Nixon's Secret (15 page)

Despite Nixon’s attentiveness to his commander in chief, for the eight years of the Eisenhower administration, there was a rift between the two men. To begin with, there was a gulf of twenty-three years between the former general and his vice president. Eisenhower, despite his humble Kansas roots, enjoyed the company of wealthy men with whom he played bridge and golf. To a man, Ike’s “gang” had made real money. Eisenhower viewed them as his peers. Eisenhower would never look on Nixon that way. Though Nixon publicly claimed that Eisenhower’s gruff indifference toward him was just part of the job, it took a tremendous toll on the insecure vice president’s psyche. Nixon knew that Eisenhower had not supported him during the fund crisis and that approval was only the result of outmaneuvering Ike. For the many tasks Nixon carried out in his capacity as vice president, he was rewarded with a slow loathing from Eisenhower. “He [Nixon] worked for a man, and I know you shouldn’t say this kind of thing—but he worked for a man who in my book was just a complete sadist, and who really cut Nixon to pieces,” Nixon biographer Ralph de Toledano said. “He would cut him up almost just for the fun of it and I don’t think Nixon ever really survived that. I don’t think I am talking out of school and I say that when he was Vice President and I saw him quite frequently, he would come back from the White House and as much as he ever showed emotion you’d think he was on the verge of tears.”
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To his credit, Eisenhower never blocked Nixon’s access to information in the administration. Indeed, Nixon would plot with the CIA, the Pentagon, and others to persuade Ike to a harder line in both Cuba and Indochina. Nixon attended and could speak at all cabinet meetings and was present at all National Security Council (NSC) briefings. Nixon received the same national intelligence briefing every morning as the president.

Nixon would use his eight years in the vice presidency to burnish his reputation as a world traveler and foreign policy expert. Nixon’s assigned duty was to travel around the world conducting goodwill missions on behalf of the United States. President Eisenhower believed these trips would help dismiss damaging notions of America. He took a tour of the Far East in 1953 that was considered a success in terms of generating positive feedback for the United States, and Nixon began to appreciate the region’s potential for industrial development and economic power—an appreciation that helped him decide to initiate economic relations with the area later on as president. He also visited the cities of Saigon and Hanoi when the region was still referred to as French Indochina, fifteen years before he would be elected as president and have to deal with saving the country from war and destruction, all while pulling out American troops and appeasing a war-weary public without seeming soft on communism.
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Nixon’s speeches “added conviction to the general opinion that American desire to aid in winning this war against communism . . . is sincere and continuing,” said the American ambassador in Vietnam.
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After the 1953 trip, Nixon decided to devote more time to foreign relations. Nixon biographer Irwin Gellman even said that “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his [vice president] by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs . . . Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title ‘the first modern vice-president.’”
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Nixon would use these foreign trips to network with both foreign leaders and the leading opposition in many countries. He would carefully cultivate and maintain these relationships by letter and would travel abroad extensively in the early 1960s when, out of office, continuing to maintain the flow of information about geopolitics around the globe. When the Democrats took control of Congress in the 1954 midterm elections, Nixon began to question if he wanted to remain in politics after he served his first term as vice president. Pat Nixon had never gotten over the public embarrassment of the Checkers speech and wanted Nixon to retire to make some money and spend more time with his daughters. Life as Ike’s thankless prat boy was draining Nixon of energy and wearing on the nerves of the vice president. Nixon did not shy away from this period of dejection in his memoirs:

As the attacks became more personal, I sometimes wondered where party loyalty left off and masochism began. The girls were reaching an impressionable age, and neither Pat nor I wanted their father to become the perennial bad guy of American politics. During the last week of the 1954 campaign, when I was so tired that I could hardly remember what it felt like to be rested, I decided that this would be my last campaign. I began to think more and more about what Murray Chotiner had said almost two and a half years earlier at the convention in Chicago: I should pretty much be able to write my own ticket after retiring for the vice presidency at age forty-four. By the time I made a nationally televised broadcast on election eve, I had decided not to run again unless exceptional circumstances intervened to change my mind.
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Fate had a different plan than political retirement. It was on September 24, 1955, President Eisenhower suffered a severe heart attack, and the level of damage done to the old man’s body was deemed to be potentially fatal at first. For six weeks, Eisenhower was unable to perform his duties as president of the United States. As the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution had not yet been implemented or even conceived, the vice president did not have the formal authority to act in the absence of the president. Nonetheless, Nixon acted in place of Ike for the entire duration, presiding over cabinet meetings just as he had trained to do, making sure that no one tried to take power. Nixon would conduct cabinet meetings from his usual vice presidential chair rather than move into the seat the president usually occupied. As Ambrose noted, during that time Nixon “made no attempt to seize power.”
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As a result of his political maturing, Nixon naturally decided to stick out a prospective second term as vice president with Ike, but by December 1955, some of Eisenhower’s top aides—perhaps out of jealously for Nixon’s political craft—wanted to have Dick replaced. Hostility toward Nixon “was little more than a whisper during the administration’s first two years,” wrote
U.S. News & World Report,
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but with the presidency only a heartbeat away, the thought of Nixon as commander in chief became real. Ike did nothing to quell the tide that was rising against Nixon. When Eisenhower announced his reelection bid in February 1956, he was faced with one question from reporters, “Would you again want Vice President Nixon as your running mate?”
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For a while Eisenhower avoided supplying an answer, which only proliferated the rumor that Nixon was a goner. When Ike finally did answer, he stated that indeed, it was the vice president who had not come to an answer regarding his role as vice president, and it would be inappropriate to answer for him. Nixon should be allowed “to chart his own course,” Eisenhower said.
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Privately Eisenhower would urge Nixon to shift to a cabinet, where he could gain “administrative experience.” Ike said he could have any slot but state, where the redoubtable John Foster Dulles reigned. Nixon didn’t take the bait. Party regulars like GOP Chairman Len Hall pressed Nixon’s case with Ike, who ultimately folded, essentially letting Nixon announce that he would be delighted to run again for vice president. Eisenhower would then instruct Press Secretary Jim Hagerty to announce that Ike was delighted by the news. Once again, Eisenhower had left Nixon twisting in the wind and had done nothing to squelch a dump-Nixon movement ginned up by former Governor Harold Stassen, who proposed replacing Nixon with Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter, a liberal Republican who would ultimately replace Dulles at state. Once again, Nixon had survived.

Nixon continued to bare the scars of Eisenhower’s mistreatment but had survived once again. In anticipation of Eisenhower’s early ambivalence about Nixon seeking another term as vice president, Nixon supporters had quietly staged a write-in effort in the New Hampshire primary. This was a precursor of Nixon’s grassroot strength among Republican Party regulars, won through nonstop stumping on behalf of Republican candidates through the 1950s. Sure enough, Ike and Dick rolled to victory in 1956 once more with another healthy—and even larger—margin of victory over Illinois’ former Governor Adlai Stevenson.

By 1957, Nixon resumed his diplomatic travels, this time embarking on a major trip to Africa. As the presiding officer of the Senate, he would play a crucial role in the landmark passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who had led the Southern block to prevent the passage of any civil rights legislation in the 1950s, decided he would have to pass a civil rights bill to make himself acceptable to Northern liberals within his party in a 1960 presidential bid. At the same time, Johnson would prepare a poison pill amendment that required that violators of the new federal law would be tried before state rather than federal juries. LBJ knew no all-white jury in the South would convict a white man of a transgression against a Negro. The amendment renders the law unenforceable.

Nixon actively lobbied his Republican colleagues against the amendment, although Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy would vote for the new amendment, which rendered the new law completely symbolic and totally unenforceable. Still Nixon would rally Republicans for final passage for which civil rights leader Martin Luther King would write him a letter of praise. Nixon would strongly urge Eisenhower to support the bill.
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The debate over the bill would lead to the longest one-man filibuster in United States history by a Democratic South Carolina Senator named Strom Thurmond, a man who would later become a Republican and play a key role in the reinvented Richard Nixon’s procurement of the GOP nomination for the presidency in 1968.

Through the late 1950s, Ike’s health continued to deteriorate, and in November 1957 he suffered a mild stroke, a blockage of a blood vessel leading to the brain. The stroke caused stammering and other speech difficulties. “He tried to tell me something,” said Eisenhower’s secretary Ann Whitman, “but he couldn’t express himself. Something seemed to have happened to him all of a sudden.”
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In New York, key stocks fell seven points when news of the president’s illness hit Wall Street.
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The stroke raised the possibility that the president’s mental faculties had been damaged to the point that he could not carry out the duties of the presidency. Once again, Nixon was on the doorstep of the Oval Office.

  This time, Nixon’s leadership in the wake of Eisenhower’s absence was put on public display. He gave a press conference and assured the entire nation that the White House was functioning well while Ike had briefly taken ill. Eisenhower recovered and Dick was anxious to return to his diplomatic and domestic campaign duties, but 1958 would prove to be difficult year on both fronts.

During an April 1958 goodwill tour with Pat to South America, Nixon would be confronted by anti-American mobs, in many cases spurred on by Communist agitators. At first the trip was uneventful. In Uruguay, Nixon made one unplanned stop at a college campus and did an impromptu question-and-answer session with a group of students on US foreign policy. But when the Nixon entourage got to Lima, Peru, they came face-to-face with student demonstrations. Nixon, still in his forties and genuinely wanting to connect with the student body, chose to get out of his car to confront the students and stayed standing in front of them until he was forced back into his car by a barrage of thrown objects. The “communist-led mob stoned him, threw garbage, spat on him and desecrated the American flag.”
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In Caracas, Venezuela, on the same trip, Nixon and his wife were both spit on by an anti-American group of protestors, and their limousine was viciously attacked by a mob of protestors wielding pipes who attacked the vice presidential limousine. As Ambrose wrote, Nixon’s conduct during the South America trip “caused even some of his bitterest enemies to give him some grudging respect.”
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His stature grew, and the coolness in which he handled himself brought wide praise at home.

A deep recession would produce the worst election cycle for the Republican Party since the Civil War. While the political party in the White House always tends to lose seats in a midterm election during a second term, the losses in the 1958 midterm races were particularly huge. Because Nixon once again undertook the role of campaigning for the party’s candidates across the country, he would suffer much of the blame for GOP defeats. The Democrats took forty-eight seats in the House—maintaining their already very commanding majority—and even nabbed thirteen Republican seats in the Senate, including one in West Virginia that would keep the same Democrat, a man named Robert C. Byrd, in office until his death in 2010, becoming one of the longest-serving Senators in American history. That year also elected Democrats who would gain national attention in the 1970s, like Eugene McCarthy and Edmund Muskie. The Democrats even won two brand new Senate seats from the new state of Alaska. In California, both US Senator William Knowland and Governor Goodwin Knight were defeated after they attempted to switch offices. Knowland wanted the governorship for the basis of a future presidential bid, and Nixon and Knowland had bludgeoned Knight into running for the seat Knowland was vacating. Things were looking bleak for the Republicans in the coming election of 1960.

A public relations coup would, however, boost Nixon before the 1960 election. In July 1959, Ike sent Nixon to the Soviet Union for the special American National Exhibition in Moscow. The event was to be sponsored by the American government, to model a similar Soviet Union exhibit in New York City that same year. The event aimed to showcase both countries’ latest “home appliances, fashions, television and hi-fi sets, a model house priced to sell [to] an ‘average’ family, farm equipment, 1959 automobiles, boats, sporting equipment and a children’s playground,”
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and it was designed in hopes of narrowing the gap between the two countries and improving the political climate. Of course, Nixon also knew that the event would present the perfect opportunity for him to challenge his Soviet counterparts on the merits of capitalism, and with the 1960 election right around the corner, he knew the chance could not be wasted. On July 24, while Nixon was touring the exhibits with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the two men stopped at a model of an American kitchen and engaged in an impromptu exchange comparing the countries’ two economic styles. This unplanned discussion through their interpreters took place throughout the exhibit, but was referred to at the time as the “Kitchen Debate”—since the most famous exchange between the two leaders took place in that American model kitchen—and the name has fittingly stayed around in history books. Nixon knew the model kitchen was full of laborsaving technologies and highly engineered recreation devices like television, which Nixon made a direct reference to as the exchange was being recorded on videotape and subsequently rebroadcast in both countries many times.