Nixon's Secret (9 page)

Murray handled the Senate race quite differently than Weicker thought. Chotiner told me in a lecture about the dynamics of a three-way race that he had funneled cash to Tom Dodd, the hardline anti-Communist Democratic senator from Connecticut who had been censured by the US Senate and was running for his seat as an Independent.

Dodd had been a congressman and one of the Nuremburg prosecutors. He had the profile of a Roman senator with wavy, silver hair. He always wore a watch fob and chain and pocket watch in the breast pocket of his suit. He chewed cigars more than smoked them but his topcoat was still often flecked with ashes. Murray told me that two suitcases of cash were delivered to a lawyer from Connecticut in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. Murray bragged that the handoff was made while J. Edgar Hoover was lunching only feet away, eating his daily fruit salad and coffee in the Town & Country lounge with his live-in deputy Clyde Tolson. Murray said the money came up from Miami sent from Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, Miami millionaire and Nixon’s best friend, who I later learned kept secret bank accounts for “RN,” as all the older Nixon guys who had been around in the ‘60 and ‘62 campaigns called him.

Weicker thinks he won on his own. In actuality, he won because Tom Dodd, fueled by money from Murray Chotiner, got 25 percent, draining Democratic votes from dove Democrat Joe Duffey.

Nixon aide Pat Hillings had considerable insight on Chotiner and his role in the birth of the modern American political consultant:

Murray Chotiner was among the first of the political consultants which are now so popular, or unpopular, as the case may be. Recent books have come out attacking political consultants in campaigns and that sort of thing. In those days, most work was done by volunteers. But now political consultants are the dominant theme, along with the media in the campaigns. Murray Chotiner was one of the first. He was a lawyer, a brilliant lawyer, from Beverly Hills. But who was always interested in politics. He did not feel that he had the appeal to run for office himself, although he tried it once and lost. But he became an advisor to various city officials, and was quite successful.

So when the time came to find someone to help Richard Nixon run for the Senate, a lot of his friends in Los Angeles said to bring in Murray Chotiner. So Murray Chotiner was the paid manager of the campaign. But often the pay was pretty small and I still think he made his living primarily as a lawyer, at least at that point. And he was tough. When I say tough, I don’t mean dirty or mean. But Murray was a very aggressive, hard driving fellow. And he tried to encourage Nixon to take more aggressive stands on issues and to work harder, at least work harder in attacking the opposition.

He was a mechanic, a nuts and bolts man. He found, for instance, that Nixon was reading letters in the car as he’d be driving, and signing the letters, letters going out to people thanking them for their help. And he took them away from him. He said the only thing he should be doing in that car is thinking of his next speech. And he did all kinds of things like that that were based on detail. But Murray Chotiner became a very effective fellow and was probably the smartest and most experienced political operative in the Nixon campaign at that time.
9

The initial task before Nixon and Chotiner was not easy. Jerry Voorhis was a tough nut to crack. He was a straight-shooting New Dealer, an idealist, and generally a moderate. Chotiner initially could not locate an effective point of attack. “We don’t have enough meat!” Chotiner griped to Nixon early in the campaign.
10
Murray would come up with the plan that worked. Careful never to say that Voorhis was a Communist, Nixon merely asked, “Is Voorhis a Communist?”

Murray came up with the strategy of causing confusion between a pro-Soviet labor lobbying union, the CIO-PAC (Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations), and the NC-PAC (National Citizens Political Action Committee), a liberal organization that, ironically, a then liberal Ronald Reagan belonged to. The NC-PAC had publicly endorsed Voorhis and contributed donations to his campaign. Nixon implied that the incumbent had taken contributions from the Communists. The false claim that Voorhis was tied with the militant communist union was reiterated in pro-Nixon publications, on leaflets, and through telephone lines.

Nixon himself would remember the PAC dupery in his 1978 personal narrative
The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
:

The PAC had been established as a political arm of organized labor to support Franklin Roosevelt in the 1944 election. A sister organization, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), was set up to permit non-union participation. Until his death, labor leader Sidney Hillman served as chairman of both groups, and many other leaders of CIO-PAC also served on NCPAC. Both groups interviewed candidates and then made funds and campaign workers available to those whom they endorsed. It was estimated that in 1944 the two PAC organizations contributed over $650,000 to political campaigns. Although the leadership of both groups was non-Communist, the organizations were known to be infiltrated with Communists and fellow travelers who, because of their discipline, wielded an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Such influence was viewed as a problem because there was an emerging concern about Soviet postwar intentions and a corresponding apprehension about the communist movement in America.

Voorhis had been endorsed by CIO-PAC in 1944. In 1946, however, CIO-PAC decided to withhold its endorsement—ostensibly because he had not supported some measures in Congress considered important by the union leadership. In the spring of 1946, the Los Angeles County chapter of the NCPAC circulated a bulletin indicating that it was going to endorse Voorhis regardless of what CIO-PAC did. The May 31, 1946, issue of
Daily People’s World
, the West Coast Communist newspaper, ran an article with the headline: “Candidates Endorsed by Big Five.” The “Big Five” labor and progressive coalition was made up of CIOPAC, NCPAC, the railroad brotherhoods, the Progressive AFL, and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. The
Daily People’s World
article reported that the Big Five had interviewed the candidates and included the list of endorsements for the June 4 primary. The first name on the list was H. Jerry Voorhis. Following his name was this note: “No CIO endorsement.” In answer, then, to the charge that he was endorsed by PAC, Voorhis had replied that he was not that year-endorsed by CIO-PAC. To me that was an irrelevancy.

When the question was raised in the South Pasadena debate, I pulled from my pocket a copy of the NCPAC bulletin announcing its endorsement recommendation and walked across the stage to show it to Voorhis. Reading aloud the names of the board members of each organization, many of which were the same, I demonstrated that there was little practical difference between a CIO-PAC endorsement and an NCPAC one.

Voorhis repeated his claim that CIO-PAC and NCPAC were separate organizations, but I could tell from the audience’s reaction that I had made my point. A few days later Voorhis himself underscored it by sending a telegram to NCPAC headquarters in New York requesting, “whatever qualified endorsement the Citizens PAC may have given me be withdrawn.” Had he repudiated the endorsement before he was backed onto the defensive and forced to act, the issue might never have developed. But since he had not, I thought then, and still think, that the endorsement was a legitimate issue to raise.

After this debate, the PAC became a peripheral but heated issue in the campaign. While Voorhis equivocated, my campaign director, Harrison McCall, came up with the idea of passing out plastic thimbles saying: “Nixon for Congress—Put the Needle in the PAC.”
11

That Murray was the senior partner in the new relationship was clear from the following excerpt from Nixon’s memoirs:

This first “debate” was so successful that many of my supporters urged me to challenge Voorhis to other joint appearances. I had some reservations, because each one would require two or three days of concentrated preparation, and I did not want to take off any more time from campaigning. Murray Chotiner, the brilliant and no-nonsense public relations man who was running Bill Knowland’s senatorial campaign and advising me part-time on mine, went straight to the point. “Dick,” he said, “you’re running behind, and when you’re behind, you don’t play it safe. You must run a high-risk campaign.” He paused for a moment until I nodded my agreement, and then he said, “Good. I’ve already arranged for an announcement challenging Voorhis to more debates.”
12

Chotiner knew that Nixon was a first-class debater and that Voorhis would confidently agree to a series of debates against the unknown Nixon. Chotiner also knew that the debates would be a forum where Nixon had nothing to lose and Voorhis had nothing to gain. From the opening argument, Chotiner’s gamble paid off. Nixon had Voorhis on his heels. Nixon, remembered in later years for awkward gesticulation, was, in his school years, a thespian. In his debates against Voorhis, Nixon utilized his acting chops, debating skill, and the charge-first tactics of Chotiner. “Voorhis found himself sinking as he made fruitless attempts to answer his opponent’s hydra-headed charges,” wrote Nixon biographer Leonard Lurie. “Voorhis was generally ineffective in his answers. On the other hand, the young attorney from Whittier was so vigorous, so condemning and his past was so vacant, so spotlessly blameless.”
13

Upon arrival to one debate, two months before Election Day, the audience members, half of who were organized by and strategically planted in the auditorium by Chotiner, were given a two-page handout titled “Facts about Jerry Voorhis.” The pamphlet tied the congressman to both Socialism and the CIO-PAC.
14
Nixon took to the stage following Voorhis’s opening remark, pulled the NCPAC endorsement out of his pocket, and stalked the incumbent congressman across the stage asking him to comment on the allegations. A shocked Voorhis returned to his podium and read the endorsement aloud. He then stated that there was confusion between the two organizations, which elicited a cacophony of deafening boos from the crowd and a vehement denial by Nixon.

Voorhis, back to the ropes, never regained his balance. Voorhis would lose the election by fifteen thousand votes and later write that Nixon was “quite a ruthless opponent ‘[with] one cardinal and unbreakable rule of conduct’ [which was] to win, whatever it [took] to do it.”
15

Nixon would confirm Voorhis’s charge of ruthlessness. “Of course,” Nixon said, “I know Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist . . . I suppose there was scarcely ever a man with higher ideals than Jerry Voorhis, or better motivated . . . but . . . I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win.”
16

To those who hate robo calls from politicians, they have Murray Chotiner to thank for the “campaign innovation.” Chotiner used the telephone like a weapon. Many prospective voters during the race would be treated to an anonymous caller. “This is a friend of yours,” the call began, “but I can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”
17
The call would then end abruptly.

To beat Voorhis, Nixon had benefited mightily from the red-baiting tactics of Chotiner. However, there was a darker truth to the victory of ‘46. Murray and his brother Jack had for years been involved in a general practice law firm that represented clients who were anything but general. A 1956 congressional probe unearthed records that found the Chotiner brothers, in one four-year stretch, had handled at least 221 bookmaking cases.
18
In almost all of these cases the “bookies” represented by the Chotiners got off with a suspended sentence or a slap on the wrist.
19

The
Los Angeles Times
propagated that the Nixon campaign expenses totaled $370,
20
$130 less than Chotiner was reportedly paid, and $630 less than Nixon’s opponent reportedly spent. Cash and services were taken in from many off-the-book donors. With campaign finance reporting laws virtually nonexistent in 1950, these figures were wildly misleading.

We have already established the money from the Eastern establishment that was funneled into the ‘46 campaign, but there was also a steady flow of underworld cash facilitated by Chotiner, for he was on intimate terms with Los Angeles Mob boss Mickey Cohen. Cohen, an ex-boxer and colorful gangster portrayed by Sean Penn in the movie
Gangster Squad
, a mobster short in both stature and temper, was approached by Murray and asked to provide for the campaign. Cohen was Meyer Lansky’s man on the West Coast and ruled the Los Angeles mob with an iron fist. He was a vicious killer who had murdered a bookmaker named Maxie Shaman a year prior.
21

According to Cohen, “In addition to helping Mr. Nixon financially, I made arrangements to rent a headquarters for Nixon in the Pacific Finance Building at Eighth and Olive Streets in Los Angeles, which was the same building occupied by Attorney Sam Rummel. We posted Nixon signs and literature, and I paid for the headquarters for three to four weeks in that building. During the period that I ran the Nixon Headquarters, I contacted most of the gambling fraternity who started him off with $25,000.”
22

In 1960, Cohen and fellow mobster Camel Humphreys would storm out of a Chicago meeting with other mob chieftains, and JFK’s father, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, tried to put the bite on the mob boys for money and muscle for JFK’s campaign. They were invested in Nixon and contributed to him. Both Nixon and Kennedy got mob money in 1960. Kennedy would get the muscle as well, as we shall see. The mob would not wait long to cash in on favors doled out to Nixon for the 1946 congressional race.

A year after his victory, Nixon would be told that low-level mob functionary Jack Ruby would need employment. Ruby had just moved from Sam Giancana’s Chicago territory to Carlos Marcello’s New Orleans turf and would collect a paycheck, tucked away on the House Un-American Activities Committee, an investigative committee created to uncover communist ties within the United States. Ruby’s hire was also a favor for Lyndon Johnson, at that point a congressman, who did favors for Marcello through bagman Jack Halfen.