RN

by Richard Nixon

  On October 28, just days before the election, the Democratic National Committee charged that my family and I owned real estate “conservatively valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars.” In reaching this sum, they included the allegation that my brother Don owned a “swanky new drive-in restaurant” appraised at $175,000. In fact, Don was renting the property. What really infuriated me over this particular series of charges was the inclusion in the DNC calculations of a small farm in Pennsylvania and a modest house in Florida that my parents had bought for their retirement. These properties, which were not lavish by any standards, reflected the sum total of an entire life of hard work by my mother and father. I considered it despicable to attack my parents and suggest that they had unethically acquired expensive real estate.

  Two days later, a Drew Pearson column appeared, characteristically teeming with innuendo and loose facts, which included information from my tax returns. Partisans in the Bureau of Internal Revenue had obviously leaked them to Pearson. Included in his laundry list of charges was one that Pat and I had falsely sworn to a joint property value of less than $10,000 in order to qualify for a $50 veterans’ tax exemption on our California taxes. The charge was totally false. It turned out that a Mrs. Pat Nixon had filed for such an exemption on behalf of her husband, Richard—but they were a couple who coincidentally had the same names as ours. Pearson had not bothered to check with me before printing this lie five days before the election and he did not retract it until three weeks after it.

  Also only after the election did information surface about a criminal scheme designed to malign my character and integrity. Someone forged a letter purporting to be from one oil company executive to another suggesting that I had been bought off for more than $52,000 a year to serve the oil industry in Washington. On the eve of the election, this patent forgery was delivered to the Democratic National Committee, which sent it to the New York Post. Even the Post decided not to risk printing such an obvious libel.

  After the election, Drew Pearson continued trying to stir up interest in the story, so I called for a full investigation by the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections. The investigation proved conclusively that the letter was a forgery, and referred the matter to the Justice Department.

  The fund smear had fallen short, and lies and forgery had also missed the target. But they all took their emotional toll on me and my family. It was not until long afterward that I found out that my proud and combative father had been reduced to bouts of weeping as each new smear surfaced.

  The taste for politics soured, but my only recourse—and my instinct—was to fight back. I quickly came to feel a kinship with Teddy Roosevelt’s description of the man in the arena “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” Forgetful critics would later remember my counterattacks without recalling the lies and distortions that often bred them.

  It would be many months before I could begin to put the agony of the fund crisis in perspective. I think that Eisenhower was impressed both by my toughness and by the political acumen I showed. He appreciated that from the start I had offered to resign if he wanted me to and that I had never consciously done anything to embarrass him.

  I also learned some important lessons about politics and friendship. In politics, most people are your friends only as long as you can do something for them or something to them. In this respect I don’t suppose that politics is much different from other walks of life—but the openly competitive nature of elections probably makes that fact stand out more starkly. Still, I shall never forget my surprise and disappointment about those who turned against me overnight when it looked as if I would have to leave the ticket.

  THE 1952 ELECTION

  After the fund crisis, the rest of the 1952 election campaign seemed tame. Voter studies and opinion polls showed that the demand for change and disgust with the corruption in the federal government were still among the most potent issues we had going for us. President Truman was extremely unpopular in 1952, as President Johnson was later in the dark days of Vietnam and as I was to become during Watergate. As with Johnson and me, some of Truman’s unpopularity rubbed off on his party. Even Adlai Stevenson began putting distance between himself and the Truman administration.

  By surviving the fund crisis, I forestalled the Democrats’ attempt to short-circuit the corruption issue. In fact I emerged a far more effective and sought-after campaigner. My prominence after the fund speech revived public interest in the Hiss case and I reminded audiences across the country that Stevenson had given a deposition used in Hiss’s first perjury trial that vouched for his reputation for veracity, integrity, and loyalty. This was after our committee hearings had proved that Hiss had lied about his relationship with Chambers.

  I also criticized Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose policies toward international Communism, I said, had lost us China, much of Eastern Europe, and had invited the Communists to begin the Korean war. I used a phrase that caught the public’s attention—and the commentators’ wrath—when I charged that Stevenson was a graduate of Acheson’s “Cowardly College of Communist Containment.”

  Many years later, when I was President, Acheson and I became friends, and he was one of my most valued and trusted unofficial advisers. In this campaign, however, his clipped moustache, his British tweeds, and his haughty manner made him the perfect foil for my attacks on the snobbish kind of foreign service personality and mentality that had been taken in hook, line, and sinker by the Communists. Today I regret the intensity of those attacks. While I still believe that Acheson was wrong about Asia, he was right about Europe, where he helped make NATO a strong, durable bastion against Communist aggression.

  In most elections, obviously, the opposing candidates are not overly fond of each other, but there is usually little or no personal antagonism. I felt instinctively negative toward Stevenson. I considered him to be far more veneer than substance, and I felt that beneath his glibness and mocking wit he was shallow, flippant, and indecisive. He reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Eisenhower shared my feelings. As late as 1957, when Dulles brought Stevenson into the State Department in an effort to assure the success of the NATO summit after the shock caused by Sputnik, Eisenhower was adamant against receiving him at the White House or having him attend the summit meetings in Paris. In fact, after Eisenhower’s stroke the doctors ordered us to steer clear of discussion of Stevenson because it always caused the President’s blood pressure to rise alarmingly.

  Although he was not running himself, and although an embarrassed Stevenson tried to keep him in the background, President Truman was one of the main actors in the drama of the 1952 campaign. Harry Truman thrived on the cut and thrust of politics, and it was impossible for Stevenson to keep him out of the campaign. After Truman’s unsuccessful attempt to interest Eisenhower in becoming his Democratic successor in the White House, the relations between the two men became strained and in the 1952 campaign, Truman attacked Eisenhower with a vengeance. Unlike most of the Democrats, who did not challenge Eisenhower’s heroic status, Truman made typically dramatic—and typically irresponsible—charges about Eisenhower’s expertise and even about his motives. Eisenhower was deeply offended by Truman’s intimation that he had been politically involved in the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, which had effectively given Eastern Europe to the Communists. The charge was demonstrably untrue, but Eisenhower never got over his anger that Truman would even countenance, much less spread, such a deliberate slander.

  As a result of this bitterness, Eisenhower would not have the traditional coffee at the White House with his predecessor before going to the Capitol for his inauguration. Instead, the two men met under the North Portico and, but for a bit of casual conversation, rode together in icy silence. Except for a chance meeting at the funeral of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in 1953, they did not meet again until 1961, after Eisenhower had left the White House.

  Pat a
nd I traveled 46,000 grueling miles during the 1952 campaign. I made 92 speeches, 143 whistle-stop appearances, visited 214 cities, and held several press conferences. Because of the fund episode, and because I took the partisan lead that Eisenhower had avoided, I received much more attention than the usual vice presidential candidate—certainly far more than Stevenson’s running mate, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. In some areas I even outdrew Stevenson.

  Everywhere I went I blasted the Democrats, linking Stevenson with Truman and Acheson and asking how the same people who had created the mess in Washington could be expected to clean it up. I called Acheson the “architect of striped-pants confusion.” I told a Boston audience that if Stevenson were elected, “We can expect four more years of this same policy, because Mr. Stevenson received his education from Dean Acheson’s wishy-washy State Department.” I told another cheering audience that I would rather have a “khaki-clad President than one clothed in State Department pinks.”

  A week before the election, in a speech on October 27 at Texarkana, Arkansas, I said that Truman, Stevenson, and Acheson were “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe.” In 1954 and in subsequent campaigns Truman charged that I had called him a traitor in this speech. Even when a tape recording was found and an exact transcript of my words was shown him, he refused to accept that what I had said was not as he had apparently remembered it.

  Some of the rhetoric I used during this campaign was very rough. Perhaps I was unconsciously overreacting to the attacks made against me during and after the fund crisis; perhaps I was simply carried away by the partisan role Eisenhower had assigned me and the knowledge that someone had to fire up the party faithful and let them know a presidential campaign was being fought.

  By the time the last Gallup poll appeared, a few days before the election, the trend was fairly clear:

  Eisenhower–Nixon

  47%

  Stevenson–Sparkman

  40%

  Undecided

  13%

  Both Eisenhower and I campaigned right down to the wire, however, ending with a televised election eve rally at the Boston Garden. Later that night Pat and I flew to California.

  I knew from my experiences in 1946 and 1950 that the longest day of a politician’s life is Election Day, when millions are deciding his fate and he can do nothing whatever about it. After Pat and I voted early in the morning in East Whittier, I asked Bill Rogers if he would like to take a ride. We drove down to Laguna Beach, where we parked the car and walked several miles along the shore.

  Some Marines from Camp Pendleton were throwing a football around on the beach, and we joined them for an impromptu game of touch football. One of the Marines had been staring at me for several minutes before he walked over to Rogers and said, “Say, isn’t he some kind of a celebrity or something?” Rogers responded, “No, he is just Senator Nixon, running for Vice President.” When I dropped a pass later in the game, one of the Marines jokingly remarked, “You’ll make a better Vice President than a football player.” Suddenly he caught himself and sheepishly added, “Sir.”

  We got back to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles around four o’clock and I went straight to my room, got into my pajamas, and tried to take a nap. I told the staff that I did not want to hear any results until at least six, because anything before then would be too fragmentary and would just make everyone nervous. At six o’clock sharp there was a knock on my door, and about a dozen people burst into the room all talking at once. The polls had been closed only for an hour in the East, but already it looked like a landslide.

  In the end, we won by over 61/2 million votes: 55.1 percent to 44.4 percent. We picked up 22 seats in the House; and the final tally was 221 to 213 and 1 independent. In the Senate we picked up 1 seat, which gave us a bare majority of 1.

  VICE PRESIDENT

  1953–1960

  January 20, 1953, the day of my first inauguration as Vice President, was mild and sunny. For the swearing-in ceremony my mother brought two Bibles that had been in the Milhous family for several generations.

  That night we had a small family dinner at home before the inaugural balls. While the others were all talking about the great events of the day, my mother quietly took me aside and gave me a small piece of paper on which she had written a message for me. No one else saw her give it to me, and I did not read it until I was alone later that night. I put it in my wallet, and I have carried it with me ever since:

  Eisenhower’s election ended twenty years of Democratic control of the White House. Winning control of the House and Senate made the victory doubly satisfying. But the tasks we faced were monumental.

  The most immediate problems lay in the area of foreign policy. We were fighting an unpopular war in Korea, and Eisenhower had pledged in the election campaign to bring it to an honorable conclusion.

  Although the U.S.S.R. was still far behind the United States in nuclear arms, it was moving dramatically forward. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet satellite nations formed a monolithic power bloc controlled from Moscow. The rigorously ideological Communist Chinese, still friendly with the Soviets and dependent upon them for economic and technological aid, were in an expansionist phase of their foreign policy.

  Following World War II, the great free world alliance had been formalized by the establishment of NATO, and Europe had been rebuilt with American aid. But it was now becoming clear that both Britain and France had been so weakened by the war that it would not be long before their ability to help maintain security beyond their borders would be limited. The war had marked the beginning of the end —if not the end—of European colonialism. Symptomatic of this phenomenon was the crisis that would plague not only the Eisenhower administration but its successors as well: the deterioration of French control in Indochina. The tide of anticolonialism had not yet swept over Africa when Eisenhower took office. But eight years later, by the time he left, there were more than twenty new independent countries on that continent.

  Other problem areas soon became apparent. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 had planted seeds of hatred that would eventually explode into three full-scale wars. Nearby Iran, with its enormous oil reserves, was under the control of a left-leaning government that most observers feared would inevitably fall under Soviet domination. Latin America appeared secure on the surface, yet long years of dictatorships had laid the foundation for a period of instability and revolution.

  At home Eisenhower’s first task was to fulfill his pledge to clean up the “mess in Washington” by restoring confidence in the honesty of those serving in government. No less important was the job of rooting out security risks in the government—those who by reasons of disloyalty or poor judgment might subvert the policies of the United States.

  The new President was also confronted with a massive problem in trying to develop an economic policy that would bring prosperity without war. He had to mediate the classic debate between those who urged him to cut spending and taxes and those who demanded that more money be spent for housing, health, education, and welfare.

  Eisenhower was to find all these foreign and domestic issues less perplexing than his new duties as head of a divided political party. The division had been stark at the Chicago convention: the Eisenhower wing versus the so-called Old Guard Republicans led by Bob Taft.

  Eisenhower had no taste for many of the rituals of politics. He recognized that he had the almost superhuman job of getting Republicans to think positively after having been the opposition for twenty years. In addition, while he had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, those majorities were very thin, and in large measure they were based on Eisenhower’s personal popularity rather than his party’s strength. He recognized that it was his responsibility to broaden the base of the party so that it would be as strong as its leader, but he never felt at ease with most of the things he had to do to achieve that end.

  INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY: 1953

  Late in the
spring of 1953, Eisenhower asked me to undertake a major trip to Asia and the Far East. He suggested that Pat come with me, and he urged that we visit as many countries as we possibly could.

  From his wartime experiences, Eisenhower knew Europe and its leaders better than almost any other non-European in the world. But he did not know Asia or the Middle East well, and he was never one to overestimate his experience or knowledge. He also felt that Truman had seriously neglected both these important areas, and he tried to remedy this neglect during his own administration.

  In the early 1950s most of the nations on our trip still knew very little about America or Americans. None of these nations had ever received an official visit from a President or Vice President. Their impressions of us were largely formed through bits and pieces of rumors and news, by contacts with individual Americans, and from exported Hollywood films about Chicago gangsters and cowboys and Indians. In those days the good will trip had not yet become a diplomatic cliché.

  There were four specific purposes that my trip was meant to serve. It was intended to honor and reassure our friends and allies. It would also provide an opportunity for me to explain American policies in countries that had adopted a policy of neutrality. It would give me a firsthand look at the rapidly developing situation in Indochina. And it would give me an opportunity to assess Asian attitudes toward the emerging colossus of Communist China.

  On October 5 Pat and I said goodbye to Tricia and Julie and boarded an Air Force four-engine Constellation at National Airport. It was a painful farewell, especially for Pat, who had never been away from the girls for more than two weeks; now we would be away from them for more than two months.