The Arrogance of Power Read online

Kissinger, who found much to admire in Nixon, made a sad observation years later. “Can you imagine,” he said, “what this man could have been had somebody loved him? Had somebody in his life cared for him? I don’t think anybody ever did, not his parents, not his peers. He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.” Kissinger did not mention Pat Nixon in the context of these remarks, but the implication seems clear.

  Nixon did discuss his relations with Pat, and with women in general, with Arnold Hutschnecker, the New York psychotherapist he first consulted a decade into his marriage. The conversations were difficult because as Hutschnecker told this author, Nixon was “so very inhibited.” Hutschnecker concluded that “no woman ever gave Richard Nixon the support he really needed. I’m reluctant to talk about his marriage. But let me put it this way. What the average American man wants [in a wife] is a mother; they often even call her Mom. Most put their mothers on a pedestal but eventually free themselves from that. Nixon couldn’t free himself. That’s it in a nutshell. He was totally devoted to his mother. He had been brainwashed, if you will. . . .” Once, tellingly, when Nixon and Pat quarreled in the prepresidential days, the grown man called on his mother for help. His wife was not speaking to him, he told her. So Hannah Nixon flew to Washington as peace broker.

  “Nixon depended on Pat because he trusted her, and she stayed with him,” said Dr. Hutschnecker. “But that was for politics. The truth is, his only passion was politics.”

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  Ma-chi-a-vel-lian-ism n : the political theory of Machiavelli; esp: the view that politics is amoral and that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used in achieving political power.

  —Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

  “I was about thirty stories up . . . there he came, with his arms outstretched and his face up to the sky. Even from where I was I could feel the impact of his personality. . . .” It was June 1945, and Richard Nixon was standing in the window of an office building high above Manhattan, tearing paper into little pieces to shower on the returning hero passing below. He was one of thousands saluting General Dwight D. Eisenhower, victorious supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe and the man who—seven years later—Nixon was to serve as vice president.

  Even as the cheers rang out and the troops returned from the war, America entered an era of fear, suspicion, and uncertainty: fear of nuclear warfare, suspicion of the Soviet Union and the supposed legions of Communists within the United States, and pervasive economic uncertainty. Thirty-two-year-old Richard Nixon, now Lieutenant Commander Nixon, had come home with his poker winnings. Now, with a newly pregnant wife, he was serving out his final months in the navy, shuttling among Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Middle River, Maryland (near Baltimore), winding up contracts with civilian companies. It was at Middle River in September that he received a letter from California asking if he wanted to run as a Republican candidate for Congress in the 1946 elections.

  “The idea that I might play even a minor part in practical politics,” Nixon would insist years later, “never previously occurred to me.” Like much else claimed about Nixon’s start in politics, the assertion was not true. Politics was of course what he had had in mind from childhood, what he had been yearning for since leaving law school. He had started running, really, in 1940 while he was courting Pat, when he made a series of speeches as a move toward winning a state assembly seat. The opportunity did not materialize, but later the same year he had put himself before the public with speeches supporting the Republican presidential nominee.

  Pat, for her part, would also insist years later that she and her husband never discussed the possibility of a career in politics. Before their wedding, though, he had written to her: “. . . We shall realize our dreams . . . It is our job to go forth together and accomplish great ends and we shall do it too . . .” Even earlier, within weeks of meeting Nixon, Pat had told friends he was going to be president some day. It is unlikely she would have said such a thing had Nixon himself not told her it was his ultimate ambition. He had shared the same aspiration with male friends.

  The call to arms from California in 1945 came from Herman Perry, a family friend and the manager of the Whittier branch of the Bank of America. He had been deputized to sound out Nixon on whether he would be interested in running for Congress against Jerry Voorhis, a wealthy Yale-educated Democrat who had held his seat through five elections. Voorhis’s peers in Washington had voted him the hardest-working man in the House and the second most diligent in putting the national interest above political gain. The press in turn had named him the representative with most integrity. To the frustration of California Republicans, Voorhis seemed almost unbeatable—until Richard Nixon was asked to take him on.

  The details of the subsequent struggle between the two men were to become political legend. Nixon flew to Los Angeles, addressed the selection board in his officer’s uniform, and convinced them—if the members needed convincing—that he was indeed their man. He received his discharge from the navy, came home to Whittier, and began devoting every waking minute to the fight. He researched his opponent’s record in minute detail, went incognito to watch him speak, and filled yellow legal pads with copious notes—a practice that was to become familiar to colleagues for the rest of his life.

  Nixon made polished speeches as he began campaigning, but for a while his efforts seemed to be going nowhere. Then, for $580 a month, Nixon’s backers brought on board a tough lawyer and public relations consultant, Murray Chotiner, to handle publicity. Chotiner was renowned and feared, even by some of those who worked alongside him, for his ruthless tactics. His campaign philosophy was summed up by one who knew him as “Hit ’em, hit ’em, and hit ’em again.”

  Nixon proceeded to hit Voorhis again and again until he was fatally crippled. Supported by a barrage of scathing advertisements and press coverage orchestrated by Chotiner, he succeeded in creating the impression that his opponent was a tool of the Communists. The accusation took advantage of a growing mood of hysteria, with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warning in a California speech that tens of thousands of Communists were “at large in the country,” with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce releasing a report on Communist “infiltration” of the nation, and with the Republican Women of Southern California portraying the election alternatives as “Americanism or Communism.”

  Voorhis himself had actively opposed communism, but he was a New Deal Democrat who once, during the Depression, had registered as a Socialist. In Nixon’s hands, the taint of this alleged communism was his undoing. Voorhis came off looking tired and second best in a series of debates and went down to humiliating defeat on election day. He left politics forever, and Nixon went off to Washington and a famous future.

  Pat had been at his side throughout the election effort. Their first child, a baby daughter they named Tricia, was born at the start of the campaign. Within hours of her delivery, according to Nixonian lore, Pat was sorting through political papers. Within weeks she was out working with her husband, taking notes during speeches, shaking hands, typing letters in the office. She stopped smoking in public because in Whittier it was not acceptable for women. She patiently accepted the criticisms of Republican matrons, who carped at everything from her shyness to the color of her fingernails.

  Simultaneously Pat had to deal with the callousness of her own husband. Broadcaster Tom Dixon and his then wife, Georgia, who accompanied Nixon on the campaign trail, saw the earliest signs of trouble in the Nixon marriage. “He would always hold the door for me,” said Georgia, “but would walk through in front of Pat as if she wasn’t there.” Tom Dixon remembered Nixon’s behavior when his wife walked into a room while he was preparing for a broadcast. “He flared at her like a prima donna and said, ‘Haven’t I told you never to bother me when I’m working? . . . Now get out.’ ”

  Nixon banished his wife, Dixon said, “with as little ceremony as he would have a dog. If he had been doing a brand-new speech, I cou
ld have understood it, but this speech he knew by heart. . . . I’ve never heard any wife cut off in public so curtly without giving a rejoinder, not even a dirty look. . . . But she just backed off. She was kind of a saint.”

  On the night of his victory Nixon said his greatest satisfaction was for his wife and his parents. He took them along that evening to receive congratulations from Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Offered a drink, they asked for glasses of milk. Nixon followed suit, then slipped into the hall with Chandler’s wife. “Could you get me a double bourbon?” asked the thirty-four-year-old new member of Congress. “I don’t want Mother and Father to see me take a drink.” Fourteen years later, when Nixon was nearing fifty, Hannah had still never seen her son drink alcohol. He likely hid his drinking from her until she died.

  _____

  The campaign in 1946 was a first glimpse of Nixon’s political style, of his sense of expediency, and of his attitude to political foes. Nearly thirty years later, during the uproar over the Watergate burglary, Pat Nixon would say that in the Nixon-Voorhis campaign someone had broken into her husband’s office to steal—and presumably destroy—a large batch of pamphlets. “No one cared,” she complained, “when it happened to us in ’46!”

  This was one of those Nixon stories the details of which changed according to circumstances. Pat’s first version of the story, told soon after the Voorhis campaign, described a lesser dirty trick. Then she merely said that Democratic opponents had posed as supporters to pick up large batches of pamphlets, only to destroy them. There was no mention, in the original version, of any break-in.

  In 1946 few cared about Nixon’s misfortunes, perhaps because of the ferocity and cynicism of the onslaught he had unleashed on the Democrats. Republican tactics ranged from the trivial to the dastardly. Local citizens were urged to say, “Nixon for Congress,” whenever their phones rang during the campaign. If the call was from Republican headquarters, they would be entitled to buy from a wide selection of electrical appliances like irons and toasters—items in short supply after the war. Those who did so emerged with leaflets promising a plentiful supply in the event of a Republican victory.

  False stories about both candidates were circulated: that Voorhis had voted in the House to increase the ceiling price on Florida oranges but not on those from California (there had been no such vote); that he was sponsoring a bill to stop the production of beer and liquor, a grotesque twisting of the facts; that Nixon’s work record including “farming” and “fruit grading,” references to chores he had done when he was less than ten years old.

  At one debate with Nixon, Voorhis realized that the Republicans had planted people in the audience armed with specific questions. At another meeting he recognized Nixon supporters who had booed and heckled him at an earlier gathering miles away.

  Businessmen were warned by banks that should they put their names to press notices supporting Voorhis, their credit lines would be cut off. One bank admonished its staff not to vote for the Democrat. Just before the election a leaflet appeared claiming that Voorhis was the spokesman for “subversive Jews and Communists” who aimed to “destroy Christian America and our form of government.” Nixon’s people may not have been responsible for the leaflet, but they neither disowned nor denounced it.

  The taint of communism, though, was the blunt instrument most effective in felling Voorhis. The attacks had begun four months before the election, when Nixon claimed publicly that Voorhis had been endorsed by the “PAC.” Nixon’s supporters had for months been promoting the notion that Voorhis was a tool of the PAC (Political Action Committee) of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which, while not Communist-based, undeniably included Communists and fellow travelers in its ranks.

  The charge, however, was simply not true. On the contrary, the left had specifically prevented a PAC endorsement of Voorhis, after whom a 1940 anticommunism act had been named and who was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. There was, however, also a group called the National Citizens’ PAC—the NCPAC—a nonlabor organization weighted with literary, academic, and entertainment figures, churchmen, politicians, and jurists. Its membership did include Communists. Unbeknownst to Voorhis, a committee of the NCPAC had made a recommendation, though it was never adopted, that Voorhis be endorsed.

  Having learned of this motion, Nixon discovered that it had been committed to paper as an internal bulletin, and waited to pounce. At a key debate he produced the document itself, brandishing it in the air—in a scene eerily prefiguring Joe McCarthy’s waving of a paper supposedly showing there were 205 Communists in the State Department—and thrust it into the hand of his astonished opponent. The document proved nothing at all, but Voorhis, caught off guard, floundered around ineffectually in response. THE TRUTH COMES OUT. VOORHIS ADMITS PAC ENDORSEMENT, Nixon’s advertisements were soon shouting. Voorhis had admitted no such thing; but by then the truth was utterly obscured, and the Democrat never recovered.

  In the last days before the election came the cheapest trick of all, a fusillade of anonymous telephone calls to potential voters. “Did you know,” a mystery caller would ask, “that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Nixon and his supporters later denied such calls had been made or authorized. Yet they were apparently made, according to one source by people specifically hired to do so, working from a bank of telephones at Nixon headquarters in Alhambra.1

  “Of course,” Nixon was to admit later in private, “I know Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist. . . . I suppose there was scarcely ever a man with higher ideals than Jerry Voorhis, or better motivated. . . . But . . . I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win.”

  _____

  The key to understanding how Nixon broke into politics, and how he remained there, is to identify his power base. After the election the Nixons painted a homey picture of a campaign fought on a shoestring. “We drew on our savings,” Pat said, “and rented a little office in one of the oldest buildings in Whittier. Dick’s mother contributed an old leather sofa. . . . We found a battered desk, and a friend lent us a typewriter. Another contributed a throw rug for the floor.”

  Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he and his wife themselves financed the campaign in its early stages. At one point, Pat claimed, they were “so broke that I wept because at a critical moment there wasn’t any money to buy stamps. . . .”

  This tale of hardship is somewhat less than credible, given that Nixon’s old law firm had reportedly created a position for him that provided a salary for the duration of the campaign.

  Apparently forgetting the campaign poverty yarn, Nixon later recalled having arrived in Washington as a U.S. representative with his wartime savings intact. Even had he had to dip into them to underwrite the campaign, he would not have had any serious concerns about his future financial stability. Earl Adams, a key supporter in Los Angeles, had promised him a job in his prestigious law firm should he fail to win the election.

  In the official accounting for the preprimary stage of the 1946 campaign, Nixon reported having spent only $555 of his own money. At least another $11,000, and more, had come from outside sources. The total expenses for the whole campaign, formally reported later, were supposedly $17,774, as opposed to $1,928 for Voorhis. Years later Nixon supporters admitted having in fact spent between $24,000 and $32,000, but even those figures are improbably low. One backer, interviewed for this book, said he alone contributed $10,000.2

  Who financed Nixon? In his telling, his backers were “typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, and a furniture dealer.” He insisted that “no special vested interest” was behind him. Voorhis thought otherwise. A year before the election, he alleged, an unnamed “representative of a large New York financial house” made a trip to California to hold talks with “a number of influential people.” The emissary exhorted his contacts to see that Congressman Voorhis, “one of the most
dangerous men in Washington,” was ousted.

  Why? According to Voorhis, it was because he had worked “against the monopoly and for the changes in the monetary system.” He “had advocated the purchase of the Federal Reserve System,” asserted Merton Wary, a college contemporary of Nixon’s. “So the bankers decided to get rid of him.”

  Voorhis had made enemies in big business with such talk. Three years before the elections that destroyed him, moreover, he had exposed a shady deal that gave Standard Oil exclusive drilling rights—and massive profits—on a federally owned oil field in California. He had gone on to displease the petroleum industry on a number of key issues, the major insurance companies by opposing their exemption from antitrust regulation, and the liquor industry by proposing that grain be diverted from alcohol production to wartime famine relief.

  But were such shadowy enemies responsible for plotting Voorhis’s removal, as he believed? Very possibly. Nixon’s name was actually first put forward not, as generally assumed, by Whittier bank manager Herman Perry but rather by somebody else in the local Republican fraternity, according to Murray Chotiner. Perry himself said a “wealthy business friend,” whom even twenty-five years later he would not identify, had promised money as early as 1944 to fund the unseating of Voorhis. Financial support came in regularly from then on from this unnamed friend and was made available for each campaign until 1952.

  “There was a lot of material I had in documentary form,” Voorhis wrote in an unpublished draft of a 1947 book, “which would have shown how the Nixon campaign was a creature of big Eastern financial interests . . . the Bank of America, the big private utilities, the major oil companies, were resolved to beat me. I never used it.” While Nixon supporters insisted that “not a nickel of oil money” found its way into the campaign, Willard Larson, who carried the “political proxy” for Standard Oil, the company Voorhis had most angered, had sat in on the selection meeting that picked Nixon as a candidate.