Yet even as he warred with the Camelot crowd, Nixon sought to capture a bit of its lost aura for himself. During a presidential stay in San Clemente, California, the press corps was alerted to a unique photo opportunity: Escorted by White House aides to a cliff near the Nixon home that commanded a panoramic view of the beach and the Pacific Ocean beyond, they looked down to see the solitary figure of President Richard Nixon walking along the water’s edge. Nixon aides had placed him in the same windswept setting that had contributed to the Kennedys allure. One small detail had been overlooked. “He’s wearing shoes!” the cry went up from the pack. In their promotion of the “personality kid,” the White House ballyhoo boys had overlooked their client’s penchant for black wing-tipped shoes. Even in the Technicolor setting, their boss bore no resemblance to the nautical Jack tacking his sailboat in Nantucket Sound or the barefoot Bobby running his dog along the same strand.
* * *
WITH the first half of his term coming to a close, Nixon lost the company of his Kennedy Democrat-in-residence, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a social-policy expert with the wit to help Nixon negotiate among the shoals of establishment contempt. Moynihan’s return to Harvard marked a symbolic end to Nixon’s notion to become, in Moynihan’s winsome phrase, “a Tory man with liberal policies.” Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air bill, instituted affirmative action in employment, and ended the dual school system in the South. Years after leaving Nixon’s side, Moynihan would recall the shared sense of frustration: “After a while, you say, ‘Why bother?’ ”
Moynihan’s leave-taking signaled the ascendancy of Machiavellian politics over progressive policy. Heading back to Cambridge, he advised the cabinet, whom Nixon had assembled for the warm farewell, to “resist the temptation to respond in kind to the untruths and half-truths that begin to fill the air.” But Herb Klein soon noted the difference in atmosphere. “The White House changed distinctly and became an organization where hardball replaced political philosophy as the major consideration.”
With the 1970 elections for Congress approaching, Nixon shifted his attention to the urgent task of keeping the usual midterm losses to a minimum. Relying on an old standby, the politics of resentment, he strove to pit those “patriotic” Americans who backed his Asia policy against the despised cotillion of elite liberals and spoiled, ill-groomed students who opposed it. The elections would prove a rough repeat of the Whittier College fight for student-body president which pitted Dick Nixon, champion of the nerds, against his cooler Franklin counterpart. Nixon wanted to make that division, to use his favorite phrase, “perfectly clear.” When antiwar demonstrators attempted to storm a Republican campaign rally in San Jose, he saw an opportunity for mischief. Delaying his departure so that the angry crowds could, in Bob Haldeman’s phrase, “zero in,” Nixon stood up, before ducking into his car, and gave the double V sign that he knew would drive the angry crowd to a frenzy. It worked. The belligerent mob obliged by pelting the presidential limousine with stones and other flying debris, creating just the television picture he wanted most.
But the plan backfired. His efforts to drive a wedge between the squares and the swells brought back the image of the early 1950s Red-baiter. A campaign speech broadcast on election eve showed the president less an above-the-battle peacemaker than a roughneck combatant amid troubling civil unrest. Soft-spoken senator Edmund Muskie, giving the television response for the Democrats, put Nixon’s vitriol in stark relief. Speaking from the parlor of his rustic Maine home, he gave a partisan address crafted to seem otherwise. Nixon aide Jeb Magruder called the juxtaposition of the nonthreatening Muskie with the snarling president “like watching Grandma Moses debate the Boston Strangler.”
* * *
MUSKIE’S even-tempered performance on election eve, given credit for the Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the 1970 election, anointed him as the prime candidate to challenge Nixon in 1972. But the man in the White House was having none of it. Richard Nixon had his mind on another Democrat, Ted Kennedy, whose diatribes against the Nixon policy in Vietnam now contained extraordinary venom. “It is Asian, now, fighting Asian, and they do it for purposes more than their own. Vietnamization means war and more war.” It was a searing indictment that the United States was arming Vietnamese to kill Vietnamese in order to advance Richard Nixon’s geopolitical ambitions. Nixon himself ordered a stakeout of the senator. “Twenty-four-hour surveillance!” he demanded of Haldeman. “Catch him in the sack with one of his babes.”
Charles Colson, deputized the year before to pursue the “Kennedy fight,” threatened to punch the Massachusetts senator in the nose for his derision of Nixon’s Vietnam policy. He managed to hit Kennedy in a softer spot. He succeeded in having a photograph taken of Teddy Kennedy leaving a Paris nightclub with a beautiful woman not his wife in the wee hours of the morning, before President Charles de Gaulle’s funeral. Colson next arranged for the embarrassing photo to be published in the National Enquirer. The accompanying report observed that Kennedy’s date was Italy’s Princess Maria Pia de Savoy and that Kennedy had been jumping up and down froglike on the dance floor until only minutes before the funeral mass at Notre Dame. “The president loved that picture,” Bob Haldeman recalled. “It stuck a knife into a Kennedy: one hundred points on the Oval Office chart.”
Haldeman saw this coup cementing Colson’s status in Nixon’s circle. The new recruit had won a battlefield promotion. “From now on, as far as the president was concerned,” Haldeman would recall, “Colson was Mr. Can Do.”
Colson was proud of his handiwork. “I sent somebody to Paris to get a picture, and Nixon loved it.” Having endured Jack Kennedy’s undetected escapades, Nixon wanted the younger brother to pay for every dance. Colson’s success boosted his position dramatically. “He arrived in the White House with one secretary,” Haldeman deputy Jeb Magruder would note. “By the time he left he had dozens of people reporting to him. The rest of us would joke about Colson’s ever-expanding empire, ‘The Department of Dirty Tricks.’ ”
Like his boss, Colson treated the threat of a Ted Kennedy candidacy in 1972 with deadly seriousness. “He was always in the political equation. There were times when we worried he would get in the race and resurrect the Kennedy charisma and we would be running against Jack Kennedy again.” Colson’s Parisian triumph won him a prized place at the table when Nixon summoned his advisers to Key Biscayne for a series of planning sessions after the 1970 elections. Just the mention of the name “Ted Kennedy” at such gatherings, Colson recalls, caused a stir. “You just sensed this was the flash point. Maybe we felt it ourselves. It was like we’d be running against the ghost of Jack Kennedy.” To repel the specter, Colson pushed Nixon to woo Catholic voters who had voted for Kennedy in 1960 by appealing to their social conservatism and patriotic resentment toward well-off college kids burning flags and draft cards on the evening news.
In December, Nixon made a bold reach for another key piece of the coalition that elected JFK, killing his own dream, ten years earlier. He named John Connally his secretary of the treasury. Like him, the former Texas governor shared a long history with the Kennedys. As a campaign lieutenant of Lyndon Johnson’s in 1960, he had accused JFK of having Addison’s disease, a charge whose ferocity came from its being true. After serving Kennedy as secretary of the navy, he served as his host on the fateful presidential tour of Texas in November 1963. When the shots were fired at Dealey Plaza, the blood-soaked Connally believed that he, as well as Kennedy, had just seconds to live.
The intimations of shared mortality did not slow the political rift between Connally and the surviving Kennedys. From the outset, the Texan was a Johnson man sensitive to any slight from the wealthy, well-born clan that appeared to view Connally’s mentor as an unpleasant interruption in the Kennedy reign. Starting in 1968, with his public derision of Ted Kennedy’s worthiness to be president and, later, with his desultory backing of Hubert Humphrey, John Connally became an insurgent i
n his own party.
Picking the Texan for such a high-level post sealed, therefore, a natural pact of anti-Kennedy allies. It gave the conservative John Connally a respect and career path now closed to him in the party of his upbringing. It gave the loner Nixon a political kin able to rally resentful Democrats against the dominant liberals for whom Ted Kennedy shined, even after Chappaquiddick, as the brightest star.
Seven years after Dallas, Richard Nixon was surrounded by those whose personal loyalty to him and deep-felt antipathy toward the Kennedys was indivisible. Against the growing bitterness over Vietnam and with the economy growing weak, the men in the White House saw themselves in a deadly conflict for survival with those bent on their destruction. To meet this threat, Richard Nixon had fortified himself with a coterie of henchmen, including Charles Colson, prepared to train the full arsenal of the presidency, including all those dark weapons Kennedy and Johnson had used on him, against those who would seize what he had won at so high a price and after such a painful detour.
At year’s end, Colson dug up some new opposition research: Howard Hughes was terminating old Kennedy hand Lawrence O’Brien as his Washington lobbyist. It was the kind of information on which Nixon thrived. He would soon demand more.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Interlude
ON January 1, 1971, as Nixon indulged in New Year’s Day ramblings with chief of staff Bob Haldeman, he came to an old sore point: with the exception of their post-Bay of Pigs meeting, John F. Kennedy had never invited him to the White House. As the executive mansion’s current occupant, he was ready to treat his rival’s widow the way a former First Lady deserved, especially the wife of a fallen president. The official portraits of President and Mrs. Kennedy were about to be hung. Pat Nixon wrote Mrs. Kennedy asking her thoughts about an official ceremony. At first, Jacqueline was hesitant. “As you know, the thought of returning to the White House is difficult for me,” she responded to Pat Nixon’s inquiry. “I really do not have the courage to go through an official ceremony and bring the children back to the only home they both knew with their father under such traumatic conditions. With the press and everything, things I try to avoid in their young lives, I know the experience would be hard on them and not leave them with the memories of the White House I would like them to have.” Pat Nixon then proposed that Mrs. Kennedy and her children might come to the White House for a private viewing.
Before the historic evening with the Kennedys, the president had other, dirtier business to complete. On January 14, the Los Angeles Times reported that a top aide to Hughes, the same Robert Maheu who had recruited mob assassins for the CIA campaign against Fidel Castro, was bringing a lawsuit against the tycoon. Nixon, who had paid politically for the $205,000 loan to his brother Don back in the 1950s and had just gotten a $100,000 campaign gift from Hughes, was now ready to attack. “It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes for ‘services rendered’ in the past,” Nixon scribbled in a note to Haldeman as he traveled aboard Air Force One for a speech to the University of Nebraska. “Perhaps Colson should make a check on this.”
On February 3, Jacqueline Kennedy, Caroline, thirteen, and John, Jr., ten, came to the White House for a secret dinner. President Nixon had sent a small presidential Jetstar to pick up the Kennedys in New York, and an intense effort was made to keep the nocturnal visit out of the media. The UPI’s Helen Thomas, the only reporter to discover the identity of the president’s mystery guests, succumbed to the promise of further information and agreed to delay her story.
Julie, Tricia, and Pat met the arrivals at the White House’s second-floor elevator. From there the two families went down the broad stairs to the ground floor to view the ethereal portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, then upstairs again to the painting of the late president, which bore a resemblance to a Newsweek photo of a stooped-over John F. Kennedy passing a few pensive last moments before his third debate with Richard Nixon.
The formal purpose of the evening behind them, the Nixon daughters led the smaller Kennedy children around the family quarters while Pat took Jacqueline on a separate tour of those public rooms that, a decade earlier, the former First Lady had worked to restore to their historic authenticity. At dinner, the guest of honor, whom Nixon described later as “very bright and talkative,” reminded her host of the time she and Jack had met him by accident at a Chicago airport in 1959. “I always live in a dream world,” Nixon recalled her saying as all of them negotiated their way through the dangerous terrain of memory. John Kennedy would recall betting his sister that she, not he, would spill something. He lost, his milk falling directly onto the presidential lap. Afterward, the president escorted his rival’s children over to the West Wing to show them the Oval Office, where their father had worked and where John junior had once played under his father’s desk. “It seemed to me a private moment,” Julie recorded later. “Instinctively, we did not go inside but waited on the walkway outside the office.”
Personal accounts of the evening are recorded in the letters that passed back and forth in the weeks ahead:
Dear Mr. President
Dear Mrs. Nixon
You were so kind to us yesterday.
Never have I seen such magnanimity and such tenderness.
Can you imagine the gift you gave us? To return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood—with you both as guides—and with your daughters, such extraordinary young women.
What a tribute to have brought them up like that in the limelight. I pray I can do half the same with my Caroline. It was good to see her exposed to their example, and John to their charm.
You spoiled us beyond belief; the Jetstar, our tour, the superb dinner. Thank you, Mr. President, for opening one of your precious bottles of Bordeaux for us.
I have never seen the White House look so perfect. There is no hidden comer of it that is not beautiful now.
It was moving, when we left, to see that great House illuminated, with the fountains playing.
The way you have hung the portraits does them great honor—more than they deserve. They should not have been such trouble to you. You bent over backwards to be generous, and we are all deeply touched and grateful.
It made me happy to hear the children bursting with reminiscences all the way home.
Before John went to sleep, I could explain the photographs of Jack and him in his room, to him. “There you are with Daddy right where the President was describing the great seal; there, on the path where the President accompanied us to our car.”
Your kindness made real memories of his shadowy ones.
Thank you with all my heart. A day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious I have spent with my children.
May God bless all of you,
Most gratefully,
Jackie
Dear Mr. President
Dear Mrs. Nixon
I can never thank you more for showing us the White House.
I really liked everything about it. You were so nice to show us everything.
I don’t think I could remember much about the White House but it was really nice seeing it all again.
When I sat on Lincoln’s bed and wished for something, my wish really came true. I wished that I would have good luck at school. I loved all the pictures of the Indians and the ones of all the Presidents.
I also really liked the old pistols.
I really really loved the dogs. They were so funny. As soon as I came home my dogs kept on sniffing me. Maybe they remember the White House.
The food was the best I have ever had. The shrimp was by far the best I have ever tasted.
And the steak with the sauce was really good.
And I have never tasted anything as good as the souffle . . . was the best I ever tasted.
I really liked seeing the President’s office and the cabinet room a lot. Thank you so
much again.
Sincerely,
John Kennedy
Dear Mrs. Nixon,
Thank you so much for the incredible tour. You were so nice to do it and I just love everything about the house. All the rooms are so lovely and it was so sweet of you to take us around so specially. I just love your dogs. King Timaho is beautiful and the others are so cute. The dinner was delicious. Your Swiss chef is the best thing that ever came out of Switzerland except maybe the chocolate. Your daughters were so nice to me, I had such a good time and it was so nice to see it all again. The President was so nice (repeat—repeat) to take so much time out of his schedule. Please thank him.
The portraits were hung so nicely. You made them look so good. Everything was just perfect and everyone was so nice. Please thank them all for me, Allen, John, the one who met us at the door, and everyone else. But thank you and your family most of all. I will really never forget it.
Love Caroline
P.S. The plane is fantastic and the candy is wonderful. Sgt. Simmons is great and so is the pilot. All I seem to be saying is so nice, fantastic, thank you, but it is all I can say.
There came a handwritten note as well from President Kennedy’s mother, Rose:
Dear Mrs. Nixon,
Jackie has just telephoned to me to tell me how happy she and the children were after their trip to Washington.
She related all the various details of her visit, and she was quite overwhelmed by your solicitude and your graciousness. I told her I wanted to write to you and thank you, too.
Your warm-hearted welcome to her and my grandchildren on a day which might have been most difficult for all of them, moved me deeply.
Your daughters completely captivated the children, and Jackie was glad the youngsters had an opportunity to see again the places in the White House which were familiar to them.
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 140