Nixon's Secret (49 page)

Within her small circle of friends in San Francisco, Pat Nixon was the embodiment of the strong, dutiful wartime wife, staying home mostly after work, eschewing large social gatherings, and saving as much of her OPA salary as she could to build a nest egg for when he returned. Lieutenant Nixon came home in August 1944.

When Nixon decided to run for Congress against Jerry Voohis in the autumn of 1945, he had some doubts; he’d lost a run for a state assembly seat in 1940 partially due to a lack of funds, and he didn’t want to have a similar experience five years later. Despite the risks involved, and having to spend a good deal of their own money, Pat knew it was what he wanted, and she encouraged Nixon to go for the GOP nomination although she disliked politics and always would. Biographer Anthony Summers quotes Nixon family friend Earl Mazo as saying, “She didn’t want politics, ever. Her friends were never political friends.”
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The couple returned to Whittier briefly to try to begin a new phase in their life together. The first step was to convince the local Republican leaders that he was the best candidate. Together Nixon and Pat spoke to hundreds of businessmen, civil leaders, and ranchers. Nixon impressed them by his convictions and determination; Pat, however, realized that she was not as much of an effective speaker, so she elicited a promise from Nixon that she would not have to give any political speeches. Nevertheless, the nomination was his, and Nixon immediately threw himself into planning strategy to win the 1946 midterm election and represent California’s twelfth district in the US Congress. Despite her innate aversion to politics, and being pregnant with their first child, Pat, a great marketer, enthusiastically threw herself into the campaign by selling her share of a parcel of land she and her brother owned and using the $3,000 to print campaign brochures. She also campaigned tirelessly right up to a couple days before Tricia Nixon was born on February 21. The new mother went back to campaigning three weeks later while Hannah Nixon’s mother took care of Tricia. But the stress of a new baby combined with that of the campaign began to take its toll on both Nixons.

One incident was indicative of that stress. While Nixon was studiously prepping for and totally focused on an important radio address, Pat suddenly walked into the studio, interrupting his concentration. He became irate and “ordered her out with as little ceremony as he would have a dog.”
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It taught Pat an important lesson in her public behavior that she applied throughout the rest of Nixon’s political career and which no doubt contributed to the perception that she was his plastic partner.

The former schoolteacher thus learned to tread carefully and stay silent whenever Nixon was engrossed in work. In public together, her role was just to smile, but behind the scenes Pat became an astute and formidable campaign partner who believed in her husband’s political beliefs, and when things got tough on Nixon, she was the one who stiffened his resolve to fight on. Pat sat with Nixon all throughout election night, buoying his spirits when it appeared that Voorhis was leading. It was a great victory for the young politician, and as Nixon said years later after two presidential victories, he and Pat were never happier than on that evening. The Nixons had fought bravely “and at times ingloriously,” biographer Swift judged, and “for the most part they would not shrink from the pattern for the rest of their lives.”
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Back again in Washington, Pat threw herself into working in Nixon’s office on Capitol Hill while he spent his days and many, many evenings immersed in legislative and committee affairs. During those eight years Pat was often alone, especially when Nixon was traveling, and work she did in his office wasn’t enough to compensate for his absence. But she played the good soldier and kept her grievances and, at times, her anger to herself. Pat began to exhibit a new maturity and demanded that he devote more time to her and Tricia, and in the process he gave her more support and respect. Although he could express his love for Pat, he was incapable of explaining many of his other traits to her, including his obsessive drive for a career during which being a member of the House of Representatives was only a way station. Politics, the “Red Scare,” and Nixon’s pursuit of Alger Hiss while a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) quickly came to dominate his life. According to one source, Nixon did seek psychological help after about ten years of marriage to gain a better understanding of his relationship with Pat, but he was “so very inhibited.” “Nixon depended on Pat because he trusted her, and she stayed with him. But that was for politics. The truth is, his only passion was politics.”
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The Hiss case made Richard Nixon a rising star. It also made him anathema to Democrats and many independents who saw him as having spearheaded a witch hunt. Pat, who had seen the seamier side of politics in the Voorhis campaign, now saw her husband as something of a hero, and the attacks on him in the press angered her. Although she publicly defended him to the hilt and would continue to stand by him, insisting that what Nixon had done was right, the attacks on her husband further soured her on politics and public service. The Hiss episode widened “still further the growing gulf in their marriage.”
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According to biographer Swift, “Pat was so wounded by the Hiss episode that she could barely speak about it to her daughter some thirty years later.”
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Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote later that, “Vindictiveness of some of the Hiss supporters caused an irreparable crack in her idealistic view of politics.” And in defense of Nixon, Pat told her daughter, “The reason people have gone after Daddy is that no one could control him—not the press, not the lobbyists, not the politicians. He did what he felt was right, and from the time this became apparent in the Hiss case, he was a target.”
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The Nixon’s next battleground was the 1950 senatorial campaign in which Nixon was pitted against the popular Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wealthy and glamorous wife of actor Melvyn Douglas who had ties to many Hollywood and Broadway leftists. In addition to branding her as a Communist sympathizer who would promote state socialism if she were elected, Nixon—with his wife’s willing participation—used Pat as an avatar of traditional family values to contrast the Nixon’s middle-class foundation. Pat became the poster child for the ideal mother, homemaker, and wife. Beneath the surface, however, she did lots of the spadework, researching material Nixon could use in his speeches blasting Douglas. It was her way to respond to the candidate’s attacks on her husband, which upset her more than she ever let on. Will Swift perhaps summarized Pat best when he wrote, “No one crossed Pat Nixon . . . lightly nor did she forget a slight to her husband—in her mind an attack on him was an attack upon her.”
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As one Nixon aide recalled, Pat “could be waspy” when scolding Nixon in private, “but when the opposition did that, she lit into Nixon, demanding ‘How could you let them do that?’”
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Publicly, however, Pat attended thousands of women’s teas and shook hundreds of thousands of ladies’ hands in her energetic campaigning for her husband. The many miles Nixon and Pat logged in their station wagon campaigning up and down California paid off. Nixon garnered more than two million votes and beat Douglas by some 680,000, the largest margin of victory in the senatorial races that year.

It wasn’t long before the Nixons confronted new and more critical challenges. Shortly before the 1952 Republican National Convention Nixon’s name began circulating as a potential vice presidential candidate to run with Dwight Eisenhower. In those days presidential tickets were decided by several “balancing” factors. Nixon’s age (he was just thirty-nine) contrasted well with Ike’s grandfatherly image; Nixon was a lifelong outspoken Republican, while Ike had been courted also by the Democrats. Eisenhower, although born in Texas and raised in Abilene, Kansas, was considered “East Coast,” while Nixon was a native Californian. Nixon would secretly be promised the vice presidential nomination by Governor Tom Dewey if he aided the nomination of Eisenhower while publicly supporting California favorite son Earl Warren. The Nixons argued over whether he should accept, Pat decidedly against it because of the many more official duties that would be thrust on Nixon’s shoulders, leaving even less time for him to be a father to their growing daughters. She also did not want them to be exposed to more press attacks that she knew would come with such high public exposure. However, in the end she again deferred to his career goals conceding that she could “make it through another campaign.”
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As we shall see, two months into that campaign, the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was rocked by allegations against Nixon that sorely tested whether Pat could indeed “make it through.” The
New York Post,
then a liberal-left daily, claimed that while in the Senate Nixon had received about $18,000 (then a significant sum) from wealthy Californians to supplement his Capitol Hill salary. The newspaper said the slush fund was deposited in a California bank and used by Nixon for hotels, airfares, gambling in Cuba, and for printed materials and postage for thousands of Christmas cards. Nixon insisted there was no impropriety, that the bank account had been created by unknown supporters of his and used for legitimate expenses. He promptly called the story a Communist smear. But the sparks of scandal had been lit and, like a California fire stoked by Santa Ana winds, it quickly became a full-blown inferno that could not be ignored.

Calls for Nixon to resign from the ticket became commonplace, and Pat’s greatest fear became a reality. The
New York Times
published a list of the fund’s contributors, calling them a “Who’s Who” of wealth and influence. Many of the so-called Eastern establishment, such as Bernard Baruch, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Harold Stassen, turned on Nixon demanding that he withdraw and that Eisenhower select a new running mate. Oscar Solbert, of the Eisenhower Research Service, said Nixon should withdraw, noting a cable that if he did, “he will go down in history as great hero who sacrificed himself for his own high principles and Ikes [sic] great crusade . . .” and he urged Nixon “to withdraw personally, unequivocally, irrevocably, and immediately.”
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The men around Eisenhower were almost unanimously a hanging jury when it came to the fund, and “there seemed to be a consensus among the advisers that the senator [should] discretely offer his resignation from the ticket,” wrote biographer Roger Morris.
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Throughout the maelstrom Ike, a political neophyte in his first campaign, irked Nixon by saying little to encourage him to stay on; instead, the general told his running mate to go on television to explain himself and let the American public decide his fate. It was Dewey who first proposed that Nixon go on television to explain the fund and how he used it all, although in Nixon’s own memoir he credits the idea of taking his case to the American people on television over the heads of print journalists to his early political mentor Murray Chotiner, of whom we will learn much more. When the Nixons arrived in Portland, Oregon, several of their friends from Whittier, including Nixon’s former law partner Tom Bewley, flew up to prop up his faltering morale and urge him to stay the course. As soon as they left, a despairing Nixon called in Pat, and together they went to a nearby morning service at a Quaker meetinghouse. Between the service and Pat’s company, Nixon returned to his hotel suite renewed and refreshed, although the battle was far from over.

Nixon warily booked prime time on NBC television on September 23 (to follow Milton Berle’s top-rated comedy show) to state his case. But even before his live address to some sixty million people, the ordeal had further strained their marriage and altered their partnership. “Pat became more estranged from the tumultuous world of politics, while Nixon grew to be even more the righteous, resentful gladiator, with the wounds of combat a price he was willing to pay. The contrast between their overachieving public personas and their complicated private feelings would become ever more dissonant over time,” Swift said.
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Nevertheless, just before airtime, Nixon—never comfortable discussing his personal life, especially in public—wavered. “I don’t think I can do it,” he told Pat. She took him by the hand, led him onto the set that had been designed to look like a typical American living room, and said, simply, “Yes, you can.”

Throughout Nixon’s dramatic and defiant public defense of his actions and his explanation of how the fund had been set up and used, Pat sat stoically beside him, no more mobile than the furniture on the set. Some viewers might have assumed she had stage fright, but that certainly was not the case. She knew his political future was on the line. After all, before her marriage she had had some small parts in movies and did some stage acting as well. In this performance she knew her role was to remain silent, her eyes riveted on Nixon, and to do nothing to upstage him. After all, Nixon’s entire political future (as well as hers) was on the line. If he failed and was removed from the ticket, he would finish his one term as senator and it was highly unlikely he would be reelected.

Looking directly into the camera, Nixon spoke of their modest home and middle-class upbringing. He extolled Pat’s frugality, noting that she didn’t have a mink coat, “she has a respectable Republican cloth coat and I always tell her she looks good in anything.” In the parlance of the sport he loved best, Nixon then tossed the winning touchdown when he admitted to having accepted one gift—a black and white cocker spaniel sent to his daughters that Tricia named Checkers. “And you know, like all kids, they loved the dog. And I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.” The so-called Checkers speech (a title Nixon came to dislike greatly) has gone down in history as not only having saved Nixon’s political career but also as one of his finest moments in public life. Even Mamie Eisenhower, watching the speech on TV with Ike, choked up with emotion.