One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (2 page)

Nixon was realistic about America’s relations with them. “We are still dealing with governments that are basically hostile to us,” he said in May 1971, each word recorded on tape. “Those Chinese are out to whip me.” As for the Russians, he called their leaders gangsters. He predicted that mutual mistrust would prevail. “They particularly won’t believe me,” he said in the Oval Office that same spring. “You see, they really think I’m a tricky bastard. And they’re right.”

But Nixon wanted to give the American people what he had promised: an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. If he achieved that goal, he calculated that he could win reelection by a landslide so enormous that the landscape of American politics would be forever altered. And that was
why
Nixon went to China.

Nixon’s geostrategic gambits were a great success with the majority of the American people. “Nixon went to China” remains a catchphrase for politics as the art of the possible. If America’s cold warrior in chief could champion d
é
tente, easing tensions with the United States’ nuclear-armed adversaries, then
anything
was possible.

*   *   *

The political and social crises Nixon faced still confront the country today. He faced them with his genius for appearing sincere.

Equal justice under law, words engraved on the entrance to the Supreme Court, was an elusive ideal. The civil rights laws of the 1960s were barely four years old. Nixon was given to making racist remarks in private; he tried with all his might to dismantle the new federal agencies designed to enforce racial equality and social justice. He supported desegregation in principle, because the Supreme Court demanded it, but in practice, and in detail, he resisted it.

Nixon confided in private that he would always favor the economic interests of corporations over the environment. But when Americans realized they were ruining the air they breathed and the water they drank, they marched in great numbers in the name of saving the earth. In response, Congress passed the strongest environmental laws in American history. To his credit, Nixon signed them, along with rules and regulations to enforce them. Yet he believed, as he said, that “the environment is not an issue that’s worth a damn to us.”

Nixon said time and again that he really
didn’t
give a damn about the domestic issues of the day. He contended that the country could run itself without a president to watch over every picayune political problem. He embraced economic policies that were “in the long run … a catastrophe,” in the words of George P. Shultz, his treasury secretary. Unemployment and inflation nearly tripled during the Nixon years; this led to the longest recession in four decades.

His clashes with the courts left lasting wounds on the American body politic. He had an abiding contempt for Congress, and he treated most of his Cabinet with cool disdain. His conferences with congressional leaders and Cabinet members and the National Security Council were show-and-tell sessions, not the time or place for policies to take shape. These full-dress meetings were shadow plays. He had reached his life-or-death resolutions before they convened.

Nixon would appear to hear out his most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence chiefs. But he didn’t want advice or counsel from the Pentagon or the CIA, where there were men who had devoted their lives to Vietnam since Americans first left footprints in the mud back in 1954. The sword of war and the shield of national security were his alone to wield.

“Nixon never trusted anybody,” wrote Richard Helms, his CIA chieftain, one among the many leading figures of his administration who would face the prospect of prison for protecting the president from the consequences of his secrecy and deception. “He was constantly telling people that the Air Force in their bombings in Vietnam couldn’t hit their ass with their hand, the State Department was just a bunch of pinstriped cocktail-drinking diplomats, the Agency couldn’t come up with a winning victory in Vietnam.”

The president’s harangues went “on and on and on,” Helms remembered. Nixon ranted: “They are dumb, they are stupid, they can’t do this, and they can’t do that.” These same generals, spymasters, admirals, and ambassadors were America’s point men in an increasingly impossible war. Nixon’s lack of faith in them was immutable—and, ultimately, mutual.

This mistrust led him to deceive his Cabinet, the Congress, and the citizenry about the course of the war as he charted it. He saw himself as commander in chief not only of the army and the navy, as the Constitution says, but of all the American people. He was the leader of a worldwide battle where the future of the nation was at stake. His enemies abroad and his enemies at home, he felt, were conspiring to bring the United States to its knees.

Nixon believed to the marrow of his bones that the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Cubans were secretly financing the American antiwar movement, which could mobilize a million marchers at a month’s notice. These people were mainstream citizens, not mad bombers. Yet while Nixon was still getting his bearings as president, a small faction of the radical left, a few hundred people, broke away to form a revolutionary gang called the Weathermen. The marchers carried placards; the Weathermen preferred Molotov cocktails. They set off small bombs inside the Senate and the Pentagon; the FBI never caught the bombers. The Weathermen declared war on the government; Nixon called them terrorists. The response he demanded—a series of illegal break-ins and warrantless wiretaps—would result in the indictments of the leaders of the FBI, not the bombers they pursued.
*

Nixon insisted that the CIA and the FBI discover the sources of underground Communist support for American peace groups. Where was the evidence? His intelligence chiefs reported that none existed. Yet Nixon convinced himself that the capital was besieged by Americans who had formed enemy battalions financed by Moscow and Beijing and Hanoi and Havana. He saw the antiwar movement as the fifth column of international communism.

Washington became a combat zone when the radical left confronted Richard Nixon. Tear gas hurled by police against protesters wafted through the windows of the Justice Department headquarters, gagging Attorney General Mitchell. Army soldiers in full combat gear camped on the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, to protect the president from attack. The days of rage and fear passed for the protesters. But not for Nixon: he was scarred by a quarter century of political warfare against his enemies. He stayed on high alert.

*   *   *

Nixon saw the clashes he faced in Washington and around the world as a continuing constitutional crisis. He compared them to the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the law of habeas corpus, the ancient writ that allows anyone under arrest to appear before a court. Lincoln’s act was unconstitutional, but he believed—and Nixon agreed—that there were times when a president had to break the law to save the nation.

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” Nixon insisted. “Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation,” he said. “This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president.”

So no one could question Nixon’s actions in the name of national security—not the courts, not the Congress, and certainly no citizen. And Nixon defined national security as far more than the powers of America’s soldiers and spies to fight their enemies abroad. It included the powers of a secret police, the power to spy on American citizens, to break into their homes, to tap their telephones, to burglarize their offices, seeking evidence of sedition and treason. For Nixon, every American citizen and every elected official who opposed the war in Vietnam was an enemy, no less than a soldier of the army of North Vietnam, and he stood surrounded by foes left and right, the lone warrior.

Nixon believed that “it was ‘me against the world,’” said Robert Finch, who served him for many years as a campaign manager, Cabinet officer, and presidential counselor.

The president, the pillar of national security, was undermined by his own political insecurity. Against all evidence that he would win an overwhelming reelection, he compulsively spied on his political opponents and sought secret cash contributions to shore up his campaign coffers. Against the law, he paid hush money to the crew of washed-up CIA and FBI agents arrested for the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. Against all logic, he wiretapped his loyal aides and compulsively tape-recorded his own complicity in the concomitant crimes, conspiracies, and cover-ups that destroyed him.

What drove him to political suicide? That was one secret Nixon hoped he might take to the grave.

*   *   *

He is buried next to the tiny wooden house where he was raised in Yorba Linda, California, amid what once were citrus groves coaxed from the dry land roughly forty miles southeast of Los Angeles, enclosed on the grounds of his presidential memorial and library. He was born more than a century ago, in 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Fewer than three hundred souls then inhabited Yorba Linda, most barely scraping by on what little the land could provide. Today it is a well-to-do suburb with landscaped lawns; the median household income exceeds one hundred twenty thousand dollars. One thing is unchanged: a railroad line runs through the heart of town, and as a child, Richard Nixon heard a locomotive’s lonesome whistle, and he wondered if that train would carry him away and where it might take him.

“He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go,” Nixon said, in a rare invocation of his childhood memories. “It seems like an impossible dream.”

He and his four brothers were named after British kings by a pious mother and a hot-tempered father with a sixth-grade education who barely made a go of it as a greengrocer. “He had a lemon ranch,” Nixon remembered. “It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it.” Richard’s childhood was unhappy. Two of his siblings died young. He strove with quiet desperation to escape the depths of the Depression, to invent a new life outside the dusty and desolate confines of his youth.

Twenty years old when President Franklin D. Roosevelt first took office in 1933, Nixon put himself through the local college in Whittier. He tried out for the football team, but was consigned to the bench as a water boy. He won a full scholarship to Duke University’s law school by dint of hard work and ambition, but no great opportunity awaited him after his 1937 graduation. He sought positions at prestigious New York law firms, but received no offers. He applied to be an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but received no reply. Only one man, a twenty-seven-year-old assistant law professor at Duke named Kenneth Rush, saw the potential in Nixon. Rush advised his student to go back to California and get into politics.
*

Nixon suffered another series of humiliations after returning home. He established a small law practice in Whittier, but writing wills and contracts bored him. His political aspirations were diminished. “The last thing my mother, a devout Quaker, wanted me to do was to go into the warfare of politics,” Nixon recounted. (She dreamed he would become a missionary in Central America.) He courted the woman he would marry one day, Thelma “Pat” Ryan, but that day was long in coming.

She turned him down repeatedly when he asked for a first date; two years passed before his immediate attraction to her became mutual. They married in 1940 and their union lasted more than fifty years. Though she despised the darker side of politics, detested pressing the flesh on the campaign trail, and despaired at the pain her husband suffered in pursuit of power, she stayed with him in victory and defeat, stoic and steadfast in the solitary confinement of their marriage.

Commissioned as a navy lieutenant after Pearl Harbor, Richard Nixon served as a supply officer in the South Pacific, but never saw a moment of combat. When the war ended in 1945, he had no great prospects. Seven years later, he was on the way to the White House as the running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s greatest military hero.

*   *   *

Nixon’s rise has few parallels in American politics. A member of a local Republican committee who knew Nixon from college urged him to run for Congress. Nixon challenged a popular Democratic incumbent in the November 1946 election. The contest coincided with the rising dawn of a great fear: that the Soviet Union would challenge Christian civilization in the United States, its spies and subversives burrowing into American institutions from college campuses to the chambers of the State Department and the corridors of the Pentagon.

Nixon ran as one of the first cold warriors. He fiercely attacked his opponent as the tool of Communist-controlled labor unions. He won handily. So did Republicans across the country: the party took control of both the Senate and the House for the first time in two decades.

By the time Nixon arrived in Washington, the war on communism was on in full. He sought and won membership on the newly revitalized House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon and the committee’s Republican staff would be supplied, in secret, with information from the FBI. That information, once Nixon grasped its significance, would soon propel him to power.

On March 26, 1947, the committee’s members heard rare public testimony from the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who already had run the Bureau for twenty-three years. He called upon them to summon “the zeal, the fervor, the persistence, and the industry to learn about this menace of Red fascism,” and to beware “the liberal and the progressive who have been hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists.”

Nixon took these words as his political credo. He and Hoover spoke one on one at the hearing’s conclusion. They had an instant and instinctive meeting of the minds. The director urged Nixon to be on the lookout for Communist infiltration of the American government. Heeding Hoover, Nixon soon rose to nationwide fame hunting traitors and spies. Thus began an alliance that would last a quarter century. Nixon became a leading figure in the Cold War’s culture of espionage and counterespionage, where bugging, break-ins, and wiretaps without warrants were weapons of political warfare. As president, Nixon would call Hoover “my closest friend in all of political life.”