In his talk with me, the President also expressed great disappointment that Earl Warren had announced he would not leave the Supreme Court to be a candidate. “I don’t see why he couldn’t just have said nothing,” he remarked, commenting that the Republican Party had dealt with Warren pretty well, and he certainly should have been willing to be a candidate in the event the party found it necessary to draft him. He pointed out that a recent Gallup Poll, asking Republican voters whom they favored for the Republican nomination in the event that Eisenhower did not run, had shown Warren with 14 per cent to 11 per cent for me. He mentioned another poll in which I had run substantially behind Adlai Stevenson. He apparently had not seen a later poll, taken after his heart attack, in which I had run ahead of Warren and in which Stevenson’s lead over me had been greatly cut down.
As we talked about polls, he said, “I want you to come in from time to time to discuss the situation with regard to yourself. We might have to initiate a crash program for building you up.” It occurred to me that a pretty effective job had been done on him concerning my recent weak showing in the polls. I told him that in making his decision as to whether he should or should not run again, I did not want him to feel that I had to be the candidate for Vice President.
He shut off talk on that subject promptly, saying he would not hear of it because he felt it would hurt the ticket if he “jettisoned” me at this point. Besides, he said, we could win as handily as we had before.
He tried to reassure me of his satisfaction with my work as Vice President. “There has never been a job I have given you that you haven’t done to perfection as far as I am concerned,” he said. “The thing that concerns me is that the public does not realize adequately the job you have done. I just can’t understand how any sane-minded person could choose Stevenson over you.”
Leaving that meeting, the strongest impression I carried away was that the President was leaning toward not running, but had not closed his mind on the subject. The idea of accepting a Cabinet post I did not take seriously. I put it in the category of a typical Eisenhower trial balloon, something which someone had suggested to him and that he characteristically was testing out.
Two days later, the President and his brother Milton, accompanied by a small staff, flew to Key West, Florida, for a two-week vacation, and spent most of the time fishing and talking politics. Mrs. Eisenhower and her mother flew down on New Year’s Eve to spend the holiday weekend with him. On his last day there, January 8, the President indicated to a press conference that he had reached a “subject-to-change” decision on the all-important political question. The fourteen reporters at the conference were polled for their opinion of the President’s remarks. Twelve thought he would not run, two judged that he would.
Soon after his return to Washington, he again brought up the question of whether I could advance my own political career better by seeking an important Cabinet post instead of running for Vice President again, pointing out that no Vice President since Van Buren had ever been elected President. The subject came up at five or six of our private conversations, usually in a casual way, and I always gave the same answer: “If you believe your own candidacy and your Administration would be better served with me off the ticket, you tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I want to do what is best for you.”
He always answered somewhat obliquely, praising my service to his Administration and saying, “No, I think we’ve got to do what’s best for you.”
This stalemate over what should have been a simple question arose, I believe, from our different attitudes on who should make the decision. I always believed, and still do, that no one should or could run for the vice presidency—the choice must be that of the presidential candidate. I considered it improper for me to indicate my desires until his plans, which were paramount, were made clear. I couldn’t say: “Look, Mr. President, I want to run.” He never put the question to me in quite the right way for that response. If he had said, “Dick, I want you to be the (vice presidential) candidate, if you want to be,” I would have accepted, thanked him, and that would have been that.
But Eisenhower’s mind did not work that way. He believed the Chief Executive should make only those decisions which could not be made by others. He preferred all other decisions to be made by his subordinates and then presented to him for his approval. Moreover, an Eisenhower characteristic was never to take direct action requiring his personal participation where indirect methods could accomplish the same result. That was why during the 1952 fund controversy he insisted that I should make the decision about resigning. And only if I had submitted my resignation would he have assumed the responsibility of determining whether my staying on the ticket would or would not be in the best interests of the party and his candidacy.
He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem and he usually preferred the indirect approach where it would serve him better than the direct attack on a problem. His mind was quick and facile. His thoughts far outraced his speech and this gave rise to his frequent “scrambled syntax” which more perceptive critics should have recognized as the mark of a far-ranging and versatile mind rather than an indicaton of poor training in grammar.
So in the early months of 1956, before it became a public issue, I was thrown into another period of agonizing indecision, which more than any overt crisis takes a heavy toll mentally, physically, and emotionally. I could not be certain whether the President really preferred me off the ticket or sincerely believed a Cabinet post could better further my career. It probably was a little of both, for this was a period when, recovering from his heart attack, he could well have been confused to some extent by the multiplicity of advice. Some of his close advisers made little secret of their personal antipathy toward me and wanted to dump me in ’56 as they had in ’52; others probably thought that I would hurt the ’56 ticket because of the attention which would be focused on the second spot in view of the President’s health; still others felt an open race for the vice presidential nomination would create more public interest; and some honestly believed a Cabinet post would foster my own career.
John Foster Dulles, one of my warmest friends and supporters in government, might well have been in this last group of advisers. I do not know if he discussed this subject with the President, but he brought it up with me one morning at his home. He expressed his belief that I ought to be President one day and that the office was within my reach because of my age, ability, and experience. He advised me strongly to consider the history of Vice Presidents and suggested that I might better prepare myself by seeking an important Cabinet post. He mentioned Defense and the possibility of Secretary of State when he resigned.
While I did consider the idea and did some private agonizing about what President Eisenhower had in mind, I soon reached the practical conclusion that I could not switch jobs without the disastrous appearance that “Nixon had been dumped.” And I knew I was acquiring executive and administrative experience in the various assignments given me by the President. Considering all the practical political aspects, I also concluded that all this was largely a tempest in a teapot. If the President decided to run, I would almost certainly be his running mate. But he would have to make the decision!
Eisenhower himself, it must be understood, was going through an ordeal of anxiety over the second-term issue. All his advisers, myself included when called upon, were pressing on him the need of the nation, the world, and not least, the Republican Party, to have him at the helm of government for another four years. At times this challenge, this call to duty must have seemed paramount—and at other times, during the periods of despondency which were part of his convalescence, he wanted to quit, defeated by an imperfect heart. The heart attack itself forced an earlier decision on the question of the second term. If he had been well and had wanted to quit, he could have delay
ed the decision until the last moment and then given the nod to his choice as potential successor. But the heart attack, politically, had shifted the odds against his seeking re-election, and now, the longer he delayed, the more his control would slip. He had to make an earlier decision in order to stop speculation and a ruinous scramble for the Republican nomination.
Personal considerations, as always, played their role along with the political and public aspects of Eisenhower’s decision. Several of his close friends and personal advisers became convinced that if he gave up his active life, he would never shake off the grip of despondency. General Lucius Clay, an intimate and long-time friend who could speak to him more frankly and bluntly than perhaps anyone else, observed a moody, depressed Eisenhower soon before he left Fitzsimmons Hospital, and from that day forward Clay worked all-out to get him to run for re-election. He called meetings and he rallied many of us privately to urge the President to run again for his own good. “I don’t care what happens to the Republican Party, but if he quits, it’ll kill him,” was the way Clay, a Democrat, put it. The same opinion was held by Dr. Snyder, and, as time went on, others close to the President recognized the wisdom of Clay’s attitude from Eisenhower’s personal point of view.
My own view, which I expressed on several occasions in meetings with close associates and friends of the President, was that it was not possible to separate the problem into two questions—what is best for Eisenhower and what is best for the nation. The only problem, as I saw it, was to convince Eisenhower that his running was imperative in the interests of the nation and the cause of peace and freedom to which he was dedicated. Once he became convinced of that, he could not make any decision other than to run, both from the standpoint of the nation and of his personal well-being. His whole life had been dedicated to public service. While there would be some risk to his health if he undertook the exertions of continuing to serve as President, there would be even greater risk to him from a physical, emotional, and mental standpoint if he consciously turned his back on a clear call to national service.
While the Washington reporters, columnists, and gossipmongers thought, wrote, and spread stories that President Eisenhower most probably would not run for re-election, the inner circle began to believe otherwise. The difference was that while those on the outside were reporting their own opinions and political theories, we on the inside knew the man. We knew that Eisenhower, as a leader and activist, might say he wanted to quit and take it easy. But when the time came, he would not want to lay down the reins of leadership with his job not fully completed.
On January 13, the President held his now famous but then secret dinner meeting of his close political advisers. Seated in front of a roaring fire in the Trophy Room on the second floor, with Milton alongside him, and the others lined up on two couches facing one another, the President asked each one in turn to present his reasons why he should run for a second term “and Milton will be my lawyer.” In turn, Dulles, Henry Cabot Lodge, Leonard Hall, Jerry Persons, George Humphrey, Arthur Summerfield, Jim Hagerty, Tom Stephens, Howard Pyle, and Sherman Adams presented their arguments. Milton made the summation. The President thanked them but held his counsel.
The questions and speculation continued for another month. On February 14, the team of doctors completed their tests, examinations, and analyses, and reported that there was no indication of any heart enlargement. Dr. White announced to the press that there was nothing to indicate that Eisenhower could not carry on “his present active life satisfactorily” for another five or ten years. The President then went to George Humphrey’s Georgia plantation for golf and quail hunting. Ten days later he returned to Washington and told intimates that his answer was “positive.”
• • •
The public announcement was made at his press conference of February 29 and when he had completed his statement, the first question was: would Richard Nixon be his running mate? The President evaded a direct reply, saying he could not properly speak out on the choice of a running mate until after the Republican National Convention itself had picked its presidential candidate. In politics, however, not speaking out can be another way of speaking out, and the President’s words set off a wave of speculation by the public and a furor among my own friends and supporters. This, in turn, caused embarrassment to me because I still could say nothing before the President spoke.
At the next weekly press conference, on March 7, the President delivered his famous answer: “I told him (Nixon) he would have to chart his own course and tell me what he would like to do.” His statement was telephoned to me soon after the press conference in a somewhat garbled version. The impression I got was that he was really trying to tell me that he wanted me off the ticket. I told Vic Johnston, Chief of Staff of the Senatorial Campaign Committee who was in my office at the time, that the only course I could properly take under the circumstances was to call a press conference the next day and announce that I would not be a candidate for Vice President so that Eisenhower would have a free hand to select his running mate. It seemed to me that it was like the fund controversy all over again. But then Eisenhower had not known me well and had every justification for not making a decision with regard to keeping me on the ticket until all the facts were in. Now, he had had an opportunity to evaluate my work over the past three years, and particularly during the period after the heart attack. If he still felt, under these circumstances, that he wanted me on the ticket only if I insisted on seeking the post, I concluded he should have someone else in whom he had more confidence as his running mate.
Later that day Len Hall and Jerry Persons, who had learned from Johnston of my intentions, cornered me at the Capitol and argued that if I issued such a statement it would split the Republican Party in two. I told them that everyone in politics knows a Vice President cannot chart his own course. “It’s up to him if he wants me,” I said. “I can only assume that if he puts it this way, this must be his way of saying he would prefer someone else.”
“That’s not what he meant at all,” said Hall. He declared that I was judging Eisenhower’s statement by standards which should be applied to a political sophisticate. Both he and Persons argued that the President was sincerely interested in my future and that I ought to consider the whole thing again and at least delay my decision.
I held off my decision and the speculation, the uncertainty, the tension dragged on. Perhaps the most difficult thing for me was placating my own close friends and associates. Letters and calls flooded my office charging that the President was being “ungrateful,” particularly in view of my conduct during the period since his heart attack.
Then an unexpected event occurred which was to have a great impact on my decision as well as the President’s. As the President pointed out to me much later in a letter he wrote while I was considering the possibility of becoming a candidate for Governor of California: “Over the years I have wrestled with many decisions. But somehow or other, when the chips were down, the decision seemed to come by itself and without a conscious thought process. Suddenly something seems inescapable or right, and any other course unthinkable. So I am sure the answer—whatever it is—will come to you.”
Six days after the “chart his own course” press conference, Pat and I were dinner guests of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She asked after dinner if we didn’t want to tune in on the New Hampshire primary results. I told her not to bother because, since my name was not on the ballot, I did not believe anything of significance as far as I was concerned would happen. The following morning my phone was ringing off the hook. The New Hampshire primary, the first of the 1956 campaign, had returned a surprising, unsolicited write-in vote of 22,936 for me as the vice presidential candidate. It was a reassuring comment coming from the voters at a difficult time, and I reappraised the situation in the light of the result. If what had happened in New Hampshire was at all indicative of sentiment in the country, my refusing to run as Vice President might, as Len Hall had predicted, “split the Republican Part
y in two.” As in the fund controversy, it was not just a question of what I personally wanted to do, but what was best for the party and the nation, as well, to the extent I thought Eisenhower’s continued leadership was in the national interest. This was the core of the difference in the way Eisenhower and I looked at the question of whether I should again be a candidate for Vice President. He insisted that I should do what I wanted to do—what I thought was best for my career. I had told him that I wanted to do what would best contribute to his own re-election, and that he should be the judge on that issue.
Politicians in Washington had no difficulty reading the meaning of the New Hampshire primary. After the vote was in, many Senators and Congressmen and party stalwarts flocked to me with reassurances of their support. The President, however, delayed a decision on the question of my candidacy. He flatly denied wanting to “dump” me, asserted again and again his affection for me, but insisted that it was not his place to choose a running mate before he himself had been nominated by the Republican Party. This continued for some seven weeks until April 25, when Len Hall came to me and urged me to unbend and put an end to the wrangling which was only hurting the party. At his press conference that morning, the President had said that I had not yet reported back to him on the charting of my own course: “He hasn’t given me any authority to quote him, any answer that I would consider final and definite.”
Six Crises Page 22