Nixon's Secret (11 page)

Nixon’s reputation as a dirty campaigner would grow from the hardball tactics he and Chotiner employed in the Senate race in 1950. Forgotten now is that Douglas’s attacks on Nixon were equally vituperative and far more
personal
. She frequently called Nixon a “pipsqueak” and “peewee.”
48
Of course, most devastatingly of all, she would hang a sobriquet of “Tricky Dick” around his neck. It would stick with him throughout his career. “It’s a brutal thing to combat,” Nixon would tell his speechwriter Richard Whalen twenty-seven years after the US Senate race.
49
The notion that he was tricky and duplicitous was the greatest obstacle in his 1968 rehabilitation.

In fact, Nixon pulled his punches on Douglas’s greatest secret. Congresswoman Douglas spent little time together with her movie actor husband. Her children were parked in private school and summer camps. She was conducting a torrid affair with Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson.

Throughout the late 1940s, it would not be uncommon to see Johnson and Douglas at Washington parties holding hands. The bullheaded Texan did not make a strong attempt to hide his affair with the California congresswoman. “Lyndon would park his car in front of [her] house night after night after night,” said a friend of Johnson. “It was an open scandal in Washington.”
50
Nixon, serving in the House with both Johnson and Douglas was well aware of their relationship.

Johnson and Douglas “essentially lived together for a period,” said a Johnson intimate.
51

The affair would carry on into Johnson’s presidential years. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, once overheard a private phone call in the Oval Office in which President Johnson would tell Douglas, “He never knew you like I did,” referring to her husband, actor Melvyn Douglas.
52

“Hell, I knew Johnson was screwing her, but we didn’t use it,” Nixon would tell me, reminiscing about the 1950 campaign and the punch he had pulled.

Nixon’s tactics in 1946 and 1950, under the tutelage of Chotiner, when combined with his role as vice president, in which he was required to “carry the partisan load” as “spokesman” for the party, while the wily Eisenhower remained above the fray as a “nonpolitical” president, only contributed to his reputation as a slashing and negative campaigner. Nixon led the attack on Democrats in his backbreaking campaign schedule in 1954–1958. Nixon was also frustrated that while he did Ike’s dirty work, Eisenhower was always disturbed by the negative attacks back. “He would tell me to go out there and kick Truman, Stevenson, and the Democrats in the balls and then when I did, he would tell me, ‘too hard.’”

As far as Nixon’s early campaigns are concerned, there is no evidence that they were any worse than those waged by his opponents. In many cases liberals and Democrats made after-the-fact judgments about them. In fact, Nixon won because both 1946 and ‘50 were Republican years and both his opponents ran exceedingly poor campaigns, despite their sharp tone.
53

Nixon would, of course, become the most
polarizing
figure in American politics in the twentieth century. His vilified campaign tactics in the early campaigns; the successful pursuit of Hiss; the sharp language and ghastly debate performance he used to excoriate Stevenson, Truman, Acheson, and the Democrats “all brought the disdain of the liberal-oriented media, liberals, partisan democrats, and those who would comprise the Nixon haters.”

Nixon and Chotiner shrewdly knew that this coin had another side. Nixon was deeply respected and enthusiastically supported by anti-Communists, organizational Republicans, and conservatives and held his own among conservative-leaning Independents. These would comprise a base that would make his political longevity possible. It would make the 1968 comeback possible. Even in the doldrums of Watergate, approximately 30 percent of the American people supported Nixon and opposed his ouster, most of them seeing Watergate as a partisan coup d’état.

“Base is everything. But you can’t win with just them,” Nixon would tell me over a martini at New York’s Metropolitan Club after he addressed a national Republican Senatorial Committee “briefing” for which wealthy people paid $5,000 a seat. “You can stretch your base but never break with them. . . . Lock up the conservatives and start looking for moderates and independents. If your base isn’t slightly aggravated, you probably aren’t reaching left enough. It’s all about the arithmetic, ya see. You gotta get to fifty-one. You can’t do it without the conservatives and can’t do it with just the conservatives. Barry proved that.”

While Nixon’s ascent from the House to the Senate was meteoric, Chotiner had much bigger things in mind. Immediately after Nixon’s election to the Senate, Chotiner began plotting how to get Nixon onto the 1952 ticket for vice president. The mysterious Chotiner would repay Governor Earl Warren’s disloyalty.

NOTES

1
.     Terry McAuliffe,
What A Party!
, p. 59.

2
.     
New York Times
, “Lone Wolf of Politics,” May 4, 1956.

3
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 51.

4
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 51.

5
.     Ibid.

6
.     William Costello,
The Facts about Nixon
, pp. 44–45.

7
.     Ibid.

8
.     Lowell Weiker,
Maverick
, p. 36.

9
.     Interview with Patrick Hillings,
American Experience
, PBS.

10
.   Christopher Matthews,
Kennedy and Nixon
, p. 36.

11
.   Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, pp. 38–39.

12
.   Ibid. p. 39.

13
.   Leonard Lurie,
The Running of Richard Nixon
, pp. 50–51.

14
.   Conrad Black,
Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full
, p. 81.

15
   
New York Times
, “Jerry Voorhis ‘46 Nixon Foe,” Sept. 12, 1984.

16
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 45.

17
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 138.

18
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 52.

19
.   Tere Tereba,
Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster
, p. 271.

20
.   Conrad Black,
Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full
, p. 86.

21
.   Paul Lieberman, “The Gangster Squad Cops who Made the Mob Look Soft,”
Daily Mail
Online, January 9, 2013,
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2259932/The-Gangster-Squad-cops-mob-look-soft-New-film-reveals-story-LA-officers-carried-machine-guns-violin-cases-dangled-enemies-bridges.html
.

22
.   Tere Tereba,
Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster
, p. 270.

23
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 169.

24
.   Conrad Black,
Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full
, p. 111.

25
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 67.

26
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 171.

27
.   Richard Nixon,
Six Crises
, p. 9.

28
.   Ralph de Toledano,
Nixon
, p. 67.

29
.   Richard Nixon,
Six Crises
, p. 10.

30
.   Lewis Hartshorn,
Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Case That Ignited McCarthyism
, p. 119.

31
.   Ralph de Toledano,
Nixon
, p. 68.

32
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 180.

33
.   Ibid. p. 180.

34
.   Ralph de Toledano,
Nixon
, p. 69–70.

35
.   Ibid. p. 182.

36
.   Ralph de Toledano,
Nixon
, p. 71.

37
.   Ibid. pp. 71–72.

38
.   Gilbert Sandler, “Revisiting the Pumpkin Papers,”
The Baltimore Sun
, Oct. 25, 1994.

39
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 70.

40
.   Ibid. p. 71.

41
.   Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober,
The Nixon Presidency: An Oral History of the Era
, p. 48.

42
.   “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies,”
Nova
Online,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_hiss.html
.

43
.   Alex Kingsbury, “Declassified Document Reveal KGB Spies in the US,”
U.S. News & World Report
, June 17, 2009.

44
.   Drew Pearson, “Mickey Cohen Talks About Nixon,”
The Toledo Blade
, Oct. 31, 1968.

45
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 215.

46
.   Julie Nixon Eisenhower,
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
, p. 108.

47
.   Greg Michell,
Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady
, p. 106.

48
.   Julie Nixon Eisenhower,
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
, p. 107.

49
.   Richard Whalan,
Catch the Falling Flag
, p. 20.

50
.   David L. Robb,
The Gumshoe and the Shrink
, p. 62.

51
.   Ingrid Scobie,
Center Stage
, p. 172.

52
.   Randall Bennett Wood,
LBJ: Architect of American Ambition
, p. 481.

53
.   Edmund F. Kallina,
Kennedy v. Nixon
, pp. 44–45.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

“There comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot.”

—Nixon to General Dwight D. Eisenhower
1

A
hot and humid Chicago summer scene in July served as the setting for the 1952 Republican National Convention, held at the since demolished International Amphitheatre. At the time, the venue was called the Chicago Amphitheater, and the convention was the first ever to be broadcast live via television in the United States.
2
In fact, television had never been this present at a political convention before. All three networks were given their own studio spaces to cover the event with all the known technology of the time. Seven large cameras caught all the action on the convention floor with almost seventy others catching any additional happenings in the halls. Lastly, correspondents were able to show off their new innovations like mobile microphones, which allowed them to mingle with delegates and see the convention’s events in real time.
3
Of course, the International Amphitheatre would go on to hold other key national conventions like the Democratic Party’s most infamous in 1968. The platform that the GOP decided to run on that year included ending the unpopular war in Korea, curtailing the economic policies implemented by Roosevelt and Truman, reforming the State Department, opposing discrimination, and using the federal government to eliminate lynching.
4

Vying for the top spot on the ticket was Ohio Senator Robert Taft, the longtime beacon of conservatism within the Republican Party. Taft was a man who had run unsuccessfully for the nomination in 1940 and 1948. The widely conceived notion going into 1952 was that this was Taft’s year. Sure enough, the convention essentially became a contest between the internationalist and isolationist foreign policy viewpoints, with Taft admitting that isolationism was dead but also maintaining his stance that the United States shouldn’t get involved with the Cold War.
5
Taft was popular with Republicans in the Midwest and parts of the South but was always considered too conservative for the party’s top bosses ever to give him the nomination. At sixty-two, this was Bob’s last chance. New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, an ardent internationalist, was the GOP nominee in 1944 and 1948 and was widely disliked by the midwestern conservatives in the party.

Taft’s main competition was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had decided to run only after begrudgingly being persuaded by the grassroots “Citizens for Eisenhower” movement. In fact, the citizen’s group was fronted for Thomas Dewey’s wing of the party, which included General Lucius Clay, Dewey’s former campaign manager Herbert Brownell, Long Island Republican leader Russell Sprague, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Kansas Senator Frank Carlson, and Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge. Democrats Oveta Culp Hobby and banker Robert Anderson gave the group its bipartisan flavor. Public relations maven Tex McCrary and his actress/model/tennis star wife, former showgirl Jinx Falkenberg, would promote the group through their popular radio show “Tex and Jinx.” McCrary would stage a Madison Square Garden rally so massive that films of the event were hand carried to Ike in Europe, where the general was mightily impressed by the growing power of the “Citizens for Eisenhower” movement. “It was a moving experience,” Eisenhower later wrote, “to witness the obvious unanimity of such a huge crowd—to realize that everyone present was enthusiastically supporting me for the highest office in the land . . . the incident impressed me more than had all the arguments presented by the individuals who had been plaguing me with political questions.”
6

Eisenhower’s party affiliation was at this point unknown. President Truman had unsuccessfully attempted to get Eisenhower to run as a Democrat in 1948. Eisenhower was still fresh from his role as a five-star general in World War II and now an influential NATO general. Ike was successfully persuaded to run by the moderate East wing of the party. The moderate or internationalist wing of the party had accepted the global role of the United States in a post-WWII world. They also accepted the permanence of the social welfare programs developed by Roosevelt and the New Deal. What they could not accept was another Democrat president. Dewey and his team knew Ike had the national popularity to beat the Democrats at a time when the Republicans hadn’t won a national election since 1928. Ike was viewed as nonpartisan; he was a war hero who appealed to Democrats and Republicans alike. Eisenhower had become an almost mythic figure. Nixon had seen Eisenhower’s appeal firsthand. In 1945, he had been one of the four million people who gathered in New York City to view General Eisenhower in his victory parade. “I was about thirty stories up—but I have the picture that there he came, with his arms outstretched and his face up to the sky, and that even from where I was I could feel the impact of his personality,” Nixon said. “I could just make him out through the snowstorm of confetti, sitting in the back of his open car, waving and looking up at the cheering thousands like me who filled every window of the towering buildings. His arms were raised high over his head in the gesture that soon became his trademark.”
7