Nixon's Secret (25 page)

67
.   David Halberstam,
The Powers That Be
, p. 477.

68
.   Monica, Davey, “1960: The First Mass Media Election,”
New York Times
, Oct. 6, 2008.

69
.   Theodore White,
The Making of the President, 1960
, p. 258.

70
.   Larry Getlen, “The Kennedy Meth,”
New York Post
, April 21, 2013.

71
.   Ibid.

72
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 27.

73
.   Leonard Garment,
Crazy Rhythm
, p. 77.

74
.   Ralph Martin,
Seeds of Destruction
, p. 250.

75
.   Richard D. Mahoney,
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
, p. 48.

76
.   Ibid. p. 50.

77
.   Ibid.

78
.   Frank Ragano,
Mob Lawyer
, p. 135.

79
.   Chuck Giancana,
Double Cross
, p. 64.

80
.   Drew Pearson, “Nixon’s Early Years Come Under Scrutiny,”
The Nevada Daily Mail
, Oct. 31, 1968.

81
.   Ibid.

82
.   Richard D. Mahoney,
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
, p. 52.

83
.   W. J. Rorabaugh,
The Real Making of the President
, p. 54.

84
.   Richard D. Mahoney,
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
, p. 197.

85
.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, p. 126.

86
.   Ronald Goldfarb,
Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes
, p. 260.

87
.   Mahoney, Richard D.
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
, p. 49

88
.   W. J. Rorabaugh,
The Real Making of the President
, p. 189–190.

89
.   Richard D. Mahoney,
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
, p. 79.

90
.   Richard D. Mahoney,
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby
, p. 81.

91
.   Ibid. p. 82.

92
.   Burton, Hersh,
Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America
, p. 203.

93
.   W. J. Rorabaugh,
The Real Making of the President
, p. 187–188.

94
.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, p. 387.

95
.   Victor Lasky,
It Didn’t Start With Watergate
, p. 48.

96
.   Burton, Hersh,
Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America
, p. 203.

97
.   Ibid.

98
.   Jack Bell,
Mr. Conservative: Barry Goldwater
, p. 166.

99
.   Jack Bell,
Mr. Conservative: Barry Goldwater
, p. 165.

100
. Ibid. p. 165.

101
. Ibid.

102
. Ibid. p. 169.

103
. Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 212.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“CALIFORNIA NEEDS A DECISIVE LEADER”

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Nixon.
Nixon who?
What, you forgot already?

—Children’s chant overheard on the streets of San Francisco, circa December 1962

N
ineteen sixty-two would prove to be a year in which Nixon would make damaging miscalculations about the direction of the Republican Party, and, in an effort to keep his White House dream alive for the long term, he became a candidate for California governor.

Early polling showed that Nixon, who had narrowly carried the state in 1960, could easily defeat incumbent Pat Brown, whom voters generally saw as an overweight, affable yet bumbling chief executive. Brown made a terrific comeback. Just two years earlier in 1960, after he had given a reprieve from a death sentence to the sensational murderer Caryl Chessman, Brown’s popularity was so low that few believed Brown could be reelected. Nixon led by 16 percent in the field poll. Nearly one-third of voters thought that Brown was doing a poor job. Sample voters described him as “weak,” “vacillating,” and “indecisive.”
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Not only did early polling show Brown losing to Nixon, but also trailing both former Governor Goodwin Knight and San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, both of whom had expressed an interest in running. The ad men around Nixon would seize on this poll finding in their campaign slogan: “Give California a Decisive Leader.” Haldeman’s marketing background would also show when the Nixon campaign used uniform yellow-and-blue graphics as well as a painted portrait of Nixon on their posters and billboards rather than a photo. “Win with Nixon” was a curious additional campaign slogan, but was presumably meant to spur some bandwagon effect.

It was clear from the beginning that Pat Nixon was opposed to another race for public office. The Nixons had settled into a palatial home in the Trousdale Estates area outside Los Angeles. Nixon’s purchase of a lot for construction of his new home was criticized when it was revealed that he bought the property at a bargain basement price of $35,000 from the developer. The International Teamsters Pension Fund funded the real estate project, but the developer was even more interesting. It was Clint Murchison Jr., whose ranch Nixon would visit on the eve of John F. Kennedy’s assassination three years hence. In my book
The Man Who Killed Kennedy,
I make the case that Murchinson, a longtime crony of Lyndon Johnson with deep connections to both military intelligence and organized crime, was one of the funders of the Kennedy assassination.

The ill-fated Nixon bid for governor started seriously in January 1962 with a long afternoon brainstorming session at the beach home of prominent California Republican Margaret Brock. Nixon’s advisors were called to the beautiful residence on Trancas Beach, near Malibu, overlooking the Pacific. There were divergent opinions expressed by Rose Mary Woods, Bob Finch, journalist Earl Mazo, and longtime friends Jack Drown and Ray Arbuthnot. Longtime Nixon financial supporter Elmer Bobst, who had made millions in pharmaceuticals, was opposed to the race, saying Nixon “would risk much but win little.”
2
The Malibu discussion on the governorship ended as the sun was sinking into the Pacific. With darkness setting in, Nixon said he would run for governor.

His only hedge was that he wanted to talk with his family on the matter. But in fact he was already discussing the date for a formal announcement and how it would be handled. Pat Nixon would tell her husband, “Let’s not run. Let’s stay home. Let’s be a family.”
3

The night Nixon announced his candidacy in 1961, Pat would tell Bob Finch’s wife, Carol, “I’m trapped. Which way can I go? He can’t help it. He must always have a crusade.”
4
While Pat Nixon would not campaign for her husband as extensively as she had in 1960, even she would undertake a separate tour in the closing weeks of the campaign. Nixon’s daughters were supportive, with fifteen-year-old Trisha telling her father, “Daddy, come on. Let’s show ‘em.”
5

Today it is difficult to determine who was for Nixon’s running and who was opposed to it. There were others Nixon consulted extensively, including the late Thomas Dewey, Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower’s first attorney general, William Rogers, Nixon’s close friend, and two veterans of the Nixon and Eisenhower campaigns, Leonard Hall, Nixon’s 1960 manager, and J. Clifford Folger, the 1960 finance chairman. Most were from New York, in touch with major party financial powers, and most urged Nixon to run.

Nixon also received substantial encouragement from outside the state to make the race. Both President Eisenhower and Governor Tom Dewey were among those urging him to run to position himself with a political future. Herbert Brownell Jr. and William P. Rogers, both of whom had served as attorney general for Ike, joined Nixon’s 1960 finance chairman Clifford Folger and former Republican National Chairman Leonard W. Hall in urging Nixon to make the race. Former President Herbert Hoover and General Douglas MacArthur opposed the run.

From the beginning it was clear that Nixon had no interest in state issues such as smog, traffic, the state education system, water problems, and the like. Echoing the 1952 campaign, he pledged to “clean up the mess in Sacramento,” which voters took as a non-issue in view of the fact that voters did not think there was a mess in Sacramento.
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Nixon also had to deal with a badly divided Republican Party. After a disastrous 1958 election in which Senator William Knowland and Governor Goodwin Knight tried to exchange seats, leading the party to ignominious defeat, the party had splintered into right and left wings. The John Birch Society had grown like wildfire in Southern California. Its members practiced a pure brand of anti-Communism that deeply distrusted the bipartisan establishment in the East. Birch Society founder Robert Welch believed Roosevelt was a Communist, Truman was a dupe of the Communists, and Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” While not all these Birches were this extreme, this appalled Nixon, who was ever sensitive about his relationship with Eisenhower anyway. The Birches had actually elected two of their members to Congress, John Rousselot and Edgar Hiestand. Both were on good personal terms with Nixon. Many Republican candidates for Assembly and State Senate were Birchers. Repudiating the Birch Society meant repudiating many local Republicans, whose support Nixon needed.

Nixon was shocked to learn that AC “Cy” Rubel, former president of the Union Oil Company and a past major union donor, was raising money for Joe Shell. The Los Angeles Young Republicans, once a hotbed of support for Nixon, had been taken over by a conservative faction, as had the Los Angeles County Committee.
7
Both were supporting Shell. While Nixon would defeat Shell in the primary, he would do so only with substantial effort. Nixon would publicly repudiate the Birch Society in his campaign. It would be a costly mistake. Four years later actor Ronald Reagan would finesse the Birch issue on his way to 993,000-vote margin over Pat Brown.
8

Nixon would be opposed in the Republican primary by firebrand conservative Assemblyman Joe Shell. Nixon had earlier told Shell he didn’t plan to run, so Shell had moved ahead with a candidacy. Former Lieutenant Governor Howard J. “Butch” Powers withdrew from the race, calling Nixon a “discard from the rubble heap of National politics.”
9
In the meantime, liberal Republicans were deserting the former vice president. Former Governor Goodwin Knight endorsed Brown. So did Norris Pulson, former Republican mayor of Los Angeles, and Earl Warren Jr., son of the chief justice and former California governor. Interestingly, Democrat actor Ronald Reagan would endorse Nixon, setting the stage to his switch to the Republican Party.

Thirty-six-year-old H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, who had been an advance man in the 1960 campaign, returned to manage Nixon’s campaign efforts. Herb Klein, thirty-four, would return to handle the press. Herbert Kalmbach was the Southern California campaign director and would later raise hush money for the Watergate burglars. Alvin Moscow, who had worked with Nixon on his book
Six Crises,
was the campaign writer. Richard “Sandy” Quinn, thirty-seven, was a press assistant. Ronald Ziegler, twenty-two, was a press aide. Maurice Stands was the Finance Chairman, and the dependable Rose Mary Woods served as Nixon’s personal secretary. Field men included Dwight Chapin, Bob Finch, veteran advance man Nick Ruwe, and John Ehrlichman. It was quite a comedown for Finch, who had held the title of campaign director in 1960. Gone were the old Nixon hands that would stand up to him. Among this younger crowd, few told Nixon when he was wrong, and all were afraid of his outburst of temper. Tom Wicker of the
New York Times
wrote, “The candidate is his own strategist, campaign manager, speech writer and fundraiser.” His campaign aides did as they were ordered. None were really advisors.

Nixon was again dogged by the loan extended to his brother by industrialist and defense contractor Howard Hughes. Word of the loan had become public in the closing days of the 1960 campaign after Robert Kennedy authorized the break-in at Hughes’s accountant’s office on the basis of a tip Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy paid $100,000 to an informant for. The loan was for Nixon’s brother Donald to prop up a fast-food restaurant that featured Nixonburgers. Evidently, the house specialty was not well received by the palates of Southern Californians. The restaurant was a bust. Despite the $205,000 loan, Donald Nixon’s restaurant went bankrupt. Vice President Nixon said that he received no portion of the loan and that his mother had posted the property on which she lived as collateral. “It was all she had,” said Nixon. Strangely, the loan had been extended through third parties, and the Nixon property was never seized after the bankruptcy of the restaurant. The loan would plague Nixon as an issue, and when he visited San Francisco’s Chinatown, Democrat dirty trickster Dick Tuck managed to string a banner in native Chinese that said, “Nixon, what about the Hughes loan?” over Nixon’s platform. Nixon would angrily confront Governor Pat Brown during the one debate they had. Brown repeatedly rejected Nixon’s demands for a series of debates. Brown would merely shrug the attack off, denying that he himself had raised the loan issue.

Nixon
eminence grise
Murray Chotiner was back. Chotiner knew Nixon needed to rally party conservatives, so he skillfully hammered out a compromise resolution that would placate the Birchers yet disassociate the GOP from Robert Welch for the powerful California Republican Assembly, a large grassroots conservative Republican activist group that would placate the Birchers yet disassociate the GOP from Robert Welch. “I usually worked nights at the campaign office when I was there,” said scheduling director John Ehrlichman, who had served as an advance man in 1960. “I could not miss seeing Murray Chotiner coming and going after hours with unidentified visitors. Haldeman told me about some aspects of campaigning I had not seen as advance man. During that California campaign I have heard and saw more dirty politics—on both sides—than in all of my 1960 national-campaign experience. The trash from our opponent’s wastebasket was regularly collected by a friend of Chotiner’s to be sifted through for information. At times I was shown Pat Brown’s advance schedule, salvaged by the garbage gleaners.”
10