Nixon's Secret (32 page)

“Let the record show that all over the world I have defended the administration’s announced goal of no surrender to aggression. I have defended it in the capitals of the world and here at home against members of the president’s own party.”

Nixon chose to respond to Johnson more in sorrow than in anger. Describing Johnson as “very tired” he correctly pointed out that he had more consistently defended the president’s policy in Vietnam than many in Johnson’s own party. The Republican Congressional Committee paid for a thirty-minute television slot made available to Nixon on the Sunday before the election. Nixon was also on ABC’s
Issues and Answers
that day. When asked about Johnson, he said, “I think I understand how a man can be very, very tired and how his temper then can be very short. And if a vice president or a former vice president can be bone weary and tired, how much more tired would a president be after a journey like yours?”
26

Nixon seized the moment as he had in the 1952 Checkers speech. It was not surprising then that early polls showed Nixon leading Johnson by as many as six points. Nixon thought he could beat LBJ.

Interestingly, Eisenhower issued a stanched defense of Nixon as “one of the best-informed, most capable and most industrious vice presidents in the history of the United States.”
27
As he had in 1962, Ike’s public announcements of Nixon were growing more positive as the old man sought to repair some of the damage that was made in his backhanded 1960 comments about Nixon, emanated from his flip comment that it would “take him a week” to assess what Nixon had accomplished as vice president. With Nixon running on “experience counts” as a theme in 1960, Ike’s off-hand comment had been damaging.

On May 4, 1990, at a seminar of Johnson administration veterans, John Gardner, the former secretary of HEW, recalled that LBJ had said of the “chronic campaigner” remark: “I shouldn’t have made that crack about Nixon. It was dumb.”
28
Johnson had made an intemperate blunder—or had he? According to Joseph Califano, LBJ’s chief White House aide on domestic affairs, Johnson’s boost to Nixon was intentional, designed to elevate the one Republican LBJ thought would be easiest to beat. “When Johnson returned to his office [after the press conference] and saw the wire-service tickers lead with his characterization of Nixon as a ‘a chronic campaigner,’“ Califano wrote later in the
Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson,
“he chortled, ‘That ought to put him out front!’“ Johnson’s attack on Nixon had been purposeful.

LBJ was cagey enough to know that he didn’t want to face Rockefeller with his millions or a new face like Governor George Romney. LBJ knew Nixon was the only politician in the country who was more polarizing than Johnson himself. Johnson greatly underestimated Nixon’s deft use of television to reinvent himself as a more likeable, relaxed elder statesman who Americans thought had the foreign policy experience to end the war. Ironically, Johnson wanted to run against Nixon and Nixon wanted to challenge Johnson.

Nixon’s arduous path of hard work paid off in spades in 1966 as the net gain of 47 house seats, 3 Senate seats and 8 governorship seats showed the Republican Party was fully resurgent and fully competitive in 1968. The party also gained 557 State Legislative seats, cancelling out their loses in the 1964 debacle. The big winners of the night were the Republican Party and Richard Nixon. In an ebullient mood he took his staff to El Morocco “for spaghetti.” It was a night of celebration as they toasted the returns. After Nixon returned to his Fifth Avenue apartment, he had John Sears call him with West Coast returns. “Ron is in!” he said when learning Reagan had defeated Nixon’s old nemesis, Pat Brown.

Even Nixon’s wary rival, Rockefeller, asked for and got a Nixon endorsement when Nixon visited Syracuse, a conservative upstate city where Rockefeller’s pollsters said he needed more conservative votes in his third term to get a come-from-behind victory over New York City Council President Frank O’Connor.
29
Rockefeller also paid Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., so useful to Jack and Bobby Kennedy in smearing Hubert Humphrey as a draft dodger in Wisconsin in 1960,
30
to run as the New York Liberal Party candidate for governor to siphon votes from O’Connor while Conservative Party candidate Paul Adams drained some Republicans from Rockefeller. Rocky won. Still, Nixon knew he had no standing in the politics of his new home state campaigning only when asked for congressional candidates.

The 1966 elections would also produce Nixon’s most serious challenger for the 1968 Republican nomination. Former actor Ronald Reagan’s victory in California made him a national figure and the darling of the Goldwater wing of the GOP. The canny Nixon knew Reagan was a far more formable challenger than New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. This proved to be correct.

It is in this period that Nixon had a curious relationship with a beautiful Chinese woman in her early thirties who worked as a hostess at the Opium Den in the Hong Kong Hilton Hotel where Nixon stayed. Chinese-American Republican businessman Harold Lee introduced her to Nixon. On the first occasion in 1966 Liu and Nixon were photographed together by the Hilton’s house photographer in 1966. Her second encounter came when Nixon and Bebe Rebozo were visiting Hong Kong and Nixon invited her and another woman to their suite at the Mandarin Hotel. The relationship would not become public until 1976, when the
New York Times
revealed that the FBI, believing the woman, Marianna Liu, was a spy, had investigated an alleged “affair” between Nixon and Liu.

The FBI was concerned that Nixon, privy to national secrets due to eight years of top national security briefings became concerned Nixon could be blackmailed. The FBI report shows that Nixon sent Liu an expensive bottle of Channel No. 5 perfume after their first encounter. As requested by the CIA, Nixon was under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Hong Kong by the authorities there because of Liu. The royal colony intelligence agency gave the CIA infrared photos of Nixon and Liu taken through the window of Nixon’s hotel suite bedroom. Hong Kong authorities suspected Liu was a spy for the Communists. J. Edgar Hoover would later use the incident to pressure Nixon after he became president.
31

Charles McWhorter, then handling Nixon’s schedule, confirmed to me Nixon saw her often between 1964 and 1967. Liu herself would tell the
New York Times
she saw Nixon on every trip except one, a fact also confirmed by McWhorter. Liu would later move from Hong Kong to Nixon’s hometown of Whittier. The sponsors on her residence application included two close associates of Nixon’s. Nixon sent flowers to Liu during a 1967 hospitalization. The glamorous Chinese woman would visit Nixon in the White House three times.
32

Liu told the
National Enquirer
she had “many dates” with Nixon in Hong Kong and said she had danced with him on a yacht. “I knew he cared for me,” she said, and “despite my constant warnings he still insisted on seeing me and being alone with me.” The
National Enquirer
published a detailed two-part series on the Nixon-Liu “relationship,” claiming it was sexual. Liu denied this and sued the
National Enquirer
. According to veteran investigative journalist Anthony Summers, her lawsuit with the
National Enquirer
was settled out of court after Liu’s attorney advised their client that the paper’s reporting was “true.” Nixon also denied the relationship was intimate,
33
but John Sears also thought Nixon’s relationship with Liu extended into the bedroom. “He saw her every time he passed through Hong Kong, and he passed through Hong Kong every time he passed through Asia,” Sears later chuckled.
34

Liu has consistently denied that it was a love affair. She would visit Nixon’s gravesite after his passing.
35

NOTES

1
.     The Global Jewish News Source, October 2, 1968.

2
.     Jules Witcover, America: The Year the Dream Died, p. 79.

3
.     Tony Zoppi, “Dallas After Dark,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 22, 1963.

4
.     Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 185.

5
.     Ibid., p. 186.

6
.     Ibid.

7
.     “Politics and Presidential Protection: Staff Report,” HSCA, Second session, 1979, p. 508.

8
.     Phillip F. Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, p. 374.

9
.     David Pietrusza, 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon, p. 387.

10
.   Don Fulsom, “Richard Nixon’s Greatest Cover-up: His Ties to the Assassination of President Kennedy.”

11
.   Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, p. 262.

12
.   Alan Peppard, “Kennedy rival Nixon left Dallas as JFK arrived in November 1963,” Dallasnews, Nov. 2013.

13
.   
http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2013/11/richard-nixons-letter-jackie-kennedy/
.

14
.   Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm, p. 71.

15
.   Church Committee deposition of Frank Sturgis, April 4, 1975.

16
   Lamar Waldron, Watergate: The Hidden History, p. 295.

17
.   Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, p. 263.

18
.   Robert Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P., 1964, p. 367–368.

19
.   Cabell Phillips, “Goldwater Likens Nixon to Stassen,”
New York Times
, June 11, 1964.

20
.   Ibid.

21
.   Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972, p. 51.

22
.   Charles Mohr, “Scranton Attack Like a Slap by Friend, Goldwater Feels,”
Pittsburg Post-Gazette
, June 13, 1964.

23
.   Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972, pp. 50–54.

24
.   Conversation with author, 1984.

25
.   Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, pp. 284–285.

26
.   Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, p. 286.

27
.   Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, p. 285.

28
.   Ibid.

29
.   William Safire,
Before the Fall
, p. 28–33.

30
.   Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography, p. 209.

31
.   Summers, Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, pp. 371–376, noting document, Director to SAC San Francisco, Aug. 18, 1976, FBI 105-40947-8.

32
.   Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, pp. 269–270.

33
.   
San Francisco Examiner
,
San Francisco Chronicle
, Feb. 8, 1981.

34
.   Conversation with John Sears.

35
.   Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, pp. 269–270.

CHAPTER NINE

THE BRIGHT YOUNG MEN

“The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains is from seeing the men that he has about him.”

—Niccolo Machiavelli
1

R
ichard Nixon, in his long political career, was deeply affected by the men around him. As the 1968 presidential election approached, his original mentor, Murray Chotiner, was to remain in the shadows but was always one boozy phone call away. The
political advisors
who worked for Nixon in his vice presidential days and through the 1960 campaign were still on the scene, but largely powerless. At first, an extraordinary talented and balanced team of writers, researchers, political operatives, and cutting-edge TV producers and men from Nixon’s New York law firm replaced them. This team was then replaced by non-ideological advance men and marketing executives who would play a significant role in Nixon’s ultimate downfall.

Because Chotiner had gotten jammed up for influence peddling when Nixon was vice president, Nixon’s mentor was forced to recede into the shadows. Chotiner avoided prosecution under Eisenhower’s Justice Department and was compelled to lay low. It is a mistake not to recognize that he was
always there.
Chotiner knew how to keep his distance, but the evidence shows he was ever present in Nixon’s 1960 face off with Kennedy, the 1962 California governor’s race, during Nixon’s maneuverings to first stop Goldwater then support Goldwater in 1964, during Nixon’s 1966 campaign for Republican candidates, and throughout the 1968 comeback bid. Indeed, Chotiner was still on board in 1972 playing a key role in Watergate, the pardon of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, and throughout the fall of Nixon’s presidency.

Nixon aide Raymond K. Price, an erudite, moderate Republican and former editorial writer for the New York
Herald-Tribune
who crafted some of Nixon’s finer speeches, argues eloquently in his book
With Nixon
that the president had both good and bad sides, indeed, good and bad personas. While some of his advisors from the ‘50s and ‘60s were often able to appeal to his better angles, other advisors angled for his dark side. They engaged in tactics and strategies that ultimately backfired.

By 1960, press secretary Herb Klein and Robert Finch, a handsome and moderate man who served as Nixon’s personal assistant as vice president and headed Nixon’s operations, were the closest men to the former vice president. They were highly capable and well liked in the press corps, even if the reporters disliked their employer. Both had a tendency to appeal to Nixon’s good side and talk him out of more extreme orders.

Nixon met and was impressed by Finch when the latter ran for Congress in California in 1958 and Nixon, as vice president, was called on to campaign for the challenger. Finch joined the vice presidential staff and was the campaign director for Nixon’s 1960 bid. He also worked for Nixon’s star-crossed 1962 governor’s race and then managed veteran Hollywood hoofer George Murphy’s 1964 election to the US Senate from California, an impressive feat since Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater in California by 18 percent in the same cycle.