The Wars of Watergate (7 page)

The Democratic presidential primaries dominated the nation’s attention in 1968. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal opened the way for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a longtime claimant for the party’s honor who now was cast in the dubious position of Johnson’s surrogate. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy intensified their campaigns, vigorously competing for the same constituency to gain the nomination. Meanwhile, Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, emerged as a wild card, pointing his own message to a wholly different quarter of alienated America. Despite talk of the wholesomeness of intra-party squabbling, the chemistry of the Democratic Party’s struggle offered a prescription for disaster, and even tragedy.

Lyndon Johnson had been embarrassed in the New Hampshire primary and defeated in Wisconsin, but for Richard Nixon, both elections amounted to a coronation. His chief rival, George Romney, withdrew from the field before the New Hampshire balloting, in large measure humiliated by his own ineptness. Nixon carefully worked to preempt the center and thus dominate his party; yet the fringes represented real threats. Nelson Rockefeller may not have been a viable alternative, but he retained the capacity to make life difficult for Nixon—as he had for a decade. And now, from Nixon’s own California base, newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan staked his claim to the still-substantial Goldwater legacy in the Republican Party and offered every indication that his made-for-media style would expand it. Reagan’s threat was formidable, yet it was not quite his time. “Nixon’s the one,” the campaign slogan proclaimed. So he was.

*  *  *

Richard Nixon in 1968 had been a familiar figure on the American political scene for two decades; still, characterizing him generated contradiction more than consistency, confusion rather than clarity. Descriptions of Nixon recorded in those years leave us with many Nixons. When Nixon emerged as “the one” for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination, General Lucius D. Clay confidently predicted that he would be “the leader of the Conservative forces.” New York’s middle-of-the-road Senator Kenneth Keating described Nixon as “pretty much my brand of Republican”; while liberal republican Arthur Flemming, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, labeled Nixon as “a genuine, progressive Republican.”
¹
Eight years later, people spoke of a “New Nixon” as if to underline not only the “Old Nixon” but the multifaceted image that had prevailed for so long.

Portraying Nixon demands a
Rashomon
-like approach if one is to understand those varied images he projected, and the society and constituencies that stimulated and responded to him. The varieties and vagaries of biographies have left us with a portrait of a deeply troubled man, insecure and sometimes tottering on the brink of mental instability; and yet we can also discover a cool, rational man, totally in command of his emotions and reconciled to his destiny. We have been given a cold, impersonal, awkward man; and yet we also have portrayals of a compassionate personality, inwardly and outwardly expressing the Quaker values instilled in him as a child. For some, Nixon vacillated between being sanctimonious and supercilious; others saw stoicism and strength in his character.

Richard Nixon is a controversial figure in any historical assessment of the postwar era of American history. His place will vary with the passage of time, running a gamut of estimates. But for now, Nixon certainly ranks with the two Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight Eisenhower as a dominant, influential, and charismatic figure of the twentieth century.

Nixon’s legions of detractors and enemies must confront that reality. They must accept that for those who love and admire Nixon he was an an inspiring personality. His impact on his party was similar to that of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Liberals and intellectuals found themselves uplifted by Stevenson’s appearance on the national scene in 1952. He offered them a refreshing contrast to the crass partisan politics of Harry Truman (who had not yet been discovered as a neo-folk idol) and a languid, entrenched, self-satisfied Democratic Party. Stevenson’s eloquence and candor revived a wave of political emotion that had been largely subdued since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

Nixon had achieved similar success on the other end of the political spectrum. What a contrast he offered to the defeatism of Thomas Dewey and the dour negativism of Robert Taft! He was a winner (though not always) and a
fighter (except at the end). He was dedicated to dissipating the fears that substantial numbers of Americans had regarding Communism and governmental control of the economy. Significantly, his support declined appreciably when his presidential policies seemed to contradict those goals.

For his supporters, Nixon’s enemies and causes generated substantial passion and sympathy for him. After all, a good part of this country despised what New Dealer and accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss symbolized. Who can gainsay a popular basis for Nixon’s defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate in 1950? H. R. Haldeman, a young Californian in 1952, found Nixon exciting, a man “fighting against odds and the establishment, and winning.” For those who loved and admired him, Nixon’s investiture as Crown Prince in 1952 confirmed the emergence of the real “Modern Republicanism.”

Nixon could evoke a range of views from one and the same observer. Walter Lippmann, never one to bind himself to consistency as a virtue, painted a variegated landscape of opinions of Nixon over the years. Lippmann described Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech (which defended his use of certain campaign contributions) as “the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear.” He found it “disturbing,” and “with all the magnification of modern electronics, simply mob law.” As President Eisenhower campaigned for re-election four years later, Lippmann remarked that the President “unites the country and heals its divisions. This is precisely what Nixon does not do. He is a politician who divides and embitters the people.” More in sorrow than in heat, Lippmann described Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial defeat as that of “a politician who does not have the confidence of moderate men.” But in 1968, Lippmann had joined the converts to the notion of a “New Nixon,” acknowledging a “new Nixon, a maturer, mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top,… who has outlived and outgrown the ruthless politics of his early days.” The humiliation of Nixon’s resignation six years later reduced Lippmann to analyzing the stars, and not the man. Arthur Schlesinger asked Lippmann if Nixon had been the worst president in history. “No, not the worst,” Lippmann replied, “but perhaps the most embarrassing.… Presidents are not lovable. They’ve had to do too much to get where they are.”
²

All that layering, all that complexity, all that elusiveness, beggars attention. Ronald Steel once remarked that Nixon was like the Ancient Mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve, anxious to tell his story. But if we are to understand and explain Richard Nixon and what he did, we, too, are compelled to tell it again and again.

“I was born in a house my father built.” So begin the memoirs of Richard Nixon. This pointed opening illustrates his humble beginnings and his strong
sense of familial community, and offers a twentieth-century analogue to being born in a log cabin. Any view of Nixon, friendly or unfriendly, comes down to a Horatio Alger–style political story. It is a model for the notion that truly any “ordinary” American boy can grow up to be President of the United States. Accounts of few other modern presidents emphasize their humble beginnings as elaborately as does Nixon’s. The detail, candor, and repetition invite comparison to tales, both mythical and factual, of the young Abe Lincoln. For his admirers, in his early years Nixon (like Lincoln) “managed to stand out in one way or another.” For them, of course, Nixon emerges in this picture as an exceptionally gifted young man, destined for greatness, while others find dark forebodings of the sinister, erratic behavior that later characterized his career.
³

The mature Nixon loved to claim “firsts.” Appropriately, he was the first child born in Yorba Linda, a farming community thirty miles inland from Los Angeles. Born on January 9, 1913, Richard was the second son of Frank and Hannah Nixon. Frank had migrated from Columbus, Ohio, where he had been a streetcar motorman. In Southern California, he tried a variety of jobs, including carpentry, working a citrus ranch, and finally, opening a gasoline station and general store in Whittier. At one juncture, apparently, Frank passed up a chance to buy a site that later turned out to be valuable oil property, provoking endless family laments thereafter over a missed opportunity to be rich.

Frank Nixon had a hot temper and was known to be severe in disciplining his children. He came from a long line of “tough, strait-laced, Bible-pounding Methodists,” but when he married Hannah Milhous in 1908, he easily moved his allegiance to his wife’s Quaker faith. Throughout his political life, Richard invoked his parents’ memory. The imagery usually centered on his father as a fighter, a scrapper, a man who took on an essentially hostile world that seemingly conspired against him. He portrayed his mother, however, as a strong, quietly assertive, but always effective woman. Richard eagerly sought his mother’s love and approval, especially as he had to cope with her three-year absence when she desperately nursed her tubercular oldest son, Harold. Those family struggles have provided ample grist for the psychohistorians, and Richard Nixon himself has hinted at some large meanings. In his memory, Hannah Milhous Nixon emerged as the center of the family, giving it cohesion and stability. In Quaker terms, Richard probably understood his mother as guided by an “inner light”; publicly, he described her as a “saint.” As his parents were different, Richard responded to them in different ways through the years, always acknowledging their special legacies to him.
⁴

Richard’s high school years in Whittier were notable for his interest and accomplishments in debate and dramatics. He had hoped to attend college in the East—not the last time that he sought to escape Southern California
for some sort of salvation in the nation’s more prestigious power centers. Nevertheless, Whittier College provided him with ample, treasured rewards, offering him a history professor who imparted to his students the Progressive tradition he had learned at the University of Wisconsin, and another who stressed Christian humanism. Despite his parents’ steadfast Republicanism, Nixon’s early thinking had, in his words, “a very liberal, almost populist, tinge.”

But his real interests at Whittier, again, lay in debate and dramatics—and football. Always a second-stringer, Nixon nevertheless reveled in his football exploits. Whatever influences the Progressive historian and the Christian humanist exerted on Nixon paled next to those of his memories of his revered coach, Wallace (“Chief”) Newman, who was of Indian descent. Newman, Nixon recalled, had no tolerance for Grantland Rice’s sentimental credo that how one played the game mattered more than whether the game was won or lost. “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser,” Nixon remembered Newman as saying. More important, Nixon gratefully remembered Newman’s influence in imparting a competitive spirit and a determination to come back after a defeat.
⁵

Richard finally realized his ambition to go east when he received a scholarship in 1934 from the newly established law school at Duke University. Here he found himself on a faster track, and even at first overwhelmed by what he had to memorize and master. But a classmate gave him a variant on Chief Newman’s competitive advice: “You don’t have to worry,” the fellow student said. “You have what it takes to learn the law—an iron butt.” Nixon learned law; he also learned about Southern views toward race and the Civil War, which he thereafter referred to as the “War Between the States.”

During his stay at Duke, Nixon first realized that “it was time to bring the South back into the Union”—a point he emphasized as part of his “Southern Strategy” in 1968. He also learned something of politics, getting himself elected president of the Student Bar Association. Eventually, however, he discovered barriers to his ambitions, as when he failed to land a job in a New York law firm and unsuccessfully applied for an appointment to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
⁶

Nixon decided to go home to California. Whatever its shortcomings for him, Whittier provided a safe haven. He returned in 1937 and settled into a career as a typical small-town lawyer—not, however, without some controversy over his ability and even his ethical behavior.
⁷
The next year, he met a young new teacher at Whittier High School, Thelma Catherine Ryan, better known as Pat. She was nearly a year older than Richard (born on March 16, 1912, not St. Patrick’s Day, as Nixon once claimed in a speech). Pat, too, was interested in dramatics, and the couple seemed to share a number of other mutual interests. They were married in 1940. By that time
Richard had established himself fairly well in Whittier, was active in community affairs and Whittier College activities, and had even dabbled in politics. He claimed that local Republican leaders approached him about running for the state assembly, but the war intervened. A few months earlier, he later recalled, he had welcomed the outbreak of the Russo-German War, believing that it would lead to Hitler’s defeat. Despite his apparent lively interest in politics, Nixon, by his own admission, had no particular anti-Soviet or anticommunist feelings at this time.
⁸

The war gave Nixon his long-awaited opportunity to seek his fortune in the East. Thanks to a recommendation from a Duke professor, he received a post in the newly created Office of Price Administration. Now, he later remembered, he could go to Washington “and observe the working of the government firsthand.” The job also satisfied his mother, who thought he could work for the government and not totally compromise his pacifist Quaker principles by joining the armed forces. If this represented some inner conflict between Nixon’s religious and family past and his future vision of himself, the future won. After only a few months as a junior lawyer in the OPA’s tire-rationing division, in August 1942 Nixon secured an appointment to the Navy’s Officer Candidate School at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The brief tenure with the OPA left its mark; Nixon later claimed that he learned a great deal about bureaucratic logrolling (from a future Truman aide) and about bureaucrats’ obsession with their own power.
⁹