Being Nixon: A Man Divided
It is the last Sunday of the month meaning it’s time for another president, making this weeks book Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas.
Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, CA to Francis A And Hannah Milhous Nixon. His mother was a Quaker and his father converted to Quakerism so Nixon was raised a Quaker. He had four brothers, older brother Harold, and three younger brother, Donald, Arthur, and Edward. Harold was the favorite son of the family and Nixon would forever chase the approval that his parents naturally lavished on Harold.
Arthur would die in 1925, cause of death unknown, but this would shake the family, but what really set the family back was when Harold, oldest son, golden child, and family favorite, would die of tuberculosis on March 7, 1933. Harold had contracted TB in Massachusetts where he was in school. By the time Nixon was ready for college, there was no money due to the depression, and he attended local Whittier college for his bachelors degree.
He had a high school girlfriend Ola Florence and thought he might marry her after college, but she rejected his suit, at least in part because he started behaving oddly…like, think of how shy nerdy kids think an alpha male behaves. He started doing that, and Ola was not impressed. When he asked her to marry him, she said no and within a year had married someone else.
This worked out ok as he then met Pat Ryan when they were both auditioning for parts in a play in 1937. Nixon was not a natural showman, but he found theater as a way to kind of force himself out of his natural shyness. I went the rout of customer service jobs, but to each their own, and Nixon did a bit in a play, falling in love with Pat. She was reticent for her part but his devotion to her won her over and the couple married on June 21, 1940.
Pat, for her part, always had faith in Nixon. When asked early on what she saw in him, she told the asker that one day, he’d be president. So she knew her suitor and then husband, had ambitions to do great things. The couple had two daughters, Tricia and Julie.
Nixon did serve in the US Navy during WWII, which is not an obvious choice since he was prone to seasickness. But serve he did and was honorably discharged, and in September 1945 he was approached to be a candidate on the Republican ticket in 1946 for Congressman. Which offer he accepted. And he really was a natural politician, able to read the political winds and shift in a moment. He was not above dirty politics…clearly….but he was generally smart in how he played it. During one of his first debates for Congressman against incumbent Jerry Voorhis, one of the democrats in the audience asked Nixon about false charges he had made that Voorhis was endorsed by the CIO-PAC. Nixon provided a brochure from NC-PAC endorsing Voorhis. Voorhis kind of spluttered and tried to argue that NC-PAC is not CIO-PAC and Nixon just rattled off the list of directors for both PAC’s, which happened to be the same list. So things like that, he was very well versed in politics, he studied and did his homework so that he was always prepared.
He was congressman from 1947 to 1950 when he made the leap to Senator after beating incumbent Sheridan Downey after demonstrating ties she had to Communism. Now, this was at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and while Nixon could spout ample talking points against communism, he really wasn’t a particular fan of McCarthy and had no problem assisting with McCarthy’s eventual downfall. Having said all that, it was Nixon’s pursuit of and the fact he was correct about Alger Hiss that gave his claim of Downey’s communistic leanings weight.
So lets talk about Alger Hiss. In brief, Hiss was a government attorney under FDR and eventually became an assistant in the State Department. Somewhere in there, he definitely became a communist spy, I believe for Russia. All of this came out when Whittaker Chambers, who had been a communist party member, testified before the House Un-american Activities committee that Hiss had been a party member.
Hiss tried to claim he did not even know Chambers and on the surface, this denial stuck. However, Nixon, with his incredible political radar, sensed Chambers was correct and being truthful, and stuck with it. Chambers testimony was such, providing such specific details about Hiss, that it became quite clear that Chambers was correct, Hiss had lied, and there was a communist spy in the State Department by the name of Alger Hiss. Hiss was eventually imprisoned for perjury. Why not espionage? The statute of limitations had run out. But Nixon had uncovered the truth, and he would ride that success all the way to the Vice-Presidency.
He was senator from his swearing in on December 1, 1950 until he resigned January 1, 1953 in preparation of stepping up as Eisenhower’s vice-president. Now, the road to VP was not all smooth sailing, and there were allegations that Nixon had illicit campaign funds and had accepted gifts illegally. Eisenhower would not step up and defend Nixon and Nixon had to go on national television and produced his Checkers speech, where in he denied everything except accepting the gift of a dog, who his youngest had named Checkers, and he would not be returning the dog. This speech won public acclaim and he was welcome back to the Eisenhower ticket, which of course went on to win, twice.
And then it was Nixon’s turn to run as president, and his first debate with Kennedy, which I believe was the first televised Presidential debate, was catastrophic. The other three Nixon held his own, but the only one people remember is the first one, where Nixon looks like he’s falling apart at the seams, and Kennedy comes across as calm, cool, and collected.
Nixon HATED losing the presidential race, and retired in humiliation to California first, where he ran for governor in 1962, then to New York after he lost the gubernatorial race in 1962. And he was working for a law firm in New York when he was put up to run as president in 1968. And he won in a painfully close race, 43.4 percent to opponent Hubert Humphrey’s 42.7 percent. Running on a third party ticket was George Wallace who picked up 13.5 percent of the vote. But Nixon was in and the presidency began.
Now, he actually wasn’t a bad president. He immediately began reducing troops in Vietnam from 500,000 to less than 70,000, and ultimately those would all come home, including all POW’s, before Nixon would leave the White House. He appointed Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State and then directed Kissinger to open China. Nixon found the intermediary needed to open China, Pakistan President General Yahya Kahn and under Nixon’s guidance, Kissinger arranged for the first visit by a Western leader to the Celestial Kingdom in 40 years. And then, he capped it by being the first president to visit Moscow ever. All the other presidents, from FDR through Johnson, had met with the leaders of Russia, but not on Russia’s home terf.
All of this worked together to land Nixon’s reelection in 1972 by an absolute landslide, 47,169,841 to George McGovern’s 29,172,767, Nixon swept every state but Massachusetts and DC, won the Catholic vote, and 35% of Democrats voted for him. It was a massacre. Yet Nixon was not happy with his reelection. Why? Well….in a word….Watergate.
Now, let me be clear here…it was not guilty conscience over Watergate. It’s that he knew the vultures were circling over his about to be dead political corpse.
When discussing Watergate, Thomas does a masterful job explaining what Nixon did and did not know, when he knew it, and how the entire house of cards came falling down. And the whole thing starts several years BEFORE the absolutely inept break in of the DNC headquarters in the Watergate hotel on June 17, 1972.
Watergate begins with The Plumbers….so called because Nixon wanted to stop leaks to the press, and on advice of Nixon’s favorite Charles”Chuck” Colson, who was an ex-Marine and a master of bloc politics. Colson was an ultimate yes man, who never said no to any order Nixon gave. This is in direct contrast to Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, who had developed a keen ear for knowing when Nixon actually meant something, and when he was just ranting and spouting off, and what he said could be safely ignored until Nixon forgot about it. Nixon NEEDED Haldeman. But he liked Colson’s ability to get things done, even if those things should maybe NOT be done.
I believe it was Colson who hired G Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, or at least recommended them to work for the Department of Dirty Tricks, which was Nixon’s way of trying to stay ahead of the dirty tricks he knew Democrats would play during election years. And he knew they would, because Republicans did. It was an unspoken gentleman’s agreement, where both sides would play the same garbage politics until the election, then quietly pretend like nothing happened and acknowledge they were all really friends once back in DC. This is still ongoing today, for the record. If you listened to Thomas Massie’s interview on Tucker Carlson back in June of this year, he says point blank he gets along really well with AOC and the rest of the “squad” because THEY WORK TOGETHER. They say one thing for the cameras so their constituents believe the congress critters are doing their jobs, then actually get along quite well in reality.
So, Nixon really did have a persecution complex, and he wanted the plumbers to stop the leaks, and to dig up dirt on his enemies. So to that end, through Colson, Liddy and Hunt were brought on board. And in January 1972, Liddy brought plans to the Committee for the re-election of the president through president’s Aide John Ehrlichman, who presented everything to CRP’s chairman Jeb Magruder, attorney general John Mithcell, and presidential counsel John Dean. The plan had all sorts of illegal activities, from raiding the psychiatrist who saw key Democrats, to illegal wiretaps, to yes, burglarizing the DNC headquarters at Watergate.
And I’m not gonna lie, Liddy and Hunt were so comically inept that I absolutely understand the conspiracy theories that have popped up in favor of this being a put up job to get Nixon out of the White House. For example, the actual break in that broke the story open, the one AT Watergate, they got caught because once the burglars entered the DNC suite, they had to make sure the door didn’t lock behind them. And so they put a piece of tape over the lock. Which is fine. Except instead of placing the tape vertically over the lock like this….they wrapped the lock horizontally like this. And when security were doing their rounds, they saw the tape on the outside of the door and thought….Wait a mo…That doesn’t look right! Police were called, arrests were made, and at first, it was a quiet story that died down pretty quickly. Remember, all of this was JUNE 1972. The election was still five months out, and if the full impact of what had happened had been known, Nixon would not have even been nominated.
But the owner of the Washington Post. And I can’t remember her name but it’s in here…really disliked Nixon. And she refused to let this story die. And so she followed the arrests and trials of the five burglars, as well as Liddy and Hunt. And all were convicted. But where things really took an interesting turn is with the bail hearing on February 2, 1973, when the Federal District Court Judge John Sirica “announced that he did not believe the testimony given by the government’s witnesses, all of whom had denied any involvement by White House higher-ups. From the bench, Judge Sirica stated his hope that the coming Senate investigation would “get to the bottom” of Watergate.”
What’s interesting about this is that in 1970, Judge Sirica had presided over the swearing in of Securities and Exchange Commissioner William Casey. And after the ceremony, Sirica had approached Nixon, politely introduced himself as a supporter from the Eisenhower runs for president, and said he would like to be on the court of appeals. Nixon brushed him off. So that chicken came home to roost in full.
Over the next year, from Nixon’s second swearing in on January 20, 1973, things got worse and worse for Nixon. The senate opened their investigation, impeachment was mentioned more frequently, and Nixon had to fire all of his closest staffers, including chief of staff Haldeman and aide Ehrlichman. Attorney general Mitchell, counselor Hunt…everyone was called in and in some cases charged.
The leak who reported Woodward and Bernstein, deep throat, was the number two man at the FBI Mark Felt, who wanted the number one spot. Which would never happen after being discovered as a government leak, no one would trust him.
And the hits kept coming, as in December 1973, VP Spiro Agnew, who had been Nixon’s VP since the beginning, was forced to step down on completely unrelated charges of tax evasion, bribery… I feel like there were several charges, to which Agnew eventually pled no contest to felony tax evasion for 1967, to which he paid a $10,000 fine and was sentenced to three years unsupervised probation. And while none of this had anything to do with Watergate, it absolutely contributed to Nixon’s reputation of having the most corrupt presidency ever. So far. 2024 election year is shaping up to be interesting, so who knows what’s coming down the pipe at us.
So Agnew resigned, and Nixon needed to find another VP, which was actually a first. We’d had VP’s die in office before and none were ever replaced. And I mean that literally. VP Dies, the president just keeps on keeping on, and the nation has no idea what happens next. This was the norm up until the passage of the 25th Amendment, which reads In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President….prior to this, it was just assumed the VP became President on President’s inability to do the job, an assumption put in place way back when William Henry Harrison became the first to die in office and John Tyler just….started acting Presidential. So the 25th Amendment became law on February 10, 1967, which meant Nixon was legally required to locate a VP. So Nixon picked the most likely to be immediately accepted and confirmed person, minority house leader Gerald Ford.
Nixon did ultimately release transcripts of the White House recordings, all except the infamous 18 minutes, which were mysteriously erased. And make no mistake, those 18 minutes HAD to have been deliberately erased. Why do we know that? Well, Kennedy is actually the first one to have wired the Oval Office for recording, and Kennedy had it set to record only on demand. LBJ kept that up, you had to press a button to record. But Nixon was notoriously clumsy and technically inept. So while he initially had the recording devices removed, he eventually had them reinstalled but voice activated. So we know they recorded, because as soon as someone spoke, they recorded. Which means any “lost” transcripts, were lost on purpose.
And just in time too, since barely eight months later, as all of Nixon’s people from the Department of Dirty Tricks were subpoenaed and looking to save their own necks from lengthy jail sentences, Nixon knew impeachment was imminent, and on the night of August 8, 1974, he made a nationwide television broadcast announcing that he no longer had political support and for the good of the nation he was stepping down and famously said to a watching world “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”
Ford, wanting to avoid splitting the nation apart, issued a pardon. But, and this is something most people are not aware of, but to accept a presidential pardon, you are legally required to admit to wrong doing. And while it was quietly done, Nixon did accept the pardon, and retire.
There is obviously much more that goes in to this, and Watergate is one of those defining incidents in American history that have entire books written about it, which I kind of want to find a good one and get more details, because just what Thomas included in this book is embarrassingly inept. And not just the tape on the door thing, but like Liddy and Hunt are outstanding examples of incompetence talking a big game with the inability to deliver. The two of them seem like good life lessons on how bureaucracy will kick problem children down the road, rather than firing incompetent people.
Thomas does a remarkable job capturing the differences between Nixon’s public and very private personas. He makes Nixon…relatable. Most people, on some level or another, have a hard time in new situations. He covers Nixon’s shyness and how he overcame that. While there are lots of examples of Nixon seeming to be cold towards Pat and their marriage not being Picture Perfect, Thomas shows how looks can be deceiving. The Kennedy’s had a picture perfect marriage and it was far from happy. Nixon actually adored Pat, he just disliked public displays of affection. And quite possibly the smartest thing he ever did, and to me this actually speaks more to his guilt than anything, is he had Chief of Staff Haldeman put up barriers limiting Pat’s access to him, as well as his daughters access. This tells me he wanted to keep his family safe and separate from the dirty deeds he was involved in. If they can’t just come into the oval office whenever they want, they can’t inadvertently overhear something they shouldn’t.
On the other hand, it speaks absolute volumes about the man, in the very best way, that his daughters and sons in law, spouse, family, were absolutely loyal to him. They never broke ranks, they absolutely supported Nixon, regardless of what he was going through. So no matter how busy he was, he made enough time for his children and wife that they never felt neglected, or that he had made his bed to lay in.
After the White House, the Nixon’s moved to New York, then Jersey, then I think back to New York. And Nixon actually found a bit of a second wind as the wise man on campus, offering guidance to sitting presidents. Ford declined, because he had already expended any political capital he had by pardoning Nixon, he didn’t need the country thinking Nixon was still running things behind the scenes. Carter declined. But Reagan was willing to talk to Nixon. Bush not so much. But the surprising star pupil of Nixon’s wisdom on foreign affairs was Bill Clinton. It seems like what Clinton learned several political tricks from Nixon, not least of which, in Nixon’s own words, was Burn the damn tapes.
Pat Nixon, in retirement, suffered at least one stroke, Wikipedia reports two, but she recovered from both, before being diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992 and dying of cancer on June 22, 1993. Nixon was basically lost without Pat, and suffered a stroke himself in April 1994, dying about four days later. Among those who spoke at his funeral were Henry Kissinger, and sitting president Bill Clinton.
This book was quite good, and I honestly wasn’t sure I would finish it in a week. I mean, it’s only 536 pages, but the books on the presidents require a bit more brain power and focus, and so I wasn’t sure I could manage, especially when I still had 200 pages to read as of yesterday, which was Saturday. But it was easy to knock out those 200 pages yesterday, because Thomas is very good at laying out his narrative in an easy to follow and easy to digest format.
Nixon did accomplish amazing things, opening up China and Russia, ending the war in Vietnam, all of which made him adored in an America which was tired of the fear that had been perpetuated during the 1950’s and 60’s. Until, of course, Watergate happened. And that quickly, you can lose your reputation, and any good will you had earned up til then.
