Nixon's Secret (28 page)

Greenberg was known for both fairness and objectivity. Bergholz always added his own negative personal observations, few of which Nixon hated. He felt this reflected liberal in the state’s largest newspaper. Bergholz also pressed relating to the Hughes loan to Nixon’s brother, Don. Nixon loathed him.

Publisher James Copley, of the
Copley News Service
, was angry because Nixon had cited only Greenberg as a fair reporter. He felt that his and many other newspapers had covered the campaign thoroughly and fairly. Copley joined most of the other resentful newspaper publishers who had endorsed Nixon in feeling resentful over the candidate’s references to television as the medium that had kept the record straight.

Ironically, in 1960 and 1962, Nixon had complained privately over the unfairness of media reporting. Nixon’s outburst would reveal his contempt and resentment for the press. By the second year of his presidency he no longer felt great need to disguise his hatred of the press.

Now, it is critical to examine whether the press was unfair to Nixon in 1962. The answer is mixed. Jack McDowell, then of the
Call-Bulletin
, Squire Behrens, dean of the Press Corps and political reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and Don Thomas of the
Oakland Tribune
certainly were fair. Reading the clippings of that long-ago campaign, I can find no animosity in the reporting of Harry Farrell of the
San Jose Mercury News,
Jim Anderson of
United Press International
, Maurie Lansberg, the Sacramento bureau chief of
Associated Press
, or Syd Kossen of the
San Francisco
Examiner.
They showed emotion occasionally, but they were strong, honest newsmen. It would be hard for Nixon to fault the writing of Henry Love of the
San Diego
Union
or Ralph Bennett of the
San Diego
Evening Tribune
. In truth, Nixon was more aggravated by the reporting of the Eastern press, which, while damaging to Nixon’s national image, had little impact of California voters.

On the other side of the coin was Mark Harris of
Life
magazine, who wrote openly of his desire to assassinate Nixon after the campaign. Harris later wrote
Mark the Glove Boy
, a nasty celebration of the political demise of Richard Nixon. But even Harris was forced to note on the dust jacket that the murder of John F. Kennedy gave new life to Richard Nixon even after his 1960 defeat. “President Kennedy’s last days approached without premonition,” Harris wrote. “The assassin who betrayed us granted, with the same action of his finger, reprieve to Mr. Nixon, whose last days seemed to me so certain the day before yesterday. Now the likelihood appears that we shall be required to judge him once more in the year ahead, as we judged him in the nation in 1960 and in California in 1962.”

The early sixties were years of growth for conservatives in the Republican Party. Senator Barry Goldwater had surfaced as a national figure at an emotional moment at the 1960 Republican National Convention when his name was briefly put in nomination for president. Journalist William F. Buckley was slowly redefining the face of American conservatism. These were years when the John Birch Society thrived. The Birch Society was named for the first American serviceman theoretically killed in the Cold War against the Communists in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The society was the vehicle of eccentric Massachusetts candy maker Robert Welch. The hardline conservative activists looked upon Nixon, a moderate conservative, as a liberal who had sold out to Rockefeller in the platform battle of 1960 and had helped undermine Senator Joe McCarthy who, although dead, was still a hero on the far right.

Nixon learned of the full impact of this early in the California primary when he found himself in a bruising battle with a lesser-known conservative legislator, Joe Shell, who refused to back out of the race for the gubernatorial nomination. Shell gained about one-third of the votes in the primary—a large number against a man who had carried California when he sought the presidency—and the primary battle wounds never were healed, although Shell would agree to introduce Nixon at a rally in the closing days.
26

Had Nixon won the governorship in 1962, inevitably he would have charged into battle with Senator Barry Goldwater, where, win or lose, the bloodletting was much more likely to lead to political death than anything which happened in 1962.

“This man will never be president,” Eisenhower said after the 1962 defeat. “The people don’t like him.” In November 1962
Time
magazine reported, “Barring a miracle, Nixon’s public career has ended.” “He was shot down and left for dead,” was the way his friend Bryce Harlow expressed it. Only two years earlier Nixon had come this close to becoming president. Now, James “Scotty” Reston would opine in the
New York Times
that Nixon was “unelected and unmourned, an unemployed lawyer.” Reston’s name would pop up on the so-called Enemies List, which would become public with the Watergate scandal.

President Kennedy rejoiced over the news of Nixon’s defeat. Aboard Air Force One en route to Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral, the journalist Mary McGrory watched Kennedy as he sat with Chief Justice Earl Warren, an old Nixon foe. “They had their heads together over the clippings,” she recalled, “and were laughing like schoolboys.”

“You reduced him to the nuthouse,” Kennedy told the victor, Governor Brown, in a phone call taped at the White House.

“You gave me instructions,” Brown replied, “and I follow your orders.”

“God,” said the president, “that last farewell speech of his . . . it shows he belongs on the couch.”
27

“This is a very peculiar fellow,” Brown agreed. “I really think he is psychotic . . . an able man, but he’s nuts . . . like a lot of these paranoiacs.”

“Nobody,” the president had said, “could talk like that and be normal.”

Nixon, too, believed his career was over. “It’s finished,” he told Billy Graham. “After two straight defeats it’s not likely I’ll ever be nominated for anything again or be given another chance.”

Murray Chotiner, who had known him from the beginning, was a lone voice predicting otherwise. “It would be hard for me,” he said, “to visualize Nixon’s removal from the American scene.”
28

ABC News broadcast the documentary
The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon
, described in this book’s introduction. ABC invited comment from a number of Nixon’s past adversaries, including convicted perjurer and Communist spy Alger Hiss. ABC newsman Howard K. Smith was the announcer. ABC’s switchboard was flooded by outraged Americans. Mail and postcards deluged the network. The program’s political obituary left no doubt that the news network considered Nixon politically dead. So, it seems, did nearly everyone else.

NOTES

1
.     Ethan Rarick,
California Rising
, p. 230.

2
.     Herbert Klein,
Making It Perfectly Clear
, pp. 46–48.

3
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 225.

4
.     Will Swift, Pat and Dick, p. 176.

5
.     Ibid.

6
.     Gladwin Hill,
Dancing Bear: An Inside Look at California Politics
, p. 174.

7
.     Robert D. Novak,
The Agency of the G.O.P. 1964
, pp. 367–368.

8
.     Stephen E. Ambrose,
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician
, 1962–1972, p. 652.

9
.     Stephen E. Ambrose,
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician
, 1962–1972, p. 659.

10
.   John Ehrlichman,
Witness to Power: The Nixon Years
, p. 22.

11
.   Kenneth Franklin Kurz,
Nixon’s Enemies
, p. 202.

12
.   Kenneth Franklin Kurz,
Nixon’s Enemies
, p. 203.

13
.   Gary Allen,
The Man Behind the Mask
, p. 219.

14
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 650.

15
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 205.

16
.   Victor Lasky,
It Didn’t Start With Watergate
, p. 86.

17
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 667.

18
.   Herbert Klein,
Making It Perfectly Clear
, p. 60.

19
.   Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician
, p. 600.

20
.   John Ehrlichman,
Witness to Power: The Nixon Years
, p. 48.

21
.   Gladwin Hill,
Dancing Bear: An Inside Look at California Politics
, p. 164.

22
.   Ibid.

23
.   Herbert Klein,
Making It Perfectly Clear
, pp. 52–64.

24
.   Kenneth Franklin Kurz,
Nixon’s Enemies
, p. 208.

25
.   Conversation with James H. Lake.

26
.   Mark Harris,
Mark the Glove Boy
, p. 138.

27
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 237.

28
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 238.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE WILDERNESS YEARS

“If ten more wiretaps could have found the conspiracy [to assassinate JFK]—uh, if it was a conspiracy or the individual, then it would have been worth it.”

—Richard Nixon

A
fter a devastating loss to Brown, Nixon joined the Wall Street law firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Mitchell. This necessitated moving the family to New York. While the firm had not actively sought him, Nixon’s old pal Elmer Bobst of the Warner Lambert Pharmaceutical Company reportedly brokered the deal. Nixon moved into 810 Fifth Avenue, owned by Nelson Rockefeller, ironically the same apartment where Nixon and Rockefeller had brokered the infamous “Compact of Fifth Avenue” deal back in 1960.

While in law practice Nixon had an income of $200,000 per year, of which more than half went to pay for the apartment in Rocky’s building. By 1968, he reported his net worth as $515,830, while assigning a value of only $45,000 to his partnership in his increasingly flourishing law firm. Nixon listed total assets of $858,190 and liabilities of $342,360. For the first time in his life, Nixon was making substantial money. He was also moving up in social circles. Theodore White said, “He himself [Nixon] belonged uptown to the Links Club, the most Establishment of New York’s Establishment clubs. Downtown, he belonged to the Recess Club and India House.” Nixon also joined three exclusive and expensive golf clubs, including the famous Baltusrol in Springfield, New Jersey. When a scandal broke out accusing the club of “Barring Jews and Negroes” Nixon penned a letter of resignation there. “In view of my nomination by the Republican Party for the Presidency of the United States, I believe it appropriate that I dissociate myself from all organizations and activities not related to the commitment I have accepted for the foregoing nomination.” The letter was posted on the Baltusrol bulletin board.
1

In a strange way, the defeat of Richard Nixon in the race for governor of California in 1962 eventually became a factor that helped him win the Republican nomination for president in 1968.

A victory over incumbent governor Pat Brown in 1962 would have propelled Nixon into an all-out bid for the presidency in 1964, a year when Lyndon Johnson was ultimately unbeatable and Republicans were enamored of Barry Goldwater. As much as he denied it, Nixon ran for governor with the idea that it would keep him alive politically on the national scene and that it would be a stepping stone for another run for the presidency. The governorship did not interest him that much. Local issues did not challenge him. He denied such presidential ambitions, as do most candidates. But fact is fact. He had the presidential bug.

In his book
The Resurrection of Richard Nixon
, Jules Witcover saw it this way:

Nixon was not seeking a stepping-stone to a 1964 rematch against John F. Kennedy; he was seeking a sanctuary from it. Far from wanting to use the state-hours in Sacramento to launch another Presidential bid in 1964, as Brown successfully charged in the 1962 campaign, Nixon actually had hoped to use it as a four-year hiding place, from which he could avoid making another losing race against Kennedy. Inherent in his decision to run for governor was a Presidential timetable not of 1964, but of 1968, when he finally did make his second try. Thus, though he lost in California in 1962, the gubernatorial contest in the end served the political purposes intended at the start—to keep Nixon off the national ballot in 1964 and to make him the Republican Party’s logical choice in 1968! The circumstances that produced both these results never of course were anticipated. But because Richard Nixon did not win in California in 1962 and did not run for President in 1964, he was able to emerge again in 1968, when his party found itself with a rare opportunity for victory, but facing a leadership vacuum.
2

* * *

Whenever Nixon welcomed visitors, even in his post-presidential years, he would invariably rifle through his desk drawer to give them a memento. It could be a presidential tie bar, golf ball, or, for ladies, a stickpin.

Nixon would send me a warm, personally inscribed copy of his memoirs and all of his subsequent foreign policy books. In 1989, I visited him at 26 Federal Plaza, the space the federal government supplied the former president for his office. The old man rattled through a drawer at the conclusion of our “chat” and produced a gold medallion from his 1972 inaugural.

“Now you are one of four men who have this,” he said. “Clem Stone [W. Clement Stone, millionaire insurance executive], Bob Alplanalp [the millionaire developer of the aerosol spray can], Clint Murchison [the millionaire oilman who would invite Nixon to Dallas on November 21, 1963], and you.”