Outside Looking In (12 page)

We had seen Gielgud in London in 1959; but my most vivid memory of him was of his 1976 performance in New York of Harold Pinter's
No Man's Land
. The play is practically a two-man tour de force, in which Gielgud played with his old partner, Ralph Richardson. The latter had resisted the role, saying, “Johnny, I'm too old to memorize all those lines.” The two of them supplied what was in effect a chamber-music study of all that human voices can suggest in support of each other. During the break between acts, I stepped out under the marquee, where people were huddling against a light drizzle of rain. In the gutter by the curb, the actor Peter Boyle was pacing back and forth in fierce concentration, paying no attention to the rain. I could not resist asking him, as he turned to go back into the theater, what he thought of the performance. He shook his head in disbelief and said, “They can't do that. Nobody can do that.”

That was the best tribute I ever heard to the human voice. It is a continuing wonder to me that, of all the million sounds a human being can make, we still recognize a particular voice on the telephone. Saint Augustine once marveled that God can take the few components of the human face and still make each set of features individual, not mistakable for any other. I feel the same about voices, and when I hear Natalie's on the phone, I melt.

I
first got involved in presidential politics by accident. In 1967, I had taken my wife and three children to my parents' home in Michigan for the Christmas vacation. I got a phone call from Harold Hayes, the
Esquire
editor, who asked me if I could fly immediately to New Hampshire. Murray Kempton, whom he had asked to cover Nixon's attempted comeback in that state's primary, had canceled for family reasons. I flew out, missing Christmas with my family for the second time at Harold's behest (the first time was when he sent me to Dallas to write about Jack Ruby). This time I fell into a political situation for which I had no experience. I was lucky enough to meet with some friendly journalists who knew more than I did, people like Jim Dickenson, Jack Germond, and Jules Witcover. Jim Dickenson and his wife, Mollie, also a journalist, became and remain especially close friends. One day when Nixon ghosted himself away for unannounced TV tapings, leaving the press crew with nothing to do, Jim and I tried to ski for the first time in our lives. Neither was deft, but I was the prime goof, going backward on the beginners' slope.

To follow the New Hampshire primary, as my earliest exposure to presidential politics, was a blessing, especially in 1967, before twenty-four-hour cable exposure had made the event national, scrutinized by hundreds of commentators. There was still a local and intimate feel to the process. Candidates crisscrossed each other in that tiny cockpit, where teams of reporters mingled and compared notes daily. I saw George Romney's flameout when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because he was “brainwashed” by government guides on his trip there.

When Nixon took a break from the New Hampshire primary to set up the race in Wisconsin, his entourage was still small enough to be fitted, staff and journalists, in a DC-3 with only twenty seats in the economy section. After short hops about Wisconsin, we boarded a plane for a night flight to Chicago, and Pat Buchanan, his press aide, led me up into the darkened first-class section for an interview with Nixon. Under the dim overhead light, it was my first close-up opportunity to observe the famous nose. I suppose these words in my
Esquire
article, more than anything else, earned a place for me on Nixon's later enemies list:

Despite Pat Buchanan's anger when the
Esquire
article came out in April 1968, some of
Esquire'
s editors thought I was too sympathetic to Nixon. I argued that he was not a right-wing extremist but an intellectually serious and prepared candidate, though one insecure and defensive. I also got in trouble with later friends, from Lillian Hellman to I. F. Stone, by continuing to say what I maintained in the article and the book—that Nixon was right in believing that Alger Hiss was a traitor.

Two things from my first coverage of Nixon's New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries made me think he was not the cartoon figure of liberal myth. I asked Nixon on the airplane to Chicago what book had most influenced him. That is now a common question given to candidates, but I had never heard of it in 1968, and I continued to use it with dozens of politicians after that. Many answers were expectable, and they told me little. For instance, when Pat Buchanan ran for president himself, I asked him the question and he said that Bill Buckley's
God and Man at Yale
was the one (the book was a plea to alumni to cut off funds for Yale that actually made them give more). When Gary Bauer was running a silly right-wing campaign for president, he told me that Whittaker Chambers's
Witness
had been the main book for him (the same one William Kristol told Dan Quayle to say that he was studying when he was vice president). But Nixon's answer to me was the most thoughtful and revealing I would ever hear.

Nixon mentioned several books, but the one he stressed most, and we discussed most, was Claude Bowers's biography of Albert Beveridge. This was unexpected on its face—Bowers was a Democratic friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him ambassador to Spain. And Beveridge was a Republican admirer of Federalists like John Marshall (about whom he wrote a four-volume biography, winner of a Pulitzer Prize). Nixon, in other words, was not giving a party-line symbolic answer, but speaking from his own deep reading. And the answer made sense for Nixon at the time. Beveridge was a Progressive Republican ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Bowers was a Progressive Democrat of the Woodrow Wilson sort, and Nixon had been telling me that he thought a Wilsonian American replacement of the British Empire's worldwide influence was the new mission of America. Neoconservatives would take this idea of spreading democracy by arms to an extreme at the start of the twenty-first century, but Nixon had a milder version of the idea already in the 1960s.

The second thing that made me place Nixon outside the right-wing stereotype was a conversation I had with one of his old friends, ex-congressman from Milwaukee Charles Kersten. I looked up Kersten while we were in Wisconsin, since I knew him from staying at his house when I traveled with his sons, my debate partners in high school. Kersten was a Catholic anti-Communist who knew the activist “labor priest” John Cronin. He told me that Cronin had been Nixon's speechwriter during his vice-presidential days. The priest had met Nixon before then, when Nixon was a senator bringing charges against Alger Hiss. Cronin had intimate ties with the FBI from his efforts to root out Communist influence in the labor unions, and his closest contact in the Bureau was Ed Hummer. Kersten told me that, through Cronin, Hummer fed information on Hiss to Nixon.

I went to interview Father Cronin, and found that his connection with Nixon was even more intimate than Charlie Kersten had told me. Despite the misgivings of his superiors in the Sulpician order, Cronin was allowed to become an unofficial member of Nixon's staff in order to pursue the Catholic Church's opposition to “godless Communism.” Cronin told me things I felt were too intimate to put in my initial
Esquire
article or in the book that followed. It was commonly thought and said that Nixon's wife, Pat, was uncomfortable in politics (something I surely observed on the campaign plane) and that she had resisted Nixon's re-entry into politics for the 1968 campaign. After his bruising losses to Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race and to Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor's race, she thought that part of her life was mercifully closed.

I asked Father Cronin if that was his view, too. He said that was definitely true. He had become very friendly with Nixon's whole family—he was especially fond of his daughter Julie. Pat Nixon told Cronin that her husband had promised he would never go back into politics after the California race, which ravaged them both. When he did decide to run in 1968, she found out about it in a newspaper, according to Cronin. But he said that her unhappiness had dated from long before that. Even while Nixon was Eisenhower's vice president, there had been trouble. Cronin discovered this when he went to see Nixon in one of his regular stops at the vice president's office. Nixon told him he needed some papers from his home in suburban Virginia (this was before the vice presidents took over the Naval Observatory in the District), and asked if he would get them for him. But when Cronin knocked on the door of the Nixon home, Pat answered, and said, “Oh no! He can't get back in by sending a priest!”—and she slammed the door. Cronin went back to Nixon and asked, “What did you get me into?” Nixon said, “Oh, I didn't think she would bring it up with you. We have been having some trouble.” After this, Cronin observed that Nixon, who had a hotel room in the District for when he presided late at night over the Senate, had stayed at the hotel for weeks.

As I say, I did not write this part of Cronin's story in my
Esquire
article; but I did write about Ed Hummer leaking to Nixon some FBI files on Hiss. Without my knowing it, I had introduced two new names—Cronin and Hummer—into the endlessly heated debates over the Hiss case (a debate I would later go over with Lillian Hellman). People asked why Nixon had to wait for Whittaker Chambers to give him the records he hid in a pumpkin if Nixon was being fed hot items all along from the FBI. Some leftists felt that my report proved Nixon was part of an FBI plot to frame Hiss. Some conservatives thought that what the FBI gave Nixon (if anything) was not conclusive enough for him to act on before Chambers gave him “the Pumpkin Papers.” The debate continues, as one can see from the biography written about Father Cronin.
¹
The argument centers on Nixon and Hiss, on anti-Communism; but Father Cronin convinced me that his main work for Nixon was on civil rights, and it is true that people were surprised (when they paid attention) by what liberal things Nixon said about blacks. Some have given Daniel Patrick Moynihan the credit for this unexpected side to Nixon's record; but I believe that Father Cronin had more to do with it.

I submitted the
Esquire
article in February 1968, and it came out in April (when the May issue appeared). It was written before the New Hampshire primary (March 8), but I knew it would appear after it. Harold had explained to me his lead-time problem: the high production values and artwork of
Esquire
made publication lag behind the processing of copy. I wrote something I hoped would stand up whether Nixon won or lost New Hampshire, and I thought that was the end of my involvement in presidential elections. But I soon got a phone call from Dorothy de Santillana, an editor at the Houghton Mifflin publishing house in Boston. She had read the article and told me, “You
have
to write a book about Nixon.” I replied that I had now said everything I knew about him—and besides, I did not think he could win in November. (So much for my political prescience.) She maintained that what I wrote about America—its conflicted Cold War liberalism—was what she wanted to hear more of, whether Nixon won or lost.

I was not convinced. She said, “Would you at least come up from Baltimore to New York, and let me go down from Boston, to talk this over?” I did not know then what I learned later, that Dorothy had a gift for getting the first book (or the first important one) from writers she set her sights on—she had edited early books from David Halberstam and Robert Stone. She was married to the Renaissance historian at MIT, Giorgio de Santillana, and she had a wide cultural vision which, at our New York dinner, she fit my article into.

At that dinner, I said that I could not write her book even if I wanted to, since I had just signed a contract with
Esquire
calling for me to write four articles a year, which would not leave me time to follow Nixon's campaign. Dorothy was not easily deterred. She asked if I would consider the book if she persuaded Harold Hayes at
Esquire
to accept several chapters of it as articles under my contract. He did agree with her, and I wrote
Esquire
articles on Nixon's Checkers speech and on his vice-presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew, as parts of the book.