I received a call from our upstairs neighbor on the morning of September 3, inviting me for cocktails that afternoon. When I arrived Rockefeller greeted me warmly, and after an exchange of small talk, we quickly settled down to a serious discussion.
“I’m going to go for the nomination,” he said. “I am not going to back out this time. If I did, I would appear to be unstable. In my opinion, Kennedy will be a one-termer. He has messed up on all issues—Vietnam, the international monetary situation, the Atlantic alliance, civil rights.”
He continued, “I have nothing to lose. I would worry if Barry won, because he’s just too shallow. He only went to college for one year. He doesn’t have a good staff, and he has a very superficial approach to problems. I will take on the task of stopping Barry. If I don’t he’s going to get it by default.”
He turned to his other rivals. “Romney wants to run,” he said, “but the regular Republicans don’t like his independent attitude toward the party. His greatest weakness is that he knows too little of the world and is too sure of what he doesn’t know. Bill Scranton wants to run, but only if he’s drafted, and there just isn’t a draft around with Bill Scranton’s name on it.”
He paused, then leaned closer to me. “Dick, you can’t run actively. You could, but it would be a big mistake, and you don’t make that kind of mistake. What we both have to recognize is that you and I are the only ones qualified on both foreign and national issues to serve as President. Despite some differences, we have generally agreed on basic policies.”
I kept silent and tried to look noncommittal. Finally he said, “What I want to suggest is that, if you will support me now, if there is a deadlock at the convention, I will support you.”
I thanked him for his candor but said that I planned not to participate personally in the campaign, except to support whoever was nominated. I did not respond to his suggestion that we make a deal.
As Thanksgiving approached, I held firm to my plan that unless something completely unexpected happened, I would not become a candidate in 1964; I would not endorse anyone before the convention; and I would try to remain on good terms with all the potential candidates so that I could play the role of party unifier regardless of who won.
I flew to Dallas on November 20 to attend a board meeting of the Pepsi-Cola Company, one of our firm’s clients. Several local reporters asked for an interview, and the next day I met with them briefly at my hotel. I had read that demonstrations were planned against Kennedy and Johnson, who were to visit Dallas the next day. I told the reporters that, however strongly people felt about particular issues or personalities, the President and Vice President deserved to be treated with respect wherever they appeared.
Early on the morning of November 22 on the way to the Dallas airport I saw the flags displayed along the motorcade route for the presidential visit. Arriving in New York, I hailed a cab home. We drove through Queens toward the 59th Street Bridge, and as we stopped at a traffic light, a man rushed over from the curb and started talking to the driver. I heard him say, “Do you have a radio in your cab? I just heard that Kennedy was shot.” We had no radio, and as we continued into Manhattan a hundred thoughts rushed through my mind. The man could have been crazy or a macabre prankster. He could have been mistaken about what he had heard; or perhaps a gunman might have shot at Kennedy but missed or only wounded him. I refused to believe that he could have been killed.
As the cab drew up in front of my building, the doorman ran out. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “Oh, Mr. Nixon, have you heard, sir?” he asked. “It’s just terrible. They’ve killed President Kennedy.”
Later in the day I called Edgar Hoover in Washington. He came right on the line and without wasting words I asked, “What happened? Was it one of the right-wing nuts?”
“No,” he replied, “it was a Communist.” Months later Hoover told me that Oswald’s wife had disclosed that Oswald had been planning to kill me when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so.
I never felt the “there but for the grace of God go I” reaction to Kennedy’s death that many people seemed to imagine I would. After eight years as Vice President I had become fatalistic about the danger of assassination. I knew that given the number of people who, for whatever reasons, want to kill a President, it takes a combination of luck and the law of averages to keep him alive. I did not think of Kennedy and myself as interchangeable: I did not think that if I had won in 1960 it would have been I rather than he riding through Dealey Plaza in Dallas at that time, on that day.
Since the 1960 election there had been no love lost between Kennedy and me; I had been critical of his performance as President. But I admired his ambition and his competitiveness, and I could feel the terrible impact this tragedy would have on his closely knit family. I remembered how I had felt when first Arthur and then Harold had died, and I wished that there was something that I could do to ease the Kennedys’ grief.
That night I sat up late in my library. Long after the fire had gone out I wrote a letter to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Richard M. Nixon
810 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10021
November 23
Dear Jackie,
In this tragic hour Pat and I want you to know that our thoughts and prayers are with you.
While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents I always cherished the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947. That friendship evidenced itself in many ways including the invitation we received to attend your wedding.
Nothing I could say now could add to the splendid tributes which have come from throughout the world to him.
But I want you to know that the nation will also be forever grateful for your service as First Lady. You brought to the White House charm, beauty and elegance as the official hostess for America, and the mystique of the young in heart which was uniquely yours made an indelible impression on the American consciousness.
If in the days ahead we could be helpful in any way we shall be honored to be at your command.
Sincerely,
Dick Nixon
A few weeks later I received her reply:
The three most significant political developments in the period after Kennedy’s death were the enormous strength that Goldwater began to pick up among party workers and organizers across the country, the consummate skill with which Lyndon Johnson conducted himself during his first weeks and months in the White House, and the emergence of Henry Cabot Lodge as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Johnson was able to consolidate the nation’s grief over Kennedy’s death, and by the first weeks of 1964 it was widely believed by objective observers in both parties that no one could beat him in November. The March 10 New Hampshire presidential primary surprised most political professionals when, as the result of a well-organized write-in campaign, Lodge came in first.
One advantage of my New York law practice was that it allowed me to travel extensively abroad to see some of the firm’s international clients. In this way I was also able to visit old friends from my vice presidential days and make new ones. As a private citizen, I was able to meet with opposition leaders as well as government officials, and my business and legal contacts gave me a much more rounded view of local issues and attitudes than I had gained as an official visitor.
I took the first of these trips immediately after the New Hampshire primary, visiting Lebanon, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Everywhere I went I heard about America’s declining prestige, and I heard expressions of dismay that the world’s strongest nation was showing so little positive leadership. Perhaps most disturbing of all, I saw for myself how dangerously different the reality of the situation in Vietnam was from the version of it being presented to the American people at home.
The Asian leaders I talked with looked at L
aos, where we had suffered an unqualified disaster because of Kennedy’s naïve willingness to accept a “neutralist” coalition regime that was known to be a convenient cover for the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas. They looked at Cuba, where our indecisiveness during the Bay of Pigs had given the Communists their greatest propaganda victory in many years. And now they were looking at Vietnam, where after years of encouraging and building up the anticommunist Saigon government, we seemed reluctant to support the measures needed to defeat the Communists. To our Asian friends and allies it looked as if a combination of political expediency, public apathy, distorted reporting in the media, and partisan politics was undermining America’s will to fight against communism in Asia.
In Pakistan I saw my old friend, President Ayub Khan. He spoke sadly about what he believed had been American collusion in the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam on November 1, 1963, three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. “I cannot say—perhaps you should never have supported Diem in the first place. But you did support him for a long time, and everyone in Asia knew it. Whether they approved or disapproved, they knew it. And then, suddenly, you didn’t support him anymore—and Diem was dead.” He shook his head and continued, “Diem’s murder meant three things to many Asian leaders: that it is dangerous to be a friend of the United States; that it pays to be neutral; and that sometimes it helps to be an enemy! Trust is like a thin thread, and when it is broken it is very hard to put together again.”
In Bangkok, Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn warned against any relaxation of the war against the Vietcong. If Vietnam were to fall, he said, Communist influence would have a green light in Southeast Asia. Pote Sarasin, the distinguished scholar-diplomat who had been Thailand’s ambassador in Washington when I was Vice President, said that Johnson’s eagerness to begin talks with the Vietcong would only encourage them to hold out for better terms. “What America should do,” he said, “is convince the Vietcong that they cannot win their struggle either in South Vietnam or in Washington. Then you should present them with a final offer that they can accept or reject. If they reject it, then you should prosecute the war relentlessly.”
I arrived at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport on a hot rainy afternoon. Sandbags were piled up around the hangars, and armed soldiers patrolled the runways.
The Vietnamese military leaders I met fully understood the nature of their enemy. One told me, “It is the same as when they were the Vietminh. They will stop at nothing, and they will settle for nothing short of winning everything. We cannot compromise with them, and we cannot negotiate with them. This has to be a fight to the finish. With your help and support, we are ready to fight them and beat them.”
Both the Americans and the Vietnamese military leaders were distressed that Washington was holding them back from launching air raids into North Vietnam as well as ground raids into Laos to cut off the pipeline of Vietcong arms and supplies known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. Many American officers I talked to thought they were being restrained because of the election year at home, and some of them blamed the highly distorted reports in the American media.
During a long conversation over dinner with Cabot Lodge, who was then U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, I described my concerns. He listened attentively and took a long time before he replied. “I know that a lot of people are impatient with the way things are going here,” he said, “and I know that the military men don’t like being held back. But there’s a bigger and broader problem that can’t be settled by fighting over it. The problem in South Vietnam is less military than economic. The Vietcong draw their strength from hungry peasants, and if we want to wean them from communism we shouldn’t shoot at them—we should distribute food to them.”
Lodge argued against pursuing the Vietcong forces into Laos or Cambodia. Even more surprising to me, he said American troops should avoid fighting the Vietcong except to retaliate when Americans were killed. I could hardly believe that I was hearing this from one as versed as Cabot Lodge in the tactics and techniques of international communism. I wondered whether he felt it was his duty to defend the administration’s policy regardless of his own feelings, or whether he had actually been converted by the academic theorists around Johnson who thought that the problem of communism in Southeast Asia could be solved by economic development.
What I saw and heard on this trip convinced me that Johnson’s Vietnam policy would not succeed.
In our discussions in Saigon, Lodge was eager to have my reading of the political situation at home. He thought that Johnson was highly vulnerable and could be beaten. Reversing Goldwater’s “Southern strategy,” he argued that a moderate Republican concentrating on the Northern cities could do very well. It was clear that he was thinking of himself as that Republican. Several years later, in fact, he told me that if he had won the Oregon primary in May he had planned to resign and return home to campaign for the nomination.
In Taiwan I was the houseguest of Chiang Kai-shek, who was predictably critical of our Vietnam policy. He said that we could never win without invading North Vietnam, and he laughed at the Strategic Hamlet Program then being pursued. “It is the familiar fallacy that economic development will defeat the Communists,” he said. He leaned closer to me and almost whispered, “But only bullets will really defeat them!”
I met with Japanese Prime Minister Ikeda in Tokyo; like the other leaders I had seen he was concerned by America’s apparent crisis of confidence over its policy in Vietnam. Minister of State Sato and former Prime Minister Kishi felt that the key to victory in Vietnam lay with China and Russia, and they suggested that American policy on Vietnam be formulated in terms of the great-power interests involved there.
When I returned home from this trip on April 15 I found that Vietnam was not nearly of as much interest in Washington as the race developing among Lodge, Goldwater, and Rockefeller, and by the battle of wills shaping up over whether Johnson would allow Bobby Kennedy a place on the ticket as his running mate. Asia seemed far away, and attention was focused on the Oregon primary, in which many expected Lodge to repeat his New Hampshire victory.
During April and May the polls continued to show Rockefeller doing well with voters; but in the area that counted—getting convention delegates—Goldwater was on the way to winning the nomination by a landslide. Some of my supporters still refused to give up, and they mounted a write-in effort for me in the Nebraska primary on May 12. The 42,800 votes I received there represented an astonishingly strong showing, but I had no illusions that this would slow the Goldwater bandwagon, let alone stop it. Rockefeller won a surprise victory in the Oregon primary, thus eliminating Lodge. But Goldwater’s victory in the all-important California primary on June 2 eliminated Rockefeller. Last-ditch efforts to launch campaigns for Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania and Governor George Romney of Michigan proved too little and too late. Goldwater had the nomination locked up long before the convention began in San Francisco.
THE GOLDWATER CAMPAIGN: 1964
Goldwater was nominated on the first ballot. I had asked that as the former standard-bearer I be given the honor of presenting the nominee to the convention before his acceptance speech; I looked upon this as the first and best chance to begin the ministry of party unity that I expected to preach right through Election Day in November. I singled out Scranton, Romney, Lodge, and Rockefeller by name as men of whom the Republican Party could be proud as we entered the campaign of 1964—just as in my acceptance speech in 1952 I had named Bridges, Martin, and Taft for the same reasons of party unity. I said, “Before this convention we were Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, Scranton Republicans, Lodge Republicans, but now that this convention has met and made its decision, we are Republicans, period, working for Barry Goldwater for President of the United States. And to those few, if there are some, who say that they are going to sit it out or take a walk, or even go on a boat ride, I have an answer: in the words of Barry Goldwater in 1960, ‘Let’s grow up, Republicans, let’s go t
o work’—and we shall win in November.”
I tried to stress Goldwater’s Republicanism and to place him in the historical tradition of other Republican nominees. In an attempt to build drama around his first appearance before the convention as its nominee, and to go over the heads of the reporters and ask the American people to listen and judge for themselves, I concluded: “I ask you tonight, look at this man. Listen to him for the next thirty minutes. Forget the too harsh criticisms of his critics and forget even perhaps the too complimentary compliments of his friends. Remember, this is the moment of truth. Judge him as he is. Make this decision yours, not as someone else tells you to make it.”
I had worked hard to find the right turn of phrase to close the speech, and I had finally found one that satisfied me: “He is the man who earned and proudly carries the title of Mr. Conservative. He is the man who, by the action of this convention, is now Mr. Republican. And he is the man who, after the greatest campaign in history, will be Mr. President—Barry Goldwater.”
The speech seemed to have the desired effect of pleasing the different party factions. As Goldwater strode to the rostrum he was greeted by a long ovation. Here was the best opportunity he would have to heal the party’s wounds and unite it behind him for the campaign ahead.
To my dismay, Goldwater proceeded to deliver a strident, divisive speech. He said, “Anyone who joins us in all sincerity we welcome. Though those who don’t care for our cause, we don’t expect to enter our ranks in any case.” Half of those in the crammed Cow Palace cheered wildly. The other half sat in stunned silence: they had just been read out of the Goldwater campaign and out of the party. And he was not yet finished. He said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” This was the statement that, more than any other, enabled Johnson and the Democrats to put the skids under his campaign.
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