Nixon's Secret (34 page)

In 1976, Sears’s selection of Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweicker, a moderate Republican, as Reagan’s vice presidential running mate were examples of bold and brilliant moves that kept Reagan’s candidacy alive until the showdown at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

“Milhous” schooled the cocky Sears on how to handle seasoned party powerbrokers and nail down the men Nixon needed across the country. Through Nixon, Sears met Tom Dewey, Herb Brownell, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, John Lodge, and the lesser party mahatmas of the late 1960s. Later, Sears and Nixon spent endless hours talking about a potential vice presidential choice, but only after the compartmentally minded Nixon had the nomination sewn up.

Sears shared Nixon’s cynicism about the vice presidential nomination. “All our polling showed Nixon ran best alone,” said Sears. This was ironic in view of Nixon’s status as a loner. Even President Dwight Eisenhower said, “I don’t understand how a man could have no friends.” In both 1960 and 1968, Nixon went through the motions of a completely contrived “consultation” with party leaders after he had decided in seclusion who he wanted as his running mate. In both 1960 and 1968, one could argue that Nixon fumbled his choice; Cabot Lodge proved an ineffective campaigner who brought little to the 1960 ticket, and Spiro Agnew’s shaky performance on the stump made him a punch line for Democrats who made TV ads that said, “One heartbeat away from the presidency. Think about it.” Sears tried to affect Nixon’s thinking, but his choices were made in solitude and with little input from the outside.

The former vice president also taught Sears about the electorate and how to pursue them, with a special focus on Southern whites, Northern Catholics, and blue-collar Democrats. “Go after the Italians,” Sears heard Nixon barking on the phone to actor Ronald Reagan when he was running for governor. “See if you can get Joe Dimaggio to campaign with you,” the Old Man counseled the former B-movie actor.

Sears also bridged the gap between many of the old pols who had been with Nixon from the beginning and the new group of “bright young men” who flanked Nixon after he joined the New York law firm.

Nixon began the quiet planning of a presidential comeback that started with valuable campaigning for Republican candidates in 1966 and advanced to a 1967 candidacy. Nixon swept the 1968 Republican presidential primaries and piled up impressive overall vote totals despite Nelson Rockefeller’s and Ronald Reagan’s efforts to block his path. Interestingly, Republican turnout was as high as in the hotly contested Democratic presidential primaries where Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey were contending. This is particularly impressive in view of the fact that Nixon was essentially shadow boxing—neither Reagan nor Rocky ever stepped into the ring.

While the subject at hand is Richard Nixon, one must look at Sears’s role in the 1980 nomination of Ronald Reagan to see the full capability of the man trained by Nixon. Bush won an upset victory in the 1980 Iowa caucuses after a Herculean physical effort. Meanwhile, Sears tried to minimize Reagan’s time on the ground in Iowa to preserve the aura of Reagan as the frontrunner. It was a miscalculation Sears had to fix.

Bush soared in the polls as he basked in the media attention in the days after his Iowa upset. “Is Bush Ready?” blared a
Newsweek
headline in their cover story of the man who had lost two US Senate races and served but two years in Congress. Sears knew Bush was headed to the Granite State with a head of steam.

As Reagan’s campaign manager, Sears walked Bush into a trap in the New Hampshire primary. His tactic: to agree to a two-man debate, then call for all GOP candidates to be included the day of the debate. Bush was petulant and froze when the high drama came; Reagan delivered one of the greatest lines of his career: “Mr. Green, I’m paying for this microphone!”

Bush was outmaneuvered and caught completely off guard. Proud of the successful debacle, John Sears was “Smiling like the Cheshire cat,” according to Reagan speechwriter Peter Hannaford.

The news stations drilled the image of a stammering Bush and confident Reagan into the heads of the voters. The New Hampshire primary was not even close. Reagan won in a lopsided upset, 50 to 23 percent.

In his early service to Nixon, Sears skillfully cultivated good relations with a number of key reporters. Nixon had no press secretary traveling with him in 1966 and 1967, so media liaison fell to Sears. The major reporters of the day, like Robert Novak and the
Baltimore Sun
’s Jack Germond, were drinkers, and Sears was a man who liked his alcohol. These ties served Nixon well in his comeback bid, but ultimately caused Sears to run afoul of Henry Kissinger, John Mitchell, and Bob Haldeman. They believed any man who had cordial relations with reporters could not be trusted.

Unlike Nixon, Sears didn’t consider the press the enemy. Instead, he saw them as targets to be manipulated and persuaded. He was particularly close to Novak,
Baltimore Sun
columnist Jules Witcover, Knoxville
News-Sentinel
reporter Loye Miller, and others. While Sears advanced the Nixon line, he was known as much for talking on background and never lying to reports. Sears was also a brooder who drank heavily through his brilliant career, and nothing lubricates the ears of reporters like a cocktail. It was ironic that John Mitchell, a man who also liked to get in his cups, used Sears’s “heavy drinking” against Nixon’s young deputy counsel in the drive to remove him from Nixon’s political operation and the White House.

Journalists were to be “schmoozed, used, but not abused,” said Sears, who had many close friendships with reporters from most of the major media outlets of the day. I agreed with Sears then and remain in his camp on the question of reporters. Some are honorable and can be trusted; others are not “reporters” at all but new media wannabes, where anyone with a keyboard is a journalist.

In his epic book on the 1976 election,
Marathon
, reporter Jules Witcover described Sears as a man “with a deceptively shy outer crust that camouflaged a biting humor and political toughness and skepticism. Also his appreciation of and affinity with members of the Washington press corps set him apart from most of the political operatives around Nixon and Reagan. Where many of the paranoid Nixon types looked upon reporters as the enemy, to be warded off at every turn, Sears saw them as an essential and unavoidable element in the drama of electing a president.”
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“While I know that you have to disagree,” Nixon wrote to me, “I still believe that the best way for a conservative to handle the media is to treat them with courteous contempt. As you may recall, I made this point in one of my press conferences. One of the reporters asked if I hated the press. I answered, No. Love and hate have one thing in common. You must respect the individual involved. I regret that there are very few members of the fourth estate who deserve respect as objective fair reporters.”
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Interestingly, Sears, scouting a 1976 presidential contender while the Nixon White House roiled, told Ronald and Nancy Reagan in their Pacific Palisades, California, home that Agnew and Nixon were toast. The Reagans were stunned and impressed with the accuracy of his prediction. How could he know? Reagan aide Mike Deaver said Sears cinched the captaincy of Reagan’s 1976 presidential bid when he appeared to be prescient.
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After Nixon’s surprise running mate, Spiro T. Agnew, proved to be an inept performer on his vice presidential tour, Sears was detailed to the Agnew plane to bring order and an end to self-inflicted wounds. He managed to coexist with the Haldeman and Ehrlichman axis in this period, but his closeness to Nixon and his deep political relationships at the party’s grassroots level across nation, as well as his precocious and wise-guy nature, irked John Mitchell. It was a godsend: by driving Sears out of the White House and Nixon’s entourage, Mitchell saved Sears the taint of Watergate and probably his career.

Mitchell ultimately replaced Sears with Harry Dent, a former aide to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurman, who had convinced old Strom to leave the Democratic Party and switch to the GOP (and Barry Goldwater) in 1964. Dent was an affable evangelical minister who understood the transition going on in the South in which white Democrats were fleeing the party of Jefferson and Jackson for the new, more conservative Republican Party. While Dent was a capable operative, he did not have the world view of Sears, who understood that the coalition Nixon was trying to cobble together for the future included
both
Southern conservative and Northern and Midwestern moderates. Goldwater had swept the Deep South, which informed Dent’s view, whereas Sears was more skillful in positioning Nixon in the center where he could win votes both to his left and to his right. Dent went on to work with Republican National Committee Chairman George H. W. Bush and in 1980 fronted a South Carolina primary campaign for Bush. He lost miserably.

* * *

According to speechwriter Richard Whalen, Nixon had a clear vision of the team he wanted around him for his second run for the White House:

Nixon wanted a small research and writing staff—“no more than six”—
young
men who were skilled “generalists” (I noticed that he had picked up some of the jargon of business.). Romney had a staff of twenty. “I’ll take my two researchers any time.” Nixon, who had been over the road before, didn’t need as large a staff as a newcomer. But, regardless of the number of men around him, would he delegate responsibilities? He hadn’t in 1960. This time, he assured me, he would let his staff run him. “That’s why I want to pick it so carefully.”

People with ideas, Nixon noted, were able to publicize them by assisting a political figure like him—a plain invitation. “Of course, you can have your say in magazines, and reach a national audience. But, when you’re with a man going for the presidency, you have a chance not only to get your ideas across, but maybe to see them put into practice. That’s a big difference.”
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Among the team putting ideas into practice was twenty-eight-year-old Patrick J. Buchanan, a hard-hitting conservative editorialist for the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat
. Buchanan was a Scotch-Irish Catholic educated at Georgetown University and the Columbia School of Journalism. Buchanan admired Nixon’s role in the Hiss case and the hard line he had taken against Communism. He revered Nixon and referred to him as “the Boss.” Buchanan screened and underlined reading material for Nixon, maintaining black loose-leaf briefing books on scores of issues. He also collated the flow of opinion polls and political intelligence. Buchanan was a prolific memo writer with a sense of history despite his young age. He was part theoretician, part cheerleader, and part verbal pugilist. He, too, was devoted to “the old man” and saw Nixon as a “man of destiny.”

Buchanan traveled extensively with Nixon and Sears in 1966. Like Sears, Buchanan understood Nixon’s desire to forge a new governing coalition of Republicans, Orthodox Jews, blue-collar Catholic Democrats in the Northeast and Midwest. Buchanan and Nixon also nurtured the idea of going after a slice of the emerging black middle class. Buchanan and Sears understood that Nixon didn’t just want to win an election, he wanted to win reelection and set the stage for Republican successors, men like George H. W. Bush, Senator Howard Baker, Senator Bill Brock, Congressman Don Rumsfeld, Mayor Richard Lugar, Massachusetts Attorney General Eliott Richardson, Congressman Don Riegel (who later became a Democrat), US Senator Ed Brooke, and others.

Former Kansas Congressman Robert F. Ellsworth, a lanky and bearded Kansan who tired of the slow pace of the House, worked with Sears on mapping out a delegate and planning Nixon’s effort in the 1968 primaries. Ellsworth’s politics were of the liberal Republican variety, although he was on good terms with the rising star of the other Kansas congressman, the more conservative Bob Dole. Somewhat haughty and dismissive, Ellsworth still played the perfect political balance to Sears as the Irish-Catholic conservative. Ellsworth worked at Nixon’s direction with Sears to plot Nixon’s 1968 rise from the ashes, which began in 1966.

Ellsworth was elected to Congress from Kansas in 1960 as Nixon was sweeping the state. He was reelected twice, and then in 1966 he lost a US Senate primary to James Pearson, a moderate Republican with whom Ellsworth had few issue differences. That same year Ellsworth met Nixon on a flight from Washington to Chicago, and, impressed with Nixon’s intellect, Ellsworth became the national political director of Nixon’s 1968 campaign.

Curt and somewhat officious, Ellsworth was nonetheless effective. “We don’t have anybody with the political savvy of Bob Finch, but Bob Ellsworth is coming along,” Nixon told Richard Whalen.
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Occasially glimpses of the “old Nixon” were seen. Sears and Ellsworth were stunned when the
New York Times
ran this story:

Du Bois ‘Duplicity’ Decried By Nixon

By DOUGLAS ROBINSON

Richard M. Nixon decried yesterday the similarity in the pronunciation of the Du Bois Club and the Boys Club of America, saying it misled people into confusing one organization with the other.

The former Vice President, who is national board chairman of the Boys Club of America, said in a statement that the confusion was “an almost classic example of Communist deception and duplicity.”

The Du Bois Clubs, which claim 2,500 members across the country, was described as a Communist-front group last Friday by Attorney General Nicholas B. Katzenbach. The Boys Club, which has a nation-wide membership of 750,000 boys 7 to 17, provides recreation, guidance and handicraft instruction.

Since the labeling of the Du Bois Clubs by Mr. Katzenbach there have been several acts of violence against members. In Brooklyn, several club members were beaten by a crowd last Saturday and, in San Francisco, the club headquarters was destroyed by an explosion.

In his statement, which was issued by the Boys Club, Mr. Nixon said the Du Bois Clubs “are not unaware of the confusion they are causing among our supporters and among many other good citizens.”