Between You and Me (5 page)

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passed by, he peered into our group looking for familiar faces and tossed personal greetings to some of us who had been with him since—as he liked to put it—“the snows of New Hampshire and before.” When his gaze fell on me, he said, “Hi, Mike, I’ll see you in California next week. We’ll be out there planning the campaign.”

“No, Mr. Nixon, I thought you knew. I’m peeling off the campaign after tonight to work on a new television series.”

Nixon was dumbfounded; he looked at me as if I’d gone bonkers.

Clearly, he could not comprehend how I, one of the first reporters to take his political comeback seriously, could walk away from the campaign at this triumphant juncture. He seemed almost insulted, as if I were casting a vote of no confidence in his ability to beat the Democrats in the general election, and had thus made up my mind not to waste time covering him after the convention. He seized the moment to set me straight on that score.

“We’re going to win this thing, Mike,” he predicted. “And later, after we get to Washington, we’re going to take some great trips.”

I had no idea what to make of that bizarre non sequitur. After all, every American president since World War II had felt obliged from time to time to visit other countries for one reason or another, and I assumed Nixon would be no exception. Well, so what? Was I supposed to be tempted by that travel-agent come-on? But a few years later, when Nixon became the first U.S. president to set foot in the Communist capitals of Beijing and Moscow, it occurred to me that those breakthrough missions had been on his secret agenda since before his election, and that was the cryptic message he’d been trying to get across to me that August night in 1968.

The premier edition of 60 Minutes was scheduled for September 24, and I spent the rest of the summer and early fall preparing stories for that show and subsequent broadcasts. The next time I saw Nixon

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again in person was in early October, when I interviewed him for 60

Minutes. He was then moving into the final month of his long campaign, and recent polls were showing him with a solid lead over his Democratic rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. One of the votes he’d be getting in November was mine, which was a fairly radical step for a guy who had never voted for a Republican in a national election.

Covering the Nixon campaign that year no doubt helped nudge me toward that sharp break with my past. There’s no denying that proximity to a candidate is an occupational hazard that can affect the judgment of even the most scrupulous reporter. (In spite of Aesop’s famous dictum, familiarity does not always breed contempt.) But more than anything else, it was the war in Vietnam that drove me into the Nixon camp.

By 1968 the country was so bitterly divided over the war that it seemed to me that only with fresh leadership in Washington could we begin to heal the psychic wounds tearing us apart. It’s true that the prime target of the antiwar protests—President Lyndon Johnson—had removed himself from the political line of fire when he chose not to run for a second term, but the way I saw it, his decision did not let the Democrats off the hook. They still had to bear responsibility for the war, especially since their nominee, Humphrey, had been such an enthusiastic supporter of LBJ’s policies. In my view, a Republican coming into the White House with a clean slate would be in a stronger position to lead us out of the morass, and in covering Nixon that year, I came to believe he had the qualities needed to meet that challenge.

However, most of my friends and CBS colleagues did not agree with me. In spirited arguments that fall, they kept insisting that I’d been duped by all the talk about a New Nixon, which they dismissed as so much malarkey. To them, he was still “Tricky Dick,” a master of

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deception who would say or do anything to get elected. Their antipa-thy was very much on my mind when I interviewed Nixon in October at his New York apartment, and I put the question to him directly.

W A L L A C E : The name Nixon is anathema to millions of American voters. To them, Richard Nixon is a political opportunist to whom the desired political end has justified just about any political means. How does Richard Nixon, if elected, go about reconciling the doubts of the skeptics?

N I X O N : I do have, based on a hard political career going back over twenty-two years, some people in this country who consider me as anathema, as you pointed out. But on the other hand, I believe that I have the kind of leadership qualities that can unite this country and that at least can win the respect if not the affection of those who have a very bad picture of Richard Nixon.

The theme of respect must have been paramount in his thoughts that day; at another point in our interview, he made a similar observation that, in light of later events, would take on an even deeper irony.

Here is what he said:

“If I do win this election, I think I will conduct the presidency in a way that I will command the respect of the American people. That may not be the same style of some of my predecessors, but it will enable me to lead. Let me make this one point: Some public men are destined to be loved, and other public men are destined to be disliked. But the most important thing about a public man is not whether he’s loved or disliked, but whether he’s respected, and I hope to restore respect to the presidency at all levels by my conduct.” (Italics are mine.)

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Looking back at that pious pronouncement, it’s almost too easy to feel scorn. We hardly need to be reminded that instead of restor-ing respect, Richard Nixon brought disgrace to the presidency. Yet even before he was engulfed by the Watergate deluge, I’d become disillusioned with his leadership. Rather than taking decisive steps to bring an end to our disastrous misadventure in Vietnam, he allowed that war to drag on and on. Four years after he became president, young Americans were still fighting—and dying—in Vietnam. In retrospect, I could only conclude that I, along with millions of other gullible voters, had gravely misjudged Richard Nixon.

But I would rather not end this reminiscence on such a sour note. I still prefer not to think of Nixon as the president who betrayed the trust of those who had believed inhim; instead, I remember him for something he did on the night of the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

My assignment that night was to cover his New York headquarters, where he was awaiting the returns. The big news from New Hampshire was not that Nixon had won (by then he had no serious opposition) but that he had received more votes than any candidate in any presidential primary in that state’s history, a stunning show of support for a man who, just a few months earlier, had been dismissed as a chronic loser. At one point that evening, Nixon emerged from a back room with his wife, and I was able to bag a short interview with him for our election broadcast. After getting his reaction to the heavy primary vote, I put the microphone in front of a visibly nervous Pat Nixon, who tautly but dutifully answered a couple of innocuous questions about the huge victory. I thanked her and dashed off to the CBS studio to do a live report. No sooner was I off the air than a phone call came in from Nixon. “I just wanted to thank you, Mike, for being so nice to Pat,” he said. That was all, but it revealed a

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thoughtful and caring side of Nixon I had never seen before and would not see again.

For many of Nixon’s detractors, the disdain they felt toward him extended to his wife. She was often derided as “Plastic Pat,” a term coined, I believe, by Gloria Steinem. But I did not view her that way.

It’s true that Pat Nixon usually came across as aloof and wary and even, at times, a little stilted and artificial (hence the “plastic” label), but there were reasons for that. For one thing, she was even more reserved than her husband and almost painfully shy. And for another, unhappy memories of personal attacks on her family in past campaigns had left her feeling bruised and vulnerable; as a result, she hated being thrust into the limelight and put on display. Yet even though Mrs. Nixon had no stomach whatsoever for the raucous commotion that is so much a part of American politics, she joined her husband on the campaign trail and did her best to be seen as a loyal and supportive wife. From what I observed, she was unfailingly courteous, in her tense and self-conscious way, to the reporters and other pests who swarmed around her in one public forum after another. Finally, there was the way she conducted herself during the Watergate crisis. Having to cope with all that must have been a terrible ordeal for her, and yet from beginning to end, she invariably projected a quiet dignity and forbearance.

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E l e a n o r Ro o s e v e lt

OF ALL THE FIRST LADIES who have graced the White House in my lifetime, there was one who towered over all others, just as her husband towered over all other presidents who came to power during the last century. When I interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt on my ABC show in November 1957, twelve years had passed since her husband had died in office. Yet his bold leadership and progressive New Deal policies continued to cast a strong shadow across our political landscape. And Franklin D. Roosevelt was still a polarizing figure, as his widow readily acknowledged when I asked her about the passions FDR aroused in the hearts of so many Americans.

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

W A L L A C E : Mrs. Roosevelt, I’m sure that you understand the sense in which I put this question to you, but I think that you would agree that a good many people hated your husband.

They even hated you.

M R S . R O O S E V E L T : Oh, yes. A great many do still.

W A L L A C E : Why? Why?

M R S . R O O S E V E L T : Well, if you take stands, in any way, and people feel that you have success in a following, those who disagree with you are going to feel very strongly about it.

W A L L A C E : There’s more than just disagreement involved.

There are people who disagree with President Eisenhower, and yet they do not hate him. I lived in the Middle West for a good many years while your husband was president, and there was a real core of more than just disagreement.

M R S . R O O S E V E L T : There was a real core of hatred. The people would call him “that man.” I remember one man who rejoiced, actually, when he died. But I suppose that this is just a feeling that certain people had that he was destroying the thing that they held dear and touched them. And naturally, you react to that with hatred.

What was left unsaid—but clearly understood by the two of us and most of our viewers—was that for all those who despised Roosevelt, there were millions more who revered and loved him. That was certainly the case in my family. I was fourteen when FDR was elected president in 1932, and along with my brother and two sisters, I was caught up in the pro-Roosevelt fervor that swept through our household. My parents’ admiration for Roosevelt bordered on hero worship.

There were several reasons for this ardor. Like millions of other

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Americans, our family was struggling to cope with the miseries of the Great Depression, and Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to offer hope and opportunity where none had existed before. Beyond that, my parents and other immigrants of that era felt a special bond with Roosevelt. They sensed that unlike the run-of-the-mill politicians who had preceded him in the power centers of Washington, he respected their ethnic and religious diversity, traits that already were starting to rede-fine our national character. In both his message and manner, FDR

made people like Frank and Zina Wallace feel more at home in this new land of milk and honey.

Roosevelt’s sensitivity in this regard was even more impressive in light of the fact that he himself was so far removed from the immigrant experience. He was the scion of a patrician Dutch-American family whose roots in the Hudson Valley could be traced back to the colonial days of the seventeenth century. FDR was denounced by his fellow blue bloods as “a traitor to his class,” and he relished their disapproval. One time, while delivering a speech at a convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution (a blue-blooded group if ever there was one), Roosevelt began his remarks with two words guaranteed to ruffle the feathered finery of the ladies in the audience. “Fellow immigrants” was how he greeted them.

But that was nothing compared to the controversy that flared up in 1939 when Eleanor Roosevelt renounced her long-standing membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. She resigned in protest of that organization’s refusal to allow the African-American singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall, which was owned by the DAR. In her public comments, Mrs. Roosevelt made it clear that she was offended by that decision and could in no way be a party to it, even by implication. Nor was that all. She then helped organize a campaign to promote a concert by Anderson at the Lincoln

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Memorial, and there—on Easter Sunday 1939—the world-renowned contralto sang before an estimated crowd of seventy-five thousand, far larger than a capacity audience at Constitution Hall.

Taking a strong stand on a highly charged issue was typical of Mrs. R, as she was sometimes called, and that was what distinguished her so sharply from her predecessors. For the most part, the previous First Ladies had been content to be national hostesses.

Rarely, if ever, had they injected themselves into the public debates and political storms that swirled around them. Such matters were deemed beyond their proper range of concerns.