Nixon's Secret (35 page)

He described the Du Bois Clubs as a “totalitarian organization” that did “not dare risk full, frank and honest disclosure of their true aims and purposes.” He appealed to the news media to “continue to focus the revealing light of truth on this Communist youth organization.”

At the heart of the matter was the pronunciation of his name by W. E. B. Du Bois, a prominent Negro historian and sociologist, who became a member of the Communist party at the age of 93 in 1961, and died two years later as an expatriate in Ghana. Dr. Du Bois pronounced his name DooBOYS, rather than DooBWA, in the French manner.

Radio and television announcers and reporters in reading the new during the past several days have tended to say DooBOYS. Many listeners have apparently misunderstood this as “the Boys,” rather than Du Bois.

Edward J. Stapleton, public information director for the Boys Club, said that, as a result, poison-pen letters and threatening phone calls had been received by many of the 680 individual clubs.

Nixon knew immediately it was a mistake and would revive images of him as the old 1950s “red-baiter.” He told Sears and Ellsworth who expressed alarm that the matter would pass. It did.
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Just as he targeted Sears for extinction, Mitchell wanted to drive Ellsworth from the inner circle. He did so by constantly second-guessing the laconic Kansan. Ellsworth sought not to engage Mitchell, but ultimately lost the power struggle when Mitchell ordered him to move from New York, where campaign decisions were actually being made, to the campaign’s office in Washington, which was actually a political backwater.

While Sears was purged, Ellsworth narrowly survived, albeit not in a political role. Henry Kissinger, who knew of Ellsworth’s interest in foreign affairs, came up with the idea of appointing Ellsworth as ambassador to NATO, with the job of assuring European allies that their views would not be ignored as the United States discussed arms levels with the Soviet Union. “The men on Nixon’s dark side were about to run out of the government one of the president’s most able supporters after only a few months in 1969,” syndicated columnist Robert Novak remembered. “Kissinger came to the rescue. He arranged for Nixon, who never liked to fire anyone, to send Ellsworth to Brussels as the US ambassador to NATO in April—removing him from this den of vipers for one of the best jobs in government.”
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The job saved Ellsworth from being forced out completely. In 1974, Nixon appointed him assistant secretary of defense for international affairs. As a former House member himself, Nixon had an affinity for congressmen. As president, Nixon initially appointed Ellsworth as one of five men with the title assistant to the president, despite his opposition to Nixon’s policies on the Vietnam War. His long sideburns were an anomaly in the buttoned-down Nixon White House.

Nixon staffer Jeff Bell remembered Ellsworth as an adept political infighter who often removed the names of the real authors of staff memos to Nixon and pass them to Nixon under his name as if he was the author.

Another of “the bright young men” who joined the Nixon entourage was Thomas W. Evans, often confused with Thomas B. Evans Jr., the former Republican National Committee co-chair, Nixon fundraiser, and later Delaware congressman. I recruited both Evanses to help me nominate Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Also on the new team was Dr. Martin Anderson. Impossibly young-looking with enormous glasses, he was dubbed “the Baby Doctor” by the wisecracking Sears. Anderson was a staunch conservative, an issues man who bolstered Nixon’s basic conservative economic philosophy, even if it was of the chamber of commerce variety.

Richard Whalen remembered Anderson “A brilliant, thirty-one-year-old assistant professor of economics at Columbia, Anderson had turned his doctoral dissertation on urban renewal into a devastating book,
The Federal Bulldozer
. While we talked, Anderson joined us for a few minutes. With his owlish horn-rimmed glasses and unruly forelock, he looked improbably youthful and strictly professorial. During the campaign and afterward, he proved himself a remarkably effective political operator, whose ideas somehow got through the maze. ‘You have to understand, Dick,’ he remarked to me one day some months later. ‘Academics are born connivers.’
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I became friends with Anderson in the 1976 and 1980 Reagan campaigns, when Sears recruited him to the Reagan team. Even today, Anderson has the greatest instinctual feel for Ronald Reagan and his beliefs. In this, Anderson certainly surpasses Peggy Noonan, who was a nice lady but
nowhere
when Reagan won in 1980. Anderson’s role as a synthesizer of ideas and effective service to Nixon and Reagan is underrated.

Key in the new Nixon entourage was speechwriter Raymond K. Price, a slight and mild-mannered man who had been an editorial writer for the
New York Herald-Tribune.
A liberal Republican, Price understood the balance and cadence Nixon wanted and was in many ways the left side of Nixon’s brain. Price provided important balance to the bombastic and conservative Buchanan. Nixon relied on Price for sweeping prose while he assigned Buchanan speeches that required red meat.

Price encouraged Nixon on civil rights and toned down Nixon’s racially based appeals to be subtle and symbolic, rather than the shrill and ugly entreaties of George Wallace. Price understood Nixon’s obsession with words, structure, and tone in his comeback bid. In 1960, it had been slapdash. Serving as his own campaign manager, strategist, and candidate, and trying to catch up with JFK after the disastrous first televised debate, Nixon spoke mostly extemporaneously on the stump, and formal statements were put out quickly and lacked polish and thought. Nixon drove himself to exhaustion serving both as candidate and chief speechwriter. The “wordsmiths” Nixon surrounded himself with still worked off drafts the old man had written himself on full-length yellow legal pads.

Another of “the bright, young men” was the aforementioned pugnacious
Fortune
magazine writer Richard Whalen, who had written a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Joseph P. Kennedy.

Nixon utilized “the bright young men” around him and their credentials to show that he was a “new Nixon” listening to “new men” with “new ideas.” Nixon told interviewers that he had hand-picked his new “first-rate” staff, in contrast to the inherited “hacks” around him in 1960.

Whalen discussed in his own biography the purpose of the “bright, young men”:

By directing the spotlight toward the fresh supporting cast, the star of the longest-running road show in American politics not only spruced up the latest production, but also assembled several credible character witnesses. We were at once ignorant and unscathed, innocent and enthusiastic. What most of us knew of Nixon’s earlier campaigns was only what we had read in Theodore H. White’s chronicle of the 1960 disaster; we could testify only in the present and future tenses. By certifying our supposed intimacy and influence, Nixon gave our testimonials impressive weight. Faced with questions from reporters, some of them friends and former colleagues, I could say honestly that I had never met the brooding loner described by White and other Nixon-watchers. The Nixon I knew—I did not dwell on our slight acquaintance—was open, attentive, and evidently willing to accept ideas.

Whalen believed that Nixon was best equipped to end the war and ultimately became disillusioned over Nixon’s unwillingness to offer a concrete proposal to end the war while essentially putting his faith in the escalation tactics that had failed Lyndon Johnson.

Whalen quit the campaign after Nixon’s nomination, after Nixon law partner John Mitchell and veteran Nixon aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman seized control of the campaign, limiting both Whalen’s access and influence with Nixon. To his credit, Whalen was early to recognize the price Nixon would pay for the isolation enforced by the “Berlin Wall” of ad men and advance operatives who tightly controlled access to Nixon.

In the end, Whalen was of course right. Nixon could have ended the war earlier and become a hero to the left. Instead, he limped through a campaign, never saying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war but implying it by sometime patting his chest as if a “secret plan” existed in the inside breast pocket of his somber business suit. Nixon believed in this period that he could leverage the Soviets and the Chinese to hasten the war, a good idea probably unexplored by LBJ but one that failed to work.

Nixon’s break with his earliest advisors proved costly. To replace them, he constructed a staff of yes-men. All were reluctant to reign in his excesses and instead sought to show Nixon and Haldeman how relentless they could be, how “tough they were,” following questionable orders. I have no doubt that had Nixon been elected in 1960, he would have served eight years as president without the tarnish of Watergate. Undisturbed by what he regarded as the theft of the 1960 election, and with a broader range of advisors who overlapped the Eisenhower administration, he would have governed without paranoid conspiracy.

Under Garment, Sears, Ellsworth, and Buchanan, backed by the redoubtable Rose Mary Woods, Nixon launched “Operation Candor.” And always in the background was veteran Nixon advance man Nicholas L. Ruwe, who later served as deputy director of protocol and then Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Iceland, an appointment Nixon secured for Reagan. The scion of a wealthy and socially prominent Grosse Pointe, Michigan, family, Ruwe was a hunter, fisherman, superb billiards player, and skeet shooter. His invariable daily garb was a solid gray suit, a Brooks Brothers blue button-down shirt, and a solid grenadine tie that was always black, blue, or maroon. Ruwe was an advance man for Nixon in 1960 and 1962 and followed Nixon into his wilderness years in New York. An iconic news photograph showed Nixon, the private citizen, crossing the street in Manhattan with Ruwe furtively glancing around over Nixon’s right shoulder. Around Nixon, Ruwe was unobtrusive, taciturn, efficient, prompt, and organized. With the boys he was garrulous, profane, a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels, and lover of “silver bullets,” as he and Nixon called vodka martinis.

Less featured in the media but providing his conservative candlepower as an economic adviser to Nixon was Alan Greenspan, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve, who was a bandmate of Len Garment in the Woody Herman orchestra in the ‘40s. Garment fondly remembered “the saxophonist-flautist Alan Greenspan, who helped with the band’s payroll (yes, the books balanced) and spent intermissions reading Ayn Rand and general economics. Twenty years later Greenspan and I, not having seen each other since band days, bumped into each other on Broad Street in downtown Manhattan and I ended up introducing him to my law partner, the presidential aspirant Richard Nixon.”
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Greenspan later joined the campaign as coordinator on domestic policy.

Also in the background as a writer for Nixon was public relations man William Safire. Safire and Nixon struck up a friendship when the PR agent helpfully steered the vice president into his client Pepsi-Cola’s exhibition at a trade fair. There, Nixon staged his famous Kitchen Debate with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, while sipping from paper cups with the Pepsi-Cola logo on them. Safire joined Buchanan, Price, and Whalen as a writer and thinker for the “new Nixon.” It is interesting to note that both Safire and Buchanan later emerged as prominent journalists, both being able to step away from the wreckage of Watergate.

The speechwriters Nixon assembled were incredibly talented. Nixon was obsessed with words. He famously drafted his own material and labored over changes and suggestions from his writers. He was aware and enthralled with nuance, impact and messaging. He often pondered the use of one word. Unlike John F. Kennedy, who largely read the work of Ted Sorenson or Arthur Schlesinger, Nixon was his own “wordsmith.” He called his writers “the Scribes.” He told Whalen that he would “take his six” over the huge, paid staffs of Rockefeller and Kennedy. Nixon’s writing staff had
balance.
Buchanan wrote from the right. Price wrote from the left. Whalen, although an open opponent of the Vietnam War, was fundamentally a conservative. Safire could write to the right or the left as he later demonstrated as a celebrated
New York Times
columnist.

Nixon’s early campaign vehicle, the Nixon for President Committee, was chaired by Dr. Gaylord Parkinson, who had helmed the California Republican Party during the 1966 campaign of Ronald Reagan for governor. “Parky” coined the famous eleventh commandment: “Thou shall not speak ill of thy brother Republican,” which had been the watchword of Reagan’s success in the Golden State. It is important to note that party moderates who supported former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher in the Republican primary, were immediately recruited the Reagan entourage in the wake of the former actor’s victory.

Nixon’s comeback bid was almost derailed by leaks in his initial campaign apparatus. Nixon would learn that a deputy to Parkinson, Robert Walker was leaking political intelligence on Nixon’s effort to both Reagan and Rockefeller.
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Walker, it seems, felt he could have a larger role in a Rockefeller-Reagan Campaign. Walker’s betrayal would be learned through a private investigator put on the Californian. Nixon would order Robert Ellsworth to fire Parkinson, Walker and four staffers he hired. “Ellsworth had purged the Washington office, down to the secretaries and switchboard operators,” speechwriter Richard Whalen would recall.
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Nixon admired Ellsworth’s butchery. “Boy, can he get tough! Almost
too
tough the way he fired those Parkinson people,” Nixon said.
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This would exacerbate the tension between Nixon and Reagan, who now controlled Nixon’s old California base. Nixon well understood that in the post-1964 Republican Party, it was Reagan, not Rockefeller, who posed the largest potential obstacle to his 1968 comeback.

The leaks to the ex-actor’s camp would have been harmful.

Walker resurfaced as an aide to Reagan, proving the intelligence he had collected from Nixon did not damage his standing with the California governor. Walker was a primary force in convincing Reagan to hire John Sears as his campaign manager in 1976. Walker would also later emerge as a vice president of the Coors Brewing Company and recruit others to Reagan’s team.