One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (3 page)

As the Cold War intensified and the Korean War erupted, Nixon won election to the U.S. Senate in 1950, catapulted upward by his relentless pursuit of Alger Hiss, a hunt for which Nixon received great acclaim and immense publicity. Hiss was a pillar of the Eastern Establishment, that congregation of well-raised, well-educated men who had ruled much of Washington for a generation; Nixon despised them by instinct. Hiss had been a standout at the State Department during World War II; he helped organize the Yalta Conference, where President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin met for the last time in the closing months of the war; he was a political architect of the blueprint for the United Nations.

When Nixon began hunting him, Hiss was running the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The endowment’s chairman was John Foster Dulles, a Republican stalwart who would become President Eisenhower’s secretary of state and, in time, a confidant to Richard Nixon.

The Hiss case was the first crisis by which Nixon defined his political life. The accusation that Alger Hiss had been a secret agent of the Soviet intelligence service seemed incredible. Nixon hunted him relentlessly, often ruthlessly, with the single-minded determination of a Hollywood homicide detective. He was convinced that the case involved “the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere.”

Hiss faced one hostile witness, Whittaker Chambers (a
Time
magazine editor who had worked for the Soviet underground in the 1930s), and one deeply hidden shred of evidence that could condemn him as a spy. As a witness, in the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover, Chambers had three strikes against him: his past life as a Communist spy, his secret life as a homosexual, and his occasional mistruths under oath. The evidence of Chambers’s espionage was too important a secret to reveal. And though Hiss had been mentioned under a code name in a Soviet intelligence communiqu
é
decoded by the military intelligence service that evolved into today’s National Security Agency, the existence of that service and its work could not be disclosed in open court.

Hiss never could be tried for espionage. So Nixon, in his own words, convicted him in the press. He set a perjury trap for Hiss. In sworn testimony, Nixon caught him in a series of seemingly evasive statements about the most obscure details of his relationship with Chambers. Then he used his allies among the corps of Washington reporters and his contacts in the FBI to smear Hiss in the newspapers. Hiss was indicted for perjury by a federal grand jury in December 1948 after denying under oath that he had given State Department documents to Chambers. The jury was hung. Hiss was convicted at a second trial in January 1950.

The publicity was priceless for Nixon. And he was right about Hiss. Soviet intelligence records released sixty years later established that Hiss had worked with the Communist underground before World War II. Chambers had lied to the grand jury, too, but without penalty. No prosecutor would take the political heat of a perjury case against Nixon’s star witness.

“The Hiss case brought me national fame,” Nixon wrote in
Six Crises
. “Two years after that, General Eisenhower introduced me as his running mate to the Republican National Convention as ‘a man who has a special talent and an ability to ferret out any kind of subversive influence wherever it may be found, and the strength and persistence to get rid of it.’” By November 1952, still shy of forty, Nixon was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. Six years later he decided to seek the presidency himself.

That was the sixth crisis.

Nixon believed to his dying day that Senator John F. Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election from him. Nixon lost by 118,550 votes among 69 million cast. A shift of fewer than 14,000 votes in three crucial states could have given him a political victory in the Electoral College. In two of those states, Illinois and Texas—where powerful Democratic political machines were controlled by Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, and Kennedy’s running mate, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson—the Republicans claimed evidence of vote fraud.

Nixon was convinced that Kennedy’s millions and political manipulations had provided the margin of victory. Nixon’s supporters urged him to mount a legal challenge to the election. But he decided, after agonizing, that “even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen at the ballot box” would do “incalculable and lasting damage throughout the country.”

He vowed he would not be outdone again. But he would suffer one final humiliation when he returned to his home state of California to run for governor in 1962. He lost convincingly, by nearly three times the number of voters who had opposed him for the presidency.

He had been up all night and he had been drinking when he conceded defeat. “For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of—a lot of fun—that you’ve had an opportunity to attack me,” he told the reporters gathered around him. “But as I leave you I want you to know—just think 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.”

After that, Nixon’s daughter Tricia wrote, there was a terrible sadness in him, and the sadness went on for years.

CHAPTER TWO

“This is treason”

P
OLITICS WAS
war for Richard Nixon, a war in which all was fair. He came back from defeat and exile by his force of will and his taste for vengeance. He won the presidency in 1968 after an act of treachery unparalleled in American politics.

Nixon left California after his “last press conference” and moved to New York, where he joined a Wall Street law firm. He brought the firm what remained of his political cachet and a handful of wealthy corporate clients who were longtime Nixon backers. The firm made him rich enough to afford a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park.

He did not make a political move until after President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. In January 1964 a national poll by the Gallup organization showed Nixon resurrected as a potential presidential candidate. He appeared to lead the pack in his support among the party’s rank and file. This news was a ray of light, but not enough to dissipate the darkness. Nixon did not think the time was ripe, and he was right. Lyndon B. Johnson, elevated to the White House from the doghouse of his vice presidency when Kennedy died, won an overwhelming victory in 1964.

Historians almost always describe Nixon’s time of political exile as a wandering in the wilderness. Nixon wasn’t wandering. He began ceaselessly cultivating future campaign supporters: corporate kingpins and foreign rulers, county chairmen and congressional leaders. He was blazing a trail back to power. “In those years in limbo,” said William Watts, a future Nixon National Security Council aide, “he traveled around the world, and lined up delegates. His time in the U.S. was spent going to every graduation, bar mitzvah, christening ceremony for every Republican potential delegate that he could. He lined up votes all over the country. It was an incredible job that he did. The other side was that he traveled all over the world and met everybody.”

Marshall Green was the American ambassador in Indonesia when Nixon came to visit the nation’s military ruler in April 1967. “When Mr. Nixon and I called on President Suharto,” said Ambassador Green, who became Nixon’s State Department overseer for East Asia, “Mr. Nixon took down notes on key points they made and when we got back to my residence, we had a long conversation on events in Indonesia and the rest of East Asia, especially China. Our conversation was tape-recorded by Mr. Nixon, and when I asked him what he did with all these notes and tapes, he replied that he had them transcribed, filed and cross-filed for later reference.”

By then it was becoming clear that Nixon would run once again for president, and that the key issue in the campaign would be the war in Vietnam.

*   *   *

The first months of 1968 were among the most brutal passages in American history. In February, more than 500 U.S. soldiers died in combat in a single week in Vietnam. In all, 16,592 Americans were killed and 87,388 wounded that year, along with 27,915 South Vietnamese killed and perhaps a quarter of a million military and civilian deaths among the enemy. On March 31, President Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection but would devote the rest of his presidency to seeking peace. Four days later, in April, came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The streets of Washington burned with rage. Seventy percent of the people living in the nation’s capital were black, and their anger turned to arson. Flying back from King’s funeral in Atlanta, the president’s entourage looked down upon a city in flames. In June the murder of Bobby Kennedy on the campaign trail left millions of Americans in despair. Nixon was not among them: Kennedy was the potential opponent he’d feared the most. Nixon swept all the 1968 Republican primaries and faced a fractured Democratic field after President Johnson announced he would leave the Oval Office. Vietnam had splintered the Democrats and poisoned Johnson’s presidency from the moment he sent troops into battle back in 1965. The war and its political fallout crushed his hopes of creating the “Great Society,” a nation where peace, justice, and equality might prevail.

“I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” LBJ told his biographer. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.… All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams.… But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.” In his nightmares, he saw himself tied to the ground as a great mob ran at him screaming, “Traitor!”

Now 549,500 Americans were in Vietnam, and hundreds were dying every week at the hands of the Communists. The dead haunted Lyndon Johnson to the depths of his soul. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching 30,000; three years of conflict had cost the United States roughly $330 billion in today’s dollars. Polls showed that popular opinion had turned against the war policies of the White House; a majority of Americans thought that going into combat had been a mistake.

Yet Nixon rarely spoke of Vietnam as he secured the Republican nomination and as LBJ’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, emerged as his opponent, after a tumultuous Democratic convention featuring the Chicago police clubbing demonstrators. Nixon pledged a program for peace without saying what his plan might be. Then he flooded the airwaves with television ads depicting dead American soldiers. In public, he justified his evasions by saying he wanted to avoid interfering with peace negotiations begun in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam. In private, he aimed to make sure that there would be no peace deal without his foreknowledge.

*   *   *

On July 12, 1968, Nixon welcomed the ambassador of South Vietnam to his campaign suite at the Hotel Pierre in New York. In the elegant room that served as Nixon’s base of operations, he and Ambassador Bui Diem spent ninety minutes talking about the war and the peace talks. Alongside Nixon sat his law partner and campaign manager, John N. Mitchell, who in his accustomed style puffed his pipe, listened intently, and said little. Mitchell was accompanied by the most famous Asian anticommunist in the United States, Anna Chennault, the widow of the aviator who had created the CIA’s private air force, Air America, a linchpin for secret operations in the Vietnam War. Madame Chennault, born Chen Xiangmei, was an influential Washington lobbyist who cultivated an air of intrigue with a hint of danger; she was known as the Dragon Lady.

Nixon told the ambassador that Mitchell and Chennault would be his private liaisons to the embassy of South Vietnam. Nixon wanted Bui Diem to serve as his direct back channel to President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. He wanted to make sure that a clear message was conveyed in private: whatever peace deal the Democrats were offering, South Vietnam would be far better served if the staunchly anticommunist Richard Nixon were in the White House.

Ambassador Diem left this meeting “increasingly attracted to the Republican side,” he wrote thirty years later. Nixon made a convincing argument that he would be the man to settle the war on terms most favorable to America’s allies in South Vietnam. And the ambassador was delighted with the offer of entr
é
e to the court of the Dragon Lady. “As far as courting Republicans went, there were few places in Washington like Anna Chennault’s penthouse apartment at the Watergate.”

The courtship intensified as the election approached. “I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage,” Ambassador Diem reported to President Thieu. Diem kept Mitchell closely apprised of Thieu’s aversion to the peace talks in Paris.

*   *   *

Nixon’s foreign intrigues extended to fund-raising. He raised thirty million dollars from Americans that summer and fall, more than any presidential candidate before him. But he also had secret sources of foreign money. Illegal and unreported funds started flowing into the campaign during September and October 1968. Nixon had learned through his associations with the CIA and the FBI during his years under Eisenhower that suitcases stuffed with cash were instruments of foreign policy for an American commander in chief. He now applied the methods of covert operations to obtaining campaign contributions.

One source of his clandestine cash was the military junta in Greece. Its leaders were pleased by Nixon’s surprising choice of a running mate, the governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew, born Spiros Anagnostopoulos, raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. The junta contributed $549,000 to the Nixon campaign through Thomas Pappas, a Boston businessman who ran the largest oil company in Greece. Pappas was a personal friend to Nixon and the colonels; he became known in the White House as “the Greek bearing gifts.”