Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  The heart attack, the ileitis operation, and the stroke were terribly difficult personal crises for President Eisenhower. They were to a less and different extent personal crises for me. But even more, they were potential constitutional crises of the greatest magnitude for the nation. If such a crisis should arise in the future, its outcome should not be dependent upon the personal whims of whoever happens to hold the offices of President and Vice President, but on the law of the land, as approved by the Congress or as set forth in the Constitution.

  SECTION FOUR

  Caracas

  The classic crisis is one involving physical danger. What is essential in such situations is not so much “bravery” in the face of danger as the ability to think “selflessly”—to blank-out any thought of personal fear by concentrating completely on how to meet the danger.

  OF all the trips I made abroad as Vice President the one I least wanted to take was my visit to South America in 1958—not because I thought it would be difficult but because I thought it would be relatively unimportant and uninteresting compared to the assignments I had in Washington at that time.

  Early in March 1958, Roy R. Rubottom, Jr., the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, called on me in my office. He said that the State Department wanted me to represent the United States at the inauguration of Arturo Frondizi as President of Argentina. He said there were several reasons why they wanted someone of my rank to head the usual delegation of dignitaries for this event. South America needed recognition at the highest level. Argentina was a symbol of the new tides that were beginning to emerge throughout this hemisphere. Juan Peron had been the strongest of the dictators and had been overthrown. A responsible group of men forming a military junta had taken over and now after the first free election in twenty years, Frondizi was to be inaugurated.

  It was essential, Rubottom pointed out, that the highest official available for such assignments from the United States attend the inauguration to help knock down the widespread impression in Latin America that the United States had sympathized with Peron.

  I told Rubottom that I could see the merits of his arguments but I could not spare the time for a trip outside the country because of my current heavy work load in Washington. Nineteen fifty-eight was an election year. Despite President Eisenhower’s landslide in 1956, we had not won the Congress and the prospects were that we would lose more seats in the fall. I thought I should stay in Washington to help make preparations for the campaign and to participate in the discussions going on within the Administration as to how to fight the deepening recession which was causing increasing concern throughout the country. Also, I did not believe that a “purely protocol” trip which Rubottom had described, where I would be one of sixty or seventy dignitaries from foreign countries, would afford enough of an opportunity for serious constructive conversations with the new government leaders to justify my leaving my duties in Washington. For these reasons, I told him flatly that I could not make the trip.

  But Rubottom, a career foreign service officer, was not only persuasive, he was persistent. He also knew how to get things done in Washington. The day after his first visit to my office, I received a call from my long-time friend and original mentor in the foreign affairs field, Christian Herter, who was then Under Secretary of State. I had the highest regard and respect for Herter and I heard him out as he described the need for some dramatic gesture of recognition from the United States of the new government in Argentina. But I still said no.

  A few days later, Foster Dulles dropped in on me one evening at my home and after discussing some other subjects he brought up the proposed trip. Like the master advocate he was, he analyzed my reasons for wanting to stay in Washington against the need for me to make the trip. He argued that it was essential for our foreign policy not only for me to appear at Frondizi’s inauguration but also, if possible, to arrange to stop in several other South American countries.

  The next day, after a Cabinet meeting at the White House, President Eisenhower asked me to step into his office. He mentioned that he had been speaking to his brother, Milton, and to Dulles and that they felt a tour of South America at this time would be of considerable long-range benefit to the nation. He said that while he understood my commitments in Washington were also of top importance he hoped I could somehow find time to fit in a brief assignment in the Southern Hemisphere.

  This was the way, incidentally, Eisenhower always broached assignments he wanted me to undertake. He recognized that the Constitution had established the presidency and vice presidency as separate and independent offices. He never ordered me to do something. He would wonder aloud if I might like to take over this or that project, always couching his recommendations in terms which would cause no embarrassment to either of us if I preferred to say no. There was, of course, never an occasion when I did not willingly accept the assignments he suggested.

  When I called Rubottom the next day I was somewhat irritated at him for boxing me in so neatly. But I had to admit to myself that he deserved considerable credit for his skill and follow-through in accomplishing an objective he thought was vital to the interests of his department and the nation. When I authorized him to make the preliminary arrangements I knew from my conversation with Dulles that the trip would be extended beyond the protocol visit to Argentina. Consequently I warned Rubottom, “Under no circumstances do I want to be away from Washington for more than one week—that is, from take-off to landing at National Airport, one week.” He said that he would carry out my wishes in that respect. I figured that having given him a week, I had probably limited the trip to no more than ten days.

  But even this was unrealistic. As word got out that I was going to Argentina, invitations poured into the State Department from other South American countries, accompanied by urgent requests from our own Ambassadors, that they be included on my trip. First Uruguay, Argentina’s small but proud neighbor to the north, asked for “equal treatment.” Then Rubottom came to me with invitations from Colombia and Venezuela. Both these countries had just rid themselves of dictators and they, too, felt entitled to a visit which would signify a United States salute of “well done.”

  As I looked into the information on Venezuela, I found that the provisional junta in Caracas was rather shaky and inexperienced and was having trouble dealing with the vigorous, well-financed, and meticulously organized Communist Party within its borders. I concluded that this well-motivated non-Communist junta needed all the encouragement and support from the United States it could get before the elections of a new permanent government later in the year.

  I added Colombia to the list because after ten years of oppression and anarchy, its dictator, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, had been overthrown and Alberto Lleras Camargo, an enlightened and dedicated statesman, had been elected President of a free representative government. I looked forward to the opportunity of helping demonstrate the United States’ gratification over this turn of events in Colombia.

  But I found after we had gone this far, we had to go all the way. Rubottom persuaded me to visit all the nations in South America on a quick and intensive tour—excluding only Brazil, which I had visited on the occasion of the inauguration of President Kubitschek, and Chile, whose Chief of State would be in Washington at the time of my tour. Consequently, when the itinerary was finally settled, the “no more than one week, one country trip” had been stretched to a two-and-a-half week tour of eight countries with a short, informal stop in Trinidad, capital of the newly created West Indies Federation.

  • • •

  I plunged into an intensive program of predeparture briefings and research with the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other sources of information. I read volumes of memoranda and situation papers so that I would be up-to-date with the best available information on the political and economic problems of each of the countries I visited. This was the groundwork which I had found to be essential in other trips I had made overseas.

  This
was to be my seventh major trip abroad as Vice President and by this time I had convinced the career men in the State Department that I should use such visits not only to talk to government leaders but also to meet the opinion makers and people in all walks of life. I had long ago won my battle with those in the State Department who had taken a dim view of my practice of trying to make contact with the people as well as the leaders of foreign countries. Rubottom welcomed my suggestion to schedule representative meetings with groups of university students, labor leaders, editors, and other opinion makers.

  I wanted to do more than simply mouth prepared platitudes designed to avoid trouble. I was determined to meet and answer head on some of the attacks which were currently being made against the United States in Latin America.

  Allen Dulles informed me of intelligence estimates on the possibility of anti-American demonstrations in two or three of the capitals I was to visit. But there were no intimations of any possible violence.

  Consequently when several newspapermen in Washington asked me if it would be worth their while to accompany me, I told them off the record that the trip had all the evidences of being routine and dull from a news standpoint and not worth their publishers’ expense. Some of Washington’s top newspaper and magazine reporters relied on my advice and stayed home. They probably will never stop needling me for that prediction. The trip produced one of the top news stories of the year.

  No journey ever started out in a less exciting way and ended more dramatically than this one to South America. It was a bleak and drizzly day on April 27 when my wife and I said our formal good-bys at Washington’s National Airport to the Ambassadors and Embassy representatives of the countries we were to visit. We reassured our two girls, Tricia, who was eleven, and Julie, who was two years younger, that this was going to be just like a short vacation and that we would be home in less than three weeks.

  Trinidad was only a refueling stop for our special Air Force plane but it afforded me time for a friendly conversation with Sir Grantley Adams, Prime Minister of the new nation known as the West Indies Federation.

  The first official stop on our eighteen-day journey was Montevideo, Uruguay. Uruguayan government leaders were out in full force and greeted me with the Latin embraso, which can best be described as a good-natured bear hug, which is much more expressive of friendship than our northern handshake. After making our informal arrival statements, we proceeded in a motorcade through the center of the city. Thousands of friendly, cheering people lined the streets. It was not until I reached the hotel that I learned that when we had passed Uruguay’s University of the Republic there had been some students carrying placards reading FUERA NIXON which translated means “Go home, Nixon.” I didn’t consider the report at all significant. The number of pickets had been so small I hadn’t even noticed them.

  But the next morning, Bill Key, my administrative assistant, brought me the press reports. The carefully prepared statement I had made on arrival and the warm and friendly reception from thousands of Montevideans received only passing attention. The headlines and news stories in South America and in the United States featured the sign-carrying pickets. It was the old story I had learned long ago: the unusual or the controversial event always makes “news” over the expected or routine occurrences, even though the latter may be a more accurate picture of the true situation. I decided I should do something, if possible, to counteract these first press reports.

  Robert Woodward, our Ambassador in Montevideo, urged me not to overestimate Communist activity in Uruguay. The Communists had made little headway in this pro-Western country, he said. The most active Communist network was centered in the University’s law school, but even there a substantial majority of students were not Communists. I told the Ambassador that I felt I should point up that fact by making an unannounced stop at the University before leaving Uruguay the next day. We made plans to keep my unscheduled stop a secret so that the hard core of Communist agitators would have no advance notice of my coming.

  The next morning as our motorcade was moving toward the airport we went by the University. I saw a few students on the grounds and ordered our cars stopped. Mrs. Nixon and I went up the steps of the University administration building and walked toward the law school wing with the Ambassador, Colonel Vernon Walters, my interpreter, and Jack Sherwood, my Secret Service escort. Events worked out as I had hoped they would. Word that I was there spread like wildfire through the school. Students swarmed around, asking for autographs, shaking hands as I moved into one of the law school classrooms. The room was soon jammed with students. I told them that I wanted to answer any questions they had with regard to United States policy toward Uruguay and other Latin American countries.

  For almost an hour they questioned me about alleged U. S. imperialism, unfair trade practices, economic exploitation, and support of dictatorships in South America. No problem between the United States and Uruguay, real or imagined, was overlooked or bypassed, and because of my intensive briefing, I was able to answer each one directly and honestly.

  The Communists, of course, could not take this lying down and toward the end of the session they got in some of their typical questions. But they had not had time to pack the audience. As we left the administration building, students crowded the staircases, the corridors, and the grounds. The Communist leaders regrouped their forces and tried to distribute some of their literature while shouting anti-United States slogans. But they ran into a hornet’s nest of opposition. The students were so overwhelmingly on our side that they tore up the pamphlets, shouted down the hecklers and called out at the tops of their voices in Spanish, “Long live United States and Uruguayan friendship.”

  Back in the car, Woodward could not have been more pleased. A characteristic of Latin Americans, he told me, was their zest for controversy, admiration of courage, and contempt for fear or timidity. Nothing could have pleased and complimented them more than my unexpected visit. In the newspapers the next day the stories of my University visit and its reception canceled out the first day’s reports of anti-American sentiment in Uruguay.

  • • •

  In Argentina, our next stop, my schedule was arranged so that I could attend all the inaugural functions and still undertake other activities.

  I threw the switch that energized an Argentine atomic research reactor, powered with uranium provided by our government. This gave me an opportunity to speak of the promise that the peaceful development of atomic energy offered to the people of South America in helping to eliminate poverty and disease under a democratic way of life.

  I spoke and answered questions at length before two labor groups and at the Buenos Aires University. The Communists are making massive efforts to infiltrate the labor unions and the universities in each nation of South America, and the United States programs directed toward these groups in South America, and in other parts of the world, are pitifully inadequate by comparison. I had long believed that we spend too much time concentrating on the elite groups who happen to be in power in government and too little time on those who represent the future in the Latin American countries. Our programs for labor and university groups are too heavily weighted on the side of impersonal propaganda. Communists are concentrating on organizing individual students, teachers, union leaders, and members into effective and powerful activist groups.

  To the labor groups here, as in other countries I visited, I emphasized the incompatibility of free labor and dictatorships of either the right or the left. No Communist government will tolerate a free labor movement. I told the story of how the Communists, masquerading as champions of the legitimate aspirations of working men, tried to infiltrate the trade union movement in the United States and even succeeded to an extent. In time, true labor leaders saw the danger and threw the Communists out of American unions. From then on, organized labor moved ahead substantially, contributing both to the welfare of its members and the country as a whole.

  My union audiences asked me some tough and pr
ovocative questions. But I was confronted with one of my most difficult problems not in the discussion period but at a mammoth asado, which can best be described as a South American barbecue party, given for Mrs. Nixon and me by one of the largest labor unions in Argentina. The main dish was beef barbecued over an open fire, Gaucho style, with the animal hair still on it. Sides of beef were cut out, placed against a vertical grill alongside the fire in such a way that the meat was cooked and the hair, on the side away from the fire, was not scorched. Pat and I found that trying to eat the beef without getting a mouthful of hair presented an even greater “crisis” than we had experienced in trying to eat a Chinese forty-course dinner with chopsticks in Hong Kong in 1953. The trick was to eat the beef like a melon, carefully cutting out squares of beef and leaving the skin and hair on the plate. The origin of the dish goes back to the days of the Gauchos who cooked enough beef for several days of riding the range, leaving the hair on to protect the cooked meat from dirt and insects.

  On my visit to Buenos Aires University I learned that some Latin American students do not fit the definition of students as we know them in the United States. In Latin America, a young man may make a profession of being a student and more often than not that young man is a Communist functionary “studying” in order to indoctrinate younger students with the promises of Marxism.

  Consequently, when I asked for questions at the University, Gregorio Selser, a well-known Communist newspaper writer who was thirty-four years old, shouted down other students and stood up to ask a question. His question was a twenty-minute tirade, a good part of which he read from a prepared text, straight out of the Communist line on every international controversy. I recognized him as the leader of the group which had handed out anti-American leaflets outside the University and I let him go on until he had finished. Then I remarked that he had forgotten to ask a question, and proceeded to answer his charges point by point, no matter how slanted, loaded, or ridiculous they seemed. This was a practice I followed in all discussions before student groups. My objective was not to convert the agitators, which I realized was impossible, but to convince those in the audience who might otherwise have been taken in by such persistent and shamefully false propaganda against the United States.