Being Nixon: A Man Divided (5 page)

Throughout their marriage, at intimate moments like anniversaries, Nixon could be oddly distant from Pat. On the day Nixon was to give Pat their engagement ring, he was a no-show at their luncheon date. Back at her desk grading papers in the afternoon, a disappointed, perplexed Pat received a basket from a messenger. Inside was tucked the ring. Impulsively, she shoved the ring away. Finally a teacher next door came in and declared, “Look, you are going to put on that ring right now.” The teacher had to slip the ring onto Pat’s finger.

In later years,
Pat would be seen as long-suffering. To her admirers, she was a saintly figure, like Nixon’s mother Hannah, sad but stoical. To her husband’s legion of critics, she was a doormat, if not a neglected wife. Because Pat was so private, it is hard to know her true feelings. As a public figure, Nixon could seem insensitive and preoccupied. But there can be no doubt that when young Richard Nixon, the ardent suitor, spoke expansively and dreamily of his hopes and dreams of attaining greatness as a lawyer or as a politician, Patricia Ryan felt her own hopes rise. She had grown up in a home with a dirt floor. She wanted a finer, better, more respectable life, and her husband-to-be promised to give her one. Fiercely, she would hold him to that promise. Though she could appear frozen in the public glare, she was tender and warm in private, and loving to Nixon. She must have also sensed his vulnerability and experienced his well-concealed sweetness. The notion that there could be any kind of physical attraction between them has been blotted out by too many photographs of Nixon glowering and Pat pretending to smile and looking stricken. Nixon’s small circle of intimates knew better. People who thought of Nixon as rather grim and hunched over were sometimes surprised by
the warmth of his smile. When he was happy—especially with his family—his posture was confident.

Pat and Dick were married on June 21, 1940, in a small, private ceremony at the Mission Inn in the town of Riverside, south of Whittier. The Mission Inn is a southern California folly, a fanciful jumble of architectural styles, an effusion of balconies, minarets, and spires. The ceremony was held in the Presidential Suite, where Theodore Roosevelt had stayed; it was chosen not for its history but because it was the smallest and cheapest room to rent. “Both my parents remember how happy the reception was,” recalled their daughter Julie.

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.

The young lawyer and schoolteacher watched their pennies. Still, they were able to get away for a cut-rate Caribbean cruise in the summer of 1941. Nixon was seasick most of the time, and their cheap berth in the bowels of the ship stank of diesel fuel. “My sharpest recollection of the trip is of the evening of June 22, 1941, when our elderly black steward told us that word had just come over the radio that Hitler had invaded Russia. We both hoped this would lead to a Russian victory and Hitler’s downfall.”
¹⁹

The world war was coming closer. As a Quaker, Nixon was, nominally at least, a pacifist who wanted America to stay out of the conflict. But he wanted, in some way, to serve and to be closer to the action, a wish hardened into resolve by Pearl Harbor. When he was recruited through Duke Law connections to take a job in the federal government, he and Pat moved to Washington in January 1942. He was bored and frustrated as a lawyer in the Office of Price Administration’s tire rationing division. That summer, he joined the navy.

His letters to Pat from Officer Training School in Quonset, Rhode Island, were ardent and touching. “I may not say much when I’m
with you
—but all of me loves you all of the time
.” After a two-day leave in New York City, he wrote:

This weekend was wonderful. Coming back I looked at myself in the window and thought how very lucky I was to have you. I certainly am not the Romeo type and you are so beautiful. I was proud of you every minute I was with you….
²⁰

Winning his ensign’s bars, Nixon “expected to be assigned to a battle fleet in the South Pacific or the North Atlantic. I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened my orders and found that I was being sent to the Naval Air Station in Ottumwa, Iowa.” The unfinished runway, he discovered, “stopped abruptly in the middle of a cornfield.”
²¹

He continued to badger the navy for duty in the war zone, and finally, in the summer of 1943, found himself on a troop ship to the South Pacific. But not to sea duty—probably fortunate, given his susceptibility to motion sickness—or to the front lines. Rather, he became an air transport officer on hot, fetid bases in the rear areas of the American island-hopping campaign. The airfields were bombed a few times, but the greatest threat, he wrote Pat, was from poisonous insects.

Yet he was a good officer. He took an interest in his men, helping them write letters home and to transfer to better postings, bucking up morale, taking off his shirt and pitching in to load airplanes on the way to the battle zone. He was an expert scrounger and found ways to treat exhausted aircrews at “Nick’s” hamburger stand. In later years, more than one officer compared him to the sympathetic, thoroughly decent character played by Henry Fonda in the play and movie,
Mr. Roberts
.
²²

He also learned to swear and to play poker. He may have seen a bit of the seamier side of life when he worked as a carnival barker while his brother wheezed in the Arizona desert, but Nixon’s true
education in profanity came as a green young officer commanding rough Seabees and Marines in the South Pacific. His swearing sounded a little posed, even on the White House tape transcripts that got him in such trouble for the frequent appearance of “expletive deleted” during the Watergate scandal. Hannah Nixon’s son was not naturally crude. But he was hardly effete, and he was not easy to fool or take advantage of. He was a very good card player, keeping a poker face, playing it safe, but then bluffing boldly. He sent home about $6,000 (roughly $80,000 in 2014 dollars) in poker winnings, far more than his lieutenant’s pay.
²³

Always, he wrote aching letters to Pat. “I think of you when I see beautiful things,” he wrote. He called her “Dear One”; she called him “Dear Plum.” Dick began imagining his return home. “I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good. Will you mind such a public demonstration?”
²⁴
When he arrived home in San Diego in the summer of 1944 after fourteen months overseas, Pat later recounted, she “ran to the airport gate and threw her arms around him in all-encompassing embrace.”
²⁵

In an early
letter home from the war, Nixon wrote his bride, “I’m anti-social, I guess, but except for you—I’d rather be by myself as a steady diet rather than with most people I know. I like to do what I want, when I want. Only where you are concerned do I feel otherwise—Dear One.”
²⁶

One wonders how someone who preferred to be alone, who often seemed so ill at ease in company, chose as his life’s calling a profession that requires constant attention to others—in the stereotype of the classic pol, endless glad-handing, schmoozing, shoulder-squeezing, and baby-kissing. Even Nixon would later acknowledge the incongruity of an introvert in an extrovert’s business.
²⁷

Yet Nixon had a great capacity to accept discomfort and endure blows. It was normal to him, even necessary. And politics, he knew, was something at which he could succeed. He may have lacked the natural gifts of the smooth sophisticates, the Bob Logues and the
Franklins, but by dint of shrewdness and hard work, he could work around, compensate, overcome. Ever alert to slights himself, he could read people and situations; he knew what made people fearful and hopeful and how to sense what they wanted, even if they didn’t quite know it themselves. He could identify and empathize with the lonely and left behind. As if to defy his own shyness, he liked to be on stage; he had a prodigious memory; he didn’t mind pressing the flesh. Indeed, he seemed to welcome plunging into crowds. As a student leader, he had developed a taste for power, the getting and using of it. Quite possibly, in the validation of elected office, he found a replacement for the adoration he missed as a child, which even Pat could not replace. Heeding his grandmother Milhous, he wanted to make his mark by doing good in the world, to leave “footprints in the sands of time.” In his eighth-grade autobiography, he had seen the way, more or less:

My plans for the future if I could carry them out are to finish Whittier High School, and College and then take post-graduate work at Columbia University, New York. I would also like to visit Europe. I would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people.
²⁸

In September 1945, a month after V-J Day, Nixon received an airmail letter from a bank manager and Whittier College trustee named Herman Perry, asking him if he would like to be “a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946.” An ardent foe of the New Deal active in local Republican politics, Perry had been watching Nixon since his days as a high school debater. He liked Nixon’s aggressiveness and hoped that marriage had softened the boy’s natural glower. Perry’s short note said that Republican and Democratic registrations in the local congressional district were split “about 50-50” and that “the Republicans are gaining.” The letter ended, “Please airmail me your reply if you are interested. P.S., Are you a registered voter in California?”

Nixon was, though he was living outside of Baltimore, serving out his time terminating navy contracts. He and Pat had saved about $10,000, including his poker money, to buy a house, and Pat was pregnant. Nixon took less than forty-eight hours to say yes.
²⁹

Victory in World
War II brought global power to America but not contentment to its people. America’s former ally, the Soviet Union, loomed as the menacing foe, and the atom bomb threatened to make the next war the last. Housewives shopping for groceries and clothes for their families complained of high prices and shortages left over from rationing. Strikes and labor unrest plagued industries trying to convert back to peacetime production. Government bureaucracy created by the New Deal was held to blame. “
HAD ENOUGH
?” asked the Republicans in 1946.
³⁰

The Republicans were looking for fresh political faces, preferably young veterans. In November 1945, Nixon auditioned before a citizens committee looking for a GOP candidate to take on Democratic Jerry Voorhis, a five-term incumbent. Nixon wore his naval lieutenant commander’s dress blue uniform because Pat had given away his one good suit while he was overseas. Crisp and hard-charging in his presentation, he got the job. As Roy Day, the Republican committee chairman, told his fellow Republicans, a mix of wealthy Pasadena gentry and small businessmen scattered around the 12th Congressional District, “He’s saleable merchandise.”
³¹

Day was not just being flip. In California politics, candidates were becoming commodities. 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. Inevitably, however, a new class of operators rose up to manipulate popular opinion. 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.
³²
The pioneer “political consultants,” a term that would later become ubiquitous but was virtually unknown outside of California
in the 1940s, were a husband-and-wife team, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. Using advertising and a pliable press (later, “free media”), they were magicians at image making and what decades later would become known as “spin.” “For a million dollars,” boasted Whitaker, “I could make tuberculosis popular.”
³³

One of their early disciples was a short, pudgy lawyer and PR man named Murray Chotiner. A sallow-faced Runyonesque figure who smoked cigars and found his law clients from the bail bondsmen, Chotiner would become known as a Svengali figure, Richard Nixon’s supposed tutor in the art of the political smear. “California has a cult of the smear,” recalled Lou Cannon, biographer of California’s other master politician of the era, Ronald Reagan. “Chotiner did not invent it, but he refined it.”
³⁴
Chotiner always insisted, “It is not a smear, if you please, if you point out the record of your opponent.”
³⁵
Nonetheless, he was straightforward about his approach to campaigning. Standing like a professor at a blackboard at a political breakfast in Pasadena, he pointed to Rule One: “Destroy your opponent.”
³⁶

In 1946, Chotiner was acting as campaign manager for the GOP’s senate candidate, William Knowland, for whom he had dreamed up the slogan “
WE WILL NOT SURRENDER
” (suggesting, not subtly, that Knowland’s opponent would). 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 Republican” and “the Little Governor.” An endorsement from the
Los Angeles Times
was worth hundreds of thousands of votes. Palmer was the one who told the Chandler family, owners of the paper, whom to endorse. He
wrote speeches for politicians and instructed them on whom to hire and what bills to support. In a state that had supposedly rid itself of old-fashioned machine-style political bosses, historian David Halberstam has written, Palmer
was
the political boss.