More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Can you imagine,” asked Henry Kissinger, “what this man would have been like if somebody had loved him?”26 Kissinger was exaggerating for effect, but Nixon’s insecurities seem so profound that he must, as a child, have lacked for some essential assurance.
his mother recalled: “He sank into a deep impenetrable silence. From that time on, it seemed Richard was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to me and his father for our loss.”48
Day was not just being flip. In California politics, candidates were becoming commodities.
Bureau’s J. Edgar Hoover regarded himself as the nation’s chief bulwark against communism, but he was ultimately interested in preserving his own vast power above all. He deftly played politicians against each other, dispensing or threatening to expose secrets, national and personal, as it suited his purposes and ambition.
Picking up his cudgel as champion for the “forgotten man,” he warned of an immense “slush fund” controlled by a “clique of labor lobbyists” and vowed, with words that would later be used against him, “We must put on a fighting, rocking, socking campaign.”
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.19 Dwight Eisenhower watched
through politics, a confident identity. The so-called Kitchen Debate, widely reported back home, proved a turning point for Nixon. He emerged to many Americans as a stand-up statesman who could handle the Russians.
High black turnout on Election Day may have made the difference for Kennedy, who carried a half-dozen states in the industrial Midwest and Northeast by narrow margins.30
winning—and Nixon was losing—the black vote. In Nixon’s view, the press hacks were too busy fawning over Kennedy to pay attention to the Democrats’ more devious maneuvers: the walking-around money and the dirty tricks like hiring hecklers, sending out salacious or prejudiced campaign literature under Nixon’s name, and changing street signs on the way to rallies. (Kennedy’s operatives did not advertise their cultivation of the black press because they did not want white voters to notice.)
Three months later, Nixon’s tax returns were audited again (they had been audited in 1961 and 1962 as
He began to talk about his dreams and ambitions. He said that he felt driven by his mother’s pacifist idealism and the profound importance of foreign affairs. Accumulating money and joining exclusive clubs to play golf did not interest him, he insisted. He had lived “in the arena,” and that’s where he wanted to be, even if it meant shortening his life. He would do anything, make any sacrifice, anything, he said, “except see a shrink.”33
Nixon’s main interest remained foreign policy, partly because presidents can have more impact in an arena where they are less often checked and second-guessed by the legislative branch.
The key sentence began, “In the long run, it means pulling China back into the world community….”61 But the import of that sentence was lost at the time, missed by reporters more focused on Nixon’s immediate political ambitions.
“There was nothing he feared more than to be thought weak,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his memoirs.11
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
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 In The Selling
On the same plane ride to Peoria, he vented at his favorite target, the press: “You see the way they hate to get up and look at the size of the crowds? Remember, the press is the enemy.”4
Indeed, it’s not clear that the Nixon campaign did any “dirty stuff” in 1960. By 1968, “Nixon demanded that his staff conduct his campaign as if we were an all-out war,” wrote Ehrlichman, and that meant air war, ground war, and covert war.
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.
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 election to Hubert Humphrey?
but he absolutely believed 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.”
The naps were kept secret, marked on the calendar as “staff time.”
Drawing from free market economist Milton Friedman, Moynihan proposed cutting out the bureaucrats and social workers altogether and giving money directly to the poor in the form of a negative income tax. The welfare rolls would expand at first, but there would be more incentives to preserve families and find work. Nixon was sold.
Nixon had the misfortune of coming to power at a time when the press was hardening in opposition to authority. The “credibility gap” created by President Johnson’s lies about the Vietnam War and the rising ferment of the 1960s had produced a new generation of journalists who were hypercritical—sometimes, like Bradlee, swaggeringly so.
On the most difficult question facing him, Nixon asked de Gaulle, “Mr. President, what would you do regarding Vietnam?” De Gaulle paused for a long time before he spoke. “What is it you expect me to do, Mr. President?” he asked. “Do you want me to tell you what I would do if I were in your place? But I am not in your place!” Even de Gaulle did not have an answer to Vietnam.55
Nixon had said, “I’m the one man that can do it, Bob.” Nixon believed that the communists feared him above all other American politicians, and he wanted to manipulate this perceived fear to end the war. “They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon,” he said. 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
Nixon’s “Madman Theory” would surface now and again in his frustrated attempts to bring the North Vietnamese to heel, but he would never show a willingness to go all the way—to flood North Vietnam by destroying its dikes or to actually use nuclear weapons. Kissinger, too, believed that the
“Hot pursuit” into neutral territory is an old military doctrine. But bombing Cambodia seemed sure to set off international protests and inflame the antiwar movement at home. Nixon’s immediate solution would become familiar: to do it secretly.
Over the next twenty months, the FBI electronically eavesdropped on thirteen staffers and four newsmen, seventeen wiretaps in all.
“Means all systems ready, never to be indecisive, get going, take risks, be exciting,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “Must use the great power of the office to do something.”30
Nixon got excited by all the ways dinner could be speeded up—he hated the chitchat with his guest’s wife—and got Haldeman to “put a stop watch on it.” Haldeman was able to get a state dinner down to fifty-eight minutes.
“His was the humility not of fear but of confidence.”
Eisenhower welcomed naysayers, but Nixon was ambivalent. Nixon wanted debate, and he made sure to read conflicting views. But he increasingly avoided personal confrontation. “There are no ‘no’ men around the President. He’s surrounded by sycophants,” Price lamented to Bill Safire as he worked on the Eisenhower eulogy.17
“There were some who urged that I end the war at once,” he said. “This would have been the popular and easy course to follow.” A favorite Nixon speech construction was to set up a morally dodgy straw man and then say, with humble sincerity (or unctuous piety, depending on one’s view of Nixon), “but that would be wrong….”
The White House PR team, working with a patriotic salesman named H. Ross Perot, whose computer company had won some hefty government contracts, began printing American flags on bumper stickers and lapel pins, sending the message, not so subtly, that to be against the war was unpatriotic.11
Nixon knew that conservatives would oppose a guaranteed minimum income—really, a negative income tax—as a “mega-dole.”41 But he hoped to win enough moderates and liberals to pass Congress.
What Nixon did on school desegregation during the course of 1970 is an example of Nixon’s political judgment, a quality defined by British philosopher and statesman Isaiah Berlin as “a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent, perpetually overlapping data.”7 It is an example of Nixon’s pragmatic politics—also, his occasionally well-concealed desire to do the right thing.
Pat Buchanan wanted to unleash Agnew to deliver a scathing denunciation of forced integration.
“You’re not going to solve this race problem for a hundred years. Intermarriage and all that, assimilation, it will happen, but not in our time. Desegregation, though, that has to happen now.” He let the words sink in and went on. “That’s why we have to hit this minority enterprise thing so hard—sure, they laugh at it—but better jobs, better housing, that’s the only way Negroes are going to be able to move to Scarsdale.” He pointed to Haldeman, his fellow Californian. “Bob, that’s the only way they’re going to get into
The newly desegregated schools of the South opened peacefully that fall. There was no rioting, no “massive resistance.” In 1968, 68 percent of black children in the South attended all-black schools. By 1972, only 8 percent did.
Nixon set about emulating Patton, a decision that would do much to create a lasting image in pop culture of Nixon as unhinged as he plunged the nation into the Cambodia “incursion” (the White House term to avoid using the word invasion).
“Very weird. P completely beat and just rambling on, but obviously too tired to go to sleep….I am concerned about his condition. The decision, the speech, the aftermath killings, riots, press, etc.; the press conference, the student confrontation have all taken their toll, and he has had very little sleep for a long time and his judgment,
The hardhats gave him a brief restorative boost. On May 8, the day before his trip to the Lincoln Memorial, a wave of construction workers had charged into an antiwar demonstration in downtown Manhattan. Shouting “All the way U-S-A!” and “Love it or leave it!” the hardhats sang “God Bless America” and beat up some hippies and a stray Wall Street lawyer or two. Some of the construction workers wielded pipes wrapped in American
Once again, Nixon eyed the cultural divide between the longhairs and their liberal supporters in the elite press and the rest of America that disapproved of permissiveness and disrespect. Though they were the majority, these voters, in particular blue-collar whites who had traditionally voted Democratic, felt like “forgotten people.”
“Order of the Hound’s Tooth,” a play on Eisenhower’s admonition that Nixon would have to prove he was “cleaner than a hound’s tooth” to stay on the ticket.
Dean was learning from an old hand, but the wrong lesson. Eager to get ahead, Dean did not realize that when the president gave an outrageous order, he often expected it to be ignored.
Soon Colson was sharing a Scotch or two in the evenings with the president at his Executive Office Building hideaway; Colson’s office was conveniently next door. “Those who say that I fed the president’s darker instincts are only 50 percent correct,” Colson told Jonathan Aitken, “because 50 percent of the time he was feeding my darker instincts.”
Nixon and Kissinger conversing without ever knowing for sure the intentions of either. Rivals at pettiness, born manipulators, and geniuses at the darker side of diplomacy, they at once distrusted and needed each other.
In The Real Majority, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued that the election would come down to which party could win the hypothetical forty-seven-year-old Dayton, Ohio, housewife whose husband was a machinist. She was concerned with “the Social Issue,” wrote the authors, which, roughly speaking, meant fear of crime and declining morality brought on by hippies and black militants. “Permissiveness is the key theme,” said Nixon.
Fearing that the Republicans would lose as many as thirty-five seats in the House—the historic norm for the party in power during the first midterm elections—Nixon decided to take to the hustings himself for the final two weeks of the campaign.40
