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The Kennedy machine revved up, though not out in the open: In black churches and bars all over the country, thousands of handbills were distributed. On one side the flyer read, “Jack Kennedy called Mrs. King.” The other side read, “Richard Nixon did not.” In the large black populations of Detroit,
Philadelphia, and New York and in the black press, Kennedy operatives reached out, sometimes with cash.
(Kennedy’s operatives did not advertise their cultivation of the black press because they did not want white voters to notice.)
The most prominent was Theodore H. White, whose Making of the President, 1960 became the ur-campaign book, at once an exaltation and embarrassment of access journalism. (“Cher Pierre,” White began a letter to Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, a month before the election, “my chips are so heavily committed to Jack.”)
On the campaign plane, reporters joined the Kennedy staff in sing-alongs about the New Frontier.38 Bouncing along on the campaign plane, separated from the traveling reporters by a red curtain (and, in some cases, by a gaping cultural divide), Nixon could not possibly compete with the glamorous Jack. Reporters could be savage to Nixon. They called him “the cardboard man” because he seemed to be hiding behind a cardboard image, even when he tried to have drinks with reporters and chat with them.
He made up his mind not to make that mistake again: “I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.”56 Or, as his daughter Julie put it more succinctly, Nixon “vowed never to be at the mercy of such political hardball himself.
November 9, Daley had called Kennedy and said, “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.”3 (In one mostly black precinct of Chicago, there were more votes cast for Kennedy than people living there.)4
But by mid-December he had confirmed his initial instinct that a challenge would be counterproductive, making him look like the sore loser and putting a cloud over the new president at a dangerous time in the Cold War.
Braden was hardly Nixon’s only problem in the press corps. He had always been able to count on the unquestioning support, indeed the boosterism, of the Los Angeles Times. Repeatedly
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he began. “Now that all the members of the press are delighted that I have lost, I’d like to make a statement of my own.” He could see reporters “exchanging glances,” he recalled, and yet—or so—he plunged on. His voice was not abject, but his rambling sarcasm would become permanently enshrined by Nixon’s foes in the annals of what reporters were by now calling “Nixonland.”*2 He famously ended, “Just think of how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”26
Three months later, Nixon’s tax returns were audited again (they had been audited in 1961 and 1962 as well). The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the Hughes loan. Neither probe amounted to anything, but Nixon blamed Bobby Kennedy, who was attorney general under his brother Jack, for the aggravation and cost.
“I thought that kind of harassment is hard to forgive or forget, particularly when it’s aimed at your family…but on the other hand the Kennedys play hardball,” Nixon told Jonathan Aitken many years later. “They had me down. They knew I wasn’t out, and they wanted to put a couple of nails in the coffin. They almost succeeded.
Goldwater’s famous line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Nixon had put his hand on her arm to restrain her.38, *3 He wanted to bring the party back to the center. He was hawkish on Vietnam—he wanted more bombing, more troops—but moderate on social policy, accepting Big Government, albeit slimmed down.
“He loved his privacy and took enormous pains to hide things,
“you’ve got to understand one thing. I can say things that if someone else said them, they would be lies, but when I say them, no one believes them, anyway.”40
Nixon was hardly an expert on the ins and outs of social policy. Indeed, walking out of their first meeting in November 1968, his chief domestic adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan would say to a friend, “He’s ignorant! He doesn’t know anything!”55 But, as Moynihan would soon learn to his delight, Nixon was ready to learn. The very fact that Nixon would hire a liberal intellectual Harvard professor as his chief domestic policy adviser suggests Nixon’s openness to new and transformative ideas. As he read philosophy and the biographies of statesmen in the winter of 1967, he was preparing
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Powerful personalities…capable of standing up to the tests of great events frequently lack that surface charm which wins popularity in ordinary life. Strong characters are, as a rule, rough, disagreeable, and aggressive.
Great men of action have always been of the meditative type. They have without exception possessed to a very high degree the faculty of withdrawing into themselves.
Nixon offered a hardheaded, realistic view of the many challenges America faced around the world and called for patience, strength, and wisdom—suggesting, neither too baldly nor too subtly, that he was the one who embodied these qualities.
He was furious at the newsmen who filled the pews, forcing many of Hannah’s friends from Whittier to stand outside the church. After the service, Nixon had laid his head on Graham’s shoulder and sobbed.
footprints in the sands of time.” Nixon did regard himself as a man of destiny,
God I hate spending time with intellectuals. There’s something feminine about them. I’d rather talk to an athlete,” he once said.12
was sometimes hard to tell when Nixon was being disingenuous or exaggerating for effect—
“Yeah, I know, you intellectuals don’t go for that sort of thing. The press won’t like it at all, they’ll climb the wall. None of them could write a speech like that, one that reaches the folks, and they’ll hate me for it….” Holding his glass by the rim, he took slow sips.
Presciently, he understood Agnew’s potential appeal to the silent voters turned off by the noisy liberal media.
But Nixon was not overtly playing to anger in 1968; rather, he was appealing to voters who were tired of all the yelling. He was appealing to what he called the “silent center, the millions of people in the middle of the political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.”46
On January 9, 1968, Nixon was a guest on the Mike Douglas Show, an afternoon TV talk show that reached a large audience of housewives. The candidate was introduced to the show’s producer, an unusually confident young man named Roger Ailes. “Mr. Nixon, you need a media adviser,” said Ailes. “What’s a media adviser?” asked Nixon. “I am,” said Ailes.48
“You see the way they hate to get up and look at the size of the crowds? Remember, the press is the enemy.”4
Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public. The more attention she gets, the happier they are,” Roger Ailes wrote Haldeman in May 1970.
Nixon read Harlow’s memo several times, and with each reading, he recalled, he became “angrier and more frustrated.”26 Here it was: the ultimate dirty trick. The president was playing politics with national security to enable his vice president to overcome the lead of the Republican challenger.
What happened next—what transpired over the four months between that first meeting and election day, November 5, 1968—has been a source of fascination and mystery to historians for decades. The Chennault Affair has loomed as one of the great litmus tests in the history of Richard Nixon—in understanding his character and his methods, in measuring just how far he would go to attain power. Did Nixon, through Chennault, secretly conspire to persuade the South Vietnamese to thwart LBJ’s “October Surprise” that would halt the bombing and bring peace negotiations—and possibly hand the November
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Ironically, it was not LBJ but the Soviet Union that wanted to see Humphrey win and Nixon lose. The Kremlin pushed the North Vietnamese to accept U.S. terms for peace talks because Humphrey was regarded as a less formidable Cold War foe than Nixon.34
By October 29, a deal appeared to be in the works: The bombing would stop, and a few days later the peace talks would begin. But then, at the last moment, South Vietnam backed away from the table and refused to sign off on the peace talks in Paris.
The president ordered the FBI to wiretap and physically monitor the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and to tap Mrs. Chennault’s phone in her Watergate apartment.
Dirksen frantically called Bryce Harlow, who awakened Nixon in his hotel room in Los Angeles to let him know the depth of the president’s anger. Nixon had to scramble—and he did, brilliantly. The next morning, November 3, the final Sunday before Election Day, Nixon went on Meet the Press and offered to be the solution to the problem he had created. He offered, if elected, to go to Saigon to persuade Thieu to join the peace talks. Calling Johnson, he was all wounded innocence. “My God,” he told LBJ, “I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean, Saigon not to come to the table….”
girls cry.”3 There was no TV in his room. He thought network anchors and commentators were all blather and no substance. Bringing in totals from election officials around the country, Chapin found the candidate, wearing slacks, undershirt, and a bathrobe, propped up on
one simple declarative sentence, later carved on his gravestone, that he had written himself: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”
Democratic activist, as a “man of ideas and action.”2, *1 Nixon’s openness to new ideas and willingness to convert them into action constituted one of his great strengths—and
His oscillations can seem dizzying—the bold risk-taker one moment, the canny calibrator the next. But he was moved by one overriding concern—to be a doer, an achiever, and not just a talky ideologue or a wishful thinker.
“the soul-stifling, patronizing attitude that follows the dole”—his own words, written in the pre-dawn hours when he rejected a speechwriter’s draft. Nixon knew something about the struggles of the poor to preserve their dignity.
His faith—optimistic, unabashedly patriotic—seems almost quaint, if not naïve, judged by cable-TV era standards of negativism and passive-aggressiveness. It is striking, from the perspective of a later, less confident age, to see how incredibly busy the Nixon administration was. Nixon was often thwarted, and he lashed out in frustration or turned to connivance, and he was at times motivated more by political expedience than principle. But he embraced the mid-twentieth-century ethos that government existed to solve problems, and he kept at them until he was swallowed by Watergate. Although
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Later debates by historians over whether Nixon was really a liberal or a conservative are largely beside the point. He was at heart a pragmatist in a deep American tradition. True to his puritanical heritage, he was a fatalist who
perhaps because he was incapable of such confident face-to-face leadership.
His essential shyness, shaped by his mother’s Quaker reticence and his father’s bullying, made Nixon avoid loud, open clashes of ideas.
Nixon could not stop worrying about his media image. He was at once determined to win over the press and sure that he would fail.
Nixon would routinely cut off all White House contact with reporters from papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post—“cut him,” “freeze him,” “dump him”—and then just as routinely forget about it.33 Larry Higby, Haldeman’s assistant, recalled his boss emerging
Nixon was no doubt ill at ease—he knew that Bradlee had been not just cordial with JFK but a close personal friend. In his recollection of the call, Bradlee, who like Nixon had learned to swear in the navy, was characteristically profane and dismissive of the president:
The Washington Post may have been “anti-establishment,” but it was, at the same time, the Establishment,
John Freeman, the new British Ambassador, took up his duties in February and was immediately folded into the capital elite. He was shocked by the animus against the president. “Nixon was treated abominably by Georgetown society,” he told Jonathan Aitken. “It was not just a question of political disagreements. Really beastly attitudes were on display towards him, largely to do with social class.”
Freeman recalled “one not uncharacteristic example of this at Mrs. Alice Longworth’s house one evening….Over drinks before dinner she asked me what I thought of the new President. I gave some sort of respectful reply. Alice then hushed up the whole company, saying in her wickedest voice, ‘How extraordinary! Listen. The Ambassador thinks well of Mr. Nixon! Such a common little man!’ and her guests all roared with laughter.”42 How wounded Nixon would have been! To know that his singular upper-crust ally—“Mrs. L.,” as he affectionately called her, his one faithful defender among the Washington
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