Nixon's Secret (31 page)

Despite Goldwater’s early stumbles in the primaries, his ultimate victory in California would seal his nomination. Political organizer par excellence F. Clifton White and a cadre of rabid Goldwater supporters had organized and turned out Goldwater supporters to sweep state conventions and caucuses collecting the masses who would fill the cow palace for Barry. The Taft wing of the party energized by Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and, particularly that year, Ronald Reagan would finally seize control of the National Republican Party, throwing off the chokehold of the Eastern Wall Street crowd.

Nixon flew to London for a two-day business trip. When he got to the airport, aide John Whitaker told him, “It’s on the radio that Romney’s
not
going to run.”

Nixon was shocked. “What do you mean he’s not going to run? He told me he was.”
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While in London, Nixon told the press he would not endorse Scranton, but he welcomed the governor’s entry into the race. Goldwater supporters began to grumble about Nixon trying to stop their man, and Goldwater himself complained, “It’s just like Nixon to set this up and run off to London.”
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When he returned to the States, Nixon realized that he had nothing to gain from antagonizing the by-now-certain nominee. He could also see, with Goldwater’s defeat guaranteed, a new role as Nixon-party unifier. Nixon spun on a dime to be the doomed Goldwater’s biggest backer.

After Goldwater led the party into disastrous defeat, Nixon would be the only man available to act as party unifier, to lead the rehabilitation of the Republicanism, and help himself at the same time.

Now sensing that Goldwater could not win and that liberal Republicans like Rockefeller and his ally Senator Jacob Javits would decline to support Goldwater, Nixon saw opportunity and repositioned himself as Goldwater’s biggest booster, declaring Goldwater’s views to be in the “mainstream.” Nixon made it clear that “I, for one Republican, do not intend to sit it out, take a walk.”
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Nixon wisely convinced Republican National Chairman Bill Miller, a congressman from upstate New York, to move his scheduled speaking slot at the San Francisco convention to the night
after
the nominations to introduce nominee Barry Goldwater to his cheering supporters. No one could accuse Nixon of trying to stampede the convention if he spoke after the nomination vote. The convention itself was raucous and the GOP bitterly divided. Governor Bill Scranton had decided to make a late effort to wrench the nomination from Goldwater and had launched a vitriolic last-minute attack on the Arizona senator that accused him essentially of being a mentally unstable warmonger. Just the same, under the brilliant organizational structure and management of F. Clifton White, Goldwater had a lock on the delegates.

When Pennsylvania Senator Hugh Scott, a Scranton backer, proposed the convention adopt an anti-extremist plank that denounced the Ku Klux Klan, lumping them with the John Birch Society, Rockefeller mounted the podium to speak for the plank. The convention hall erupted in a cacophony of boos and catcalls, as the grinning Rockefeller seemed to taunt the crowd. Scott’s resolution was defeated on a resounding voice vote.

Nixon told the convention that he represented “the ministry of party unity,” and in introducing Goldwater he said, “And to those few, if there are some, who say they are going to sit it out or take a walk or even go on a boat ride, I have an answer. In the words of Barry Goldwater in 1960, ‘Let’s grow up, Republicans, let’s go to work—and we shall win in November.’”

Nixon introduced Goldwater, and the crowd went wild. Nixon thought it was one of the finest speeches of his career as he spoke party unity and support for the nominee while blasting LBJ and the Democrats. The convention hall was on fire as Goldwater approached the podium. It was near pandemonium. Then Nixon watched Goldwater commit political suicide. “Anyone who joins us in all sincerity we welcome,” Barry said. “Those who do not care for our cause we do not expect to enter our ranks in any case. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation and the pursuit of justice is not virtue,” the squared-jaw Arizonan would bellow. Nixon later wrote he was “almost physically sick” when he heard the nominee. The place exploded as the conservatives exulted over finally capturing the nomination from the Eastern elite. It was then and there that I believe that Nixon recognized how the center of gravity had shifted in the Republic Party and how the conservatives, who had been defeated in 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, and 1952, had finally taken control of the Republican Party. It was to be a vital lesson for Nixon’s own comeback from the wilderness. Nixon would campaign in more states and make more stops for Goldwater than Goldwater would for himself, winning the gratitude of grassroots conservatives.

Nixon began his tack to the right in preparation for a 1968 bid for the White House. After stumping for Goldwater, the 1966 election afforded Nixon the next opportunity to position himself as a proponent of party unity and to collect IOUs from party leaders. Immediate preparations for an arduous 1966 campaign effort to resuscitate the Republican Party and position someone who could be elected in 1968. He assembled a staff of the pugnacious Patrick J. Buchanan, political savant John Sears and the ever-present Rose Mary Woods. This experience also led Nixon to see at the grass-roots level the revolution that had taken place. Nixon would launch a campaign while wealthy backers, coordinated by longtime Nixon friend and aide Peter Flanagan, funded “Victory ‘66,” which financed the former vice president’s travels on behalf of Republican candidates across the Republican spectrum, with a particular emphasis on House candidates.

Nixon would, in an endless assortment of fundraisers, cocktail parties, chicken dinners, and campaign events, bring congressional candidates needed media coverage and needed campaign contributions.

In the hinterlands, Nixon was still the man who had lost to JFK by a whisker, and most of the party knew the White House had been stolen from him by the Kennedys, the Daley machine, and the Mob. Buchanan and Sears traveled with Nixon, and Sears laid the foundation for his own network of power brokers and shrewd political operators.

Nixon noted that even in the so-called Eastern moderate states the conservative faction was competitive within the party while Goldwaterites held sway at the party level in the South, Midwest, and West. If anything, Nixon’s campaign travels showed him the continued strength of the conservative wing of the GOP. Nixon would soon launch his courtship of the major figures of the Goldwater movement: Goldwater himself, the movement’s intellectual guru, William F. Buckley, and, ultimately, the venerable senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond.

Nixon would be unhappy when Republican National Chairman Ray Bliss, a non-ideological mechanic who Nixon helped install after the Goldwater debacle, refused funding for an airplane for some of Nixon’s campaign trips and also declined to let Nixon give the party’s formal response to one of president.

Richard Nixon understood the value of chits. Starting in 1952, he had campaigned indefatigably in an endless stream of state and big county Republican dinners, Republican fundraisers, and Republican candidate campaign outings and press conferences. With the non-partisan-appearing General Eisenhower leading the country for eight years, the partisan road fell to Nixon. Dick Nixon knew that the Ohio Republican county chairman whose dinner you spoke at recently would someday likely be a delegate to a Republican National Convention. As a Republican who had defeated an incumbent in 1946, he knew those he helped their first term in Congress would “owe him.” Starting in 1952, 1954, 1956, 1960, 1964, and 1968, Nixon would pick up many IOUs on what Ronald Reagan would call the “mashed potato circuit,” an endless array of hotel party receptions and dinners.

Even in 1965 Nixon would campaign for the Republican candidates in the off-year elections in New Jersey. In the Old Dominion State, Nixon would stump with A. Linwood Holton, who was challenging the political supremacy of the Byrd machine in Virginia. Holton would run well and go on to be one of the key organizers in Nixon’s campaign in the South. A moderate Republican from Big Stone Gap, Holton would come back in 1969 to be the first Republican governor elected since Reconstruction.

Nixon would campaign for winners and losers, liberal Republicans and archconservatives. He would show up at the Cuyahoga County Republican dinner in Cleveland, the Nassau County Republican dinner on Long Island, and Republican venues both bigger and smaller. “Nixon was the one guy who got along with both Rhodes and Taft,” longtime Republican Chairman Robert Hughes told me. “Jim Rhodes played footsies with Rockefeller but that was only to get Rocky’s money for the state party,” Hughes added.

If anything, grassroots affection for Nixon only grew after he shrewdly stumped for Goldwater in 1964 while Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and William Scranton took a walk on the Goldwater-Miller ticket. Nixon also tacked sharply to the right on foreign policy and the Vietnam War. Out from under Eisenhower. Nixon could finally be the tough proponent of a hard military line on the Communists as he had been in the private counsels of Ike’s administration. Nixon pounded LBJ and the Democrats on their handling of the war, at the same time supporting the basic policy of escalation. Nixon knew he was driving a wedge between the Democrats, a wedge that ultimately would drive LBJ from the race in 1968. Nixon’s tough line in Vietnam won him Goldwaterite support in the party.

“Hell, he came to South Dakota for Goldwater when we couldn’t get Barry himself to come,” said Jim Stockdale, a longtime Republican who lived in South Dakota between Republican political campaigns, where he was an itinerant political operative. “Everyone here was real grateful Dick Nixon was the guy who showed up.”

“Dick Nixon could always be counted on,” former Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio told me. “Hell, we’d fight with his advance men who never wanted the schedule to let him get down with the people, but he always showed up to headline our state dinner.” The feisty Rhodes would serve as Ohio state auditor and then as governor from 1963–1967. He would make a miraculous comeback to serve a second term from 1968–1971. Like Nixon, Rhodes was ideologically “flexible.” “I was in the state house when he was vice president and he came to Columbus,” Rhodes remembered. “My job was to line up every single Republican running for the House that year. Vice President Nixon came in and methodically posed for a picture with each one to use in their campaign. Dick Nixon was a guy you could count on.”
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Rhodes would argue so strenuously with Nixon’s advance men about the schedule when Nixon visited the Buckeye State that he finally once hijacked a presidential motorcade, taking it to a state fairgrounds, which the vice president’s handlers thought they had knocked off the schedule. Rhodes commandeered the motorcade because the state policeman riding the lead motorcycles worked for him, as did the cops in the rest of the caravan. Nixon was a big hit at the Ohio State Fair. “You could, of course, get Ohio by taking Rhodes for vice president, but who would want responsibility for that?” Richard Nixon said in 1968.

Nixon was brutal in his attacks on the Johnson administration. “The high cost of Johnson,” he kept saying. He was relentless in his critique of Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War. “I can get under his skin,” Nixon said. Reporters and politicians were stunned when President Lyndon Johnson issued a blast at Nixon, thus elevating him in the Republican filed and making him the face soon to be resurgent Republic Party.

At a White House news conference on November 4, the Friday before the elections on Tuesday, Lyndon Johnson would issue a blistering attack on Nixon. When a reporter asked Johnson to comment on Nixon’s criticism of the Manila communiqué, a “peace proposal” from the South that the North would never buy but was Johnson’s first bid to end the war. Johnson would hit the roof. Stunned reporters scribbled furiously as the president assaulted the former vice president:

I do not want to get into a debate on a foreign policy meeting in Manila with a chronic campaigner like Mr. Nixon. It is his problem to find fault with his country and with his government during a period of October every two years. If you will look back over his record, you will find that to be true. He never did really recognize and realize what was going on when he had an official position . . . You remember what President Eisenhower said, that if you would give him a week or so he would figure out what he was doing.

Since then he has made a temporary stand in California, and you saw what action the people took out there. Then he crossed the country to New York. Then he went back to San Francisco, hoping that he would be in the wings, available if Goldwater stumbled. But Goldwater didn’t stumble. Now he is out talking about a conference that obviously he is not well prepared on or informed about.

Johnson’s position on the war and the Manila peace feeler, claiming that it made clear that the United States and its allies would stay in South Vietnam only “so long as our presence is necessary” to protect that country’s territory and put an end to the fighting. Then he turned is fire on Nixon again:

They know that and we ought not try to confuse it here and we ought not try to get it mixed up in a political campaign here. Attempts to do that will cause people to lose votes instead of gaining them. And we ought not have men killed because we try to fuzz up something. When the aggression, infiltration, and violence cease, not a nation there wants to keep occupying troops in South Vietnam. Mr. Nixon doesn’t serve his country well by trying to leave that kind of impression in the hope that he can pick up a precinct or two, or a ward or two.
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While flying with Buchanan from New York to a speech in Waterville, Maine, Nixon made up his mind to reply in sorrow rather than in anger—to be firm in his position but reasoned, low-keyed, even forgiving. “Jesus, how he hit us,” said Patrick J. Buchanan as he boarded the small plane at LaGuardia Airport that was to ferry Nixon to Maine, where he would campaign for Republicans. Nixon couldn’t believe his good fortune but elected not to return fire. Nixon praised Johnson as “hard-working” and said that the issues should be “discussed like gentlemen.”