Nixon's Secret (48 page)

Connally, under pressure from LBJ, later double-crossed Nixon, appearing with Johnson and Humphrey at a huge Houston rally on the eve of the election. Fifty-eight thousand people filled the Astrodome; Frank Sinatra served as the master of ceremonies. Between the bombing halt and Humphrey’s movement in the polls, Connally had switched sides. To the surprise of the Nixon men, Texas went narrowly for Humphrey.
64
The double-cross, as we shall see, would not slacken Nixon’s ardor for John Connally.

In the end, none of it mattered. Nixon was an old dog whose team knew all the new tricks, and he was prepared for any attempted backstabbing by Johnson, Humphrey, or anyone else. With the “October Surprise” out of the way, and a closing Gallup poll had Nixon up 44–36 percent on Humphrey with Wallace at 15 percent.

NOTES

1
.     Richard Nixon,
In the Arena
, p. 255.

2
.     Ibid.

3
.     Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 650.

4
.     Jules Witcover,
Resurrection of Richard Nixon
, p. 211–212.

5
.     Stephen E. Ambrose,
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician
, 1962–1972, pp. 121–122.

6
.     Michael Novac,
Choosing Presidents
, p. 47.

7
.     Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President
, p. 63.

8
.     Gabriel Sherman,
The Loudest Voice in the Room
, p. 33.

9
.     Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President
, p. 30.

10
.   Tom Junod. “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”
Esquire
. Jan. 2011.

11
.   Jules Witcover,
The Year the Dream Died
, pp. 69–70.

12
.   Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President
, p. 64.

13
.   Herbert Klein,
Making It Perfectly Clear
, p. 61.

14
.   Richard Whalen,
Catch the Falling Flag
, pp. 10–11.

15
.   Ibid.

16
.   Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President
, p. 103.

17
.   “Nixon gets socked in Laugh-In’s most famous, and influential, five seconds,” Noel Murray, A.V. Club. Sept. 13, 2012,
http://www.avclub.com/article/nixon-gets-socked-in-ilaugh-inis-most-famous-and-i-84881
.

18
.   “The Comedy Writer That Helped Elected Richard M. Nixon,” Kliph Nesteroff,
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/09/richard-nixons-laugh-in.html
.

19
.   “Sock it to me: behind the scenes of Richard Nixon’s ‘Laugh-In’ cameo,” Brian Abrams,
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/190513/sock-it-to-me-nixons-laugh-in-cameo-that-won-the-1968-election
.

20
.   Ibid.

21
.   “The Unthinking Man’s Nixon’s Four Second Moment,” The New Nixon,
http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2008/09/forty-years-one-day-on
.

22
.   Ibid.

23
.   “Sock it to me: behind the scenes of Richard Nixon’s ‘Laugh-In’ cameo, Brian Abrams.

24
.   Kenny Young,
UFO Frontier
, p 25.

25
.   Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President
.

26
.   Richard Kleindienst,
Justice
, pp. 47–48.

27
.   Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page,
An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968
, p. 101.

28
.   Dennis D. Wainstock,
Election Year 1968: The Turning Point
, p. 51.

29
.   Jules Witcover,
Very Strange Bedfellows
, p. 9.

30
.   
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Spiro_Agnew.htm
.

31
.   Lou Cannon,
Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power
, pp. 266–270.

32
.   Conversation with Robert Novak.

33
.   Ibid.

34
.   James Mann,
The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War
, p. 234.

35
.   Lou Cannon,
Reagan
, p. 158.

36
.   Casper Weinberger,
In the Arena
, p. 164.

37
.   Nicole Hemmer. “Richard Nixon’s Model Campaign,”
The New York Times
, May 10, 2012.

38
.   Nadine Cohodas,
Strom Thurmond & The Politics of Southern Change
, p. 396.

39
.   “Thurmond Praises Nixon,” p. D5.

40
.   Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, pp. 304–305.

41
.   “Thurmond Throws Support to Nixon, Says He Offers America’s Best Hope,”
Charlotte Observer
, June 23, 1968, p. A10.

42
.   “Thurmond Urges Johnson Not to Fill Court Vacancy,” Charleston News and Courier, June 22, 1968, p. A6.

43
.   Lou Cannon,
Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power
, p. 258.

44
.   James Rosen,
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
, p. 50.

45
.   James Rosen,
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
, p. 52.

46
.   Lou Cannon, Reagan, p. 163.

47
.   Ibid, p. 164.

48
.   Garry Wills,
Nixon Agonistes
, p. 273.

49
.   Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson, Ol’ Strom, p. 230.

50
.   Ibid.

51
.   Ibid.

52
.   Ibid.

53
.   George Will. “The Cheerful Malcontent,”
Washington Post
, May 31, 1998.

54
.   Barry Goldwater,
Goldwater
, p. 174.

55
.   Frazier Moore, (July 18, 2009). “Legendary CBS anchor Walter Cronkite dies at 92.” GMA News, Associated Press, Retrieved June 22, 2013.

56
.   Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
, p. 332.

57
.   
http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/BE062374/dan-rather-at-the-1968-democratic-national
.

58
.   Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
, p. 331.

59
.   David Farber,
Chicago
`68, p. 201.

60
.   David Farber,
Chicago
`68, p. 201.

61
.   Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1968 (1970).

62
.   Robert Dallek,
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
, pp. 73–74.

63
.   Jules Witcover,
The Year the Dream Died
, p. 351.

64
.   Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died, p. 427.

CHAPTER TWELVE

PLASTIC AND STEEL

“Yes, you can.”

—Pat Nixon to her husband seconds before the Checkers Speech, a time when he was mired in doubt.

A
n analysis of the great setbacks and triumphs of Nixon’s career would be incomplete without a better understanding of the role of Patricia Ryan Nixon. Until now, historians have largely misunderstood the significance and actions of Pat. Pat Nixon was completely unlike her public image as forged in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a warm, engaging, and confident woman who had proved a great political asset in Nixon’s political career. She was the first wife of a candidate for a major office to strike out and campaign for her husband alone; she attended campaign events without him by her side. She was enormously well liked for her middlebrow tastes, her warmth, and her openness. She consistently topped the lists when Americans were polled about the most admired women in America. But she was, in truth, far more than the tight-lipped supportive “campaign wife” that was her public persona.

When polls showed in 1960 that Pat Nixon was more popular than her husband, a
faux
“Pat Nixon for First Lady” campaign sprung up. I am convinced that if Thelma Catherine Ryan had agreed to the young California attorney’s request for a date on their first meeting, there might never have been a First Lady, Pat Nixon. The young Whittier High School business teacher was not at all attracted to Dick Nixon when they met during tryouts for a local amateur drama production despite his relative good looks, eloquent manner of speech, and obvious intelligence. She was determined to chart her own course and be free to do whatever she wanted to, which included traveling; a serious relationship was not something she wanted or needed at that moment. If those who in later years labeled her “plastic Pat” had known of her iron constitution and steely determination—attributes she exhibited throughout her public life—they never would have branded her with such a demeaning epithet. Least likely of all to do so would be Nixon himself, who was dogmatic in his pursuit and determined to win her over, even to the point of learning where she lived and sending her roses on her twenty-sixth birthday. Her numerous attempts to cool his ardor only fueled his attraction to the young woman whose father had nicknamed her Pat because she was born on St. Patrick’s Day eve.

Pat was not ready for a serious relationship when she met Nixon in the winter of 1938. Perhaps driven by her father’s years as a seaman and gold miner, she wanted to travel, and as a schoolteacher, she had the summers off to do so. With that in mind she had saved money from her teaching jobs, which included also working as a night-school instructor, to pay for experiences that were a world away from her difficult and dreary childhood in Ely, Nevada. During the week she devoted all her efforts to her students, but on the weekends she fled small-town Whittier for short trips elsewhere. “I never spent a weekend in Whittier the entire time I taught there,” she proudly admitted years later.
1
Even those weekend jaunts away did not deter Nixon, who had met her during tryouts at a local theater production. He even resorted to penning romantic letters to her, not something that came naturally to a man born into the Quaker faith and its avoidance of shows of emotion. As their friendship (and her attraction to him) grew, he took every opportunity to put the relationship on a more permanent basis, promising her adventure and a better life than she had had in Ely or Whittier. After they had appeared together in a local play attended by Nixon’s parents Frank and Hannah, he invited Pat to their home. The gathering had to be awkward because Hannah Nixon, a rather cold and stoic individual, did not embrace her prospective daughter-in-law and never could warm to her.

I know it’s difficult for most people who never met Nixon and knew him only in the harsh light of the adversarial press that constantly hounded him to believe that he could court any woman with flowers, poems, and heartfelt letters in which he expressed his devotion to her. But, in fact, that is precisely what the young Nixon did unabashedly. Slowly, this most independent of women—who was not content to simply settle into domesticity with a husband and children and become the dutiful, loving wife that was expected of women in those years between the World Wars—was won over by his dogged determination, an attribute he later relied upon as he climbed to the pinnacle of political power, the White House. On a long motor trip with a friend from Southern California to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1939, Pat realized that she missed Nixon. With his promising law practice, Nixon began to take an interest in local politics with a thought to perhaps run for office himself (And when he did, he lost in his first attempt.). Much as she tried to hide it even to herself, she had to admit she was in love with Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, she established a three-month hiatus on his proposals, a last attempt to truly understand her feelings for him. As their very sympathetic biographer Will Swift put it, “Beneath her glamour and verve, Pat was surprisingly similar to Dick’s standoffish, pious, and unglamorous Quaker mother, Hannah, whom he professed to revere.”
2
And on a drive to Dana Point in March 1940, Nixon proposed and Pat accepted. The woman who had put travel and adventure ahead of marriage and a family would soon have a lifetime of both in abundance, and in ways that she could not have imagined.

They were married in a Quaker ceremony in Riverside, California, on June 21, 1940, and spent a good part of the next year traveling around the United States, Canada, even to Cuba, the Panama Canal, and neighboring Costa Rica. The strong-minded, independent woman whom the press would quite erroneously dub “plastic Pat” would be tested by the US entry into World War II. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the Nixons moved to Washington, DC, where Nixon went to work at the Office of Price Administration in the tire-rationing division, a vital wartime defense measure to conserve rubber, most of which came from areas in the South Pacific that were being overrun by the Japanese. Pat also got a job at OPA as an assistant business analyst. Restless after less than a year on the job, Nixon realized that if he was to have any success in politics he couldn’t stay stuck behind a desk in Washington. He enlisted in the navy and left Pat in August 1942 for Rhode Island and Officers Training School. When he was stationed in Ottumwa, Iowa, Pat joined him there, and together they watched corn grow at the end of an unfinished runway. Knowing that stateside duty would not be an asset in a political career, Nixon applied for sea duty as soon as openings were posted, and he was transferred to the South Pacific for fourteen months. Pat stayed behind in San Francisco where, with her degree in marketing, she landed a new job at the OPA West Coast offices as a price economist. Will Swift, a psychologist as well as their biographer, asserts that Nixon’s “frustrating and ultimately undistinguished role on the outskirts of the real war, brought up old feelings of inadequacy, heightening his attachment to Pat.”
3
In her letters she tried to assuage Nixon’s regrets for leaving her by reminding him of her independence and willingness to accept challenges.