by Nancy Gibbs
In 1997, Chennault confirmed publicly to Nixon biographer Anthony Summers that she had worked on his behalf to stall the peace talks. “Power overpowers all reason,” she said. “It was all very, very confidential.”
In 1968, Johnson did not want Nixon as his enemy. Plus he honored his club duty to defend the office of the presidency, if not the man who had just won the right to occupy it, and a confrontation at that moment would have weakened the office no matter who prevailed. It was a decision not unlike the one Nixon had made himself eight years before, when he decided not to challenge the results of the 1960 race.
It is also worth noting that, this opportunity missed, the war would continue and widen, the death toll mount, the damage deepen for years, until it finally ended on terms very much like the ones tentatively agreed to in October of 1968.
There are too many ironies to count, but among them is that the outcome left Nixon in Thieu’s debt—a fact very much against the interests of a president, and a country, trying to end an unwinnable war. Nixon considered Thieu’s stonewall to have been crucial, Safire concluded. “We were in real danger on Saturday,” Nixon told him a few weeks after the election, referring to the moment when peace seemed at hand with seventy-two hours to go. “If they had waited one more day, they would have had the election in the bag.” When he said this, he was sitting in the easy chair on Air Force One, which Johnson had lent the president-elect as a club courtesy. He pushed a button that raised a coffee table into a desk, and propped his feet up.
“It sure beats losing,” he said with a smile.
The Next Transition
Given the finale, the transition from Johnson to Nixon could have been as frosty as Truman and Eisenhower in 1952. But that would not turn out to be the case.
Nixon understood how much he needed Johnson’s goodwill. Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress; he would need bipartisan support to get anything done. And Johnson had no desire to have Nixon as an enemy.
He and Johnson met just a week after the election, on November 11. The Johnsons waited outside the South Portico to greet the Nixons, who pulled up in a black limousine; the greeting was so warm you’d have mistaken them for old friends. Pat and Dick had lunch with Lyndon and Lady Bird. They got a tour of the private quarters; Nixon was cautious, polite; Johnson warm, expansive.
They spent all afternoon together—and then faced reporters for one of the more extraordinary handoffs ever.
Nixon pointed out what a delicate moment it was, between the peace talks, arms control, the Middle East; the United States could not afford three months of paralysis in its foreign policy. “If progress is to be made in any of these fields, it can be made only if the parties on the other side realize that the current administration is setting forth policies that will be carried forward by the next Administration,” he declared. Therefore, Nixon gave his assurances that Johnson and Rusk “could speak not just for this Administration but for the nation, and that meant for the next Administration as well.”
Was Nixon essentially offering to extend Johnson’s presidency longer—or start his own sooner? Nixon clarified a few days later that he presumed there would be “prior consultation and prior agreement” between himself and the White House before any major step was taken in foreign affairs. Rather than offering support, Nixon now looked like he was staging a coup, or at least demanding a co-presidency for the interregnum. This was not Johnson’s idea of how a transition worked, so the next day he told reporters that “of course, the decisions that will be made between now and January 20th will be made by this President and by this Secretary of State and by this Secretary of Defense.” Experiment over.
A month later both families met again in the mansion, while the outgoing cabinet hosted the incoming administration at the State Department, and the personal staff had a reception for Nixon’s staff in the White House mess.
Up in the Oval Office, Nixon sat on the sofa, Johnson in his king-sized rocker. The retiring president talked about secrecy, of all things. Don’t revive the NSC, he warned, it will leak like a sieve.
“Let me tell you, Dick, I would have been a damn fool to have discussed major decisions with the full Cabinet present, because I know that if I said something in the morning, you could sure as hell bet it would appear in the afternoon papers.
“I will warn you now, the leaks can kill you.”
12
“I Want to Go; God Take Me”
—DWIGHT EISENHOWER
In April of 1968, Eisenhower had suffered his fourth heart attack while playing golf in Palm Desert, California. “You know Lady Bird and I are thinking of you every minute and praying as deeply as we know how,” Johnson said in a telegram, and offered a plane to fly Ike back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where the long finale played out.
Ward 8 at Walter Reed is a medical refuge like no other, something of a club infirmary. It was “a pageant, a drama unfolding every day, a corner drugstore where Senators, Generals and Presidents meet in hospital robes to trade stories and exchange gossip about the world outside,” David Eisenhower observed. Established in 1946 to treat VIPs, Ward 8 was where Churchill came to visit George Marshall and John Foster Dulles, who died there in 1959. Ike put a picture of Churchill over a mantel there, in a sitting room decorated in Mamie’s favorite colors. Johnson arranged to have a movie screen and projector installed, with a full-time projectionist on call, so Ike could borrow movies from the White House film library. “If you feel lonesome and need a visit from a friend, just send word,” Johnson wrote at the end of June. “I might even ask you to move over and make room for me too.”
And indeed he came regularly, usually arriving quietly and alone, without his entourage. He sent a steady stream of gifts and flowers, proclaimed Eisenhower Week for October to mark the general’s seventy-eighth birthday. Having announced at the end of March that he would not be seeking another term, his presidency was prematurely inviting a hostile verdict from history. He would never get to be like his hero Roosevelt, David Eisenhower wrote, so “Johnson seemed drawn to the man who perhaps, though not the greatest president, had been the most loved.”
Indeed, at the start of 1968, Ike was back to being the most admired man in the world in Gallup’s poll. But his condition continued to weaken after three more heart attacks, followed by congestive heart failure. Walter Reed got offers from people to donate their hearts if Ike needed a transplant.
Which meant Ike was too ill to attend a most remarkable event: a club marriage. The club is a fraternity, a trade union, a secret society; but it is also something of a family, always figuratively and sometimes literally, as in December of 1968 when Nixon’s daughter Julie married Ike’s grandson David. If Eisenhower and Nixon had never quite managed to consummate their political union, their offspring would manage the next best thing.
Julie and David had met only a few times as children. “But each,” observed the Washington Post, “had a mother who was forever saying ‘I want my child to have a normal life’—while normal mothers were talking about their children growing up to be president.”
If the club creates a natural bond among its members, something of that sympathy extends to their families as well. The first ladies share the unique burden of being perhaps the only person left on the planet who can keep the Leader of the Free World grounded, tell him to pull up his socks and quit feeling sorry for himself. They know, and their children know, what it means to live in the bell jar; to have family vacations turned into photo ops; to wonder at the sudden surfeit of friends and absence of intimacy. “People in public life, presidents, first ladies, have to make a lot of difficult choices,” Lyndon Johnson’s daughter Luci explained. There’s a reason that even first families of very different political persuasions rarely criticize one another. “It’s not necessarily because we’re so classy and nice,” she said. “It’s because we all empathize with each other, with the vulnerability and exposure and the demands on family life. Who needs that kind of life?”
At the same time, habits run in families. When Grandfather Ike left the White House in 1961, his grandson had left “I will return” notes under the White House rugs. In the fall of 1966, David Eisenhower went off to college at Amherst; Julie Nixon went to Smith. Both were invited to address the Hadley, Massachusetts, Republican Women’s Club. They conferred on the phone and decided to decline, but it was not long before David and his roommate paid a visit to Smith and took Julie and a friend out for ice cream. “I was broke,” David recalled. “My roommate forgot his wallet. The girls paid.”
In November 1966 they watched the midterm election returns together; in December he escorted her to her debutante ball, and it lit up the headlines. As things got serious, President Eisenhower tried to rein in his smitten grandson; finish your education, he urged, get yourself firmly established before you consider settling down. He and Mamie had set aside money for David’s education.
Richard Nixon, for his part, could not have been more pleased. “Freshman year they hitchhiked between the campuses,” Nixon told a reporter in Portland, Oregon, in 1967. “I’m told General Eisenhower blew his stack and urged David to get a car.” By Thanksgiving in 1967, with Mamie’s blessing, David gave Julie his great-grandmother’s ring. “All the news reports made us sound like fugitive lovers,” David said with a laugh when the news became public two weeks later.
The romance was a great blessing for Nixon, personally and politically. He and Pat genuinely liked David. Nixon was struggling to erase the old images of hatchet man, loser, stiff; now he got to be the proud father, uniting his tribe with the most popular brand name in American politics. It was a huge dose of Republican love. At a moment when college students were occupying buildings and levitating the Pentagon, the couple were like a Madison Avenue ad for respect and decency. “In a year of wee-hour skull sessions, G.O.P. strategists could hardly have cooked up such a promotional coup,” Time wrote. “The idea would have seemed too stagy or cloyingly obvious: the candidate’s perky, pretty 20-year-old daughter Julie becoming engaged to the 20-year-old grandson of Dwight Eisenhower on the very eve of the presidential primary race.”
“In the realm of national politics,” the New York Times marveled, “nothing like it has been seen since the marriage of Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Nicholas Longworth, then Speaker of the House.”
The kids had given one another joke initials reflecting their endless press coverage: Julie was NCPD—No Cream Puff Deb; Tricia was FP—Fairy Princess; David was TCC—Teen Carbon Copy, for his famous grandfather. Julie and her older sister, Tricia, “have blossomed into political charmers, paragons of wholesome comeliness in a nonconformist era,” Time treacled.
David was actually a more loyal Nixon partisan than Ike had ever been: “You are guilty either of grave oversight or willful neglect in regard to Richard Nixon,” read David’s stern letter to the New York Times in July of 1968 as he settled into his new job as chairman of the Youth for Nixon organization. He became a star campaign attraction through the summer. “I always campaign better with an Eisenhower,” Nixon would joke as he introduced David to appreciative crowds. “Inheriting both the name and his grandfather’s magnificent grin,” Time observed, “the tousled, sometimes diffident college junior lends a certain symmetry to the Nixon drive in the minds of many Republicans. His very presence recalls calmer times when Ike was in the White House.”
What to give the bride whose family potentially has everything? At Julie’s first bridal shower, Nixon’s secretary Rosemary Woods gave her a steam iron. Others offered scented candles, nightgowns, bookends, scouring pads, and a copy of The Joy of Cooking. But this was no normal couple setting up house. As the December wedding approached, the gifts came in from all over the world—especially after Nixon’s squeaker of a victory in November. Charles de Gaulle sent a Sèvres tea service for twelve; Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan sent an ancient Canaanite necklace and fertility idol from 200 BC. As for the wedding dress, made by Priscilla of Boston, that was guarded like a state secret.
Julie and David could have had a White House wedding. But she wanted something more private; she said that she and David were historic enough without having their wedding in the East Room. Luci Johnson did give the incoming generation a tour after the election. The White House, she said, can either be “the loneliest” or “the warmest” place to live.
“It can be as much as you put into it.”
Julie chose Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, where her father used to worship when he was a naval officer in World War II, stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Officiating would be Dr. Norman Vincent Peale—another rich political irony, since it was Peale’s meeting of evangelical leaders in September of 1960 that denounced the Catholic John F. Kennedy’s fitness for office with such fervor that it may have helped cost Nixon the race.
One more plot twist, this one a preview, not an echo: David’s best man was Fred Grandy, his Exeter roommate. In years to come, Grandy would play Watergate dirty trickster Donald Segretti in the forgettable 1979 TV adaptation of John Dean’s Blind Ambition, and most famously, the bumbling Gopher on The Love Boat. In 1986, he was elected to Congress from Iowa. The reception would be at the Plaza Hotel; they requested “Edelweiss” for their first dance. “There will be no musical selections from ‘Camelot,’” the New York Times archly observed. But there would be “The Impossible Dream.”
As the big day drew near, it was clear that Eisenhower would not be well enough to attend. So Nixon took the family festivities to him. At the end of November he visited Walter Reed, had Thanksgiving with the Eisenhower family, turkey and pumpkin pie at the communal table in Ward 8. Nixon was in the process of assembling his cabinet; he asked all his cabinet choices to pay Eisenhower a visit. Soon after, Eisenhower wrote to Nixon, telling him, first, how sorry he was to miss the wedding—his grandson, he said, “is one of the luckiest young fellows in the world, to get such a girl”—and second, he had some thoughts about staffing. He attached a proposal, which he asked Nixon to destroy after he read it. It suggested that Nixon consider appointing Ike’s old friend and attorney general, Herb Brownell, as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The whole event, wedding ceremony and reception alike, was closed to the press; but NBC tried (unsuccessfully, it turned out), to televise the ceremony for an audience of two: Ike and Mamie, watching over closed circuit TV from Walter Reed. The church was decorated for Christmas, filled with red and white poinsettias and a twelve-foot wreath. The guests entered to Christmas carols and Handel’s Water Music. It was a surprisingly nonpolitical affair; incoming cabinet members attended, and old Nixon family friends, and lots of David’s and Julie’s college friends. When former New York governor Thomas Dewey entered the church, an usher asked on which side he belonged, bride or groom: that was a puzzle. “Both!” he said, and the usher led him to the Nixon side.
Julie surprised her father as he stood at the front of the church to give her away, by turning to kiss him. His daughter, he said later, was not nearly as nervous as he was.
One concession to biography and the electoral map: half the champagne at the reception was from California, the other half from New York. The six-tier wedding cake stood five feet and weighed five hundred pounds. When the couple set off for their honeymoon, Julie threw her bouquet into Tricia’s hands: she would turn out to have the White House wedding, on a June day in 1971. Her sense of history guiding tradition, Julie had worn the same blue garter that Mamie wore in 1916—but she gave David a different one to throw to his groomsmen.
It was a happy day for both families; it would be followed some months later by a sad one. Eisenhower continued to weaken, and developed pneumonia in March of 1969. “I want to go; God take me,” he said at last, and died on March 28.
He was laid out in his Army uniform, in the $80 government-issue casket he had requested. The funeral arrangements had been made years before like a battle plan, covering every detail from the pace
of the funeral march to the points at which soldiers would present arms or bands would play. The body lay in state at the Capitol, on the same black-draped bier used for Lincoln’s funeral in 1865. The funeral required Johnson’s first trip back to Washington since leaving office. He called on Mamie, but declined Nixon’s invitation to come to the White House, trying to keep a very low profile. It was one year to the day that he had announced he would not run for another term. It was also David’s twenty-first birthday.
After a service at the National Cathedral, Ike’s body was borne by horses and hearse to Union Station, where a freshly painted C&O train carried the body back to Abilene, a journey that took nearly two full days. Thirty-one guns sounded as the baggage car was closed and the black crepe curtains drawn. People lined the tracks even in the chill nights. In Washington, Indiana, with a population of eleven thousand, ten thousand people gathered from as much as fifty miles away to greet the train as it stopped to change crews. Johnson had not planned to follow the body to Abilene; but the Eisenhowers invited him warmly, so after flying back to Texas, he asked the Air Force to provide him a JetStar, and he landed in Kansas just before Nixon arrived on Air Force One.
Johnson lost more than a friend and counselor; Eisenhower was the living symbol of what felt in 1969 like an easier age, when greatness was an American birthright, when the torrents of change had not yet crashed into every corner of the culture, when there was a majesty about the presidency that allowed Eisenhower to leave office as beloved, respected, and above all, trusted, as he had been when he assumed it.
“A giant of our age is gone,” Johnson said. “His death leaves an empty place in my heart.”
Nixon too lost a mentor whose firm, faithful guidance he sorely needed. His speechwriters debated the tone of the eulogy. It should be “gracious, eloquent, deferential . . . not obsequious.”