Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  A hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln was asked during the dark days of the tragic War Between the States whether he thought God was on his side. His answer was, “My concern is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God’s side.”

  My fellow Americans, may that ever be our prayer for our country. And in that spirit, with faith in America, with faith in her ideals and in her people, I accept your nomination for President of the United States.

  Also by Richard Nixon

  Beyond Peace

  Seize the Moment

  In the Arena

  1999: Victory Without War

  Real Peace

  No More Vietnams

  Leaders

  The Real War

  RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

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  Endnotes

  Chapter 1

  1 Actually, as Chambers later testified and as he recounts in his book, Witness, both these dates are wrong. He entered the Party in 1925 and left it in 1938. But in both cases, what was involved was a process rather than a single moment—a whole series of events and not one sharp entrance or break—which makes his lapse all the more understandable.

  2 Later I learned that Dulles had first offered this position to Adlai Stevenson and that Stevenson, in declining the offer, had, in a letter to Dulles, suggested three other names he might consider. One of the three was Alger Hiss. But Dulles and Stevenson were to end up on different sides when Hiss finally was tried for perjury. Stevenson gave a sworn deposition that Hiss’s “reputation for veracity, for integrity, and for loyalty was good.” Dulles testified against Hiss.

  3 Chambers’ memory of minute details was one of the very things, incidentally, that raised doubts in the minds of some Committee members as to his credibility. How could he possibly recall names, places, and events with which he had last been associated over ten years before? In retrospect, I believe that two factors contributed to his ability to do so. First, even his most bitter enemies had to agree that Chambers was a man of extraordinary intelligence. In addition, as a Communist underground agent, he had to train himself to carry vast quantities of information in his head so that he could reduce to the minimum the risk of ever being apprehended with documents on his person. As a result, his mind’s retentive capacities were developed to an astonishing degree.

  4 Tom Murphy, the government prosecutor in the perjury trials, was to prove that Hiss had good cause for worry on both counts. The car and the rug became incriminating pieces of evidence which Hiss could not explain away.

  5 In both instances, this should have been “Twenty-eighth Street.”

  6 Tom Murphy did not repeat my mistake. His disarmingly courteous but relentless questioning of Priscilla Hiss was to be a major factor in convincing the jury of Hiss’s guilt in the perjury trials to come.

  7 During these tense days, there were several rumors concerning what went on behind the closed doors of the Grand Jury. One newspaper story on December 13 reported that the much-sought Woodstock typewriter had been found. Actually, the typewriter was found several months later and produced during Hiss’s first trial for perjury.

  8 This is not the time or place to tell the full story of the dramatic battle between Hiss and Chambers and their counsel at the two trials. But I would not want this opportunity to pass without paying a deserved tribute to the Federal prosecutor, Tom Murphy, now a Federal District Judge in New York, for his superb presentation of the case against Hiss, and to the agents of the FBI who added to the laurels of the world’s finest investigative agency by tracking down bits of evidence going back over a period of ten to fifteen years with almost unbelievable efficiency. As Whittaker Chambers so accurately pointed out, without Murphy and the selfless devotion of the FBI agents, the successful prosecution of Alger Hiss would never have been possible.

  Chapter 2

  1 Even from a political viewpoint, I should have recalled one of Jim Farley’s favorite axioms: “The most important lesson for a politician to learn is that he must always be sure he can carry his own precinct.”

  2 My father’s comment after the broadcast, incidentally, which Pat remarked sounded just like him, was: “It looks to me as if the Democrats have given themselves a good kick in the seat of the pants.”

  Chapter 3

  1 I thought that some of the press coverage of the President’s difficulties in this period was unnecessarily savage and sadistic. Some reporters insisted on counting up and duly reporting the exact number of “fluffs”—actual or imagined—the President might make in a speech or press conference. Knowing what agony he was going through, I would become so infuriated on reading such reports that on more than one occasion I slammed the paper or magazine into the fireplace.

  Chapter 4

  1 It was in Pegu, Burma, on Thanksgiving Day 1953—during my first overseas mission as Vice President—that I had previously faced a crowd of Communist-led demonstrators. After a special civic luncheon, Mrs. Nixon and I were scheduled for a visit to a nearby Buddhist temple. An angry, sign-carrying crowd of hecklers had gathered just outside the City Hall, spurred on by a Communist agitator shouting anti-American slogans from a sound truck. The government officials and members of my own party urged that we drive but I insisted that we stick to our plans and walk to the temple. I also insisted that Mrs. Nixon and I walk first and alone—not surrounded by Burmese officials and guards. This is just what we did. When the first demonstrator accosted me, I asked him to point out the leader of the group. I retained the initiative I had gained, walked up to him, asked what his grievances were—and by this direct action put him completely on the defensive and, at the same time, swung the crowd to my side. We then went on our way, with a now overwhelmingly friendly crowd following along behind.

  2 The twelve Secret Service men were magnificent. They saved our lives and, just as important, not one of the attackers was killed or seriously injured. On my recommendation, each was later presented with an Exceptional Civilian Service Award (Gold Medal), with a special citation for his outstanding conduct in Caracas. One of my predecessors, incidentally, had declined the offer of Secret Service protection because “no one would ever bother to shoot a Vice President.”

  3 Betancourt learned the lesson well. Three policemen were killed during demonstrations which broke out as soon as President Kennedy’s forthcoming visit to Venezuela was announced, early in December 1961. Starting two weeks before his scheduled arrival, Venezuelan government authorities began a systematic round-up of known Communists and left-wing agitators, shut down all Communist offices and several student organizations, and suspended publication of one newspaper, Clarion. Twelve hours before Kennedy’s arrival, the highway from Maiquetia Airport to Caracas was closed to all normal traffic. Everyone at the Airport was checked and re-checked for concealed weapons. When the official party drove into the center of the city, 35,000 steel-helmeted troops were on duty, thousands of them standing three-feet apart with fixed bayonets, facing toward the crowds lining the highway. Helicopters hovered overhead. The U. S. cruiser Northampton stood just outside Caracas harbor, reportedly with a detachment of battle-ready U. S. Marines. At the time of my own arrival in Caracas in 1958, by contrast, no precautions had been taken. There were no troops on the parade route, and the handful of police on duty melted away at the first sign of demonstrators.

  4 Not all the rioters, of course, were Communists. But this misses the major point: there can be no doubt that the riots were Communist-planned, Communist-led, and Communist-controlled. Fresh evidence of this fact keeps turning up. Just a few months ago, in December 1961, two Peruvian students—self-confessed former Communists—told of Communist organization of
the San Marcos riots in Lima and also publicly apologized to me for their own part in these demonstrations.

  Chapter 5

  1 Even Khrushchev got into the spirit of the occasion again. As we continued our stroll, it happened that Voroshilov and I walked on ahead and Khrushchev fell behind. When I turned around and asked if he did not want to walk with us, he replied with a somewhat sardonic smile, “No, you walk with the President. I know my place!”

  2 See Appendix for text of this speech.

  3 The official blackout of all news concerning my visit and the time of my arrival in Warsaw was rendered a failure because the Polish Government had not taken Radio Free Europe into consideration. RFE had flooded the airwaves with announcements—and so the word was spread throughout the population of Warsaw and its suburbs.

  4 He had turned in a particularly outstanding job the week before in Leningrad, where he demanded to see a new Soviet atomic icebreaker—just as we had shown U. S. atomic ships to visiting Soviet officials earlier.

  Chapter 6

  1 I recall a pungent comment which illustrates this point. During my first year at Duke Law School, I was concerned about my ability to keep my scholarship in competition in a class that numbered over twenty Phi Beta Kappas out of a total enrollment of fifty. I had expressed this concern to Bill Adelson, a third-year man who ranked near the top of his class. Adelson, who had noted the long hours I spent studying in the law library, reassured me: “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “You know what it takes to learn the law? An iron butt.”

  2 The full text of this speech may be found in the Appendix.

  3 The Challenges We Face, McGraw-Hill, New York.

  4 An indication of the difficulty of our task was a Gallup Poll published in late-July 1960, showing the decline in GOP support, 1952–60, among various occupational groups. In 1952, 28 per cent of the farmers said the Republican Party “best serves” their interests; in 1960, only 18 per cent. Among white-collar workers, the drop was from 44 to 29 per cent.

  5 That this was just campaign rhetoric was demonstrated by President Kennedy himself, barely half a year after taking office. In a late-June press conference he changed his tune and said the United States was outproducing the USSR, that the Soviets won’t catch up with us by the year 2000, and that Soviet total product has increased but one per cent in comparison with that of the U. S. in the past 48 years. All of which led Roscoe Drummond to comment: “I thought I was at the wrong press conference or that . . . the man who was talking was President Richard Milhous Nixon . . . One could fairly say that President Kennedy has hurled Mr. Nixon—or at least his arguments—at Mr. Khrushchev and scored a bull’s eye.”

  * Senator Kennedy was briefed on Cuba by CIA representatives on July 23, 1960, at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Press accounts at the time characterized this briefing as a “nothing withheld rundown” on the “two hotspots, Cuba and the Congo.” The New York Times on July 24, reported “ . . . Such secret information as was added to the Senator’s fund of knowledge about world affairs will remain secret. But it provides guidance for his campaign utterances dealing with foreign policy and defense and it puts him on the same footing as the administration’s candidate, presumably Vice President Nixon.”

  However, after the publication of the first edition of this book, the White House issued a statement on March 20, 1962, denying that the two and one-fourth hours briefing covered any United States operation relating to Cuba.

  On March 21, I made the following statement: “Because the Cuban issue was such an important one in the campaign, I personally researched the facts relating to it. The statements in my book, Six Crises, were based not only on the public press accounts of the briefings President Kennedy received during the campaign in 1960, but on personal conversations with responsible individuals who had knowledge of the facts.

  “President Eisenhower has authorized me to state that following the practice he had established in 1956 he had given instructions that in regard to U.S. intelligence activities abroad, Senator Kennedy was to be as fully briefed on our foreign problems as I was.

  “Beyond this I have no further comment. My book speaks for itself.”

  6 This speech was prepared with the assistance of Jim Shepley, the head of my research group, who rates as an expert on the subject of atomic development.

  7 One of the American Bar Association’s Canons of Professional Ethics, which govern the conduct of attorneys, provides that “a lawyer should not communicate or argue privately with the Judge as to the merits of a pending cause, and he deserves rebuke and denunciation for any device or attempt to gain from a Judge special personal consideration or favor.”

  8 One of our major financial contributors, W. Alton (Pete) Jones, expressed the same thought to me this way a few weeks later. “This was just like a horse race. When you bet on a horse and he loses by a nose after being bumped in the stretch, you are disappointed. But you figure you’ve had a good run for your money.”

  9 Months later, as I was writing this book, she was to tell me, “That was the saddest day of my life.”

  10 The difference in the personalities of our two girls, who are in many ways, of course, very much alike, was illustrated by their reactions to the motion picture, King of Kings. Julie exclaimed, “It was wonderful! I cried so much.” Tricia said, “I didn’t cry when Christ died—He had suffered so much. I cried during the Sermon on the Mount because it was so beautiful.”

  11 “The Ambassador,” of course, was Mr. Hoover’s way of referring to Joseph P. Kennedy, the President-elect’s father and one-time Ambassador to Great Britain.

  12 Tricia’s reaction was similar. When I was in Washington briefly in May, right after the Cuban disaster, Kennedy asked me to come to the White House to discuss the situation. I first learned that he wanted to see me when I came back to the house after a visit to the Capitol and found a message for me by the telephone. It was in Tricia’s handwriting and read: “JFK called. I knew it! It wouldn’t be long before he would get into trouble and have to call on you for help.”

  13 The answer, of course, to Edwards’ charge, assuming it has some validity, is that the fault was mine for failing to get across my views more effectively to the press. As far as “fairness” of coverage is concerned, my attitude is summed up by a statement Governor Munoz-Marin made when we visited Puerto Rico in 1955. Mrs. Munoz-Marin, at dinner, had complained bitterly about what she thought was a particularly unfair attack on her husband in one of the San Juan papers. She turned to Pat and said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get up in the morning and not have to read such unfair attacks on our husbands?” Munoz-Marin responded quickly, “No, it wouldn’t. Above everything else, a free press is the greatest guarantee of our freedom. And if the press is to be truly free, those who write have a right to be unfair. Because who is to judge what is fair or unfair? Only the readers have that right.”

  14 Cardinal Cushing and I have enjoyed a personal friendship which goes back several years. When I called on him in Boston in 1955, after my first trip to Latin America, he greeted me with the Spanish word “tocayo” which means, in effect, “your name is the same as mine.” His first name, of course, is Richard.

  15 It was Tom Dewey who had urged me to delay any decisions with respect to the future for at least sixty days after the election. “This is one area where I can speak as an expert,” he said. “A candidate who has lost an election for the presidency, after all he has gone through in the campaign, is literally in a state of shock for at least a month after the election. He should make no decisions of importance until after that period has passed.”

  16 An interesting sidelight is that Earl Adams, senior partner in the firm with which I am now associated—Adams, Duque & Hazeltine of Los Angeles—had offered me a position in that firm fifteen years before. At that time I was running for Congress and the prospects were not bright. He was one of my earliest supporters and he told me one day that he wanted me to have the assurance in the back of
my mind, should my candidacy fail, that a position in his firm would be available for me. It was an extremely thoughtful gesture on his part at that time and my association with his firm now, therefore, became a very natural and pleasant one.

  Index

  Abt, John, 3, 39

  Achilles, Theodore, 195, 197–98

  Adams, Earl, 424 n.

  Adams, Sir Grantley, 187

  Adams, Sherman, 155, 158, 163, 232;

  and “fund,” 87, 89, 92, 100;

  and heart attack, 145, 147, 148;

  and stroke, 170–71, 173

  Adelson, Bill, 295 n.

  Adenauer, Konrad, 239 Akalovsky (interpreter), 253, 256, 276–77

  Albania, 265, 266

  Albright, Robert, 342

  Alcorn, Meade, 351

  Allen, George E., 136

  Alsop, Joe, 344, 359

  Ampex Company, 253

  Anderson, Dillon, 148

  Andrews, Bert, 20, 23, 41, 48–49, 64, 69, 86, 122;

  on Democratic reporters, 91

  Annenberg, Walter, 231

  Appell, Donald, 15

  Arbuthnot, Ray, 393

  Argentina, Nixon’s trip to, 183, 188–91

  Arias Espinosa, Ricardo Manuel, 168–69

  Arnold, Henry, 397

  Atomic test ban, 269–70, 361

  Ball, Don, 192

  Barcella, Ernie, 258, 262

  Barkley, Alben, 417

  Barmine, Alexander, 242

  Bassett, Jim, 78, 81, 85, 92–94, 101, 107–8, 118–19, 125;

  in 1960 campaign, 329, 330, 337

  Baughman, U. E., 210

  Benson, Ezra Taft, 141, 333–34

  Bentley, Elizabeth, 2

  Berle, Adolf A., Jr., 4

  Bernbaum, Maurice, 195, 197, 207–8

  Bernstein, Leonard, 209

  Berry, Frank M., 210