Nixon's Secret (52 page)

The media caricature of Pat Nixon as passive or without recognition that she was the source of Nixon’s strength misunderstands this determined and resilient woman who achieved so many firsts as the second lady and on the campaign trail.

When
Time
magazine asked the ex-president about that press sobriquet “Plastic Pat,” Nixon replied, “[H]er plastic was tougher than the finest steel.”
42

NOTES

1
.     Will Swift,
Pat and Dick
, p. 21.

2
.     Ibid., 30.

3
.     Ibid., 51.

4
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 36.

5
.     Will Swift,
Pat and Dick
, p. 66.

6
.     Ibid.

7
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 40.

8
.     Roger Morris,
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
, p. 506.

9
.     Will Swift,
Pat and Dick
, p. 97.

10
.   Roger Morris,
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
, p. 506.

11
.   Ibid., 106.

12
.   Ibid., 103.

13
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 118.

14
.   Roger Morris,
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
, p. 796.

15
.   Ibid., 803.

16
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 117.

17
.   Roger Morris,
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
, p. 848.

18
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 139.

19
.   Ibid.

20
.   Will Swift,
Pat and Dick
, p. 126.

21
.   “Richard and Pat Nixon: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Their Marriage,”
Parade
, Jan. 7, 2014, online:
http://parade.condenast.com/249558/parade/richard-and-pat-nixon-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-their-marriage/
.

22
.   Will Swift,
Pat and Dick
, p. 132.

23
.   Ibid., 136.

24
.   Ibid., 147.

25
.   Ibid., 150.

26
.   Ibid.

27
.   Ibid., 153.

28
.   Ibid., 156.

29
.   Ibid.

30
.   “Richard and Pat Nixon: “10 Things,”
Parade
, Jan. 7, 2014.

31
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 216.

32
.   Ibid., 176.

33
.   Julie Nixon Eisenhower,
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
, p. 215.

34
.   Ibid., 231.

35
.   Ibid., 234.

36
.   Judith Viorst, “Pat Nixon is the Ultimate Good Sport,”
Sunday Magazine, New York Times
, Sep. 13, 1970, 13.

37
.   Gloria Steinem, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Nixon,”
New York
magazine, Oct. 28, 1968,
http://nymag.com/news/politics/45934/index11.html
.

38
.   Ibid., 235.

39
.   Ibid., 254.

40
.   Ibid., 255.

41
.   Ibid., 420.

42
.   “Richard and Pat Nixon, Ten Things,”
Parade
, Jan. 7, 2014.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A NEW BEGINNING

“The greatest title history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”

—Richard Nixon

E
lvis “The King” Presley showing up one day in late 1970 outside the gates of the White House is one of the truly bizarre intersections of politics and pop culture of the twentieth century. Two years prior Nixon had orchestrated one of the greatest political comebacks of all time. Elvis had also staged a career-reviving comeback of his own two years earlier. After the British invasion, the Beatles and other bands of “the swinging sixties” had taken all the gas out of Graceland. Amid declining record sales, and dwindling attendance for his films, built around half-baked song offerings such as “Do the Clam” and “Petunia, the Gardener’s Daughter,” the King needed a spark. In 1968, Elvis appeared on NBC and, much like Nixon had, used a team of media gurus to redefine his image and turn the schlocky irrelevance of the previous years on its head. The comeback special pulled in the highest ratings for NBC that year.

Only two years later, Elvis was bloated and often tranquilized by massive amounts of prescription drugs. Often in the company of the gun-totting, pill-popping, raucous yes-men playfully dubbed the “Memphis Mafia,” Elvis sought license for he and his hillbilly army to legally carry firearms and pharmaceuticals. Elvis thought a badge from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs might do the trick. Enter Nixon.

“The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley later wrote. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”
1

To this end, Elvis vowed to help the president by becoming an undercover federal agent who would fight the drug element, hippie culture, and Black Panthers. The King promised this and more in a handwritten letter scribbled illegibly on American Airlines stationary en route to DC.
2
“I can and will do more good if I were made a Federal Agent at Large and I will help out by doing it my way through my communications with people of all ages,” Presley continued. “First and foremost, I am an entertainer, but all I need is the Federal credentials. I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing, where I can and will do the most good.”
3

Nixon aide Egil “Bud” Krough bought the Presley ruse. Krough even thought that the King could put out an anti-drug album titled
High on Life
that could be cut at a rehabilitation clinic, a Nixon administration spin on Johnny Cash’s
At Folsom Prison
for the recovering addict set.

Elvis showed up to the White House in an ensemble that included tight purple velvet pants, a matching velvet cape, an oversized lion’s head pendant, and one of his signature ham-sized belt buckles. Nixon aide Dwight Chapin insisted that Elvis meet Nixon—that this could be an opportunity for the perennially square Nixon to connect with the youth element. “You must be kidding,” H. R. Haldeman replied.
5

Nixon, who so often greeted guests to the Oval Office with trinkets from his desk, was brought a souvenir from Presley—a World War II Colt .45 pistol that was quickly confiscated by the Secret Service. “You dress kind of wild, don’t you, son?” Nixon asked on greeting the bedazzled pop star. “Mr. President, you’ve got your show to run and I’ve got mine,” Presley answered.
6

The Richard Nixon Show at the White House began almost two years earlier. Election Day proved to be extremely close—it wasn’t until the next day that the television networks and newspapers finally called Nixon the winner. The key results came down to California, Ohio, and Illinois, all of which Nixon carried by only three percentage points or less. If Humphrey had carried all three of these states, he would have won the election. If he had won just two of them—or even just California—Wallace would have succeeded in his quest to prevent an electoral majority. The race would have gone to the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, dashing Nixon’s hopes again.

While Nixon’s Electoral College vote count with thirty-two states was certainly larger than Humphrey’s thirteen states, the popular vote margin was a mere 500,000 votes, or about 1 percent. Nixon said Humphrey left a gracious message congratulating him, noting, “I knew exactly how he felt.”
7

The fact is, in 1968 there were so many factors in play no one can claim Nixon won because he pandered to the darker side of Southerners. Several of his actions and speeches during the campaign prove this false, as do election season polling numbers. When the 1968 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, and Wallace at 22 percent. When the campaign ended, 43.4 percent of Americans voted for Nixon, Humphrey came in at 42.7 percent, with Wallace at 13.7 percent. Nearly 9 percent of the national vote that had deserted Wallace were Democrats who originally deserted Humphrey.

Wallace’s final vote totals further support the idea that the South had a limited role in the general election: he won only 13 percent of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes with five states.

Critics of the “Southern Strategy” failed to realize that Nixon had to win in other regions to earn the 270 electoral votes he needed. If Nixon would have made his pandering for Southern votes more obvious, he risked losing support in Northern industrial states, which would be political suicide. Nixon commented, “There were going to be seven key states in the 1968 presidential campaign: New York, California, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Michigan. Of these I had won only California and Ohio in 1960.”
8

Furthermore, the South was not and could not be central to Nixon’s campaign, as Nixon himself later said. “The Deep South had to be virtually conceded to George Wallace. I could not match him there without compromising on the civil rights issue, which I would not do.”
9

This “Southern Strategy” was much more complex than most people understood. It was more of an “Outer” Southern Strategy. Previous battles with Reagan and Rockefeller never forced Nixon to focus on strategies to win over the Southern delegates, but now it was critical.

During his meetings with Thurmond, the Atlanta state Republican chairman, Florida delegates, and other important Southern political leaders, Nixon never made any unreasonable promises. Although he emphasized issues that were popular to Southern voters, the transcripts of these private meetings show that the message was consistent throughout his many encounters with Southern politicians.

Some people have claimed that Nixon told Thurmond that he would slow down desegregation if elected.
10

Exactly the opposite happened, as Nixon described later in his memoirs:

“Schools in the South and all across the country opened in the fall of 1970 without violence and in compliance with the Supreme Court’s order. The dramatic success of our Southern desegregation program is eloquently told by the statistics. By 1974 only 8 percent of black children in the South were attending all-black schools, down from 68 percent in the fall of 1968.”
11

Although unintentionally, Nixon probably helped spread desegregation through his Southern campaign strategy, which was originally conceived to bring more Southerners into the electoral process, which it did, but it also had other consequences. Patrick Moynihan saw the impact Nixon had with his Southern Strategy. In 1970 he said, “There has been more change in the structure of American public school education in the past month than in the past 100 years.” And in 1970, there was no violence, as when John F. Kennedy was president, for example, and over 375 people were injured and 2 persons were killed at the University of Mississippi when it integrated. Nixon’s desegregation followed his general policy of dealing with the South, which Ehrlichman said was done “his way, with conciliation and understanding and not in a fashion that would abrade the political sensibilities of Southerners and conservatives.”
12

Quite contrary to the negative press the 1968 campaign received for the Southern Strategy initiative, it was actually a great success, both in terms of the impact it made in the campaign and also for the effect it had on school integration in the South. President Nixon broadened his appeal to Southern voters during this time, which allowed him to carry the region for the 1972 presidential election, in which he acquired an astounding 70.5 percent of the votes. It was a remarkable feat, and on that led to the Republicans dominance in the South for the next forty years.

Nixon’s 1968 campaign is an interesting case too because of its unusual nature in American political history. Since the Republican Party first ran a candidate for president in 1856, only twice has an individual who previously lost a general election campaign won the presidency—Nixon in ‘68, and Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1892. The only other cases of an individual who ran in a general election as a major party candidate (at least) twice unsuccessfully, were the populist Democratic crusader William Jennings Bryan (who ran three times, in 1896, 1900, and 1908), Republican Governor of New York Thomas Dewey (he of the infamous, “Dewey Defeats Truman” mistaken
Chicago Tribune
headline) in 1944 and ‘48, and Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who fell to the Eisenhower-Nixon team twice in 1952 and ‘56.

Many having been nominated previously would mount a second bid for the presidency, including Herbert Hoover and Hubert Humphrey, only to fail in their attempt to be renominated. Nixon and Cleveland were the only two men to be nominated, lose, and be renominated
eight
years later and win.

What distinguishes the cases of Cleveland and Nixon is that their losses were sufficiently close as to keep alive their chances in the eyes of party members. Cleveland, in fact, having first been elected to the presidency in 1884, won the popular vote despite losing the Electoral College to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and won reelection in 1892 becoming the first (and to date only) president to serve two nonconsecutive terms. Nixon, as we have noted, lost an exceptionally close vote in 1960 that was riddled with fraud in key states, against the supremely charismatic Jack Kennedy. If Bill Clinton was the comeback kid, Dick Nixon was the original comeback kid.

We cannot examine the life of Richard Nixon without also discussing his many successes during his time in the presidency. While he is perhaps best remembered for the twin pillars of post-Nixon media coverage, China and Watergate, the Nixon presidency was one of the most prolific in terms of crafting lasting reform to government and its operation. Indeed, in many ways we forget the myriad ways in which Nixon, the old cold warrior and Republican, oversaw one of the most moderate-to-progressive administrations of the later twentieth century.