Fifties (53 page)

Richard Nixon’s rise in politics was in a way meteoric, but it was not without a terrible price. There was in the Voorhis and Douglas races a savagery, a willingness to blur the truth in charges against
opponents. In the process, Nixon made real and lasting enemies: Sam Rayburn, the longtime Democratic House Speaker, who was angered by Nixon’s insinuations that the Democratic party was one of treason, liked to say that Nixon had the most hateful face of the five thousand people he had served with in the House. Why he pushed such charges so far is a fascinating question: It was as if he believed that all rich and powerful men had adjusted the rules to succeed and he was going to do the same. During the 1950 campaign Ted Rogers, who handled television appearances for him, was struck by Nixon’s almost obsessive fear of the television technicians and his belief that because they were union members, they were going to pull a plug or kill a mike on him. Rogers would point out that they were professionals, but Nixon would have none of it. It was, Rogers later decided, a fascinating insight—that Nixon thought
others
would behave as if there were no rules, because, on occasion, he behaved as if there were none.

Helen Douglas said years later that it had been foolish of him to run so dirty a race. He was going to win anyway. Everything was against her. Because of the Tidelands issue, the oil money was pouring into the state against her; all those new young voters saw her as an older, too liberal figure, and the outbreak of the Korean War sealed her fate, she was sure. What drove him to such excess, she suspected, was not politics but his own anger—that everyone else got away with something, so finally he should too. He was most comfortable, she thought, when he was on the attack, even when he did not need to be.

The vice-presidential nomination in 1952 was something he had courted, even though Pat had at first strongly opposed it. Eventually, she came around. “I guess I can make it through another campaign,” she said. What had ended the pleasure for her once and for all was the Checkers speech, though. Pat had told him to press forward, and on the eve of the speech she had allayed his doubts. “I don’t think I can go through with this,” he had said. “Of course you can,” she had answered. But she hated it. She felt her privacy had been completely violated. He had gone on national television and opened their bank account; he had shown the entire nation the haunting poverty from which she had barely escaped and which was still so painful to her. She remained the good soldier or, more accurately, the good trooper, but their professional associates could feel a chill in the marriage. Such old-time colleagues as Jim Bassett, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter who served as a Nixon press secretary, was appalled by the way he began to treat her. He was cold, almost rude to her,
lashing out on occasion, yet he was quick in all public appearances to refer to her glowingly as his wonderful wife. Thus developed an odd pattern that was to mark their campaign appearances for the next twenty years: In public he would always praise her lavishly, but once the public appearance was over and they were back in the airplane, he would go about his business as if she did not exist. When he left the White House in disgrace in 1974, he gave an impromptu speech in which he paid homage to his parents, yet he failed to mention Pat: Given how much pain she had been through and how little pleasure she had taken from the latter part of his political career, it was an omission that offended many of those who knew him best.

Her face, under the pressure of his career, gradually turned from a movie star’s to American Gothic. It was as if she had gone full circle. Whatever success she had once enjoyed in her husband’s career had been stolen from her bit by bit. In the end their heartbreak was caught, live and in color, for the entire world to see on television: the disgraced President leaving the White House in order to escape impeachment. A family photo was taken on their last night in the White House, and Pat particularly hated the photo: It was the final indignity of politics intruding into her personal life. “Our hearts,” she told her daughter of the photo, “were breaking and there we are smiling.”

Once in office as Vice-President, he became a prisoner of his own past—handling the Republican right, keeping McCarthy on a short leash, and playing the partisan role for a President who had little taste for partisan politics. All in all, Ike got the high ground, Nixon the low. The President grandly disdained the uglier side of politics, yet he accepted the fact that it had to be done although he did not particularly like the man who did it for him. In fact, the more Nixon did for Ike, the more he became, in the President’s eyes, a politician, a breed not to be greatly respected. The White House staff, led by Sherman Adams, exacerbated his usual resentments; as far as Nixon was concerned, the staff wanted to keep him as far from policy as possible and to summon him only when it had some odious task to be attended to. In the early years that meant trying to baby-sit McCarthy, and then eventually filling the vacuum created as McCarthy self-destructed.

In December 1953, he and Bill Rogers, on orders from the White House, tried to get McCarthy to let up on the Communist issue (which was placing McCarthy on a collision course with his own party in the White House). In March 1954, after Adlai Stevenson went on national
television and accused the Republican party of being “half Eisenhower, half McCarthy,” it was Nixon who was chosen to answer Stevenson, for he was, Ike thought, perfectly situated as the victor in the Hiss case. Nixon hated the idea of giving the response; that was a part of his past that he was quite willing to let go of. At first he flatly refused, but then Ike called him to the White House and ordered him to do it. Jim Bassett, who worked with Nixon on the speech, had rarely seen him so angry. He was already aware that he was being perceived as the administration hatchet man, Bassett thought, that it was becoming harder to escape the stigma of that role, and that there would almost surely be a price to pay later. In a phrase that had not yet entered the language, he was caught in Catch-22. The more loyal he was, the less respect he got from the man he served. His political advice, which was often shrewder than that of Eisenhower’s inner political circle, was rarely sought.

In 1956 Eisenhower wanted to squeeze Nixon off the ticket; he asked Len Hall, then the head of the Republican party, to break the bad news to Nixon. When Nixon heard, he was shattered. His face, Hall remembered, turned very dark. “He’s never liked me,” Nixon had told Hall. “He’s always been against me.” Hall had decided that the decision to drop Nixon from the ticket would be a disaster, it might split an already divided party. He set out to save Nixon’s job by commissioning a series of polls that showed Nixon running ahead of anyone else as Vice-President. With that, the threat to get Nixon off the ticket was turned back.

But the damage was done, and it added to Nixon’s feeling that he was a second-class citizen in this White House. In truth he was. The social distinctions in the Eisenhower years were not inconsiderable, and the Nixons were treated somehow more as servants than as peers. He felt that he and his wife were outcasts. On occasion Nixon complained bitterly that even though he was Vice-President, he had never been invited into the social quarters of the White House. The Eisenhowers
did
look down on the Nixons. When, in 1958, the Nixons were about to go on a multination tour of Latin America, Pat Nixon called Mollie Parnis, a prominent dress designer who catered to the wives of many of Washington and New York’s most powerful men, including Mamie Eisenhower, about doing some clothes for her. Ms. Parnis mentioned this to Mamie Eisenhower, who immediately vetoed the idea. “No, no, dear, don’t do that. Let the poor thing go to Garfinckel’s and buy something off the rack.”

Eisenhower never could really understand Nixon. He couldn’t fathom how a grown man could have so few friends. In that way, as
in so many others, the two men could not have been more different. Friendship came easily to Ike; by contrast, Nixon was wary and distrustful of most of his peers. He sought alliances, most of them temporary, rather than friendships. Once Eisenhower visited Nixon in the hospital, and when he returned to the White House, he remarked how lonely his Vice-President had seemed. How could that be so, he wondered aloud to his secretary, Ann Whitman, with a man at the top of his profession?

TWENTY-FOUR

J.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER’S SECURITY
file had always been something of a nightmare. Whereas he was the ultimate sophisticate as far as science went, in political matters he was totally naive. He had been the prototypical fellow traveler of the thirties, belonging, he once joked, to every Communist front organization on the West Coast. But the McCarthy era had so changed the political climate that there was little sympathy or understanding for youthful and careless Depression-era politics. He had tried to justify the past and protect old friends with small lies. That had been tolerated during the war because of his immense contribution to the important work at Los Alamos. Still, some of the security men there had believed him to be a security risk; they kept him under constant surveillance, bugged meetings he attended, and tapped his phone. Indeed, Oppenheimer later joked that the government had spent
more money watching him for security violations than it had paid him in salary—and he was almost surely right.

The move to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance took place in the spring of 1954, at the same time as the Army-McCarthy hearings. With McCarthy’s censure looming, it seemed that McCarthyism was over; and yet, ironically, the key players who moved against Oppenheimer (including, eventually, Eisenhower himself) prided themselves on being opposed to McCarthy and were moving to head him off. Obviously, they were still making significant accommodations to the norms he had established; a certain ugliness had entered America’s bloodstream.

By 1954, Robert Oppenheimer had become a target of various conservative groups, not merely because of his security lapses in the thirties and forties, but because of his virtually unchallenged position in the political scientific world and because he was emerging as a powerful opponent to administration policy on the hydrogen bomb. He was not, in the vernacular of the time, on the team. He offended not just the political conservatives but also, increasingly, the Air Force, which saw itself as the nuclear delivery arm of the military.

Oppenheimer’s own politics had come a long way since his days as a vaguely radical student and young academic. He had come to recognize the cruelty and brutality of Stalin, and he had little confidence left in Russian intentions. If anything, in the years after the war, he had become something of an establishment figure. He had even apologized lightly for his left-wing days in a 1948
Time
magazine cover piece celebrating him as America’s scientist laureate: “Most of what I believed then now seems complete nonsense, but it was an essential part of becoming a whole man. If it hadn’t been for this late but indispensable education I couldn’t have done the job at Los Alamos.” His opposition to the H bomb was a curious blend of moral and pragmatic concerns. On the moral side, he was exhausted and spiritually depleted by the making of the atomic bomb; on the pragmatic side, he, like Conant and Kennan, wondered if the Super might divert energy from more usable weaponry and whether we were devoting too much of our resources to a weapon that might, in the end, turn out to be unusable. It was easier for opponents to challenge his past than his logic.

Some of his old colleagues felt that Oppenheimer had become, by this time, a prisoner of his own myth. Even at Los Alamos, Victor Weisskopf thought, he had believed that the other scientists should not debate or even think about the political consequences of the bomb. They should leave this to Oppie, who was their ambassador
to the world of politics and who knew how to deal with politicians. After the war, old friends complained that Oppenheimer had changed, that he had become self-important, constantly dropping the names of the high officials with whom he had just visited. He turned out to be a surprisingly hierarchical man, Weisskopf thought, and he seemed to be unduly impressed by the wisdom of the politicians with whom he dealt. “He was,” Weisskopf said dryly, “impressed by their need to come to him.”

“Oppie, in terms of politics, always wanted to do the impossible,” I. I. Rabi, his friend and colleague, once said. “The difference with me is that I have always managed to stay within the possible.” His old-time friend Philip Morrison thought Oppie began to play God in the years after the war. Even some of those who supported him had doubts about the course he had charted and his reasons for it. Ulam thought Oppenheimer had, in his own mind at least, exaggerated his role in the making of the atomic bomb and, correspondingly, exaggerated his guilt, seeing himself as, in the
Bhagavad-Gita,
Death the destroyer of worlds. Von Neumann agreed. “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin,” von Neumann liked to tell Ulam.

For all of that, no one thought that this distinguished man, who had given such invaluable service to his country, would soon be defending his patriotism before the nation’s security apparatus—even though there had been earlier encounters with the security forces. In June 1949, Oppenheimer had gone before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and afterward the candor of his testimony had been praised by the committee’s most enterprising young member, Richard Nixon. But by the early fifties, one man who held a very important job at the epicenter of atomic politics was beginning to believe that J. Robert Oppenheimer was not merely a political problem but also a security problem.

That man was William Borden, who was chief staff aide to Brien McMahon on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Borden, a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, had been a bomber pilot during World War Two when he had glimpsed his first V-2 rocket in the air. “Our plane seemed to stand still,” he later said. It made a profound impression on Borden, who saw the coming of modern rocketry as an end to the security America had previously enjoyed. The oceans no longer offered protection, as they had in the past. A Soviet bomber would require two and a half hours to hit targets in Europe; a rocket might cover the same distance in five or six minutes. He wrote a book on the subject,
There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy,
and believed as a matter of faith that we should move ahead as quickly as possible on the hydrogen bomb.