The Hughes loan had also made an unexpected comeback. That $205,000 Donald Nixon had borrowed in 1956 to expand the family store in Whittier was never repaid. At a joint Nixon-Brown press conference, the closest Nixon would come to a debate, liberal editor Tom Braden raised the devilish issue. “I want to ask you whether you, as vice president, or as a candidate for governor, think it proper for a candidate for governor, morally and ethically, to permit his family to receive a secret loan from a major defense contractor in the United States?”
Nixon was indignant. “Now it is time to have this out. I was in government for fourteen years. I went to Washington with a car and a house and a mortgage. I have made mistakes, but I am an honest man.” He dared his rival to make an issue of it. “Governor Brown has a chance to stand up as a man and charge me with misconduct. Do it, sir!” But the issue survived Nixon’s stagecraft. A few days later, a more confident Brown demanded that Nixon defend the unpaid loan from Hughes Tool. Nixon never did and paid for it at the polls.
But a far greater voter concern about the former vice president was the suspicion he was only using Sacramento as a refueling stop. Desperate, the Nixon forces trotted out the familiar anti-Communist pitch. “Is Brown Pink?” a bumper sticker coyly asked. “The Committee for the Preservation of the Democratic Party in California,” a front organization financed with Nixon campaign money, mailed 500,000 postcards to registered Democrats claiming that Pat Brown was in bed with the Communists. Nixon tried giving the smear credibility by demanding that Communist speakers be banned from University of California campuses. He spoke of the “mess in Sacramento,” trying to resurrect the old Ike-and-Dick crusade against “the mess in Washington.” The staleness of Nixon’s act suffered from the dramatic change in backdrop. The nation was now in the youthful embrace of the New Frontier, not the death throes of the Truman era.
One of the president’s own political chores that fall was bequeathing his old Senate seat to his youngest brother, Ted. Having failed to buy out rival Edward McCormack, using Tip O’Neill as the middleman, the Kennedys succeeded in blasting him out. By October, the confident president was back in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, campaigning for the Democratic party nationally, recalling an earlier stop there. “The first time I came to this city was in 1947, when Mr. Richard Nixon and I engaged in our first debate,” he quipped to an outdoor crowd. “He won that one, and we went on to other things.” The fight was still on, he said. “And that’s why I am here in this community, sixteen years later, still debating Mr. Nixon and his confreres on which party should hold office in 1962 and in this decade.”
To help finish off his 1960 rival, Kennedy dispatched a half-dozen cabinet officers to California to stump for Pat Brown. “The administration is really loading the defense contracts into this area and getting maximum publicity every time,” Nixon wrote backers. “With all their faults, we will have to agree that they play their politics to the hilt.” Kennedy had made Fred Dutton, an old Pat Brown hand, his back-channel liaison with Sacramento during the race. As in the Cuban invasion, his goal was plausible deniability. The idea, as Dutton explains, was to get Nixon “tripped up without Kennedy being involved in it.” Even if his old rival managed to eke out a victory, Kennedy wanted to “dent him enough so he wouldn’t be back for a rerun of 1960.”
* * *
SINCE the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro had been a vivid emblem of Kennedy indecision, incompetence, and failure. “We need a man on horseback, and many people think you are riding Caroline’s bicycle,” E. M. Dealey of the archconservative Dallas Morning News had scolded the president to his face in a public meeting with publishers the year before.
Kennedy refused to be bullied. “I’m as tough as you are, Mr. Dealey. I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not. I didn’t get elected by arriving at soft judgments.”
No right-wing voice outside the administration could have matched its own behind-the-scenes passions. Not even the most adversarial newspaper publisher could have conjured up the image of an American president sharing a mistress, as Kennedy did until warned off by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, with Sam Giancana, the same Mafia don the CIA had contracted to kill Fidel Castro. But neither could the Kennedy brothers’ most Communist-hating critics have imagined their zeal to kill off the Communist leader who had humiliated them the spring before. “Robert Kennedy ran with it, ran those organizations,” CIA covert chief Richard Helms would one day testify of the anti-Castro plotting. The attorney general’s only concern, voiced after he had been given a thorough briefing on the assassination effort, was that he be kept informed. His orders to “get rid” of Castro were unrelenting.
In October, New York senator Kenneth Keating charged that the Russians were constructing missile bases in Cuba; worse yet, the president was covering up the threat. “Intelligence authorities must have advised the president,” the New York Republican declared, “that ground-to-ground missiles can be operational within six months.” Two weeks before the November elections, Kennedy took action. “This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba,” he told a national television audience, the aerial photographs at hand. “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” The missiles had to go, Kennedy said, declaring a naval blockade of all ships carrying offensive weapons or missile-firing equipment to Cuba. Any such vessel would be stopped and turned back.
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response to the Soviet Union.” He then recited the Cold War canon. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”
Richard Nixon watched the speech from the Edgewater Hotel in Oakland. “It’s over,” he said as Kennedy declared the blockade. “There’s no way that anyone is going to pay any attention to a California governor’s race now. I just lost the election.” Behind in his race, Nixon knew he could not possibly catch the California voters’ attention, much less turn them against Brown. His last hope, a thin one, was to capitalize on his historic connection to Kennedy. “What he did decide to do was immediately talk about support for the president and what we ought to do in pressuring other countries,” Herb Klein recalled. “He immediately wanted to talk about national security, not California issues. He thought it was the only way to chime in, to get any attention at that time.”
Within the week, Kennedy had won Khrushchev’s agreement to remove the missiles. The crisis had ended. A nation that had lived for days with the prospect of nuclear war could now breathe easy. “If Kennedy never did another thing,” said British prime minister Harold Macmillan, “he assured his place in history by this single act.” Using precious campaign funds, Nixon now bought television time to declare that the president’s success in the Cuban Missile Crisis “demonstrates again that when you stand up to Communist aggressors, they back down.” Desperate, he was trying to capitalize on Kennedy’s feat by reminding voters that he and the heroic president had once competed in the same league.
But the rivalry, with its visceral shenanigans, played on. Democratic prankster Dick Tuck would recollect with a chuckle years later:
We’re in LA and we hear that Dick Nixon is doing a thing in Chinatown. I decide maybe we can smoke Nixon out on the $205,000 unsecured loan that Howard Hughes gave to his brother Don. I get to the event and I make up a big sign that says, in Chinese characters, “How about the Hughes Loan?” Above that, I write “Welcome Nixon” in English. There’s one TV news crew there, and I tip them off that Mr. Nixon may be about to do something interesting. So Nixon’s stand
ing there, posing with this kid holding up my sign, when a Chinese elder suddenly says, “No! No! No!” Nixon says, “What do you mean, no! no! no?” When the man explains what the Chinese characters say, Nixon grabs the sign out of the kid’s hand and tears it up. Right there on camera!
Once, when candidate Nixon was speaking from the back of a whistle-stop campaign train in San Luis Obispo, a man dressed as a conductor signaled the engineer to start the train. As the candidate stood on the platform speaking to the crowd, he watched his audience slowly disappear into the distance. “The crowd went out like the morning tide,” a proud Tuck would brag.
Voters came gradually to suspect that Richard Nixon didn’t really want to be California’s governor, that he was simply using the Sacramento office as a rest stop to the White House. “When I become pres—” the candidate began one answer in his election-eve telethon. The slip surprised no one. Running for an office in which he had never shown interest before, the former vice president of the United States could see the loss coming long before the balloting ended. On election day, with many of the votes still to be cast, Steve Hess asked the candidate if he was still pessimistic about the results. “Yes,” Nixon answered, “but at least I am never going to have to talk about crap like dope addiction anymore.”
* * *
NIXON was right. On November 6, Pat Brown beat him by 297,000 votes. His anticipation of the voters’ verdict didn’t protect the loser from a long, brutal night, a feeling of public rejection beyond any he had experienced.
With the bright light of the next day, things had only grown bleaker. Groggily awaking in his Beverly Hilton suite, Nixon confronted the public hell of his second electoral defeat in two years. In the ballroom below, the press pack was hungry for blood.
“They’re all waiting,” Herb Klein said.
“Screw them,” Nixon said. When Klein and the others said Nixon had no choice but to offer a concession statement, the candidate wouldn’t budge. “Screw them.”
Klein tried again. “I told them you’d make a statement.”
“You make the statement!” Nixon retorted. “You make it!”
Hillings recalls Nixon’s condition. “He had a scotch or two. He was exhausted, bitter, unhappy, but he was not drunk. He was unshaven and was sitting there in his robe with the world going down around him.” “To hell with the bastards,” Nixon grumbled. Realizing that the defeated candidate was in no mood to make an appearance, his aides decided that Nixon should slip out while his press secretary read a statement to the press. The plan’s fault lay with the candidate. “Why doesn’t he make the statement himself?” a reporter screamed at Klein. Watching the television up in his room, Nixon grew furious. Instead of ducking out of the hotel as planned, he headed for the elevator and the ballroom. The stage was now set for the most infamous press conference in history.
“Now that Mr. Klein has made a statement, now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I lost, I would just like to make a statement of my own,” a morose Nixon began. First came his sledgehammer blow at how the California press corps had covered the race. That done, he could not resist a dig at Jack Kennedy. “This cannot be said for any other political figure today, I guess. Never in my sixteen years of campaigning have I complained to a publisher, to an editor, about the coverage of a reporter.” Unlike JFK, he had not canceled a subscription to an offending newspaper, as JFK just had to the New York Herald Tribune. “And as I leave the press, all I can say is this: For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of fun—a lot of fun—that you’ve had an opportunity to attack me, and I think I’ve given as good as I’ve taken . . . .”
Regaining his global statesman’s voice to offer a backhanded compliment to an old foe, Nixon predicted that President Kennedy would confront the continuing Cuban threat. “If he has his own way, he will face up to them; if he can only get those who opposed atomic tests, who want to admit Red China to the United Nations, all of the woolly-heads around him—if he can just keep them away from him and stand strong and firm with that good Irish fight of his, America will be in good shape in foreign policy.”
His own political career was, of course, kaput. “One last thing: What are my plans? Well, my plans are to go home. I’m going to get acquainted with my family again [a promise Kennedy had made after winning in 1960]. And my plans, incidentally, are, from a political standpoint, of course, to take a holiday. It will be a long holiday. I leave you gentlemen now, and you will now write it, you will interpret it, that’s your right. But as I leave you I want you to know—just think how much you’re going to be missing me.” Brightening, he let loose with his kicker: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
Stepping off the stage and away from the ears of the presss, Nixon shared his actual sentiments with aide Bob Haldeman. “I finally told those bastards off. And every goddamn thing I said was true.”
“Exit Snarling,” the Washington Star’s Mary McGrory headed her column on the “last press conference.” The losing candidate himself savored his outburst. “Nixon never wavered in his personal satisfaction with that incident,” Haldeman recalled years later.
But for a man who had devoted his life to politics, no measure of backbiting could soothe the pain of what seemed the final defeat. Back at home the day after the election, he and his wife, Pat, were both in tears. It was the first time their daughters could ever remember their both losing control of their emotions at the same time.
The following Saturday, President Kennedy and Supreme Court justice Earl Warren flew together to the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt. Both Nixon rivals were in high spirits. During the flight they were relishing accounts of the “last press conference.” Kennedy got a special joy from the Nixon jab, obviously meant for him, about never having canceled a newspaper subscription. The president congratulated Mary McGrory: “That was a nice story you wrote about Nixon.”
“It would have been hard to say, watching their faces,” the columnist wrote in a follow-up, “who had enjoyed the downfall more, the chief justice or the president of the United States. They had their heads together over the clippings and were laughing like schoolboys.”
* * *
JACK Kennedy was not the only one who thought Nixon was finished. “Barring a political miracle,” Time magazine reported, “his political career ended last week.” The Sunday after the election, ABC News broadcast a nasty half-hour special entitled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” The program was a diabolical version of This Is Your Life, with the devil as spirited moderator. One of the guests was Alger Hiss. The implication was that Nixon, not Hiss, had been the one convicted and sentenced. Many viewers saw it as overkill, however, by a press corps long tilted toward the liberal Democratic line. Eighty thousand Americans wrote to complain about ABC’s decision to let a convicted perjurer criticize a former vice president for losing an election. Sponsors threatened to cut their advertising.
Nixon encouraged the buzz. “What does an attack by one convicted perjurer mean when weighed . . . against the thousands of wires and letters from patriotic Americans?” he asked in an open telegram to major newspapers. He was hardly alone in his thinking about the “Obituary” program. Lyndon Johnson, watching the ABC program with fellow Texan Jim Wright, thought that it was “mean and unfair” to Nixon.
Typically, Jack Kennedy had two responses to the “Political Obituary” of his rival: one for the public, one for his pals. “How do you feel about the appearance of Alger Hiss on a television program on the career of Richard Nixon?” a reporter asked at the next White House news conference. Dodging, Kennedy said that he agreed with the FCC commissioner that the wisdom of putting on a person such as Alger Hiss was not up to the sponsors but “for the public to decide.” Privately, Kennedy had a different reaction. Although he thought Nixon now “beyond saving” and his last press conference “sick,” he retained his Mucker’s contempt for the network’s dec
ision to have Alger Hiss dance on Nixon’s grave. He called the program “a typical demonstration of phony liberals.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Diem
NIIXON spent the three weeks after the defeat in the Bahamas, walking up and down the beach. At forty-nine, the young man who had seen his ambitions so quickly and brilliantly realized was a political has-been. “It was the system that produced him,” New York Times columnist James Reston decreed the day after the 1962 election. “He came to power too early and retired too soon.”
* * *
BUT by New Year’s a striking metamorphosis was under way. Nixon visited Tom Dewey in New York. The former governor, twice-beaten Republican presidential candidate, lawyer, and elder statesman, would be his new role model. Soon another New York law firm had a prominent political name in its partnership. With the move eastward came a fresh energy to Nixon’s stride. Before him loomed the twenty-four-hour-a-day excitement of the big city. Behind him, happily, was the slower pace of his native Southern California. “If I have to play golf one more afternoon with Randy Scott,” Nixon said of his too many hours sharing the tee and cart with the former cowboy star, “I’ll go out of my mind.”
His new life in a new place did not hide Nixon from his enemies. In February 1963, the Internal Revenue Service initiated three successive audits on the former vice president’s income tax returns, scrutinizing them again and again for possible wrongdoing. The Kennedy fingerprints were unmistakable. Amid the painful investigation, however, the Nixons established themselves in New York, renting an East Side apartment and enrolling their daughters in the Chapin School, Jacqueline Kennedy’s alma mater. By spring, Tricia and Julie’s father was ready for his own coming-out party.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 132