Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  I recall, for example, a conversation with some of my friends in the press whom I had invited to a Christmas reception at my house in Washington after the 1960 election. I asked them if, in view of the charges that had been floating around through the years with regard to my financial affairs, they thought it would be worthwhile for me to take the unprecedented action of putting out a complete financial statement of all my assets and liabilities on leaving office. They indicated their personal understanding of my concern on this issue, but they doubted if the story would have enough news value for them to go to the trouble of writing it. If they had shown any interest, my statement would have shown that after fourteen years in Washington, including eight years as Vice President, all that Pat and I had in the way of an estate was the equity in our Washington house. After we deducted the cost of moving to California, that came to $48,000. We owned no stocks and bonds, and had no pension except for the Congressional Civil Service retirement plan to which I had contributed as a Congressman, Senator, and Vice President, and for which I would not qualify until I was sixty-two years of age.

  I have been asked by friends, “How does a man in public life take the kind of attacks you have been subjected to over the years?”

  A man who goes voluntarily into the political arena must expect some wounds in the battles in which he engages. Unwarranted attacks, particularly those involving personal integrity, do take their toll, of course. No matter how often you tell yourself that “this is part of the battle,” or that “if you can’t take the heat you ought to get out of the kitchen,” or that “an attack is a compliment because your adversaries never bother taking on someone who amounts to nothing,” there are times when you wonder if you shouldn’t chuck the whole business. Many do. This is particularly true of businessmen. Many come to Washington, thinking they are going to tear the town apart and “show those politicians how a businessman can run the biggest business in the world,” and then they are shocked, dismayed, and finally deeply hurt by what they call the “unfairness” of both politicians and the press in launching attacks which are not based on fact.

  The crisis of the fund was the hardest, the sharpest, and the briefest of my public life. Because it was decided so quickly, it did not have the lingering effect which some of the more prolonged crises like the Hiss case had had, and were to have. Nevertheless, it left a deep scar which was never to heal completely. From that time on, Pat was to go through campaign after campaign as a good trouper, but never again with the same feeling toward political life. She had lost the zest for it. We had both become perhaps overly sensitive, even when we were subjected to the standard attacks which a public figure must expect with regard to his personal affairs.

  Why then should an honest man enter public life and submit himself and his family to such risks? The answer, of course, is that if men with good and honest reputations do not take such risks, they leave the field of public service to the second-raters and chiselers who have no reputations to worry about. Every public figure, whose most important asset is his reputation, is at the mercy of the smear artists and the rumormongers. No one can keep pace with a concerted smear campaign. To deny a rumor publicly, to sue in a court for libel or slander, is generally a mistake, because it helps spread the smear. A charge is usually put on the first page of the newspaper; the defense is buried among the deodorant ads. The man in political life must come to expect the smear and to know that, generally, the best thing to do about it is ignore it—and hope that it will fade away. The 1952 fund smear was an exception to this general rule, but then it was an exceptional situation.

  The over-all political effect of the crisis of the fund on my career was strikingly similar to that of the Hiss case. A distinguished political science professor, after making a thorough study of the 1960 election, stated his considered judgment that if it had not been for the fund broadcast I would have been elected President of the United States. It was a neat theory, brilliantly supported by facts and figures, but like most classroom theoreticians he had not faced up to the hard reality of the alternative. If it hadn’t been for that broadcast, I would never have been around to run for the presidency.

  SECTION THREE

  The Heart Attack

  Decisive action relieves the tension which builds up in a crisis. When the situation requires that an individual restrain himself from acting decisively over a long period, this can be the most wearing of all crises.

  CHARLES G. DAWES once described the job of Vice President as “the easiest in the world.” He said he had only two responsibilities—to sit and listen to United States Senators give speeches, and to check the morning’s newspaper as to the President’s health.

  On Saturday, September 24, 1955, the United States Senate was not in session, and any concern about the state of the President’s health was the furthest thing from my mind.

  The day was unusual in one respect only: this was one of the few Saturday afternoons in my years in Washington that I had not spent in my office, catching up on the week’s accumulated correspondence. Instead, Mrs. Nixon and I had attended the wedding of Drusilla Nelson, a pretty New Hampshire girl who had served as a secretary in my office for the past four years, and Henry Dworshak, son of the Senator from Idaho. By the time we returned home it was after five. I picked up the Evening Star from the sidewalk as we went into the house and sat down in the living room to scan the headlines. A brief item on the front page reported that President Eisenhower, out at the Summer White House in Denver, was suffering from a slight case of indigestion. I hardly gave the item a second thought.

  Almost everyone close to the President knew he was susceptible to stomach upsets. I recall, for example, an incident on my first goodwill trip abroad as Vice President, a seventy-two-day round-the-world tour in 1953. The Governor General of Australia, Field Marshal William Slim, who had served with Eisenhower during World War II, greeted me with a friendly, “How’s Ike?”

  I replied that, despite the rigors of his new job, he seemed to be in the best of health.

  “How’s his tummy?” he asked with a smile. “Ike always used to have trouble with his tummy.”

  I had practically forgotten the indigestion story and was checking the baseball averages in the sports section when the phone rang. I walked into the hall and picked up the receiver. “Dick,” said a familiar voice, “this is Jim Hagerty—the President has had a coronary.”

  It is impossible to describe how I felt when I heard these words. The news was so unexpected, the shock so great that I could think of nothing to say for several seconds. The pause was so long that Hagerty thought we had been disconnected.

  I slowly began to recover my equilibrium. “Are they sure? There are many times when people have indigestion and it is erroneously diagnosed as a heart attack. Doctors can make mistakes. I don’t think we should announce it as a heart attack until we are absolutely sure,” I told him.

  “No,” he replied slowly, “we are absolutely sure.”

  He went on to tell me that the press would be informed of the President’s heart attack in about half an hour. His final words were, “Let me know where you can be reached at all times.”

  Later I discovered that Hagerty, who was in Washington at the time, had telephoned the news to me just after he had received word from his assistant, Murray Snyder, who was with the President in Denver.

  I went back into the living room and sat down again. For fully ten minutes I sat alone in the room, and to this day I cannot remember the thoughts that flowed through my mind. The only accurate description is that I probably was in a momentary state of shock.

  I had been completely unprepared for this turn of events. During the three years I had been Vice President, there had never been any reason to worry about the President’s health. He had waged a vigorous campaign in 1952, and since his inauguration, despite newspaper criticism of his vacations and his golf, he had maintained a strict schedule of early rising and hard work at his desk. He was, in fact, a superb specimen o
f a man who believed in keeping himself physically fit. Golf was part of the regimen prescribed by his doctor as the best means of relieving the tremendous tension and strain of the presidency.

  Yet now, he was the first of our thirty-four Presidents to have suffered a heart attack during his term of office. As I thought of this I realized what a tremendous responsibility had descended upon me. It was like a great physical weight holding me down in the chair. What I thought of, and what concerned me, was not the awesome problems I would have if I should become President, but how I could best handle my immediate responsibility as a Vice President who was now, more than any of his thirty-five predecessors, “one heartbeat from the presidency.”

  With the President of the United States gravely ill, the eyes of the nation and of the world would be focused upon me and what I did. Every word, every action of mine would be more important now than anything I had ever said or done before because of their effect upon the people of the United States, our allies, and our potential enemies. How I reacted to this crisis was infinitely more important to the nation and the world than the way I handled the Hiss case or my fight to stay on the ticket in 1952.

  Because of my awareness of this responsibility, my first conscious decision at the time was that I should check everything I said and did in the next critical few hours with someone whose judgment I respected. My thoughts turned to Bill Rogers, who was then Acting Attorney General while Herbert Brownell was vacationing in southern Spain. I thought of Rogers, not because he was the ranking legal officer in the United States, but because he was a friend who had proved during the fund crisis that he was a cool man under pressure, had excellent judgment, a good sense of press relations, and was one to whom I could speak with complete freedom without any concern that what I might say would find its way into the Washington gossip mill.

  I dialed his number and when he answered the phone I said, without any preliminary comment, “I wonder if you could come over.”

  “Yes, Dick, I’ll be right over,” he answered. I knew from the tone of his voice that he had the news; there was no need to spell it out.

  As I hung up the receiver, I suddenly realized that Pat was unaware of what had happened and I went upstairs and told her the news. I then telephoned my secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who was still at the wedding reception, and asked her to go to her apartment so that she could handle the incoming telephone calls on an extension of my home phone located there. Pat in the meantime had tried to break the news, as quietly as possible, to the children. But just as I finished the call to Rose, Tricia, who was then nine years old, came running down the stairs crying.

  “The President isn’t going to die, is he, Daddy?” she asked.

  “No,” I tried to reassure her, “he’s going to be all right.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. I asked her to look through the blind to see who it was because I knew newspapermen might be arriving on the scene at any moment.

  “It’s Mr. Rogers,” she called back to me.

  I went to the door and let Bill in. Before we sat down to talk we pulled the shades on the large picture windows which faced the street. We were just in time. Within minutes after Bill arrived, reporters and photographers were ringing the doorbell. Pat, with perfect poise developed over many years of handling similar situations, told them that I was not at home, that she did not know when to expect me, and while they were welcome to wait outside until I returned, they might be better advised to check with my office for further information. All of them, of course, decided to wait outside until I returned.

  This was the first problem that Bill and I discussed. I knew the reporters had their job to do. But I believed that this was one of those rare occasions in which the public interest demanded no statement whatever be made to the press.

  There were several reasons for this conclusion. Most important, I did not have the information at hand with which to answer the inevitable questions the reporters would ask. I knew nothing more about the President’s condition than they did. In addition, I realized that my own position as Vice President had become extremely delicate; my every move during this period had to be made with caution, for even the slightest misstep could be interpreted as an attempt to assume power. I knew from my study of history how sensitive the members of the President’s family, his staff, and for that matter the people throughout the nation, could be when the Chief Executive was gravely ill and his Vice President—or anyone else—did or said anything that smacked of exceeding his own authority.

  I realized, too, that my position was even more difficult than that of some of my predecessors who had faced similar circumstances. Hundreds of thousands of words had been written in 1952 about my youth as a vice presidential nominee, questioning my ability to assume the duties and responsibilities of the presidency if required to do so. I had long been the whipping boy for those who chose not to direct their political attacks against Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most popular President in recent history. The nation’s attention would be focused on the sickbed in Denver, but many eyes would be watching to see whether I became brash or timid in meeting the emergency. My job was to be neither.

  As Bill and I discussed these problems we agreed that it was vitally important that I not only have no press conference that evening, but that I avoid being photographed if possible. Even a camera can misquote or misinterpret a man. An unconscious, unintentional upturning of the lips can appear in a picture as a smile at so grave a moment. On the other hand, too serious an expression could create an impression of fear and concern which would also be most unfortunate.

  By this time the press corps outside the house had grown to the proportions of a street-corner political rally. Television cameras had been set up on the sidewalk. Floodlights were trained on the front of the house in the expectation that I might appear. I decided that the only thing I could do was to make myself literally unavailable for comment for the next few hours. I knew it would be impossible to be assured privacy in a hotel. Consequently, Bill and I decided to go to his house, which was well off the main road in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Our next problem was getting there. I could not use my car because I would have to walk through the phalanx of reporters to open the garage. Bill had come by taxi. We finally telephoned his wife and asked her to come after us and to park Bill’s car on the side street away from the front of the house. Just as she arrived, about fifteen minutes later, we had a bit of luck. Tricia had gone out the front door for a closer look at the TV cameras and had unintentionally drawn the attention of most of the reporters and photographers to herself. Bill and I went out the back door and walked quickly across my neighbor’s yard to where Mrs. Rogers was parked in his Pontiac convertible, about a hundred yards down the street from our house.

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the sanctuary of Bill Rogers’ home, free from all unnecessary interruptions, while the press continued to maintain its vigil outside my house.

  We kept in touch with the situation in Denver and Washington through the White House switchboard, making and receiving calls on the only downstairs telephone in the Rogers’ home, a wall-type instrument in his kitchen which proved to be particularly uncomfortable for the amount of telephoning we had to do during the night.

  I first called Denver to get the latest news on the President’s condition. We learned that his personal physician, Major General Howard Snyder, had diagnosed a “mild” coronary thrombosis and that the President was resting comfortably under an oxygen tent in Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. The reports indicated that his chances of recovery were good, but that it was too early to tell for sure. We learned piece-meal that night what had happened that day in Denver, but it was not until some time later that the story of the President’s heart attack became fully known. The events and particularly Dr. Snyder’s actions are worth reflecting upon.

  • • •

  Although on vacation, the President had put in one of his typically strenuous and full days. He worked hard and he played hard, too.
He was that type of man, and nothing could change him—even after he had recovered from the heart attack. That morning, away on a fishing trip with friends 8600 feet up in the Rockies, he had arisen at 5:00, cooked breakfast for his companions, and then had gone by car eighty-two miles back to Denver, where he put in over two hours of concentrated paperwork at the Summer White House at Lowry Air Force Base.

  Then he moved on to the Cherry Hills Country Club, where he played twenty-seven holes of golf. At lunch, after the eighteenth hole, he ate a hamburger with large slices of raw onion on the side (which later was blamed for his “indigestion”). Then he played out the final nine holes, conferred with Secretary of State Dulles by phone, and returned to the Doud home, where he plunged into three hours of work on a painting of a Rocky Mountain landscape. He ate a roast-lamb dinner with Mrs. Eisenhower, Mrs. Doud, and Mr. and Mrs. George E. Allen. Later, after the Allens had left, he complained to Mrs. Eisenhower of indigestion, but not seriously. He went to bed at about ten. Shortly after 2:30 Saturday morning, he awoke with a dull pain in his stomach and chest. Uncomfortable and unable to sleep, he got out of bed, turned on the light, and walked about his room, hoping the pain would pass. Mrs. Eisenhower heard him from the adjoining room and came in to find out what was wrong. When he complained of indigestion she gave him a dose of milk of magnesia and a glass of water, his usual medicine for an upset stomach. He went back to bed, and a few minutes later the full brunt of pain seared across his chest. He called out to Mrs. Eisenhower and told her she had better get the doctor. She telephoned Major General Snyder, his personal physician and a friend of many years. Dr. Snyder arrived a few minutes after 3 A.M. and he quickly realized that the President of the United States, just twenty days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, had been stricken with a heart attack, or, in medical terms, an acute coronary thrombosis—a blood clot in an artery of the heart.