When the other reporters drifted away, Edson took me aside and asked the question about the $20,000 “supplementary salary.” He said he had not asked the question on the air because he had not had an opportunity to check the facts.
Any rumor that I had an extra salary was completely false, I explained to him. I suggested that the stories might be referring to a political fund which had been set up by my supporters in California. It was used to pay expenses for travel, printing and mailing of speeches, and extra clerical help—expenses which were strictly political in character and for which, therefore, I could not properly be reimbursed by the government. The fund had been set up after my election to the Senate in 1950. Dana Smith, my Finance Chairman in that campaign, handled the collections and disbursements as trustee. I described all this to Edson and gave him Smith’s telephone number in Pasadena, California, so that he could call Smith directly if he wanted to get any further details. Edson thanked me and we left the television studio shortly afterwards. I did not give Edson’s inquiry another thought. It never occurred to me that from such an innocent beginning would grow the most scarring personal crisis of my life.
The next morning Edson telephoned Dana Smith, who was the Southern California Chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon, told him of our conversation, and asked him for the details. Smith welcomed the opportunity to tell him more about an idea which he had originated. He had started the fund after the 1950 election so that I, as a newly-elected Senator from California, could continue my political activities on a year-round basis—instead of my being restricted to campaign periods, when funds would be available.
The idea, Smith told Edson, was substantially this: if Republican Party supporters contributed to the election of Senator Nixon, why wouldn’t they want to contribute funds between elections which would allow him to travel back to California more often to see his constituents, keep in touch with party workers by regular mailings, and carry on other political activities? The fund had been carefully established, limiting contributions to individuals, not corporations, and to a maximum of $500, so that no one could be accused of trying to buy special favors. The money was solicited from regular party contributors and it was administered by Smith as trustee. The funds were kept in a Pasadena bank and subject to regular audits. It was to be used for transportation, mailing, and office expenses connected with political activity, as distinguished from official government business.
Later that day, by coincidence, three more reporters came to see Dana Smith in Pasadena. Explaining that they were doing background stories on my life, they brought up the same subject as Edson had. The reporters were Leo Katcher of the New York Post, Richard Donovan of The Reporter magazine, and Ernest Brashear of the Los Angeles Daily News. Smith, without hesitation, reviewed the fund’s operation and purpose again, and these reporters left to prepare their news stories. Smith did not consider any of the inquiries of sufficient importance to contact me about them.
That same day, I flew to Denver to see General Eisenhower to discuss plans for the start of our campaign on Wednesday night.
As I thought of the campaign ahead, I could not have been more confident. All the public opinion polls and most of the expert political opinion predicted that Eisenhower would beat Adlai Stevenson decisively.
I thought that no one in the world could have been more fortunate than I. In July, when I went to Chicago for the Republican Convention, I knew that my name had been mentioned as one of a number of possible candidates for Vice President, but I did not think I had more than a remote chance to be nominated. I had not even bothered to pack a dark suit for the trip since I did not expect to have an opportunity to speak in Convention Hall.
Two days before Eisenhower’s nomination, Jack Knight, publisher and editor of the Chicago Daily News, had carried a front-page column speculating that the ticket would be Eisenhower and Nixon. I sent a member of my staff down to the newsstand to buy a half-dozen copies because, as I told him, “That will probably be the last time we’ll see that headline and I want to be able to show it to my grandchildren.”
July 11, 1952, was the most exciting day of my life. I received a telephone call from Herbert Brownell (who later became Attorney General) informing me that General Eisenhower had selected me as his running mate. Nothing before or since was to exceed the excitement and emotion Pat and I both felt as we stood with General and Mrs. Eisenhower before the wildly cheering Convention audience. This was true not only because it marked the culmination of what many observers described as a phenomenally fast rise to national prominence, but even more because the event was so unexpected.
After the Convention, Pat and I experienced for the first time the spotlight of intense coverage which is accorded national candidates. Reporters and photographers covered everything that we did and said. Writers for magazines and newspapers interviewed us and members of our families for special stories. I keynoted the Ohio State Convention, was the speaker at Republican Day at the Illinois State Fair, and completed my “shakedown cruise” as a national candidate with four days of campaigning in Maine, which at that time still held its congressional and gubernatorial elections early. The mechanics and organization of my campaign staff had been worked out. In these early speeches, I had hammered hard at the three great issues of the ’52 campaign—Corruption, Communism, and Korea. My speeches had been well received.
There had been a triumphal homecoming with a rally on the football field at Whittier, California, where I had attended college. I was able to point out in my remarks that one of the biggest thrills for me of being a candidate for Vice President was to return home and finally get a chance to stand in the middle of the field, after having warmed the bench for four years in college.
And now, as I went to see Eisenhower that September 15, the road ahead seemed full of promise and no pitfalls. No one should ever take anything for granted in a campaign, but this one seemed easy compared to the others I had been through. Historically, an election campaign is not too hard an assignment for the vice presidential candidate. The presidential candidate wins or loses the election. The number two man goes along for the ride, doing his best to stir up the party faithful but making no major pronouncements. The candidate for Vice President seldom, if ever, makes national news. In fact, a public opinion poll at about this time revealed that only 40 per cent of the voters could name the Republican nominee for Vice President. This might have dampened my high spirits except that the same poll disclosed that only 32 per cent could identify the Democratic nominee.
I saw General Eisenhower that evening in his headquarters at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. The place was swarming with aides, party workers, and visiting dignitaries. It had the aura of a command post. Eisenhower was not the ordinary run-of-the-mill candidate seeking friends and supporters. He had been Commander of all Allied troops in Europe during the Second World War; he was the General who won the war; and even as a candidate he was accorded the respect, honor, and awe that only a President usually receives. Despite his great capacity for friendliness, he also had a quality of reserve which, at least subconsciously, tended to make a visitor feel like a junior officer coming in to see the commanding General.
The first time I ever saw Eisenhower, he was in fact the victorious commanding General. It was shortly after V-E Day. I was thirty-two years old and a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. After returning from service overseas in the South Pacific, I was assigned the task of negotiating settlements of terminated war contracts in the Bureau of Aeronautics Office at 50 Church Street, New York City. General Eisenhower, the returning hero, was riding through the streets of Manhattan in the greatest ticker-tape parade in the city’s history. As I looked down from a twentieth floor window, I could see him standing in the back of his car with both arms raised high over his head. It was a gesture which was to become his political trademark in the years ahead.
I met him again five years later at the Bohemian Grove, near San Francisco, where we were both luncheon guests of
former President Herbert Hoover. I had just won the Republican nomination for the United States Senate in California. We were introduced, but he met so many others during his stay there that I doubted then if he would remember me.
Less than a year later, in December of 1951, I met him again at the Headquarters of SHAPE in Paris, and this time we talked for almost forty-five minutes. He made a great impression on me with his grasp of international affairs. I came away from that meeting with my first personal understanding of the Eisenhower popularity: he had an incomparable ability to show a deep interest in a wide range of subjects, and he displayed as much interest when he listened as when he spoke. I recall that he was particularly interested in my role in the Hiss case. He had read accounts of it and pointed out that one of the reasons I had been successful where others in the Communist investigating field had failed was that I had insisted on scrupulously fair procedures in my handling of the case.
In Denver that Monday night we reviewed our campaign strategy. The plan was for General Eisenhower to stress the positive aspects of his “Crusade to Clean Up the Mess in Washington.” I was to hammer away at our opponents on the record of the Truman Administration, with particular emphasis on Communist subversion because of my work in the Hiss case.
I left Denver early the next morning ready for battle and confident of victory. I had scheduled my campaign kickoff rally for Wednesday night in Pomona, California, fifteen miles east of Los Angeles. Pomona was the city where I had launched my successful campaigns for the House and for the Senate. It had spelled “good luck” for us in those campaigns, and we thought that a kickoff there would bring us good luck in the biggest campaign of all.
On our way from Denver to Los Angeles we made a sentimental stop at Ely, Nevada. That predominantly Democratic mining town gave a rousing welcome to its now famous native daughter, Pat Ryan Nixon. Then we flew on to Riverside, California, to spend Tuesday night at the Mission Inn where Pat and I had been married twelve years before, on June 21, 1940.
The next day, my Press Secretary, Jim Bassett, who was on leave from his job as political editor of the Los Angeles Mirror, told me that one of the reporters assigned to cover us had mentioned that his paper had a story scheduled for Thursday about a Nixon fund.
“That’s probably the Pete Edson story. There’s nothing to worry about,” I told him.
We went ahead the next day with our plans for the rally at the railroad station in Pomona. It was to be televised nationally. It turned out to be colorful, exciting, and, by every political standard, completely successful. The crowd was big and enthusiastic, and the television cameras gave millions of people an opportunity to see a campaign train pull away from the station at the beginning of what was to be the shortest and most dramatic campaign trip in history. There was only one minor mishap. Governor Earl Warren said, in introducing me, “I now present to you the next President of the United States.” But the crowd loved it and he, in high good humor, laughed at his slip of the tongue. Everyone was in fine spirits as the “Nixon Special” pulled out of Pomona on schedule, with the candidate waving good-by from the rear platform of his first campaign train. I had only one minor problem. I had caught a cold on the flight from Ely to Riverside and my throat was sore and my voice hoarse.
We had not reached our first stop in Bakersfield when word reached us from Republican headquarters in Los Angeles that a story with regard to a “Nixon fund” would be published the next day and that it might cause trouble. It still did not seem serious to me, but I decided to talk the matter over with four of my advisers in the lounge of my private car.
Those who joined me were Jack Drown, one of my oldest and closest friends, who was our train manager; Murray Chotiner, a Los Angeles attorney who had served as campaign manager to Earl Warren and William Knowland before managing my 1950 Senatorial campaign; Pat Hillings, who had succeeded me in the House of Representatives when I had been elected to the Senate; and William P. Rogers, a New York and Washington lawyer whom I had met in Washington during my work on the Hiss case when he was serving as Counsel for a Senate Investigations Committee. Drown, Chotiner, and Hillings, as Californians, knew about the fund. But Rogers was a newcomer. In fact, when I had asked him to come along on our campaign trip as one of my advisers, one of the selling points I had used was that it would be a pleasant experience and not too much of an ordeal because “nothing ever happens to a candidate for Vice President.”
I now explained all the details of the fund to Rogers because I thought since he knew nothing of it he could give me a good objective opinion on the subject. I said that the fund had been set up at Dana Smith’s suggestion and that we had been scrupulously careful to avoid any possible charges of improper collection or use of the contributions. For that reason, the fund was set up as a trust in which only Smith collected the contributions and disbursed the money according to vouchers and bills for political activities sent to him from my office. He had even arranged for an independent audit by a certified public accountant so that he could send reports to the contributors accounting for every dollar collected and spent. Rogers asked about the size of the fund and I told him that, as I remembered it, a total of between $15,000 and $18,000 had been collected and disbursed over a two-year period.
Rogers observed that the only unusual feature of this fund, as distinguished from other political funds, was that it was so scrupulously accounted for, was openly solicited, the amount of any contribution was limited, and that none of the funds passed through my hands but were disbursed by a trustee.
I explained to him that there were two reasons for setting up such procedures. First, Smith himself was an impeccably honest man and had always insisted in the campaigns in which he had been finance chairman that the contributors deserved to have their money accounted for in a manner which would meet not only the legal requirements but the highest ethical standards as well. In addition, when Smith had suggested the idea of such a fund to me, I had told him that it would have to be handled in such a way that it would be completely above criticism, whether justified or unjustified.
I had recognized from the time I became a member of the Committee on Un-American Activities, and particularly after my participation in the Hiss case, that it was essential for me to maintain a standard of conduct which would not give my political opponents any solid grounds for attack. I have often told those who investigate in the field of Communist activities that they must always be sure that they are right on the issue, that their procedures are impeccably fair, and that their personal conduct is above criticism. “Even when you are right they will give you a rough time,” I have said. “When you happen to be wrong they will kill you.”
I knew that the standards which would be applied to the average Congressman and Senator as far as collection and disbursement of political funds were concerned might well not be applied to me, and I was determined not to give anyone even the slightest opening through which they might attack not only me, personally, but the work I was doing in investigating Communist subversion in the United States.
For example, I pointed out to Rogers, it is perfectly legal for a Congressman or Senator to have relatives on his payroll, provided they work for the salaries he pays them. It is also proper for a lawyer who happens to be a Congressman or Senator to remain a member of his law firm and to participate in the division of fees, except in cases where there is a conflict of interest. I had resigned from my law firm, however, and never received a fee from law practice after I was elected to Congress in 1946. My wife had spent many days working in my office, both while I was a Congressman and a Senator, but had never been on the government payroll.
After we had explored every facet of the fund, I asked Rogers for his honest opinion. He said, “I don’t see anything to worry about. There is nothing illegal, unethical, or embarrassing about this fund. If your opponents try to make something out of it, they will never get anywhere on the merits.” Chotiner was even more emphatic. He labeled the whole story as “ridiculous
, a tempest in a teapot.”
The consensus that night among our little strategy group was to ignore the attacks, on the theory that answering them would simply give them more publicity and would play into the hands of those making the attacks. This, I knew, was generally sound political strategy. “Let’s wait and see what they do,” I said.
• • •
We did not have long to wait. The next morning the attack began. But it was not in the Edson story, which as I had expected was a fair and objective account of the fund.
It was the New York Post which let me have it with both barrels. Jim Bassett gave me the substance of the story between whistle-stops. The headline on the front page screamed, SECRET NIXON FUND. Inside the tabloid, the story by Leo Katcher, a Hollywood movie writer who also covered the Los Angeles area for the Post, was a masterpiece of distortion: “The existence of a ‘millionaire’s club’ devoted exclusively to the financial comfort of Senator Nixon, GOP Vice Presidential candidate, was revealed today,” said the opening paragraph. The story went on with substantially the same information that Dana Smith had told all the reporters. It was a clever example of the half-truth. In fact, more than half the story was true—but that was the bottom half. Nowhere did Katcher explain the “millionaire’s club” and nowhere did he say or indicate that the fund was “secret.” Only the headline said that. The subhead over the story declared: “Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.”
Six Crises Page 11