Fifties (39 page)

The campaign, as courteous as it was, did not make the candidates like each other. Stevenson was angered by Eisenhower’s failure to disassociate himself from the McCarthy wing of the party and for his willingness to be packaged in television advertisements. Early in the campaign he stopped referring to Eisenhower as his distinguished opponent and started calling him the general. Eisenhower was equally disenchanted with his opponent. In the beginning he was inclined to be impressed by Stevenson—after all, they both had connections to George Marshall—but as the campaign progressed, he decided that Stevenson, for all his high-mindedness, was just another politician, not a profession greatly admired by the general.

The most dramatic moment in the campaign came early, and it was also connected with television. In mid-September, it was discovered that a group of wealthy California businessmen had created a fund designed to alleviate the financial pressures on Richard Nixon, a politician without financial resources of his own. The idea was that the money be used for the young senator’s travel, for his Christmas cards and other small expenses. “They are so poor that they haven’t a maid and we must see to it that they have a maid,” said Dana Smith, one of the chief organizers. The Nixon fund was not unique. Similar funds had been used by other politicians, including Adlai Stevenson, it would turn out. Many congressmen enhanced their salaries by placing their wives on the payroll in various administrative or secretarial positions, something that Nixon, to his credit, had not done. Neither Nixon nor the organizers were particularly secretive about it. In mid-September, when reporters first asked Nixon about it, he was quite open and relaxed about it and suggested that they go see Dana Smith. Smith, in turn, spoke enthusiastically about what they were doing and suggested that it might be a model for others. He also used the opportunity to go on a tirade against the New Deal, which he said was “full of Commies.... Our thinking,” he added, “was that we had to fight selling with selling and for that job Dick Nixon seemed to be the best salesman against socialization available. That’s his gift, really—salesmanship.”

The fund apparently had a total of over $16,000. The contributions ranged from $100 to $500. The early stories did not seem to cause much of a stir. Most newspapers played the story inside if at all. Then on September 18, the
New York Post,
a liberal left newspaper decidedly unsympathetic to Nixon, played the story big. “
SECRET NIXON FUND
,” screamed the banner headline, “
SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY
,” said the head. Nixon responded in typical fashion. He was doing whistle-stop speeches from the back of a train in Northern California when a voice rang out, “Tell them about the $16,000!” Nixon started visibly: “Now I heard a question over there—hold the train! Hold the train!” The train came to a stop several hundred feet down the track. “The Alger Hiss crowd,” Nixon said to the reporters with him in an aside as he waited for the crowd to catch up and reassemble. Then he began again: “I heard a question over there. He said, ‘Tell them about the $16,000.’ And now I am going to talk about that on this score. You folks know the work I did investigating the Communists
in the United States. Ever since I have done that work, the Communists and the left-wingers have been fighting me with every smear they have been able to do ...” The
Post
story could easily have been the end of it: The fund might be somewhat questionable, but there was no evidence of anyone buying a vote. In addition, the
Post
was obviously hostile. “We never comment on a
New York Post
story,” Jim Hagerty, Ike’s press secretary, said immediately. But with that the Eisenhower people froze. The whole campaign was premised on his cleanliness: He was the man who was going to, as the saying went, clean up the mess in Washington. A decision was taken aboard the Eisenhower train that the general must be protected and not tainted by this, even if it meant letting Nixon take the heat. The general himself soon held a press briefing, supposedly off the record, in which he asked rhetorically, “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 clean as a hound’s tooth?”

With that, the burden was on Nixon to clear himself in Ike’s eyes. How he was going to do this was unclear. Nor were the candidates’ logistics much given to coming up with a coherent mutual strategy. Ike was on his train, traveling in the Midwest, surrounded largely by people from the liberal, Eastern wing of the party, men who had never wanted Nixon on the ticket in the first place; Nixon was on
his
train, whistle-stopping in California, surrounded by people who were fast becoming angry at the general for his lack of political acumen. Communication between the two trains was sparse. Ike was sitting back waiting for Nixon to save himself, and in the resulting vacuum the story grew.

Each candidate was now behaving exactly in character: Ike, the commanding general, was aloof, so carefully sheltered by his own staff that he did not sense that his very inaction was giving the story momentum and validity (in fact, his people were leaking their irritation with Nixon and the fact that the general barely knew him); on the Nixon train the candidate, always given to black moods and periods of despair, fell to brooding and self-pity. His staff cursed the general, who could have put the entire thing behind them in a minute and had chosen not to do so. Nixon later said that Ike had made him feel like “the little boy caught with jam on his face.”

As the story fed on itself, the newsmen covering the trains had a field day. It was the first flaw in an otherwise perfectly orchestrated campaign. Even BBD&O was not able to handle it, and the newsmen took some pleasure in showing that the leader of the greatest invasion in the history of mankind was not necessarily adept at domestic
politics. More and more, Nixon’s place on the ticket seemed in jeopardy. Bill Knowland, on vacation in Hawaii, was alerted to get back to the mainland and to be prepared to replace Nixon on the ticket; this news was soon leaked, spurring even more rumors about Nixon’s demise. The one Easterner sympathetic to Nixon, Governor Dewey, privately reported to the vice-presidential candidate that the men around Ike were by and large a hanging jury. Gradually, the idea was born among those sympathetic to Nixon that Nixon should make a special television appearance to clear himself.

Nixon himself was angry over what he considered Eisenhower’s waffling. “General,” Nixon said to him at one point in desperation. “I never thought someone of my rank would be saying something like this to someone of your rank, but there comes a time when you have to shit or get off the pot.” So Nixon decided to seize the initiative with a television appearance. Arthur Summerfield and Bob Humphreys were told to raise $75,000 for the television hookup—a pathwork of 64 NBC television stations and 194 CBS radio stations and, in addition, almost all of the 560 radio stations of the Mutual Broadcasting System. The decision to go ahead with the television broadcast was made on Sunday, September 21. There was some debate over time slot: The television people wanted to piggy-back after the
Lucy
show on Monday night, which would guarantee a huge audience. But Nixon did not think he could be ready in only twenty-four hours, so they decided to come in on the back of Milton Berle, on Tuesday, September 23, even though Berle did not have the audience that Lucy had.

That night Nixon seemed to bare his soul to the entire nation—at least, his financial soul. He had everything to gain and nothing to lose, with his political career hanging in the balance. He was, it appeared, to be judged by a hostile jury; he had been told by Dewey to conclude his speech by resigning from the ticket, thus leaving the decision up to the general. Ike’s people wanted copies of the speech before Nixon went on, but the vice-presidential candidate was not about to give them anything. Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s top political operative, finally told Sherman Adams, his counterpart on the Eisenhower train, “Sherm, if you want to know what’s going to be said, you do what I’m going to do. You sit in front of the television set and listen.” For Nixon, it was all rather exhilarating—it was the kind of challenge he could understand and rise to. The speech was thereafter known as the Checkers speech, after a reference to his dog, Checkers—although Nixon himself, who loved the speech and thought of it as one of the high-water marks of his career, much preferred to
refer to it as the Fund speech. Still, Nixon was proud of the reference to his girls’ dog because it was a version of a famous Roosevelt speech that featured Roosevelt’s little dog, Fala.

He knew exactly how he wanted to portray himself: as the ordinary American, like so many other veterans back from World War Two, just starting out in life, more than a little modest about his service to his country (“Let me say that my service record was not a particularly unusual one. I went to the South Pacific. I guess I’m entitled to a couple of battle stars. I got a couple of letters of commendation, but I was just there when the bombs started falling”). He wanted his audience to know he had never been rich and that he was being smeared in the process of fighting Communists for ordinary Americans (which he would continue to do, no matter how this all came out). There was no advance copy of the speech; he spoke from notes.

Ted Rogers, who was in charge of television for Nixon, told the people at the broadcast studio to make the setting as natural as possible. Rogers wanted to make the candidates comfortable with the American people, into whose homes he was going. There were to be no flags, no gimmicks. Nixon was the one who insisted that Pat go on with him. She was his only prop, a reminder that they were a typical young American couple. Rogers was dubious about putting her on—he thought it might be in bad taste—but Nixon was firm. It was not just politics for him, Rogers realized; it was as if he were fighting some kind of war—Nixon against the world. The director kept asking Rogers how he would know when Nixon was through. Rogers could answer only, “You’ll know. You’ll just know.” Rogers drew an arc on the floor with a piece of chalk and told Nixon to stay within it so the camera could shoot him.

Nixon spoke to the nation for thirty minutes. He outlined his family’s finances in exceptional detail. Pat Nixon came to hate the speech because in her eyes it unveiled the poverty of their past. “Why do we have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?” she had asked. The speech itself was extremely maudlin: “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a perfectly respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.” Then there was the dog: “And you know the kids love that dog, and I just want to say this right now—that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it ...” But above all there was the respect and obedience to Eisenhower (“And remember, folks, Eisenhower is a great man, believe me. He is a great man ...”), while telling his listeners to send telegrams to the Republican National
Committee, a conservative group hostile to Ike and sympathetic to Nixon. He cast the issue not in political terms but in personal ones. He had come to the American people and told them he was drowning and asked them to save him: Most surely they would now reach out.

He was in tears as he finished, sure that he had blown it and that he had not even gotten in the Republican National Committee’s address in time. Rogers, though, was dazzled by how well it had worked, how Nixon had ended just on the right note without even knowing it, “walking off the set into the Warner Brothers sunset,” as Rogers later said. The phone response showed that Rogers was right. Ike, watching in Cleveland, was not amused by the way in which Nixon had taken the play away from him. He turned to Summerfield and said, “Well, Arthur, you surely got your $75,000 worth.”

If the advertising people around Ike had not known how to deal with the news of Nixon’s fund, they were ready well in advance to deal with Nixon’s speech. Bruce Barton, one of the more senior people at BBD&O, had cabled Ben Duffy: “Ben, tonight will make history. This will be the turning point of the campaign. The general must be expertly stage managed and when he speaks it must be with the understanding and the mercy and the faith of God. My suggestion is that ... at the conclusion of Nixon’s speech ... the General come out with the following memo in his own handwriting: ‘I have seen many brave men perform brave duties. But I do not think I have ever known a braver act than I witnessed tonight, when a young Marine private [Barton was apparently under the impression that Nixon had been an enlisted man in the Marine Corps rather than an officer in the Navy], lifted suddenly to the height of national prominence, marched up to the TV screen and bared his soul ...’” That was in fact very close to what Ike later said: “I have seen many brave men in tough situations. I have never seen anyone come through in better fashion than Senator Nixon did tonight ...”

Nixon had saved his spot on the ticket. There was a price, of course. Ike never entirely trusted him again, and Nixon became increasingly contemptuous of Eisenhower’s political judgment. There was also the belief on the part of the nation’s tastemakers that there was something more than a little unsavory about the entire episode: the self-pity, the willingness to use wife, children, and dog. “He may aspire to the grace and nobility of Quakerism but if so he has yet to comprehend the core of the faith,” Richard Rovere wrote. “It would be hard to think of anything more wildly at variance with the spirit of the Society of Friends than his appeal for the pity and sympathy of his countrymen ... on the ground that his wife did not
own a mink coat.” Walter Lippmann was equally bothered; it was, he wrote, “a disturbing experience ... with all the amplification of modern electronics, simply mob law.” A few days after the speech, Fred Seaton, Bernard Shanley, and a few of Eisenhower’s other people were having drinks when Tom Stephens, a Dewey man working for the general, joined them. “There was just one thing he left out of the program,” Stephens said. What was that? one of the men asked. “It was the portion when Checkers, the Nixon dog, crawled up on Dick’s lap and licked the tears off his face.”