Nixon's Secret (4 page)

Nixon’s razor-thin loss to JFK scalded him and sent him into a deep depression. Getting worked over by the efficient Kennedy machine with their hardball tactics and Madison Avenue imagery, Nixon self-managed a defensive, unfocused campaign, driving him to the brink of collapse with fatigue. More importantly he let Kennedy dominate the dialogue and with it, the outcome. Lost in history, though, is the fact that JFK was stalled in the polls in the closing weeks and Nixon’s superhuman effort was closing the gap. The late movement in the polls was in favor of Nixon. He triumphed in the last three of the four debates. Contrary to the conventional history, the TV audience grew in the last of the four debates and virtually matched that of the first.
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It was considered Nixon’s best debate. Nixon closed fast but not fast enough . . . or did he? As we shall discover, voter irregularities in Illinois and Texas probably cheated Nixon out of his come-from-behind victory. In addition, a case can be made that Nixon actually won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.

“They say RN is paranoid,” Nixon’s veteran advance man Nick Ruwe told me. “You’d be paranoid too if the presidency had been stolen from you.”

Nixon would drive himself to nervous exhaustion in his effort to catch and pass Kennedy. Kennedy paced himself while his wealthy father paid for an outstanding professional staff and media campaign. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” the elder Kennedy promised. Nixon vowed a defeat due to imagery in lieu of hard issues would never happen again. He, too, could run a mass media campaign using television. He too would pace himself.

From Nixon’s defeat in the 1962 race for governor of California and his valedictory outburst at the press that you “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” to his inauguration as president in 1969 in a period of only six years, it is Nixon’s savvy reading and manipulation of events that make this account all the more interesting.

An extraordinary set of circumstances opened the door for Nixon’s stunning comeback. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the escalated and seemingly hopeless war in Vietnam and the unrest caused on America’s campuses coupled with a newly militant demand for civil rights and the resulting resentments of a white middle class all provided a confluence of events that gave Dick Nixon another shot.

It is only in recent years that a more balanced portrait of John F. Kennedy has come into focus. So successful was Kennedy’s embodiment of the spirit of a younger generation of Americans in the early 1960s, and so adept was JFK at the use of Madison Avenue “image making,” fueled with his father’s money, that only today do we realize JFK was a philandering husband whose voracious sexual appetite was likely heightened by his taking of methamphetamine injections allegedly to address the pain in his back.

Just as history demands a balanced portrait of JFK, the good and the bad, so should history demand a balanced portrait of Richard Nixon. His achievements for a safer, more peaceful world, a cleaner environment, and greater social justice cannot be discarded, for unlike JFK, more bad is known about him than good. My goal in
Nixon’s Secrets
is not to provide an apologia for the thirty-seventh president, nor to rehabilitate him. Rather, my aim is to provide a balanced portrait based on the historical record and the many opportunities I had to learn more than the “official version of events.” It is also my aim to connect the dots between the CIA’s Operation 40 (a Nixon-led, anti-Castro operation), the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, Nixon’s downfall, and the exact circumstances of the pardon, which ultimately allowed Nixon to stage his greatest comeback. Nixon’s fervent anti-Communism, his arm’s-length relationship with organized crime, his tortured relationship with the CIA, and his personal ambition would be the threads that sewed these events together.

Nixon was a single-minded individual. His only passion outside of the political arena was professional sports. He was as fervent and as knowledgeable about baseball as he was government and politics. Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose hatred for Nixon ran so deep it led Thompson to label him an “American monster,” connected with the presidential candidate over a mutual love of professional football while on the ‘68 campaign.

Thompson got an audience with Nixon only on the condition that they could discuss football and nothing else. Nixon’s travel aide Nick Ruwe arranged a car ride with Nixon upon his arrival in New Hampshire on a private jet, and Thompson almost ignited the plane in jet fuel with a careless cigarette clenched in a holder, which would have killed Nixon, Thompson, and Ruwe on the spot.

“We had a fine time. I enjoyed it—which put me a bit off balance, because I figured Nixon didn’t know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusion to football on the stump, but it had never occurred to me that he actually
knew
anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.

But I was wrong. Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still no doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every fact of pro football. At one point in our conversation, when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned a down & out pass—in the waning moments of a Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland—to an obscure, second-string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pinpoint style and precision.

He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh and laughed: ‘That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!’”
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Beyond sports, Nixon had no interests; neither food, movies, plays, nor the reading of fiction interested him. He spent his time thinking, brooding, and plotting. When he wasn’t doing these things, he was reading or writing about the only thing he understood—strategy.

The extent to which politics consumed Richard Nixon was extraordinary. Despite the fact that he would, for the first time in his life, make big money as a lawyer after moving East in the wake of his 1962 gubernatorial defeat, he would quickly grow bored.

Nixon’s ambition was born of resentment. He was a westerner, an outsider whose taste and sensibility reflected the American middle class. He didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, but matriculated instead at Whittier College and would shoehorn his way into the Duke University School of Law. Nixon had, as JFK would sniff, “no class.”

Author Russ Baker had been particularly perceptive in his view of Nixon’s deep resentment of the nation’s privileged and moneyed elites. It galled Nixon that without independent wealth he was forced to grovel for campaign contributions that would fuel his drive for the presidency. He remembered well that the
New York Herald-Tribune
, the very voice of the Wall Street/corporate wing of the party would first embrace his vice presidential candidacy and then be first to urge that he be thrown over the side when questions about his integrity surfaced in the so-called “fund crisis” of 1952. Nixon would utilize a cocker spaniel to thwart those who would dump him.

In fact Nixon would channel his resentment of the financial and cultural elite into the “politics of resentment.” Nixon practiced the politics of “us” vs. “them.” Nixon would use his bristling resentment and hatred of those who felt entitled to forge a middle-class constituency that would weld small-town Republicans with white Southern Democrats and big-city Northern Catholics to take back the White House for the GOP after a twelve-year drought during which many in the mainstream media speculated that the Republican Party was finished and would go the way of the Whigs.

“What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,” he told former aide Ken Clawson. “But if you are reasonably intelligent enough and your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”
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Like FDR, Nixon’s politics were about cobbling together a new and enduring electoral base for the GOP by uniting Republicans, a distinct minority out of power for many years with Southern whites leery of civil rights and Northern ethnic Catholic Democrats. So durable was this coalition that it would almost reelect Gerald Ford in 1976, only two years after Nixon’s resignation, and go on to elect Ronald Reagan to two terms and George H. W. Bush to one.

Nixon understood that politics was about addition. You had to galvanize those who shared your values, resentments, and anger to reach a governing majority by winning an election. Unlike many of the party’s right, politics was about
winning
.

But Nixon also understood the human psychology that makes it easier to get people to vote against something than for something. Politics is also about division. It’s us against them: the elites, the government, the privileged, the Ivy Leaguers, liberals on the US Supreme Court, those to the manor born who inherit. Nixon rallied the strivers, the small-business men who were getting screwed by the big corporations, the little people who paid their taxes, served in the military, belonged to the Rotary, and didn’t burn their draft cards. It was the politics of resentment.

Nixon viewed all his opponents as elites. His first major opponent, Jerry Voorhis, was a millionaire banker’s son, Helen Gahagan Douglas was a famous actress and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Alger Hiss, whose downfall Nixon would cause, was Ivy League. John F. Kennedy, wealthy and debonair as Nixon would never be, was seen as another child of privilege, “a rich kid whose father bought it for him,” Nixon would tell me.

Nixon hated the Eastern elite even more so because he had to rely on them financially. Although carefully styled as a small-time boy from the city of Whittier, his political career was not only first financed by the oil, agricultural, and defense industries in Southern California, but Eastern interests funneled money to Nixon as well. There was significant Eastern funding for Nixon’s 1946 campaign against veteran New Deal Congressman Jerry Voorhis.

It is notable that Nixon fled Southern California immediately after his 1962 debacle in the governor’s race. He returned to New York, indeed to Wall Street, the bosom of the very moneyed and elitist crowd he claims to detest. Pharmaceutical king Elmer Bobst swung profitable legal business to the firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander where Nixon was a “law partner.” As we shall see, Pepsico’s Don Kendall would give the firm legal business that would bring Richard Nixon to Dallas on November 21 and 22, 1963. It is notable that none in Nixon’s circle of close, deep-pocketed financial supporters and intimates had Ivy League degrees or social connections.

While Nixon could always count on his friends Charles “Bebe” Rebozo,
Reader’s Digest
owner Hobart Lewis, Aerosol valve inventor Robert Abplanalp, coal and railroad heiress Helen Clay Frick, Pepsico’s Don Kendall, and Chicago insurance executive W. Clement Stone, he had to go to Wall Street and the big boys in New York for the real money again in 1968. As vice president, Nixon had to grovel for the money to face JFK. In 1962, with his star in eclipse, he struggled to raise money in his failed gubernatorial comeback bid.

It was the Eastern boys who got him on the ticket with Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The selection of Nixon was engineered by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, two-time presidential loser in 1944 and 1948 with the vigorous backing of Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his brother, Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge, and Wall Street lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles as well as Eisenhower campaign manager and later attorney general Herbert Brownell. These men picked Nixon not because of their high regard for his intellect, but because they thought he brought the ticket both age and geographical balance. The anti-Communist credentials earned in his successful pursuit of Communist spy Alger Hiss made Nixon a favorite with the conservative wing of the party, and it was thought that he would appeal to the disgruntled supporters of Senator Robert A. Taft, from whom Ike had snatched the presidential nomination. The Eastern establishment was old money, history, and connections. Nixon was thought of as a pawn, not a prize, and they would attempt to sacrifice him without thought to the contrary.

Nixon was never
of
the establishment, although he would enjoy the support of the Dulles brothers, Henry Luce, Herbert Brownell, John McCloy, Tom Dewey, and the Whitneys, Bushes, Walter Thayer and other pillars of the Eastern establishment. Nixon also deeply remembered that these were precisely the folks who had urged Eisenhower to force him to resign from the ticket in 1952 when a scandal involving an alleged “secret fund” put together by a group of businessmen was claimed to support Nixon’s lifestyle. Minutes after Nixon gave him this bad news, Nixon launched his televised Checkers speech that would save his career. Nixon never forgot that the Eastern snobs had rallied to cut his throat. He would court them, he would take their money, but he would always hate them.

What historians like Rick Perlstein fail to grasp is not only that Nixon resented and envied the glamorous Kennedys, with their privileged lifestyle and well-funded political ascendency, Nixon also resented those in his own tribe like Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he would always be beholden. Ironically, Nixon would move into a Park Avenue apartment building Rockefeller owned and lived in. Rocky would be Nixon’s neighbor and landlord. Nixon’s new law firm would handle real estate transactions for the Rockefeller owned bank Chase Manhattan.
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Nixon, who had seen his father, Frank Nixon, a dirt-poor roustabout, literally work himself to death, resented the country club elite with their fancy educations and their trust funds. Nixon’s father would be fierce and loud in his political opinions and fast with his fists. The resentment developed in Nixon from watching his father’s struggle would only intensify when, after law school graduation, every white-shoe New York law firm he applied to rejected him. His application to become an FBI agent would also be rejected.