Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  • • •

  The next morning, I put into action a plan decided upon the night before. I returned home and drove with Pat and the girls to the Westmoreland Congregational Church, about a mile from our house. The newspapermen followed us and also attended the services. We heard the minister, Dr. Philip Gordon Scott, pray that the President be “restored to health and strength and to the power of full life.” It was a somber service, similar to thousands upon thousands of others throughout the world. Eisenhower, the man who had led the Allied forces to victory in World War II, had become a symbol of the hope for peace for people everywhere.

  After the services, the reporters crowded around and I invited them to return with me to the house. Eight or ten of them followed us home and we settled down in my living room for a talk. Few, if any, of them realized that this was precisely in line with my plan of action worked out the night before. This first meeting with the press, in which my words, my actions, even my mood, would be reported to the nation, for me was a crisis. I wanted to be prepared for it as best I could. Even the manner of my meeting the press, no matter what I said, could be subject to misinterpretation. If I called a press conference, attracting the whole Washington press and television corps, it would appear as though I were attempting to step center stage in the absence of the President. If I refused to see the press altogether, it might indicate a lack of confidence or even fear—and this would be a reflection upon the whole Administration. The answer was to have a casual meeting with the press, and that is just what this one seemed to be.

  With this small group of newsmen, many of whom I knew personally, sitting with me in my own home, I was able to speak frankly and informally. Of course, they had their jobs to do and they fired questions at me, loaded with politics, in their quest for what they call hard news. But I knew perfectly well what I wanted to say and what I didn’t. All questions on the President’s condition and its political implications for the next year’s presidential election, I declined to answer. “The only comment I can make,” I told them, “is to express the concern that I share with all the American people for the early and complete recovery of the President. In comparison with this, all other questions and problems are not worthy of discussion.”

  This did not stop the reporters that day, and others thereafter, from questioning the political implications of every move I made. The Republican National Convention was less than a year away; Eisenhower was known to be reluctant, even before his heart attack, to run for a second term; virtually everyone was counting him out now; and the newspaper pundits seemed to be equally divided between a “wide-open race” for the Republican nomination and Richard Nixon being the “heir apparent.” Somehow no one seemed to want to believe the truth, which was that the “team,” myself included, was concerned exclusively with how to carry on through the present emergency. No one close to the President thought of jockeying for the nomination while he lay ill. It would have been in poor taste, ill-advised, and, as some who tried it discovered a short while later, political suicide. My concern was how to keep politics out of the picture. If a scramble for the Republican nomination broke out at this time it would be tantamount to desertion of the President personally and an irresponsible scuttling of the administration of government. Despite the millions of words written about the political implications at the time, no member of the “team” began to seek the nomination.

  Our attention was directed on how to avoid the political maneuvers and how to maintain the balance of power in running a government without a Chief Executive. My first meeting with the press gave me the opportunity of making public the theme that the Administration would carry on the policies and practices of President Eisenhower until he himself was well enough to take over the reins. “The President has set up the Administration in such a way that it will continue its policies, which are well defined, during his temporary absence,” I told the reporters. “The President has always made it clear that the business of government should go ahead. He set it up in such a way that it can go ahead despite the temporary absence of anyone.”

  Foster Dulles and George Humphrey, with whom I had conferred by telephone the night before, also told the press that the “team” could and would carry on, thus setting the interim policy in Washington.

  Dulles, as the ranking senior member of the Cabinet, bolstered by his sense of history, long experience in government, and force of character, maintained a strong guiding hand behind the scenes upon all the actions of the team. It was he who strongly urged that Sherman Adams set up shop in Denver rather than Washington when Adams returned from overseas. He preferred Adams at the President’s side, serving as a liaison between the Chief Executive and the Cabinet, rather than Hagerty, the press secretary, or anyone else who might try to fill that vacuum. Dulles, in one conversation with me, candidly recalled the difficult period when Woodrow Wilson was paralyzed with a stroke in 1919 and the only ones who had access to his sickroom in the White House had been his wife, his secretary, and his doctor. Neither the Vice President, the Cabinet, nor Congress could find out Wilson’s state of health, and the only state papers he saw were those his wife and possibly his secretary chose to show him. For eight months, Wilson was unable to call a Cabinet meeting and when his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, initiated Cabinet meetings in an attempt to carry on the drifting affairs of the Administration, Wilson flew into a rage and demanded (and got) his Secretary of State’s resignation. That Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was John Foster Dulles’ uncle.

  The word from Denver on Sunday, after Dr. White had consulted with the military doctors, was that the President had had “a moderate attack of coronary thrombosis without complications.” Attention was focused on the word “moderate” because it differed from Dr. Snyder’s original diagnosis of a “mild” heart attack. However, the really important words were that the heart attack was “without complications.” The word from Denver, in short, was that the President had suffered a very ordinary coronary, one from which thousands of other men in his age-group had recovered. Barring complications, which could not yet be ruled out completely, the prognosis was that the President would be well enough in two weeks to take on limited duties and to resume normal activity in two months.

  The news was heartening and, after spending most of the day on the telephone, I relaxed Sunday night with Bill Rogers and Jerry Persons, talking over the various details which would have to be tended to during the week. We were fairly certain by this time that there was nothing requiring the President’s signature or attention which could not be delayed for two weeks. The significance of this was that it became apparent this early that we would not have to solve the thorny problem of a delegation of the President’s constitutional powers. Despite all the speculation in the press, that possibility was never taken up seriously within the Administration, and as the President’s health continued to improve, the constitutional question itself, aside from the practical considerations, faded into the background.

  The next day, Monday, I reviewed matters pending at the White House during a luncheon meeting with the senior staff personnel and then stayed on for a private talk with Sherman Adams, who had just flown in from Scotland. My relationship with Adams was somewhat formal rather than friendly. But we worked well together, with a mutual respect for our abilities and positions in the government. Adams said little in this meeting, but for him that was not unusual or surprising. I stressed the importance of keeping all the Cabinet members informed and up-to-date on everything, and I emphasized the necessity of avoiding any impression that any one clique of Cabinet officers was running the government. Some of the members whom I had not reached by phone the night I had learned of the President’s illness had raised this point with me, and I wanted to make sure that no jealousies arose within the Cabinet as a result of my having consulted that evening with Humphrey and Dulles and not with others.

  On Monday night, Adams, Len Hall, who was then the Republican National Chairman, and his press aide Lou
Guylay, along with Rogers, Persons, and myself, met at Rogers’ home to discuss some of the political questions which were bound to arise during the President’s illness. During this meeting, which lasted for over four hours, Adams volunteered nothing. As Len Hall later described his actions: “Every time we asked, ‘Sherm, what do you think?’ he would talk about fishing in Scotland.” After three or four questions were put to him, we realized that Adams’ sole loyalty was to Eisenhower and that he did not want to take part in any action before he knew his chief’s inclinations.

  The major subject of discussion that night was how to keep the lid on the political cauldron. Len Hall, a man who knew and loved his job, needed no instruction. He already had taken the first step. Caught by reporters that afternoon at a scheduled talk to the Union League Club in New York, Hall came out flatly with his prediction of the 1956 Republican ticket: Ike and Dick. That night I asked Hall to get word to all the Republican State Chairmen and political leaders throughout the country to say nothing which would set off a premature battle for the presidential nomination. I stated flatly that I would do nothing that could possibly be construed as political so long as we had a President who conceivably could run for a second term. No one at that time, it must be admitted, thought that Eisenhower would choose to run again even if he were physically able.

  How to provide leadership to the party and to the nation during the President’s illness came up as a problem of many facets. I refused to take any overt leadership, although I was equally determined that things must not be allowed to drift. My problem remained how to exert leadership without seeming to do so.

  The next day and all through the next two weeks, I was careful to conduct all my business from my own office in the Senate Office Building. I made it a point to visit various Cabinet members in their offices rather than summon them to mine. I met with Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Herbert Hoover, Jr., Under-Secretary of State, and Dillon Anderson, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, to prepare for the regular Thursday meeting of the National Security Council. I put in several hours with the White House staff and, for the first time since the President was stricken, I signed some non-legal, ceremonial papers. I signed them, of course, with my own name, “in behalf of the President.” My working day stretched from twelve to sixteen hours during the week, but that Wednesday was the opening day of the World Series and I managed to listen to the final three innings of the game.

  At the two-and-a-half-hour meeting of the National Security Council on Thursday, attended by twenty-three ranking members of the Administration, we went through the regular agenda of reports and then spent considerable time reviewing and putting somewhat of an official stamp of approval on the course of action for the interim government. It was officially decided, for instance, that Sherman Adams should go to Denver to serve as liaison and administrative assistant to the President, while Jerry Persons would handle the paper work at the President’s White House office, routing the documents which the President should see through Adams.

  Presiding at the Security Council was not new to me. I had done this before when the President had been away from Washington. I was fully briefed for this meeting, but still there was an aura of tension in the air. I was mindful to preside as Vice President, not as acting President. My role was to see that the items up for discussion were handled effectively and efficiently. I was careful not to express my opinion on any decisions or to cut off the discussion until all the officials present, understandably sensitive about their prerogatives, had their say. Only at the end of the discussion of each subject did I express my own point of view and set forth what I thought was the sense of the meeting as to the decision which should be made.

  Despite all my efforts, I was not completely successful in keeping harmony within the Cabinet group. I did my best during this period to avoid meeting the press, but it was virtually impossible to go in and out of the White House and my office in the Capitol without running into reporters who had the responsibility to cover me. Even though I tried to be completely noncommittal on such occasions, two Cabinet officers called me Thursday evening very upset because they thought I had sought out the press after the Security Council meeting, in violation of our general understanding to have no press conferences during this period.

  Foster Dulles must have been aware of the great tension under which I had been working. The next morning, Friday, I presided over the meeting of the Cabinet. The Cabinet meeting went almost exactly like that of the National Security Council. I presided from my own chair opposite the empty seat of the President. The meeting was opened with a prayer for the recovery of the President, and I again took care to preside rather than to conduct the meeting. At the end of the two-and-a-half-hour session, Foster Dulles gave my morale a much needed boost when he said, “Mr. Vice President, I realize that you have been under a very heavy burden during these past few days, and I know I express the opinion of everybody here that you have conducted yourself superbly. And I want you to know we are proud to be on this team and proud to be serving in this Cabinet under your leadership.”

  As I had expected from the very first, my road continued to be straight and narrow. I had to move ahead, realizing that any misstep could bring disaster. While some Cabinet members feared I was doing too much, others told me I was not doing enough. Typical of the latter attitude was a wire I received from Styles Bridges, the senior Senator from New Hampshire: “You are the constitutional second-in-command and you ought to assume the leadership. Don’t let the White House clique take command.”

  In Washington, there has always been a sort of continuous rating system, an intangible popularity poll, which fluctuates with the supposed importance and influence of each member of the government. In the Executive branch, the measure usually goes according to who has the ear of the President. In the absence of President Eisenhower, this rating system shifted gears in quest of someone who could be considered to be filling the huge gap left by the President’s forced absence.

  This even affected the Washington press corps. Some reporters who had known me since I had come to the Capital as a freshman Congressman changed their form of address from “Dick” to “Mr. Vice President.”

  The most noticeable effect was, of course, on the large group of sundry politicians, businessmen, and lobbyists who can always be counted on to “play the winner.” Men who had hardly cloaked their antipathy before, now paid me courtesy calls or sought to give me sagacious advice about my brilliant future. A bandwagon of sorts had started the very first week, but I knew how fickle that sort of support could be. I was not surprised to note that as President Eisenhower’s health improved, these new camp followers drifted off to different roads.

  In Denver, the President regained his strength day by day. After a week in the hospital, he put his signature on two documents—primarily to reassure the nation of his recovery. A few days later he wrote me a letter, made public to put his stamp of approval on my activities: “Dear Dick, I hope you will continue to have meetings of the National Security Council and of the Cabinet, over which you will preside in accordance with the procedures which you have followed at my request in the past during my absence from Washington.”

  Pat and I were able to keep track of the pace of the President’s recovery by the diminishing number of reporters who maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil at our home. The first two or three nights after the attack, when his condition was touch and go, this group numbered ten. As the reports got better during the week, one by one they drifted away to other assignments until ten days later only Bill Blair of the New York Times was on hand to greet me when I left my home for the office. He stayed on duty for three more days, and since he was the only one, I was able to give him a ride to the Capitol each morning.

  But it was not until two weeks after the heart attack that the tension in Washington was eased. Although it was hardly mentioned, I am certain that many of us realized that our team-government would be i
nadequate to handle an international crisis, such as a brush-fire war or an internal uprising in a friendly nation or a financial crisis of an ally. The ever-present possibility of an attack on the United States was always hanging over us. Would the President be well enough to make a decision? If not, who had the authority to push the button? This two-week period was critical in the health of a heart patient, his doctors said. It was the period in which a recurrence or “complications” were most likely, and everyone in Washington was aware of the possibility. When that two-week period ended and the scar tissue in the President’s heart had formed—for we had all started our course in becoming lay heart specialists—only then did we feel that the crisis had ended. Eisenhower would be well enough to handle the powers and duties which were vested by the Constitution in him alone.

  • • •

  I flew to Denver to see him for the first time since his attack with Dr. White and the President’s son, John, on October 8, exactly two weeks after the heart attack; and Dr. White, an articulate and sophisticated physician, lectured me vigorously on his favorite theme: heart patients should not be treated as invalids. Once their recovery is complete, they should resume their previous normal activities. For President Eisenhower this would mean a renewal of his strenuous life, hard work, and plenty of exercise. One of the doctor’s heart patients, I remember his telling me, was in his eighties and still played golf regularly.

  I was the first of the visitors permitted to see the President after the “critical period.” The Cabinet members followed according to rank. It was obvious that in Denver they were as mindful of protocol as I had been in Washington.

  President Eisenhower looked startlingly thin and pale, but seemed in good spirits. His mind was agile and he roamed over various subjects, including his heart attack and problems of government. I told him he needn’t rush to get back to his office, that the team was carrying on his policies without “one iota of jealousy” among us.