Suddenly he hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I just remembered,” he said. “I haven’t resigned from the Army yet!” He called in his secretary and dictated a letter to the Secretary of the Army. A few minutes later she brought the typed letter back to him.
While I watched as he read it over and signed it, I wondered what must be going through his mind. He had spent his entire adult life in the Army and had reached the pinnacle of fame and success. Now he was giving it up to plunge into politics. My guess is that if he could have known of the agonies he was to go through over the next eight years he would have had serious second thoughts.
As we talked, I was struck by Eisenhower’s beguiling mixture of personal savvy and political naïveté. He began by telling me all the reasons he had not wanted to run for President, and how he had finally decided that it was his duty to run. Then, turning abruptly to his plans for his administration, he said, “Dick, I don’t want a Vice President who will be a figurehead. I want a man who will be a member of the team. And I want him to be able to step into the presidency smoothly in case anything happens to me. Of course,” he added with a grin, “we have to win the election first.”
Eisenhower wanted his campaign to be waged as a crusade against the corruption of the Truman administration and against its foreign policy, which he felt had played into the Communists’ hands in both Europe and Asia. It was clear that he envisaged taking an above-the-battle position, and that whatever hard partisan campaigning was required would be pretty much left to me. He said that as an upstanding young man and a good speaker I should be able not only to flail the Democrats on the corruption issue but also to personify the remedy for it. As for the communist threat, he said that the Hiss case was a text from which I could preach everywhere in the country.
Years later, in 1964, he told me my name had been first on the list he had submitted to his advisers for consideration. He added a bit sheepishly, “I must admit I thought at the time that you were two or three years older than you were.”
I think there were several reasons that Eisenhower had put me on his list and that his advisers had chosen me. In 1952 Republican Party stalwarts viewed Eisenhower as the candidate of the Eastern liberal establishment. In order to hold the party together, he needed a moderate conservative from the Midwest or West who could serve as a bridge to the regular Republican Party organization, which had been sorely disappointed by Taft’s defeat. Eisenhower also knew that to maintain his above-the-battle position he needed a running mate who was willing to engage in all-out combat, and who was good at it. In a sense, the hero needed a point-man.
There was undoubtedly a geographic element in his choice—the recognition of the postwar power and influence of the western United States and particularly of California. More than anyone else under serious consideration, I would also be able to appeal directly to the large number of younger voters and veterans.
I knew that some of Eisenhower’s more liberal advisers had preferred Earl Warren to me, and that some of his more conservative advisers had preferred Bill Knowland, or even Bob Taft if he would accept. Perhaps my anticommunist credentials from the Hiss case were what most tilted the decision to me, because it was already clear that the communist challenge would be an important issue in the campaign.
Eisenhower finally looked at his watch. “We had both better begin getting ready for tonight,” he said.
As we shook hands again at the door, two things were foremost in my mind. First, within a few hours I would be addressing the convention and millions of Americans on radio and television, and I had not yet prepared a single word or thought. Second, this possibility had seemed so remote that the only suit I had brought to Chicago was the wrinkled light gray one I was wearing. Pat too had been caught by surprise. She was lunching in a nearby restaurant when she heard a news bulletin that I was to be Eisenhower’s running mate.
Chotiner and I went directly to the convention hall. We arrived shortly before the delegates were to begin the balloting for Vice President. I found Bill Knowland and asked him if he would do me the honor of placing my name in nomination. Knowland was not only a personal friend, but also the man whom Taft probably would have chosen as his running mate. Knowland said that he would be proud and happy to nominate me. I walked down the aisle to the Ohio delegation, and immediately spotted Senator John Bricker by his massive mane of white hair. When I asked if he would second my nomination, tears filled his eyes: “Dick,” he said, “there isn’t anybody in the world I would rather make a speech for, but after what they have said and done to Bob Taft over the last few months, I just cannot bring myself to do it. I would appreciate it if you would ask somebody else.” I was taken aback by the depth of his feeling against the Eisenhower forces, and for the first time I realized how difficult and how important my role as a bridge between the party factions was going to be. I told Bricker that I appreciated his candor. I asked Governor Alfred Driscoll of New Jersey to deliver the main seconding speech in his place.
Since there was no opposition to my nomination, a motion was made that the rules be suspended and I be nominated by acclamation. At 6:33 P.M. I became the convention’s nominee for Vice President. Joe Martin asked me to come up to the rostrum. Pat joined me on the convention floor and kissed me twice—the second time at the insistence of the photographers who had missed the first time.
It was to happen many times over the next two decades, but both Pat and I still remember that first time, and our surprise and elation at the thunderous sound of several thousand people shouting themselves hoarse and stamping their feet and clapping for us. I felt exhilarated—almost heady—as I looked out across the moving, shifting mass that filled the convention floor and galleries. Pat said later that for those few minutes it actually made her forget the long campaign that we would have to endure.
Joe Martin was beaming broadly. Pat kissed him, and his face flushed boyishly. I asked him whether he should not try to calm the people down, and he had to yell in my ear to make himself heard above the noise: “You know the old saying—gather in the hay while the sun is shining.”
That night Eisenhower delivered his acceptance speech proclaiming his crusade. My acceptance speech followed his and closed both the evening and the convention. Standing before the delegates and the television cameras, still in my rumpled gray suit, I pledged myself to put on a “fighting campaign for the election of a fighting candidate,” and also to work for a Republican-controlled House and Senate. In an attempt to begin healing wounds right away, I praised Joe Martin and Styles Bridges—both considered to be either pro-Taft or at best neutral toward Eisenhower—for their work at the convention and said how important it was that they be Speaker and Majority Leader in the next Congress.
The raucous audience suddenly grew still in anticipation of what it knew must be coming. “And then may I say this one word about a man that I consider to be a very great man. I am a relatively young man in politics. . . . But I do think I know something about the abilities of men in legislative life. And it seems to me that one of the greatest tragedies of the past two years, in the past four years, has been this: that one of the really great senators, one of the greatest legislative leaders in the history of America at the present time, instead of being chairman of the majority policy committee is chairman of the minority policy committee. And I say let’s be sure that Senator Bob Taft is chairman of the majority policy committee after next January.”
The frustration of the Taft supporters at having lost was added to the general sentiment for “Mr. Republican,” and the convention went wild for him. In fact, it went too wild for the taste of some of Eisenhower’s liberal advisers, who felt that Taft’s ovation was more enthusiastic than Eisenhower’s. Some of them even suggested that I had done this purposely in order to belittle Eisenhower and build myself up. This was my first, but by no means my last, run-in with this small but determined group.
The next evening I called on Taft at his hotel. He was obviously a terribly
disappointed man, but not a beaten man. He took his defeat with good grace, and reassured me that he would work for Eisenhower’s election. He told me that he was genuinely pleased that I was on the ticket.
My major job in the campaign, as I saw it, was to help heal the breach which had developed during the pre-convention period between the Taft and Eisenhower supporters. The problem was not the men at the top: Taft was a team player and he went all out in his support of the ticket. But many of Taft’s partisans were bitter over their defeat and seemed likely to sit out the campaign. Most of the resentment was not aimed at Eisenhower personally, but at the men around him, and particularly the Eastern liberal faction that had managed his nomination, symbolized by Cabot Lodge, Sherman Adams, and Tom Dewey.
While they all knew that I had been for Eisenhower, they appreciated the fact that I had not been involved in any of the pre-convention attacks on Taft. Also, the Taft people tended to be organization minded, and they considered me to be a good organization man because both as congressman and senator I had spoken for party fund-raising and other affairs all over the country and thus was known personally to many of them. They knew that I would hit hard against communism and corruption, and they believed that it was essential to develop those issues if we were to pull in the candidates for the House and Senate who would assure us majorities in Congress.
That was why I was asked to keynote the Ohio State Republican Convention held in Columbus three weeks after the national convention. Two weeks later I made a similar speech on Republican Day at the Illinois State Fair. Illinois was a Taft state, and it was felt that through my speech I could stimulate the interest of the organization people on behalf of the ticket.
Right after the convention, Eisenhower went to Denver for a vacation, and I returned to Washington in a kind of daze. One of the many thousands of letters that poured in to my office was a handwritten one from a 1947 House classmate.
Dear Dick:
I was tremendously pleased that the convention selected you for V.P. I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly. You were an ideal selection and will bring to the ticket a great deal of strength.
Please give my best to your wife and all kinds of good luck to you.
Cordially,
Jack Kennedy
Campaigns in those days still used whistle-stop trains, and that is how we began ours. Eisenhower’s train, the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special, set out first for a tour of the Midwest. My own more prosaically named Nixon Special left on September 17 from Pomona, the town near Whittier where I had kicked off my campaigns for the House and Senate.
Nearly all the Nixons and Milhouses were on hand at the station that night. Even Earl Warren was carried away by the excitement. He introduced me graciously and concluded by saying, “I now present to you the next President of the United States.” The laughter and applause which broke loose after his uncharacteristic slip of the tongue drowned out his embarrassed correction.
From the back platform of my train, I described the corruption in Truman’s administration and lambasted “the mess in Washington.” Eisenhower would change all that, I said, and I promised to bring the message of Eisenhower’s crusade to every corner of the country during the next two months.
THE FUND CRISIS
A few days before the Pomona kickoff, I had appeared in Washington on Meet the Press. After the broadcast, one of the reporters on the panel, the syndicated columnist Peter Edson, took me aside and said, “Senator, what is this ‘fund’ we hear about? There is a rumor to the effect that you have a supplementary salary of $20,000 a year, contributed by a hundred California businessmen. What about it?”
I told Edson that immediately after my election to the Senate I had met with several of my California supporters to discuss the best ways of being an effective senator. The biggest problem was the great distance between Washington and California. Everyone agreed that to be effective I should spend as much time as possible traveling around the state, making speeches and keeping in touch with the people in person and through the mail. But the statutory allowance provided for only one round trip between California and Washington per session, and since personal or strictly political material could not be sent free under the Senate frank, I would also have to pay for printing and postage of political mailings from my own funds. This could be expensive; for example, it had cost me over $2,000 a year just to send a Christmas card to each of the 20,000 people who had done volunteer work or made a contribution to my Senate campaign.
Murray Chotiner suggested that we think in terms of running a “permanent campaign” all through my six-year term, and Dana Smith, an attorney from Pasadena who had been finance chairman of my Senate campaign, suggested that we do some public fund-raising for it. He said that if we limited contributions to a relatively small amount and then had everything handled through a trustee, there could be no question about people trying to buy influence or about my gaining any personal profit.
In late 1950 Smith sent a letter to a few hundred campaign contributors outlining the purposes of this new fund. Several weeks later Smith sent out a second and more widely distributed mailing—this time an open letter to several thousand people on our campaign mailing lists. In the end, seventy-six had contributed an average of $240 each. No single contribution was more than $500, the limit Smith had set. The total amount we received for my fund was $18,235. Throughout the two years of its existence, all transactions were handled by Smith and paid by check. All expenditures were for mailing, travel, and other political activities. Not a cent was used for solely personal purposes.
I told Edson to call Smith for any information he needed for his story and gave him Smith’s phone number in Pasadena.
Edson called Smith, who was happy to explain the fund to him. The same day, three other reporters also asked Smith about it, and he explained it to them. One of the three was Leo Katcher, a Hollywood movie writer who also covered the Los Angeles area for the New York Post.
On September 18, the day after our Pomona kickoff, the fund story exploded across the front page of the late morning edition of the New York Post. Secret Nixon Fund! the banner screamed; inside, another headline said: Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.
The story, written by Katcher, did not support the sensationalism of these headlines. In fact, the Post’s play of the story was so excessive that many editors dismissed it as a partisan ploy or relegated accounts of it to an inside page. The Post’s extreme liberal-left politics and Katcher’s Hollywood gossip background lent weight to this interpretation. The editors of Newsweek decided that the story was a political stunt and that it would either be ignored or would backfire. Peter Edson’s long and objective story on the fund appeared in many papers on the same day as Katcher’s “exclusive,” but its sober recounting of the facts sounded pale alongside the Post’s bombastic fantasy.
The Democrats, whose presidential nominee was Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, tried to keep the Post’s version of the fund story going. They succeeded in making it a national issue when the Democratic National Chairman, Stephen Mitchell, demanded that I be thrown off the ticket or that we at least keep quiet about public morals. Other Democrats quickly chimed in that the whole Eisenhower crusade had been exposed as a phony.
About the only silence concerning the fund came from the Eisenhower train, where his staff had kept the story from him until early Friday morning so that he could devote his full attention to a major speech outlining his farm policy at Omaha on Thursday night. When they told him, he was surprised and upset. Concerned because his next scheduled speeches were on corruption, he told his staff, “Let’s find out the facts before I shoot my mouth off.”
After meeting with his principal advisers, Eisenhower released a statement:
I have long admired and applauded Senator Nixon’s American faith and determination to drive communist sympathizers from offices of public trust.<
br />
There has recently been leveled against him a charge of unethical practices. I believe Dick Nixon to be an honest man. I am confident that he will place all the facts before the American people fairly and squarely.
I intend to talk with him at the earliest time we can reach each other by telephone.
Meanwhile, the Nixon Special moved up through the central California valley toward Oregon. Large crowds continued to turn out as hecklers transformed my speeches into sparring matches.
We delayed our departure from Chico, in northern California, to make telephone contact with the Eisenhower train in Nebraska. Senator Fred Seaton, who was acting as liaison between the Eisenhower and Nixon campaign trains, told me that he had a message that Eisenhower had penciled out that morning, recommending that I publish all documentary evidence I had to back up my position. He added that the general said he was ready to consult with me as soon as physically possible, explaining that our train schedules had apparently prevented a telephone conversation up to now. It was clear to me that Eisenhower was not committing himself.
By the beginning of the weekend, the whole nation was saturated with stories and rumors about the Nixon fund—and with speculation about Nixon’s future. Late Friday night, after our train had pulled into a siding until morning, I ran into a reporter in the corridor, and he asked if I had any comment on the Washington Post and New York Herald Tribune editorials.
“What editorials?” I asked.
“Both the Post and Herald Tribune have editorials tomorrow morning saying that you ought to offer your resignation to General Eisenhower.”
I felt as much of a jolt as if the train had suddenly started to move. I said I would not comment without having read the editorials and went back to my private car. I asked to see Murray Chotiner and Bill Rogers, who told me it was true. Since there was nothing that we could do about it, the staff had decided not to ruin my sleep by telling me. They showed me a copy of the Herald Tribune editorial. Although it avoided the question of whether I was actually guilty of anything, it concluded: “The proper course of Senator Nixon in the circumstances is to make a formal offer of withdrawal from the ticket. How this offer is acted on will be determined by an appraisal of all the facts in the light of General Eisenhower’s unsurpassed fairness of mind.”
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