RN

by Richard Nixon

  The Shah was only thirty-four. He had just come through a harrowing experience—an attempt had been made to assassinate him. In our meetings he let Zahedi do most of the talking, but he listened intently and asked penetrating questions. I sensed an inner strength in him, and I felt that in the years ahead he would become a strong leader.

  When our plane landed at National Airport on December 14, we drove to the White House, where Eisenhower invited us upstairs to have coffee with him and Mrs. Eisenhower.

  The next day I received a two-page handwritten letter that, coming from one who meted out praise in very small and careful doses, I knew to be an extraordinarily warm and personal gesture.

  Dear Dick:

  Proud as I am of the record you—and Pat—established on your recent visit to a number of Asian countries, yet I must say I’m glad to have you home.

  We, by which I mean all the principal figures in the Administration, have missed your wise counsel, your energetic support and your exemplary dedication to the service of the country.

  On the purely personal side it was fine to see you both looking so well after the rigors of a trip that must have taxed the strength of even such young and vigorous people as yourselves. I look forward to some quiet opportunity when I can hear a real recital of your adventures and accomplishments.

  With warm personal regards,

  Sincerely,

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  The 1953 trip had a tremendously important effect on my thinking and on my career. It was an undisputed success in that it accomplished its stated objectives and more. But further, it established my foreign policy experience and expertise in what was to become the most critical and controversial part of the world.

  The trip was highly educational for me. I learned much about the people of Asia through contact with hundreds of leaders and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. I also saw three centuries of European colonialism on their deathbed, and I felt that I was able to diagnose the illness. I saw how the leaders and the masses of Asia longed for independence —whether or not they were ready for it, and whether or not they really understood it—because for them it meant dignity and respect. It meant being taken seriously and treated decently, and that was what they wanted.

  I found that many people in these countries knew America only as an immensely powerful nation that both Communist propaganda and European snobbery had painted as crass and rapacious. I reassured them that we were not a colonial power, nor did we approve of the lingering colonialism of our European allies. Both Pat and I took every opportunity to let the people, as well as their leaders, know that America was genuinely interested in them, in their opinions, in their problems, and in their friendship. During years of oppression and repression the people had developed efficient underground communications networks, so that word of the little gestures we made quickly reverberated through a whole city or even a whole country.

  This novel personal diplomacy made headlines everywhere we went and became, I think, one of the most significant contributions of the trip. In Singapore, for example, a front-page headline proclaimed: Nixon Chats with Common Man, and a news account of my arrival began by noting, “The American Vice President, Mr. Richard Nixon, yesterday found time to stretch his arm over a five-foot fence and offer his hand to an ordinary citizen of Malaya.”

  A columnist in Djakarta’s mass-circulation Abadi wrote, “Maybe you readers would not believe that Vice President of the United States Richard Nixon yesterday helped fry sweet potatoes in a peasant’s home between Bogor and Tjipanas. But that really happened yesterday. . . . Nixon even dropped in at a village coffee shop, and seated on a bamboo chair with Sukarno, had a chat with the proprietor.”

  Both Pat and I had a tremendous amount of personal contact with the people wherever we went. One day in the Philippines we shook hands with more than five thousand students at a 4-H exhibition. Later, as I walked through heavy crowds at a factory, my Filipino escort touched my arm and said, “That man back there, Mr. Vice President, said, ‘He is not afraid to shake my hand even if my shirt is dirty!’ ” I shall never forget the look of quiet pride in my escort’s face.

  The New York Times surveyed its correspondents in each of the places we had visited and presented their observations in a front-page story on the day we returned home: “According to correspondents of the Times along his route, Mr. Nixon has shown that he has a knack for walking into delicate foreign political situations and saying the right things. In summary, the reports were that ‘the common man of Asia liked this big, friendly, informal, democratic, serious young American, and got the impression that he likes them.’ ”

  Today it may hardly seem a revelation that the peoples of Asia wanted to be treated with respect; but it was a lesson that the European nations did not learn sufficiently well or sufficiently soon in the years after World War II. In Hong Kong, the best run and most prosperous of the Asian cities I visited, I asked a local Chinese leader how the people would vote if offered independence. Without hesitation he said, “They would vote for independence by ten to one.” I asked him why this was so, since the British presence had obviously materially benefited the people. He replied, “There is a saying that when the British establish a colony they build three things, in this order: a church, a racetrack, and a club to which Orientals cannot belong. That is an exaggeration but it is based upon a truth, and that is why we would always choose to be independent.”

  For better or worse, the colonial empires were disintegrating. The great question in the 1950s was who would fill the vacuum. Japan had the potential but was prohibited from doing so by the postwar treaties. None of the other countries in the region had the military and economic resources to defend itself unaided against Communist infiltration and subversion. It was clear to me that if the United States did not move, the Chinese or the Soviets, acting with or through the local Communist insurgent groups in each country, certainly would. The question, therefore, was not whether but how.

  I learned much on this trip about the theory and practice of communism. In each country I saw how the Communists had carefully targeted their propaganda and aid where it did them the most good, and how they always presented themselves as being on the side of the people against the ruling classes—whether European or native. The Soviets were skillful with their propaganda and lavish with their money. But they, like us, were still interlopers in an Oriental world. The major new and unfathomable factor in Asia and the Pacific was Communist China. It was a giant looming beyond every Asian horizon—475 million people ruled by ruthless, disciplined ideologues. At a time when wishful thinkers in Washington and other Western capitals were saying that Communist China would not be a threat in Asia because it was so backward and underdeveloped, I was able to report firsthand that its influence was already spreading throughout the area.

  With some countries, for example, the Chinese Communists had established student exchange programs, and large numbers of students were being sent to Red China for free college training. In Indonesia this amounted to as many as a thousand students a year, and I was shocked to find some of our embassies completely unconcerned about the impact this could have on the next generation of leaders.

  I returned home convinced that, since the great battle in Asia was between communism and the free nations, we could not ignore the powerful Communist propaganda. I believed that the best way to undercut the appeal of the Communists was to confront them and show uncommitted observers that representatives of democratic nations were neither afraid of the Communists nor unable to debate them on any question. The most dramatic justification of this belief had come at the Pegu pagoda.

  The trip also impressed upon me the tremendous spirit of enterprise and discipline in postwar Japan: it seemed as if everyone we saw—from farmers in the fields to factory hands on the assembly lines—was working feverishly. The country was still pretty much on its back in 1953, but after this trip there was no question in my mind that Japan would recover much more quic
kly than most Americans had predicted. When I got back to Washington I became a staunch advocate of close American-Japanese ties.

  The 1953 trip had two lasting results. During those sixty-nine days I was able to meet not only those in power, but many of the younger up-and-coming generation whose careers developed over the next two decades as did my own. Each time I returned to these countries—as Vice President, as a private citizen, and then as President—I found that I was often dealing with people I had met on this first trip. The relationships that even these few early meetings had established and what I learned through these contacts were tremendously important to the development of my thinking about foreign affairs. It was as a result of this trip, too, that I knew that foreign policy was a field in which I had great interest and at least some ability.

  One less significant but equally lasting result of this trip has been that neither Pat nor I has cared for champagne since. I would guess that during those two months we drank at least two cases of it. At every lunch and dinner and at almost every stop along the way, our hosts proudly produced bottles of fine French champagne and proposed toasts, which I then had to return. Before this, Pat and I had always enjoyed champagne as a way to celebrate a special occasion, but neither of us has willingly taken a glass of it since. When I was President, I would sip a little, as required when a toast was offered or returned, but I never actually finished a whole glass of the stuff.

  JOE MCCARTHY

  One of the most serious problems we inherited from Truman was Joe McCarthy. As a Democratic friend put it to me, “Joe has been a snake in the grass for us. If you’re not careful he’ll become a viper in your bosom.”

  Both McCarthy and I had come to Washington in 1946. He was elected to the Senate as “the fighting Marine” after a brief career in local Wisconsin politics. I saw very little of him in those early years. He was a senator and I was a congressman, and we moved in different circles.

  In February 1950, the month after Hiss was convicted of perjury, McCarthy gave a Lincoln Day speech to a Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. His subject was communist infiltration of government, and he ended by brandishing a paper that he said contained a list of individuals employed by the State Department who were known to the Secretary of State as members of the Communist Party. By the time he reached Salt Lake City the next day the number of names on the list had changed, but the charge remained the same.

  Like everyone else in Washington, I read these stories with great interest. I also read them with great trepidation. Joe McCarthy had never been involved in fighting communists before, and I could not help wondering whether he understood the need for absolute accuracy and fairness in going after them. He called me shortly after he returned to Washington from Salt Lake City to ask whether, as a result of my work on the Hiss case, I had any files on communists in the State Department.

  I told him that he was welcome to look through whatever files I had. But I urged that he be especially careful about facts. I noted that in his speeches he had talked about “card-carrying Communists.” I told him he would be on firmer ground talking about the problems of security risks. He thanked me warmly for my advice and said I had made an important point. As the months went by, however, he continued to strike out indiscriminately.

  I had a peculiar encounter with McCarthy in December 1950, at a small dinner-dance at the exclusive Sulgrave Club in Washington. Among the guests was Drew Pearson, who had been attacking McCarthy almost every day in his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column. Although the two men were not seated near each other at the dinner table, it was clear that McCarthy was spoiling for a fight. Pearson seemed ready to give it to him.

  There was dancing between the courses, and at one of the intermissions McCarthy went over to Pearson and said, “You know, I’m going to put you out of business with a speech in the Senate tomorrow. There isn’t going to be anything left of you professionally or personally by the time I get finished with you.” Pearson looked up impassively and said in a low voice, “Joe, have you paid your income taxes yet?” Pearson had been running articles about McCarthy’s personal finances, and the remark infuriated him. He challenged Pearson to step outside, but some of the other guests intervened and got McCarthy to return to his seat.

  As the party began to break up, I went downstairs to the cloakroom. There was Joe McCarthy with his big, thick hands around Pearson’s neck. Pearson was struggling wildly to get some air. When McCarthy spotted me, he drew his arm back and slapped Pearson so hard that his head snapped back.

  “That one was for you, Dick,” he said.

  I stepped between the two men and pushed them apart. “Let a good Quaker stop this fight,” I said. Pearson grabbed his overcoat and ran from the room. McCarthy said, “You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dick,” and went upstairs to bid his hostess good night.

  Relations between McCarthy and Eisenhower had long been strained because of McCarthy’s attacks on George Marshall.

  After the election, I felt I should try to broker their feud. I began, therefore, to act as a go-between for McCarthy and the administration. I soon learned that the go-between is seldom popular with either side.

  Most Republicans in the House and Senate were then still strongly pro-McCarthy and wanted Eisenhower to embrace him, while the predominantly liberal White House staff members opposed McCarthy and wanted Eisenhower to repudiate him. The President himself was torn. He disliked McCarthy personally, not only because of the attacks on Marshall but because of his coarse familiarity, which Eisenhower found distasteful. But he was reluctant to plunge into a bitter personal and partisan wrangle, aware that if he repudiated McCarthy or tried to discipline him, the Republican Party would split right down the middle in Congress and in the country. The unique personal good will that enabled Eisenhower to lead his party even while representing only its minority wing would have been severely damaged. So he hung back from provoking any confrontation.

  Almost immediately, I found myself putting out brushfires started by McCarthy.

  Two early nominations Eisenhower sent to the Senate were of James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and of veteran diplomat Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Conant had stirred up the ire of many anti-communists a few months earlier by flatly asserting that it was inconceivable that any member of the Harvard faculty was a Communist. McCarthy prepared to attack Conant’s nomination on the Senate floor. Getting wind of his plan, I managed to talk him out of it. He agreed, instead, just to send a letter to Eisenhower expressing his opposition to the nomination. I was less successful, however, when the Bohlen nomination was debated several weeks later.

  In the summer of 1953 McCarthy came across the tantalizing bit of information that William Bundy, one of Allen Dulles’s brightest young men at the Central Intelligence Agency, had made a contribution to Alger Hiss’s legal defense fund. McCarthy decided to investigate not only Bundy but the whole CIA. Allen Dulles asked me if I could do anything to help prevent a confrontation. He said that he had complete confidence in Bundy, and that his main interest was to keep the CIA out of the newspapers. I told McCarthy that I had seen Bundy’s performance in several National Security Council meetings and he seemed to me a loyal American who was rendering vital service to the country.

  “But what about his contribution to Hiss?” McCarthy persisted.

  “Joe,” I said, “you have to understand how those people up in Cambridge think. Bundy graduated from the Harvard Law School, and Hiss was one of its most famous graduates. I think he probably just got on the bandwagon without giving any thought to where the bandwagon was heading.”

  The next day I had lunch with McCarthy and the other Republicans on his subcommittee, Everett Dirksen, Karl Mundt, and Charles Potter. I enlisted their support, and McCarthy with obvious reluctance agreed to drop his investigation of Bundy and the CIA.

  I tried to convince all parties—Eisenhower, the White House staff, the C
abinet, and many congressmen—that, while urging McCarthy to use restraint, we should consider each of his cases on its merits. I thought that until a break was unavoidable we should attack McCarthy only when his facts were wrong, and I hoped that in the meantime the anticommunist cause would not be irreparably damaged by his excesses. In August 1953, for example, he had discovered a Communist working in the Government Printing Office. He stretched the case far beyond its importance, but I argued against opposing him because there was at least some factual basis for his charges.

  In his search for new areas of possible communist infiltration, McCarthy began investigations into the Army. The atom spy Julius Rosenberg had worked at an Army base, and McCarthy felt that where there had been one Communist there were likely to be more. At the end of December 1953, I invited him to Key Biscayne, where Bill Rogers, now Deputy Attorney General, and I double-teamed him about the dangers of pushing the Army investigation too hard.

  I said that he should continue to go after communists in government. “It doesn’t make any difference if they are in this administration or in previous ones,” I told him. “If they are there, they should be out. But remember that this is your administration, and the people in it are just as dedicated as you are to cleaning out subversives.” I suggested he talk with Robert Stevens, the Secretary of the Army. Rogers and I urged that he should think about moving into some new areas lest he become known as a “one-shot” senator.

  McCarthy seemed to understand the good advice we were giving him, and before he left Florida he told some reporters that he planned to broaden his investigations to include questionable income tax settlements that had been made during the Truman administration. But no sooner had he returned to Washington than he was back in furious pursuit of communists and headlines.

  In January 1954 McCarthy discovered Irving Peress, the Army dentist who was to lead to his downfall.

  Peress had received a routine promotion even after he refused to answer a loyalty questionnaire. An Army investigation revealed that in fact Dr. Peress, by now a major, had not complied with its regulations and they decided to discharge him.