Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  After Len left the room, I continued to listen to returns for another hour. At four, Kennedy’s popular vote margin was down to 600,000. NBC, which as early as 8:00 on Tuesday evening had flatly predicted a Kennedy victory, now began hedging: “Our best judgment is that Kennedy is ahead.” CBS, which had made the same sort of prediction, joined in: “Kennedy apparently has won.” I finally turned off the television set, just as NBC flatly gave California to Kennedy and thus added up his electoral vote total to 296, well over-the-top. I did not accept this conclusion because I knew what any observer of California political trends should have known—that the absentee ballots, if past trends held, would put the state in our column.

  As I went to bed at last, a little after four, I realized that if we could win California, gain enough downstate to take Illinois, and come through in Minnesota, we might do exactly what Eric Sevareid had suggested earlier in the evening, only in reverse—“snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.” As I dozed off, I recalled what had happened to Charles Evans Hughes in a similar but again reverse situation in 1916. He had gone to bed believing that he had been elected President. California, however, because of an unintentional snub to Senator Hiram Johnson by Hughes, had surprised all the experts and ended up going for Wilson. The next morning, a newsman called to talk to Hughes. A secretary replied, “The President is asleep and cannot take your call until he wakes up.” To which the newsman reputedly replied: “Well, when he wakes up, tell him he isn’t President any longer.”

  Perhaps in the morning, I thought, someone might awaken me with a report that the miracle had come to pass—that we had turned the tide by winning California, Illinois, and Minnesota. And with that, I finally did go off to sleep, expecting and hoping to get my first good night’s rest since leaving Los Angeles for Alaska almost three days before.

  • • •

  Barely two hours later, I felt someone shaking my arm insistently and urgently. I opened my eyes and saw that it was Julie.

  Pat had put her to bed at about ten o’clock the night before, as she was becoming more and more distressed by the early returns. As she tucked her in, Pat had said: “You go to sleep now and don’t worry. Things will be much better in the morning.” Well, here it was morning and, waking at six and finding her mother and sister still asleep, she had gone to the Secret Service man in the hallway and asked where I was. He had brought her down to my room.

  She asked me, “Daddy, how did the election finally come out?”

  I could think of no way to make the news easy for her. “Julie, I’m afraid we have lost.”

  She started to cry and the questions tumbled out through her tears: “What are we going to do? Where are we going to live? What kind of a job are you going to be able to get? Where are we going to school?”

  I tried to reassure her and told her there would be no problems that we could not work out—and that she never needed to worry about my ability to provide for my family. I then took her into the drawing room of the hotel suite, called room service, and ordered breakfast for the two of us. We then proceeded to have what was for me the first and probably the most difficult post-mortem of the campaign.

  I explained how close the election was and that we had actually won more states than Kennedy—but because he had received a bigger vote in the major cities of the key states, he had won the election. Then she asked a strange and disturbing question: “Daddy, why did people vote against you because of religion?”

  “What in the world gave you that idea?” I asked. She said, “That was what they were saying on television last night.” Then I recalled that several commentators, appraising the early returns from the big cities, had stressed Kennedy’s huge margins in some predominantly Jewish and Catholic precincts.

  I tried to explain it to her this way. “Julie, people do not vote for one man or the other because they happen to be Jews or Catholics—or Protestants, as we are. They vote for a man because they believe in what he stands for or because they like him as a person. And you must never think just in terms of the people who voted against us. You must think of those who voted for us.”

  I reminded her of one of her favorite people—Mr. Wagshall who ran the delicatessen near our home in Washington, and who never failed to bring her and Tricia some special treats from his store during the holiday season. I recalled that she and I had helped Father John Cronin, one of my best and closest friends, celebrate his twenty-fifth year in the priesthood at an anniversary luncheon. And then there were Earl Mazo and Ralph de Toledano, my biographers, who had visited in our home on many occasions and, with their families, had been so close to all of us.

  “So you see, Julie,” I said, “it isn’t a question of a man’s religion when he decides to vote for you or against you. It is whether he believes in you and respects and likes you as an individual.”

  She did not answer for a moment after I had finished. Finally she said, “I think I understand, Daddy.” And then: “Well, maybe we didn’t win the election, but we won in the hearts of the people.”

  I had seen many people in tears the night before as they heard the returns, but for the first time I was confronted with the same problem. I told Julie my hay fever was bothering me as I wiped my eyes with a handkerchief.

  It began to look as if everyone was up early on the morning of November 9—or, what is perhaps closer to the truth, very few had bothered to go to bed at all—and that all of them had decided at once to drop in for a visit and a good word. From 7:30 on, old friends and members of the campaign staff came in a steady stream: Bebe Rebozo who had flown to Los Angeles from Miami to be with us on Election Day, Jack Drown, Ray Arbuthnot, and many others whom we count among our closest personal as well as political friends—each in his way tried to take some of the sting out of the results of the night before. It was during these hours and days after our defeat that I was to learn not only who were my most loyal friends but also how much such friendship can mean in a period of great emotional, physical, and mental stress. One of the hardest lessons for those in political life to learn is that the rarest of all commodities is a political friendship that lasts through times of failure as well as success. I have seen many men become bitter after an election defeat when they saw friendships melt away; friendships they thought were personal turned out to be purely political. And what usually hurt the worst was that those for whom they had done the most were often the first to desert. I was not unprepared for this reaction because I had already gained that experience during my mercurial career.

  I had seen Congressmen and Senators, who politely avoided me when Hiss was riding high after his first appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, beg me to come into their districts and states to speak for them—after Hiss was indicted.

  The same men who had publicly called on me to resign from the ticket during the early days of the fund attack in the 1952 campaign, heaped praise upon me after my television speech—and after the favorable reactions started pouring in.

  When newspaper columnists and radio and television commentators were blaming me for the narrow Republican defeat in the 1954 off-year elections, it was like pulling teeth to get even Senators and Congressmen for whom I had campaigned to come to my defense. But when President Eisenhower had his heart attack in 1955, many of these same men fell over one another trying to get appointments and pictures with the man who might, at any moment, become President of the United States.

  Some of my younger and less experienced staff members were bitterly disillusioned by the sudden desertion of some of those we had thought were close and loyal friends, even as the unfavorable returns started coming in. What I tried to tell them was that they, in fact, were the exceptions. Their loyalty through good times and bad was the rarity. Those who reach the top, particularly in the political world, have to develop a certain tough realism as far as friendships and loyalties are concerned.

  But what was now to compensate for these understandable defections among my supposed supporters was
the overwhelmingly warm and friendly reaction we began getting, by wire and letter the morning after Election Day, from thousands of people in all walks of life. Our appearance on television in the early hours of the morning had created a warm reaction throughout the country. Wires and letters from Kennedy supporters complimented us for our “good sportsmanship.” Those who had supported us thanked us for our efforts during the long and hard campaign and urged that we not be discouraged by this defeat—that we continue to carry on the fight for the principles in which we believed.

  At about nine that morning I received what was to be the first among scores of offers of positions after I finished my term of office as Vice President on January 20, 1961. A partner in one of the biggest and best law firms in Los Angeles called to say that he had checked with all his partners by phone, and they were already prepared to offer me a full partnership in the firm if I decided to return to Los Angeles—and with an annual income approximately three times as great as the salary I had received as Vice President.

  But I had many things to do before I could even think about such an offer, tempting as it was.

  First of all, I called President Eisenhower in Washington. He did his best to try and buck me up, but he could not hide his own crushing disappointment. I had never heard him sound more depressed. But he still had lots of fight left: he had heard early reports of fraud charges in Illinois and Texas and urged me to do everything possible to check them out.

  Just as I completed my call to the President, Cabot Lodge reached me by phone from Boston. I knew that he felt our loss just as deeply as I did. He had suffered a great disappointment in 1952 when, after leading the fight for Eisenhower’s nomination, he had lost his own Senate seat to John F. Kennedy. Now, in a sense, he had lost again to the same man. Neither of us could think of very much to say. I told him how much I appreciated his untiring efforts in the campaign. He replied: “We can always look back with pride on the fight we waged.” But Cabot and I, experienced practitioners of the art of politics, knew that these words meant little to either of us. General MacArthur, in his historic address to the Congress on his return from Korea, had said: “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” Cabot and I knew that this is truer still, if that is possible, in politics.

  It was now almost ten o’clock and Herb Klein reported that the press was asking him when I would send Kennedy a formal concession wire. I had thought that my statement of the night before would suffice for the purpose; but because of the closeness of the race, Kennedy apparently felt he could not claim victory until a formal concession was received. I asked Len Hall and Bob Finch to work with Herb in preparing an appraisal of the returns to that hour so that I could make an appropriate statement.

  While I was waiting for them to get their notes together, Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune dropped by the room. He had first covered my activities during the events leading up to the Hiss case, back in 1948. Our talk turned to the press coverage during the campaign just concluded. He was aware, as I was, that although a majority of the nation’s publishers were Republican, an overwhelming majority of the reporters covering Kennedy and me during the campaign favored Kennedy. Later, Newsweek was to report on an informal poll, with these results: for Kennedy, 37—for Nixon, 13. In 1952, a similar poll of 50 top Washington newsmen had shown 40 for Stevenson and 10 for Eisenhower. I told Edwards that, because of this fact, Herb Klein’s task had been much more difficult than that confronting Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary.

  I am sure that no candidate is ever completely satisfied with the press coverage given his activities. And I am the first to grant that the candidate is the least objective of critics in this kind of appraisal. But I completely reject the theory, expressed by some since the campaign, that I might have received better treatment from the press had I “courted” them more, or had Herb provided the more elaborate facilities for entertainment that Salinger, with greater funds at his disposal, was able to provide.

  I told Edwards that morning that I doubted if any official in Washington had greater, more sincere respect for the press corps than I, or had tried to be more fair in his treatment of them. Kennedy, Salinger, and several top members of the Kennedy staff followed the practice during the campaign of complaining to individual reporters about the fairness of their stories. In several instances, Kennedy himself and members of his staff went over the heads of the reporters to their publishers and to the top officials of the radio and television networks, when they felt they were getting less than fair treatment in news stories or on TV and radio reports. Never once during the course of the campaign did I resort to such tactics, regardless of what opinion I had of the coverage of my activities.

  As Edwards and I talked that morning, I told him if I had to do it all over again, I would follow this same course. Going over the heads of reporters to their publishers would only have irritated them more. I have always felt that a reporter has a perfect right to any political bias whatever—provided that he keep it out of what are supposed to be straight news stories. Signed “opinion pieces” are, of course, something else altogether, as are regular editorials.

  On my trips to Caracas and to Moscow, the reporters could not have been more fair and generous. Why, then, would some of the same men who covered my trips now take a different point of view during the campaign? The answer seemed fairly plain: When we were abroad, we were all on the same side. During the campaign, however, they quite naturally—and often as not, perhaps, quite unconsciously—favored the candidate of the party of their own choice. Nor do I believe that special favors and flattery, nor all the gimmicks recommended by public relations experts, would have made an iota of difference in their coverage. This kind of treatment may turn the heads of the minor-leaguers. But the men in the Washington press corps are big-leaguers, and the best of them would only have resented such crude attempts to curry their favor—and properly so.

  Typical of the problem was the attitude of one of the most highly regarded of the Washington corps—James Reston, chief of the New York Times Washington bureau. He had, for example, given me very generous treatment when he covered my Russian trip. But ten days before the election, one of my supporters—Henry Arnold of Philadelphia—had written him, complaining about his coverage of my activities. Reston wrote back: “I’m afraid we differ about Korea, Radford, Nixon, Knowland, Bridges, etc. You like their policy, and I don’t.”

  As Edwards was leaving, he asked me what I thought was the answer to this problem. I expressed my honest opinion: “Republicans will get better treatment in the press only if and when more reporters, like their publishers, take a more favorable or at least a more tolerant view of Republican policies and principles—and not before.”

  At 10:30, Hall, Klein, and Finch brought in their final analysis of the election returns to that hour. Kennedy’s popular vote margin had now been pared to less than 500,000. With complete but unofficial returns from Illinois, his lead there was a bare 8000 votes. In California, he still held on to a 35,000 vote lead—but we knew, with nearly 250,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, the usual Republican preponderance among these ballots would give us the state, and I specifically authorized Herb to make that prediction after our meeting. With California in our column, our margin in states-ahead was 26 to 23 for Kennedy, but his lead in electoral votes was still decisive—303 to 219, with the balance of 15 unpledged. Even if we were to overturn the Illinois outcome, therefore, we would still need 15 more electoral votes to win. Minnesota held out our only immediate hope, and it was a thin one. We made some phone calls to party officials in Minneapolis and they told us there was no further hope—that Kennedy would probably carry the state by 20,000 (which turned out to be almost on the nose). It was then that I dictated my formal concession wire to Kennedy:

  I WANT TO REPEAT THROUGH THIS WIRE THE CONGRATULATIONS AND BEST WISHES I EXTENDED TO YOU ON TELEVISION LAST NIGHT. I KNOW THAT YOU WILL HAVE THE UNITED SUPPORT OF ALL AMERICANS AS YOU LEAD THE NATION IN THE CAU
SE OF PEACE AND FREEDOM DURING THE NEXT FOUR YEARS.

  Now, it really was all over. Pat, Julie and Tricia, and I walked together down the corridor to the elevator. On the way, we stopped to say good-by to my mother and my brother, Don. Over and over again in the days and weeks ahead I was to find that the hardest thing about losing is not how it affects you personally but to see the terrible disappointment in the eyes of those who have been at your side through this and other battles. It was particularly hard for Don. During the last days of the campaign, the opposition had resurrected the financial troubles which had forced him into bankruptcy two years before and had tried to connect me with a loan he had received from the Hughes Tool Company during that period. They had, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that my mother had satisfied the loan by transferring to the creditor a piece of property which represented over half her life savings and which had been appraised at an amount greater than the loan.

  As we left, Don said with his voice breaking: “I hope I haven’t been responsible for your losing the election.” I reassured him: “The only place the charge meant anything was here in California, and we are going to carry California anyway.” For a number of reasons, I was especially gratified when the absentee ballots finally did put California in our column ten days later, by a 35,000 vote majority, but one of the major reasons for my satisfaction was that I did not want Don to have any feeling of responsibility for my defeat.

  The elevator took us down to the lobby floor, and there a very warm and wonderful thing happened. Eight years before, Pat and I had walked through this same lobby at a time of great victory. The halls had been crowded with our cheering friends and supporters. This time we had expected them to be deserted—but again they were filled. People cheered, slapped us on the back, shook our hands as if we had won the election rather than lost. Julie put a book over her face to cover the tears which, in her case, come quickly to her eyes at such times. I looked at Tricia and saw the thin, tight smile which I knew covered emotions deeper than tears could express.10