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Jackson
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Apr 29, 2019 18:08
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Andrew Jackson, please.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:31
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Nixon but really, with the quality of the writeups in this thread I literally can't go wrong. That factoid about Tyler's coffin not being under the US flag is one of the coolest Presidential facts.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:40
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I'd love any of them, but because he shares my father's name, Andrew Jackson, that monster.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:58
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Angry_Ed posted:why we put a man who hated Central Banks (and just about everything else it seems) on the $20  I wanna see Jackson. We've encounter the young Democratic party a couple of times now and I feel like it's time to meet the man at its helm.
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Apr 29, 2019 19:23
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I think it's about time for NIXON'S time to shine, arooooooooooooo I swear I have reasons other than futurama references and the obvious Watergate scandal
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Apr 29, 2019 22:52
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This is going to be pointless because I'm already outvoted but I want to hear about the man, the legend, the Rough Rider: Teddy "The Bear" Roosevelt. But I'll look forward to reading about Nixon when that vote becomes official. Thanks for everything so far, Fritz! VH4Ever fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Apr 30, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 23:09
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Nixon, just to keep the vote more interesting (the media does love its horse races!).
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Apr 30, 2019 01:05
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Trasson posted:Nixon, just to keep the vote more interesting (the media does love its horse races!). If you don't pick him, gentlemen, this will be his last press conference. You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.
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Apr 30, 2019 01:25
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Nixon's the one!
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Apr 30, 2019 03:05
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I'm ready for that alligator man who drove his wife-to-be to dates with other men. That tricky dick. Nixon
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Apr 30, 2019 08:28
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The ex-President who in the late 80’s visited a Burger King, and left a napkin on his table on which he had written “To Burger King, home of the Whopper - Love, Richard Nixon”
Cat Hassler fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Apr 30, 2019 |
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Apr 30, 2019 08:40
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Giving people till the end of the day to cast votes; we have an EXTREMELY close race right now and a couple more people making their voices heard could decide it.
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Apr 30, 2019 12:06
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Andrew Jackson. I've had enough Dick to last a lifetime.
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Apr 30, 2019 16:48
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Discendo Vox posted:Andrew Jackson. I've had enough Dick to last a lifetime. All the better to get it over with! Nixon.
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Apr 30, 2019 17:04
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Please don't shoot me daddy Jackson
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Apr 30, 2019 17:06
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I received a telegram from our old pal Rutherford B. Hayes. He offered me an enticing deal to resolve this deadlock. If you agree to not cover the DIRTY YANKEE LIES about the Southern Strategy so as to not cause embarrassment to our friends from the South, I will switch my vote from Jackson to Nixon, delivering Nixon the
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Apr 30, 2019 17:09
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Nixon
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Apr 30, 2019 19:46
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NIXON.
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Apr 30, 2019 22:17
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NIXONS BACK! AWOOOOOOOOOO
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Apr 30, 2019 22:23
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We have a winner! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHoqWQB3Cp4
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May 1, 2019 01:14
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Pleased that Nixon is getting picked finally. His presidency is fascinating to me even beyond Watergate and how much it set in motion a lot of the bullshit we're stuck with today.
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May 5, 2019 17:48
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Feldegast42 posted:NIXONS BACK! AWOOOOOOOOOO https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/ Everyone should really give Hunter S. Thompson's glorious eulogy for Nixon.
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May 6, 2019 14:31
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RagnarokZ posted:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/
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May 6, 2019 14:48
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Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States…and Mrs. Nixon.” The newscaster’s voice rang through the ears of millions of Americans as the procession made its way through the assembled crowd of administration staffers. The President, his wife, and his two daughters and their husbands trooped slowly up to the stage, and Richard Milhous Nixon stood behind the podium, turning to face the crowd. The speech Nixon would go on to give would be the last address he’d make as President. Strangely, at his darkest hour, he was at his most vulnerable and maybe his most poetic. quote:You are here to say goodbye to us. And we don't have a good word for it in English -- the best is "au revoir," we'll see you again. I just met with the members of the White House staff. You know, those that serve here in the White House, day in and day out....Because many of you have been here for many years, with devotion and dedication. Because this office, great as it is, can only be as great as the men and women who work for, and with, the president. Our next subject is a man with a deeply tortured soul, scarred by insecurity and decades of what he perceived as unfair attacks from a litany of “enemies”. His greatest sin, born out of a deep paranoia and mistrust for the judgment of the American people, was an act that was unforgivable--it was the final knife in the back of the sacred trust many Americans had for their government. And yet, as so many of his contemporaries have said of Richard Nixon, he was a man who would have been so easy to “fix”--change his personality in a couple of key respects, and his Presidency and his life might have turned out drastically different. Instead of the greatness he so desperately craved, Nixon lives on now in a series of pop culture jokes--perhaps most famously as his own head in “Futurama”, where he once again wins election (this time to the Presidency of Earth) while mounted on the top of a giant robot body. Funny, yes, but an ignominious end to the legacy of a man who could have been great. The story I’m about to tell you won’t make you like Richard Nixon any more, but hopefully it will help you to understand him. California, Here I Come…  Before he was perhaps the most infamous President in American history, Nixon was just a kid from Yorba Linda, California. Born there on January 9, 1913, to Frank and Hannah Nixon, young Richard was reared in a town of some two hundred people. The doctor who delivered him arrived at the Nixon’s home by horse and buggy. Nixon’s family was a curious mix of immigrants--his father’s family was Scotch-Irish Protestant, and they had roots very deep in America. One of his ancestors, George Nixon, served under George Washington at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and a second George Nixon, the original’s grandson, was killed during the battle of Cemetery Ridge fighting for the Union at Gettysburg. His mother’s family, on the other hand, was Irish Quakers--and they didn’t approve of their daughter’s marriage to Frank Nixon. “They looked down on Uncle Frank,” his niece Alice once recalled. “I could feel that keenly, because he wasn’t well educated and had a gruff manner.” When you read about Frank Nixon it’s easy to see where Richard got his disposition from--Frank was a “curt, disgruntled son-in law, meeting obligations but breezing in and out of family gatherings,” biographer John Farrell writes. One thing you might not know about Nixon’s father (and something you might not wanna know) is that he was horny as gently caress. After he married Hannah, he basically turned her into a baby clown car. A friend remembered him as “a fanny pincher and a horny old devil”. He had to avoid dancing with women at church suppers because he had to hide his boners. I swear I am not making any of this poo poo up. Anyway, young Richard arrived in 1913, the second eldest of five boys. His eldest brother, Harold, had beaten him by four years, and he’d have three younger brothers: Donald (1914), Arthur (1918) and Edward (1930). This didn’t help the already crotchety Frank Nixon’s disposition--he was given to stomach troubles and nervous headaches, and later in life would suffer a bleeding ulcer. He vented his spleen on his boys, unfortunately, even as they idolized their dad’s struggle to scratch out a living for them. They were beaten often with belts, sticks, and switches, and Frank wasn’t above smacking them--or other severe punishments. Once, when he caught young Richard swimming in a canal, he bellowed at him to get out--then flung him back into the water headfirst. To Hannah’s (and her sisters’) horror, Nixon nearly drowned. Nixon’s mother punished her boys too--but she never raised a hand to them. John Farrell explains it best. quote:...Instead, she employed distance as a tool to discipline the boys. Frank and Hannah “were both explosive persons, one outwardly so, one inwardly,” their granddaughter Lawrene recalled. Hannah “exploded inside” and “gave everybody the silent treatment, which just killed them, because she was so sweet….She kept at it for days.” “I just can’t stand it,” Arthur would say. “Tell her to give me a spanking.” Nixon internalized all of this growing up. He dismissed any psychoanalysis later in life, scorning any notion that the tortured, scarred nature of his personality was due to any childhood trauma. Most of his associates and friends agreed--they felt that it was the result of long years of political battles. A friend and future White House aide, Bryce Harlow, however, disagreed. quote:I suspect that my gifted friend somewhere in his youth, maybe when he was very young or in his teens, got badly hurt by someone he cared for very deeply or trusted totally—a parent, a dear friend, a lover, a confidante. Somewhere I figure someone hurt him badly. It didn’t help that his brothers were developing their own personalities and finding their way in the family. His older brother Harold was your stereotypical eldest child--charming, outgoing, and always laughing. His little brother Donald was chubby, but friendly, likable, and possessed of a great sense of humor. Richard struggled. The middle child always does. He craved closeness and attention, making more demands on Hannah Nixon’s maternal instincts than his brothers did. When rebuffed, he would conclude that it was because he was “unlovable”. Add this to the serious bouts with measles and cholera he suffered growing up, and you can conclude that Nixon’s early life was full of both physical and emotional pain. Interesting note--Nixon’s got a reason for the weird combover. When he was three, he was thrown from a wagon and struck his head on its metal wheel. The cut on his head was so long and bled so badly his mother feared it might kill him. For the rest of his life, he’d comb his hair straight back to hide the scar. Nixon was a rather disagreeable child growing up, too. He once smashed a playmate over the head with the blunt end of a hatchet in an argument over a jar of tadpoles, and when he did join other children in games, he would throw terrible tantrums if he couldn’t make the rules. And if he lost? “He was a terrible loser. He’d get so angry when he lost...angry for himself for not having lived up to his idea of perfection,” his cousin Edith Nunes recalled. One anecdote I liked from his early childhood--once, as a schoolboy, Nixon posed with his violin for a commercial photographer. Two photographs survive from that day--one where he is smiling, but one where he looks positively terrifying--his brow low, his scowl firmly in place. Throughout his life, Nixon would be the man with two faces--he would be on the brink of acknowledging a deep-seated fear or feeling--then, immediately fearing he’d revealed too much, would pull back and amend the thought. “There were times when I suppose we were tempted to run away and all that sort of thing,” he once told a biographer. “But on the other hand it was a happy home.”  In the age of the Internet, Nixon would have been a serial killer, not President. Nixon attended school in Yorba Linda, and the curriculum was very simple: math, reading, recess, spelling, lunch, penmanship, reading, math, language, geography. All the school teachers? Young women, saddled with Quaker rules--no dancing, no alcohol, and no talking to men. They were also told where they could live, who they could live with, and they had to cook their own dinner on hot plates in their rooms. And you teachers whine about how bad you have it now.  Even though he attended school without shoes, Hannah Nixon’s boys were never dirty--they always wore clean, white, pressed shirts, and Hannah instructed Nixon’s teachers to call him Richard, not “Dick”. “I named him Richard,” she said simply. Sorry, lady, but once a bunch of kids find out your name is “Dick”, no one is calling anyone “Richard”. Nixon himself, though, was an exceptional student. His teachers remember him as such--a solemn and businesslike learner. “He absorbed knowledge of any kind like a blotter,” one of them remembered. Another teacher remembered Nixon as a Republican at a young age, too--she told a story about how young Nixon stood on a literal actual stump at the age of seven and told his fellow students why their parents should vote for Warren Harding in 1920. Hm. In 1922, Frank Nixon finally caught a break. He’d worked a series of odd jobs--as a roustabout in the new California oil fields, a citrus farmer, cutting and selling firewood, and land-clearing with a neighbor, to name a few, but 1922 had seen a massive boom in the use of the automobile--and nearby Whittier, California, was quickly becoming a travel hub. So, he bought a lot on the corner of Whittier Boulevard and built a gas station. It worked out extremely well--Whittier wasn’t like Yorba Linda. It had a thriving business district, a college, and wealthy clientele--all of whom owned automobiles and needed fuel. It marked a surprising change in lifestyle for Nixon--he would spend summers at his mother’s family ranch, riding horses, hunting rabbits, and eating well for the first time in his life. As for his father, Frank sold gasoline and tires at a surprisingly high rate to his rural clientele, and he gained enough in capital to add a small store onto the gas station, stocked with produce and basic groceries. He even bought the old church in Whittier, lifted it wholly off the foundation, and had it towed by trucks and rollers to his gas station, wherein he used it as an office. The Roaring Twenties were good to the Nixons. The store grew--grew, in fact, to the point where Frank Nixon focused more on the grocery store and leased out the gas station. There were now racks upon racks of produce, a meat counter, shelves of canned and packaged goods, and the family would even box and deliver orders. Frank hired help, but his primary source of aid was always his boys. “They worked,” Harry Schuyler, the Nixons’ neighbor, remembered. “From the time they were able to work, they worked. What did they do when they got home from school? They worked.”  Even in the face of prosperity, though, Frank Nixon didn’t change. He held grudges against neighbors and customers for perceived slights, refusing to carry bags for one woman who was eight months pregnant. One of his nieces used to help clean the house, and she kept finding coins--nickels and dimes--all over the place. When she asked Hannah about it, she learned that Frank was intentionally putting them there as a test of her honesty. Starting to see where the son got his paranoia from? As for Dick, he kept studying hard. He finished the fifth and sixth grades in East Whittier, then mid-way through seventh grade went to live with an aunt in Lindsay, California so she could teach him music. He’d spend the rest of his high school years divided like this--between another aunt in Fullerton and home in Whittier. They were largely uneventful--but for what happened in 1925. One day in spring of that year his family arrived to take him home, and his little brother Arthur asked permission to give his big brother a kiss. Seems pretty normal, right? Well, here’s where it goes off the rails. Three weeks later, Arthur Nixon was dead. Doctors diagnosed him with tubercular meningitis--a strain of tuberculosis that attacked the nervous system. One morning, little Arthur had complained that he was tired--the next, his parents were coming back downstairs, crying hysterically, and Nixon’s father told him, “They say the little darling is going to die.” Nixon and his brothers were sent to stay with one of their aunts, and she woke them one night with the terrible tidings of Arthur’s death. Nixon was devastated, his mother remembered. quote:…[he] slipped into a big chair and sat staring into space, silent and dry-eyed in the undemonstrative way in which, because of his choked deep feeling, he was always to face tragedy. And this wasn’t the last dose of tragedy to hit the Nixons. Two years later, when Richard was fourteen, his older brother Harold returned from a boarding school in New England...coughing up blood. See, here’s the thing--growing up, the Nixon boys had been fed raw milk from the family’s livestock. Frank didn’t put much stock in things like “pasteurization” and “sterilization”. He flatly refused to pay any heed to the doctor’s warning that the cow should be tested for the tuberculosis bacteria. Nixon remembers this bitterly. “Our family paid a heavy price,” he said years later. The worst part? Arthur’s death was quick but Harold clung on for six long years--as he lived an almost Kennedy-esque carefree existence, chasing girls, racing hot rods, and gambling, he wrestled inwardly with the knowledge that he didn’t have long to live. For a short time, Frank Nixon committed his son to a sanitarium--but he left that for the dry mountain air of Prescott, Arizona, accompanied by his mother. Nixon visited often, taking odd jobs to earn money--he would at one time or another be a chicken-plucker, a carnival barker, and a pool boy. To save himself, Nixon dove into his schoolwork. He became president of his eighth grade class, and when asked about what he’d like to do with his future, he said “I would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people.” Despite this, however, his nickname, “Gloomy Gus”, persisted. Nixon didn’t smile easily, and even as a kid he still had that heavy brow and the eternally down-turned mouth. “Unconsciously...I think Richard may have felt a kind of guilt that he was alive,” Hannah Nixon said once. “It seemed that Richard was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up for our loss.” If anything, I’d put the blame on his parents for not telling young Nixon that he didn’t have to do this. Gloomy Gus  Despite all the tragedy and hardship that had befallen Nixon in life, he continued to excel academically. He was a straight-A student in high school and quickly gained a reputation as a sterling public speaker. If you look closely, though, you can already see the origins of a man who would grow up to dislike the media. He argued in 1929 that “libelous, indecent, and injurious statements” should not be covered by the First Amendment. “Should the morals of the nation be offended and polluted in the name of freedom of speech or freedom of the press?” he asked. Oh, Dick, sweetie...I have some terrible news for you. He flourished, though. At Fullerton High School, he joined the debate team, earned a spot on the JV football team, was in the drama club plays, and even played the violin in the school’s orchestra. Nevertheless, his classmates remember him as “prissy”--he still wore those starched, ironed white shirts, and he gargled before leaving the house every morning, constantly checking his breath throughout the day. This might not sound prissy to you, but recall that 1929 was the beginning of the Depression--kids were lucky if they were going to school with shoes, let alone clean mouths. Funny anecdote: Nixon didn’t like riding the school bus. Apparently, his classmates had started a fad wherein they wore corduroy pants every day and refused to wash them until they were unspeakably filthy, and nowhere was this more of a problem for the “prissy” Dick Nixon than on the school bus. You know what? I’m not entirely sure I blame him. People who don’t wash are gross. As for girls, well, Nixon wasn’t his father. His Quaker upbringing had brought with it certain inhibitions and taboos about sex. Nixon would remain a virgin until he was in his late twenties, in fact--something he wouldn’t confess until a couple decades after the fact. All the way through high school, college, and law school, Dick remained, well...unspoiled. If you ask me, the man shoulda gotten some. Maybe he would have been less of an rear end in a top hat. The funny thing? Nixon wasn’t without admirers. There were girls--distant cousins and classmates--who remember being attracted to him. “I used to think he was very handsome,” said cousin Jo Marcelle. “I thought his eyes were just beautiful. He has dark eyes. He has so much expression in them.” Another cousin, Alice Nixon, spoke of an inner beauty. “[There] was a warmth underneath, and if you get through this shell, there is a wonderful person, an understanding person.” If Truman was our first goon President, I have a funny feeling that Nixon might have been our second. After graduating from Whittier High (he transferred schools) in 1930 at the age of 16, Nixon’s world was changing. The stock market had crashed and Europe was sliding towards fascism--but none of that meant anything to a young man who had just graduated high school at the top of his class and wanted to go to college. And he had offers. Oh, lord did he ever. Harvard and Yale came calling with the promise of scholarships, and Nixon BADLY wanted to go to an Ivy League school. He viewed it as one of the ultimate accomplishments--something that would signify that he had finally “made it”. But his mother had just had a new baby very recently--despite his parents’ middle age, Frank Nixon’s horniness apparently knew no bounds, and Edward Nixon was born in the spring of 1930. This was too much. With the economic anxiety brought on by the Great Depression, the costs of raising a new baby, and the expenses incurred by caring for the tuberculosis-stricken Harold, the family could not afford to have Nixon go so far away. Nor could they afford room and board in Cambridge or New Haven. Nixon dutifully heeded his parents and enrolled instead at nearby Whittier College, where his tuition would be covered by an inheritance from his grandfather...but he would never forget his inability to achieve his dream, and it no doubt contributed to his antipathy towards “Ivy League elites” in later years. It also might have had to do with the fact that the avatar of this privilege was John F. Kennedy, a figure Nixon would come to detest later in life. Who knows? Anyway, once again, they couldn’t lick our Dick. He flourished at Whittier--the freshmen elected him class President, and for once, Nixon let his hair down a little. He bought his first car--a Model A Ford. He joined several different intramural sports teams, led the school’s glee club on a statewide tour, and even visited his first speakeasy in San Francisco (remember, we’re still at the height of Prohibition in 1930). He became less awkward and more personable, but he never abandoned his almost frenetic work ethic--his schedule included classwork, the debate club, student government, glee club, football, and the school play, much like at Fullerton. But most of all, Nixon relished the disdain of those who thought themselves his “betters”. As John Farrell puts it: quote:His classmates—sobered by the era’s financial and political turmoil, some skipping meals and selling blood to get by—were moving in his direction. These were serious times, and they came to appreciate his diligence and resilience. There were those who sneered at the grocer’s boy who rose at 3:30 a.m. to drive to Los Angeles in the family truck and buy fruit and vegetables for the Nixon market…[And] there were more than a few who laughed when he joined the varsity football squad, warmed the bench, and never won his letter. But many saw, and admired, Nixon’s guts. And brains. Besides, Whittier College was tiny. With but some hundred students in the class of 1934, Dick had no host of competitors for student leadership. This leads in nicely to my next section. Interlude: The Franklins, The Orthogonians, And First Loves  I felt that this was something worth telling you about, for reasons that you’ll understand once you read it. I’ve already told you that Richard Nixon was beginning to develop a sort of “us-against-them” mentality when it came to the have-mores in society. This was exacerbated throughout his life by his father’s stinginess and crotchety nature, his inability to attend an Ivy League school like he’d wanted, and the low regard in which some (but not all) of his classmates held him. With that in mind, let’s learn about the Whittier College Franklin Club. The Franklin Society, as it’s known now, was the oldest fraternity at Whittier. Founded in 1921, its members were almost exclusively upper-crusters and the campus elite: star athletes, rich kids, you know the type. The reason I get to tell you about them is that despite the fact that Dick Nixon was the President of his class and the head of the debate team and the glee club, the Franklins never extended him an invitation to join them. Pop quiz: How do you think this played to a kid with deep insecurities and a rapidly-burgeoning disdain for those he viewed as “the elite”? You know the answer, I don’t have to tell you. It bothered Dick. Deeply. Back in high school, he’d lost an election for class President to a classmate he dubbed an “athlete and personality boy”. Fortunately for him, he was among friends--other scrappers who had worked very hard to get where they’d gotten, and were in no mood to have a bunch of fancy-pants rich kids tell them they weren’t good enough. In response to the snub from the Franklins, Nixon helped to organize a competing fraternity that came to be known as the Orthogonians.  “They were the haves and we were the have nots, see?” Nixon recalled later. The Orthogonians, rather than shying away from their social status, embraced it. They were the plebeians and the proletariat--the forerunners of the people Nixon would call the “Silent Majority” decades later when he ran for President. The Franklins wore tuxedos in their class pictures; the Orthogonians wore open-collar white shirts. The Franklins held fancy dress balls and ornate feasts; the Orthogonians thrived on dinners of beans and spaghetti. No, I’m not making that up. Beans and spaghetti. Interestingly enough, however, the Orthogonians also took pride in being more progressive than their rich counterparts. They accepted African-Americans into their ranks, for one thing--something that was no small feat in 1930s California. Their motto? “Beans, Brains, Brawn, and Bowels”. I, uh...I’m not touching that one. Nixon’s membership in the Orthogonians lent it academic cred--one of its founders, Keith Wood, recalled “Our founders did not want us to be known as an unintelligent bunch of athletes”. Nixon helped write the club’s constitution, the official club song lyrics, and he also helped devise its rather sadistic initiation rites (read: frat hazing). But most of all, they gave Nixon something he’d never had before: a political base. Like I said, the Orthogonians were supposed to represent the everyman, the poor kids scraping their way through school, and the hardest workers at Whittier College. These people provided Nixon with a launching pad for campus politics--he had most of the athletes on his side in the Orthogonians, which never hurt when it came to popularity contests. Nixon paid them back in kind, defending his classmates’ interests before college administration in his capacity as President, and even leading a movement to allow dancing on campus. Yes, Nixon was the protagonist from Footloose. And yet even as he thrived, he still remained very abstemious. One thing you might not know about Richard Nixon: Pat wasn’t his first love. No, our Dick had a girlfriend!  He’d actually met Ola Florence Welch back during his senior year at Whittier High School, when they’d been the leads in the school production of The Aeneid. See, there’s a scene in this play where there’s a rather enthusiastic kiss between these two characters, and their rather awkward performance caused the teenage audience to break out laughing. Nixon was mortified. He stomped out of rehearsal the next day, but he wrote a note to Ola to apologize almost immediately. Ah, l’amour. Needless to say, they started to date--and they were very close. Ola was everything Nixon wasn’t--bubbly, personable, outgoing, and she was utterly fascinated by Richard Nixon. She loved his dark and serious manner--that he spoke to her of politics, history and international affairs rather than gushy romantic crap. And yet? Despite Ola finding him so irresistible, there was “no hanky-panky” as Nixon would put it in his memoirs. They attended Whittier College together, and one night during their junior year, Nixon asked Ola to marry him. She accepted. “I thought Dick was wonderful...so strong, so clever, so articulate,” Ola recalled years later. “He wrote me notes which I just couldn’t believe, they had such beautiful words and thoughts.” Why did I bother telling you all this? Well, it leads into what Nixon did next. Go Blue Devils!  After graduating Whittier College in the fall of 1934, Nixon was twenty-one and on the path he’d set for himself once again--and this time, he got what he wanted. He was accepted to Duke Law School, over on the East Coast. Problem was, he still wasn’t exactly well-off. Even as he studied furiously, ran for and won the Presidency of the Duke school bar association, and would eventually graduate near the top of his class, Nixon was still scraping by. He took money from relatives and worked menial jobs to make enough money to survive. His letters home reflect a tortured soul--a young man who, even as he works his fingers to the bone, is afraid that he’s going to waste the opportunity. “He was scared to death he was going to flunk out,” a classmate recalled. Nixon’s inferiority complex wasn’t helped by the fact that his classmates at Duke were favorite sons--from bigger places and possessed of much more in the way of assets and opportunities. His girlfriend, Ola, recalls that there were moments where he actually considered quitting school. “I’ve almost decided that I don’t like this law business. No fooling. I’m getting almost disgusted,” he wrote to her in one particularly despondent letter. Funny anecdote: all the stress caused Nixon to develop a recurring, nagging case of hemorrhoids. One of his aunts wrote to him, urging him to relax, and included her own home remedy for them. Much like at Whittier, Nixon’s former classmates are divided on their opinions of him. In their recollections they joke about his “iron butt” and his well-worn wardrobe, but they also praise his commitment, his work ethic, and his drive. However, “Gloomy Gus” followed him even to Duke: some of his contemporaries found him rather unpleasant to be around. Classmate Lyman Brownfield remembers Nixon as a bit of a killjoy. quote:He never expected anything good to happen to him or to anyone close to him which wasn’t earned...Any time someone started blowing rosy bubbles, you could count on Nixon to burst them with a little sharp prick. Perhaps it was his living quarters that contributed to his depression too. Nixon lived in rented rooms in nearby Durham--and then in a remote cabin in the woods during his senior year with Brownfield and two other seniors. Dubbed “Whippoorwill Manor” by the boys, it had no electricity and no running water. Nixon and his cohorts stashed their towels and shaving kits on campus, and would shower in the school’s gym. Every morning he’d get up and dress, then walk through the forest to the Duke campus. “Let me tell you about the nuttiest of the nutty Nixons,” he once wrote to Ola. “He remains a stolid bachelor and I think his hair is beginning to thin out. He doesn’t smoke, he drinks very little, he swears less, and he is as crazy as ever. He still thinks an awful lot of his mother.” But even Ola was losing her allure. After Nixon’s brother Harold died, John Farrell writes of an “emotional deadness” that overcame him. His mercurial nature began to wear on Ola, even in his letters, and even as he wrote to her from North Carolina and spoke of marriage as though it was inevitable, he learned she was seeing someone else when he returned to Whittier after his first year of law school. He called her and confronted her, ending the conversation with “If I never see you again it will be too soon!” and banging down the phone. But Nixon seemed unable to really let Ola go. For weeks afterwards he sent her letters, some of them terribly self-denigrating and pathetic. He likened himself to a “bad penny” that was “impossible to get rid of”, and he said “when a person is worth even less than that, the impossibility becomes complete.” This dude hated himself.  A few months into 1936, she’d be married, and Nixon would be forced to recognize the inevitable...but he’d always remember her in a positive light. quote:Old memories are slowly fading away. New ones are taking their place...But I shall always remember the kindness, the beauty, the loveliness that was, that is, and shall for ever be Ola Florence Welch. Now What?  Here’s the thing about Duke--back in the 1930s it was not as prestigious a university as it is now. Sure, it turned out graduates that took jobs in government, but most of its scions returned home after leaving to join local law practices. The Wall Street firms, such as the ones Richard Nixon aspired to join, were the nearly-exclusive domain of the Ivy League. And Nixon was not known as a terribly imaginative student, according to his professors, though he was very bright and hard-working. “There was the suggestion of an intellectual inferiority complex,” one of his professors, Lon Fuller, remembered. Now let’s put all the pieces together. Nixon is a brilliant student, but he’s also got a very fragile ego. He has a huge persecution complex and a very well-developed sense of “us versus them” when it comes to class warfare. He shows a clear disdain for the rich and the privileged because they are afforded opportunities that are unavailable to him. And now he’s applying for a job. What’s the one thing that would be the worst for him at this point in time? If you guessed “complete rejection”, you’re right in one. Nixon wasn’t without help--he had glowing recommendations from his professors, and those recommendations got him interviews with several New York law firms...but they didn’t get him any offers. He’d dabbled in criminal justice during an internship with the Durham district attorney, so he decided to send an application to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI liked his application--but it never went anywhere. There was no escaping Whittier, it seemed. After graduating third in his class from Duke Law in 1937, Nixon was forced to return home. He was 24, morose, angry, and had no prospects--despite the fact that his mother had prevailed upon a family friend in town, Tom Bewley, to offer him a position at the law firm of Wingert & Bewley. The law firm handled all of Whittier’s legal matters--oil leases, matrimonial disputes, tax issues, and even probate matters--but it wasn’t what Nixon wanted to do. His dreams still lay in the big Wall Street firms or on Capitol Hill. He didn’t want to help farmers draft their wills for the rest of his life. But Nixon had a bizarre form of persistent optimism that kept him going. He took the California bar exam, passed, and joined Bewley’s law firm in late 1937. The pay was $50 a month. Much like every other part of his life, Nixon took it extremely seriously, working late, taking lunch at his desk, and keeping his nose buried in his cases. (The picture at the top of this section is the building in which Wingert & Bewley was based out of). But he hosed up his very first opportunity. Tom Bewley had given him a fairly simple case to handle, but Nixon was green. He’d foolishly asked the opposing counsel for advice, and he’d been lied to. The client angrily sued Wingert & Bewley for malpractice, and Nixon offered to resign. Bewley said no. He accepted responsibility for his protege’s mistake and the firm settled with the client for $4800. It’s hard to imagine Nixon as a fuckup, isn’t it? Criminal, maybe, but not a fuckup. Anyway, his time at the firm was...awkward for him. He was still that square-rear end Quaker from Yorba Linda, and when the Wingert family invited him on his first trip to a race track, he declined to bet on a horse. When they brought him to a fancy Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, he wouldn’t order a drink. “I never once remember Dick relaxing...not for a minute,” Tom Bewley recalled. “I saw him laugh only once. And in all that time I never went to lunch with Dick just for fun.” Nixon’s Achilles heel was divorce cases--he used to blush crimson whenever female clients would describe how their husbands were letting them down sexually. Once, he had to interview a couple that had been caught having sex in a public park, an experience that was both annoying and mortifying to him. Even then, friends recall, Nixon’s associates remember him as having a particular animus against women that he perceived as wanting to “punish” their husbands for petty grievances. He did better with tax cases and other matters that involved cool, dispassionate logic. Nixon might have been our first incel President in the age of the Internet. I can just picture him hunched over a computer bitching on Reddit about “females”. There was no denying Nixon was good at his job. Wingert & Bewley became Wingert, Bewley & Nixon in 1939, and he opened a branch of the office in La Habra, California. Still, he felt rather empty. He’d made no forward progress, and despite Frank and Hannah Nixon buying a fancy house on the hill above Whittier College to enhance Nixon’s social standing, it was widely perceived by those in Whittier who knew him that his promise had soured. Nixon actually contemplated packing up and moving to Cuba to start over. He had nothing tangible going for him, really...except one thing. He was in love. Interlude: Pat In early 1938, Nixon rediscovered an old love: drama. He joined a theater group in Whittier and auditioned for a play called The Dark Tower. We already know that Nixon was a pretty good actor--he’d done it in both high school and college, and it’s where he’d met Ola Florence Welch in high school. He didn’t manage to get the lead in this one; only a bit part as a playwright, but this beautiful young lady managed to get a bit part as well.  Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan was a farmer’s daughter. Born in Artesia, California, she’d fled the family home as soon as she could to move to New York, where she worked in a Catholic hospital tending to tuberculosis patients. She’d left California a chubby teenager, but New York brought her “poise, sophistication...and admirers”, as John Farrell put it, and she was now a willowy, beautiful strawberry blond with high cheekbones. She returned to California and enrolled at USC, but the acting life was too superficial for her. As her friend Helene Drown put it, Pat had her dance cards filled with admiring men--and she wanted to leave hard times behind her. “She had gaiety and a love for life and a sparkle in her eye,” Drown said. Nixon was instantly smitten when he met her. He asked her out...and she turned him down. A few nights later, he asked her again. Again, she turned him down, laughing slightly. “Don’t laugh, Nixon said to her, as serious as a heart attack. “One day, I’m going to marry you.” These romantic stories from the thirties and forties must have felt and sounded romantic then, but like Harry and Bess Truman, they just scream “stalker” now. In March, on her birthday, Nixon sent her a dozen roses. “Gee, Dick--guess I am a pretty lucky Irishman!” she wrote. “Best of all was knowing you remembered.” It was fairly obvious that Pat was not all that interested in the beginning. Nixon was glum, serious, and seemed to find little joy in life, and Pat was…just so not any of that. She found Nixon’s methods of courting her...bizarre, to say the least. Within days of meeting her, he’d introduced her to his parents, and he would constantly show up at her house at night, begging her to take walks around town with him. CALL THE POLICE ON When she rebuffed his advances and closed the door in his face, he still didn’t give up. He’d slip notes under her door. “I know I’m crazy,” he wrote her once, “and that I don’t take hints, but you see, Miss Pat, I like you!” Nixon’s devotion constantly straddled the knife-edge between obsession and love--he would do things like drive Pat to Los Angeles on weekends so she could go on dates with other men. “Please forgive me for acting like a sorehead when you gently ushered me out the other night,” he wrote her once, after a fresh attempt by her to rid herself of him. “You must have thought I was trying to put on the attitude that I didn’t really give a darn...May I say now what I should have said then: I appreciated immeasurably those little rides and chats with you.” Seriously, guys, this “romance”...not only was it almost entirely one-sided, it was one bad day away from being a murder-suicide at this point. In September of 1940, Pat moved and didn’t give Nixon her new address...so he wrote pleadingly to her at school. “[I need] so very much to see you again--after class, before breakfast, Sunday, or any time you might be able to stand me!” he said. Pat relented and gave him her new address. Pat, honey...this is roughly the time when you say that you live on 123 Mockingbird Lane and give Dick a phone number with six digits. The reason she didn’t, though, is because she was starting to enjoy the attention...and there was no denying she and Nixon had much in common. Like him, she’d spent her childhood working on a farm and yearning to be anywhere but in the boondocks. She too had had a volatile father and a conciliatory mother--something that led her to avoid personal confrontations, just like him. Pat had lost her father to tuberculosis, Nixon had lost two brothers. Most of all, though, they were too smart and disciplined to be ignored by the elite in school, but they were never allowed to “belong”. That bred the chips on their shoulders--Pat had worked as a model and salesgirl on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles during her years at USC, and she often groused about having to “grin at the fat, rich customers” to get them to buy. She recognized in Nixon a kindred spirit--someone whose drive was certain to take him places, even though he wasn’t in a great place right now. Slowly but surely, Pat relented. She and Dick were, in many ways, too similar NOT to end up together. In February 1940 on the second anniversary of the day they met, Nixon made the following vow: quote:When the winds blow and the rains fall and the sun shines through the clouds, as it is now, he still resolves as he did then, that nothing so fine ever happened to him or anyone else as falling in love with Thee—my dearest heart. Nixon would accumulate many enemies later in life, but one fact is clear: he was deeply, deeply in love with Pat, and he’d remain so for the rest of his life. One night in March, he and Pat drove out to Dana Point near San Clemente, California, and he proposed to her. She accepted, prompting Dick to send her an engagement ring in a basket of flowers a few days later. As weird as Nixon’s promise no doubt sounds to you, he made it come true. In June 1940, Richard Nixon wed Pat Ryan in a small, unassuming ceremony at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. Fun fact: it wasn’t until Nixon and Pat signed their marriage license that he learned her real name was “Thelma”. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Jun 24, 2020 |
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May 18, 2019 20:02
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The Navy Man Almost immediately after marrying Pat, Nixon’s fortunes began to turn. One of the things that had attracted her to him in the end, after all, was his potential to “accomplish great ends” as she put it. It coincided with a rather nasty turn in the world’s temperature, too--the evils of Nazi Germany were spreading across Europe and America was preparing itself (though unofficially) to go to war at any moment. As for Nixon, he gave a brief look at running for state assemblyman when it looked like the incumbent in his district might step down--but it didn’t end up coming to fruition. Still, he spent some time on the speaking circuit in the fall on behalf of Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. Then it finally happened, at long last. One of Nixon’s old professors recommended him for a job as a staff attorney in the Office of Price Administration in Washington D.C.. The office had been newly-formed to deal with America’s rapidly-growing war footing, and Nixon happily accepted. Pat was eager to leave Whittier too--the residents had not taken kindly to her. They thought she’d “ensnared” Nixon as a vehicle for her own ambition. Now, you and I know the story of the Pat/Dick love connection, and we know this is patently untrue. Nevertheless, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on--as one Whittier resident, Judith Wingert Loubet, sister of Nixon’s law partner, remembered: quote:It was a gossipy town—terribly so...Some people felt that he should have been going with a girl from, you know, a better family…[a woman] that didn’t work….They were very unfair to her. Dicks. But Nixon hadn’t yet reached Washington when he and Pat heard the news about Pearl Harbor in December 1941. They had just left a movie theater, and a month later when they arrived in DC, the city was on war footing. The OPA’s mission changed overnight--from fighting inflation to designing and administering a huge system of wartime rationing. Nixon’s job was to work on tire and rubber regulations, and he was pretty good at it--he rose fast, earned promotions and pay raises and was put in charge of gasoline price controls as well--but he came to detest the large government bureaucracy the New Deal had put in place. Unlike the privileged few, however, Nixon felt that instead of sitting behind a desk in Washington, he could do better by fighting fascism directly. Now, he had legal protection from the draft--whether it was his job, his marriage, or his Quaker faith--but he enlisted and attended officer candidate school. He knew that military service offered those with little means and less opportunities a chance to do great things--it was, often, the great equalizer, and World War II would turn out a great deal of very prominent military officers and politicians. So Dick shipped out in August 1942 to Quonset Point, Rhode Island, for Naval OCS, and he requested carrier duty as an assignment--something that was particularly dangerous, he knew. The Lexington and the Yorktown had both been sunk, one at the Battle of Coral Sea and the other at Midway. In the meantime he marked time in Iowa, on Ottumwa Air Base. He helped fellow officers with tax returns, hosted a radio show, and served as an aide to the base’s executive officer. The whole time he kept feverishly lobbying for a transfer, and he was finally granted one in May 1943. Nixon was shipped out to the Solomon Islands in June just after the fight for Guadalcanal had ended. He arrived just as Allied forces in the Pacific went on the offensive, island-hopping towards New Britain--and he was, of course, in the same theater with several men whose paths would intersect with his after the war, such as John Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, John Mitchell, and a Marine lieutenant named Joe McCarthy. Funny how life works.  He was assigned to the South Pacific Air Transport Command, under Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, but he kept trying to persuade the navy to send him “up the line”, so to speak. “He wanted to get into something where the smell of combat was closer,” Carl Fleps, one of his superior officers, recalls. Nixon made it to the front at Bougainville, where Japanese counterattacks were bombing and shelling American forces. The hut he was staying in was destroyed as he huddled in a foxhole during the battle, and on another night, he felt an eight-inch poisonous centipede crawling on him while he slept. Leaping up, he threw it off himself frantically--only to have it land on a tentmate, Hollis Dole. It stung Dole, sending him to the infirmary in excruciating pain. Nixon was a very able soldier and fairly popular with his men, who nicknamed him “Nick”. Nevertheless, “Gloomy Gus” had followed him to the Pacific too. Hollis Dole remembers. quote:Nixon always seemed to be two people: one, very quiet, very much in the background, and actually somewhat morose...But when the chips were down it was just as if he were electrified. He knew what to say, how to say it, and he became quite animated and smiled. Fun fact: Nixon learned to play poker in the South Pacific, and he won. A lot. His fellow soldiers played rashly and impatiently, but not Nixon. “When I knew that I didn’t have the cards,” he remembered, “I got the hell out.” He took a lot in weekly beer rations that way. Being away from Pat put pressure on their relationship, though. She rediscovered her taste for freedom in his absence. Once, she wrote him, “I have to admit that I am pretty self-reliant, and if I didn’t love you, I would feel very differently...these many months you have been away have been full of interest, and had I not missed you so much and had I been footloose, could have been extremely happy. So, Sweet, you’ll always have to love me lots and never let me change my feelings for you.” I’m...not even sure what she was going for here. “Hey, Dick! I coulda cheated on you, but I didn’t! Aren’t you proud of me?!” It just seems...twisted. Emotionally blackmailing even. Nixon’s tour in the South Pacific, mercifully, allowed him to avoid sickness or injury, aside from a bad case of jungle fungus at one point. He was happy to return to the states in 1944 to begin an assignment as the administrative officer at Alameda Air Station in San Francisco, then the Navy sent him back east to Philadelphia, to the Bureau of Aeronautics. He was put in charge of drawing down the war contracts, now that the war was winding down (it was January 1945). Why did I tell you all of that? Dick For Congress?  In the summer of 1945, the Navy needed a new legal liaison in Baltimore, Maryland. The Glenn L. Martin aeronautics complex in the city was building bomber planes, and it was one of the largest such plants in the world. Fifty thousand employees built seaplanes, bombers, and other aircraft for the war effort. The Navy liaison was Lieutenant John Renneburg--his assignment was to begin the massive drawdown of production and settle the government contracts with the company. However, Renneburg had requested a transfer--something he’d been granted on the condition that he’d train a replacement. The man the Navy sent? Lieutenant Richard Nixon, fresh off the fighting in the Pacific theater. They’d bounced Nixon around Washington, Philadelphia, and New York between 1944 and 1945, and now they were staying in Stansbury Manor, a complex of two-story apartment buildings near the Martin airfield in Baltimore. Under Renneburg’s tutelage, Nixon spent his days haggling with the firm’s accountants on the Navy’s behalf. As for Renneburg, he liked Nixon. The work was demanding, to be sure, but he found Nixon smart and serious--and, bizarrely, friendly. Inevitably, however, they talked about civilian life. One day, Renneburg asked him point-blank what he was planning to do when he was discharged. He didn’t know. Nixon had given some thought to a firm in Manhattan, fulfilling an old dream, but if all else failed, he still had a job back in Whittier at Wingert, Bewley, and Nixon....but he did mention that he’d gotten a letter from some friends back home encouraging him to run for Congress. Whittier resided in California’s 12th Congressional District, and the incumbent was this man.  Jerry Voorhis had served ten years in Congress at this point. A staunch New Deal Democrat, he’d earned the support of the 12th’s citrus ranchers and farmers due to his work on the House Agricultural Committee. A former member of the Socialist Party, he was a graduate of Yale University and the son of a retired automobile executive, wealthy enough to finance his own campaigns. If you didn’t immediately key on that as the reason Nixon decided to challenge him, I’d question just how much attention you’ve been paying so far. Nixon was hedging at this point though. “I’m not a politician. I probably would be defeated,” he told Renneburg. This is bullshit. Nixon had thought about politics pretty much his whole life, and quite frankly, if you didn’t already know that he’d called the interested parties back in Whittier the following night, then you’re dumb. Renneburg seemed to know, though--he told Nixon to accept the offer. “Even if you lose, you might pick up some clients. Someone might remember the name of Nixon,” he said. He admired Nixon--thought he’d be a voice for a new generation in uniform, returning home from war and seeking to build a better world. Is it really a stretch to think Nixon bought into it? Still, he was “Dick from Whittier,” though, as John Farrell writes. quote:Sure, the Quakers saw him as a fair-haired boy—he had been elected to student office in college, chosen to lead the junior Kiwanis club, and appointed to serve as an assistant city attorney. But he had never campaigned for public office and was thoroughly unknown in the rest of the vast Twelfth District. The lives of American presidents are often cast as Horatio Alger tales, and the stories of their rise barnacled with myths. Yet few came so far, so fast, so alone, as Nixon. Not the governor of California or his aides, nor any member of the state’s delegation to Congress knew Richard Nixon’s name. He was, he would remember, “somebody who was nothing.” What an unhealthy opinion to have of yourself. Nixon didn’t have much in the way of personal assets. What he did have, however, was the man who’d sent the letter. This is normally when I show you a picture, but sadly I don’t have one. Herman Perry was the vice president and branch manager of the Bank of America in Whittier, and he’d first met the Nixons when Frank Nixon had gone to his bank for a loan in 1907. He’d been a guest at Frank and Hannah’s wedding, and the credit he’d extended the Nixons had helped the grocery store survive the Depression. Perry’s son Hubert attended high school and college with Nixon, and the Wingert & Bewley office had been in the Bank of America building, where Nixon worked. In Richard Nixon, Perry saw a kind of “fulfillment of his own ambitions”, said his son Hubert (Hubert himself had tried law school and failed). “He saw in Dick Nixon his own dreams that he couldn’t make happen.” In 1944, Don Lycan, the vice president of the largest independent West Coast oil company, Signal Oil & Gas, was leading a drive to dump Jerry Voorhis. Unfortunately, the oil industry had become synonymous with corruption at the time. Lycan knew that he couldn’t personally do it--he’d need a front man, someone with a squeaky-clean personal resume. As for Jerry Voorhis? He’d personally pissed off every moneyed interest in the 12th District--manufacturers and big agricultural interests with his support of labor unions, insurance companies with his support of tougher antitrust rules, and small-town businessmen with his support of the New Deal’s price controls and rationing regulations. These people had stayed silent during the war, but now that it was over, they were making their grievances known. They’d tried to beat Voorhis in 1944, but the Republican candidate had gotten crushed. To Perry and Lycan, he wasn’t the type of “gut fighter” who would call Voorhis a Communist and make it stick. Nor was it a good time to do so--it was 1944, we were still fighting, and Stalin’s Soviet Union was ostensibly still our ally. It was inevitable that Nixon would jump at the chance, but Perry warned him that they wouldn’t just hand him the nomination. He’d have to audition before Republican activists in the 12th and survive a primary, where his opponents could potentially be people like war hero George Patton and state superintendent of education Walter Dexter--personalities with much more in the way of clout and resources than Dick Nixon’s. But Nixon was a “dragon-slayer,” as he put it. He wrote Perry in October after the Navy promoted him to lieutenant commander, saying “I feel very strongly that Jerry Voorhis can be beaten and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at him”, promising to wage “an aggressive, vigorous campaign of practical liberalism” to replace “Voorhis’s particular brand of New Deal”. He asserted that Voorhis’ lack of a military background would hurt him, what with all the returning GIs coming home and voting. The Republican establishment in the 12th had lost hope of ever beating Voorhis, even after the 1940 redistricting wherein Voorhis had lost some of his stronger territory in East Los Angeles. Kyle Palmer, the chief political writer for the Los Angeles Times, then a very conservative publication, didn’t really believe in Nixon’s mission at first. “My first impression of Nixon was that here was a serious, determined, somewhat gawky young fellow who was out on a sort of giant-killer operation,” Palmer recalled. “The Republicans--including myself--generally felt that it was a forlorn effort.” The Republicans in the 12th--the financiers and the political operatives--announced open “tryouts” for a candidate, and Perry began spreading the word. “Some of the people in the Whittier area are interested in suggesting the name of Lt. Richard Nixon...he has over three years of war service…[he] comes from good Quaker stock...he is a very aggressive individual,” Perry’s pitch read. Well, the primary was a bust. George Patton was killed in a car accident in Europe after the war, and Walter Dexter was strong-armed into quitting the race by Perry once he had committed to Nixon’s cause. Nixon wowed the Republican officials in the district, and he won the nomination in a walk. The race was set, and Nixon was exhilarated. “I’m sure we can win,” he said. “And that we can retain our integrity as well because we shall only say what we believe and do.” Even as he said it, he was filling yellow legal pads with notes and reminders. Things like “set up budget” and “call on newspapers, former candidates, leaders” were written on them. Benign things, things that any candidate would do. Then there was this, the last entry on one of the pads: “Set up...spies in V. camp,” he wrote. “I Had To Win”  Back to Whittier they went, Pat and Dick, to begin campaigning, even as Pat was in her third trimester of pregnancy with the couple’s first child. At first they stayed in Nixon’s parents’ house, but soon Nixon fled it for the quiet of his secretary’s home, where he could dictate letters, make lists, and leave Pat to his parents. How callous. Nixon had problems right out of the gate. Something the Republicans in Whittier hadn’t anticipated was his difficulty with women voters. After all, Pat was vivacious and beautiful--how’d he pulled her if he had problems with the ladies? Even by 1946, though, Nixon still couldn’t look female voters in the eye. This was a problem--Republican ladies’ groups were among the party’s most prized assets, and the women who had gone to work during the war were returning home with a new sense of independence. They’d need to be courted. And Nixon just couldn’t. “He was very timid,” campaign aide Roy Day recalled. “He’s anything but a coward...he just felt that women kind of bugged him...He wasn’t that way around men at all.” That’s a little bit of inborn misogyny if you ask me. Nevertheless, Day coached Nixon--warning him that lack of eye contact imparted untrustworthiness. To test him, Day invited students from the all-female Scripps College to come ask Nixon questions. They sat in a circle around him, a format which forced him to look the questioners in the eye. Doggedly, slowly, Nixon improved. He took each question, complimented the questioner, and delivered his point without being confrontational. He would never learn how to glad-hand, but he knew that the handshaking and back-slapping was necessary to go places. Other than this, though, he was a formidable campaigner. He spoke to the Elks, the Masons, and the Lions Clubs. He talked to the Rotary Club one day, then the Kiwanis the next, then he’d go to the next town--Pasadena or Pomona--and do it all over again. He was tireless, fearless, and eloquent--by March’s end alone, he’d done 36 separate engagements. When he spoke to veterans’ groups he kept his speeches less partisan, talking about his wartime experience. He recounted his time at Bougainville when he’d unloaded a plane full of munitions and replaced the cargo with wounded soldiers on their way back to the hospital at Guadalcanal. quote:His crew was a microcosm of America, he’d say, with a Texan and a New Yorker, a Mexican American and an American Indian, a boy with wealthy parents and the son of a railroad engineer. In the best American spirit they came together to fulfill their mission. Now they were home and hoping to chase their dreams. Their country owed them that, said Nixon, but government wage and price controls and other regimentations were stifling. Pat went into labor on February 21, 1946, and Nixon carried her down the stairs of his family’s home himself. Patricia “Tricia” Nixon was born in a very difficult breech birth procedure, coming into the world with a broken shoulder--and an absent father. Nixon had gone to an event in Los Angeles after the doctors had assured him that it would be hours still until the baby was born when Pat was admitted. See, I would have stayed with my wife, but that’s just me. After Tricia’s birth, Nixon dug a little deeper. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech during a commencement ceremony, accompanied by Harry Truman. Accordingly, Nixon wrote his own “iron curtain” speech. John Farrell describes it. quote:He titled it “The Challenge to Democracy” and reworked it as the campaign progressed. It began with a tour of Russian history—“a tragic story of war, starvation, torture, rape, murder and slavery”—of which the Soviet dictatorship was but the latest chapter. Isolationist sentiment was strong in the Republican Party; other, more belligerent factions were demanding a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, or a war to liberate the nations of Eastern Europe. Nixon struck a middle way. He had been briefed on the Red peril in his visits with party leaders in Washington, but his speech just as certainly reflected the long hours of study and thought he gave to world affairs. It was enlightened for a rustic candidate, calling not for war but for the active containment of Soviet adventurism—for American deployment of economic, political, and military might to “hold the line for the growth of democratic ideals” that would one day topple the totalitarian state. He recognized, as well, the seductive danger of resorting to the enemy’s tactics. “We must use means that conform to the highest moral standards,” he said. It established the young navy officer as credible on foreign affairs instantly, and it started to frighten Voorhis supporters. After seeing Nixon bring a Lions Club gathering to its feet, one of them wrote to Voorhis saying “He is dangerous...I’m getting nervous about the situation, Jerry.” It was true that Nixon’s favorite target audience was veterans. The American Legion and VFW posts were, traditionally, supposed to be non-partisan, but Nixon found a way to make an effective pitch to them. “He has joined the Legion and also the VFW and...he just drops into the Post meetings very informally and quite often…[he] has quite a bit to say about veteran needs and what he will do when he gets into Congress. These World War II veterans know very little about your work,” Voorhis campaign advisor Jack Long wrote his boss in April 1946. There were just two problems with Nixon’s campaign--while Voorhis could go for the long haul, his could not. It lacked two things: money, and “punch”. As for money, well, Nixon knew he had a place he could go--the oil interests that resided in the 12th District. He did that through Herman Perry, of course, and the oilmen wasted no time in approaching Nixon. They wanted Voorhis gone more than anyone. In particular, they wanted an answer to whether or not Nixon favored federal control of offshore oil drilling. They reached an agreement. In exchange for any votes Nixon would provide on the tidelands oil question--namely, allowing companies like Signal to drill offshore without obtaining a waiver from the federal government--the oil executives would funnel money through a campaign backchannel. These funds would pay for billboards, newspaper ads, canvassers, and direct mailings--no small expenses. If all of this is sounding shady as gently caress to you, that’s OK. It is shady as gently caress. Nixon’s campaign couldn’t keep talking about veterans in peacetime either--the message was wearing stale, and Roy Day told him, “Sending out laudatory statements about you from the people in the district will not do the trick.” No, but it might have allowed Nixon to keep his honor intact. Anyway, to introduce Nixon to a brand of what was called “rocking, socking politics”, Day hired this man.  Murray Chotiner was a 36-year old attorney from Los Angeles, and he played defense attorney to a laundry list of shady characters, from bookies to high-stakes gamblers. In addition to a taste for fast women and nice suits, he also had a passion for politics. He’d gone to school at UCLA, graduated law school at twenty and directed Earl Warren’s 1942 campaign for governor in Southern California. However, he and Warren split rather rancorously when he asked the governor to intervene on behalf of one of his less-savory clients--in fact, Warren aide Warren Olney would describe Chotiner as “nothing but a two-bit crook”. As John Farrell put it, “If Nixon wanted meat, Chotiner was his butcher.” Chotiner’s style was fast, aggressive, and rather...cavalier with the truth. Anyway, it wasn’t much of a mystery as to how Nixon would attack Voorhis--he’d known going in that the Republicans in the 12th were expecting him to do what the 1944 campaign had not. He had been told how Voorhis was revered by the “pinko” crowd and voted with “the most radical element” in Congress. By selectively chopping up and cherry-picking Voorhis’ voting record, Nixon made Voorhis seem like something he wasn’t. Interestingly enough, one of Voorhis’ signature bills was the Voorhis Act of 1940--a law which would force Communists and other subversives to register with the federal government. Voorhis himself actually served on the House Un-American Activities Committee (we know it better, of course, as HUAC). This would have put the lie to Nixon’s tales, of course--so he erased history. With Chotiner's help, he omitted all mentions of Voorhis’ first three terms of work in his campaign literature. The standard by which the incumbent would be judged was his last four years instead, which included a 1945 vote against making HUAC a permanent committee. Nixon seized on this. What was Jerry Voorhis hiding, he asked voters? Who was he protecting? Didn’t he understand the Communist threat? 1946 was a bad year for Democrats anyway. Harry Truman’s grasp of foreign policy was looking rather shaky at best--he’d accompanied Churchill to Missouri, then turned around and endorsed Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace’s more conciliatory approach to the Soviet Union, then under public pressure had publicly rebuked and fired Wallace. Truman was clearly a flag flapping in the breeze, and a Boston-based advertising agency made great hay out of the fact that all this was happening under fourteen years of Democratic hegemony. The slogan Republicans used was simple: “Had enough?” As for Voorhis, he never figured out how to effectively combat Nixon’s accusations of perfidy. “There was a lot of fear,” Nixon campaign aide Frank Jorgensen remembered. The campaign never actually had to directly call Jerry Voorhis a Communist--voters made the implicit connection between Nixon’s words and his meaning all by themselves. Then, on the debate stage, Nixon struck the fatal blow. See, there’d been a bit of a back-and-forth for a few weeks over an endorsement from a PAC. I’ll let John Farrell tell the story. quote:The thread on which Nixon hung the charge was a provisional endorsement that Voorhis had gotten, back in March, from the Los Angeles chapter of the National Citizens’ Political Action Committee, a harmless group of left-wing activists. The NC-PAC, however, was a spinoff of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the militant labor group that had its own political action committee—the powerful CIO-PAC, regularly called “the PAC.” And several of the CIO’s member unions had been infiltrated and dominated by Communists. “The CIO is drunk with power. They have had a good taste of it. They like it. And I suspect that they feel strong enough to get it,” Charles Voorhis warned his son. There was no question “but that CIO is saturated with the more radical elements of our society…including the real Communists.” Now, if you didn’t read that and go “Of course Nixon conflated NC-PAC and CIO-PAC”, you’re not paying attention, because that’s exactly what he did. NC-PAC had endorsed Voorhis, of course, but their association with CIO-PAC worried him. Fast forward again to the debate. Nixon made the charge that Voorhis had taken the CIO-PAC’s endorsement. Voorhis promptly challenged Nixon, charging him to produce proof--and Nixon promptly stood up, marched across the stage, and shoved a piece of paper into Voorhis’ hands. It was the preferred list of candidates from the local NC-PAC chapter, and Voorhis was caught completely off guard. Did it matter that NC-PAC and CIO-PAC were two different organizations? No. Nixon had spent weeks conflating the two in direct mailings and speaking engagements. “At this critical moment, [Voorhis] had fumbled and was flustered,” said Paul Bullock, the timekeeper at the debate and a Voorhis supporter. On Election Day, Nixon’s tactics bore fruit. He destroyed Jerry Voorhis, 56%-44%, outdistancing him by nearly 15,000 votes out of a little over 100,000 cast. Voorhis ended up fleeing elected politics for the remainder of his life--a move that infuriated Democrats who thought he should have challenged Nixon to a rematch in 1948 in order to keep the district competitive. Instead, the 12th became a Republican stronghold. In mid-1947, Voorhis adviser Stanley Long joined Congressman Nixon for lunch, and they re-visited the campaign as they ate. During their talk, Nixon made a startling admission. “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Nixon said. Additionally, he understood that a congressman could contribute to the legislative process without passing bills that had his name on them. When Long objected, Nixon laughed. “You’re just being naive,” he said. “I had to win. That’s something you don’t understand. The important thing was to win.” End of Part 1. In Part 2, we will cover Nixon’s time as Congressman, Senator, and Vice President. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 02:54 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 18, 2019 20:04
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excellent writeups so far. The even more insane part about the stuff with Pat is that he used to drive her to dates with other dudes. Like jesus.
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May 19, 2019 21:13
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Bumping this to start the week.
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May 20, 2019 14:28
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Looking at the resignation speech he gave to his staff, you can tell, just the amount of self deprecation there. "I had a little quote in the speech last night from T.R. As you know, I kind of like to read books. I am not educated, but I do read books -- and the T.R. quote was a pretty good one" "we think that when you don't pass the bar exam the first time -- I happened to, but I was just lucky; I mean, my writing was so poor the bar examiner said, "We have just got to let the guy through." It's actually a pretty inspiring speech if you listen to the entire thing. But the thing that most strikes about Nixon, and I probably like Nixon more than a lot of you do, is that Nixon was the type of guy who lived his life always expecting to be kicked. Also, regarding the "bowels" thing, I think it was just an unfortunate attempt by the Orthogonians to find a synonym for "guts" that started with a B. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 15:37 on May 20, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 15:33
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This is a great writeup so far.Fritz Coldcockin posted:“Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Nixon said. Additionally, he understood that a congressman could contribute to the legislative process without passing bills that had his name on them. When Long objected, Nixon laughed. “You’re just being naive,” he said. “I had to win. That’s something you don’t understand. The important thing was to win.” I wonder to what degree this was the spawning point of a lot of modern political tactics.
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May 20, 2019 15:45
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Whole lot of stuff about Nixon is making sense now given his upbringing and youth.
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May 20, 2019 15:46
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I'm currently split between admiring Nixon for coming from so little, playing things extremely intelligently, actually going out on the front lines instead of claiming some kind of deferment, and hating him because he's loving Nixon and I know where this story goes and even at this early stage I can already see the man who commits Watergate.
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May 21, 2019 06:41
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Epicurius posted:But the thing that most strikes about Nixon, and I probably like Nixon more than a lot of you do, is that Nixon was the type of guy who lived his life always expecting to be kicked. Oh sure, I find Nixon and his foibles pretty relatable on a personal level. Despite being a pretty bright guy who rose to the highest position on the planet he never shook his deepseated insecurity and it ruined him. OTOH he was a mass murderer, so...
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May 21, 2019 06:53
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Pembroke Fuse posted:This is a great writeup so far. I don't know making poo poo up about your opponent to win elections goes back to the roots of democracy.
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May 21, 2019 07:06
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It's worth bearing in mind that even with this first election he's ending the career of an excellent, ethical politician with good policies, with dirty tricks, planning criminal actions, and laundering oil baron money. Whatever nixon's backstory, he's still chosing to work for the Scum Party and advocate Scum Policies.
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May 21, 2019 07:23
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Part 2: Mr. Nixon’s Wild Ride This part had another title, but since I didn’t discuss the 1960 election I didn’t feel I could use it just yet. Anyway, when we last left Dick Nixon, he’d won election to the House of Representatives--but not only had he done so with the backing of every corrupt, moneyed interest in the California 12th, he’d done it in such a manner that he had personally and politically destroyed his opponent. The incumbent Democrat, Jerry Voorhis, was so devastated by the loss that he abandoned politics forever. Effective though it was as a campaign tactic, its scorched-earth nature ensured that Nixon left a trail of political enemies in his wake--people who took umbrage at his tactics and felt he was an unscrupulous schemer. The list was short now, but with every subsequent campaign for higher office, it would grow and grow. But for now, Nixon was simply the young freshman Congressman from California’s 12th District, so that’s where we’re going to start the story. Be advised that these next 14 years are some of the wildest years not just of Nixon’s life, but of the United States’ life too. The Greenest Congressman This title is actually credited to the Washington Post circa early 1947--it’s what they called Nixon when he arrived in DC. In his cramped office on the fifth floor of the Old House Office Building (now known as the Joseph Cannon Office Building), Nixon began building a staff and an infrastructure. However, his lack of seniority made things difficult. He was denied the seat he wanted on House Judiciary, for example, and just like at Whittier, he wasn’t in any of the “in” groups. The capital was just as weird and insular then as it is now. But just like at Whittier, Nixon didn’t need them. He’d start his own club, with blackjack. And hookers. On second thought, forget the club. No, but seriously, that’s what he did. That year was a good year for Republican freshmen, and within a couple of years he’d become a member of what became known as the Chowder and Marching Club. There were fifteen freshmen and junior House Republicans who got together once a month to eat, drink, and tell stories. Fun fact: one of them was a newly elected Congressman from Michigan who had previously played football at Ann Arbor. His name was Gerald Ford. Even now, in Congress, Nixon was still Gloomy Gus--Ford remembers one night out where during the revelry, Nixon seemed as happy and buoyant as any of them, playing some tunes on the piano and leading sing-alongs. But afterwards, as he waited outside for a car, Ford overheard Nixon mumbling to himself. “He seemed sad and detached,” Ford recalled. One of the appointments Nixon earned was the Education and Labor Committee. He was the Republican low man on the totem pole--interestingly enough, the Democrats named another young Navy veteran who had just won election to Congress that year to the same committee as the last man in their lineup.  I don’t think he requires much in the way of introduction, do you? John F. Kennedy had become a household name during the war after his PT boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer out in the Pacific. For several days, his crew had survived by sheer force of will, dragging themselves from island to island until they were finally rescued. Kennedy had done much the same as Nixon when he'd run for Congress in Massachusetts--challenge entrenched party infrastructure and win, despite extreme youth and inexperience. When they first met, Nixon and Kennedy were, if not friends, friendly. One night on a train back from Pennsylvania to Washington, the two talked for hours about domestic and foreign policy--and found they had much in common. Both had lost older brothers, and both felt the enormous weight of parental expectations. As Nixon put it: quote:He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them. One anecdote from Nixon’s early time in Congress: he got invited to a dinner party at the home of Christian Herter in his first winter in Washington. Herter was a Massachusetts Congressman who would eventually become Secretary of State, and he’d married into Standard Oil money, giving him a life of “tastefully refined grandeur”, as Nixon biographer Evan Thomas puts it. The Nixons dressed in their finest clothes--Pat wore a teal-blue cocktail dress and Nixon wore his finest dark blue suit. When they arrived at the party, however, they were shocked to find that they were the only partygoers not dressed in black tie/formal gowns. See, in Washington society, informal meant tuxedos, “formal” meant white tie and tails. Second anecdote: At the end of August, Nixon got a coveted spot on Herter’s foreign aid committee--the committee that was tasked with going to Europe and outlining the specifics for what eventually became the Marshall Plan. You all should have at least a basic idea of what that is; I shouldn’t have to tell you . Anyway, Herter told the committee members to leave their wives at home--the trip was to be all business. However, John Kennedy, who Nixon was on friendly terms with at this point, decided that this just wouldn’t do. He gave Nixon the names and addresses of three accommodating young ladies in Paris. Nixon’s secretary, Dorothy Cox, recalls Nixon politely refusing. “He was far too embarrassed,” she said.I could go on and on about the awkwardness Nixon faced in his early years, I really could. One takeaway from this you should absorb is that Nixon was an early supporter of the Marshall Plan, largely based on his work in Herter’s committee. The young Congressman from Whittier had gone from writing farmers’ wills to discussing foreign policy with no less than British Prime Minister Clement Attlee--they dined at 10 Downing Street one evening. He supported the Marshall Plan, mind you, in the face of overwhelming opposition from his constituents--more than ¾ of them were opposed to any kind of foreign aid. Nixon came to realize, however, that the Republican Party was doomed if it stuck to pre-war isolationist dogma. World War II had changed things. We were a world player now--we couldn’t go back. Hiss, Chambers, And The Pumpkin Papers  A little background first: after the war ended, we went from allies to enemies of the Soviet Union quicker than a jackrabbit on a date. The signs were already there--the tension at Yalta caused by Roosevelt’s failing health and Stalin’s predator-like instinct to capitalize on that had led to the Soviets taking gross advantage of the Americans at Potsdam after the war. Stalin was easily the most experienced Allied leader in the room at that point--Clement Attlee replaced Winston Churchill mid-stream and Harry Truman had been President for a matter of months. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why we became suspicious of Communist Russia so quickly. Suspicion abroad quickly gave rise to suspicion at home. All throughout the 1930s, the Soviet Union had planted spies, recruited agents, and had successfully penetrated deep into the United States government--although recordings from FBI wiretaps would show, decades later, that we’d successfully caught the worst of the spies after the war. This didn’t stop the United States Congress. Thus was the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, formed. You know why, of course--its purpose was to ferret out Communist influence and agents both in the private and public sector, but as Evan Thomas points out, it far exceeded its mandate--a mandate that was barely necessary to begin with. quote:HUAC, as the congressional committee was known, was a poor scourge of the Red Menace. Its members tended to be blowhards or worse. The ranking Democrat, John Rankin of Mississippi, a flagrant anti-Semite and racist, was known to paw through a dubious volume entitled Who’s Who in American Jewry to see if witnesses were hiding their ethnicity. The committee had a reputation for trampling on constitutional rights and for engaging in general foolishness. A parade of left-leaning movie stars and screenwriters trooped before HUAC to deny that they were taking orders from the Kremlin; Gary Cooper was guarded but testified that communism was not “on the level.” Why do I get to talk about all this? Because the House GOP, somewhat embarrassed by the committee’s leadership, stuck Nixon on the committee. They’d hoped he would bring a voice of moderation to the proceedings--he was a lawyer, after all, so he would have a clearer vision of what was legal and what wasn’t--and perhaps he’d steer the committee towards catching some actual Soviet spies. Let’s fast forward a couple years, now, to August of 1948. Harry Truman is running for election to his own term as President, and it, uh, isn’t going so well. At least not to the untrained eye, anyway. To revive his flagging campaign, Truman called the “Do-Nothing” Congress, as he had branded them, back into session, and on August 3, 1948, HUAC called as its first witness this man.  Whittaker Chambers was, at first glance, an unremarkable man: dumpy, rumpled, and an utterly unimpressive specimen of humanity. Formerly a member of the Communist Party and an honest-to-god Soviet spy, he joined the writing staff of TIME Magazine in 1939. This was the story he told HUAC--in a bored, wheezing, flat monotone that was made all the harder to hear because the microphone on the table was broken. He named names--other Communist agents in America. It would have been just another boring, unremarkable, dishonorable day for HUAC had it not been for the fact that Chambers mentioned this man.  Alger Hiss was one heck of a big fish. A former assistant to to the Assistant Secretary of State under FDR, Hiss had been named Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in 1944 and was a delegate at Yalta with FDR. With the backing of luminaries like Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, Hiss’ rise to the top of the diplomatic heap seemed assured. He was also the epitome of everything Nixon despised--urbane, handsome, refined, self-confident and charming, and Ivy League-educated--so it sent “a ripple of surprise” through the room, Nixon recalls, when his name came up in Chambers’ list. Well, of course, Hiss heard that his name had been mentioned in the hearing, so he immediately telegraphed the committee demanding the right to formally and publicly deny Chambers’ charge. Appearing before a packed hearing on August 5, Hiss immediately rubbed Nixon the wrong way. Nixon recalled he was “coldly courteous and at times, condescending”. You know what, Dick? If someone had accused me of treason, I’m not sure I’d take the time to be polite either. Hiss denied having ever met or indeed heard of Whittaker Chambers, categorically. When Congressman Karl Mundt (R-SD) held up a picture of Chambers to jog Hiss’ memory, Hiss replied coolly, “He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the Chairman of this Committee.” Mundt was short and pudgy like Chambers, and that answer didn’t sit well with him. “I hope you are wrong about that,” he said. Unfortunately for the HUAC members, Hiss was the clear winner the day of the hearing. The crowd appreciated the little jabs he fired at his questioners, and afterwards, a crowd clustered around Hiss to congratulate him. “It was a virtuoso performance,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs. One can almost see the muscles in his jaw working as he grinds his teeth in frustration. Hiss had clearly left the watchers with the impression that he was the innocent victim in a titanic case of mistaken identity. The press agreed--the Washington Post depicted Hiss as an innocent pedestrian splattered with mud by a passing vehicle. Their cartoonist, Herbert Block--or as you might know him, “Herblock”, would famously depict Hiss as cornered by a tiger labeled “Smear Statements”. Sadly, I do not have an image of this cartoon...I did look for one. Shame, as it would have made an excellent teaching tool. Just know that this is not the last time we’ll hear about Herblock. Most of the committee members, two-bit schoolyard bullies that they were, felt they’d been beat. “We’ve been had. We’re ruined,” one of them complained. “Let’s wash our hands of the whole mess,” said another. Not Richard Nixon. Whether it was conviction that something had been overlooked or just a personal hatred of Hiss, he forged on. He told his secretary, Dorothy Cox, that Hiss seemed just “a little too suave” and was “overplaying his hand”. There are differing accounts for why he thinks this. Some assert it was facts-based--that Nixon had gotten a tip-off from the famous “Red hunter” Father John Cronin, whose close ties to several high-placed FBI agents assured him that Hiss was indeed a spy. Other biographers stick with the original story--that Nixon just hated the guy. Either way, it isn’t clear--there is no definitive proof for either account. As Evan Thomas says: quote:...even as an obscure congressman, he had an instinct for what he liked to call “the big play.” Nixon may not have known that Hiss had served the Soviet intelligence service, but he could tell a phony when he saw one, especially one who affected an upper-class accent. In the end, it really was Hiss’ overbearing arrogance that doomed him. On August 17, Hiss appeared before Nixon and another HUAC investigator in a suite at the Commodore Hotel in New York. Rather snippily, Hiss told them that he was supposed to meet his wife at the Harvard Club that night and that he hoped someone would let her know if he was going to be late. It seemed as though he had a pathological need to remind the young Congressman from Whittier that he was dealing with a social better. At one point, as Nixon and Hiss were arguing a point, Hiss said huffily, “I am familiar with the law. I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier?” Aside from the fact that no, Nixon had attended Duke Law, it succeeded in getting Nixon’s hackles raised. The committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, said “Nixon turned red and blue and red again.” Nixon visited John Foster Dulles, then the senior law partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm where Nixon had once interviewed as a Duke law student. Dulles was Governor Thomas Dewey’s foreign policy advisor in the 1948 campaign, but he took the time out of his schedule to see Nixon anyway--perhaps because he knew that he bore some responsibility for Hiss’ rise. Dulles had given Hiss his current job as head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. When Nixon showed Dulles Hiss’ and Chambers’ testimony, Dulles spotted something that no one else had: the accuracy to which Whittaker Chambers could speak about things in Hiss’ personal life. “There’s no question about it...Chambers knows Hiss,” Dulles said. He advised Nixon to proceed with the investigation. Interesting note: At the time, Nixon worked hard to court the media. He would invite them to his office in the evening, making sure to memorize their names and favorite cocktails. He invited Bert Andrews, Washington Bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune, to come with him when he visited Chambers on his Maryland farm. All the while, he was leaking details to the press that rekindled interest in the Hiss-Chambers investigation throughout the summer of 1948. He actually had to sneak out his office window to avoid the press mob so that he could make the trip to Chambers’ house in Maryland. Oddly enough, as Nixon questioned the ex-Communist, they struck up a bizarre friendship. Evan Thomas will explain. quote:Chambers had a shadowy past—he had been arrested for homosexuality and had told a great many lies during his underground existence as the member of a communist cell. Chambers was gloomy and martyrish, shy and tortured, and Nixon, for his part, may have related to him; certainly, he understood him. The two became family friends. Nixon took Chambers to meet his mother, while Chambers later wrote that his children worshipped “Nixie, the kind and good, about whom they will hear no nonsense.” Make of that what you will, I guess. During late August and September, Nixon, Chambers, and Hiss dueled over the facts that could potentially out Hiss as a Soviet spy. Chambers was, correctly, able to identify several things about Hiss that only a friend could have known: for example, he knew Hiss’ wife, Priscilla, was a Quaker, and used “thee” and “thou” as pronouns in her speech. He knew that Hiss was an avid bird-watcher. He knew the nicknames Hiss gave to his children and his dog. Slowly, the veneer of haughty aloofness Hiss had been hiding behind peeled away. It became apparent that he had lied--he did, in fact, know Whittaker Chambers. Still, as Nixon threw himself into the case with what his daughter Julie later called “a frightening intensity”, he was becoming less and less...human. As Nixon wrote himself in his memoir Six Crises: quote:I began to notice…the inevitable symptoms of tension. I was ‘mean’ to live with at home and with my friends. I was quick-tempered with members of my staff. I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. Getting to sleep became more and more difficult. On the eve of a big hearing on August 25, Nixon took his first sleeping pill to get some rest. Bert Andrews had stopped by his office and told him, “You look like hell. You need some sleep.” So what to do? The Nixons needed a vacation, Hiss or no Hiss. The Herter Committee had ruined one vacation and the Hiss affair had put off a beach trip in August 1948. So Nixon decided to put his family first. He took Pat on a lavish Caribbean cruise in December of 1948. Sadly, work, once again, got in the way. On the first night, as they were dining at the captain’s table, the purser brought over a radio telegram. It was from the committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling and it sounded urgent. “Case clinched. Information amazing. Heat is on from the press and other places. Immediate action appears necessary. Can you possibly get back?” Nixon read the telegram aloud, and a frustrated Pat threw up her hands and said “Here we go again.” Another telegram followed that one. This time it was from Bert Andrews, the Herald Tribune bureau chief. “Documents incredibly hot. Stop. Link to Hiss seems certain. Stop...Love to Pat. Stop. (Signed) Vacation-Wrecker Andrews.” Well, at least he didn’t lose his sense of humor. Nixon was flown off the boat by a Coast Guard seaplane. He left Pat to make her way home, alone, from the next port of call, incidentally. I think in this day and age this would be the point where most women would find a divorce lawyer. The press, however, was waiting for Congressman Nixon when he arrived in Miami and asked him for his comment on the “Pumpkin Papers”. Here’s where it gets weird, guys. Nixon was completely befuddled. “What is this, a joke?” he asked the assembled reporters. No, in fact it wasn’t. Apparently, Chambers had led federal investigators out into the middle of a field on his farm, taken the top off of a hollowed-out pumpkin and produced five rolls of microfilm. On the microfilm were photos of top-secret State Department documents--and summaries of the documents in Alger Hiss’ handwriting. Thus, the saga of the “Pumpkin Papers” began. This famous photograph of Nixon examining the evidence still survives.  Nixon declared the evidence “proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation’s history”...but Eastman Kodak, the manufacturer of the film, punctured the happy balloon of vindication. They reported that the film had been manufactured in 1945--seven years after Chambers had allegedly photographed the incriminating documents as insurance against assassination. Nixon was, simultaneously, livid with Chambers and completely crushed. Here’s Evan Thomas again. quote:“The news jolted us into almost complete shock,” Nixon later wrote. “We sat looking at each other without saying a word. This meant that Chambers was, after all, a liar.” Nixon called Chambers and told him what the committee had just learned from Eastman Kodak. “What is your answer to that?” Nixon demanded. There was a long silence over the phone. Nixon wondered if Chambers had hung up. Finally, Nixon recalled, Chambers answered in a “voice full of despair and resignation: ‘I can’t understand it. God must be against me.’ ” Nixon exploded “with all the fury and frustration that had built up within me, ‘You’d better have a better answer than that!’ ” Unhappily, Nixon braced himself to eat a metric ton of crow in front of the press...but five minutes before his scheduled mea culpa, the contact from Eastman Kodak called. Guys, I’m not making any of this up, I swear: he said there had been a mistake. The film had, indeed, been manufactured in 1938, just like Chambers had said. He was vindicated. Jubilantly, Robert Stripling, a Southerner, let out a loud rebel yell, gripped Nixon’s arms and began to swing him around the room. Fighting to extricate himself, Nixon called Chambers’ house but couldn’t reach him. Later, he found out that Chambers had attempted suicide--but failed. Unfortunately for the treason charge, the statute of limitations had run out. But after the Hiss case dragged through the courts for months, he was convicted of perjury--for lying about being a spy--and sent to prison. Years later, declassified information from American and Soviet archives would seem to bear out that Hiss was, in fact, a Soviet spy--but Hiss himself maintained his innocence, right up until he died in 1996. He also admitted that he may have made a mistake in how he presented himself in the hearings: “From time to time I was guilty of a certain snobbishness toward [Nixon],” Hiss said. “He may have sensed some of that, and it may have annoyed him.” I think you’re wrong about that, Mr. Hiss. The “may” part of it, I mean. That tore the scab off the wound that was Red-baiting. If someone like Alger Hiss could be a Soviet spy, who could say where the subversion ended? When the Soviets exploded their own nuclear bomb a year later, it was off to the races...and Evan Thomas asserts that the decades-long culture war between the East Coast elite and Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” began with the case of Richard Nixon v. Alger Hiss. He portrays himself as a lonely David taking on the Goliath that was East Coast elite and its press minions--and that they never fully recovered from their backing of Hiss. These same people would be added to Nixon’s growing list of enemies--their enduring belief that Nixon had railroaded an innocent man never wavered. Nixon claimed in his Six Crises that he was “subjected to an utterly unprincipled and vicious smear campaign. Bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole gamut of misconduct in public life, ranging from the unethical to downright criminal activities--all these were the charges hurled at me, some publicly and others through whispering campaigns which were even more difficult to counteract”. This is largely untrue, or at least it was at the time. The vast majority of Nixon’s press coverage was glowingly positive. At the start of 1950, Newsweek called Nixon “the most outstanding member of the present Congress,” and the Saturday Evening Post featured him as an up-and-comer to watch. Even as these publications fawned over Nixon, he remained ever alert to put-downs. So did Pat, incidentally--in 1979, their daughter Julie remembers asking Pat about the Hiss case. Her mother’s answers were “brief and strained”. Additionally, the Nixons noticed that many doors that had been open to them--parties, dinner invitations--slammed shut after Hiss. Even as he became a national figure for the Hiss case, Nixon was so downcast that he considered giving up his Congressional seat and going back to practicing law full-time. We know now, of course, that he didn’t. Pink Right Down To Her Underwear  Don’t let his melancholy fool you. Nixon still had way more friends than enemies in the press at this stage of his career. One of them was the political editor of the Los Angeles Times and his old confidante, Kyle Palmer, who called Dick in the fall of 1949 and said “Dick, have you thought of running for the Senate?” Nixon said he hadn’t--which was not exactly true. Nixon had realized that, after Democrats took back the House on the back of Truman’s come-from-behind Presidential victory in 1948, that the House was a non-starter for anyone looking to advance their career. Without chairmanships, Republicans were reduced to playing second fiddle again on all the committees, and that just wouldn’t do for Nixon. He needed a clear path upward. “Well, I wish you’d give it some thought because we’ll all support you if you do,” Palmer told Nixon. The backing of the Times was the clincher--it meant that Nixon would face no Republican opposition in a Senate primary, and it gave him immediate access to contributors with very deep pockets. So, on November 3, 1949, Richard Nixon announced his candidacy for the United States Senate. The California GOP was overjoyed--they had a prominent, popular Congressman to run against the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Sheridan Downey. Thing is, Downey had problems of his own. He was facing a primary challenger.  Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA) represented California’s 14th District. She had had quite a career pre-politics; she’d appeared on Broadway, toured as an opera singer, and landed the starring role in the 1935 film She. Her portrayal, in fact, inspired the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs two years later in 1937. In 1938, however, after working with migrant workers in California, she decided to convert her considerable talents to political activism. She became more and more politically conscious, becoming close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, running for and winning a House seat in 1944. She was an immensely popular member of the California delegation, and Downey, faced with what he was sure would be a bitter primary battle, announced that he was retiring from the Senate. The seat was open, and Nixon and Douglas coasted to their respective primary victories. Nixon’s announcement speech was full of the fire and brimstone he’d become known for in his later campaigns. He warned the audience of an immense “slush fund” that would be used by labor lobbyists against him, and made a vow to run a “rocking, socking campaign”. It was exactly the kind of political warfare Murray Chotiner, his mentor back in Whittier, had trained him for. “It is one of our greatest assets and we would be fools to revert to the usual campaign. Scores of people have written and asked if YOU REALLY MEAN IT?...NOW YOU HAVE TO SHOW THEM,” Chotiner wrote Nixon in late 1949. The early going, however, did look a lot like a regular campaign. Nixon and Pat drove around small towns all over California in a beat-up station wagon with a loudspeaker on top. Contrast that with Helen Douglas, who bought up radio and TV ads all over the state--and you understand the irony that Nixon would end up spending more money than Douglas by the end of the race. Unfortunately for Douglas, she had poor political instincts. It’s often thought that the “Pink Lady” smear was Nixon’s creation. Well, the historians who credit him with it are only partially right. Douglas’ own primary opponents had used the same insults, calling her “pinko” and “the red queen” while spreading anti-Semitic garbage about her husband, actor Melvyn Douglas. Nixon’s colleague, John F. Kennedy, actually sent him a check for a thousand dollars for the campaign--he felt Douglas was too much of a radical and didn’t belong in the Senate. Douglas gave as good as she got, though. Incredibly enough, she’d attack Nixon as soft on communism. One of her leaflets featured the phrase “THE BIG LIE! (Hitler invented it. Stalin perfected it. Nixon uses it.)”. For Murray Chotiner, it was like Christmas had come early. Douglas had opened the door, and the Nixon campaign charged through it. Charging that Douglas was “pink right down to her underwear,” Chotiner countered with a flyer that compared Douglas’ voting record with that of Congressman Vito Marcantonio (D-NY), a far-left Democrat from New York who had been criticized for Communist sympathies. The pamphlet described what Chotiner called the “Douglas-Marcantonio Axis”, and it featured the number of times the two Representatives had cast identical votes. Now, you and I know this is complete and utter horseshit, and in modern campaigns, it would have been treated as a joke. Of COURSE there are going to be tons of similarities between any two Congressmen or Senators’ voting records; there are a million motions to advance or table or take up a resolution on any given day, let alone any given year. But in 1950, it was just misleading enough to work. The “Pink Sheet”, as it became known, has become a notorious fixture in campaign lore. Chotiner had to increase the initial press run from 5,000 to 50,000 copies. Douglas struggled valiantly against the charge, to be sure. Claiming that the leaflet was misleading, she repeated her charge that Nixon was a fellow traveler in the Marxist cause, and bought a series of newspaper ads declaring THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS. Most notably, she gave Nixon a series of nicknames, such as “pipsqueak”, “Pee Wee”, and the one he would never escape for the rest of his life, “Tricky Dick”. The Eastern press loved Douglas, of course, and described Nixon as a schemer and a bully--which you and I realize he was, of course. Nixon complained about the unfairness of it all, but his acting belied his enjoyment of what he was doing. No, he wasn’t great at the pressing-the-flesh aspect of politics, but he had an incredible memory for names, something that was far more valuable. He could astound small-town politicians and businessmen because he not only remembered their names, but the names of their wives and children as well. It was an invaluable asset to have and it would serve him well in later campaigns too. Chotiner’s campaign tactics drew a jaundiced eye from Pat Nixon. She disapproved of the way her husband and Chotiner were always talking about ways to set “verbal traps” for the combative, bombastic Helen Douglas. Strangely, however, she was not shy about wanting to counter Douglas’ personal attacks. “How can you let them do that?” she demanded of Nixon when one of Douglas’ new ads hinted strongly that Nixon was a fascist surrounded by men in “dark shirts”. This is another one of those things that seems obvious to you and I, but try to put yourself in the mind of a California voter in 1950. True to his nature, Nixon got pessimistic as the days wound down to Election Day, November 7, 1950. He went to the beach with Pat and his daughters that day, but the day turned gloomy and overcast. Sure that voter turnout would be low, Nixon prepared himself for defeat, and took his family to a movie instead. In the darkness of the theater, he hunkered down to brood some more. What he didn’t know is that he was clobbering Douglas at the polls. He won by nearly 20 percentage points--the largest margin of victory for any Senate candidate in the country that year. He was only 37 years of age, and he was now a Senator-elect for one of the largest and most powerful states in the Union. That night, Nixon was almost happy--to the point where he went from victory party to victory party banging out “Happy Days Are Here Again”, Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign song, on the piano. Why? Because he knew it would make his enemies upset. Yes, that’s right. Nixon was the first “let’s trigger the libs” candidate, folks. But his campaign’s “rocking, socking” nature came with a cost. Back East, Nixon was becoming a favorite target of derision. Remember Herblock? Well, after the Senate race against Douglas, it was Herblock who created the famous caricature of Nixon--the dark jowls, the long, sloped nose, the beady eyes, and the heavy beard shadow. Liberal journalists delighted in castigating Nixon as someone utterly without a sense of morality. One of my personal favorites is the New Republic’s William Costello: “If he did wrestle with his conscience, the match was fixed.” He Sucks At This “Fitting In” Thing  I’ve never had the opportunity to write an entire section of a bio on what a goober the President was, but there isn’t a whole lot of material on what Nixon did as a Senator, so this is what I chose to do. This’ll be a new experience for me. Nixon caught the eye of Stewart Alsop as soon as he ascended to the Senate. Alsop was one of the biggest anti-Communist hardline voices in Washington at the time--in 1949, when Mao Zedong triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek and China became Communist, Alsop let the cry of “Who lost China?” to the chagrin of the Truman administration. He made a habit of befriending and cultivating people he felt would become the leaders of the future in exchange for scoops. He identified Nixon as a fellow traveler--a Republican internationalist--and in addition to offering to share interviews with ambassadors from Iron Curtain countries, Alsop invited the Nixons to dinner at one of his famous “Sunday Night Suppers”. The Sunday Night Supper was an informal Georgetown institution. It was one of those weird, cliquey DC things wherein a bunch of rich people get together and talk about how gross they think the proles are. Or something. I don’t know. Anyway, an invitation to one of these things was highly sought after in postwar Washington. Senators, statesmen, and others were always flattered to join the Alsops for a night of alcohol-fueled debate and conviviality. The night of the dinner, the Nixons arrived at Alsop’s home at 2720 Dumbarton Street--and were, no doubt, a little puzzled at Alsop’s choice of decorating scheme. Among the Federalist and Greek revival houses that littered Washington, Alsop liked to joke that his home was “garage Palladian”. Do we have any home design experts that can explain why this is funny? Anyway, Tish, Alsop’s wife, observed that Nixon was uncomfortable from the moment he arrived. He didn’t mingle; rather, he sat down in a large wingback chair and brooded. Dinner was no better; in fact, it was worse. Across the table from Nixon sat Ambassador Averell Harriman. Harriman was a graduate of Groton and Yale (aka, one of the “Eastern elite”), and he wasn’t exactly in a gracious mood that night. Standing up, he glared at Nixon and said, in a very loud voice, “I will not break bread with this man!” Harriman had campaigned for and contributed to Helen Gahagan Douglas’ Senate campaign, and he had no doubt accepted the Eastern press’ caricature of Nixon as an amoral, soulless scumbag. Harriman turned off his hearing aid, refused to eat anything, and left shortly after the main course was served. Make of that story what you will, I guess. The Nixons weren’t social outcasts, but they struggled to fit in. After the embarrassment of the Sunday Night Supper, Tish Alsop hosted them at a dance party and was nearly as judgmental as Harriman in her recollections. She found the Nixons “wooden and stiff” and “terribly difficult to talk to,” historian Fawn Brodie writes. “Nixon danced only one dance, with me. He’s a terrible dancer. Pat didn’t dance at all. They stayed only half an hour. It was as if the high school monitor had suddenly appeared. I couldn’t wait for him to go.” I dunno. I can sort of understand the awkwardness. I’m not great at big parties either. Evan Thomas elaborates a bit more. quote:The Nixons were hardly social outcasts, but getting on with the swells was never easy. That same December of 1950, they were invited to a dance at the Sulgrave Club hosted by Luvie Pearson, the wife of Drew Pearson, the muckraking columnist who was socially well connected. During the Senate campaign, Pearson had written that Pat had to wear costly dresses because she was too bony to wear regular sizes. “I thought that was the height of viciousness,” Pat wrote a friend. About the Pearsons’ party at the Sulgrave, she wrote, “They had the nerve to invite us.” Drew Pearson: kind of a dick. Incidentally, that Sulgrave party nearly turned into an all-out brawl--Pearson had also invited Joe McCarthy to the party, and at the end of the evening, Nixon found McCarthy trying to strangle Pearson in the coatroom. He literally had his hands around Pearson’s throat. When he saw Nixon enter, McCarthy smacked Pearson hard in the face and said, “That one was for you, Dick.” Nixon separated the two. Later, he said he genuinely thought McCarthy was going to kill Pearson. One non-social thing I should mention about Nixon’s brief time in the Senate: he hired this lady as his new secretary.  Rose Mary Woods had been hired when Nixon set up his Capitol Hill Senate office. She was smart, tight-lipped, and loyal to a fault--qualities Nixon prized above almost anything else. In time, she’d become practically family--Tricia and Julie Nixon would call her “Aunt Rose”. She was a true believer; during the 1956 campaign she’d write Nixon’s mother, Hannah: “The next few months will be hard to take when we read things about the Boss that are entirely untrue and, in many cases, vicious lies. I know it is particularly hard on you and Mr. Nixon, but just remember that most of the people who are against him….are being led around by propaganda which was originally started by the decidedly left-wing element of the country.” Yeah. She didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, she mainlined it. Just like in the House, Nixon worked his fingers to the bone. Pat and the girls would take picnic baskets to his Senate office so they could spend time with him. During the first six months of 1951, he’d crisscross the nation, trumpeting the tale of how he’d taken down Alger Hiss--but it cost him. Pat wrote a friend in September, saying “Dick is more tired than I have ever seen him.” Nixon began to suffer from neck and back pains. During one of his speeches, he nearly passed out, and he began to experience twinges near his heart. He even developed a chronic eye twitch--an unmistakable sign that he wasn’t sleeping enough. He consulted a doctor in New York, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, who advised him on healthy living habits--but found nothing physically wrong with Nixon. He prescribed strong barbiturate-based sedatives, pronouncing Nixon’s maladies as the result of severe anxiety. Nixon took the doctor’s advice--and in December 1951, one of his colleagues, Sen. George Smathers (D-FL) invited him to Miami out of concern that Nixon was nearing a nervous breakdown. A close associate of John F. Kennedy as well, Smathers was known as “The Collector” because he collected friends--influential Senate colleagues, reporters, etc--who he’d take on bacchanals to Miami. I think “orgy” is all but implied here. Anyway, this was how Nixon met this man.  Charles Gregory “Bebe” Rebozo was the son of a Cuban immigrant who had attended high school with Smathers and had once worked as a steward on Pan-American Airways. He’d made a fortune off of leveraged real estate in South Florida, and he and Smathers tried to help Nixon unwind with speedboat trips around Miami. Originally, Rebozo didn’t like Nixon much, according to Smathers. “Don’t ever send another dull fellow like that down here again,” Smathers recalls Rebozo saying. “He doesn’t drink whiskey, he doesn’t chase women, he doesn’t even play golf.” Over time, however, Rebozo and Nixon struck up a friendship. His recollection of their first meeting is a good deal kinder. “He had a depth and genuineness about him which didn’t come through because of his shyness, but I saw it,” Rebozo said of Nixon. Over the next couple decades, Nixon would make numerous visits to Rebozo’s Miami compound when he needed to relax. Anyway, Nixon followed a similar career path when he joined the Senate--he immediately joined Joe McCarthy’s HUAC, after McCarthy opened a seat by booting out Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME). Nixon’s first speech in the Senate attacked Truman for firing Douglas MacArthur. “The Communists and the stooges for the Communists are happy, because the President has given them exactly what they have been after: General MacArthur’s scalp,” he intoned. He urged an expansion of the Korean conflict, which involved bombing the Chinese supply lines. It wasn’t all Red-baiting, though. Nixon backed the Berkeley school board’s decision to host Paul Robeson, an accused Communist, at the local high school. “I do not believe we should follow the example of the totalitarian nations through the suppression of a free exchange of ideas,” he said. It was a classic example of his paradoxical nature--and it foreshadowed one of his most major accomplishments as President two decades later. He’d also use the investigative power granted to McCarthy’s committee to expose corruption in the Truman administration, but in the course of his work he discovered that high-placed officials in the RNC had done the same, if not worse. It won him regard in the press when he declared that the top officials in both party offices should resign. This would cost him, believe it or not--RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson refused to resign and blocked Nixon from giving the keynote at the upcoming convention in Chicago--but it also helped him escape scrutiny when it was discovered that the RNC had laundered a $5,000 donation for him with the help of an influence peddler in the party. That’s....pretty much all I have for Nixon’s time as a Senator. It was largely unremarkable, given that 1952 was so close at hand. Sorry, guys. My writing is usually more inspired.
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Jun 5, 2019 16:18
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Mr. Vice President Scarcely had Nixon moved into his new office than Kyle Palmer, editor of the Los Angeles Times, started sending him letters about the national political landscape and the 1952 Presidential race. The West was expanding rapidly in size and electoral importance, and California was one of the largest electoral prizes in the nation (or at least it would be in 1952). Republicans were certainly aware of this, as Texas and the rest of the Sun Belt was doing the same thing. Interesting note: In the next 14 of 16 Presidential elections, the GOP would include a candidate from either California, Texas, or Arizona on their ballot. It was almost certain that the leading contenders in 1952 for the Presidential nomination would look to the West for a running mate, not to the Northeast or South. Let’s meet them, shall we?  Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH) represented the isolationist wing of the GOP. Shrewd, powerful, and a consummate insider, Taft was the son of former President William Howard Taft, and he certainly had a large band of dedicated supporters who would have loved to see him become President. However, his isolationism was looking increasingly naive and untenable in the face of the Communist threat, and after the Soviets exploded their A-bomb in 1949, people started to roll their eyes when his name was mentioned.  Do I REALLY have to introduce him? General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was the architect of American victory on D-Day and one of America’s biggest military heroes. Originally courted by Democrats in 1948 (Truman had offered to run as his Vice President), he’d turned on Truman after China fell to Communism and Korea was so badly mismanaged. Problem was, no one knew his politics, and he wasn’t thought of as a Republican in the classic sense--walking backward into the GOP due to his dislike for Harry Truman. It put off a lot of the old guard--they couldn’t be sure Ike would adhere to a Republican agenda if he won the Presidency. Nixon chose his side early. He liked and admired Eisenhower and felt his chances were infinitely better. Plus, like Eisenhower, he was an internationalist. He’d supported the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe, due to the time he’d spent on the Herter Committee in the House. Ike was a hero who could win over millions of Democrats too, especially in the face of a weak candidate, and potentially break the Democrats’ hold on the South. Taft shared none of these advantages. “If we are to win, we had better get together on our strongest electable man and start building him up now,” Nixon wrote to Palmer in January 1951. “Otherwise, Taft will win the nomination virtually by default.” So Nixon put his not-inconsiderable influence and talent to work on behalf of Dwight Eisenhower’s candidacy. The two met in Paris when Nixon was attending a world health conference in Geneva and Eisenhower was serving as Supreme Commander of NATO, and Nixon came away deeply impressed. “He had an incomparable ability of showing just as much interest when he listened as when he spoke,” Nixon recalled later. Nixon didn’t realize until a bit later that RNC operatives were evaluating him just as closely for the second spot on the ticket, however. He was strong in every area Republicans needed to be strong in: Korea, corruption, and Communism. He was conservative, but he shared Eisenhower’s internationalism. “He knew the world was round,” Thomas Dewey, former New York governor and Presidential candidate, remembered. Nixon had managed to avoid being lumped in with the McCarthyites and those that Eisenhower called “disciples of hate”. Nixon and Ike had stood for academic freedom, in fact, when they’d opposed a HUAC inquiry into “subversive” textbooks in 1949. Yes, he’d struck a perfect balance of being a Red-baiting loon while simultaneously looking like the smartest and most level-headed person in the room. Nixon was canny, to be sure. But, as in all stories like this, there was a fly in the ointment.  Earl Warren was the current Republican governor of California. Simply put: he was a moderate, and he wanted to be President. After serving as Thomas Dewey’s running mate in 1948, he felt his hour was due. Problem was, Warren didn’t like to ask for support--much like Eisenhower, he felt much more at home above the political fray. Nixon biographer John Farrell says he “disdained the grubby process of claiming the prize”. Nixon didn’t much like Warren. During the 1946 contest between him and Jerry Voorhis, Warren had not only refused to endorse Nixon, but had publicly praised Voorhis. Additionally, he’d blocked plans by former Minnesota Governor (and Nixon’s Navy colleague) Harold Stassen to come to California and campaign for him. Four years later, during Nixon’s Senate bid, Warren agreed to stay out of the primary, but then declined to endorse Nixon in the general. You can understand where the bad blood came from--Nixon didn’t like Warren, but Warren didn’t like him either, whether it was because of the Red-baiting or Murray Chotiner’s campaign tactics. Warren’s strategy at the convention was to come out as California’s favorite son candidate and with their delegation firmly behind him. If Eisenhower or Taft were not able to clinch the nomination on the first ballot, he’d hoped to leverage that uncertainty into a potential compromise nomination. Nixon wasn’t about to let that happen. After a meeting with Ike’s political lieutenants--Dewey, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (R-MA) and strategist Herbert Brownell, Nixon agreed to act as the “fifth column” in California. “I couldn’t think of anybody else who could keep the California delegation in line,” Lodge recalled. Nixon had problems on that front. His own supporters were divided. Some, like Roy Day and Chotiner, preferred Ike. Others, however, wanted Nixon to defer to Warren’s role as leader of the California Republican Party, and others, like Herman Perry, the oil man who had originally drafted Nixon to run for Congress, wanted Taft to win the nomination. The Taft backers threw their lot in with Congressman Thomas Werdel of Bakersfield, who was rallying California’s conservatives to try and embarrass Warren. It was a lot to juggle, but Nixon was up to the challenge. First thing he’d have to do was beat back the Werdel delegation. For that, he made a Faustian bargain with Warren and another Vice Presidential candidate, Bill Knowland. They agreed to each name a third of the eventual convention delegation. Warren, despite his dislike of Nixon, went along, because by custom the delegates would be bound to him as the favorite son candidate, unless he should release them. Meanwhile, Nixon worked feverishly to undercut Warren’s chances in the nomination fight. He told California Republicans that Warren had little hope of winning the nod, and “once Governor Warren releases the delegation, we shall be free to look over the field and select the man best qualified”. Warren knew none of this, of course, and the Nixon-Warren-Knowland slate of delegates was chosen at the June 3 state convention by a 2-to-1 margin. OK, let’s set the scene. We’re a few days out from the Chicago RNC in 1952. Eisenhower has only just declared himself a Republican, and Taft has amassed a healthy delegate lead, securing most of the delegates from the Midwest. With me so far? Dewey and Lodge locked up the Northeast for Eisenhower, and Warren held California. That left one delegate-rich region still on the board: the South. Over the four days of the convention, a series of battles would play out among the delegations specifically of Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana--Taft’s Old Guard Republican machinery would get overrun by a surge of activists and new voters who showed up to cast their ballots for Eisenhower at the state conventions. When Taft loyalists tried to get the delegate slates thrown out, Ike’s people would file prompt appeals. It’s easy to see why California would have a determinative impact on the final result, isn’t it? Nixon’s machinations became clearer and clearer as the days wore on. He’d arrived in Chicago a few days before the convention due to his status as a member of the platform committee, just as Taft’s people were executing what became known as the “Texas grab”--a blatant attempt to disqualify the Eisenhower delegation from Texas and supplant it with a Taft-friendly delegation based on a series of backroom deals. Thomas Dewey organized the GOP governors in a resistance movement, declaring support for “fair play”. Earl Warren joined the movement, believing that he needed to stall Taft’s momentum. Nixon made his move. He declared Taft a loser and embraced the “fair play” movement. “[The party] can’t hope to win this November if it limits its membership to the minority which has not been large enough to win four national elections,” Nixon said. He then did what was expected of him--he got on a plane and flew to Denver, where he boarded the chartered train that was taking Warren and the rest of the California delegation to the convention in Chicago. Warren was so focused on stalling Taft’s momentum that he never perceived the threat posed by Eisenhower. See, Nixon had spoken with the California delegates and told them that Taft’s “Texas grab” was unfair and could lead the party to ruin. But if they got on board with fair play, they could help Eisenhower win and keep from being left out in the cold. It was an enticing proposition for many of them. Warren got word and was “furious”, said aide Merrell Small. “He was convinced they were soliciting first-ballot votes for Eisenhower”. The tension on the train was mounting, and Californians were increasingly dividing into two camps: Nixon and Warren. Nixon’s people felt that if the California delegation stayed true to Warren that it would clinch the nomination for Taft, so they devoted their time and energy to swinging the state to Ike. Nixon’s machinations worked. The “great train robbery”, as it was called later, bled support away for Warren and nudged the delegates towards Eisenhower. The press, meanwhile, was treating Taft as all but inevitable when the convention started, making them blind to the movements of Eisenhower’s top lieutenants. Even as Nixon appeared to support Warren’s votes on the party platform, he was slowly stripping away any incentive to stay loyal to Warren after the first ballot. Eisenhower's people didn't call in their chits immediately; they let Warren get in the game on the first ballot, but the convention was not going to deadlock and there would be no dark horse. Just after noon on Friday, Eisenhower clinched the nomination--helped, no doubt, by the California delegation’s 62-8 vote in favor of seating the Eisenhower delegates over the Taft ones. Immediately, the convention set about finding Ike a Vice President. One of Ike’s strategists, Herbert Brownell, compiled a list. The first name on it was none other than Dick Nixon himself. It made sense. Brownell, Dewey, and Lodge all approved--Nixon was a veteran, he had a photogenic family, and he was a popular Senator from a Sun Belt state. He had anti-Communist bonafides, which pleased Old Guard Republicans, but his support of the Marshall Plan marked him as a clear internationalist. Plus, he could act as Eisenhower’s willing attack dog, shredding Democrats on Korea, Communism, and corruption, while Ike himself took the high road. There was very little debate on the subject, even as various cheerleaders for other candidates like Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) and Robert Taft made their cases. When the meeting was over, Brownell picked up the phone and called Nixon. Nixon loves to tell the story of how he found out--that he was caught napping, literally, when Brownell’s phone call came through. Indeed, Pat caught wind of the Republicans’ decision when she was at the downstairs coffee shop in the hotel with her friend, Helene Drown--and she was so startled that a bite of sandwich fell out of her mouth. From obscurity to a spot on a national Presidential ticket within six years? It was unthinkable. And yet to assume Nixon was totally unprepared would be untrue. John Farrell elaborates. quote:Earlier that year they had spent an evening discussing the vice presidency with the indomitable Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who told them all about her father, who found the job a bore but was rewarded with the presidency when William McKinley was assassinated. And Nixon needed his nap because he had been up all the night before, in earnest discussion, trying to persuade his hesitant wife that they should accept Ike’s offer. Pat was totally against it. She hated politics. Not only did it take Nixon away from his family, it was detrimental to his health and their marriage. They’d just won a Senate campaign--surely that was enough? Plus, what if they won? What would happen when Ike finally exited the stage? The pressure would be on Nixon to seek the Presidency--which hopefully he’d be able to do, assuming his conduct had been flawless over the four or eight years of Eisenhower’s term. But it was Murray Chotiner who provided Nixon with the best argument in favor of accepting the offer. Here’s John Farrell again. quote:“The junior senator from California doesn’t amount to anything. There comes a time when you have to go up or out,” Chotiner told them. “Suppose you are a candidate [for vice president] and we lose? You’re still the junior senator and haven’t lost anything.” The vice presidency didn’t commit them to a presidential run—and if not, well, no vice president, leaving office in his mid-forties, with his contacts and prestige, would ever have to worry about making a living. So Nixon accepted. He dressed hurriedly, then went to Eisenhower’s hotel suite for a meeting. Afterwards, he trekked down to the convention hall to find Pat. “I’m amazed, flabbergasted, weak and speechless,” she told reporters. Nixon entered the hall to “Anchors Aweigh” and quickly scrawled some lines for his acceptance speech as he sat among the California delegates. They obligingly shielded him from reporters as he did so, and he was named by acclamation--there was no vote. The image of Nixon holding Eisenhower’s hand aloft at the podium still survives.  That night, Nixon collapsed onto his bed in his hotel suite, dead tired. He’d slept a total of three hours in the last two days. And had he known what being the Vice Presidential nominee meant, he probably would have gone on not sleeping. Checkers  After the convention, the next two months were a whirlwind of activity for Richard Nixon. He was, unfortunately, subjected to the same abasing stunts that VP candidates usually had to submit to: learning to fly-fish with Eisenhower in front of a crowd of reporters, wrestling with a gigantic lobster in Maine, etc. Too bad the corn dog wasn’t a thing yet, otherwise we might have a shot of Nixon at the Iowa State Fair deep-throating one. He’d even had to stand outside the Ohio Republican state convention to shake hands with thousands of Republicans, in an attempt to heal the rift between the Taft and Eisenhower wings of the party. He made the cover of TIME, and Pat offered reporters a window into the Nixons’ family life in the Saturday Evening Post. She emphasized that “we come from typical, everyday American families that have had to work for what they got.” If that isn’t a little bit of foreshadowing… One of Nixon’s favorite things to do, though, was attack the Democrats’ candidate.  You all might recognize him. Gov. Adlai Stevenson (D-IL) was a graduate of Choate and Princeton and a favorite of the Eastern press corps--everything, once again, that Nixon hated. His disdain for Stevenson was further inflamed by the fact that the governor had once served as a character witness for Alger Hiss. Engaging his personal opposition researcher, former Congressman George MacKinnon, and drawing on his connection to Father John Cronin (who had advised him during the Hiss case), he gathered reports of “Stevenson’s Communist Affiliations”. Nixon even received a tip from a reporter in St. Louis that Stevenson was gay, but even Richard Nixon had lines. “Even if I thought there was anything to that story about Stevenson’s being a queer (which I don’t) I wouldn’t dream of allowing it to be used in this campaign,” Nixon wrote back to the reporter. “This personal stuff, true or false, is below the belt”. A bizarre line indeed, especially considering that Nixon had no compunctions about poking fun at Stevenson’s masculinity, calling him “Sidesaddle Adlai” during a tour of New England and saying “Let the other side serve up the clever quips which send the State Department cocktail set into gales of giggles.” John Farrell elaborates further on why Nixon hated Stevenson so much. quote:In the coming years, Nixon grew a fine hate for Stevenson. “To me he was the so-called ‘liberal-intellectual’ at his worst—plagued with Hamlet-like indecision, tittering at his own quips, assuming a superior, mincing attitude toward the so-called run-of-the-mill politician which characterizes the Georgetown, Ivy League social set to whom he is the second coming of Christ,” Nixon confided to a diary in 1961. “He was a man who was all veneer and no substance, a perfect pigeon to be taken in by Hiss’ veneer and to fail to see Chambers’ substance.” Nixon should have known that he was daring his opponents to strike, and strike they did. Earl Warren loyalists still seethed over his betrayal at the convention, and they worked hard to try and make Ike and Dick lose California in the general. By the time Nixon left Chicago, the rumors were already circulating that he was the beneficiary of a “slush fund”--that a group of wealthy businessmen were bankrolling all his personal expenses. This is one of those scandals that mattered back before Donald Trump, you see. The charges had merit. Over the years, Nixon had taken money from some very rich people back in California--$1,000 here and there from Herman Perry and other entrepreneurs--to help him meet the cost of political and personal expenses. Such things included mailings, travel expenses, and anything that his Congressional salary didn’t cover. “I personally feel we cannot expect a young man of Mr. Nixon’s ability to carry these expenses out of his own salary,” Perry wrote in one personal fundraising letter. When Nixon became a Senator, the process was consolidated into what his allies called the “Nixon Sustaining Fund”. At its largest, it reached a sum of $18,325. Syndicated columnist Peter Edson was the first to contact Nixon upon hearing the rumors. He liked Nixon, despite serious misgivings about his ability to be President “should anything happen to General Eisenhower”. He sent Nixon a draft of the story he had written. The original version of this tale was fairly straightforward--Edson’s story, headlined NIXON AIDED FINANCIALLY BY RICH CALIFORNIANS, ran in afternoon newspapers across the nation on Thursday, September 18, 1952. This version would have been only mildly damaging on its own, but the New York Post ran its own copy of the story that day too--and they’d been tipped off by Warren loyalists back West. SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY, blared the headline. “Once the headline appeared, it...created a firestorm,” Nixon remembered. There was certainly evidence that Nixon had taken money from some very rich people, but the idea that the Nixons were living in great style or comfort was laughably false. Pat had occasional help with the gardening, child care, and housekeeping, but this was because Nixon was always working. Tricia and Julie were attending public school, and more often than not, Hannah and Frank Nixon did the babysitting. And it wasn’t just Nixon who played fast and loose with these rules. Stevenson had his own $84,000 slush fund for political obligations and often used it to support other candidates, entertainment, and sending Christmas gifts to journalists. The Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Sen. John Sparkman (D-AR), had his wife on his office payroll. Hell, Eisenhower himself was the beneficiary of a great deal of lavish generosity from his wealthy friends, one of whom would build a house for his use at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. When Nixon first heard the story, he dismissed it. “That’s probably the Edson story,” he told a reporter when he was informed. After all, he’d seen an advance copy of the story and he felt it wouldn’t do much lasting harm. Problem was, as Eisenhower’s train was speeding through the Midwest, he was hearing the New York Post’s version of events--and the story was causing “great concern” in the campaign’s high command. Why? Well, it ran counter to one of the campaign’s main narratives. Ike had been attacking Democrats for the rampant corruption in the White House, and “the episode….threatened to demolish, with eloquent mockery, the more righteous pretensions of a campaign that had christened itself, without excessive modesty, a ‘Crusade’,” Emmet Hughes, one of Ike’s speechwriters, remembered. “Corruption is the leading Republican argument,” CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid told his listeners. “Now that weapon may be blunted.” Reporters began asking the question: was Eisenhower going to jettison Nixon from the ticket for this? Republicans were divided. The political lifers thought they could ride out the storm--first of all, dumping Nixon from the ticket mid-stream would not exactly be great for voters’ confidence in Eisenhower’s judgment. The others, the newcomers who were closer to Ike personally, were furious that Nixon had tarnished the general’s image. “The more idealistic and less experienced of the Eisenhower advisors wanted Nixon to vanish in a Wagnerian cloud of smoke,” Look magazine reported. For someone as insecure as Nixon was, the next few days were Hell on Earth. One by one, his friends and political patrons deserted him. Stassen and Dewey both abandoned him, and Eisenhower was completely mum on the subject. Even as he fought back at campaign stop after campaign stop (to cheering crowds), he found out that the New York Herald Tribune was calling on him to step down. That one hurt him in particular--the Tribune had helped him during the Hiss case and its editorial page was the voice of Wall Street Republicanism. Plus, Bert Andrews, its Washington bureau chief, was a close friend of his. Nixon was reeling. The walls were closing on all sides, and Murray Chotiner raged at the “damned amateurs” who were playing “right into the hands of the enemy”. John Farrell elaborates on the family dynamic that was at play. quote:This time, Pat was on Chotiner’s side. She had watched it all unfold, and on Friday night, when her husband expressed his discouragement and wondered aloud if he should not step down, she told Dick to rally. “If you, in the face of attack, do not fight back but simply crawl away, you will destroy yourself,” Pat said. “Your life will be marred forever and the same will be true of your family, and particularly, the girls.” Her bracing talk was welcome. Nixon found the resolve to soldier on. “My emotional and mental and physical resources had been drained to a dangerous low point,” he remembered. “Pat’s insistence that I had to fight the battle through may have averted a rash decision.” So what to do? It was Murray Chotiner who came up with the answer, believe it or not. “All we’ve got to do is get you before enough people,” he said. Nixon could take his case straight to the voters. Let them decide what he should do. When presented with this plan, Eisenhower agreed. He’d give Nixon the time to collect all the data and prove his innocence, but he said “Of what avail is it for us to carry on this crusade against this business of what has been going on in Washington if we, ourselves, aren’t as clean as a hound’s tooth?” Privately, though, Ike knew the implications of dumping Nixon from the ticket. “If Nixon has to resign, we can’t possibly win,” he told advisor Sherman Adams. Nixon kept to his schedule even as the attacks came flying from all corners. One night, after attending an event at a synagogue in Washington, he got a phone call. It was Eisenhower. “Hello, Dick. You’ve been taking a lot of heat the last couple of days,” Ike said. “Yes,” Nixon said. “Has it been pretty rough?” Eisenhower asked. “Yes,” Nixon replied. “You know,” said Ike, “this is an awful hard thing for me to decide.” “Well, General, you know how it is,” Nixon said. “But there comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to poo poo or get off the pot.” It was bold. Nixon was daring Eisenhower to make an executive decision, but Ike demurred. “I suggest that you ought to go on a nationwide television program and tell them anything there is to tell--everything you can remember. Tell them about any money you ever took.” And so, the following Tuesday, Nixon did just that. Appearing before a national audience at the El Capitan Theater on Vine Street in Hollywood, Nixon brought every ounce of strength and resolve he had to bear on this matter--and to his intense relief, he found that despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, and despite the calls to resign from all corners of the Republican Party, a miraculous thing happened. quote:Nixon realized that he had it nailed. The words were flowing. The argument was cogent. He stopped looking at his notes. The intense fatigue, the cost of not eating and hours of sleeplessness, fell away. “The tension went out of me,” he recalled. “I felt calm, and in complete control of myself and my subject.” He was onstage. He was acting. He could do this. And so Nixon proceeded, as Eisenhower aide Emmet Hughes would recall, to make “his dog, his wife, her clothes, his debts and his mortgages famous.” “...Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she’d look good in anything,” Nixon said. It was gut-wrenching for him, to tell the world just how little he actually had. As his final confession, he said “One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me, too,” he said. quote:“A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip, we got a message...saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted. And our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.” If none of the other lines in the speech had driven it home, this one did. It communicated a message to Nixon’s “Silent Majority”: I am one of you, and THEY are screwing us. Yes, there was more to the speech that eventually became known as the “Checkers” speech--Nixon railed against his tormentors and adversaries, the “crooks” and the Communists and the elitists and yes, even the Republicans who were pressuring him to drop off the ticket. At the end, he defied all the calls to resign. “I don’t believe I ought to quit, because I’m not a quitter,” he said, and he would abide by only one decision--that of the people. Here's a full video of the thing if you're inclined to listen: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixoncheckers.html When he closed his speech, though, he was in tears. Throwing his notes on the floor, he moaned, “I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t any good.” Thing was, he wasn’t the only person crying. The cameramen and all the people on set were crying too. Even the guy wiping away Nixon’s TV makeup was choking back tears. Nixon didn’t know it yet, but he had completely flipped the table. “In 30 minutes, by the exposure of his personality, he had changed from a liability to his party to a shining asset,” TIME Magazine said. “He had established himself as a man of integrity and courage.” The sophisticates scoffed. Some of them called it “schmaltz”. Warren Olney, an Earl Warren ally who would eventually serve in Eisenhower’s Justice Department, called it “an intolerable amount of corn” mixed with “tear-jerking remarks about the family dog”. Lucius Clay, an Ike advisor and no friend of Nixon’s, was watching from his hotel suite and thought the speech was going to be an immediate flop. But when he exited the hotel, he saw the elevator attendant and the doorman crying, and he knew he’d been wrong. Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown of California was more sanguine. “...he overwhelmed us with that Checkers speech....You’ve got to hand it to him. It was as phony as a counterfeit dime but...very effective.” Opinions varied as to whether Nixon’s speech was genuine, but most people seemed to agree that he had strangled the fund story in the cradle and completely neutralized it as a weapon the Democrats could use against the GOP. Telegrams poured into the RNC--nearly 4-to-1 in favor of keeping Richard Nixon on the Republican ticket. Ike’s advisors, the ones who had wanted to dump him, including Tom Dewey and Herbert Brownell, had no choice but to back down. “Well, that boy’s got a lot of courage,” Eisenhower remarked to his staff after the speech was over (he’d been watching it before a rally in Cleveland). But Ike had noticed the jab at the GOP at the end of the speech, and he told Nixon in no uncertain terms that the decision was still his to make. Nixon would make his report in person, and Ike would make a final “personal conclusion”. Instantly, Nixon reverted to his self-loathing ways. “What can he possibly still want from me?” he asked, his voice full of anguish. Bert Andrews, however, soothed Nixon’s rattled nerves. John Farrell elaborates. quote:“Richard, you don’t have to be concerned about what will happen when you meet Eisenhower. The broadcast decided that, and Eisenhower knows it as well as anyone else,” Andrews said. “But you must remember who he is...He is going to be President, and he is the boss of this outfit. He will make this decision and he will make the right decision. But he has the right to make it in his own way, and you must come to Wheeling to meet him and give him the opportunity to do exactly that.” Nixon needn’t have worried. As he disembarked his plane on that cold night in West Virginia, Eisenhower was waiting on the tarmac for him. “You didn’t need to come way out here,” Nixon said. “Why, Dick,” said Eisenhower, putting an arm around Nixon’s shoulder, “You’re my boy.” That was that. Later that night, the RNC voted 107-0 to keep Nixon on the ticket, and that was the final nail in the story’s coffin. “There is nothing like adversity to bring out the best in a real man--and Nixon came through with flying colors,” Eisenhower told his brother, Edgar. We’re going to skip to the end here, because you already know how 1952 ended. Largely thanks to Nixon’s efforts at the bottom of the ticket (although Ike’s popularity had a great deal to do with it), Ike and Dick galloped to victory. Here’s that 1952 map again, in case you forgot. Sorry about the quality; for some reason the idiots who made it chopped off the last letter of Ike's name.  Funny anecdote--one morning after the election, a photographer caught little Tricia Nixon outside on the lawn of the Nixon home. “He’s always away,” Tricia said. “If he’s so famous, why can’t he stay home?” Why not indeed. The Curious Vice Presidency Of Richard M. Nixon  The new Vice President-elect remained, as always, very sensitive to what he perceived as unfair criticism. James Keogh, a Nixon speechwriter, remembers. quote:It became a spiral: Nixon reflecting to the press he didn’t like it; the press hitting Nixon’s raw nerve. Just a real visceral feeling...He could not excise himself of it. It would burn on him and burn. After the Checkers speech, Nixon’s relationship with the media was undoubtedly on the downswing. His allies in GOP-controlled newspapers had abandoned him when they thought him a liability to the ticket, and Nixon had felt utterly alone--a breeding ground for bitter enmity. Plus, his very nature made him an easy target. His childhood, chaotic and painful, made him crave order. His teenage years saw him speak out against dissent rather than for it. His Quaker upbringing engendered a profound sense of privacy, and his deep, deep insecurity left him vulnerable to the slightest barbs. “Nixon was so goddamn shy that it was just painful for him,” said Earl Mazo, a New York Herald Tribune reporter. “Newspaper men were all part of an inquisition for Nixon...we were the representatives of a hostile world, a world trying to tear him down and find out what he wanted to hide.” The Checkers speech had taught Nixon a valuable lesson, however--it showed him how to outflank those he perceived as enemies in the press. He could appeal directly to the voters on television. “He saw that night what television can do and he was in awe...he was absolutely spellbound,” NBC producer and Nixon ally Ted Rogers said. Let’s fast forward a bit. Even as Nixon and Eisenhower took their respective oaths of office, the relationship between them was unsettled. Things had never quite reached a proper equilibrium again after the fund scandal. Nixon’s age, a youthful forty (the youngest man, incidentally, to occupy the Vice Presidency for a century), made him more like a staff officer to Eisenhower than a second-in-command. John Farrell explains. quote:Eisenhower had spent forty years in uniform, where the chain of command was inviolable. Junior officers were dispensable. Staff was staff. “He had for me, I believe, fulsome respect for my abilities and my integrity and similar political persuasion,” Nixon would recall. “He considered me an important member of the ‘team,’ one who pulled his own weight. But there was little personal feeling between us. I gathered that I was considered a trusted lieutenant to the commander, but with the differences in our age and temperament, I was not a personal friend.” To be honest, I’m not sure there’s ever been a POTUS/VPOTUS relationship in history that didn’t have some friction in it. Nevertheless, Ike didn’t ask Nixon’s advice in selecting a Cabinet, nor was he included in the circle of advisors who would chart the course of the administration. He’d never be one of the coterie of businessmen who played golf or fished with Eisenhower, either--Nixon was hopeless with a fly rod and awkward at best on the golf course. To make matters worse, Eisenhower’s White House staff was full of people who weren’t exactly on Nixon’s Christmas card list--the new Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams, was among those who felt Nixon should have quit the ticket after the fund episode. White House aide Emmet Hughes recalls. quote:From his awareness of the hostility…there came the first stirrings of emotions that would cloud much of Nixon’s future relations with Eisenhower and the White House staff...As these sentiments persisted and evolved, they would inspire in Nixon much detachment, some disparagement and a little distrust. And, in varying degrees at different times, the White House would reciprocate. Guys, to put it bluntly--they didn’t hate each other by any means, but Nixon and Eisenhower weren’t pals. They didn’t socialize. And Eisenhower didn’t treat Nixon as a peer. That being said, Eisenhower learned one important lesson from the fiasco of the FDR/Truman transfer of power. Eisenhower recalled being absolutely shocked that Truman was not kept informed on the most momentous affairs of state. Heck, FDR never bothered to tell Truman that we were building the atomic bomb! Truman didn’t find out until about ten minutes after he took the oath of office. Consequently, Ike insisted Nixon join him when he met with Congressional leaders, the Cabinet, and the National Security Council--a newly created forum of the administration’s top military and diplomatic leaders. Duty demanded, Ike felt, that he not leave the country unprepared. He knew that he had health problems of his own--he was a former chain-smoker, his body prematurely aged by stress and a chronic intestinal disorder called ileitis (we know it today as Crohn’s Disease). Were he to die, he wanted Nixon to have all the information necessary to lead the country. Nixon was, in addition to these meetings, asked to preside over the gatherings of the NSC and Cabinet when Eisenhower was not available. He was invited to the White House “stag dinners” with other Republican Party bigwigs. Ike did what FDR did not--he prepared his Vice President to assume the office without feeling like, as Harry Truman once said, “the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” When Senator Taft died and the administration lost his talents as a reader of the Congressional landscape, that job too fell to Nixon. Bill Knowland had taken Taft’s place as Majority Leader, and he lacked Taft’s ability. With the GOP holding only slight majorities in both houses, Nixon became invaluable as a man who could read the tea leaves on Capitol Hill. To Ike, Nixon represented a class of people--professional politicians--that he viewed as a necessary evil. Here’s Farrell quoting a letter that Ike wrote to his old wartime chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith. quote:“The one thing that we always had in the war was a burning and constant desire to win. That burning desire helped us to defy fatigue and so filled our minds and hearts that there was no room for depression or anything else. The big and almost single job was to determine what was right—after that it was simply a matter of execution to which we gave our full energies,” Ike wrote. But in politics, the president discovered, “right, as opposed to expedient or even subterfuge, is often at a disadvantage.” So here’s the thing, guys: Richard Nixon’s Vice Presidency is best broken down into a series of short stories. We’ll start with one that should be very familiar. When Republicans took back the Senate in 1952, it meant that this man was now a committee chairman.  Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) requires no real introduction. You all know who he is and what he did. Anyway, he was able to hire staff and set an agenda now that he was running the Senate Committee on Government Operations. Nixon felt indebted to McCarthy--the senator had defended him during the fund controversy, so Nixon repaid him by endorsing him for reelection. Plus, the cry of “Commie!” was like catnip to Nixon--it was, after all, how he’d made his bones in Congress. It’d helped them beat Stevenson in November and it could be used to great effect in the 1954 midterms. Ike didn’t much like Tailgunner Joe, however. He and his staff viewed McCarthy and the rest of the far-right contingent of the Republican Senate caucus as political troglodytes--engaging them solely because their votes were needed, a fact that Ike found tough to swallow. McCarthy found himself in a quandary, however. When he’d been a member of the minority and Truman had been in the White House, bomb-throwing had been perfectly acceptable--after all, the only people he was likely to embarrass were Democrats. Now that Ike was in charge, however, McCarthy knew that if he kept hunting Communists he would more than likely run afoul of some of Ike’s State Department appointees. Nixon knew that too--and at dinner with the senator one night, Nixon urged him to throttle it back a little. You and I both know this was a useless gesture. It would have cost McCarthy what he truly wanted: attention. McCarthy chose to confront Eisenhower instead of concentrating his efforts on Democratic malfeasance, an error that would prove fatal. In the first few weeks of the new administration, McCarthy would challenge three of Ike’s major appointments: Walter Bedell Smith as Undersecretary of State, Harvard President James Conant as high commissioner for Germany, and diplomat Chester “Chip” Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union on the grounds that they were insufficiently anti-Communist. Going after Smith rankled Ike in particular. He’d been at Ike’s side during the war, and it made him sufficiently angry enough that Nixon (and an ailing Taft) begged McCarthy to back off. They were successful in getting McCarthy to stop persecuting Smith, and they even got him to back off on Conant--but Chip Bohlen was subjected to every indignity McCarthy could think of. They spread rumors that Bohlen was gay--to the point where in order to get him confirmed, Eisenhower had to agree to submit Bohlen’s FBI file to the committee. As the year progressed, McCarthy’s bullying got worse. Two of his aides, G. David Schine and a particularly odorous scumbag named Roy Cohn, toured the libraries at U.S. embassies abroad, looking for “subversive” books. In addition, another of the lawyers on McCarthy’s staff was sent to hound Western shipping firms that did business with China. Wanna know who it was?  Yep. Not gonna waste any more time on explaining why Robert Kennedy was kind of a shithead. When McCarthy announced he was going to investigate the CIA, Nixon again took him out to dinner and pleaded with him for restraint. Nixon accepted his role as “buffer” between the more militant Republicans on Capitol Hill and Eisenhower’s staff and Cabinet. “A controversy would cause a very decided split among Republicans and could well lead to defeat for us in the 1954 elections,” Nixon explained. I gotta tell you, this is shameful even for Nixon. He and Eisenhower were preaching that bullies abroad had to be stopped--as they were knuckling under to the ones in Congress. We know, of course, how McCarthy’s reign ended. He started drinking heavily, began attacking military officers, and making more and more enemies in the diplomatic and intelligence community. As his drinking increased, his behavior got more and more erratic, even as Nixon begged him to dial down the rhetoric. It got to the point where, as McCarthy descended into his downward spiral, the cause that Nixon had used to vault himself into national prominence--ferreting out Communists--was slowly becoming less and less of a national priority and was being treated more and more like a joke. By the time McCarthy received his Senate censure and ended up drinking himself to death at age 48, Red-baiting in the government was largely passe. After eight years, the Red Scare had largely petered out, despite the continued existence of HUAC and J. Edgar Hoover’s continued hegemony at the FBI. Let’s move on. Fast forward to 1954. In the midterm elections, Republicans lost control of the Senate, paving the way for Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) to become possibly the most powerful and influential Majority Leader in the chamber’s history. They lost the Senate for 26 years and the House for four decades. Yes, that’s right. The next Republican Speaker would be Newt loving Gingrich. Sometimes we forget this because of the grip the Republicans kept on the White House over that same time period. Anyway, the main reason? The hysteria over Communism had faded. McCarthy and his kind had largely turned public sentiment against fanatical Red-baiting. Nixon himself wasn’t immune--in 1955, as he positioned himself to run again, Gov. Adlai Stevenson called Nixon “McCarthyism in a white collar”. With the relationship between him and Eisenhower still cool at best and icy at worst, Nixon was again contemplating quitting politics. As early as 1954, Nixon was promising Pat he wouldn’t run again--he vowed to “quit the game forever” and even scribbled the date on which he said that on a piece of paper that he kept stored in his wallet. Nixon may have had every intention of keeping his promise, but we’ll never know. Why? Because on September 24, 1955, Dwight Eisenhower suffered a massive heart attack. In the early evening, Nixon received a phone call from James Hagerty, the press secretary. “Are you sitting down?” Hagerty asked. “The president has had a coronary.” The 64-year-old Eisenhower was in an oxygen tent in Denver, gasping for air and clinging to life. Nixon’s first reaction was numb shock. “Oh my God,” people around him recall him saying. His thinking was “disjuncted”, he reports in his memoirs. “It might not be true...maybe it was a stomach problem...people recover...they lead active lives...they must get Eisenhower expert care.” But as with all Vice Presidents who get news like this, his mind immediately drifted to a new thought, one much more terrifying: “The President might indeed die...I would become President,” Nixon recalled thinking. “With all my being, I prayed for the recovery of Dwight D. Eisenhower.” From that point on the phone in the Nixons’ house would not stop ringing. There were spotlights and helicopters over the house itself. Even if Ike survived, the New York Times wrote, Nixon was “heir to one of the greatest responsibilities and political opportunities ever presented to so young a man in the history of the Republic”. He’d now be in a “better position than anybody else to get the Republican nomination in 1956” if Ike stepped down at the end of his first term. Nixon knew the pressure he was under. He knew everything he said and did would be scrutinized and analyzed with a fine-toothed comb, and anything he did would be examined minutely for signs he was trying to ‘take over’. His enemies’ eyes were on him, he knew. So he called the Deputy Attorney General, William Rogers, a close friend. Bear in mind--the 25th Amendment didn’t exist yet. Very few mechanisms for transfer of power in the event of the President being incapacitated were in place. Right now, Nixon only knew he could discharge the powers of the office if Eisenhower was dead. He needed legal advice, and Attorney General Brownell was out of the country. Ironically, neither of them knew what the Constitution said, and they knew they couldn’t call for help--they’d look like idiots. They searched Rogers’ house until they came up with a Farmer’s Almanac with the Constitution in it. Despite the initial difficulties, Nixon surprised everyone in the days that followed. He was a model of restraint and wise leadership--something even his harshest critics admitted. As Ike recovered, he sent notes to Nixon directing him to lead the Cabinet and NSC meetings, but Nixon never sat in Ike’s chair. Further, when he wanted to talk to White House staff and Cabinet members, he went to their offices instead of summoning them to his. “Throughout this whole terrible episode, your straightforward dignity and visible unselfishness and loyalty has been superb,” former White House aide C.D. Jackson wrote Nixon. “Nixon is behaving like a model Vice President,” Drew Pearson, a longtime foe of Nixon’s, wrote. All of this was done with an eye towards making sure no one had any reason to criticize him--he had now been in Washington for a decade and his mind was always on political repercussions. Rose Mary Woods, his secretary, kept detailed notes and sent instructions to Nixon loyalists back in California--Murray Chotiner, Kyle Palmer, and others began scheming as to how to lock down the 1956 nomination if Eisenhower were to bow out. All of this only served to buoy Nixon’s confidence--his promise to Pat to abandon politics was forgotten as Ike returned to Washington in November 1955 to a loud, raucous crowd at National Airport.
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Jun 5, 2019 16:46
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"Dick"ed Around Nixon should have known that no good deed goes unpunished, of course. Eisenhower had spent the first few years of his Presidency insisting to friends that one term would be enough. “I shall never again be a candidate for anything,” he told his old friend Edward “Swede” Hazlett in 1953. After his heart attack, though, Eisenhower changed his mind. John Farrell elaborates. quote:As autumn turned toward winter, however, the thought occurred—to Ike, and even Mamie—that leaving a job undone could create more stress than staying. The challenge of a second term, while arduous, was stimulating and life affirming. Coronary patients need inspiration, and Ike had always been stirred by the summons of competition and the call of duty. He loathed the idea of turning the country over to “crackpot Democrats.” But, strangely, despite Nixon’s bravura performance as his stand-in, Eisenhower still wasn’t ready to anoint him as his successor. Here’s Farrell again. quote:The clash with death spurred Eisenhower to consider his successor. Nixon always made the roster on the lists Ike made, but somehow never topped it. Eisenhower expressed his admiration for Nixon’s deft performance during that fall’s crisis but griped to others about Dick’s immaturity. There was too much political hack in Nixon. Too much an opportunist. He had not grown. Sorry for the length of that snip, but I felt that I had to include it all. It gives you a sense of why Eisenhower did what he did next. That being, of course, summoning Nixon to the White House and suggesting that he serve in the Cabinet instead of the Vice Presidency if Ike were to win a second term in office. It would be good for him, Eisenhower said, if he could get some executive experience as Defense Secretary or chief of another large Cabinet department. The idea wasn’t totally insane--both Taft and Hoover had claimed the White House from Cabinet posts, while the last Vice President to succeed to the Presidency was Martin Van Buren in 1836. Nixon hadn’t ever run anything larger than a Congressional office. Riding herd on the Joint Chiefs or running the State Department (Ike had Dulles dangle State in front of Nixon at one point to sweeten the deal) would make him look more like a young executive and less like Eisenhower’s hatchet man. Nixon wasn’t dumb. He knew what this meant--Eisenhower was signaling doubt in Nixon’s ability to assume the office in perilous times. Even if he were to run the Defense or State Department ably for four years, what then? He’d essentially have a scarlet letter branded on his chest. No one would vote for someone that the great Dwight Eisenhower had deemed unfit for office. That is, Nixon knew that’s how the press and the public would interpret it, no matter what Ike’s real intentions might be. “I can only assume...this must be his way of saying he’d prefer someone else,” Nixon told RNC chairman Leonard Hall. Here’s John Farrell again to tell us just what this meant. quote:It was 1952, redux. Ike wanted Nixon gone—but was leaving it to him to cut his own throat, to minimize the political cost. Those wounds had never fully healed, and Nixon, always sensitive, insecure, and wary, smelled a trap...Nor was Nixon’s humiliation yet complete, for his torment became public spectacle. He was snubbed when Ike gathered his top political lieutenants to a dinner and discussion of the 1956 campaign. “Ike went along” with Nixon’s enemies. “If the fellows could organize [the coup], it was alright with him,” said Hall’s deputy, Lou Guylay, summing up the vice president’s stretch in purgatory. John Kennedy, Nixon’s friend and future rival for the Presidency, was struck by Eisenhower’s treatment of Nixon. “He won’t stand by anybody,” Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger. “He is terribly cold and terribly vain. In fact, he is a poo poo.” Words not minced. Nixon wouldn’t beg for Eisenhower’s affection, though, and Ike didn’t dare fire him, especially after Nixon’s allies organized public displays of affection from voters in the early states during the 1956 election campaign. No, Nixon wasn’t to be denied, and Republicans would keep him on as their nominee for Vice President at the 1956 Republican convention--but he never forgave, and he never forgot. Oh, by the way, in case you guys forgot, they won. By a LOT. Adlai Stevenson really was just hopeless as a Presidential nominee. So, apparently, were the makers of this map, because they cut off the last letter of Ike's name again.  End of Part 2. In Part 3, we’ll discuss Nixon’s 1960 campaign for President...and the aftermath. It may not be as long an update as you’re all used to
Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 16:47
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holy crap that's a lot of posts. added them all to the OP
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Jun 5, 2019 17:14
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Please
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Jun 6, 2019 19:59
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