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Aides to President Nixon like to reminisce and joke about Nixon’s oft-expressed dislike for Ivy Leaguers, particularly graduates of Harvard. In his memoir, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, describes the president exclaiming, “None of them in the Cabinet, do you understand? None of those Harvard bastards!”
Nixon was smarter, more intellectual, more open to ideas than almost any president who had come before him, including the ones who had gone to Harvard.
Both are the real Nixon: He used anxiety to create strength, but a brittle strength.
football, Newman made no effort to hide his grudges. He hated losing, disdained quitters, and was loud
lonesomeness of a politician—friend of all, intimate of none.
He was bothered that neither of the regular ministers, a Methodist and a Quaker, ever discussed race relations. Nixon observed that the blacks in Durham lived in a separate and unequal world, waiting on tables and working in the factories, speaking only when spoken to. Other students from outside the South were bothered by the strict segregation, but only Nixon spoke out about it,
“I knew that these firms were virtually closed shops, which hired only from the establishment elite of the Ivy League law schools, but I thought it would be worth a try,” he recalled. “I must have looked pretty scruffy sitting in those plush polished mahogany and leather reception rooms in my one good suit.”6, *
Whittier was very conservative—despite the Depression, the town refused to take New Deal money from Washington to create jobs because, the town council decreed, public relief was “Bolshevik.”
He could identify and empathize with the lonely and left behind.
Under Governor Hiram Johnson, California had reformed city machine politics through statewide referenda and open primaries, substituting the will of the people for the backroom politics of party hacks.
Their goal, as Theodore White put it, was to “twitch an uninformed electorate by its nerve ends,” to use emotion and visceral appeal by hyping a few simple issues.
The Republicans hired Chotiner to write some press releases and advise their young and green candidate for California’s 12th Congressional District. Legend, spread largely by Chotiner, held that he played a key role in the making of Richard Nixon, attack dog. Actually, he was only marginally involved in that first campaign, but the advice he gave was useful. He told Nixon to debate his opponent and sent him to see Kyle Palmer, chief political reporter of the Los Angeles Times.37 In California politics, Palmer, a dapper, cheerfully cynical man with an ingratiating manner, was known as “Mister
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Nixon would later regard the press as his undying enemy.
professor type. Voorhis was a patrician reformer, a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, an East Coast establishment liberal transplanted to the West. After five terms, he seemed to have a safe seat; he had been lazy and slow to react. Nixon was happy to be underestimated, especially by a snob.44
Nixon became the avatar of the “forgotten man,” the financially strapped shopkeepers and out-of-work laborers to whom FDR had appealed with the New Deal.
Asked what he wanted to drink, Nixon answered, “Milk.” But then he followed Mrs. Chandler into the kitchen and asked, “Could you get me a straight bourbon? I don’t want my mother to see me drinking it.”
“We shared one quality which distinguished us from most of our fellow congressmen,” Nixon recalled. “Neither of us was a backslapper, and we were uncomfortable with boisterous displays of superficial camaraderie. He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.”4
The invitation from the Herters said “informal,” so Pat Nixon “bought a beautiful teal-blue cocktail dress for the occasion and my father wore his dark blue suit,” wrote Julie Nixon Eisenhower. “When they walked into the Herters’ home that night they were stunned to see that they were the only two guests not dressed in black tie and long, formal gowns.” In Washington society at that time, “informal” meant a tuxedo; “formal” meant white tie and tails.6
Clyde Tolson, wrote a memo to Hoover asserting that Nixon was a headline seeker who “plays both ends against the middle.
From time to time I was guilty of a certain snobbishness toward him. He may have sensed some of that, and it may have annoyed him.”35
Well, there you had it. That was perhaps typical, typical of people in the foreign service, typical of people closely associated with Harvard and other great universities. They couldn’t bear to find one of their own like Hiss being involved in this kind of thing. They considered the Hiss case as being an attack on the whole elite establishment, an attack on the foreign service, an attack on those who were there for the UN, and even an attack on Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Those attitudes were all crap, but that was what I had to fight against.37
In Six Crises, Nixon claimed that after the Hiss case, he was “subjected to an utterly unprincipled and vicious smear campaign. Bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole
gamut of misconduct in public life, ranging from the unethical to downright criminal activities—all these were among the charges hurled at me, some publicly and others through whispering camp...
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But Nixon, ever alert to put-downs, sensed that liberal columnists and opinion-makers and their social friends in Georgetown and on Capitol Hill were beginning to privately sneer at him as a charlatan and demagogue. There
Amazingly, she attacked Nixon as soft on communism. She distributed a leaflet shouting “THE BIG LIE! (Hitler invented it. Stalin perfected it. Nixon uses it…)” and claimed that Nixon—not she—was the congressman “the Kremlin loves.”
but he had an attribute far more important than a hearty handshake: an amazing memory for names.
He worked at it, compiling thousands of note cards with the identities of supporters and small personal details about each person. He
That night, he moved from one victory party to another, playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the Democratic theme song—which he appropriated—on the piano. Nothing pleased him more than outfoxing his enemies.
“If he did wrestle with his conscience,” William Costello wrote mockingly in The New Republic, “the match was fixed.” The magazines were small but influential among intellectuals and academics, particularly Ivy Leaguers.9
At the table across from Nixon sat Ambassador Averell Harriman, also Groton and Yale, but not exactly a gracious gentleman on this night. “The Crocodile,” as he was known for his habit of snapping at people, looked straight at Nixon and announced in a loud voice (he was slightly deaf), “I will not break bread with this man!” Harriman had been a supporter of Helen Gahagan Douglas and regarded Nixon as an inferior being. He turned off his hearing aid, refused to eat anything, and shortly left the dinner.
“Make me a promise: don’t get fat, don’t lose your zeal, and you can be president some day.”30
“I felt hot, sleepy, and grubby,”
On a brief holiday in the mountains, the running mates attempted to bond. Eisenhower tried to teach Nixon how to fly cast. “I caught his shirt on the fourth try,” Nixon recalled. “The lesson ended abruptly. I could see he was disappointed.”40 (The next year, Ike would try to instruct Nixon at golf. The lessons went no better. “Look here,” Ike told Nixon, “you’re young, you’re strong and you can do a lot better than that.”
“General Eisenhower is on the phone.” Nixon braced himself. “Hello Dick,” came the flat Kansas twang over the line, “warm and friendly,” Nixon would recall. “You’ve been taking a lot of heat the last couple of days. I imagine it’s been pretty rough,” said Eisenhower. Nixon did not disagree. “You know,” the general continued, “this is an awfully hard thing for me to decide. I have come to the conclusion that you are the one who has to decide what to do.”
Chotiner dropped by Nixon’s seat. He noted that all the Democrats except the presidential candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson, were attacking Nixon. “I smell a rat,” said Chotiner. “I’ll bet he has something to hide.” Chotiner’s typically base and shrewd instinct was confirmed when they arrived in Los Angeles, where Nixon was to go on national television the next day. Stevenson confirmed that he had his own private fund for campaign expenses, just like Nixon. But he refused to take reporters’ questions, and—gallingly to Nixon—the press “treated him with kid gloves.”
“For me, it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at it.”12
Nixon’s speech was brilliant political theater.
is no wonder that hating Nixon became a mantra of the liberal elite.
Dwight Eisenhower watched his running mate’s speech with an inner circle of wise men, New York lawyers like Governor Dewey and military pals like General Lucius Clay. “Sophomoric!” “Sugary sweet!” they exclaimed.20 For a more meaningful reaction, Eisenhower had only to look to his wife, Mamie. She was crying. Eisenhower turned to Arthur Summerfield, the head of the Republican National Committee, which had paid for Nixon’s TV time. “Well,” said Ike, with cold understatement, “you certainly got your money’s worth.”21
“I still resented being portrayed as a demagogue or a liar or as the sewer dwelling denizen of Herblock cartoons in the Washington Post,” he later wrote. “As the attacks became more personal, I sometimes wondered where party loyalty left off and masochism began. The girls [who turned eight and six in 1954] were reaching an impressionable age, and neither Pat nor I wanted their father to become the perennial bad guy of American politics.”
personal, staff hurts).”43 He was stung in April when the Duke faculty voted not to give him an honorary degree and was wounded again in June when Whittier students formed two lines at commencement—one for those wishing to shake his hand, the other for those wishing not to shake his hand.
Decades later, as he was writing his memoirs, Nixon was still outraged at “the blatant double standard.” Not unreasonably: In 1976, Stevenson’s official biography disclosed that Stevenson’s private fund was more than four times larger than Nixon’s and went to private expenses like paying for the orchestra at a dance for Stevenson’s son.10
The ordinary people, the have-nots, the “Silent Majority,” as Nixon would later call them, had spoken, and Nixon got to celebrate the news with the doughty daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, Nixon’s beau ideal of the “man in the arena.”
Shopping for a wardrobe for the South America trip, she had called Mollie Parnis, a dress designer for First Lady Mamie and other powerful Washington women. When Miss Parnis mentioned this to Mamie, the First Lady breezily responded, “No, no dear, don’t do that. Let the poor thing go to Garfinckel’s and buy something off the rack.”22
After meeting privately with Nixon at Whitehall, the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote a memo-to-file: After Dulles’s ponderous evasions, Nixon’s incisive frankness was a great relief. He has a first class mind backed up by a masterly understanding of the world scene….The president’s deputy does not appear to be, as was sometimes feared, a kind of political ogre without principle or integrity, but rather a tough politician who possesses common sense as well as formidable energy, charm, and a lively intelligence…if he succeeds Eisenhower, the world will have nothing to worry about.
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He was determined to outwork (the soft, spoiled) JFK, which led Nixon to make another mistake. Ignoring the cautions of his advisers, he decided to campaign in all fifty states. He fell behind right away when he banged his knee on a car door and had to spend two weeks in the hospital with a serious staph infection that almost cost him his leg.
When, just before midnight on September 25, Nixon arrived in Chicago for the first nationally televised debate, he was exhausted and still sick. He had lost ten pounds, and his shirt hung limply around his neck. He wore himself out some more by giving a speech to a hostile labor audience in the morning and then spent five hours trying to cram facts into his head. On the way to the studio, he once again cracked his knee on the car door. His face turned ashen as he pretended to ignore the pain.15
His rival had spent the day sunning, napping, and listening to Peggy Lee records. When Kennedy sauntered into the studio, tan, crisp, and fashionably late, he ignored his opponent. Nixon couldn’t take his eyes off Kennedy. A producer asked Kennedy if he wanted makeup. “No,” said Kennedy, offhand and cool. Did Nixon want makeup? Nixon declined, too. He told his press secretary, Herb Klein, that he didn’t want to look like a “sissy.”
But the damage done by Ike’s careless remark was severe. Vanocur’s question particularly rankled Pat Nixon, who (rightly, as events would show) suspected newsmen of doing the Kennedys’ bidding.21
In the aftermath, Nixon was in a mild daze, unsure what to think. A supporter tried to console him: “That’s all right. You’ll do better next time.” She spoke loudly so that the microphones could pick up her words. She was in fact not a supporter but a woman hired by Dick Tuck, a campaign prankster. The wily Tuck had first crossed Nixon’s path as a Democratic operative in the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Posing as a Republican advance man, he had embarrassed Nixon by hiring an empty hall. By the time of the 1960 election, Tuck was on the Kennedy payroll.24
