Nixon's Secret (12 page)

By the fall of 1951, columnists and polltakers alike had decided that the race would be between Ike and Taft. Ike was clearly the choice of the Republican media, with support for the general coming from the
Herald Tribune
,
Time
,
Life,
and
Fortune
. The
Tribune
even endorsed Eisenhower for the presidency as early as October 1951 with a glowing review: “At rare intervals in the life of a free people the man and occasion meet,” the newspaper’s editorial staff wrote. “[Eisenhower] is a Republican by temper and disposition.”
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For Nixon, the writing was on the wall as well—Eisenhower had the popularity to win a national election, and he had the party’s financial and media muscle behind him.

The next most prominent candidate in the mix for the vice presidential nomination was Governor Earl Warren of California, though barely a candidate from the beginning. Both he and Nixon ran statewide in California in 1950—with Warren remaining in the governor seat and Nixon becoming a US Senator. Warren was obviously very popular in his home state, with Western delegates, and with independent voters but refused to campaign in the primaries and thus severely limited any chances of his getting the nomination. Nonetheless, he had the full support of the California delegation, including Nixon, who supported Warren in the California primary and served on his delegation. Naturally, Nixon was
invaluable
to anyone hoping to sway the opinion of the California delegation.
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Sure enough, that California delegation of seventy votes would prove to be crucial coming into the convention. Eisenhower began his campaign with a victory in the New Hampshire primary, upsetting Taft on a purely write-in driven campaign. But from there, the two candidates essentially split the remaining primary states evenly, with Taft picking up Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, and South Dakota and Ike nabbing the New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Oregon primaries. Warren naturally held up his home state of California with all the state party’s leadership—including Nixon—supporting him, and by July, the nomination to be expected out of Chicago was just too close to call.

Herbert Brownell, the able Wall Street lawyer who would guide Eisenhower to victory, first approached Murray Chotiner to inquire about Nixon’s potential as a vice presidential running mate. So that Murray could not say he had an “offer” it was couched as ascertaining Chotiner’s arguments for Nixon or Senator William Knowland for the VP spot. The notion of Knowland as vice president was ludicrous, but Chotiner could not tell the press Nixon had been “felt out,” a deft touch by Brownell. The die was cast. The Dewey crowd around Ike was playing its hand.

Eisenhower once asked an aide after meeting with Knowland, “How stupid can you get?”
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Knowland was the scion of the publisher of the
Oakland Tribune.
He was a tall, handsome, gregarious, bluff man who was both affable and not terribly bright. He was on the Neanderthal right of his party. He was so much a “hail fellow well met” man that his colleagues elected him majority leader in the brief period they controlled the Senate in the 1950s. Knowland had greater presidential aspirations and personal wealth than he had brains. In 1958, he announced that he would seek election to the governorship, challenging sitting governor and liberal Republican Goodwin Knight. Knight was no Nixon fan, but the vice president, in the interest of party unity, convinced a reluctant Knight to run for the US Senate seat Knowland was vacating. It was a disaster, leaving Nixon in control of what little Republican apparatus existed in the California Republican Party in the run-up to the 1960 election. It also put a Democratic governor in the governor’s mansion when Nixon needed to carry his home state in a close contest with Kennedy. Knowland would later play a key role in convincing a reluctant Ronald Reagan to challenge Nixon at the 1968 convention. Knowland was also a prolific cocksman, and marital infidelities would be frequent. Knowland later left his wife of forty-five years to move in with a twenty-two-year-old and ended up shooting himself in the mouth with a revolver in a San Francisco hotel room when he became despondent over severe financial debts to organized crime figures. In other words, Knowland was never really under consideration for vice president in 1960.
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It’s worthy to note that with Nixon’s stealth defection, Knowland stayed loyal to Warren. Knowland supported Warren, his home state governor, despite the fact that they were ideologically miles apart. Warren no doubt saw it as a way to keep peace in the California Republican Party. Knowland was offered a VP slot with Taft if he could sway the delegation to that side, and Eisenhower’s campaign had courted his support and may have given him the impression he was being considered for VP. He denied both and didn’t get anything from either.

Nixon had to make his own moves so he could personally guarantee the invaluable California vote either to Taft or Eisenhower, which of course would first require him to abandon his pledge to Warren. Political veteran Frank Mankiewicz asserted in his book
Perfectly Clear
that Nixon had been offered and accepted the vice-presidential spot—with Ike’s approval—months earlier through Dewey.
12

Nixon knew the price of the vice presidential nomination was delivery of California’s votes in a carefully staged floor fight in which the Eisenhower forces would unseat Taft delegates in three Southern states, seating Eisenhower backers in their stead. The ingenious aspect of this maneuver was that the Taft delegates in the disputed states could not vote on their own fate; they called it the Fair Play Amendment. With these votes deducted from Taft’s strengths, the Eisenhower forces easily prevailed, particularly if Nixon could deliver California’s seventy delegates for the proposition. When Knowland tried to call for an even split of the state’s delegate votes on the so-called Fair Play Amendment, he was only beaten back by Nixon taking the floor and asking the delegation to stand united in the floor fight to seat the Eisenhower delegates. Warren’s chances evaporated when the Eisenhower forces won the procedural vote. Nixon was to remain “committed” to Warren while pushing for a credentials challenge that would doom Warren’s chances, preventing the governor’s name ever being entered for the nomination. Warren would barter his support for Eisenhower in return for a pledge that he would be appointed to the first open Supreme Court seat. After Eisenhower’s election, when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died unexpectedly, Eisenhower tried to argue that he had not committed to appoint Warren chief justice. Warren argued that he was promised the
next
opening and went on to be chief justice. Eisenhower would go on to claim the appointment was one of his greatest mistakes.

Nixon told Dewey that he would welcome the vice presidential nomination in the diminutive, but dapper, mustachioed governor’s suite in the Roosevelt Hotel. Nixon had been invited by the New York State Republican Committee as their featured speaker. The black-tie dinner was made up of precisely the kind of people Nixon despised: Ivy League, old-money WASPs who controlled Wall Street and the financial sector; socially sophisticated publishers like Henry Luce; titans of industry; the political elite; and the Eastern moneyed of the Republican Party were present. The speech was essentially an audition for Dewey. Nixon hit it out of the park, and the governor invited him upstairs for a chat. It was here that Dewey told him the vice presidency would be his if he submarined Warren.

Warren had rejected entreaties from the Eastern crowd to join the Eisenhower bandwagon. Warren had been Dewey’s running mate for vice president in 1948 and Dewey thought he had turned in a non-energetic performance, even losing California to Truman and Barkley. Warren would not budge, hoping an Eisenhower-Taft stalemate would turn the convention to him as a compromise.

Nixon tackled his goal with gusto. He began to rally the troops. He made it publicly clear about his appointed delegates’ preference for Eisenhower, which naturally enraged Warren. As Mankiewicz writes, “If a historian wonders a few generations from now why Earl Warren . . . has never had a good word to say about Richard Nixon, he need look no further . . . than to the weeks prior to the Republican convention of 1952.” Nixon, almost immediately after the California primary, began to jettison his support for Warren and speak publicly on the radio and elsewhere about the opportunity for California’s delegates at the national convention in the event of a Taft-Eisenhower deadlock. Ten years later, Warren’s son Earl Jr. also lamented that “Mr. Nixon, through backdoor tactics, pulled the rug out—for political gain for himself.”
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Nixon’s intentions became somewhat obvious when Dick mailed his campaign’s former precinct chairmen a poll—paid for by his Senate office’s funds—asking them that “if” Warren wasn’t the nominee, who they thought would be the “strongest” candidate the party could nominate. The Warren campaign naturally regarded this as “virtual treachery,” especially when the word came back from Washington that Eisenhower was easily the favorite choice.

To seal the deal, one of Nixon’s handpicked delegates was in charge of booking the California delegation’s travel to Chicago, complete with assigning rooms on the train. Sure enough, Nixon was able to use this to his advantage—as soon as he and Chotiner joined the delegation on the train in Denver, his room became the focal point of the entire delegation’s trip. Delegate after delegate came to visit Nixon to listen to his case about why Eisenhower was a sure thing, and if California pulled for the general, they would be rewarded and Nixon would likely get the vice president spot on the ticket. For years later, Warren would refer to the trip as the Great Train Robbery
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and thereafter referred to Nixon as “Tricky Dick.”

According to reports at the time, Nixon was in constant motion at the convention, milling in the halls and lobbies with everyone he knew, and even mingling with some celebrities he didn’t know, such as baseball great Jackie Robinson, a registered Republican. Nixon recalled seeing Robinson play against Oregon during his collegiate career, and this impressed the young ballplayer.
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Dick was in rare form that week.

Naturally, the highly competitive race and dead seasonal heat also gave the convention a fiery atmosphere. Eisenhower’s campaign had accused Taft’s of “stealing” votes from Southern delegates in Texas and Georgia by denying Eisenhower delegates spots to the convention through the credentials committee, which was heavily stacked with Taft men. Dewey and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., both in charge of Ike’s campaign, threatened to evict the pro-Taft delegates through a minority report they filed with the committee, in hopes of replacing them with pro-Eisenhower delegates via a proposal they called the Fair Play resolution. At Nixon’s urging the California delegation voted 57 to 8 in favor of the Fair Play resolution. Without the Southern delegates, Taft’s momentum slowed and the California vote grew absolutely crucial to any nomination.

It may be important to note at this point Eisenhower Convention Manager Herbert Brownell’s role in this official selection, or for that matter, his role in developing the Fair Play strategy that really secured Ike the nomination. Brownell had successfully elected Dewey governor of New York in 1942 and managed both of Dewey’s campaigns in 1944 and 1948. Brownell had traveled extensively and had broad contacts in the Republican Party in both wings where he was known as a man of his word and a straight dealer. According to his memoir,
Advising Ike
, Brownell says the “control of the convention” was to be determined by which slate of delegates were actually seated from each state. Thus, Brownell used his past experience as a party chairman to utilize an old rule change tactic that he developed by studying the entire minutes from the 1912 Republican National Convention, when Robert Taft’s father, President William Taft, was battling former president (and former friend) Teddy Roosevelt for the party’s nomination. From studying the outcomes of the 1912 convention, which subsequently forced Teddy to leave the Republicans and form his own party, Brownell understood what his team had to do. “First, we had to amend the convention rules so that they could not be used, as in 1912, to prevent even the consideration of changes to temporary-delegate roll and discussion of whether contested delegates could vote on contested delegations. Second, we had to present our arguments in carefully prepared briefs. . . . We would not repeat Roosevelt’s mistakes.”
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In short, Brownell was the man with the plan, and it worked.

Similarly, when it came to the vice presidential choice, Brownell often wondered why Warren didn’t seize the initiative and deliver the California delegation’s votes to Ike. The only explanation Brownell could offer was the possibility that Knowland, a proud Warren supporter, was going to bring the Taft votes to Warren in the event of an Eisenhower-Taft deadlock, just to spite Dewey and the entire moderate wing. It’s possible that Warren just stayed in it in hopes he would receive the nomination himself if everything went his way. At the time, Warren was not counting on the subterfuge of Dick Nixon.

The Eisenhower delegates were seated, and Ike narrowly secured the nomination on the first ballot by barely defeating Taft by ninety-five votes. After the first ballot at the convention, Ike actually went to visit Taft in his hotel suite. Taft was congratulatory on Eisenhower’s victory but held resentment on what he felt were untrue charges of “stealing delegates.” Taft withheld public support for Ike’s campaign for several weeks after the convention until the two again met in New York City, and he only gave his support after Ike agreed to a number of Taft’s demands. The requests were largely on domestic issues, as the two essentially agreed on most of those; their differences came primarily on foreign policy.
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The divided convention had, as with any political maneuvering, the inevitable bitter emotions that come with political trickery. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, a fervent Taft supporter, accused Dewey on the convention floor of leading Republicans “down the road to defeat.” Dirksen, considered one of the greatest orators in the Republican Party, spoke for the party’s conservatives who blamed moderate nominees for losing the 1940, 1944, and 1948 elections. The golden-tongued Dirksen would point his finger in Dewey’s face as the Illinois delegation was seated hard by the New Yorkers. The diminutive governor would merely glare at his accuser. There were even fistfights between different members of the two camps.