The Ends of Power 14

I finished H.R. Haldeman’s (and Joseph DiMona’s) The Ends of Power.  In this post, I’d like to highlight something that Haldeman says in the book’s afterword.  This afterword appeared in a later edition of the book, after a number of people had offered their thoughts on The Ends of Power.

On page 413, Haldeman states the following:

“My own viewpoint has changed from that of more than a year ago when I started work on this book, shortly after the Nixon-Frost TV interviews.  Despite the popular mythology, I was neither enraged by those interviews nor did I ‘turn against President Nixon’ after seeing them…Unlike my reaction after the TV interviews last year, I now feel that President Nixon has provided many of the answers I had hoped for and felt were missing.”

I often got the same impression in reading The Ends of Power as those who bought into what Haldeman calls “the popular mythology”: that Haldeman was upset by what Nixon was saying in the Frost interviews.  Sure, there was one place in the book where Haldeman tries to be a good soldier, where he says that he himself was dispensable, for the important person was the President of the United States.  But I detected that Haldeman was upset because he believed that Nixon in the Frost interviews was blaming Haldeman and John Ehrlichman for the coverup, to save his own reputation.  I wouldn’t characterize The Ends of Power as thoroughly bitter against Nixon, however, for it does say positive things about him.

What puzzled me about Haldeman’s characterization of Nixon’s comments in the Frost interviews was that it did not seem to me that Nixon’s side of the story blamed the cover-up (if that’s the right word) solely on Haldeman and Ehrlichman.  By “Nixon’s side of the story,” I mean what Nixon said in his memoirs.  What Haldeman said in The Ends of Power did not strike me as dramatically different from what Nixon said in his memoirs: that Nixon wanted the CIA to limit the FBI’s investigation into Watergate.  According to Nixon in his memoirs, Nixon thought that he had a national security (rather than a political) reason for that, but, when he listened to the tape of his consideration of the idea, he was not so sure.  Haldeman is a bit more brazen in saying that Nixon was in on the cover-up from the beginning, and yet Haldeman acknowledges that Nixon may not have seen it as a cover-up.  Both slightly differ in their account, yet they’re still telling the same basic story (at least about the contents of the “smoking gun” tape).  Haldeman’s praise of Nixon’s account in the presidential memoirs redresses my confusion.

The Final Days 3

On page 104 of The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein say:

"Nixon's inability to handle more than one drink was well known to his intimates.  During campaigns he had wisely chosen not to touch alcohol.  But now, on too many afternoons, he started sipping in his office with [his friend Bebe] Rebozo.  On the mornings after, the President arrived in his office late, sometimes not until noon.  [Chief of Staff Alexander] Haig was worried that the press would learn about it, and he ordered that the time the President left his residence to go to work no longer be recorded."

If this is accurate, then I can identify with Nixon here: he was going through a hard time, and he tried to self-medicate by drinking alcohol with his friend.  But Woodward and Bernstein say that there was a downside to this: that drinking was hindering Nixon from doing his job.  Now, people may debate about whether or not Nixon was hindered in doing his job during Watergate.  Nixon argues that he was accomplishing stuff, especially in the field of foreign policy, and that his political critics were upset about this.  Anthony Summers in The Arrogance of Power, by contrast, argues that Nixon was dropping the ball, on some things.

During the time when I was drinking, I got things done.  I read a lot, especially when I was eating dinner and sipping my beers.  I wrote papers.  But there were times when I drank, and I would wake up late, with a hangover.  Ever since I quit drinking, I don't have to put up with that.  And that makes me happy.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 12

On page 520 of Nixon: A Life, Jonathan Aitken talks about an incident that occurred in the final days of Richard Nixon's Presidency:

"Nixon might have been more hurt had he known how another senior figure in his administration, the Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, was behaving in the final days.  In what would surely win first prize in a competition for the wildest over-reaction of Watergate, Schlesinger somehow got the thought into his head that Nixon was planning a military coup to avert his own resignation.  This weird notion caused Schlesinger to issue an order to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that no alert or major movement of US forces would take place without his countersignature as Defense Secretary.  Somewhat to the embarrassment of the Joint Chiefs, the Schlesinger Protectorate, created by this order, lasted for three days.  'Incredible' was Nixon's reaction when he later learned about it."

The reason that this stood out to me is that Anthony Summers discusses the same event on pages 478-481 of his anti-Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.  Only Summers depicts the event differently from Aitken.  Aitken wonders how in the world Schlesinger could have gotten the idea that Nixon would plan a military coup, but Summers goes into that.  According to Summers, there was concern among a number of people in the government about what might happen if Nixon were not willing to let go of power, based on what some considered to be paranoid ramblings on Nixon's part.  Schlesinger acted in response to this, according to Summers, and Summers quotes the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Brown, as saying, "I think the secretary had a responsibility to raise these sorts of matters."

Summers closes his telling of this story with, "Mercifully, nothing untoward happened."

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 6

A controversial issue that dogged Richard Nixon in his 1960 and 1962 political campaigns was a loan that one of magnate Howard Hughes' companies made to Nixon's brother, Donald.  The loan was so that Donald could expand his business, and Nixon's mother, Hannah, put up a piece of her property as collateral.  There were allegations that Nixon as Vice-President gave Howard Hughes governmental or political favors in exchange for the Hughes Tool Company's loan to Donald.

Aitken does not believe that Nixon gave Hughes any governmental or political favors, even though Aitken does acknowledge that Hughes may have been making the loan in order to get more influence with Vice-President Nixon.  Aitken notes that Attorney General Robert Kennedy's investigation into the matter uncovered no misdeeds on the part of the Nixons.  Aitken also states that the notion that Hughes gave Donald the loan in exchange for favors from the government presumes that Vice-President Nixon had more power over certain government offices than he had.  Aitken observes that the affair turned out to be a catastrophe, since Donald failed in his businesses, so "the resulting embarrassment all round destroyed any prospects for influence peddling" (page 287).  Moreover, Aitken appears to buy Richard Nixon's story that he (Richard Nixon) was surprised by the loan and encouraged Donald (to no avail) to give back the money.

Stephen Ambrose also gives Nixon the benefit of a doubt.  As I said in this post about volume 1 of Ambrose's biography of Nixon: "Another scandal concerned Nixon’s brother Donald, who received money from business magnate Howard Hughes when his (meaning Donald’s) restaurant was in trouble.  There was speculation that Hughes was doing this to get governmental favors from Richard Nixon when he was Vice-President, but Ambrose, as he considers Eisenhower Administration documents, sees no evidence for this."

I have read other books that say differently.  I think particularly of the works of Fawn Brodie, Anthony Summers, and Don Fulsom.  Brodie refers to the account of Noah Dietrich, who was the executive Vice-President of the Hughes Tool Company, and who related that Richard Nixon requested help from Hughes through Washington lobbyist Frank Waters.  Dietrich told his story after he had become estranged from Howard Hughes.

Brodie states that the loan was made in a roundabout way to hide Howard Hughes' name: it went from Dietrich to a Canadian branch of the Hughes Tool Company to Waters, whose name would be on the loan, and then the check was "made out to Hannah Nixon", who "then loaned $165,000 to Donald and used the remaining $40,000 to pay off a loan she had made jointly with him" (page 437 of Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character).

Brodie, Summers, and Fulsom all contend that Hughes may have gotten a governmental favor in return for the loan.  The Internal Revenue Service had been denying Howard Hughes' request that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute be tax exempt, but the IRS changed its mind a few months after Donald Nixon received the loan.  Fulsom's telling of the story calls the Howard Hughes Medical Institute "Hughes's then shady 'medical institute'" (page 87 of Nixon's Darkest Secrets).

Fulsom actually goes a step farther than Brodie.  Fulsom refers to people who claim that the money didn't even go to Donald, but rather to Richard.  One of these people was C. Arnholt Smith, a friend of Nixon, and the other was "veteran California reporter Frank McCullough" (page 162).  Smith said that he thought the loan was intended to help Richard Nixon when Nixon was "a relatively poor man" (Smith's words, quoted on page 162), and Fulsom notes that Nixon soon thereafter put down $75,000 on a new house in Washington, D.C., before he sold his "old home" (page 162).  And McCullough said that Hughes himself told him that the money was for Richard, not Donald, and that it had a political intent.  Incidentally, this sort of accusation was around in 1962, for Nixon accused his opponents of claiming that he himself received some of the money from the Hughes loan.

At the same time, Fulsom earlier in the book states that Donald was an annoyance to Nixon on account of Donald's mischief, such that Nixon as President "bugged Don's phones and put a full-time Secret Service tail on him" (page 88).  Does Fulsom see the Hughes loan as an example of such embarrassing mischief, only later in the book to entertain another possibility (that the loan was for Richard, not Donald)?

One other issue that I want to mention: What about the land that Hannah Nixon put up as collateral?  Brodie calls it a "vacant lot" (page 435), whereas Richard depicted Hannah as sacrificing a piece of lucrative property, as putting up "practically everything she had" (Nixon's words, quoted on page 300 of Aitken).  Obviously, Richard puts Hannah in more of a sympathetic light!

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 3

For my post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, I'd like to comment on Aitken's treatment of Richard Nixon's 1946 congressional campaign and the Alger Hiss case.

1.  Aitken's biography is largely considered to be pro-Nixon, and I'd say that is mostly true in his narration of Nixon's 1946 race for Congress.  Aitken disputes that Nixon's campaign was heavily funded by wealthy special interests, for the Committee of 100 had a number of small businessmen; any oil or utility company donations to Nixon's campaign (if there were any) did not surpass $500; about a third of Nixon's $37,500 campaign budget was from the Republican National Commitee; and Nixon's budget amounted to "less than twenty cents per voter" in "an electorate of 205,000" (pages 130-131).  Aitken notes that Nixon's campaign did not "spend money on radio advertising" (page 130), and he states that, "Compared to the personally wealthy and politically well-connected Voorhis, Nixon only had shoestring campaign finances which grew to adequate but far from lavish levels" (page 131).  Against the possible charge that Nixon traded favors for contributions, Aitken states that "Indeed, there are old men living around Whittier and Alhambra who still complain about Nixon's lack of generosity to his supporters in the form of government contracts, appointments and political favours" (page 131).

While Aitken acknowledges that some right-wing rogues may have behaved irresponsibly in 1946, calling voters and telling them that  Nixon's Democratic opponent, Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, was a Communist, Aitken does not believe that Nixon was responsible for this, and Aitken states that "The evidence of these calls is of doubtful provenance, for they were never raised by an actual recipient, and only emerged as an issue some months after polling day" (page 132).  Aitken seems to imply that Nixon's charge that Voorhis was being endorsed by a Communist-infiltrated union was not particularly fair, for the hard-core leftists in the CIO opposed Voorhis due to his anti-Communism, and its sister-organization, the NC-PAC, which did endorse Voorhis, was "a milder coalition of non-union progressives with noticeably less Communist influence" (page 123).  But Aitken does not appear to buy into the prominent narrative that Nixon was exploiting fear of Communism for his political gain, for he states that Communism in 1946 was not particularly feared.  Aitken states that at the time "there was little anti-Russian hostility in the United States" and "Communism did not gain its connotations of treachery and espionage until the Hiss case of 1948 and the McCarthy era of the 1950s" (page 131).

As I compare Aitken's arguments with the narratives of Nixon critics such as Roger Morris and Anthony Summers, it is interesting to me that Aitken and Morris don't really disagree on how much Nixon spent on his campaign.  Morris states on page 337 of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician that "Nixon backers would finally admit that the actual tallied contributions had been between $24,000 and $32,000"; Summers, however, thinks it may have been more than that, for Summers refers to a person he interviewed who claimed to have donated $10,000 to Nixon in 1946.  Contrary to Aitken's portrayal of Nixon as the financial underdog in the race, Morris notes that files in Sacramento indicate that Voorhis spent $1,928.  On the anonymous phone calls calling Voorhis a Communist, Morris refers to recipients of such calls who mentioned receiving them.  On whether Nixon traded favors for contributions, Morris highlights more than once that Nixon's political ideology and the policies that he supported were consistent with the agenda of the wealthy special interests, whether or not he gave specific favors (and those kinds of accusations----of special favors----would dog Nixon throughout his political career).

On whether or not Communism was feared in 1946, I can somewhat see Aitken's point, for America had just fought World War II alongside its ally, the Soviet Union, plus some of the events that would increase Americans' apprehension of Communism were yet to occur.  But I ultimately have a hard time accepting Aitken's argument, for it seems to me----from what I have read about the the 1946 campaign, from even Aitken's acknowledgement that there were businessmen who disliked unions because they saw them as Communist-infiltrated, from the existence of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and simply from the very fact that Nixon was making Communism an issue in 1946----that Communism was indeed opposed and feared as early as 1946.

2.  Aitken's discussion of the Alger Hiss case is so-so.  I was disappointed that Aitken did not (as far as I could see) address the argument that the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss was manufactured after Hiss' wife had supposedly typed those documents that Chambers was to relay to the Soviets.  Roger Morris made that argument, and Morris is in Aitken's bibliography, so Aitken should have addressed it, rather than just assuming that the typewriter was a slam-dunk that revealed Hiss' guilt.

Where Aitken's contribution to the discussion about the Hiss case is salient is on the role of Father John Cronin.  Did Father Cronin feed Nixon information about Hiss before Hiss and Chambers appeared before HUAC, or is the opposite the case, as Nixon would claim in Six Crises?  I guess why this question is important is that, if Nixon were receiving information from Cronin, he had reason to be confident about Hiss' guilt from the beginning, and his story that he executed sound judgment when others were not and placed his political career on the line is not particularly credible.  In other books, I have read that Cronin for years claimed that he fed Nixon information prior to the initial appearance of Hiss and Chambers, yet Cronin would retract that claim in the 1990's.  My impression is that Cronin allegedly retracted his long-standing claim to Aitken.  (Anthony Summers wonders how Cronin even could have retracted it, for Cronin in January 1991 “was in a home for the aged, deaf, and…unable to hold a cogent conversation”; see here).

On page 155, Aitken quotes Cronin as saying to him in 1990: "The stacked deck remark was unfair.  Nixon might have read something about Hiss in my reports, I don't know whether he did or not, but we didn't discuss the case until after Hiss had made his public denial.  From then on I worked with Nixon a lot and gave him everything I had on Hiss.  He needed that help.  He was very unsure of himself at the beginning."

Aitken has other grounds for believing that Cronin and Nixon had not discussed the case prior to Hiss' first public denial.  If Nixon had information about Hiss during Hiss' initial appearance before HUAC, why didn't Nixon challenge Hiss on that occasion, especially when so many people----even people on HUAC----were believing Hiss?  On this, perhaps one could say that Nixon was playing it cool: that Nixon didn't want to reveal his cards all at once, but preferred to wait a while, to let others buy into Hiss' act so that he (Nixon) could later step forward and be the heroic exception.

On page 158, Aitken quotes Bill Rogers, who would later serve as Dwight Eisenhower's Attorney General and as Nixon's Secretary of State.  Rogers was on the scene during the Hiss case, and he said that Nixon was initially doubtful about the case against Hiss.  So there you have the eyewitness testimony of someone who does not think that Nixon was sure from the beginning.  One question that I have, however, is whether Cronin even had intelligence information that would have made Nixon absolutely certain about Hiss' guilt.  Cronin was working with Nixon after Hiss' initial appearance, according to what Cronin said in 1990, yet my impression (and I'm open to correction on this) is that Nixon even in that time was not completely certain about Hiss' guilt.  (Hiss first testified on August 5, 1948, and Rogers met Nixon five days later, which was supposedly the time when Nixon was unsure about the case.  I guess the question is when Cronin started to work with Nixon----was it in the five days in between?)

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 1

I started Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life.  Jonathan Aitken was a member of Parliament in Great Britain as well as the Minister of State for Defense.  His biography of Nixon came out in 1993, and Aitken was convicted of perjury later, in 1999 (see here).  This book is considered to be rather pro-Nixon, and I one time read an online commenter who remarked that two of Nixon's greatest defenders in recent history were convicts: Conrad Black and Jonathan Aitken.  Aitken in his book, however, narrates that he was not a Nixon fan at first, but he gained admiration for the man through his interactions with him, and he was impressed by Nixon's knowledge and kindness, notwithstanding Nixon's social awkwardness and clumsy mannerisms.

I was initially reluctant to read Aitken's book because I already had enough books by or about Nixon to read.  Plus, when I read that Aitken relied heavily on interviews with Nixon, I wondered why exactly I should read Aitken's book, since I already got Nixon's perspective through Six Crises and his memoirs.  What more was there for me to learn of Nixon's own perspective?

I checked out Aitken's book, however.  One reason was that I was in the mood to do so, the same way that I was in a mood to read Conrad Black's book, even though I was initially reluctant to read Black's biography of Nixon because I already had enough to read.  Another reason is that I had read about the extent of Aitken's documentation and interviews, especially when it came to controversial times in Nixon's career, such as his 1946 congressional race.

Now that I've checked out Aitken, I am glad that I decided to read it.  Stephen Ambrose praises Aitken's book, saying that Aitken had access to documents and people that many other biographers of Nixon did not have.  I saw that in my latest reading.  More than one of the biographies about Nixon that I had read quote an essay in which Nixon as a student at Whittier College expressed his liberal religious views about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  Nixon himself in his memoirs quoted that particular essay.  But Aitken quotes more essays that Nixon wrote as a college student at Whittier, on such topics as creation and evolution, the nature of the soul, and worldwide disarmament (Nixon expressed support for it).  Nixon in some of those essays relates how he evolved in his views from his Quaker religious conservatism and biblical literalism, to a more liberal outlook.  (Aitken goes on to say, however, that Nixon remained quite religious.)  As Aitken notes, those documents are not widely available.  (Whether or not that's still the case, I don't know.)  But you can read more about them in Aitken's book!

I was thinking about some of the other books about Nixon that I read when I was reading Aitken.  Don Fulsom in Nixon's Darkest Secrets says that "Young Dick favored his mom ('My mother was a saint,' he tearfully asserted, in his farewell speech to his White House staff) while, for unknown reasons, his siblings did not" (page 69).  Fawn Brodie says that Nixon's mother would really eviscerate her children when she gave them her little lectures after they misbehaved, making them feel horrible about themselves.  Brodie and Anthony Summers both refer to someone who claimed to have seen Hannah Nixon holding a switch while her son Richard was playing the piano.  But Aitken quotes Nixon's youngest brother, Ed, saying that: "She had a temper too, but controlled.  She knew how to throttle my Dad if he was hurting one of us unintentionally...she was the great defender of hurt feelings in our family...she always looked beyond an action thinking in terms of consequences two or three moves ahead, but she often did not say much at the time because she had a proper sense of privacy" (page 14).  Apparently, Richard was not the only Nixon child who spoke highly of his mother!

Fawn Brodie paints a picture of conservative Whittier trying to keep the Mexicans outside of the town at bay, appealing to that to explain Nixon's later love for Latino people and culture.  (For Brodie, Nixon was repudiating Whittier's stuffiness.)  Aitken, however, says that there were Mexican students where Nixon went to school.

I'm not pointing these things out to say "gotcha," as if Aitken's story refutes the other stories, or vice-versa.  Rather, I believe that reality is complex, which is why it is difficult at the outset to tell a satisfying, completely accurate tale of what really happened, or what a person or situation was like.

Something that I liked about Fawn Brodie's book is that she talked some about how people who knew Nixon in his younger years reacted to the Watergate scandal years later.  Aitken offers similar anecdotes.  Aitken said that Nixon called his Whittier College mentor and coach, Chief Newman, when Nixon was feeling down in 1975.  (I didn't know Chief Newman was still alive then!)  Aitken also talked about some of Nixon's professors.  One Whittier professor was a liberal and encouraged his students to think outside of the box, and his love for reading was contagious!  He disagreed with how Nixon conducted his political campaigns, and yet he and Nixon continued to stay in touch for years.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story 7

I have three items for my blog post today about Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story.

1.  I wrote in my post yesterday that "Julie throughout the book (at least in what I have read thus far) very rarely questions her father's presidential decisions..."  Well, as my reading of the book goes on, Julie questions more and more her father's judgment.  In my latest reading, for example, she appeared to be criticizing her father's heavy dependence on his aide, H.R. Haldeman.  Julie relates a few stories about how Haldeman would tell Nixon that someone wanted to resign, when actually that person was unaware that his resignation was even on the table!  Julie expresses understanding, however, for her father's desire to consolidate his staff.

Julie also seems to imply that her father was wrong to demand the resignations of every "noncareer government employee" in his Administration when he began his second term, which was Nixon's symbolic way of declaring a new beginning.  Although Nixon did not plan to accept most of the resignations, his move hurt morale, according to Julie.  Julie narrates that her mother, Pat Nixon, was "surprised and unhappy about the request for resignations" (page 361).  Nixon later would regret his move.

Later in the book, Julie implies that her father and John Mitchell, Nixon's Attorney General, were wrong to laugh off the eccentricities of Mitchell's wife, Martha, for those eccentricities turned out to be serious problems.

I'm not sure if Julie ever explicitly says that her father was "right" or "wrong", per se, but her usual manner seems to be to tell the story in such a way that the reader would arrive at a specific conclusion.

Overall, at least in my reading so far, Julie does not question her father's policies.  On once occasion, however, she mentions a slight difference of opinion between her father and mother: Pat Nixon supported the Equal Rights Amendment, whereas Richard Nixon had some reservations about it.

2.  I read in Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power that there were rumors in 1960 that Pat Nixon had been married prior to her marriage to Richard.  Summers says that the question of whether this is true "may now be unanswerable" because it's hard to hunt "down old marriage records in New York State" (page 29). Summers does not think it impossible that she had been married before, for Pat's "alleged first husband" denied the marriage to a Washington Post reporter in a manner that she considered ambiguous, and some of the documentation that "should have included Pat Ryan's marital status...seemed to have gone missing" (page 29).  Summers also points out that Betty Ford's previous marriage was unknown before "a Time magazine reporter dug into her background in 1974", and he wonders if Pat could have had "a similar secret".

In a note in the back, on page 488, Summers offers more nuances.  He notes that Pat referred to herself as unmarried in letters home "as late as February 1934."  He does not think that Pat was married to Dr. Francis Vincent Duke, for that was not mentioned in Duke's obituary, plus Pat's alleged first husband whom the Washington Post reporter interviewed lived in New Orleans, whereas Duke did not.

As far as Julie's book goes, Julie narrates that Dr. Duke asked Pat to marry him more than once, but Pat rejected his offers, since she wanted her independence, and she did not feel that she had truly lived yet, having been busy for much of her life up to that point.

3.  On page 117, Julie tells a story about someone she encountered during the 1952 election, back when Julie was a child:

"When Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy), the 'Inquiring Photographer' for the Times-Herald, encountered me playing outside our house, she asked, 'Do you play with Democrats?'  My response was 'What's a Democrat?'"

When I was reading that, I was picturing Jackie as a paparazzi journalist!  Julie may not have been painting that picture, but that's what I was thinking!

Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story 6

For my blog post today about Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, I'll use as my starting-point something that Julie says on page 312:

"For months, Tricia had been denying----with my mother, father, David, and I faithfully following the family line----rumors of an engagement to Ed Cox, but the rumors were put to rest that night with an official announcement of her engagement.  She and Ed had been in and out of, but mostly in, love for a long time.  They had first met at Tricia's senior-year school dance in 1964.  Both were romantic and idealistic, and both were intelligent, opinionated, and strong-willed.  At times they disagreed over politics.  After graduating from Princeton University, Ed spent the summer of 1968 working for consumer activist Ralph Nader, while Tricia campaigned for my father."

I have three items.

1.  Something that stood out to me in this passage is that Julie seems to be acknowledging that her family was lying to the public about Tricia Nixon's engagement.  I may be completely off base here, since maybe the Nixons were denying her engagement in a time when she was not engaged----after all, Julie said that Tricia and Ed Cox fell in and out of love for quite some time.

But there are other places where Julie seems to admit that her family was not completely transparent to the public.  On page 325, she refers to a column that Jack Anderson wrote revealing the contents of a meeting that Henry Kissinger had with the Washington Special Actions Group, which consisted of people from the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, and the National Security Council.  Julie states that "The minutes revealed that Kissinger clearly had indicated a presidential 'tilt' toward Pakistan, which was at variance with the neutral position of the Administration on the [India-Pakistan] war."  On pages 323, Julie tells a funny anecdote about a letter that Pat received from an eighth grader, lamenting the life of a First Lady, while attempting to look at things from the First Lady's perspective (thus speaking in the first-person).  The fifth grader's letter said that being a First Lady means getting a sore throat after giving a speech, hurting one's feet after standing for hours, getting back-aches from sleeping in lots of hotels, and hearing bodyguards outside when one is trying to sleep.  The fifth-grader then went on to say, "I wish I could be an ordinary housewife and wear sneakers and blue jeans."  Pat wrote back to the fifth-grader that being the First Lady is a "special joy and privilege", but Pat saved the fifth-grader's letter, saying "She hits the spot!"

And, while Julie throughout the book (at least in what I have read thus far) very rarely questions her father's presidential decisions, she does admit that it was a mistake for her father to install the taping system in the White House, since (in her mind) his method of discussion and decision-making gave people the wrong impression when it was made public.

I suppose that many people are not completely transparent to people, and they may tell "white lies."  Some of those lies may be excusable.  Others, however, are not necessarily.

2.  Julie says that her sister Tricia was "strong-willed".  On that note, I'd like to share something that Anthony Summers says about Tricia in The Arrogance of Power, on page 326.  Essentially, Summers depicts Tricia as somewhat of a diva:

"Tricia did not endear herself to Nixon's staff.  Ehrlichman thought her a 'tough and troubled cookie.'  She once reported an Air Force steward for allegedly staring at her legs.  An usher who had been told to bring pillows to Tricia and a friend was then expected to lift the friend's outstretched legs to create a hassock.  Secret Service agents, who dubbed Tricia Goody Two-shoes, objected to being instructed to water her plants while she was away on a trip.  They carried out the mission, one agent claimed, by urinating on them."
In the endnotes, Summers cites Ehrlichman's book, some secondary sources, and a couple of former agents.
Julie probably wouldn't agree with Summers' characterization of Tricia, while also highlighting the positive things that Tricia did.

3.  In my post here, I talked about Tricia's staunch conservative political views, and how my impression was that Julie was more open to different perspectives.  Overall, I'd say that Julie echoes her father's political views in this book, as she largely defends her father's policies as President.  But, on page 327 of Julie's book, we read:

"The subject that night was the role of women.  David and I had just read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, a thoughtful analysis of women's place in society prior to and at the onset of the feminist movement.  My father was intrigued and asked for a copy as a belated Christmas gift.  Tricia had commented that unless it was absolutely necessary, she felt children five years and younger should not be sent to day-care centers."

Here, Julie seems to be somewhat open to Friedan's argument, at least enough to call Friedan's book a "thoughtful analysis".  But Tricia in the discussion expresses a rather conservative position.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story 4

On page 227 of Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, Julie Nixon Eisenhower (the youngest daughter of Richard and Pat Nixon) talks about Pat Buchanan working for her father starting in 1966, which was a time in between Richard Nixon's service as Vice-President and President.  Pat Buchanan worked in the same room as Rose Mary Woods (Nixon's long-time secretary), Shelley Scarney (who would become Pat Buchanan's wife), and Pat Nixon.  Julie tells some amusing anecdotes about Pat Buchanan.  She states that he "cursed and mumbled" (Pat Buchanan's words) while he was typing, and that, while the people in that work-space didn't have much time for small talk, Pat Buchanan "bummed cigarettes from my mother" in the afternoons, even though he "was trying to quit smoking."

This passage stood out to me for two reasons.  First of all, it was interesting to me to read about Pat Buchanan's human side.  Pat Buchanan was the first person I voted for in a presidential election.  I voted for him in the 1996 Republican primary, and also in the 2000 Presidential election.  (I lived in Massachusetts, which was going for Gore anyway, so I figured I could vote for the candidate I liked best.)  Although I am more to the left nowadays than I was then, and even though I can understand and sympathize with my friends' criticisms of and reservations about Pat Buchanan, I still like the guy!  I don't know him personally, but I like watching him on TV and reading his writings.

Second, the passage brought to my mind Pat Nixon's smoking.  Earlier in the book, on page 89, Julie acknowledged that Pat Nixon smoked,  but she states that Pat didn't smoke publicly when Richard was running for Congress in 1946.  Julie quotes Pat as saying: "It just wasn't acceptable in Whittier for women to smoke then.  I was a very light smoker and felt why let something that's not that important to me become an issue."

Anthony Summers, in The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, portrays Pat Nixon as a chain-smoker.  He states on page 38:

"Pat Nixon claimed she used neither cigarettes nor alcohol.  In fact, she smoked almost all her adult life and was to die of lung cancer.  By the time her husband was president, she was chain-smoking the moment she stepped out of the public eye.  'She smoked incessantly aboard Air Force One,' said chief pilot Ralph Albertazzie.  'That was one of the little secrets she shared with the crew.  Sometimes, after a flight, the stewards counted the butts....'"

When I was growing up, I was taught that smoking was wrong.  If I'm not mistaken, my church said a couple of times that smoking was a sin because our bodies are the temple of God.  The thing is, when I was a child, I saw adults smoking!  I was confused.  Adults were telling me that smoking was wrong, yet I saw adults smoking.

I would occasionally tell strangers who were smoking that what they were doing was wrong, to the embarrassment of my parents!  The smokers would usually acknowledge that smoking wasn't good for them, but they would say that they couldn't quit.

One time, when I was in elementary school, my class was on a field trip in the woods.  From a distance, I saw my very own teacher smoking in the main cabin!  I brought my friend over so that he could see the event, and he shook his head in shame.  This teacher had taught us a whole curriculum about why smoking was wrong, and she admitted in class that she used to smoke, but no longer did so.  But there she was...smoking!

When I told my Mom after coming home that I saw my teacher smoking, my Mom was sympathetic to the teacher.  "Well, I'd smoke, too, if I had to be around a bunch of kids for four days!", my Mom said.  My Mom herself did not smoke, but she knew why my teacher was smoking: it was a way for the teacher to relax.

I think it's sad when people die from lung cancer due to smoking.  But I'd probably put smoking in the same category as eating fatty foods or lots of cholesterol----something with which I've struggled: I wouldn't consider a person immoral for doing that, but it's not particularly healthy for the person.

Still, I have to be honest: there is a stigma that I attach in my mind to smokers.  Part of it is that I don't like the smell of cigarettes, but it's also because people are doing something that I was taught was wrong back in my childhood days.  This is one of the many ways in which I need to get past my prejudices so that I can respect and appreciate people.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story 2

One feature that I noticed in my latest reading of Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, which I haven't really seen in other books about Richard Nixon that I have read, is that Julie quotes extensively from the love letters between Richard and Pat, both from the time when they were courting, and also after they had married and Richard was in the navy.  Other books I have read quote some of those letters, or they refer to bits of information in the letters in an attempt to make a specific argument (in Fawn Brodie's case, that Nixon's later stories about his war record were exaggerations).  But Julie quotes from them more extensively.

When I have read pieces of Nixon's love letters in other books about Nixon, they come across to me as cheesy and over-the-top.  But I actually liked some of the letters between Richard and Pat when I was reading passages from them in Julie's book, and the reason is that each was saying what he or she liked about the other.  Richard commended Pat's energy, and Pat praised Richard for the consideration that he showed at a party.  I'd actually like to quote from the latter letter.  Nixon in the navy had a hamburger stand, where he gave out coffee, juice, and food.  More than once in my reading of books about Nixon, I have seen the navy Nixon compared with Henry Fonda's character in Mister Roberts, a movie that I now want to see!  In any case, after Richard wrote Pat about a get-together at his hamburger stand, Pat wrote back:

"I always like to hear of your get togethers too----you always make people have a good time.  Our parties have always been your successes.  Remember the time you even made the chop suey!!  When I think of all the wonderfulnesses for me----didn't I take advantage?----but, dearest, it was appreciated then and now.  I never shall forget how sweet you were the night Margaret and I had the teachers for a wiener roast----You carted, helped with the salad, bought the pies, went to LA for Mary's gift."

Okay, I'll admit that "wonderfulnesses" is a little over the top, but I still like this letter, for a variety of reasons.  For one, it exemplifies Julie's portrayal of her father, at least in what I have read thus far.  Julie acknowledges that her father was a shy introvert, and yet he comes across as a bit more fun and sociable in her book, as compared with other books about Nixon that I have read.  Second, I like how Pat highlights what she specifically likes about Richard.  Anthony Summers, in The Arrogance of Power, argues that Richard did not really know Pat when he married her, and some people I have read argue that Nixon tended to idealize Pat in his love letters to her, or perhaps even treated her as a project when he was courting her.  I'm not sure what to say about this, but their letters to one another convince me that they genuinely admired qualities in each other.

And, third, what Pat said Nixon did at her party reminds me of what I, as a shy and socially-awkward introvert, would most likely do at a party.   I one time read a post by a lady with Asperger's, and she suggested that what people with Asperger's should do at parties is help out: set out the food, help in the kitchen.  That way, they're at the party, meaning that they're not offending the host by not showing up, but they're not exactly interacting with people and making small talk, for they're busy helping out!  That seems to be what Richard was doing at the wiener roast for teachers that he and Pat attended.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 11

I finished Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character.  On pages 513-514, Brodie states:

"Pat Nixon told Jessamyn West that in the early years Julie and Tricia could make their father laugh, and 'he could make them laugh.'  The fun, the laughter, what Pat described as 'the good times,' had long since disappeared in the relationship between Nixon and his wife.  But he did write her notes.  Dianne Sawyer, secretary in the White House, who accompanied the Nixons to San Clemente in their retirement and remained there until the memoirs were finished, has said that Nixon wrote many notes to Pat, which she was privileged to read, although she would not indicate the number or divulge the nature of the contents.  (She has taken 'a private oath' not to write or give interviews about her experience, at least while the Nixons are alive.)  Publication of these notes to Pat, or even a description of their feeling and content, may reveal a tenderness to Nixon which he has otherwise resolutely kept hidden.  In any case the very recourse to notewriting tells us more of the warping of Nixon's capacity for love."

One thing that this passage tells me is that nobody can write a fully-orbed biography of another human being.  Fawn Brodie, with all of her speculations about the psychology of Richard Nixon, cannot capture the full man.  Nixon, after all, wrote many letters to Pat.  Brodie may call that "the warping of Nixon's capacity for love", but the fact that he wrote letters to his wife may indicate that he did care about her, even though Brodie tells story after story about how that may not have been the case.

Now that Richard and Pat Nixon are dead, I wonder how much Diane Sawyer has chosen to talk about her time working for Nixon.  You can read here her responses to the Broadway play, Frost/Nixon, which later was made into a movie.  Someone played her in that.  Also, if I'm not mistaken, ABC News not long ago did a story on Nixon's love letters to Pat when they were courting.  As far as I can remember, though, Diane Sawyer did not give any indication that she knew much about the topic of Nixon's letters to Pat.  Perhaps she didn't think that was the time or the place for that!

Now for my overall impressions of Brodie's book: it was all right.  I didn't read anything earth-shakingly surprising.  I'm not sure if any anti-Nixon book can surpass Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power!  Summers drew from Brodie's work and even recommended it, but he had a lot more stories than she did.  Brodie's book has had a mixed reputation: it has been lauded for its interviews, but it has been criticized for its psychological speculations, and also for some of the negative things that it says about Nixon.  One criticism that I have read is that Brodie implies that Nixon had a homosexual relationship with his friend, Bebe Rebozo.  But she did not say that explicitly.  She simply said that they were friends, and that Nixon did not want people to think that he had a homosexual relationship with Rebozo.  She also mentions some of the homophobic things that Nixon had said.  I guess one can draw his or her own conclusions from that, but Brodie did not go as far as, say, Don Fulsom, who told about a lady who saw Nixon and Rebozo holding hands under the table.

Overall, I did find Brodie to be a good writer, and sometime in the future I may read her biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican who was played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie Lincoln.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 9

In Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, Fawn Brodie argues that Richard Nixon had a troubled marriage with his wife, Pat.  This is not new in terms of the books about Nixon that I have read.  Brodie stops short of believing that Nixon was physically abusive of his wife, for Brodie states on page 454 that "There are also unsubstantiated reports that the resulting private quarrel at home was searing and violent."  But she does depict Nixon as rather dismissive and lacking in affection towards Pat.

I'd like to share three items about this topic.

1.  In my post here, I asked about what the reaction of Nixon's daughters was to their parents' relationship.  I wondered how Julie and Tricia could be so supportive of their father, if he was as bad of a husband as many writers say.  I'm planning to read Julie Nixon Eisenhower's biography of her mother, Pat Nixon, after I finish Brodie's book, so it will be interesting to see what Julie writes.  On page 455, though, Brodie states the following:

"Julie, then fifteen, and Tricia, seventeen, it must be remembered, had been brought up with parents who were inordinately proud of the family tradition of self-control and who continually tailored the facade of family happiness...Of Julie's wretchedness we learn more from Earl Mazo than from her father.  He was told that she said, 'All I want is for everyone to love everyone and be happy.  I can't study or do anything when one of us is not happy.'"

The context here was the family's discussion about whether Nixon would run for Governor of California in 1962.  Pat was against it, Tricia was for it, and Julie said that she would support whatever her father decided.

It was after Nixon lost that particular election that he allegedly got violent with Pat.  The "unsubstantiated reports" that Brodie mentioned on page 454 were about this alleged incident.  Anthony Summers, on page 233 of The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, portrays Julie's recollection of this time frame as rather shadowy----as if Julie remembered something, but was in the dark about what was really taking place:

"Pat, Julie was to write, was watching television in the den when the television ran the 'kick around' speech.  At the point where Nixon attacked the press, she shouted 'Bravo!'  When her father came home, Julie recalled, 'We were waiting tearfully in the hallway at the front door.  Mother spoke first.  She said brokenly, 'Oh, Dick.'  He was so overcome with emotion that he brushed past and went outside to the backyard.  That afternoon was the first and the only time my parents gave way to their emotions simultaneously, and it bewildered Tricia and me....'

"Domestic life for a top politician is rarely what most families would consider normal.  What happened to bewilder the children that sad Wednesday in November 1962, however, may have been something they never learned of as children."

I don't know Julie, but I doubt that she would publicly endorse Summers' narration.  I'm interested in reading Julie's book to see what she does say about her parents' relationship, however.  Some of the reviews on Amazon dismiss her book, implying that it is a rather idealized portrait of her parents.  But I have read books that are quite critical of Nixon, and they treat Julie's book with a measure of respect----as if her voice is important----and some of the passages that they cite from her book seem to me to be rather honest, in that Julie acknowledges that things were not always rosy in her parents' marriage.  I'll see what my impressions of her book are!

(UPDATE: Brodie later in her book speculates that Julie became angry with her father, especially near the end of Watergate, and Brodie notes that Julie wrote a biography about her mother Pat, not her father.)

2.  Columnist Jack Anderson was a thorn in Richard Nixon's side.  There were even people in Nixon's Administration who wanted to assassinate Anderson, if you can imagine that!  Don Fulsom, in his anti-Nixon book, praises Anderson as a champion of righteousness, a muckraker, and an inspiration to muckrakers.  You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I read in Brodie's book that Anderson argued that Richard Nixon actually had a good marriage.  After quoting people who claimed otherwise, Brodie states on pages 467-468:

"Jack Anderson, on the other hand, privy to much Washington gossip, described the Nixon marriage as a good one.  He believed Nixon 'loved his family very much.'

"[']At no time have I ever had a suspicion, save from irresponsible sources trying to make something out of nothing, that Nixon did not love her or in any way degraded her.  He held his wife in esteem and affection as far as I have been able to learn.  She apparently had a healthy attitude about him...a little like my wife.  Whenever I get to thinking that I'm important she always says the right thing to pull me right back down to earth.[']

"'Nixon's closeness to his wife,' Anderson said, 'was the only healthy thing about him.'"  Brodie's source for this is her own interview with Anderson on April 19, 1975.

How could Anderson's impression be so different from that of many others----eyewitnesses, journalists, etc.?  Perhaps Anderson saw something different----he highlighted the affection between Nixon and his wife rather than making a big deal out of what many deemed to be Nixon's slights or signs of disrespect.  And, since Anderson mentions his own marriage, perhaps he was looking at Nixon's marriage through those lens: he believed that there was enough similarity between the marriages, that he may have projected elements of his own marriage onto that of the Nixons.  I'm just speculating here!

3.  I recently watched a clip in which Frank Gannon asked Nixon why he did not mention Pat in his speech to the White House staff after he had resigned from the Presidency.  Some have made a big deal about this, since Nixon in that speech was reading about the death of Theodore Roosevelt's wife, without even mentioning his own.  Was Nixon slighting or disregarding Pat?  Nixon clearly indicated to Gannon that he did not care for that claim, then he went on to say that he did not mention Pat out of consideration for her.  He realized that she was saddened by the resignation, and he feared that she would break down publicly had he mentioned her in his speech.  Unfortunately, I cannot find that clip right now.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 8

What I noticed in my latest reading of Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was that Fawn Brodie did not criticize John F. Kennedy.  At least she hasn't in what I have read of her book thus far.

I've become somewhat accustomed to seeing snark about Kennedy in some of the books about Nixon that I have read.  After talking about Kennedy's advice to Nixon on the importance of writing a book, Stephen Ambrose said that Kennedy did not really write Profiles in Courage, and that his father pressured the Pulitzer Committee to give JFK the Pulitzer.  I read in one book about Nixon (though I forget which one) that JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, may not have been just lucky when he managed to thrive during the Great Depression.  Don Fulsom is rather positive about JFK, noting that the mob hated him, and yet he acknowledges that JFK had mob connections at some point.  Anthony Summers goes more deeply into JFK's mob connections, even talking about how some bruisers were at polling stations pressuring people to vote for Kennedy.  Summers also tells a humorous story about when a Kennedy associate in 1960 was doing investigative work on the wild weekend parties that Nixon attended at Bebe Rebozo's home, but he decided not to pursue that line when he learned that Kennedy, too, was at the parties!  And Nixon, and also biographers about Nixon, have claimed that there were ghost votes for Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election.

I'm reading Brodie's book, and I don't see much of that.  She acknowledges that JFK was a womanizer, but I suppose that this was such common knowledge by the time that she wrote the book that she decided not to omit it.  But she appears to take for granted that Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage.  She says that Joseph Kennedy luckily dodged the negative consequences of the Great Depression.  While Nixon charged that candidate Kennedy was briefed about the U.S. Government's plots against Fidel Castro, and that Kennedy was really low when Kennedy was publicly accusing the Eisenhower Administration of doing nothing against Castro, Brodie seems to think that Kennedy had not been told about the U.S. Government's plots.  Overall, she portrays Kennedy as a witty person who came across as more authentic than Nixon did.  As far as negatives go, she says that Nixon was healthier than Kennedy because of Kennedy's bad back, and that Nixon was a better orator, even though Kennedy improved by the time he got to the first debate.  But I don't see the snark about Kennedy that I saw in many of the other books about Nixon that I read.

Why didn't Brodie share much dirt on Kennedy?  Anthony Summers wrote an anti-Nixon book, and he didn't shy away from that!  Brodie talks about how Kennedy drove women wild.  Could she have had a crush on the late President Kennedy?  I don't know.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 7

As Vice-President, Richard Nixon visited Latin America, and he faced down angry mobs in some of the Latin American countries.  When Nixon returned home to the United States, his favorability rating increased, and many esteemed him as a hero.  Some cynics, however, maintained that Nixon was deliberately placing himself in grave danger to make himself into a hero, thereby transforming himself into a more electable candidate for President.

The latter view seems to be held by Fawn Brodie, in Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, and Anthony Summers, in The Shadows of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.  Summers claims that Nixon was warned that he would encounter danger in certain areas.  Brodie states on page 364 that "Had [Nixon] confined himself to wreath-laying and negotiations there might have been only five instead of six crises for his first book", but Nixon had an "appetite for publicity [and] delight in confrontation."

Brodie also discusses the reasons that Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were unpopular in certain Latin American countries: the Eisenhower Administration's apparent endorsement of dictators; the small amount of foreign aid that the U.S. gave to the region; "U.S. tariffs on lead, zinc, and wool, and the dumping of American cotton on the world market" (page 363); and the Eisenhower Administration's apparent lack of concern for Latin America.  As Brodie states on page 363, "[Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles in 1954 had attended an Inter-American Conference in Caracas called to ventilate the hemisphere's appalling economic problems, but had stayed only long enough to introduce a resolution against Communism."

Brodie contrasts Nixon's accounts of certain events with the recollections of other eyewitnesses.  For example, Nixon said that when he visited a Catholic University he was warmly received, whereas someone else stated that Nixon's reception was rather mixed.  Brodie simply states that the stories differ, but my hunch is that she is hesitant to swallow Nixon's version of the story in its entirety, since she has argued in her book that Nixon had a tendency to lie.

What especially stood out to me in reading Summers' book was his argument that Nixon treated his wife, Pat, with callous unconcern on the trip.  Summers states on pages 169-170:

"The 'detachment' Nixon ascribed to himself extended also to his attitude to the long-suffering Pat.  He had made no move to shield her as they stood through the playing of the Venezuelan national anthem in a shower of spit.  He had then insisted that Pat's car drive immediately behind his, breaking the Secret Service's cardinal rule that only agents travel in the follow-up car.  'One remark made by Mr. Nixon stayed with me from this terrible episode,' said Secret Service chief Baughman.  'The agent inside Mr. Nixon's car said to the Vice President after the motorcade had started to roll again: 'I hope Mrs. Nixon gets through.'  To which Mr. Nixon replied, 'If she doesn't, it can't be helped.'"

Baughman's testimony should not be dismissed, but there is another side to the story.  Brodie depicts Nixon showing concern for Pat.  Nixon and Vernon Walters differ on whether Nixon went to see if Pat was all right, or if Nixon sent Walters to check on Pat.  But both are expressions of concern, on some level.

The Arrogance of Power 6

I finished Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.  In this post, I'll talk about something interesting that Summers mentions on pages 62-63, then I will offer my overall impressions of Summers' book.

After Richard Nixon graduated from Duke Law School, he went to New York City to look for a job as an attorney, and he was interviewed by a panel that included John Foster Dulles, who would later be President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State.  Nixon didn't get the job, but he would return to New York in 1945, after his time as a Navy officer.  According to Summers, Nixon would say that he dealt with naval contracts during that time, whereas his wife, Pat, stated that Nixon was working at the Bureau of Aeronautics.  David Wise, who wrote about intelligence, deemed those years in Nixon's life to be a mystery.

But John Loftus, whom wikipedia calls as an "American author, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer", and whom Summers states was "a former prosecutor with the Justice Department unit investigating Nazi war crimes", claims that Nixon during that time was reviewing Nazi documents that had been captured.  According to Summers, Loftus appeals to interviews with "retired intelligence officers" (Summer's words) in arguing that "Allen Dulles...told [Nixon] to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return, arranged to finance the young man's first congressional campaign, against Jerry Voorhis" (Loftus' words).  Allen Dulles was the brother of John Foster Dulles and would later be head of the CIA.  Summers refers to pages 221 and 557 of a book by Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews.

What exactly did Dulles want Nixon to keep a secret?  Summers states: "According to some chroniclers, the Dulles brothers had links to the Nazis dating back to pre-war business contacts.  Loftus, who had access to contemporary records, claims Allen Dulles maintained such contacts even during the war and that proof of the ties lies in captured German documents, still classified to this day."  Nixon's opponent in the 1946 congressional race, Jerry Voorhis, would say that someone from a "large New York financial house" (Voorhis' words) came to California and urged that Voorhis be ousted.  Summers appears to wonder: Could this have related somehow to Allen Dulles?

One would have to check Loftus' book to see what documentation he provides for his claims.  The reason that I'm highlighting this passage is that it exemplifies why I enjoyed Summers' book.  For one, it contained stories and speculations about Nixon that I did not find in other books that I read for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Second, I liked the sense of intrigue, especially when it was discussing what many would probably regard as a rather mundane time in Richard Nixon's life.  Nixon at one time was negotiating contracts (see here), but could he have been doing other things soon after his time in the Navy----interesting things?

Now for my overall impressions of Summers' book.  The book is definitely worth reading.  As I have said, the book says things about Nixon that I did not read in other books about him.  For instance, Summers argues that a Chinese lady named Marianna Liu may have been romantically linked to Nixon during Nixon's marriage to Pat.  Summers does not seem to think that the two of them slept together, but just that they had some sort of romantic connection.  (I should also note that Don Fulsom, who argues in Nixon's Darkest Secrets that Nixon may have had somewhat of a homosexual relationship with his friend, Bebe Rebozo, stops short of suggesting that Nixon and Bebe actually slept together.  As far as alleged physical contact between Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo goes, the furthest it seemed to have gone was them holding hands under a table, according to one eyewitness, and Nixon putting his arm around Bebe.)

The book is very negative about Richard Nixon.  The only positive thing about Nixon that I remember from Summers' book is that Nixon stood against racism in his younger years, and as President increased funding on civil rights enforcement, but Summers also goes into some of the racist things that Nixon said.  Overall, the book argues that Nixon was a liar, was corrupt, broke the law on numerous occasions, was physically abusive to his wife Pat, was involved in a plot to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and was drunk and high, sometimes during significant events during his Presidency, when vital issues were at stake.  On some things, Summers presents a rather complex picture of Richard Nixon.  For example, Summers basically implies in one passage of his book that Nixon as President was lazy, yet elsewhere (if my memory serves me correctly) he depicts Nixon as working hard.  When a book makes negative claims about a figure, seeing the author's documentation is important.  In terms of documentation, I'd say that Summers does fairly all-right.  He cites eyewitnesses, but there is also hearsay in his book: he refers to someone saying something that someone else said.  Hearsay is not admissible in a court of law, but I have a hard time thoroughly dismissing its reliability.  Summers also cites secondary sources.

Summers argues that Nixon could have been physically abusive to his wife, Pat.  Overall, Summers relies on hearsay: Seymour Hersh's investigative reporting, in which Hersh claimed to have talked with a source that said Pat was taken to an emergency room, and a doctor who corroborated that this was so; a friend of a former Los Angeles reporter, Bill Van Patten, who related to the friend that Nixon beat Pat; what Governor Pat Brown and Brown aide Frank Cullen heard; and the claim by John Sears, who was an aide to Nixon and would later be campaign manager to Ronald Reagan, that Nixon's family lawyer told him (meaning Sears) that Nixon hit Pat.  Summers also argues that Nixon was the type of person who would do something like that---- one who was aggressive, had a temper that could manifest itself in violence, got drunk, blamed others, and had difficulty dealing with stress.  Later in the book, on page 464, Summers refers to an Executive Protection Service officer who claimed that agents one time rushed to Pat near the end of Nixon's Presidency because Nixon had hit her.  This is an actual eyewitness, and yet his claim has been questioned.  John Taylor, who worked for Nixon after Nixon's Presidency, states the following in his post here:

"Summers' principal source was a former uniformed Secret Service agent who would rarely if ever have been in the White House family quarters. I learned about him after one of Nixon's former pilots overheard the man bragging in a bar about his coming star turn with a British TV crew that was promoting the Summers book. The man's allegations were probably known to Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who had a family connection with the source, and Pulitzer Prize winner (and thoroughgoing Nixon critic) Seymour Hersh. Neither reporter published the charge."

When is an eyewitness reliable?  Summers refers in one place to an eyewitness whom he does not consider reliable, mentioning criminal activity by the eyewitness.  Yet, I seriously doubt that every eyewitness whom Summers cites was pure, especially some of the ones who claimed that Nixon had ties with the mafia, or was a leader in a plot to kill Fidel Castro.  Summers in his notes in the back mentions times when eyewitnesses contradict each other----one may say that Nixon was drunk at such-and-such an event, whereas another says the opposite----and Summers more than once tries to navigate his way through conflicting accounts.  Moreover, while Summers refers to the eyewitness testimony of John Ehrlichman, Conrad Black made clear that, when considering what Ehrlichman said, we should remember that Ehrlichman was bitter against Nixon after leaving the Nixon White House.  Some say that we should rely primarily on documents, and Summers does do that, at times.  I wouldn't toss out consideration of eyewitness testimony, but perhaps there should be clearly stated criteria for determining what is true and what is false: corroboration, looking at motive, etc.

The Arrogance of Power 5

I have two items for my blog post today about Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.

1.  On page 348, we read: "'We're going to look like perfect fools when all of the tapes are released,' Kissinger was to warn Ehrlichman.  'Nixon will be heard delivering one of his tirades, saying all sorts of outrageous things, and we will be sitting there quietly, not protesting or disagreeing.  You and I know that's how we had to do business with him, but we will be judged harshly....'"

There are many times when I do not challenge a person's offensive comment because I want to fit in, or I don't want to come across as a joyless and self-righteous buzzkill, or I don't want to embarrass anybody.  But there are also times when I am quite obnoxious about my opinions----because I feel especially strongly about a particular issue, or I want attention, or something that a person is saying is getting on my nerves.  Maybe I should put my latter self in the former kinds of situations.  Of course, coming up with tactful ways to express my disagreements is probably the best course!

2.  On page 469, we read: "At the White House one day, Pat and her daughters sat alone while Nixon lunched with Norman Vincent Peale and his family, Rose Woods, and former Eisenhower aide Robert Keith Gray.  'He never ate a thing, just stared at his food,' Gray recalled.  'The Peales talked to me and to Rose, and Nixon never said a word.  He was obviously too much in agony to have company, yet also too much in agony to be alone.'"

People...you can't live with them, you can't live without them!  I have a hunch that I myself cannot be satisfied.  I want to be affirmed by others, but I feel smothered if I am overly affirmed.  Perhaps, in Nixon's case, he just needed to be around people, on that occasion, whether he chimed into the conversation or not.

The Arrogance to Power 4

President Richard Nixon wanted to pressure the CIA to limit the FBI's investigation into Watergate, and his rationale to CIA director Richard Helms was that one of the Watergate conspirators, E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA, might go on blabbing about the Bay of Pigs, which was a failed attempt under the Kennedy Administration to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.  H.R. Haldeman, a close aide to President Nixon, would write in his book The Ends of Power (which he co-wrote with Joseph DiMona) that "Bay of Pigs" could have been a code-word for the Kennedy assassination.

What did the Bay of Pigs have to do with the Kennedy assassination?  Don Fulsom, in his book Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President, states that the connection was probably that "the cast of characters employed in the 1960 plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and kill Fidel Castro and the cast of characters employed in the plan to assassinate Kennedy in 1963 were the same" (page 130).  You may have seen Oliver Stone's JFK, which posits that prominent elements of the U.S. government and anti-Castro Cubans were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  According to this narrative, the anti-Castro Cubans were upset the Kennedy left them hanging in their attempts to overthrow Castro, whereas certain forces within the U.S. government did not particularly care for Kennedy's (alleged) desire to scale back on America's involvement in the Vietnam War, to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union, and to shatter the power of the CIA.  Meanwhile, there were American business interests that profited off of war, and that also did not care for losing their investments in Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power.  Oliver Stone was also open to the possibility that the mob was involved in the JFK assassination, albeit at a "lower level".  Some believe that one reason that Nixon appealed to the Bay of Pigs in encouraging the CIA to limit the FBI's Watergate investigation was that Nixon was essentially telling the CIA that, unless it acted, the way that its Bay of Pigs operation led to the Kennedy assassination could be exposed.

Oliver Stone in the movie Nixon may have the same idea as Fulsom: that Nixon meant the Kennedy assassination when he mentioned the Bay of Pigs because some of the anti-Castro Cubans and intelligence agents involved in the Bay of Pigs  participated in the plot to kill President John F. Kennedy.  Both Fulsom and Anthony Summers argue that Nixon, during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, was involved in plots to overthrow Fidel Castro.  After I first watched the movie Nixon, I read reviews that said that Stone was alleging that Nixon felt somehow responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy, since Nixon was an integral part of the plots against Castro, the plots that some believe boomeranged into the Kennedy assassination.  Fulsom actually goes a bit farther than this.  On page 151 of Nixon's Darkest Secrets, Fulsom states: "Was Richard Nixon really in Dallas on November 22 for a PepsiCo convention, as he said, or could his presence have been some sort of signal to his friends in the Mob and the CIA and among the Cuban exiles----the eventual chief suspects of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists?  Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana proudly told relatives that, as the mastermind of the JFK assassination plot, he and Nixon had a preassassination meeting there to discuss the plot."  Fulsom refers in the footnotes to a book by Chuck and Sam Giancana.  Can we trust Sam on this, or was Sam merely saying it as a way to sell more books?

But back to Haldeman's claim in The Ends of Power that Nixon meant the Kennedy assassination when he referred to the Bay of Pigs.  Anthony Summers, in a note in The Arrogance of Power, interacts with Haldeman's later retraction of that claim.  Haldeman would blame that claim on his co-author, Joseph DiMona.  But Summers does not buy Haldeman's retraction because of indications that Haldeman was intimately involved in the composition and editing of his book (The Ends of Power), and Haldeman was quite particular about what went into his book and what came out.  Summers also notes that Haldeman told him (meaning Summers) in 1989, when Summers was working on a book about J. Edgar Hoover, that he (Haldeman) was merely speculating that Nixon's reference to the Bay of Pigs related to the Kennedy assassination.  Haldeman had not yet retracted the claim.

What interested me in reading Summers is that what Haldeman said in The Ends of Power (according to Summers) differs significantly from the narrative that some of the anti-Castro forces involved in the Bay of Pigs later participated in the Kennedy assassination.  Summers states on page 199 of The Arrogance of Power: "If the Cuban leader decided to retaliate, Haldeman surmised, then the U.S. plots to kill him 'may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy.'  The CIA, he suggested, 'desperately wanted to hide that dark possibility.'"  What this seems to suggest is that, according to Haldeman, the Bay of Pigs could have been associated with the Kennedy assassination because the Bay of Pigs made Cuban leader Fidel Castro mad, and so Castro may have retaliated by contributing to the assassination of Kennedy.  In this scenario, it is not anti-Castro forces that were responsible for Kennedy's death, but Castro.

This is actually a fairly popular idea.  I remember watching the Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, and (if I'm not mistaken), Ramsey Clark, who had served as President Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General, stated that Johnson expressed to him a belief that Castro was somehow behind the Kennedy assassination.  In the movie JFK, a bullying government agent tells one of Jim Garrison's assistants that Oswald didn't pull the trigger, but Castro did (which is not to be taken literally, but simply expresses the belief that Castro was behind the shooting of Kennedy).  And, in a documentary about the Kennedy assassination, Jack Anderson (whom Fulsom praises in his book) posits that a combination of the mob and Fidel Castro participated in the plot to assassinate JFK.  I wouldn't be surprised if the mafia played both sides (pro and anti) when it came to Fidel Castro.  Remember David Ferrie's rant in JFK, in which he said that Castro was almost on "our" side, and everyone is always switching sides?

The Arrogance of Power 3

For my blog post today about Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, I will use as my starting-point something that Summers says on page 3:

"Some of the untruths Nixon told as president mattered little.  There was the claim, convenient when meeting a group of athletes, that he had met his wife at a football game.  By all other accounts, including his own, he met her when both auditioned for parts in a play.  There was his assertion, useful when addressing French reporters, that he had 'majored in French.'  In fact his college major had been history.  There was his written instruction to his staff----an unusually careless lapse----to find some chopsticks, and any chopsticks would suffice, to display in an exhibit commemorating his breakthrough visit to China.  He did so in the knowledge that the authentic ivory chopsticks, used at dinner with Mao Zedong, had not been preserved.  'That doesn't make any difference,' he wrote.  'We undoubtedly have some chopsticks, ivory or otherwise.'"

One of the sources that Summers cites on Nixon's statement that he met his wife at a football game is the Public Papers of the President, 1969-1974, citing a speech that Nixon gave to the National Football Foundation on December 9, 1969.  But, as Summers notes, Nixon claimed on page 23 of his memoirs to have met Pat at an audition for a play.  On Nixon's claim before French reporters that he majored in French, Summers cites Ted Szulc's The Illusion of Peace, Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years, page 766.  For the fact that Nixon majored in history, Summers refers to page 123 of Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  For the chopsticks story, Summers cites page 383 of a book that Bruce Oudes edited, From the President, Richard Nixon's Secret Files.

(UPDATE: On Nixon majoring in French, Fawn Brodie in Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character also says that Nixon lied about that.  But Brodie on page 107 lists the classes that Nixon took at Whittier, and he took six French classes.  I don't know if that counts as a major, but it's quite a few French classes!)

I'm not sure why this kind of lying bothers me so much.  It's not as if I haven't read charges about Nixon lying, prior to reading this passage in Summers' book.  Perhaps, in those other cases, I was able to say that Nixon did not remember everything he said or did and thus conveyed inaccuracies, or I was so busy comparing different accounts that it did not sink in that Nixon could be lying.  In the cases that Summers cites on page 3, however, they appear to be to be deliberate falsehoods: Nixon says something that he knows to be false.  And maybe I was also disturbed that Nixon was lying about his own personal story, which I have come to cherish (somewhat) over the course of my Year (or More) of Nixon.

The Arrogance of Power 2

In my post today about Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, I will write about the Alger Hiss case, in which Congressman Richard Nixon played a prominent role.  I've summed up the Alger Hiss case more than once on this blog, but I'll do so once more.  (I could copy-and-paste from my previous posts, but I'm suddenly in the mood to write about the highlights of the Alger Hiss case.)  Whittaker Chambers was an ex-Communist who was accusing Alger Hiss of engaging in espionage for the Soviets back when Hiss was a U.S. State Department official.  Hiss initially equivocated about knowing Chambers, but Chambers was claiming to know personal information about Hiss, some of which was accurate, some of which was not.  Hiss eventually admitted that he knew Chambers under another name, George Crosley, and Hiss said that he (Hiss) sublet an apartment to Chambers.

Eventually, Chambers would say that Hiss' wife, Priscilla, copied U.S. Government documents on the Hiss's Woodstock typewriter, then gave those copies to Chambers so that he could relay them to the Soviets.  Chambers hid those copied documents, or perhaps it was microfilm copies of the documents (quite frankly, I don't know, since I vaguely recall reading the latter, yet Summers seems to suggest that the former was the case), in a pumpkin on his farm.  There was a search for Hiss's Woodstock typewriter, since, if the type on the copies of the documents matched the type that the Woodstock typewriter produced, that would supposedly indicate that Hiss's wife indeed had typed copies of those documents and given them to Chambers.  Nixon himself said that typewriters were like fingerprints: that each typewriter produced its own unique kind of type.  A Woodstock typewriter was brought forth, and it was said to be Hiss's typewriter.  Hiss was widely believed to be guilty of espionage on account of that.  The thing is, unbeknownst to the public, there were problems with the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss: it was manufactured later than Hiss's typewriter.

Summers speculates that the FBI (perhaps collaborating with Nixon) may have manufactured the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss.  Summers states on page 71: "...typewriters have been expertly forged, and with the government's blessing, in a very relevant time frame.  By 1941, as part of World War II liaison between American and British intelligence, operatives had developed machines that, according to one of the British officers involved, 'could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth.'  One successful anti-Nazi operation achieved precisely that by rebuilding an old Italian typewriter."  Summers states on page 73 that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover "himself had visited the secret installation in Canada where typewriter fabrication and similar acts of wizardry were perfected."  Summers in the documentation part of the book refers to Allen Weinstein's Perjury, Morton and Michael Levitt's A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss, Montgomery Hyde's Room 3603, and William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid (and Summers, if I'm reading his note correctly, says that Stevenson's book has a photograph of an October 30, 1941 letter).  One would probably have to look at those books to see if what they say about typewriter forgery is solidly supported.  Summers also refers to a statement by Horace Schmahl, who claimed to have been a "consultant" on typewriter forgery during the Hiss case.

So was Hiss an innocent man, who was deliberately framed by the FBI and Nixon?  Summers does not exactly go that far.  Summers contends that the FBI may have sincerely believed that Hiss was a Communist, on the basis of "Soviet cable intercepts", but that it could not reveal this.  After all, if the Soviet Union learned that the U.S. could intercept its cables, it would take steps to ensure that the U.S. couldn't intercept future cables.  Summers asks on page 73: "Could there have been some twisted reasoning along the lines that since Hiss was now apparently clearly guilty, but the real proof of it had to remain concealed, it was justifiable to fabricate another sort of 'proof'?"

Summers does not appear to believe that Hiss' guilt was rock-solid, however.  Hiss questions the reliability of some people behind the Iron Curtain and in the Soviet Union who claimed that Hiss was spying for the Soviets, while being open to others.  Summers also refers to Soviet sources that denied that Hiss was spying for the U.S.S.R.  On the Venona cables, which have been argued to indicate Hiss's involvement in espionage for the Soviets, Summers expresses doubt that ALES was Alger Hiss.  Summers states on page 77: "John Lowenthal, a lawyer who has long been a student of the subject and who maintains Hiss was innocent, has noted that----unlike the ALES of the 1945 message----Hiss was never accused of betraying 'military' information."  Summers also asks why Hiss equivocated about knowing Chambers, and he inquires if it could have been because of a homosexual relationship.  Summers states that Nixon said this to congressmen on a presidential yacht (for this, Summers cites a November 1975 article in Esquire), and he mentions a report that the FBI received saying that Chambers had a sexual relationship with Alger Hiss's stepson, Timothy.  Overall, because many Soviet and House Committee on Un-American Activities documents have been sealed, Summers states that "Until we have full access, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated" (page 77). 

I think that Summers does well to ask questions, and I found his discussion of Venona and the foreign Communists who claimed that Hiss was a spy to be impressive, and comprehensive.  I have some questions, however, about whether the typewriter was manufactured by the FBI.  Roger Morris, in Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, does not appear to accept that the typewriter was manufactured by the FBI.  On pages 498-499, Morris refers to the claims of William Sullivan, who worked with the FBI, that the Bureau's lab was "weakly staffed and managed" (Morris' words).  On page 499, Morris states: "'Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to prove his case against Hiss, Hoover would have been only too glad to oblige,' Sullivan believed from his intimate perspective on the case.  But 'even if we had wanted to, we simply would not have been capable of it.'"  Summers on page 74 quotes the first statement by Sullivan, in arguing that Hoover would have had a motive to manufacture evidence, but he did not quote Sullivan's statement that the FBI was incapable of it.  In the notes in the back, on page 491, however, Summers says that Sullivan, in talking to Hiss, backed away from a former statement he had made and said that the FBI was not able to fabricate a typewriter.  I don't know if Sullivan made both statements at once, or made the former statement, only to later back away from it.

The Arrogance of Power 1

Over the next six days, I will be blogging about Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, which is an anti-Nixon biography.  My format of blogging through this book will be different from my usual custom in blogging through books.  Ordinarily, I read a certain number of pages, then I pick out something from those pages to blog about.  In the case of The Arrogance of Power, however, I have already read two hundred pages before today, so my usual approach does not strike me as particularly feasible.  What I'll be doing for The Arrogance of Power is that I will select my favorite passages and will blog about them, even if those passages are not from my latest reading.

I was going to blog about Summers' interesting take on the Alger Hiss case, but I'll save that for tomorrow.  What I'll blog about today is Summers' discussion on pages 12-13 about Richard Nixon's religion.  Some of what Summers said is not new to me: Nixon's references to his Quaker mother, his statement that he prayed each night before he went to bed, etc.  Summers refers to possible indications that Nixon was not particularly religious, however: Nixon aide John Ehrlichman said that Nixon's friendship with Billy Graham was "window dressing", and also that Nixon "was not a motivated Christian" (Ehrlichman, quoted on page 12).  Summers says that "Nixon stopped holding Sunday services at the White House during Watergate and for months did not attend church at all" (page 12).  But Summers also notes indications that Nixon had an interest in religion and a belief in God.  Summers states that Nixon in his old age had a number of books about religion, and that Nixon told Rabbi Baruch Korff on his last day as President that he felt that God was punishing him.  Summers also refers to the view of the Chicago Tribune's Walter Trohan that Nixon's Quaker background may have influenced him to develop loner tendencies: "Quakers don't have anybody to deal with God except themselves, and that can make them loners.  He didn't consult people..." (Trohan, quoted on page 13).

What I did not know was that Nixon was an admirer of Roman Catholicism.  According to Summers, Ehrlichman quoted Nixon as saying: "You know, if I were ever to embrace a religion, it would be Catholicism, because they're so well disciplined in their dogma, so well defined."  Summers says that, according to Charles Colson (an aide to Nixon who would later become a lay minister), Nixon was thinking of becoming a Catholic before the 1972 election, for Nixon came to believe that "Catholics represented 'the real America'" (Summers' words, though Summers may be quoting Colson on the "real America" part).  Summers notes that "To traditional Quakers like [Nixon's] mother, Catholicism is anathema."  On page 13, Summers states that Nixon in his old age "still admired Catholicism, having come to believe that ritual and ceremony were essential to religion..."  Summers then goes on to quote a statement by Nixon's mother that Nixon "shuns even the restrained rituals" of his Quaker faith, so my impression is that Nixon's belief in the importance of rituals and ceremonies may have developed over time.

This discussion is a fine example of why I like Summers' book: it contains information about Nixon that I have not encountered in other books by or about Nixon that I have read.  Many books that I have read have had the same material.  There may be an anecdote here and there that is new to me, and each author adds his or her unique spin or analysis, but it's still a lot of the same stuff.  When I read Summers, however, there is a lot that he presents that is new to me.  And, in a number of cases, Summers refers to the testimony of eyewitnesses.

People have encouraged me to convert to Catholicism, but I doubt that I'll ever do that.  There are things that I admire about Catholicism----the beauty of its liturgy, its solid intellectual tradition, the salt-of-the-earth people----and there are things about its doctrines that I have problems with (i.e., no birth control).  Overall, I'm reluctant to hitch myself to a specific religion because I fear that doing so will hinder my own freedom of thought.  Catholicism has clear ideas about what people should do and believe, and I find that to be restrictive.  Consequently, I prefer my own loose version of Protestantism (if my religion even falls under that category).

UPDATE:  I'd like to mention one more thing about Nixon and religion.  Yesterday, I talked about Billy Graham's eulogy at Nixon's funeral, and how Graham likened Nixon to King Saul, one who had his own inner demons, yet accomplished great things.  It appears that Graham may have interpreted Nixon's demons literally.  Summers on page 318 quotes Graham as saying in 1979, as Graham reflected on Nixon's downfall: "I think it was sleeping pills.  Sleeping pills and demons.  I think there was definitely demon power involved.  He took all those sleeping pills, and through history, drugs and demons have gone together....My conclusion is that it was just all those sleeping pills, they just let a demon's power come in and play over him...."  In the documentation part of his book, on page 585, Summers refers to "Billy Graham in Esquire, Apr. 10, 1979."