Nixon's Secret (20 page)

In was in this period that veteran journalist Tom Wicker would note:

It was in 1960, also, that Nixon’s dependence on H. R. [“Bob”] Haldeman began to affect his conduct, with other aides as well as toward the public. Haldeman was the perfect defender of Nixon’s desire to “do it all” for himself, and to share credit with no one—a desire that led naturally to a growing isolation of the candidate from friends and advisers. Haldeman—ostensibly only the campaign “tour director”—knew how to fend off unwanted advice, and how to make himself an indispensable guardian at the door of the candidate’s introversion.

Haldeman’s latent instinct for power and how to get it, and Nixon’s instinct to prove that he needed no one, melded into a combination with long consequences. In 1960, the immediate effect was to shield Nixon from the kind of political give-and-take that might have steered him away from some of his mistakes and that would have helped create a more cohesive and dedicated staff. Haldeman was not a man to tell the boss he was wrong, and as the campaign went on, he saw to it that few others had the chance to do so.
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Nixon’s pollster Claude Robinson showed that Nixon consistently ran better alone than with any running mate. Kennedy, however, would reluctantly take on the only vice presidential running mate who made an actual difference in a presidential election in Lyndon Johnson.

As I indicated in my book
The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ
, Johnson essentially blackmailed his way onto the ticket with Kennedy after the Massachusetts senator had already asked his Missouri colleague Stuart Symington to take the vice presidential nomination. LBJ appeared at Kennedy’s hotel room late at night with speaker Sam Rayburn. Johnson had with him a dossier on Kennedy’s sex life, which had been compiled by LBJ ally J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy got the message, and the offer Kennedy had made to Stuart Symington was withdrawn. Had LBJ not bludgeoned his way onto the ticket, Kennedy would not likely have been elected, particularly in light of voter fraud in Texas, which would tip the Lone Star State to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket by a slim forty-six thousand votes. Fifty thousand Nixon-Lodge votes were thrown out in Dallas County alone under the watchful eyes of Democrat-dominated election officials and the LBJ man who served as county sheriff. LBJ would also use his Senate connections to pressure local Democrats to back the national ticket and work to thwart the independent elector strategy segregationist were using to block Kennedy and Nixon and throw the election into the US House of Representatives.

Nixon would not be so fortunate in his choice of a running mate. His list came down to Lodge, Dr. Walter Judd, a respected conservative from Minnesota, and Thruston B. Morton, an affable senator for the border state of Kentucky. Polls showed in both 1960 and 1968 that Nixon ran best with no running mate. Nixon would tell me, “[D]on’t look for someone who can help you; try to find someone who won’t hurt you.” I recall distinctly when Nixon would call me in the televised wake of George H. W. Bush announcing that he would take Senator Dan Quayle as his running mate. “Has he lost his goddamn mind,” he bellowed. Nixon’s strong opinions were belied by the fact that in both 1960 and in 1968 he would pick running mates who would not help his electoral prospects and may have actually hurt him. In essence, Nixon made the same mistake
twice.

Senator Thruston Morton, the fifty-two-year-old Republican national chairman, was a moderate Republican from Kentucky. The border states, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas, were crucial to Nixon’s strategy. Morton, a Yale graduate who had served in both the House and the Senate, had defeated incumbents for both offices after serving in Eisenhower’s State Department. Morton’s brother Rogers Morton was a veteran congressman from Maryland who would later serve as the floor manager for Nixon’s 1968 convention operation. Both Mortons were Nixon men. Nixon recalled, “[Thruston] Morton wanted the position badly.”
42
Morton was known as a heavy drinker on Capitol Hill.
National Review
publisher Bill Rusher called him “Thirsty” Morton.

A staunch anti-Communist congressman from Minnesota, Dr. Walter Judd was born in a small town in Nebraska and was both a medical doctor and Christian missionary. In 1925, Dr. Judd went to South China as a missionary for the Congregational Church. Overcome by malaria, he would return to the United States. He returned to China in 1934 to continue his missionary work only to see Japan’s brutal invasion of the Chinese mainland. Returning to the United States in 1938, Dr. Judd spoke out across the country about the growing might of Japan’s military. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dr. Judd was elected to Congress, where he served for twenty years, mainly as a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. A fiery orator, Judd would overcome a badly scarred face caused by his early use of radiation in his rustic medical practice in China. In spite of Judd’s physical deformities, his powerful voice and mastery of the language could stir an audience.

Conservative organizer Marvin Liebman would form a committee to draft Walter Judd for vice president, which was funded by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Edison. Judd was clearly the favorite of grassroots conservatives in the party, many of whom would have preferred Barry Goldwater as the improbable 1960 Republican nominee. Liebman would bring the Judd boomlet to Chicago, where the Minnesota congressman was the favorite of many of the rank-and-file delegates.

Liebman remembered the Chicago boom that was ignited by Judd’s convention keynote speech. “Telegrams urging Judd’s nomination were pouring in to the Nixon headquarters from all over the country,” said Liebman. “By the time the Tuesday night session was over, the entire convention was talking about the possibility of Walter Judd as Nixon’s running mate. All the delegate hotels had Judd signs in their lobbies, and many of the delegates were wearing Judd buttons. Our campaign had snowballed in just a few hours.”
43

As he would do in 1968 Nixon went through the motions of consulting party leaders on the choice of a running mate in the hours after his nomination. Thirty-eight Republicans, senators, congressmen, governors, state party chairmen, and party elders, including Governor Tom Dewey, Senator John Bricker, Congressman (later Senator) Everett Dirksen, Governor William Stratton, and President Eisenhower’s brother Milton met in Nixon’s Sheraton-Blackstone hotel suite in the Windy City. Nixon would tell the group of party leaders that Dr. Walter Judd had taken his name out of consideration for “health reasons.” Four years later Kleindienst would see Judd in Phoenix where Judd was addressing a group. “Before the program began, I expressed to Judd my sincere regrets that he had, for health reasons, asked Nixon not to consider him as a running mate.”

“I asked him not to do what, for what reason?” he responded with surprise and incredulity.
47
Judd said he had met with Nixon and that Nixon had told him that the choice was down to Judd and former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Judd responded that Lodge’s brother, former Connecticut brother John Davis Lodge, who served in the House with Judd, had told Judd that the decision was made and that Nixon had asked Cabot Lodge to be his Vice Presidential running mate and that “Cabot was drafting his acceptance speech.” Nixon denied that Lodge had been selected and said that his mind was still open. Judd claimed he made complimentary comments about Lodge but insisted that he himself would be a stronger candidate. More importantly, Judd had no memory of eliminating himself for “health reasons.”
48

Kleindienst would recall that the meeting of party elders he attended had seemed “scripted,” with former Ohio Senator and Governor John Bricker weighing in for Morton, as did former-Eisenhower Interior Secretary Fred Seaton and Illinois Governor William Stratton. Nixon then turned to former New York Governor Tom Dewey, who had been the Republican nominee for president in 1944 and 1948 and had largely engineered not only Eisenhower’s nomination in 1952, but also Nixon’s own vice presidential nomination that year. Kleindienst felt that Dewey’s advocacy of Lodge “had the distinct characteristics of advance preparation.” After Dewey’s eloquent statement for Lodge, Nixon declared, “That’s it—it has to be Cabot.”
49
Kleindienst believed that Nixon had flown to New York on the morning of July 22 to secure the support of Nelson Rockefeller and Dewey and that their quid pro quo was Lodge’s nomination.
50

“Nixon, so often a cold, dispassionate judge of electoral strategies, had flung logic out the window,” wrote David Pietrusza in
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon.
Pietrusza makes a compelling argument. “Instead, his choice was dictated both by a deep-seated obsession to curry favor with the party’s still influential Rockefeller-Dewey Eastern wing and by deep-seated social insecurity—an idea that by placing the ultra-Brahmin Lodge on his ticket he might compensate for his own filling station–grocery store origins, particularly against the Harvard-Palm Beach Kennedy organization.”
51

Barry Goldwater, whose supporters championed Judd, the most conservative choice for VP, called Nixon’s choice of Lodge “a disastrous blunder.”
52
Judd, who Nixon had eliminated for “health reasons,” would be vigorous and active into his nineties. When Ronald Reagan awarded Judd the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981, he would call Judd “an articulate spokesman for all those who cherish liberty and a model for all Americans who aspire to serve mankind as physicians, spiritual leaders and statesmen.”
53

Ironically, Nixon would continue to promulgate the myth that Judd had removed himself from consideration in a 1988 letter to the congressman.

“As I was listening to the convention in New Orleans this week, I thought back to 1960 and the greatest keynote speech I have ever heard at the convention of either party,” Nixon wrote to the then ninety-year-old Judd. “You will remember that I talked to you thereafter about the possibility of your going on the ticket. You declined in part because you felt that your experience was exclusively in the legislative branch of the government and in part because of what you thought was your advanced age! And now you are ninety and still going strong. It is no reflection whatever on Cabot, incidentally, that had you gone on the ticket we might have won.”
54

Nixon’s choice for a running mate, former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was a strategic error. While Lodge was liked by the Eastern Republican establishment and was a favorite of Eisenhower, he had been defeated for his Senate seat in 1952 by Congressman John F. Kennedy. Lodge would antagonize the Taft wing of the party by serving as the campaign manager for Eisenhower and forcing the Convention Rules, or “Fair Play,” Amendment that would seat Eisenhower delegates in the South, thus snatching the nomination from the Ohio senator. Lodge would put no large state in play, and while his selection was seen as bolstering the ticket’s foreign policy credentials (Lodge had been Ike’s UN ambassador), Lodge himself was bright but obtuse, somewhat lazy, and his aloof patrician manner put voters off. Additionally, Lodge had no appeal in the South or the West and did not help Nixon make inroads in the Northeast. When, to Nixon’s surprise, Lodge announced without notice that the “Nixon cabinet would have a Negro appointee,” a furious Nixon was forced to repudiate him. Lodge was famous for taking midafternoon naps on the campaign trail, and he would don pajamas to do so every afternoon for two hours. “We can’t beat the Democrats with a man who campaigns only an hour or two a day,” said Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
55
He brought nothing to the Nixon ticket.

* * *

After a two-week stay in the hospital to treat his knee injury, Nixon would come roaring back from a substantial deficit in the polls only to be damaged in the first televised debate in which he looked haggard and nervous. Nixon’s greatest error was his decision to debate the lesser-known Kennedy on television. Nixon would make the historic mistake of believing that
substance
would prevail over style and appearance. This was another costly mistake.

As a two-term, eight-year vice president who had bested Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate, Nixon held a substantial stature advantage over the rather junior Kennedy. Kennedy benefited just by being on the stage with Nixon. Nixon had little to gain from the exchange, while Kennedy could only benefit from the massive exposure to voters that a one-on-one debate would bring. Debates on the air were now possible following a change in broadcast law. Kennedy accepted immediately when the networks called for debates after the Democratic convention. JFK knew a debate was “the one way to break through”; he knew his advantage lie in television. Despite the success and the game, changing ability provided him by the Checkers speech, one of the most viewed political speeches in US history, Nixon still derided television as a “novelty,” which by 1960 had “worn off.”
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Nixon was wrong.

Nixon’s advisers were unanimous in opposing televised debates. Nixon initially agreed with them. “Nixon felt that he had a name, that he was known as a debater, and that he would be better off campaigning on his own, and not bring Jack Kennedy along,” Nixon’s press secretary, Herb Klein, recalled. “His instructions to me were not to commit to a debate, although I was under tremendous pressure.”
57
His running mate Lodge would advise Nixon that a debate could “erase the assassin image”
58

Then, out of the blue, the sometimes-capricious Nixon changed his tune. He wanted a debate. Press secretary Herb Klein “almost fell over” when he heard of Nixon’s acceptance. When Len Hall asked Nixon to explain, he “just looked up at the sky and didn’t answer. The rain started coming down . . . he still stood there looking up at the sky.”
59

Nixon was overconfident about the coming exchange with Kennedy and felt he could deal JFK one knockout blow. “Kennedy speaks over people’s heads . . . I’ll murder Kennedy,” Nixon proclaimed.