Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  It was not until the spring of 1952 that the thought first seriously occurred to me that I might be a possible candidate for national office. As a result of the Hiss case and my election to the Senate in 1950, speaking invitations came into my office from all over the nation. One of these, the principal speech at a fund-raising dinner of the New York State Republican Committee, May 8, 1952, at the Waldorf-Astoria, turned out to be one of the most important speeches I had made up to that time. I devoted a full week to preparing it. I knew I faced a major test before a highly sophisticated audience and was keyed up for the occasion. It turned out to be one of my more successful efforts. When I concluded, the audience gave me a standing ovation. As I sat down, Governor Dewey grasped my hand and said: “That was a terrific speech. Make me a promise: don’t get fat; don’t lose your zeal. And you can be President some day.”

  I was somewhat embarrassed by the generosity of his remarks. It was not the first time that someone had suggested that I might be presidential timber. Every public figure, at one time or another, and particularly after he has made an effective speech, has had someone say—“you have what it takes to be President,” or words to that effect. It is a way some people have to pay their highest compliment to a speech they may have liked.

  I thought at first that this was all Governor Dewey meant to convey. I assumed that he was simply indulging in the usual practice of trying to say something nice to a fellow political practitioner after a major effort. However, as I was to learn when I came to know him better, he is not addicted to that kind of political puffing. Through the years I served as Vice President, I was to find him one of my most objective critics. If he thought one of my speeches was good he would say so. But he would never hesitate to tell me that another one had not been up to par, or was even “lousy,” if he thought that to be the case. This candor on Dewey’s part probably lost him some friends in the political world, but I respected and admired him for it. I thought that his failure to win the presidency in 1948, at a time when I did not know him personally, was a great loss to the nation. As I got to know him well through the years after 1952, I came to believe this even more deeply. At his best, Dewey is one of the most brilliant, tough-minded, resourceful men of this era. He would have been more than a match for Khrushchev or any other world leader. It is America’s and the Free World’s loss that his great talents were never utilized on the world scene.

  Despite the success of my New York speech and Dewey’s unexpected reaction to it, I did not consider myself a serious contender for the vice presidential nomination when I attended the Chicago Convention in July 1952. And this is perhaps as good a place as any to lay to rest one of the many myths regarding my selection as General Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952. It has been alleged that there was a “deal” beween Dewey and myself under which I was to receive the vice presidential nomination in return for “delivering” the California delegation to Eisenhower. There are two facts which completely demolish this allegation. In the first place, I was for Eisenhower long before I met Dewey at the New York dinner in May. And in the second place, the California delegation was pledged to Governor Earl Warren and stayed with him to the finish. It did not shift to Eisenhower until after he had already been assured the nomination by reason of the switch to him, over Harold Stassen’s objection, of the Minnesota delegation.

  From the time I became the Republican nominee for Vice President, everything I was to do or say inevitably was appraised in light of the possibility that I might eventually become a candidate for President, but it was not until November of 1958 that the story of my candidacy really begins.

  • • •

  Friday, November 7, was a bleak day at the start of a long, cold Washington winter. It was a particularly cold day in the fortunes of the Republican Party and of Richard Nixon. My political career had been one of very sharp ups and downs since my nomination and election as Vice President in 1952. My stock soared after the success of my first round-the-world trip in the fall and winter of 1953. It went down just as sharply when, in 1954, my back-breaking campaign for a Republican House and Senate fell short. It went up again in 1955 because of the general approval, even from my most severe critics, of my conduct during the period of the President’s heart attack. It went down again in 1956 when Harold Stassen made his abortive attempt to dump me from the ticket. My renomination and re-election in 1956 more than compensated for the losses sustained during the Stassen attack. But in 1957 and 1958 my support drifted downward again as the recession began to be felt throughout the country. Then the crisis of Caracas, in May 1958, carried me to an all-time high. But just six months later, the shattering Republican defeat in the ’58 Congressional elections drove my stock down to an all-time low.

  It was at this time that I received a telephone call from Len Hall. Len had been a long-time personal and political friend. We had served together in the House. He had been Chairman of the Republican National Committee during the period of the President’s heart attack and the successful campaign of 1956. He told me—this Friday in November—that Clifford Folger, who had been National Republican Finance Chairman during Hall’s tenure as Party Chairman, was on leave in Washington from his post as U. S. Ambassador to Belgium and that they would like to drop by to discuss the political situation. I invited them to dinner at my home.

  After dinner Len quickly got down to essentials. “It is time for you to decide what you are going to do in 1960,” he said. “If you are going to be a candidate, you must start now.”

  The thought that I might be a candidate in 1960 had, of course, occurred to me before. But for the first time, I now had to face up to the problems I would be confronted with if I made the decision to run.

  First we discussed the odds against us. They were formidable indeed.

  At the beginning of the 1952 campaign, by way of contrast, there were 199 Republicans in the House of Representatives (out of a total of 435 members) and 47 Republican Senators against 49 Democrats. There were Republican Governors in twenty-five states and the Republican Party controlled both houses of twenty-six state legislatures. The Republican candidate in 1960 would find that there were only 153 Republicans in the House (out of a total of 437), 35 Republican Senators out of 100, 14 Republican Governors, and that the Republicans controlled both houses of the state legislatures in only seven states. As a further indication of party weakness, a Gallup Poll as to party preferences (in February 1960) showed that 47 per cent of American voters considered themselves Democrats, 30 per cent Republicans, and 23 per cent independents. To win in 1960, the Republican candidate would have to get practically all the Republican votes, more than half of the independents—and, in addition, the votes of between five and six million Democrats.

  My personal stock was no higher than that of the party because I had campaigned throughout the country for our Republican candidates in the 1958 elections. As a result of that massive national defeat and Nelson Rockefeller’s victory in New York, columnists and commentators were freely predicting that I was on the way down and Rockefeller was on the way up as the potential Republican candidate in 1960.

  One major winner in the ’58 campaign was Jack Kennedy. He had won an overwhelming re-election victory in Massachusetts and his presidential bandwagon, which had started to roll immediately after his narrow defeat for the vice presidential nomination in 1956, was now moving at high speed. In a trial heat between Kennedy and me which Gallup took at this time, it was Kennedy by 59 to 41 per cent. This would have meant a Kennedy landslide of the same proportions as Eisenhower’s decisive victory over Stevenson in 1956.

  I asked Len Hall, in light of all these discouraging facts, to give me his honest appraisal of the odds against me on winning the nomination and the election. He replied that he was confident we could win the nomination—even though the odds at the moment were probably in Rockefeller’s favor. As far as the election was concerned, he estimated the odds against any Republican winning in 1960 at about five-to-one. But speaking from
his wealth of political experience, he refused to concede that the situation might not change drastically before Election Day 1960, particularly if we mounted an effective campaign.

  Before our evening’s conversation was over, Len Hall agreed to assume the responsibility for directing the campaign to line up delegates to the 1960 National Convention. Cliff Folger said that he would undertake the role of Finance Chairman as soon as he completed his assignment in Belgium.

  As we entered the year 1959, some breaks began to come our way. President Eisenhower sent me to London late in November 1958 to represent him at the dedication of the chapel in St. Paul’s Cathedral honoring the American dead of World War II. The trip was rated a success by most observers. My speech at the historic London Guildhall received a particularly favorable reaction, both in Britain and in this country.2 The effect of these events in the United States was not massive. But it did tend to erase the memories of the unsuccessful ’58 campaign and started me on the way back from the low point I had reached.

  Another factor that worked in my favor was one over which I had no control. After a good beginning as New York’s Governor, Nelson Rockefeller had fallen on lean days. Because his predecessor, Averell Harriman, had left the state’s fiscal affairs in such bad shape, Rockefeller had to ask for new taxes in order to put the state budget on a pay-as-you-go basis. This step was, in my opinion, necessary—and I publicly said so. But raising taxes is never popular, even when it is right, and Rockefeller’s standing in the public opinion polls began to fall off.

  And as the national economy began to turn upward in the winter and spring of 1959, the Administration’s standing rose accordingly—and along with it, the personal stock of all of us associated with it.

  Then came a decisive break—my meeting with Khrushchev in July 1959. Until that meeting, polls indicated my support was no greater nationwide than that of the Republican Party. After my return from the Soviet Union, my personal standing rose the critical five to six points above Republican strength in general—a margin I had to maintain if I were to have a chance to win in 1960. The trial heats between Kennedy and myself provided further dramatic evidence of this increase in my public support. Before the trip, a Gallup Poll showed Kennedy’s strength at 61 per cent and mine at 39 per cent—a margin even greater than Eisenhower’s over Stevenson in 1956. After the trip, the gap closed to 52 per cent for Kennedy, 48 per cent for Nixon. In November 1959, I moved ahead of him in the polls for the first time: Nixon 53 per cent—Kennedy 47 per cent.

  I had no illusions, however, that this margin could be maintained without an extraordinary effort. Kennedy’s problem was simply to get the Democrats to stay in their own party and vote for him. My problem was to hold virtually all the Republicans and then persuade five to six million Democrats to leave their own candidate and vote Republican. I recognized that I could accomplish this only as President Eisenhower had—by acting and speaking not just as a Republican partisan but as a representative of all the people. My trips to Caracas and Moscow had provided an opportunity for me to appear in this role. And it was only after these trips that my strength rose the necessary level above that of my party.

  One more opportunity to demonstrate “national” leadership occurred before the campaign year of 1960. A crippling 116-day steel strike—running from July 15 through November 7, 1959—had been suspended by a Taft-Hartley injunction which was due to expire on January 26, 1960. President Eisenhower, on December 3, began a trip which would take him to Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia and would continue until December 22. Before he left the country, Secretary of Labor James Mitchell and I discussed the strike with him and he approved a plan for us to attempt to mediate the dispute in his absence. After numerous preliminary “feeler” sessions and then eight days and nights of the most intensive discussions I have ever participated in, we were able to work out a settlement—on January 4, 1960—acceptable to both sides. The settlement, which would run until July 1962, was attacked in some quarters as being inflationary, but the critics overlooked the fact that this was the first steel labor contract since World War II which was not accompanied by a price boost. And whereas the postwar pattern of annual wage increases had averaged out to about 8 per cent, this new contract provided for an average of less than 3 per cent—almost exactly in line with the annual “productivity” factor. At any rate, the political effect of the settlement was to sustain my narrow lead over Kennedy in the trial polls into the early months of 1960, and to project Jim Mitchell into the foreground as a potential vice presidential candidate.

  Len Hall had proved to be a good prophet. As a result of two events none of us could foresee in the discouraging winter of 1958–59—my Russian trip and the steel settlement—the almost prohibitive odds against me a year before had now shifted. As the campaign year began, I was a strong favorite to win the Republican nomination and was running practically a dead-heat in the public opinion polls against the strongest Democratic candidate—Jack Kennedy.

  • • •

  But now both Kennedy and Rockefeller were beginning to make their moves and the decisive battles would shortly be under way. Early in January, I invited some of the key men in my campaign—Len Hall, Cliff Folger, Bob Finch, Herb Klein, Fred Scribner, Jim Shepley, Fred Seaton, and Claude Robinson—to lunch in my Capitol office to discuss our strategy for the period up to the Republican Convention in July.

  We foresaw no serious difficulty in winning the Republican nomination. The problem was to win it in such a way as to strengthen rather than weaken our chances to win the November election. And this was the only real threat that Rockefeller’s candidacy posed to us. His stock had dropped considerably since his victory in New York in 1958. His political advisers had shown appallingly bad judgment on several occasions. Most recently, for example, he had made the error of publicly suggesting that I should settle the steel dispute—at the very time that Jim Mitchell and I were in the process of negotiating a settlement. To become a serious contender for the nomination, he had only one course of action open to him—to enter and win one of the earlier primary contests. When he failed to take this step, what little chance he had to win the nomination was lost. When he finally made his move, through a late spring attack on me, it was too little and too late.

  However, with mounting belligerence, Rockefeller was taking a line very similar to that of the Democratic critics of the Eisenhower Administration. He favored, for example, putting the “senior citizen” medical care program under Social Security, and he attacked the President’s defense policies even more strongly than some of the Democratic candidates. Anti-Administration columnists and commentators, as well as Democratic candidates, gleefully seized on every statement he made and used them effectively against the Administration and, thus, against me. But while these attacks were irritating, we all recognized that they would not be decisive. In the end, once the Convention choice was made, I had every confidence that Rockefeller would campaign for the Republican nominee.

  Our primary subject for conversation that afternoon in January was the problem we would confront in winning the election itself. I insisted from the outset that Kennedy was most likely to be nominated and would be the hardest to beat. While some of those present dissented from this view, Len Hall agreed with me.

  I listed Kennedy’s assets as I saw them at the time. From a personal standpoint, he had high intelligence, great energy, and a particularly effective television personality. He also had unlimited money which already had enabled him to employ a large, skilled staff of organizers, speech-writers, pollsters, and others essential for a successful campaign. He had a head start with a personal staff who had begun their drive back in 1956, soon after he had come so close to winning the Democratic nomination for Vice President.

  But Kennedy’s most decisive asset, as far as getting nominated was concerned, was the weakness of his opponents.

  Adlai Stevenson had strong emotional support but he was a two-time loser and none of the Democratic profes
sionals, who control the votes at national conventions, gave him any serious chance.

  Hubert Humphrey was a tireless campaigner, a good speaker, and had strong support among the liberal elements of the Democratic Party in the North and West. But while he had become more restrained and moderate in recent years, some of his more radical and irresponsible positions of the early days in Washington could not be lived down. The Southerners and the big city bosses of the party would never take him.

  Stuart Symington had never been able to recover from what many observers had considered a rather mediocre performance during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

  Lyndon Johnson was the strongest and ablest of Kennedy’s prospective opponents for the nomination but, despite his efforts to portray himself as a Westerner rather than a Southerner, the Southern tag would inevitably deny him the support of the big delegations from the Northern states and of organized labor.

  In summary, Kennedy had going for him, therefore, not only his own affirmative assets but also the powerful negative factor which is as true in politics as in any other field: you can’t beat somebody with nobody.

  Claude Robinson, a polling and public opinion expert, summarized Kennedy’s potential liabilities in this order: youth, inexperience, wealth, and religion. I responded that each of these potential liabilities could be turned into an asset by an intelligent candidate, and that no one should ever underestimate the intelligence of Kennedy or of his corps of close associates and advisers.

  As far as youth was concerned, I pointed out that he was only four years younger than I, and had begun his career in Washington the same year.