by Garry Wills
To follow the New Hampshire primary, as my earliest exposure to presidential politics, was a blessing, especially in 1967, before twenty-four-hour cable exposure had made the event national, scrutinized by hundreds of commentators. There was still a local and intimate feel to the process. Candidates crisscrossed each other in that tiny cockpit, where teams of reporters mingled and compared notes daily. I saw George Romney’s flameout when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because he was “brainwashed” by government guides on his trip there.
When Nixon took a break from the New Hampshire primary to set up the race in Wisconsin, his entourage was still small enough to be fitted, staff and journalists, in a DC-3 with only twenty seats in the economy section. After short hops about Wisconsin, we boarded a plane for a night flight to Chicago, and Pat Buchanan, his press aide, led me up into the darkened first-class section for an interview with Nixon. Under the dim overhead light, it was my first close-up opportunity to observe the famous nose. I suppose these words in my Esquire article, more than anything else, earned a place for me on Nixon’s later enemies list:In pictures, its most striking aspect is the ski-jump silhouette (“Bob Hope and I would make a great ad for Sun Valley”) but the aspect that awes one when he meets Nixon is its distressing width, accentuated by the depth of the ravine running down its center, and by its general fuzziness. Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow” extends all the way up to his heavy eyebrows, though—like many hairy men—he is balding above the brows’ “timber line.” The nose swings far out; then, underneath, it does not rejoin his face in a straight line, but curves back up again, leaving a large but partially screened space between nose and lip. The whole face’s lack of jointure is emphasized by the fact that he has no very defined upper lip (I mean the lip itself, the thing makeup men put lipstick on, not the moustache area). The mouth works down solely, like Charlie McCarthy’s—a rapid but restricted motion, not disturbing the heavy luggage of jowl on either side. When he smiles, the space under his nose rolls up (not in) like the old sunshades hung on front porches. The parts all seem to be worked by wires.
Despite Pat Buchanan’s anger when the Esquire article came out in April 1968, some of Esquire’s editors thought I was too sympathetic to Nixon. I argued that he was not a right-wing extremist but an intellectually serious and prepared candidate, though one insecure and defensive. I also got in trouble with later friends, from Lillian Hellman to I. F. Stone, by continuing to say what I maintained in the article and the book—that Nixon was right in believing that Alger Hiss was a traitor.
Two things from my first coverage of Nixon’s New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries made me think he was not the cartoon figure of liberal myth. I asked Nixon on the airplane to Chicago what book had most influenced him. That is now a common question given to candidates, but I had never heard of it in 1968, and I continued to use it with dozens of politicians after that. Many answers were expectable, and they told me little. For instance, when Pat Buchanan ran for president himself, I asked him the question and he said that Bill Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was the one (the book was a plea to alumni to cut off funds for Yale that actually made them give more). When Gary Bauer was running a silly right-wing campaign for president, he told me that Whittaker Chambers’s Witness had been the main book for him (the same one William Kristol told Dan Quayle to say that he was studying when he was vice president). But Nixon’s answer to me was the most thoughtful and revealing I would ever hear.
Nixon mentioned several books, but the one he stressed most, and we discussed most, was Claude Bowers’s biography of Albert Beveridge. This was unexpected on its face—Bowers was a Democratic friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him ambassador to Spain. And Beveridge was a Republican admirer of Federalists like John Marshall (about whom he wrote a four-volume biography, winner of a Pulitzer Prize). Nixon, in other words, was not giving a party-line symbolic answer, but speaking from his own deep reading. And the answer made sense for Nixon at the time. Beveridge was a Progressive Republican ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Bowers was a Progressive Democrat of the Woodrow Wilson sort, and Nixon had been telling me that he thought a Wilsonian American replacement of the British Empire’s worldwide influence was the new mission of America. Neoconservatives would take this idea of spreading democracy by arms to an extreme at the start of the twenty-first century, but Nixon had a milder version of the idea already in the 1960s.
The second thing that made me place Nixon outside the right-wing stereotype was a conversation I had with one of his old friends, ex-congressman from Milwaukee Charles Kersten. I looked up Kersten while we were in Wisconsin, since I knew him from staying at his house when I traveled with his sons, my debate partners in high school. Kersten was a Catholic anti-Communist who knew the activist “labor priest” John Cronin. He told me that Cronin had been Nixon’s speechwriter during his vice-presidential days. The priest had met Nixon before then, when Nixon was a senator bringing charges against Alger Hiss. Cronin had intimate ties with the FBI from his efforts to root out Communist influence in the labor unions, and his closest contact in the Bureau was Ed Hummer. Kersten told me that, through Cronin, Hummer fed information on Hiss to Nixon.
I went to interview Father Cronin, and found that his connection with Nixon was even more intimate than Charlie Kersten had told me. Despite the misgivings of his superiors in the Sulpician order, Cronin was allowed to become an unofficial member of Nixon’s staff in order to pursue the Catholic Church’s opposition to “godless Communism.” Cronin told me things I felt were too intimate to put in my initial Esquire article or in the book that followed. It was commonly thought and said that Nixon’s wife, Pat, was uncomfortable in politics (something I surely observed on the campaign plane) and that she had resisted Nixon’s re-entry into politics for the 1968 campaign. After his bruising losses to Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race and to Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor’s race, she thought that part of her life was mercifully closed.
I asked Father Cronin if that was his view, too. He said that was definitely true. He had become very friendly with Nixon’s whole family—he was especially fond of his daughter Julie. Pat Nixon told Cronin that her husband had promised he would never go back into politics after the California race, which ravaged them both. When he did decide to run in 1968, she found out about it in a newspaper, according to Cronin. But he said that her unhappiness had dated from long before that. Even while Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president, there had been trouble. Cronin discovered this when he went to see Nixon in one of his regular stops at the vice president’s office. Nixon told him he needed some papers from his home in suburban Virginia (this was before the vice presidents took over the Naval Observatory in the District), and asked if he would get them for him. But when Cronin knocked on the door of the Nixon home, Pat answered, and said, “Oh no! He can’t get back in by sending a priest!”—and she slammed the door. Cronin went back to Nixon and asked, “What did you get me into?” Nixon said, “Oh, I didn’t think she would bring it up with you. We have been having some trouble.” After this, Cronin observed that Nixon, who had a hotel room in the District for when he presided late at night over the Senate, had stayed at the hotel for weeks.
As I say, I did not write this part of Cronin’s story in my Esquire article; but I did write about Ed Hummer leaking to Nixon some FBI files on Hiss. Without my knowing it, I had introduced two new names—Cronin and Hummer—into the endlessly heated debates over the Hiss case (a debate I would later go over with Lillian Hellman). People asked why Nixon had to wait for Whittaker Chambers to give him the records he hid in a pumpkin if Nixon was being fed hot items all along from the FBI. Some leftists felt that my report proved Nixon was part of an FBI plot to frame Hiss. Some conservatives thought that what the FBI gave Nixon (if anything) was not conclusive enough for him to act on before Chambers gave him “the Pumpkin Papers.” The debate continues, as one can see from the biography written about Father Cronin.1 The argument centers on Nixo
n and Hiss, on anti-Communism; but Father Cronin convinced me that his main work for Nixon was on civil rights, and it is true that people were surprised (when they paid attention) by what liberal things Nixon said about blacks. Some have given Daniel Patrick Moynihan the credit for this unexpected side to Nixon’s record; but I believe that Father Cronin had more to do with it.
I submitted the Esquire article in February 1968, and it came out in April (when the May issue appeared). It was written before the New Hampshire primary (March 8), but I knew it would appear after it. Harold had explained to me his lead-time problem: the high production values and artwork of Esquire made publication lag behind the processing of copy. I wrote something I hoped would stand up whether Nixon won or lost New Hampshire, and I thought that was the end of my involvement in presidential elections. But I soon got a phone call from Dorothy de Santillana, an editor at the Houghton Mifflin publishing house in Boston. She had read the article and told me, “You have to write a book about Nixon.” I replied that I had now said everything I knew about him—and besides, I did not think he could win in November. (So much for my political prescience.) She maintained that what I wrote about America—its conflicted Cold War liberalism—was what she wanted to hear more of, whether Nixon won or lost.
I was not convinced. She said, “Would you at least come up from Baltimore to New York, and let me go down from Boston, to talk this over?” I did not know then what I learned later, that Dorothy had a gift for getting the first book (or the first important one) from writers she set her sights on—she had edited early books from David Halberstam and Robert Stone. She was married to the Renaissance historian at MIT, Giorgio de Santillana, and she had a wide cultural vision which, at our New York dinner, she fit my article into.
At that dinner, I said that I could not write her book even if I wanted to, since I had just signed a contract with Esquire calling for me to write four articles a year, which would not leave me time to follow Nixon’s campaign. Dorothy was not easily deterred. She asked if I would consider the book if she persuaded Harold Hayes at Esquire to accept several chapters of it as articles under my contract. He did agree with her, and I wrote Esquire articles on Nixon’s Checkers speech and on his vice-presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew, as parts of the book.
After taking on the book assignment, I boarded Nixon’s campaign plane (a far bigger deal than the one he was flying in January, when I had first joined him). By this time, Pat Buchanan, who had not liked my Esquire article, tried to discourage people from talking with me—though I beat him to Nixon’s brother and many others who had known Nixon in California and elsewhere. Dorothy de Santillana read each draft of the book and found me some extra advances as it grew in bulk. She went to bat for me with other editors when they tried to kill my title, Nixon Agonistes—they said no one could pronounce the second word, people would be intimidated by it, afraid to ask for it in bookstores. She pointed out that two of the most famous poems in the English language were Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. When the book came out, she arranged for a launch party at Sardi’s in New York, and the senior publishing board came down from Boston for it.
One of the board members, sitting across from me at table, got fuddled with wine and began berating his son at Harvard, saying he was tearing down everything his father believed in. The son was a radical demonstrating against the Vietnam War. His father said, “If I went back tonight and saw him across the barricades, I could shoot him myself.” When I met my current literary agent, Andrew Wylie, I told him that story, since the board member was his father and the son he talked about was Andrew.
The hardcover of Nixon Agonistes was well enough received, but it positively took off in paperback, after the first Watergate reports began to circulate. I was told during a visit to Yale that it was being taught in four or five different courses there, and I still run across people who say they were introduced to it in college classes. Some say that it inspired them to become journalists, since I made that seem so exciting. I was often told that the book predicted the Watergate scandal—which is not true.
Still, one of the things I noticed on the campaign plane had seeds of future trouble for Nixon. There was a team of stenographers who rotated back to the plane from each campaign stop where Nixon spoke. I asked them what they were up to. It turns out that one man would take down a record of Nixon’s speech and go back to type it up, while another man remained at the campaign site to take down Nixon’s responses to any questions he was asked. Working at top speed with backup typists, they would have a record of that stop by the time he reached the next one. These records silted up in huge piles at the back of the plane. I asked what was the point. Admittedly, in 1968 there were not cameras and microphones everywhere all the time, as there would be later; but I pointed out that his campaign speech varied little from one place to another, and there would be a record in journalists’ tape recorders and notes. But I was told that Nixon did not trust anyone else to be true to what he said, since they were all out to get him. He wanted a record he alone controlled, to challenge any misrepresentations and false extrapolations from his words, and he wanted it from moment to moment. This omnidirectional mistrust would blossom into the break-ins and spying that brought Nixon down. To guard against his enemies, he gave his enemies all their ammunition.
What I said about Hiss and Nixon continued to come up in my life. In 1974 I was teaching a course on the Cold War at Johns Hopkins. Hiss, who had edited the Hopkins student paper in his time at the university, was visiting the campus. A current editor of the paper was taking the course, and he asked if Hiss could visit the class. I said of course. As I have noted, I knew Hiss from the Harrisburg trial of Philip Berrigan. We had conversed there civilly, and I had no reason to think there would be tension in having him address my students.
But just before our class Nixon released a first (heavily edited) collection of the tapes he had made in the Oval Office. I drove to D.C. from Baltimore to get the transcripts from the Government Printing Office, read them quickly through the night, and told Hiss the next morning that he was frequently mentioned in the tapes. He did not know this yet, and I asked if I could read the passages about him to the class and get his comments. He agreed. On the tapes, Nixon repeatedly told staffers how shrewdly he had handled the Hiss investigation, offering that as a model for how to handle the Watergate scandal. Hiss rightly pointed out that there was no parallel between the two episodes. But my students, who had studied his court record, asked Hiss embarrassing questions. I did not pursue those, since I felt I was the host on the occasion. Hiss wrote me a letter afterward, thanking me for my courteous and fair treatment in the class.
Four years after that class I reviewed Allen Weinstein’s book on Hiss, Perjury, concluding that Hiss had in fact been a traitor, though the statute of limitations left him liable only to perjury charges. Hiss, I was told by a lawyer for the New York Review of Books, regularly brought lawsuits against anyone who charged him with treason. Whether he meant to follow through with the action or not, the suits were meant to discourage people from questioning Hiss’s loyalty. The lawyer asked me if I had had any dealings with Hiss that would let him claim I was acting from malice. When I produced his letter thanking me for the kind treatment in my classroom, the lawyer said that would be the end of the suit.
Hiss was the occasion for one of my arguments with Lillian Hellman. She not only thought Hiss innocent, but thought Nixon had knowingly framed him. I met Lillian when she held a private conference on the possibility of impeaching President Nixon at Katonah, New York, in 1971. I was invited because Nixon Agonistes had appeared the previous year. Raoul Berger’s book Impeachment was in galleys, and he read parts of it to the gathering. Others invited included the nuclear physicist Philip Morrison, Hannah Arendt, Robert Silvers, and Jules Feiffer. I was asked to be rapporteur, summarizing the discussions at the end of the meeting. Since Lillian liked how I did that, she invited me to write an introduction to her book Sco
undrel Time.
I accepted, thinking she would send me the text at my home. But no, she said I would have to come to her home on Martha’s Vineyard and stay with her while she read her drafts to me. She was very nervous about letting any text get away from her fussy ministrations—the result, I guess, of her trying out play manuscripts with producers and actors. She was known publicly for an aggressive manner, but I had heard from her lawyer Joseph Rauh how nervous she was as they prepared for her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I found her oddly shy. After we went swimming, she would not take off her swimming cap until I went out of the room—she did not want me to see her hair before she dried and arranged it.
As she read her book to me, I tried to correct one thing. She said the story of Whittaker Chambers hiding the Hiss microfilms in a pumpkin on his farm was ridiculous because they would have rotted in the pumpkin. I said he hid the microfilms only overnight, so they could not be seized by Hiss’s agents. But she refused to believe any such story. She was one of those who could never trust Nixon and never doubt Hiss. Even after the Venona intercepts were released in 1995, which should have removed all reasonable doubt about Hiss’s guilt, true believers and Nixon haters refused to recognize the obvious.