Outside Looking In (13 page)

After taking on the book assignment, I boarded Nixon's campaign plane (a far bigger deal than the one he was flying in January, when I had first joined him). By this time, Pat Buchanan, who had not liked my
Esquire
article, tried to discourage people from talking with me—though I beat him to Nixon's brother and many others who had known Nixon in California and elsewhere. Dorothy de Santillana read each draft of the book and found me some extra advances as it grew in bulk. She went to bat for me with other editors when they tried to kill my title,
Nixon Agonistes
—they said no one could pronounce the second word, people would be intimidated by it, afraid to ask for it in bookstores. She pointed out that two of the most famous poems in the English language were Milton's
Samson Agonistes
and Eliot's
Sweeney Agonistes.
When the book came out, she arranged for a launch party at Sardi's in New York, and the senior publishing board came down from Boston for it.

One of the board members, sitting across from me at table, got fuddled with wine and began berating his son at Harvard, saying he was tearing down everything his father believed in. The son was a radical demonstrating against the Vietnam War. His father said, “If I went back tonight and saw him across the barricades, I could shoot him myself.” When I met my current literary agent, Andrew Wylie, I told him that story, since the board member was his father and the son he talked about was Andrew.

The hardcover of
Nixon Agonistes
was well enough received, but it positively took off in paperback, after the first Watergate reports began to circulate. I was told during a visit to Yale that it was being taught in four or five different courses there, and I still run across people who say they were introduced to it in college classes. Some say that it inspired them to become journalists, since I made that seem so exciting. I was often told that the book predicted the Watergate scandal—which is not true.

Still, one of the things I noticed on the campaign plane had seeds of future trouble for Nixon. There was a team of stenographers who rotated back to the plane from each campaign stop where Nixon spoke. I asked them what they were up to. It turns out that one man would take down a record of Nixon's speech and go back to type it up, while another man remained at the campaign site to take down Nixon's responses to any questions he was asked. Working at top speed with backup typists, they would have a record of that stop by the time he reached the next one. These records silted up in huge piles at the back of the plane. I asked what was the point. Admittedly, in 1968 there were not cameras and microphones everywhere all the time, as there would be later; but I pointed out that his campaign speech varied little from one place to another, and there would be a record in journalists' tape recorders and notes. But I was told that Nixon did not trust anyone else to be true to what he said, since they were all out to get him. He wanted a record he alone controlled, to challenge any misrepresentations and false extrapolations from his words, and he wanted it from moment to moment. This omnidirectional mistrust would blossom into the break-ins and spying that brought Nixon down. To guard against his enemies, he gave his enemies all their ammunition.

What I said about Hiss and Nixon continued to come up in my life. In 1974 I was teaching a course on the Cold War at Johns Hopkins. Hiss, who had edited the Hopkins student paper in his time at the university, was visiting the campus. A current editor of the paper was taking the course, and he asked if Hiss could visit the class. I said of course. As I have noted, I knew Hiss from the Harrisburg trial of Philip Berrigan. We had conversed there civilly, and I had no reason to think there would be tension in having him address my students.

But just before our class Nixon released a first (heavily edited) collection of the tapes he had made in the Oval Office. I drove to D.C. from Baltimore to get the transcripts from the Government Printing Office, read them quickly through the night, and told Hiss the next morning that he was frequently mentioned in the tapes. He did not know this yet, and I asked if I could read the passages about him to the class and get his comments. He agreed. On the tapes, Nixon repeatedly told staffers how shrewdly he had handled the Hiss investigation, offering that as a model for how to handle the Watergate scandal. Hiss rightly pointed out that there was no parallel between the two episodes. But my students, who had studied his court record, asked Hiss embarrassing questions. I did not pursue those, since I felt I was the host on the occasion. Hiss wrote me a letter afterward, thanking me for my courteous and fair treatment in the class.

Four years after that class I reviewed Allen Weinstein's book on Hiss,
Perjury,
concluding that Hiss had in fact been a traitor, though the statute of limitations left him liable only to perjury charges. Hiss, I was told by a lawyer for the
New York Review of Books,
regularly brought lawsuits against anyone who charged him with treason. Whether he meant to follow through with the action or not, the suits were meant to discourage people from questioning Hiss's loyalty. The lawyer asked me if I had had any dealings with Hiss that would let him claim I was acting from malice. When I produced his letter thanking me for the kind treatment in my classroom, the lawyer said that would be the end of the suit.

Hiss was the occasion for one of my arguments with Lillian Hellman. She not only thought Hiss innocent, but thought Nixon had knowingly framed him. I met Lillian when she held a private conference on the possibility of impeaching President Nixon at Katonah, New York, in 1971. I was invited because
Nixon Agonistes
had appeared the previous year. Raoul Berger's book
Impeachment
was in galleys, and he read parts of it to the gathering. Others invited included the nuclear physicist Philip Morrison, Hannah Arendt, Robert Silvers, and Jules Feiffer. I was asked to be rapporteur, summarizing the discussions at the end of the meeting. Since Lillian liked how I did that, she invited me to write an introduction to her book
Scoundrel Time.

I accepted, thinking she would send me the text at my home. But no, she said I would have to come to her home on Martha's Vineyard and stay with her while she read her drafts to me. She was very nervous about letting any text get away from her fussy ministrations—the result, I guess, of her trying out play manuscripts with producers and actors. She was known publicly for an aggressive manner, but I had heard from her lawyer Joseph Rauh how nervous she was as they prepared for her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I found her oddly shy. After we went swimming, she would not take off her swimming cap until I went out of the room—she did not want me to see her hair before she dried and arranged it.

As she read her book to me, I tried to correct one thing. She said the story of Whittaker Chambers hiding the Hiss microfilms in a pumpkin on his farm was ridiculous because they would have rotted in the pumpkin. I said he hid the microfilms only overnight, so they could not be seized by Hiss's agents. But she refused to believe any such story. She was one of those who could never trust Nixon and never doubt Hiss. Even after the Venona intercepts were released in 1995, which should have removed all reasonable doubt about Hiss's guilt, true believers and Nixon haters refused to recognize the obvious.

1
John T. Donovan,
Crusader in the Cold War: A Biography of Fr. John F. Croning, S.S. (1908-1994)
(Peter Lang, 2005).

I
got involved with Jimmy Carter's campaign, as with Richard Nixon′s, by accident. When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace during Wallace's second run for the presidency in 1972, Clay Felker, the editor of
New York,
asked me to survey the South to see what effect this would have on the presidential race that year. I started calling politicians and reporters in the southern states, and when I got the office of Jimmy Carter, Georgia's governor, his press secretary, Jody Powell, came on the line and said that the governor would be glad to talk with me if I would just come down to Atlanta. A memo from the time was later published, telling how Powell and Hamilton Jordan had mapped a strategy for getting reporters to raise Carter's national profile for a run at the White House—and my name was on the list of journalists to court.

When I got to Atlanta, Powell said that the governor was about to fly to Tifton in south Georgia to talk with a group of sheriffs who were grumbling against his racial policies. We got on the governor's small plane and he began teasing me about big-shot New Yorkers (he did not know I was from Baltimore, not New York, and had in fact been born in Atlanta). When we got to the sheriffs' meeting, Carter was not intimidated by the clear hostility some of the men displayed when he went into their room. When he rose to speak, he did not preach to them or use liberal talking points. He spoke their language, saying their mamas had told them we all have to get along with each other. He took their questions and went out to a sincere round of applause. I was impressed.

When we got back on the plane, he said he wanted to stop off in his hometown, Plains. He showed me around his residence there, and then around his peanut business. He introduced me to his brother, Billy (his mother was away from home). It was a tour many journalists would be given in the next few years. I wrote an article saying that Carter was aiming to be president, and could well make a good one. Shortly after the article appeared, I met Carter at a Democratic dinner in Washington, and he said he liked what I had written—all but one point. What was that? “Where you said I was trying to run for president.” “Aren't you?” “No.” Later, when he promised the American people that he would never lie to them, I had reason to question that.

When he did run for president, I flew on his campaign plane, and was impressed all over again. Once, standing in the airplane aisle, someone (I think it was Jim Wooten) asked him how he would differ from a Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. “I'm not afraid of intellectuals.” I believed him. I had read his book,
Why Not the Best?,
which he wrote himself. It had a precision that comes from clear thinking. Later he was asked on the plane, “Why do you keep bringing up religion?” He answered: “I resolved when this campaign began never to bring religion up myself. But you people keep asking me about it. If I don't answer you, you'll say I'm dodging the issue.” This was before Reagan and the Moral Majority, and George W. Bush and the Religious Right, made religion a proud part of their campaigns.

Back in 1976, reporters thought an evangelical believer had to be a kook. He was asked if he felt that he was “born again.” He said he was, as all Christians must be, since Jesus said (John 3.3), “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” A leading question from a
Playboy
interviewer provoked Carter to admit that he had experienced lust in his heart. The interviewer did not realize he was just making the evangelical admission that he was a sinner, like all men, and that he was again quoting Jesus, from the Gospel of Matthew (5.28): “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The religious illiteracy of the press was made the basis for charges that Carter was a religious extremist.

While he was campaigning Carter did not announce on his schedule what church he would be going to on Sunday. Those of us who were interested had to follow him to see where he might turn up. Once I was in a small group that sat together in a pew while Carter worshiped in a new church on the campaign trail. The pastor that morning preached from the story at Luke 12.13, where a man asked Jesus to decide on a property dispute with his brother. The preacher said, “Who would dare to bring up such a petty matter with the Lord?” Jody Powell passed a note down the pew from journalist to journalist, with the words: “If Sam Donaldson were following Jesus, he would sure as hell be asked petty questions.”

So far from injecting religion into politics, Carter had the historical Baptist belief in a separation of church and state. Roger Williams was one of the earliest proponents of that view, and Baptists were among the strongest supporters of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the great champions of religious freedom. When Carter became president, he never had a prayer service in the White House, never invited Billy Graham, the pastor to presidents who would be called in to bless George H. W. Bush's Gulf War. Carter continued to uphold the old Baptist position even after the Southern Baptist Convention broke from its tradition to join the Religious Right. A former president of the Southern Baptists, when he paid a visit to the White House, told Carter that he and his fellow members were praying that the president would give up his “secular humanist” ways.
¹