The American Vice Presidency (60 page)

In that 1952 election, as a junior senator from California, Nixon rode Eisenhower’s coattails into national prominence. What little drama there was in the campaign came from a controversy surrounding Nixon’s financial support. He deftly extricated himself and the GOP ticket from it with a television performance for which long afterward he has been remembered.

This controversy, the only perceived threat to Eisenhower’s election, involved the disclosure of a “secret Nixon fund” raised by wealthy Californians to cover the travels of Eisenhower’s running mate, seized upon by the Democrats to cast the vice presidential nominee as a bought candidate. Nixon confronted the allegations by going on national television with a plea of middle-class frugality, capped by his defense of keeping his daughter Julie’s dog, Checkers, the gift of a political contributor. Nixon urged viewers to call or write the Republication National Committee to say whether he should withdraw from the ticket, and predictably the vote
was overwhelmingly in his favor, effectively taking the decision on his fate from Eisenhower’s hand.

The maneuver was in keeping with Nixon’s skill in political self-preservation up to that time and long thereafter, in the vice presidency and in his public career that followed. Only the crimes of the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee in 1972, whose cover-up was engineered by Nixon and exposed in a tenacious Senate committee investigation, dramatically drove him into political exile.

Richard Nixon was born in the small Southern California town of Yorba Linda, in suburban Los Angeles, on the morning of January 9, 1913, the second son of Frank and Hannah Milhous Nixon. The father was a onetime trolley driver and fruit ranch hand, and the mother a devout Quaker and graduate of nearby Whittier College. They lived in a small clapboard bungalow built by Frank the year before Nixon’s birth, and a year later a third son, Francis Donald, was born, joining Richard and Harold, then five years old.

The Milhous clan was of German-Irish Quaker stock who settled in the William Penn colony in eastern Pennsylvania in 1729, migrated to Indiana in 1854, and moved to Southern California in the late 1880s. The Nixon side, of English, Scottish, and Irish roots, first settled in northern Delaware in 1731 and fought in the Revolutionary War. Frank Nixon was born in Ohio in 1878 and became a motorman in Los Angeles in 1907.
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After a failed effort to raise lemon trees, Frank abandoned the orchard in 1919, as well as subsequent hopes to find oil on the land. The father took the setbacks hard. He was a stern disciplinarian with his sons, but Richard earned a reputation as an intelligent, studious, and solitary young man.
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With his mother’s encouragement, he took piano lessons, maintained excellent grades in school, and helped at the grocery the family ran for a time. He had his first involvement in politics at Whittier High School, where he won an oratorical contest as part of a debating team. Later when he attended the local Whittier College, he was on the football team but played little as a third-stringer. He was, however, elected student president in his senior year, graduated second in his class, and went on to Duke Law School on a scholarship. He passed the California bar in 1937 and joined a Whittier law firm. In the meantime he had met Thelma Ryan, called Patricia or Pat, a graduate of the University of Southern California, a fellow amateur
among the Whittier Community Players, and a new teacher at Whittier Union High School. In 1940 they married.
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By the time war came with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nixon had already been recruited through a Duke faculty member to join the Office of Price Administration in Washington. But in mid-August 1942 he quit that position, enlisted in the navy, and handled transportation duties in the South Pacific, in Bougainville and on Green Island in New Guinea. He returned to San Diego in 1944 and then finished out his enlistment at a naval facility in Maryland. In September 1945 some Whittier Republican businessmen summoned him from Maryland to California to consider running for Congress against the five-term incumbent Democrat, Jerry Voorhis. Nixon showed up wearing his naval uniform and was chosen to take on the liberal Voorhis in 1946. In a debate, Nixon attacked Voorhis as the tool of a labor political action committee that Nixon described as communist-infiltrated—establishing a pattern of negative campaigning that would mark much of his career.

There actually were two such labor groups, the one supporting Voorhis not a union offshoot and not targeted by critics for communist ties. Nixon’s campaign manager, Murray Chotiner, intentionally tied Voorhis to the suspected communist front, and in the debate Nixon confronted Voorhis with a mimeographed copy of that labor group’s endorsement of the Democratic candidate. On Election Night, Nixon won 57 percent of the vote, part of a nationwide Republican sweep of Congress.
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Sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives in January 1947, Nixon was placed on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Amid the growing public fears of communism, which were raised by the right wing of the GOP, the committee was made to order for Nixon, fresh from his exploitation of the “Red Scare” in the campaign against Voorhis. He gained central stage in the case of the State Department official Alger Hiss, who was brought before the committee and accused of past communist affiliations by a
Time
magazine editor and former member of the Communist Party, Whittaker Chambers. Before a subcommittee chaired by Nixon, Hiss first denied having ever met Chambers but then acknowledged he had met him by another name. Chambers accompanied HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he extracted from a hollowed-out pumpkin some
undeveloped films of State Department documents and other material—the soon-famous Pumpkin Papers. The sensational story kept Nixon in the headlines into early 1950, when Hiss was indicted and finally convicted of perjury. With the statute of limitations having run out on any possible espionage charges, Hiss served forty-four months of a five-year jail sentence.
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After only four years in the House, Nixon decided to run for the Senate seat against the three-term Democratic congresswoman and glamorous actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, wife of the Broadway and Hollywood star Melvyn Douglas. She was an aggressive critic of HUAC and of Nixon’s methods, and her staunchly liberal views made her an obvious target for Nixon’s aggressive tactics. Her attacks on HUAC’s Red-baiting and on a loyalty oath that California required from its state university faculty cemented her nickname as “the pink lady,” which the Nixon campaign adopted. The Nixon headquarters then widely circulated what came to be known as “the Pink Sheet,” a flyer printed on pink paper detailing the most prominent votes she shared with the left-wing New Yorker Vito Marcantonio, while boasting that Nixon had “voted exactly opposite to the Douglas-Marcantonio Axis!”
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Douglas took to referring to Nixon as “Tricky Dick,” the label destined to stick to him the rest of his political career. Nixon insisted, “If there is a smear involved, let it be remembered that the record itself is doing the smearing.”
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But many years later in a memoir, Nixon’s longtime press adviser Herb Klein acknowledged, “The pink sheet was a smearing distortion.”
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Nonetheless, on Election Night, Nixon routed the actress-politician by nearly seven hundred thousand votes.

Shortly after Nixon’s victory, his finance chairman for that campaign began soliciting prominent California supporters for a bank account to help pay for expenses in an active incumbency, just as had been done for Nixon when he was in the House. Known simply as “the fund,” its donors were mainly Southern California oil and manufacturing men who had been in on the ground floor of Nixon’s political career.
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He used the money for travel, mail, and other practical expenses, including Christmas cards to donors.

Many of Nixon’s California enthusiasts reasoned that his next political step might well be the governorship, with the incumbent, Earl Warren, considered unlikely to seek a fourth term and instead to pursue a presidential bid in 1952. Nixon was committed to Warren, the state’s favorite
son, but had his eye on another prospective presidential candidate, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon attended a secret meeting of Eisenhower supporters at which the former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen was urged to run for president as a stalking horse against the other leading prospect, Senator Robert A. Taft, to ease the path for Eisenhower if he could be persuaded to run as a Republican.
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Earl Warren’s own presidential hopes would ride on a Taft-Eisenhower deadlock at the Republican convention. Nixon repeated his endorsement of Warren while also urging Eisenhower to get into the race, saying, “He owes it to his party to state his views before the nominations are made.”
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Tom Dewey, keeping Nixon secretly onboard, dangled the vice presidential nomination with Eisenhower under his nose. In late May at the Texas party convention, the Taft forces elected their slate to the Chicago convention, obliging the Ike supporters to send a competing delegation. The Eisenhower strategists raised an issue of “fair play” that would appeal to delegations with favorite-son candidates, like California, joining in.

When Warren and the state delegation boarded the train from Sacramento to Chicago on July 3, Nixon was not aboard. He joined it in Denver and set out on what later was dubbed “the great train robbery” of separating the California delegation from its unwitting governor. For his own “guidance,” Nixon undertook a secret poll of California delegates’ preference for an alternative if Warren were to bow out. Warren was furious at the gambit and demanded that the poll results, indicating stronger support for Eisenhower than for Taft, not be published, and Nixon was so “ordered,” but inevitably they were leaked.

With Nixon functioning as what Dewey later called a “fifth column” within the California delegation, Nixon declared the nomination “still wide open,” adding with feigned detachment that if either Taft or Eisenhower was nominated, the delegation would press for the state’s more conservative senior senator, William F. Knowland, for the vice presidency.
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Having completed his undercover work aboard the train, Nixon slipped off at Cicero, outside Chicago, and was taken by car into the city. When the train pulled into Union Station, the waiting buses, which earlier had been decked out with banners reading “Warren for President,” now read “Eisenhower for President,” with the switch suspected as Murray Chotiner’s handiwork, adding to Warren’s agitation and anger at Nixon.
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The
California delegation caucused on the proposed “fair play amendment,” which would prevent previously seated Taft delegates from voting on more than a hundred contested delegates. Nixon seized the microphone, arguing that the Taft delegates be excluded on the grounds that they had been illegally chosen. The fair play amendment easily carried. Many Californians thought they were helping Warren’s cause, and the Texas delegates for Eisenhower were seated.

Later, the Dewey associate Herb Brownell asked Eisenhower whether he had a preference for his running mate. “I thought the convention had to do that,” he replied, apparently unaware he had any say in the matter.
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After briefly mentioning some other names, they agreed on Nixon. The next day, for all the maneuvering over the California delegation, it held firm for Warren on the first ballot, which ended with Eisenhower leading with 595 delegates compared with 500 for Taft. Then Minnesota, previously behind Stassen, switched to the general, and he was nominated. Henry Cabot Lodge walked over to the California delegation and informed Nixon that the vice presidential nomination was his, and he immediately accepted.

As the fall campaign began, running mate Nixon quickly embraced the traditional role as attack dog, referring to the Democratic presidential nominee, Stevenson, as “sidesaddle Adlai,” who “like all sidesaddle riders, his feet hang well out to the left.”
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Soon, however, he was to take center stage with the disclosure of and intense news-media focus on that little fund from California helpmates. When a panelist on
Meet the Press
in mid-September asked Nixon about it, he referred the questioner to the Californian handling the fund.

By this time, word of the slush fund had been trumpeted by the then-liberal
New York Post
under the headline “
SECRET NIXON FUND
!” Based on a report that some of the money went to hire the Nixons a maid, the subhead read, “Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far beyond His Salary.”
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Back in California the Nixon campaign train was now wending its way through the Central Valley and just pulling out of the small town of Marysville when a voice called out to the candidate, “Tell ’em about the $16,000!”—the amount reported in some of the newspaper accounts.
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Nixon, hearing it, ordered the train halted and made a full-throated defense of the fund on the grounds that his use of it actually saved taxpayers’ money.

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Chairman, Stephen Mitchell, called on Eisenhower to demand Nixon’s resignation from the ticket. The general, fighting on a battlefield unfamiliar to him, expressed to reporters on his train his confidence that Nixon was an honest man, but added, “Of what avail is it 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?”
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Under pressure from both Dewey and Eisenhower to tell his side of the story, Nixon agreed, and the result was the famous “Checkers speech,” which ultimately prevented the expulsion of young Julie’s spaniel and kept her father on the 1952 Republican ticket. With wife Pat sitting just to his side, Nixon proceeded to lay out his personal financial history, mixing facts and figures with a heavy dose of sentimentality that included his disclosure: “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.”
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Nixon called on viewers to write to the Republican National Committee—notably, not to Eisenhower—and say whether they thought he should stay on the ticket or resign.
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Soon after, a telegram finally arrived from Eisenhower urging him to meet the presidential candidate’s entourage in Wheeling, West Virginia, for a dramatic, heavily photographed reunion. Ike read a wire from the party national chairman, Arthur Summerfield, reporting overwhelming support for keeping Nixon on the ticket. The Eisenhower-Nixon team would remain intact.