BARRY Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election to Lyndon Johnson by 26 million votes to 43 million votes—the worst Republican defeat of the century. The one leader not blamed for the debacle now prepared himself to answer his party’s call.
Nixon’s first step was to the right. He lashed out at the liberals surrounding John Kennedy, though not the slain hero himself, who had “enabled the United States to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory” during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam policy was another target of opportunity. “The United States must be prepared to meet the issue squarely and to commit whatever forces are necessary,” he taunted Johnson. What he meant was more U.S. bombing. America could not afford to lose any more ground in Asia.
Nixon moved to the right on civil rights as well. “In this election year, Republicans will be urged by some to outpromise the Johnson administration on civil rights in the hope of political gains,” he declared. “I am completely opposed to this kind of political demagoguery. Making promises that can’t be kept—raising hopes that can’t be realized—are the cruelest hoaxes that can be perpetrated on a minority group that has suffered from such tactics for a hundred years.” The man who once scared white southerners with his opposition to segregation was now, a year after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, seeking to benefit from their backlash.
The headquarters of the Nixon political operation was his Lower Manhattan law office. “Between wars a campaign is more like an organism which can live for years in the national ganglion hidden from sight,” John Ehrlichman described the scene at Nixon’s law firm, “its vital signs discernible only to the most sensitive of political diagnosticians. On the twenty-fourth floor, amid the five floors leased to Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander at 20 Broad Street, in a back corner close by the door to Richard Nixon’s office, there incubated the incipient virus of a presidential campaign . . . slowly thawing from a cryogenic storage that had begun after Richard Nixon’s defeat in the California gubernatorial election in 1962.” At the start of 1965, the Nixon “virus” was still limited to some of his law partners, his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and a “Miss Ryan,” who came in to help out with the typing. Pat Nixon used her maiden name to remain as unobtrusive as she was helpful to her husband’s cause.
As the years passed, Nixon began recruiting professionals to his embryonic comeback. A young, newly arrived Nixon, Mudge associate named John Sears saw two aspects of Nixon that were not evident in the well-known figure. One was a man without the mechanical quality of his public performances; the other, a politician very much haunted by his 1960 defeat. “Nixon always prided himself that he worked harder than anybody. Everything seemed to come easy to Jack. I think the Kennedys frightened Nixon.”
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IF Richard Nixon could not live with his defeat in 1960, the victorious Kennedys were determined to repeat it. To do it, they needed to finesse relations with President Johnson. Not yet weakened by Vietnam, he was the official champion of all that Jack Kennedy had begun and the most powerful man in the country besides. Suddenly, there loomed a malignant threat to the Kennedy-Johnson alliance: William Manchester’s book on the assassination.
Four months before publication, Time reported that the book showed Johnson as an “unfeeling and boorish man.” The men around Johnson, including Gov. John Connally, who had been wounded in the assassination, figured that Bobby Kennedy was behind the derogatory reference. In fact, the Kennedys were obsessed with getting the negative material excised, knowing people would assume that the late president’s family had approved it. “I’ll ruin you,” Jacqueline Kennedy told Harper & Row editor Evan Thomas when they met at a cocktail party. Manchester suffered more brutal treatment, including a civil suit and surveillance by private detectives. He described it as the “Kennedy winter offensive of 1966-67.” His chief assailant was the junior senator from New York, Robert Kennedy. “I spent three of the most uncomfortable hours of my life in his Washington office on the afternoon of August 12, watching, appalled, while he paced tiger-like between Evan Thomas, John Seigenthaler and me. He appeared to be wholly irrational. He accused me of raising my voice. He pretended to leave the room, hid in an alcove, and leapt out, pointing an accusing finger at me.”
Kennedy suggested that Manchester “shred” the galleys of a Look magazine excerpt of the book so that they’d be unprintable. Again, the Kennedys were trying to trade money for reputation. He offered to pay Manchester not to publish. “How much do you want? Three hundred thousand? Four hundred thousand?”
When the author rejected the hush money, Kennedy tried getting editor Evan Thomas to kill the book. Manchester recalled Bobby Kennedy’s rage: “Was it actually possible that my editor and I had sat grimly silent in a Manhattan hotel suite while a United States Senator, determined to alter the book, hammered on the door and repeatedly called my name? It was as though the First and Fourteenth Amendments had been struck from the U.S. Constitution,” he would write in a long account of the episode.
What the Kennedys wanted deleted was any record of the friction existing between Bobby and Lyndon Johnson in those chaotic days following the tragedy in Dallas. A rift with LBJ could jeopardize the Kennedy succession. Eventually, the beleaguered author agreed to delete sixteen hundred words. It didn’t appease the Johnson crowd. When the first installment appeared in Look, Connally called a press conference to blast the Manchester book as an “astonishing propaganda instrument cleverly woven to reflect favorably on those who gave it birth while rudely discrediting others.”
By the summer of 1965, LBJ faced an even bigger menace than Jack Kennedy’s little brother: Vietnam.
A lesson of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the prudence of a “measured response” to foreign policy conflicts. The United States should take only those steps that the adversary’s conduct justifies. In the war with North Vietnam, the policy now translated to step-by-step escalation. Unwilling to fight a war of annihilation, such as the Allies prosecuted against Hitler and Tojo, the United States had joined in a war of attrition designed to keep Russia and China from entering the struggle. One man not satisfied with the strategy was Richard Nixon. He called Johnson’s mention of “negotiations” a veiled move to capitulate that “would reward aggression.” He was far tougher on Johnson’s critics, accusing them of advocating “appeasement and retreat.” “If the United States gives up Vietnam, the Pacific Ocean will become a Red Sea,” Nixon wrote in the Reader’s Digest. “The true enemy behind the Viet Cong and North Vietnam is China. If Vietnam is lost, Red China would gain vast new power. Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos would inevitably fall under Communist domination.” He warned that the felled dominoes would position the Communist Chinese “only 14 miles from the Philippines and less than 100 miles from Australia.”
In the fall, Nixon switched his sights to the Red threat at home. When Robert Kennedy spoke out and defended the right of a self-proclaimed “Marxist” and Vietcong enthusiast to teach at Rutgers, he was quickly challenged by the former vice president. The country was “at war,” Nixon declared. The professor had no right to use his lectern to “give aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Expecting Vietnam and inflation to hurt the Democrats in the 1966 elections, Nixon saw the combination spurring a sizable Republican gain. NBC correspondent Robert MacNeil, meeting Nixon at his Fifth Avenue apartment, heard his host recite from memory the name of the Democratic incumbent, the Republican challenger, and the local campaign issues in the fifty congressional contests in which he was about to campaign. Nixon saw victory coming and banked on taking credit. “First ’66!” he admonished Patrick Buchanan when his zealous new speechwriter had mentioned prospects for a White House run in 1964. Working with another speechwriter, the once-and-future candidate spent an inordinate amount of time trying to craft a contrapuntal line of the kind Ted Sorensen had scripted for John Kennedy. “For twenty minutes we worked on a single line,” William Safire recalled.
Nixon saw the lack of victory in
Vietnam as a major Democratic vulnerability. After visiting Saigon again in July 1966, he declared that there was “no possibility of negotiations” with North Vietnam and attacked President Johnson for an insufficient war effort. Two hundred and seventy thousand American troops, he said, were not enough.
In August, Nixon stirred the political pot again, predicting that President Johnson would drop Hubert Humphrey and make Robert Kennedy his running mate. It was a rerun of his mischievous November 21, 1963, forecast that Jack Kennedy would dump Johnson. “If Lyndon thinks he’s in trouble,” the troublemaker observed, “if Lyndon thinks he needs Bobby on the ticket to win, he’ll sugarcoat him, swallow him, and regurgitate him later.” Instead of a Kennedy dumping Lyndon Johnson, Johnson might be forced now to dump a loyal ally in order to accept a Kennedy.
Nixon’s goal was to score attention from the press, chits from his fellow Republicans. He knew that all the press clips and party dinners would be redeemable two years later. Stephen Hess recalled Nixon’s attitude toward this political scut work: “He was telling me about how he was a law student at Duke during the Depression and had a summer job. He had a professor who couldn’t sell his textbook to a commercial publisher, so he decides he’s going to mimeograph it and sell it to his students. Nixon gets the job of cranking the mimeograph machine . . . in the North Carolina summer in an airless room. And the reason he’s telling me this story is that the end justifies the means. He needed to get his law degree, and he would do anything, including cranking the mimeograph machine in the North Carolina heat . . . all summer, to get the money to be a law student. That’s the way he treated politics. It’s what you’ve got to do.”
On October 25, just days before the 1966 congressional elections, President Johnson met with South Vietnam president Thieu in Manila. They issued a joint communiqué on the war that now saw American troops in direct confrontation with the North Vietnamese regular army. A week later, Richard Nixon offered a point-by-point dissection. He was particularly critical of Johnson’s reference to “mutual withdrawal” from South Vietnam by the two opposing armies. Nixon said that the South Vietnam Army could not defeat the Vietcong without American advisers, that Johnson’s talk of a “mutual withdrawal” plan was really an offer to “surrender a decisive military advantage.”
The president heard a report on Nixon’s talk of his “surrender” on his way to a televised press conference. It was the Friday before the election, and he had mischief in mind. When asked about the former vice president’s detailed criticism of his Vietnam policy, Johnson dismissed Nixon as a “chronic campaigner.” “That ought to put him out front,” Johnson said with a chuckle as the wire services began ticking away with news of the skirmish between the president of the United States and the man he had just anointed leader of the opposition.
Johnson had outsmarted himself. Believing that the press would run with his ridicule, to his horror he found them playing it as a David and Goliath situation, with LBJ in the role of ugly giant and Nixon wielding the slingshot. Two nights later, the Republicans bought Nixon thirty minutes of national television time to speak for the party. He used it to stick in the knife. He cited Johnson for “one of the most savage personal assaults ever leveled by a president of the United States against one of his political opponents.” Then he twisted the blade. “I understand how a man can be very, very tired,” he said of the Democratic president, “and how his temper then can be very short.” In other words, it was time for the old president to retire, to turn the job over to someone a few years younger, someone a bit more seasoned in international matters.
On election night, just as Nixon had expected, his party won big, picking up 47 seats in the House of Representatives, 3 in the Senate, and 540 in state legislatures. Herb Klein, who received a call from his former boss that evening, said, “I never heard him sound happier.”
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As Nixon positioned himself for the prize that had been denied him in 1960, the legacy of the man who beat him was undergoing revision. In March 1967, columnist Drew Pearson revealed a CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro on Kennedy’s watch. Lyndon Johnson, convinced that Castro had had a hand in President Kennedy’s own assassination, ordered the intelligence agency to review any and all efforts to eliminate Castro. The final document, prepared by CIA inspector general S. I. Breckenridge, laid out the entire story of anti-Castro assassination plotting beginning under Eisenhower. His report detailed the attempted use of Sam Giancana and other Mafia figures, early attempts to humiliate Castro with drugs and bizarre beard-defoliating chemicals, Operation Mongoose, and the poison pills meant for the Cuban leader. Breckenridge placed the burden of the assassination efforts entirely on the shoulders of John and Robert Kennedy: “It became clear early in our investigation that the vigor with which schemes were pursued within the Agency to eliminate Castro personally varied with the intensity of the U.S. Government’s efforts to overthrow the Castro regime.” That intensity was greatest, the report stated, in the years 1961 through 1963. “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime.”
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IT was now time for Richard Nixon to begin his extraordinary deviation from Cold War doctrine, much as Jack Kennedy had done with his Algeria speech a decade earlier. The ’68 hopeful produced an essay in Foreign Affairs urging a diplomatic opening to Red China. Nixon suggested that the United States demonstrate to China “that its interest can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.” Such a policy, he reasoned, would lure “China back into the world community . . . as a great and progressing nation.” The ardent Cold Warrior who had blasted Truman for the Communist takeover in 1949, who had hit Kennedy as too soft on Quemoy and Matsu and Johnson as weak-rooted on Vietnam, was now talking of normalizing relations with the Communist giant herself.
With the 1968 election approaching, Nixon was coming to terms with another danger: television. “The time has come for political campaigning, its techniques and strategies, to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye,” aide Bob Haldeman wrote in a memo. Giving speeches all day, he argued, was no way to run for president. A candidate would “become punchy, mauled by his admirers, jeered and deflated by his opponent’s supporters, misled by the super-stimulation of one frenzied rally after another.”
Nixon received similar advice from a Philadelphia educator named William Gavin, who sent a quotation from Ortega y Gasset: “Those are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.” Gavin urged Nixon, whom he had never met, to run; also to make bold use of television. “Instead of those wooden performances beloved by politicians, instead of a glamour-boy technique . . . be bold. Go on live and risk all. I know you can win if you see yourself for what you are: a man who has been beaten, humiliated, hated, but who still sees the truth.”
The former vice-president could run a different kind of campaign, one that exploited television while protecting him from the uncertainties of the old-style campaign.
Three days after Christmas, Nixon left for Key Biscayne. Three weeks later, he returned home, having made what he told his daughter Julie was “the most important decision of his life.” He would run for president again, not as the vice president defending the status quo but as a seasoned politician on the attack. And he would not have John F. Kennedy as his adversary. Nixon’s aides began telling reporters the story of the little girl who, upon meeting Nixon on the campaign trail, remembered him as “President Kennedy’s friend.” Kennedy had called his campaign plane the Caroline; Nixon now named his the Tricia.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
1968
RICHARD Nixon began his second try for the presidency determined not to repeat past mistakes. To win, he needed to overcome the echoes of the past, both the crippling electoral setbacks of 1960 and 1962 that had tagged him a loser and his political ident
ity as the villain of Camelot. Soon the campaign he had expected to wage against Lyndon Johnson would become, if only briefly, a reprise of his worst horror.
Nixon was obsessed, most of all, with avoiding another humiliation at the polls. To maximize the odds of victory, he set to work assembling a state-of-the-art campaign team, one that emphasized lightning-fast advance work, controlled and limited access to the candidate by the media, and zero interaction with opposing candidates. Richard Nixon’s second effort would pay strict homage to what the Kennedy organization had accomplished in 1960, a day-to-day program to avert the fatigue and confusion of the last effort. He would win with new friends like law partner John Mitchell, who had offered refuge in the wilderness years, and a new cadre of no-excuses operatives led by H. R. Haldeman. Old allies like Bob Finch and Herb Klein, men who had lost Nixon’s confidence in the 1960 defeat and lacked the necessary, unswerving commitment to victory, would hold the secondary positions. Like Jack Kennedy, Nixon had found the choice between old loyalist and ruthless agent difficult but doable. Aide Jeb Magruder noted the candidate’s new preference for “tough, efficient managers like Bob Haldeman and John Mitchell, men who loathed the media as much as Nixon did and had as little to do with it as possible.”
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THE year 1968 was taking on a historic character well beyond New Year’s. The political season had commenced prematurely with the October “March on the Pentagon” anti-Vietnam War rally and the antiwar Democratic insurgency of Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who was challenging Johnson’s renomination. January brought the Buddhist New Year, Tet, and an all-out attack on the cities of South Vietnam by 50,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars. Thirty provincial capitals were all attacked simultaneously, destroying the confidence of both the Saigon government and its U.S. allies. Suddenly, America lived with the knowledge that the Vietnam War was not being won militarily. Within weeks, Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, would decide that the 500,000 American troops in-country were insufficient; he needed 200,000 more. Many Americans would view the additional troop request as a public admission of defeat.
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