. The Senator’s bold proposal to dismiss General Lewis Hershey, the Selective Service Director, and J. Edgar Hoover, the seemingly untouchable head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggested some new direction, different from the long-prevailing course of hallowed institutions.

  New Hampshire’s Democratic governor readily dismissed McCarthy, stating that the Senator would get barely 5 percent of the primary vote in his state. Perhaps that is all he would have garnered if he had been perceived only as an antiwar candidate. But Tet changed the campaign. Public resentment ran high because of the embarrassment of that debacle, and the resentment was shared by supporters of the war as well as opponents. Now Johnson was the man “who could neither pacify the ghetto, speak the plain truth, lick inflation, nor above all end the war.”43

  The Tet backlash focused attention in early March on the New Hampshire primary, the nation’s first. The results shocked the nation. Hawks joined doves, Republicans crossed over—and McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote, and the majority of the state’s delegates. Whether McCarthy was David or Thomas More was questionable; but he had unquestionably embarrassed the President of the United States.

  Invigorated by his New Hampshire “victory,” McCarthy moved on to Wisconsin, which was far less politically ambiguous than New Hampshire. The old Progressive tradition, the high level of political activism, and a longstanding tradition of suspicion toward foreign adventures quickly made McCarthy the frontrunner in the state’s primary. McCarthy’s appeal to his Wisconsin neighbors transcended the war issue. More than anyone else at the time, McCarthy recognized the deeper issue of presidential power and its abuse—an enormously sensitive subject in a state with deep-seated distrust toward public officials. He suggested that presidential candidates acknowledge the limitations of power. Most of all, he twitted Johnson for personalizing the office. “A President should not speak of ‘my country’ but always of ‘our country’; not of ‘my cabinet’ but of ‘the cabinet,’ because once the cabinet is appointed, it becomes something different from the man who may have nominated these persons, even from the Senate which confirms them in office.” In more playful moments, McCarthy sarcastically noted the President’s references to “my helicopters,” or “my troops.” Johnson’s conception of the office was wrong, McCarthy stressed. The office “belongs not to the man who holds it but to the people of this nation.”44

  With less than a week to go before the Wisconsin election, Johnson’s supporters in the state predicted McCarthy’s overwhelming triumph. Projected estimates for the Senator ranged as high as 65 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the swelling opposition to the President encouraged Senator Robert F. Kennedy to announce his own candidacy. Ironically, the immediate effect was to create bitter divisions in the anti-Johnson and antiwar camps.

  The Tet surprise, the New Hampshire rebuke, the prospect of repudiation in the Wisconsin primary, the new reality of the ever-present Kennedy threat, the inability to get Hanoi to the bargaining table, the rebelliousness of Congress—to name only the most obvious factors—projected a different image of the President, one of Gulliver harassed by an army of Lilliputians. And they seemed about to topple him. Physically ill and worn, obsessed with the fear of a second heart attack, demoralized by his failure to win the hearts and minds of Americans, Johnson announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in a March 31 televised address. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” The President also announced a partial bombing halt, stressing a desire to avoid partisan entanglements for the sake of “the presidency” and the opportunities for peace; but he fooled very few. The political system had mastered him—not the other way around—as his editorial and public support dropped sharply, and key supporters drifted away or opposed his policies. The primary results portrayed a painful truth: the President was not very widely loved, and worse, he was judged a failure. He may well have rationalized his withdrawal as giving him an opportunity to gain, as Doris Kearns has written, “more control over and more love from history—the only constituency that really mattered in the end.”45

  The President’s withdrawal was cloaked in typical, albeit understandable, secrecy. The day after announcing it, Johnson insisted that his action had been long planned and had nothing to do with his declining political fortunes. Nevertheless, it seemed—and again, the perception was important—that media and street politics had, for the first time, driven a president from the White House. Johnson acknowledged as much when in a speech to broadcasters in Chicago on April 1, he blamed the failure of the war on the media which had fostered and marshaled unfair opposition to that war and his policies.46

  Johnson’s decision to withdraw provoked a great outpouring of affection and goodwill (even though the lingering skepticism was such that a sizable portion of the media and the public doubted whether he really was through as a candidate). He was, as he so often reminded the people, “the only president you’ve got.” Images of November 1963 and his healing force, as well as his inspiring legislative tour de force, briefly flashed on the scene. The President’s popular approval rating soared from 36 to 49 percent. For the first time in many months, the White House mail came overwhelmingly from friendly correspondents.47 Yet little warmth or depth characterized the response; there was mostly numbness. The war had deeply divided the American people, and those who supported and opposed it at last could agree: it was best for the President to go. The momentary rush of good feeling certainly did not usher in a new era; rising social tensions and the events of the electoral season soon rekindled and unleashed almost boundless furies.

  The nation had rejected Johnson as it had few other sitting presidents. He was perceived as a man who had misled, maybe even willfully deceived, the American people. To achieve his aims, he had attempted to suppress countervailing forces and institutions; his imperiousness and arrogance had led him to ignore dissident voices, outside and inside the White House, and had provoked the unprecedented protests that rent the land. Johnson’s failure to accommodate or temper those protests eventually isolated him and left him no alternative but to leave the presidency—and to leave it largely in disgrace.

  Johnson’s decision was both exhilarating and disturbing. The critics of the war and of the growing excesses of presidential power could take great satisfaction in Johnson’s departure. The “voice of the people” had been heard; democracy had been served. But few pondered the implications for the nation and the presidency. Johnson’s presidency lay in ruins—confused, demoralized, and pervaded with bitterness. The presidency itself, battered from without and distorted from within, had suffered enormously. And worse was yet to come.

  II />
  MAKING MANY NIXONS: 1913–1965

  The Democratic presidential primaries dominated the nation’s attention in 1968. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal opened the way for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a longtime claimant for the party’s honor who now was cast in the dubious position of Johnson’s surrogate. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy intensified their campaigns, vigorously competing for the same constituency to gain the nomination. Meanwhile, Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, emerged as a wild card, pointing his own message to a wholly different quarter of alienated America. Despite talk of the wholesomeness of intra-party squabbling, the chemistry of the Democratic Party’s struggle offered a prescription for disaster, and even tragedy.

  Lyndon Johnson had been embarrassed in the New Hampshire primary and defeated in Wisconsin, but for Richard Nixon, both elections amounted to a coronation. His chief rival, George Romney, withdrew from the field before the New Hampshire balloting, in large measure humiliated by his own ineptness. Nixon carefully worked to preempt the center and thus dominate his party; yet the fringes represented real threats. Nelson Rockefeller may not have been a viable alternative, but he retained the capacity to make life difficult for Nixon—as he had for a decade. And now, from Nixon’s own California base, newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan staked his claim to the still-substantial Goldwater legacy in the Republican Party and offered every indication that his made-for-media style would expand it. Reagan’s threat was formidable, yet it was not quite his time. “Nixon’s the one,” the campaign slogan proclaimed. So he was.

  * * *

  Richard Nixon in 1968 had been a familiar figure on the American political scene for two decades; still, characterizing him generated contradiction more than consistency, confusion rather than clarity. Descriptions of Nixon recorded in those years leave us with many Nixons. When Nixon emerged as “the one” for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination, General Lucius D. Clay confidently predicted that he would be “the leader of the Conservative forces.” New York’s middle-of-the-road Senator Kenneth Keating described Nixon as “pretty much my brand of Republican”; while liberal republican Arthur Flemming, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, labeled Nixon as “a genuine, progressive Republican.”1 Eight years later, people spoke of a “New Nixon” as if to underline not only the “Old Nixon” but the multifaceted image that had prevailed for so long.

  Portraying Nixon demands a Rashomon-like approach if one is to understand those varied images he projected, and the society and constituencies that stimulated and responded to him. The varieties and vagaries of biographies have left us with a portrait of a deeply troubled man, insecure and sometimes tottering on the brink of mental instability; and yet we can also discover a cool, rational man, totally in command of his emotions and reconciled to his destiny. We have been given a cold, impersonal, awkward man; and yet we also have portrayals of a compassionate personality, inwardly and outwardly expressing the Quaker values instilled in him as a child. For some, Nixon vacillated between being sanctimonious and supercilious; others saw stoicism and strength in his character.

  Richard Nixon is a controversial figure in any historical assessment of the postwar era of American history. His place will vary with the passage of time, running a gamut of estimates. But for now, Nixon certainly ranks with the two Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight Eisenhower as a dominant, influential, and charismatic figure of the twentieth century.

  Nixon’s legions of detractors and enemies must confront that reality. They must accept that for those who love and admire Nixon he was an an inspiring personality. His impact on his party was similar to that of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Liberals and intellectuals found themselves uplifted by Stevenson’s appearance on the national scene in 1952. He offered them a refreshing contrast to the crass partisan politics of Harry Truman (who had not yet been discovered as a neo-folk idol) and a languid, entrenched, self-satisfied Democratic Party. Stevenson’s eloquence and candor revived a wave of political emotion that had been largely subdued since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

  Nixon had achieved similar success on the other end of the political spectrum. What a contrast he offered to the defeatism of Thomas Dewey and the dour negativism of Robert Taft! He was a winner (though not always) and a fighter (except at the end). He was dedicated to dissipating the fears that substantial numbers of Americans had regarding Communism and governmental control of the economy. Significantly, his support declined appreciably when his presidential policies seemed to contradict those goals.

  For his supporters, Nixon’s enemies and causes generated substantial passion and sympathy for him. After all, a good part of this country despised what New Dealer and accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss symbolized. Who can gainsay a popular basis for Nixon’s defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate in 1950? H. R. Haldeman, a young Californian in 1952, found Nixon exciting, a man “fighting against odds and the establishment, and winning.” For those who loved and admired him, Nixon’s investiture as Crown Prince in 1952 confirmed the emergence of the real “Modern Republicanism.”

  Nixon could evoke a range of views from one and the same observer. Walter Lippmann, never one to bind himself to consistency as a virtue, painted a variegated landscape of opinions of Nixon over the years. Lippmann described Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech (which defended his use of certain campaign contributions) as “the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear.” He found it “disturbing,” and “with all the magnification of modern electronics, simply mob law.” As President Eisenhower campaigned for re-election four years later, Lippmann remarked that the President “unites the country and heals its divisions. This is precisely what Nixon does not do. He is a politician who divides and embitters the people.” More in sorrow than in heat, Lippmann described Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial defeat as that of “a politician who does not have the confidence of moderate men.” But in 1968, Lippmann had joined the converts to the notion of a “New Nixon,” acknowledging a “new Nixon, a maturer, mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top,… who has outlived and outgrown the ruthless politics of his early days.” The humiliation of Nixon’s resignation six years later reduced Lippmann to analyzing the stars, and not the man. Arthur Schlesinger asked Lippmann if Nixon had been the worst president in history. “No, not the worst,” Lippmann replied, “but perhaps the most embarrassing.… Presidents are not lovable. They’ve had to do too much to get where they are.”2

  All that layering, all that complexity, all that elusiveness, beggars attention. Ronald Steel once remarked that Nixon was like the Ancient Mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve, anxious to tell his story. But if we are to understand and explain Richard Nixon and what he did, we, too, are compelled to tell it again and again.

  “I was born in a house my father built.” So begin the memoirs of Richard Nixon. This pointed opening illustrates his humble beginnings and his strong sense of familial community, and offers a twentieth-century analogue to being born in a log cabin. Any view of Nixon, friendly or unfriendly, comes down to a Horatio Alger–style political story. It is a model for the notion that truly any “ordinary” American boy can grow up to be President of the United States. Accounts of few other modern presidents emphasize their humble beginnings as elaborately as does Nixon’s. The detail, candor, and repetition invite comparison to tales, both mythical and factual, of the young Abe Lincoln. For his admirers, in his early years Nixon (like Lincoln) “managed to stand out in one way or another.” For them, of course, Nixon emerges in this picture as an exceptionally gifted young man, destined for greatness, while others find dark forebodings of the sinister, erratic behavior that later characterized his career.3

  The mature Nixon loved to claim “firsts.” Appropriately, he was the first child born in Yorba Linda, a farming community thirty miles inland from Los Angeles. Born on January 9, 1913, Richard was the second son of Frank and Hannah Nixon. Frank had migrat
ed from Columbus, Ohio, where he had been a streetcar motorman. In Southern California, he tried a variety of jobs, including carpentry, working a citrus ranch, and finally, opening a gasoline station and general store in Whittier. At one juncture, apparently, Frank passed up a chance to buy a site that later turned out to be valuable oil property, provoking endless family laments thereafter over a missed opportunity to be rich.

  Frank Nixon had a hot temper and was known to be severe in disciplining his children. He came from a long line of “tough, strait-laced, Bible-pounding Methodists,” but when he married Hannah Milhous in 1908, he easily moved his allegiance to his wife’s Quaker faith. Throughout his political life, Richard invoked his parents’ memory. The imagery usually centered on his father as a fighter, a scrapper, a man who took on an essentially hostile world that seemingly conspired against him. He portrayed his mother, however, as a strong, quietly assertive, but always effective woman. Richard eagerly sought his mother’s love and approval, especially as he had to cope with her three-year absence when she desperately nursed her tubercular oldest son, Harold. Those family struggles have provided ample grist for the psychohistorians, and Richard Nixon himself has hinted at some large meanings. In his memory, Hannah Milhous Nixon emerged as the center of the family, giving it cohesion and stability. In Quaker terms, Richard probably understood his mother as guided by an “inner light”; publicly, he described her as a “saint.” As his parents were different, Richard responded to them in different ways through the years, always acknowledging their special legacies to him.4