Nixon's Secret (5 page)

That brings us to the issue of Nixon’s ideology; he was without one. He was most definitely an internationalist and favored an aggressive foreign policy that was held in disdain by the isolationist GOP old guard. His successful nailing of Communist spy and New Deal darling Alger Hiss brought him national name identification, a large and fervent national base, and popularity among grassroots conservative Republicans. In fact, Nixon was a centrist who still believed the center of gravity within the Republican Party was in the center/left as late as 1960. Nixon’s concessions to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the platform (referred to as the Munich of the Republican Party by Senator Barry Goldwater)
16
and Nixon’s unfortunate selection of liberal Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in 1960 and his capitulation to Rockefeller on the party platform both proved this point.

Although Nixon would be late in understanding his party’s 1964 shift to the right, the scene of the Goldwater-dominated 1964 convention lustily booing Nelson Rockefeller would graphically show Nixon that the center ground had shifted from beneath him. Nixon would launch a stop-Goldwater effort and deliver stinging criticism of the Arizona Senator long after Goldwater had the nomination wrapped up. The former vice president would then pivot to become Goldwater’s biggest supporter only days later and would shrewdly campaign in more states for the ticket in ‘64 than Goldwater himself. Nixon was schooled on “sounding” conservative. By 1968, he had learned how to manipulate the
symbols
of conservatism, attacking a runaway federal government, stirring violence in the inner cities, and white resentment of what they perceived as munificent government benefits of African Americans. When the GOP shifted right, Nixon’s
imagery
would shift right while his pragmatism remained the same. When it came to his domestic record philosopher Noam Chomsky would tell the
Huffington Post
in 2013, “Nixon was our last liberal president.”
17

There are several leitmotifs that pervade the Nixon life story. His deep resentment of the speed by which the Eastern establishment that was so quick to dump him in 1952 from the ticket, left him wary of their future support and sensitive to their private derision. His narrow defeat by John Kennedy in which he believed he had been cheated out of, left him with what aide John Ehrlichman called a “Kennedy obsession.” And his entanglement with a secret loan from mysterious industrialist Howard Hughes would plague his 1960 and 1962 campaigns and play a crucial role in Watergate.

This book is also about Nixon’s long and tortuous relationship with the American right. Fervent anti-Communism and the stalwart support of party conservatives undergirded Nixon’s early rise. The support of party conservatives was instrumental in his comeback. The themes of conservative values were crucial in galvanizing his governing majority, but as we shall see it was the very foreign policy hard-line anti-Communists who would come to distrust Nixon and then actively undermine his détente policies to defuse tension with the Soviets and the Chinese. In the end, a cabal of the joint chiefs of staff and the CIA spied on Nixon and utilized the president’s struggle with the Watergate scandal to remove him.

Also central to any analysis are the rules of engagement for politics in the decade in which Nixon lived. “Everyone does it,” was the excuse rejected by the American people in the wake of the Watergate fiasco. As we will show, that is certainly true, as all of Nixon’s contemporaries would utilize the same hardball tactics and shady campaign financing that Nixon himself would excel at. Nixon’s belief that his campaign had been bugged in 1960, 1962, and 1968 left his entourage with the idea that the Democrats could be bugged in 1972, because “everybody bugs everybody,” as Nixon put it. The story of Richard Nixon is one of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

While I don’t think Nixon gave approval or ordered the break-in at Watergate, he created an atmosphere where surrounded by yes-men and advance men, there was no one to say no. By 1968, those Nixon aides willing to argue with him had been relegated to the outer circle, their access was denied, or they were purged. As we shall see, more even-keeled early advisors, such as Robert Finch and Herbert G. Klein, as well as newcomers such as John P. Sears to his early 1968 comeback bid, were moved behind the “Berlin Wall” of H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, setting the stage for Watergate. “Never hire anyone over thirty,” Nixon would tell aide Lyn Nofziger. “Get young guys who do as they are told.”
18

As we shall see, Nixon surrounded himself with bright young conservative intellectuals for his comeback bid only to discard them for a coterie of ad men, advance men, and PR merchandisers. Nixon would wisely latch on to John P. Sears, Richard Whalen, Pat Buchanan, Alan Greenspan, and Jeffrey Bell. Even “liberals” in this group, like speechwriter Raymond K. Price and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were men of the moderate center. But after the arrival of the Berlin Wall of straitlaced authoritarian Christian Scientist advance men Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the men of ideas were out and the enablers were in. Those who could say no to Nixon were vanquished or their access was denied. Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns had a scheduled meeting with the president. He got up to leave only to remember he had forgotten to tell the president something. “Your appointment is over, Dr. Burns,” Haldeman would bark. When Burns told him what he wanted to tell the president, Haldeman said, “Put it in a memo.”
19

Nixon’s trajectory is extraordinary. After a dizzying climb from a lieutenant commander in the navy to a whisker loss of the White House in just fifteen years, Nixon would be cheated out the presidency and would fail at a bid for governor of his home state. Written off for dead, he would shake off the label of “loser” to rise Lazarus-like in the greatest comeback in American history only to be brought low by his terrible secrets. Yet one of those secrets would spare him prison and allow him to stage his last comeback as respected foreign policy statesman, advising President Bill Clinton on how to handle the Russians and the Chinese.

“Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain,” said Nixon.
20
“The man in the arena,”
like JFK, deserves a closer look.

NOTES

1
.     Anthony Summer,
Arrogance of Power
, p. 144.

2
.     Conversation with Pete Barbuti.

3
.     
Crossfire
, CNN, November 1982.

4
.     Interview with John Sears, November 8, 1979.

5
.     Richard J. Whalen,
Catch the Falling Flag
, p. 156.

6
.     Ibid. p. 223.

7
.     Robert Sam Anson,
Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon
, p. 144.

8
.     Conversation with author.

9
.     Sandy Fitzgerald, “Pat Buchanan Writes Book About His Years With Nixon,” Newsmax, Feb. 8, 2014.

10
.   Roger Stone, “Nixon on Clinton,”
New York Times
, April 28, 1994.

11
.   William Safire, “Sizing up Nixon: an inspiring resilience,”
Gadsen Times
, April 26, 1994.

12
.   “Nixon at 100,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2013.

13
.   Hunter S. Thompson,
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson
, pp. 138–139.

14
.   John Aloysius Farrell, “The Operatic Life of Richard Nixon,”
The Atlantic
, January 9, 2013.

15
.   Gary Allen,
The Man Behind the Mask
, p. 223.

16
.   Brian R. Farmer,
American Conservatism: History, Theory and Practice
, p. 279.

17
.   Christine Conetta, “Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was `Last Liberal President.’” Huffington Post, Feb. 21, 2014,
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-the-neocons-and-nixons-southern-strategy-512
.

18
.   Lyn Nofziger, Nofziger, p. 123.

19
.   Richard Reeves, Alone in the White House, p. 71.

20
.   President Nixon’s final remarks at the White House, August 9, 1974.

CHAPTER TWO

“YOUR GOOD DOG”

“I’ve often wished that Richard and his brothers had not been burdened with the hardships they had to endure as boys; they should have had more fun.”
1

—Hannah Nixon

T
o understand Nixon it is important to understand the developmental history of the man. Nixon was born to Francis A. Nixon and Hannah (nèe Milhous) Nixon on January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California. Richard’s mother was a Quaker, to which his father converted to after their marriage, and they maintained a conservative household. While the conversion placated the family somewhat, from the beginning the Milhous clan was ambivalent at best at the prospect of Frank’s addition to the family.
2
One of Hannah’s sisters would later recall writing into her journal, “Hannah is a bad girl”—reflecting on the difficult relationship between the Nixons and the Milhouses.
3
“I don’t think they ever let Hannah forget the fact that she married outside of her status,” said a family friend.
4

His father, born in Ohio in 1878, played an important role in Richard’s early life. Francis Anthony “Frank” Nixon had only a few months of formal education and for much of his life was something of a drifter.
5
Frank Nixon was also unafraid to voice his opinions on the political issues of his day, from agitating for heating the cabs of the streetcars in which he worked as a motorman and suffered frostbitten feet, to his outspoken advocacy of the virtues of self-improvement, add to this his stalwart and vocal support for President Warren Harding and Frank Nixon was what many would call a “loudmouth.”
6
He was fast with his tongue and his fists. Frank Nixon was a Republican (one of his favorite stories was of having met William McKinley in Ohio and McKinley complimenting Nixon’s horse after riding it in a parade) and didn’t shy away from telling friends and neighbors about how he saw things. He became a small-business man who would fail in a number of ventures, including an orange grove. Nixon himself would lose money on a frozen orange juice scheme that he pursued while practicing law. Frank’s angers and frustrations, borne from his own hardships and failures, were exerted onto Richard and his brothers; he was a demanding and abusive taskmaster. Frank at one time caught one of the Nixon boys swimming in the canal that ran by their home. Father Nixon reportedly “beat him so bad his hollering could be heard all up and down the ditch,” said a Nixon cousin.
7

Nixon was devoted to his mother, Hannah, a cold, proper woman who, while fiercely encouraging to her son, never expressed anything approaching affection. “Think how great he might have been if anyone had loved him,” Henry Kissinger said after his death. Richard clearly favored his mother, whom she perpetually called “Richard,” and he perpetually called “Mother.” A letter ten-year-old Richard wrote to his mother was indicative of both his burgeoning self-awareness as an outsider and his subservient devotion to Hannah:

My Dear Master,

The two boys that you left me with are very bad to me. Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me.

One Saturday the boys went hunting. Jim and myself went with them. While going through the woods one of the boys triped [sic] and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked [sic] me in the side and we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing [sic] came out of it. I felt a pain all over. I started to run and as both of my eys [sic] were swelled shut I fell into a pond. When I got home I was very sore. I wish you would come home right now.

Your Good Dog

Richard
8

Campaign aide John Sears recalled Nixon visiting his mother in 1962 after a prolonged period. “With news cameras rolling, Nixon knocked on her front door only to shake her hand when she opened it.”
Los Angeles Times
reporter Richard Bergholz described the greeting as “weird.” Still, in his farewell to his staff just before his resignation, Nixon would extol the virtues of his mother, saying, “My mother was a saint.”

In 1922, the Nixon family ranch in Yorba Linda failed, and the family moved to Whittier, California. Whittier was a small, conservative Quaker town named after the great poet and Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier. In Whittier, Frank Nixon opened a grocery store and gas station. Richard Nixon had four brothers, Harold, Donald, Arthur and Edward, of whom two, the eldest Harold and Arthur would die from tuberculosis. When Arthur died, the first of the two to occur when Richard was thirteen, his mother described Richard’s reaction as follows: “I can still see Richard when he came back. He slipped into a big chair and sat staring into space, silent and dry-eyed in the undemonstrative way in which, because of his choked, deep feeling, he was always to face tragedy.”
9

While his mother was generally rather withdrawn, she was also clearly devoted to her family. In the words of a Nixon cousin and author Jessamyn West, “Not a saint in the sense that she had had a great spiritual experience, [but] enormously thoughtful and loving.”
10
And Frank Nixon, while by all accounts a loud and opinionated individual, was quite clearly a man doing his best to support his family in difficult times and by the standards of the time nowhere near as severe as some. Given the angel of death that at times it must have seemed to hover over the family, Nixon’s upbringing was likely less traumatic than it could have been due to his parents’ efforts.

However, Frank and Hannah Nixon did not always act in such a way as to make their lives and the lives of their children easier. While charity is a virtue, Hannah in particular was known for often being overly lenient with offers of credit to those who frequented their store. Once she refused to punish a shoplifter, instead offering her a generous line of credit.
11
She did this on the recommendation of young Richard, who went to school with two of her sons.