Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

On their honeymoon, they drove down to Mexico. Short of money, they had stocked up on canned food to avoid the expense of restaurants, but, as a wedding prank, their ushers had removed the labels on the cans. “Several times we ended up having pork and beans for breakfast and grapefruit slices for dinner,” recalled Nixon.

Nixon’s speech was brilliant political theater. The man who had fashioned the Orthogonians’ mission statement knew his audience—knew that the Franklins might make fun of his speech but that the vastly more numerous common people would be moved. Liberal Democrats who fancied themselves as tribunes of the working man suddenly saw Nixon outfox and supplant them. It is no wonder that hating Nixon became a mantra of the liberal elite. In the Checkers Speech were seeded the roots of Nixon’s later appeals to the Silent Majority—which would again leave the chattering classes spluttering.

Nixon loved unpredictability and surprise, and he didn’t mind being seen, under the right circumstances, as a little unhinged. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

On September 27, 1970, as he was flying to Europe on Air Force One, Nixon instructed Haldeman to create a “campaign attack group”—he named the “nutcutters,”