Nixon's Secret (33 page)

Finch was like “Nixon’s son,” according to vice presidential assistant Charles McWhorter.
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Finch ran for lieutenant governor of California in 1966 and won running slightly ahead of Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s circle never trusted Finch, viewing him as Nixon’s plant within the Reagan administration. Finch later tried an unsuccessful US Senate race, and in 1968 Nixon actually offered the Republican vice presidential nomination to Finch, ultimately passing over Congressman George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor John Volpe to settle on Spiro Agnew.

Finch played a role in Nixon’s 1968 bid but was mostly a spokesman for the campaign, managed by Nixon’s law partner John Mitchell. Nixon offered Finch his choice of cabinet jobs and wanted his fellow Californian to take Housing and Urban Development while also serving with the title of senior advisor to the president. Finch instead chose Heath, Education, and Welfare (HEW), where he advocated aggressive desegregation of the public schools. This brought him into conflict with Mitchell, who believed in a “go slow” approach he believed was less likely to result in violence. Finch also selected HEW liberals out of step with the Nixon administration as his top appointees. This further inflamed Mitchell and Nixon supporters on the right. Lyndon Johnson’s longtime right-hand man, Bobby Baker, recognized the Nixon blunder. “The biggest, dumbest mistake Richard Nixon ever made was not making Bob Finch his chief of staff in the White House,” said Baker. “The Washington media didn’t like Nixon, but they liked Finch; he would have kept Nixon from those silly, dictatorial things. It just seemed natural to me—and to other politicians—for Nixon, who was an introvert, to have a warm, friendly guy named Bob Finch. But he put him in the worst department in town—HEW.”
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Finch suffered a nervous breakdown while at HEW, largely because of the turbulent political cross currents and attacks from the Republican right. Finch was then moved to the White House as a “counselor to the president” and recovered sufficiently to make his own bid for the US Senate for California in 1976.

Klein, a veteran California newsman, had long been Nixon’s spokesman. In 1946, Klein signed on as a press agent for Nixon’s campaign for California’s twelfth congressional district seat and in 1950 handled press for Nixon’s California US Senate campaign. Klein was easygoing and well-liked among the press corps, even those with a low opinion of Nixon.

Klein was ultimately warehoused with the undefined title of communications director and replaced with the more malleable Ron Ziegler, a former Disney World tour guide. Ziegler had worked as Klein’s deputy in the 1962 campaign, recruited by Nixon’s ultimate White House chief of staff, the brush-cut and briskly efficient H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Haldeman had managed the disastrous 1962 California run and returned to run the show only after Nixon had locked up the 1968 nomination.

Klein was also a pivotal figure in the career of former San Diego Charger quarterback Jack Kemp. He arranged an off-season internship for Kemp in the office of California Governor Ronald Reagan. Kemp, a conservative, moved to the Buffalo Bills, ran for and won election to Congress in the Buffalo suburbs in 1970, and provided crucial intellectual support for Reagan’s 1980 campaign for president. Kemp ran for president himself in 1988, served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and was selected as the vice presidential nominee by Senator Bob Dole in 1996. Klein was a behind-the-scenes adviser to Kemp until the latter’s death in 2009.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and White House speechwriter William Safire remembered Klein’s “routine refusal to carry out these ukases [Nixon’s more strident orders to freeze out reporters critical of Nixon] are why Old Hand Klein was not in close, and why he emerged from the ruins [of Watergate] with his reputation intact.”
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Indeed, in his post–White House years, Klein returned to professional journalism as respected editor-in-chief of the
San Diego Union
, where he retired in 2003.
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Before the arrival of the Pretorian guard derided in the media as the “Berlin Wall”—Haldeman and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrichman—Nixon had jettisoned his 1960 advisors like Klein and Finch in favor of a new team known as “the Bright Young Men.”

“The Bright Young Men” were largely recruited by Nixon’s New York law partner Leonard Garment. Nixon carefully assembled this extraordinarily balanced team of young men, with an average age of thirty-eight, who helped him engineer the greatest comeback in American political history. Garment was Nixon’s unlikely choice to help him assemble the new team to navigate the waters of a changing Republican Party. With their help, Nixon reinvented himself, paced himself carefully, and assembled a new voter coalition built on traditional Republicans and former Democrats no longer comfortable in their party. In the process, they rethought the entire process of marketing and advertising to affect public opinion. They were the first to use television in a way that still dominates presidential politics today.

A litigator at the Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander Law Firm at 20 Broad Street, Garment was a liberal Jewish Democrat who voted for John Kennedy in 1960. Garment had the soul of an artist, and, while he quickly advanced to the head of his class at Brooklyn Law School, he played part-time clarinet and tenor sax with the Woody Herman and Henry Jerome orchestras.
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His views were diametrically opposed to those of Nixon, although he wasn’t terribly political. Garment was, however, intrigued at the idea of putting a two-time loser in the White House. He had a flair for showbiz, the dramatic, and the law. Richard Nixon speechwriter Richard Whalen remembered him as clever and quick-witted, saying, “The game was the thing,” for Garment.
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“He wore a slightly perplexed and harried expression,” Whalen wrote. “Restless, quick-moving, and faster-talking, he did not look like a veteran of Wall Street litigation . . . An aura of show biz still clung to him and crept into his conversation, along with the jargon of his new concerns—polling, media and advertising. The outgoing Garment was the organization’s chief talent scout, recruiter, and promoter, as well as self-appointed liaison man between Nixon and alien worlds. It was Garment who sat up all night in his kitchen rapping with people like Dick Gregory.”
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Despite their personality and cultural differences, the former jazz musician and the son of a grocer from Yorba Linda, Nixon and Garment became close. On one particular trip to Miami in 1965, Nixon and Garment were scheduled to spend the night in a newly finished home. Nixon suspected the developers of the real estate project had booked him there as a publicity stunt, so he quickly ordered the driver to turn back forty miles in the opposite direction to the home of Nixon’s friend, businessman Elmer Bobst. The gates were locked at the Bobst home. Still, Nixon instructed his driver to return in the morning, and he turned to Garment and said, “Come on, Garment. It’s over the wall we go.”
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“So over we went, two New York lawyers, briefcases and all,” Garment recalled. “We were able to get into the pool house, which had twin beds.”
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“There Nixon was, with his big head sticking over the covers,” Garment continued. “The lights were off, but he couldn’t sleep—he never could—and he just kept talking. He talked for what must have been an hour, sounding sad and determined, about the things that meant a lot to him. If he couldn’t live in politics, he said, how was he to live? We had been talking about him running for president. And he said if he couldn’t play a real role, on that front or otherwise, he’d be dead very soon.”
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When Nixon hit the road in 1966, fighting his chronic insomnia, he would phone Garment late at night after a combination of sleeping pills and a couple of cocktails. Nixon shared his ambitions with Garment, even his dreams and his worries. “I was the disembodied presence to whom Nixon could unload his daily deposit of anxieties until he was carried away by alcohol, sedation, and exhaustion into the Land of Nod,” recalled Garment. “. . . cries and whispers . . . I worried over these calls.”
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Among his most important finds, Garment recruited John Sears, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer from Upstate New York and a shrewd, wisecracking attorney at the Nixon law firm Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander.

Len Garment later recalled his fortunate acquisition of Sears:

I recruited nuts-and-bolts political operators. In this endeavor, one of my greatest small claims to fame was bringing Nixon the young John Sears. Actually, Sears just turned up at my office one day in 1964. He had attended Notre Dame University and Georgetown Law School. His early ambition had been to become a psychiatrist; but during his college years he entered politics, as a partisan of John F. Kennedy. When I met Sears, he was clerking for Judge Adrian Burke of the New York court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, and making the rounds of Manhattan law firms looking for a post-clerkship job. He clearly wanted a place where he could not just practice law but engage in politics as well.

Then barely twenty-five, Sears was very good looking—tanned, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, glistening like a baby seal. He was also poised and strikingly articulate, one of those young men who seem to know too much for their age. He was impressive enough in that first meeting so that even before it was over, the next step seemed obvious. “Let me introduce you to Mr. Nixon, John.” They talked. When Sears and I left Nixon’s office, Sears worried about whether he had made a god impression. But shortly afterwards, the candidate phoned me to say, “Get me Sears.”
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Sears became a Nixon favorite and disciple. At the same time, he recognized Nixon’s occasional excesses and misjudgments and worked to minimize them. Sears called Nixon “Milhous” behind his back. He often quoted him to illustrate a point he agreed with or to underscore some of Nixon’s more amusing miscalculations. “Milhous” gave him a series of political assignments.

Sears was also a favorite of Rose Mary Woods and close to Pat Buchanan, having ridden shotgun with him in Nixon’s 1966 campaigning. He remained close to both of them long after the 1968 campaign and through Rose, Sears also became a friend of former New York City policeman Jack Caulfield. Approached by the Nixon White House, Caulfield was hired as an investigator for White House counsel John Ehrlichman. When Caulfield was called before the Senate Watergate Committee as a witness, who should appear with him as an attorney but John P. Sears! By that time he’d been purged from the Nixon White House by a jealous John Mitchell in an alliance with Bob Haldeman.

Nixon was clearly a father figure to Sears, who studied Nixon’s every move and his long political pronouncements in the same way I did twenty years later. Sears grew to be like a son to Nixon, but it wasn’t about small-bore politics, delegates, and county chairman and such. Nixon taught Sears how to handle
men.
It is not coincidental that Sears thought of becoming a psychiatrist before switching to a future as an attorney and political strategist.

Nixon also taught Sears the game, when to act, when to do nothing, when to make decisions. While Nixon gave lip service to big ideas, he executed on them only in governing, not in the 1968 campaign.

Sears recruited me as the director of Youth for Reagan. Four years later, he hired me to handle New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut as a regional political director for Reagan’s 1980 campaign. His detailed instructions to me about how exactly to handle specific Italian-American party leaders, in manner and tone, I could see, were the lessons he learned from Nixon. Sears taught me that politics was about ideas and taking risks. Those who are given to bold plays and high risk in the advancement of new ideas are those who win. Those who aren’t, don’t.

“Politics is motion,” Sears convinced me. “The key to moving is to be interesting to the voters,” the introverted Irishman taught me. “A politician has to have something interesting to say or he will bore the voters, who will look elsewhere.” Sears had a cool and aloof manner when he tossed off these maxims learned at the knee of Tricky Dick.

“Politics is about being interesting, and not boring the voters. It’s about making news. Being bold. Being interesting. The worst thing you can do in politics is trying to sit on a lead or freeze the ball,” Sears said. “If you are not gaining votes, you are losing votes. Sitting on a lead ultimately bores the voters and they begin to look elsewhere.” Nixon himself would tell me, “The only thing worse than being wrong in politics is being boring.” Sears was enough of a realist to point out that Nixon violated his own dictum in 1968 and came perilously close to losing as late momentum and interest shifted to his opponent Hubert Humphrey. By late in the 1968 campaign, Nixon aide Patrick J. Buchanan said, “Nixon was just giving the same speech day in and day out. He kept up with the same game plan and sort of froze the ball and coasted.”
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In Ronald Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Sears was resolute not to repeat Nixon’s “near mistake.” Sears believed it was essential that a campaign create the
perception
of motion and momentum. He understood the vital role that good relationships with reporters could play in creating this perception. Sears also understood why it was essential both to hold and maximize your base while maintaining the flexibility to win Independents and particularly Democrats in view of the overwhelming Democratic Party registration edge in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

“If your base isn’t slightly pissed off, you’re doing something wrong,” Nixon later told me. “You can’t win without your base, and you can’t win with just your base.”

It was also Sears who taught me to think outside the box. When it came to politics, as Aristotle Onassis said of business, “The only rule is, there are no rules.” Sears historic setup of George Bush in Nashua New Hampshire in 1980 stands out as the best tale of Sears, cunning. “I know Bush is an asshole,” Sears told me, “and now we just have to show people.” As we shall see, Sears engineered Bush’s petulant meltdown on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.