Reflections on My Year (or More) of Nixon

Sometime in 2012, I got in the mail a book that I had ordered off of Amazon for a cheap price: Irwin Gellman’s The Contender, which was primarily about Richard Nixon’s years in Congress (both the House and the Senate).  I had seen the book years earlier at one of Columbia University’s libraries (I had library privileges there as a Jewish Theological Seminary student), and it intrigued me.  The book came across to me as a defense of Richard Nixon against detractors who claimed that Nixon ruthlessly and unfairly exploited anti-Communism to advance himself politically.  One of the book’s arguments was that Nixon was actually a level-headed voice of sanity on the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

When I received Gellman’s book in 2012, I had a thought: I knew that the centennial for Richard Nixon’s birthday was coming up—-for Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, and it would soon be January 9, 2013.  How about if I read Gellman’s book during the month of January?  But then I thought some more.  Richard Nixon had long intrigued me, for he was socially-awkward, introverted, resentful, and yet rather hard working, like me.  He had a kind side, and also there were liberals and conservatives who were claiming that he was politically progressive in areas, and that was of interest to me.  I had long noticed Stephen Ambrose’s trilogy about Nixon in libraries and I had wanted to read it, yet I did not feel that I had the time or the discipline for such a task.  But what if I were to devote an entire year, or even more, to reading about Richard Nixon?  Instead of just blogging about Gellman’s book in January 2013, perhaps I could devote all of 2013 to reading books by and about Nixon!

I had reservations.  For one, I feared that I would become bored with the topic.  Wouldn’t I be reading the same stories over and over, which would get old after a while?  Second, I feared that my blog stats would plummet because my readers would become bored with the topic, and potential readers would not read my blogs because they would see that I write primarily about Nixon.

But I decided to go ahead with the project.  On my fear of boredom, I reminded myself that I would read thirty pages of a Nixon book a day: I could handle that, even if I became bored.  On my fear of my blog stats plummeting, there was a part of me that said “So be it.”  I felt that I had to do this project for me, even if nobody else appreciated what I was doing.  If I could not blog about my own interests, then what was the point of me blogging?  But another part of me hoped that my posts on other topics would allow my stats to remain as high as they were, or to increase.

I went into the project with a list of books that I wanted to read.  Many of them, I read.  Some of them, I did not.  And there were books that I read that were not on that initial list.  My plan was to read Gellman’s book, the Ambrose trilogy, Monica Crowley’s books about her time working for Nixon, Richard Reeves’ book about Nixon, a psychological profile of Nixon that I saw at a Harvard library years before, all of the books that Nixon wrote, Theodore White’s books about the Presidential races in which Nixon ran, and others.  I read most of these.  I never got to Theodore White’s books, however, but I’ll probably read them during the next Presidential election (in 2016).  As I read Gellman’s response to Roger Morris’ book, and I noticed that I could get Morris’ book off Amazon for a cheap price, I decided to read Morris for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  I also added other books to the list in the course of the year.

I am proud of myself for sticking with this project.  I also think that most of my blog posts for it were good.  The project did not result in a drop in my blog stats.  On my blogger blog, my Nixon posts got the same amount of views that my other posts usually got.  (My hunch is, though, that the 200-plus views for one of my posts on Gary Allen’s Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask was largely due to spam or robotics!)  On my WordPress blog, my stats actually increased in 2013, but that was not due to my Nixon posts: I had a lot of views of posts that I had written in the previous years, or of non-Nixon posts that I had written.  But at least My Year (or More) of Nixon did not hurt my WordPress stats!

I think that I wrote a lot of good posts about life and social skills as a result of My Year (or More) of Nixon, but many might not read them because they don’t have a catchy title.  I titled my Nixon posts in reference to whatever book I was reading (i.e., “Six Crises 3), and that does not exactly catch readers!  I thought that a number of my posts were rather antiquarian, in that they discussed historical situations that many may think are not particularly relevant today.  I can understand why those posts would not attract people, but my hunch is that some of them eventually will.  I won’t be surprised if someone who is interested in learning the nuances of the Alger Hiss case will find my blog after doing a Google search!

Interestingly, I can’t say that I became thoroughly bored in doing this project, for I did it for a year, and there was enough material in the books that engaged me enough for me to write blog posts.  There were stories that crept up in most of the books that I read, but each book had a story or a take that was unique.  Still, I have to admit that I am itching to move on to another project!  I decided to end My Year (or More) of Nixon today because there are books that I want to read for Black History Month, which is in February 2014.

What was my favorite book about Nixon?  To be honest, I think that it would be Conrad Black’s Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.    It was far from being the best book about Nixon that I read, for there were other books that I found far more informative.  I was initially hesitant to read Black’s book because it seemed to me to rely largely on secondary sources, a number of which I had already read.  But I have pleasant memories of Black’s book, for a couple of reasons.  First of all, I loved the scene where Richard Nixon’s father was driving Richard and some of his schoolmates, and Black was talking about the improvements around them on this road-trip that were due to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Second, I liked Black’s analysis of issues and his suggestions of what Nixon and others should have done.  Granted, Black did come across to me as somewhat of a know-it-all in these discussions, but I still liked them.

Irwin Gellman's The Contender has a warm place in my heart because it inspired this project and was the book that introduced me to prominent aspects of Richard Nixon's life----the controversy surrounding Nixon's activity at the 1952 Republican National Convention, for example. But, as I read books after Gellman, my conclusion was that he did not say much that was particularly new, that others (I think of Jonathan Aitken) had defended Nixon better than he did, that some of his arguments were not that good, that his representations of the other side sometimes amounted to being strawmen (for example, the biographers Gellman criticizes acknowledge that Helen Gahagan Douglas lost the 1950 Senate race not only on account of Nixon’s attacks of her), and that the authors Gellman criticized themselves presented a fairly decent case.

There were books that I liked, but my liking them had little to do with what they said about Nixon.  For example, Fawn Brodie had some interesting things to say about Nixon’s lying or embellishments of the truth early on in her book, but what she had to say about Nixon got pretty boring as the book proceeded.  But I was fascinated as she told the story about the Kennedys and how Joseph Kennedy had to struggle to become accepted in the United States on account of his Irish and Catholic heritage.  Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland told many of the same stories about Nixon that I had read elsewhere, but it had a number of interesting stories about other political figures, and it, more than any other book I had read, effectively told the story of the political developments and turmoil of the 1960′s-1970′s.

Did I learn more about Nixon as a result of this project?  Well, I learned a number of facts that I did not know before, but I can’t say that my conceptualization of the man is all that different from how it was before the project.  I will say that I am more familiar now with the arguments of those who do not feel that Nixon was overly progressive, with the view that Nixon was a calculating politician rather than a principled leader.

All of that said, I am glad that I did this project, and I hope that some of you got something out of it, or will get something out of it if you stumble upon my posts in the future.

The Final Days 14

On page 433 of The Final Days, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, President Richard Nixon’s White House Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, is asking a secretary in the White House press office, Anne Grier, is she will be coming with him, Nixon, and two people on Ziegler’s staff—-Frank Gannon and Diane Sawyer—-to San Clemente, California.  Nixon is about to leave the office of the Presidency.  After pausing to consider how she will respond, and being told by Ziegler that she didn’t have to go, Anne finally says: “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  Of course I’ll go.”

I liked this part of the book because Ziegler is sticking with Nixon, even though Nixon is departing as a disgraced President.  And, as someone who watches ABC News each weeknight, I also think it’s cool that Diane Sawyer went with Nixon to San Clemente.  I already knew that Diane Sawyer worked for Nixon after his Presidency on account of the movie, Frost/Nixon, in which an actress plays her.  But it’s interesting to me how often she shows up in The Final Days, often dutifully doing her work, and sometimes expressing an opinion (of sympathy for Nixon, or of shock that John Connally was being attacked for a particular scandal).  Jonathan Aitken in Nixon: A Life narrates that Nixon and Sawyer had a breach in their relationship after Diane Sawyer interviewed him on CBS.  Aitken states on pages 559-560: “She needled him particularly harshly on Watergate, possibly because of a feeling on her part that she had to demonstrate her journalistic independence from her former boss.  Nixon coped more than adequately with her tough questioning, but was inwardly hurt by it and felt he had been betrayed by an old friend.”

President Nixon: Alone in the White House 1

I started Richard Reeves' President Nixon: Alone in the White House.  I'm finding that I am having to get used to Reeves' writing-style, but I am beginning to enjoy his book, even though I don't absorb every single detail of every single paragraph.  Reeves' book is unlike other books about Nixon that I have read.  Rather than taking a step back and narrating the broad themes and the important events of Richard Nixon's life, Reeves seems to give the impression that he is following Nixon day by day, as if he is a fly on the wall.  Granted, Reeves did not actually do that, but the book so far goes into an incredible amount of minutiae, while occasionally stepping back and commenting on larger characteristics of Nixon's approach and personality.  I'm liking it!

In many cases, when I have started a book about Nixon, the impact of the previous book that I had read lingers within me.  That's true right now.  Reeves narrates that Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave Nixon a copy of Robert Blake's book about Benjamin Disreali, who was a Prime Minister of Great Britain during the mid-nineteenth century.  Moynihan in doing so was encouraging Nixon not to thoroughly repudiate the Great Society but rather to build on it and to make it better, the same way that Disraeli, who founded the modern Conservative Party in Great Britain, "pushed forward great reforms in public health and welfare----reforms initiated by his Liberal predecessor, William Gladstone" (page 45).

I thought about Jonathan Aitken's biography of Nixon, which I had recently finished, as I was reading Reeves' narration here.  Blake's biography of Disraeli comes up a couple of times in Aitken's book.  Aitken actually opens his first chapter by mentioning it, saying that it was Nixon's favorite biography, and that Nixon marked the opening words of the book, which said that Disraeli did not have as humble of a background as many believed, and that "It is possible to overestimate the obstacles in his way and underestimate the assets he possessed."  It's ironic that this passage stood out to Nixon, since Nixon himself tended to emphasize, and perhaps even to embellish, his humble origins, whereas it was some of Nixon's negative biographers, such as Roger Morris, who would argue that Nixon's family of origin was not as poor as Nixon would let on.

Later in the book, Aitken talks about the time that Nixon actually met Blake.  This was after Nixon's resignation, and Nixon went to Great Britain and spoke at Oxford.  Blake said that he could tell that Nixon had actually read his book about Disraeli, rather than just being briefed about it.  Blake himself speculated that Nixon may have seen parallels between himself (meaning Nixon) and Disraeli: how both rose to prominence from relatively humble origins, were rather alienated, inspired animosity on their way to the top, and bounced "back after apparently permanent defeat" (Blake, quoted on page 549).

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 14

I finished Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life.  In this post, I'd like to share one of my favorite stories.  I don't have any profound thoughts to add about it, but I just liked it.

On page 566, Aitken is talking about the dedication of Richard Nixon's Presidential Library and Birthplace.  Back when Nixon was President, Nixon's close adviser, H.R. Haldeman, did not get along with Nixon's long-time secretary, Rose Mary Woods.  Haldeman tended to restrict access to the President, and he could be quite intimidating, which was why Nixon entrusted him with the tasks that he himself was uncomfortable doing.  And Woods herself was one tough lady!  Incidentally, Woods reportedly did not get along with Henry Kissinger, either, and Aitken tells a story about how she really dressed Kissinger down when Kissinger proudly did not want Alexander Haig to be Chief of Staff because Haig had served under him in the past; to his credit, Kissinger agreed to play ball!

But back to the dedication of Richard Nixon's Presidential Library and Birthplace!  Aitken narrates: "Resplendent in a green silk dress, [Woods] was meeting and greeting like a Hollywood hostess, even giving her old adversary Bob Haldeman a warm embrace after he whispered: 'I'm so sorry Rose, and for so many things.'"

I have to respect Haldeman for apologizing.  I've wondered about his human side, underneath his gruff exterior.  Some day, I may read his book and his diary, but I most likely won't do so for My Year (or More) of Nixon, since I'm in the process of winding that down, and I'm getting eager to move on to other things.  Haldeman did have a human side, beyond being Nixon's stern functionary.  He had children.  He (like John Ehrlichman) was a devout Christian Scientist.  And I have to give him credit for being loyal to Nixon throughout Nixon's life, when there were others who bitterly deserted him, for Haldeman attended Pat Nixon's funeral.  Haldeman's book about his time in the Nixon Administration was not particularly flattering to Nixon, as I understand it, but he would come to be reconciled with Nixon.  Moreover, it's also interesting to me that Haldeman was generous with his time when it came to people who were writing about Nixon, for he gave interviews.  I've wondered if I would be too intimidated to interview a no-nonsense man like Bob Haldeman, but, from what I read of his responses in interviews, he seemed to be quite open and helpful.

I'm glad that I read Aitken's book.  It's probably my favorite biography of Nixon that I have read so far, especially because of its anecdotes about Nixon's kindness, as well as its interviews.  Plus, Aitken is a really good writer: I like his easygoing prose!  I suppose that his book speaks to the side of me that loves The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, which seeks good in people, notwithstanding their flaws.  I think that it's important to balance out Aitken with books that are more anti-Nixon, if one is interested in studying Nixon.  But I'm definitely glad that I read Aitken's work, and I someday may read some of the other books that he has written.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 13

My blog post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life will focus on a couple of items on page 556.  They concern Richard Nixon's relationship with Robert "Bud" McFarlane, who served as President Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser.

McFarlane got frustrated with Reagan, mentioning to Aitken his "difficulties in overcoming President Reagan's inability to understand foreign policy" (McFarlane's words).  But Nixon would offer tips to McFarlane on how he could explain foreign policy to Reagan ("Put it to him this way"), and McFarlane said that the advice would often work.

Over a year after quitting his job as National Security Adviser, McFarlane would try to kill himself on account of the controversy surrounding the Iran-Contra affair.  Aitken narrates about McFarlane that "The morning after he was coming round from his drug overdose in February 1987, his first visitor at Bethesda Naval Hospital was the 37th President of the United States."  Nixon tried to make McFarlane feel better, knowing that McFarlane would be portrayed as weak by the media.  Nixon told McFarlane that Churchill and de Gaulle endured their "black dogs."  Nixon also encouraged McFarlane to continue his practice of prayer and Bible reading, since those could be an anchor to him, and having faith could get McFarlane through his hard times.  And Nixon exhorted McFarlane to look to the future, not the past, when getting out of the hospital, and to go earn himself some money.  McFarlane relates that "Coming from him, I can't tell you what a tonic that encouragement was."

There are a lot of issues here.  I could identify with both Reagan's difficulty in understanding foreign policy (assuming that what McFarlane says is true), as well as McFarlane's struggle to explain it to him.  It's refreshing when someone cares about how well we are learning, enough to explain things to us in a way that we can understand, rather than just writing us off as slow or dumb.

Nixon's visit to McFarlane in the hospital was inspiring to me.  It illustrates one of the reasons that I enjoy Aitken's book: it has stories about Nixon's kindness to people, that I have not found in other books.  I agree with Nixon that prayer and Bible reading can be an anchor in hard times.  They are often things that I hold onto----since I need something to hold onto.  Moreover, Nixon's encouragement of McFarlane is actually an encouragement to me, a motivation for me to get back up and try after setbacks, as I attempt to look to the future rather than the past.

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 11

Lately, my readings of Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life have focused on Watergate.  I have two items.

1.  Aitken seems to be open to the argument of Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup that White House Counsel John Dean ordered the Watergate break-in to uncover information about a call-girl ring.  Aitken said that he thought that the thesis was pretty far-fetched, until he talked with Gordon Liddy about it.  Liddy would come to accept Silent Coup's thesis.  When I first read that in another book, I was puzzled.  Was not Liddy a major participant in the Watergate scandal?  Wouldn't he know at the outset that the Watergate break-in was ordered by Dean and was intended to uncover information about a call-girl ring, if that were indeed the truth?  How could Liddy come to accept a new theory about Watergate, as if he were some dispassionate observer, rather than an actual participant?

It turns out that Liddy accepted Silent Coup's thesis because that made sense to him in retrospect.  Liddy acknowledges that, while he was participating in Watergate, he did not know everything that was going on.  On page 471, Aitken quotes Liddy as saying:

"Without doubt the man who commanded and conceived the Watergate operation was John Dean.  Nixon and [Attorney General John] Mitchell had nothing whatever to do with it.  I didn't realize that at the time.  Like most other people I was fooled by Dean's facile lies.  'Oh you don't understand Mitchell's ways', he told me when I was assuming from everything Mitchell said to me that he wanted Gemstone aborted...[H]e didn't tell anyone except Howard Hunt that what he was really after was the call-girl address book and a bug on the phones that were used to book the call girls.  He duped Magruder on that one and he duped me.  I remember Magruder saying to me, 'what we want is what they've got right here', pointing at the middle drawer of his own desk.  Now he didn't mean Larry O'Brien's desk.  When the Cubans went in they didn't go near O'Brien's office in the DNC.  Hunt gave them their orders and on the second break-in they went straight to the office and the desk of a secretary called Maxie Wells.  Our look-out post from the hotel over the road was angled to that office not to O'Brien's...I thought I was involved in an operation that was politically important to the President.  I now know it was an operation that was personally important to John Dean.  Period."

On the secretary, Maxie Wells, Aitken states: "According to Silent Coup, the FBI was able to establish that Wells's desk was the burglars' target, because when the burglars were being arrested, one had tried to conceal a key that fitted Wells's desk.  For some mysterious reason, this fact was ignored throughout the investigation of the break-in."

Liddy's claim that the Watergate burglars "didn't go near O'Brien's office in the DNC" stood out to me, for it recalled to my mind Joan Hoff's claim in Nixon Reconsidered that "the Watergate burglars did not initially bug, nor were they subsequently caught in, O’Brien’s office" (page 305).  That puzzles me because I have read in more than one biography of Nixon that the burglars indeed did break into Lawrence O'Brien's office.  Who's right on this?

2.  I'd like to turn my attention now to the topic of Deep Throat, the alleged inside source that was feeding Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein information about Watergate.  Mark Felt claimed to be Deep Throat, and Woodward confirmed Felt's claim.  When Jonathan Aitken wrote Nixon: A Life, however, the identity of Deep Throat was still unknown.  Aitken notes that Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein that material had been deliberately erased from the tapes, and this was before knowledge of the missing 18 and 1/2 minutes was widespread.  For Aitken, that should narrow down the candidates for Deep Throat, for not many people were aware of the missing 18 and 1/2 minutes.  Those who were aware included Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, Al Haig, Fred Buzhardt, Steve Bull, and Major General John C. Bennett (deputy to Haig).  Aitken excludes Nixon and Woods from being Deep Throat because he doubts that they would leak stories about themselves.  Aitken also believes that Deep Throat was probably the person who deliberately erased the 18 and 1/2 minutes, since "none of the remaining four should have had knowledge, at the time of the Deep Throat-Woodward conversation, that the gap had been caused by deliberate erasures" (page 512).

How can what Aitken says be reconciled with Mark Felt being Deep Throat?  Incidentally, it's on account of these sorts of issues (among other things) that Ann Coulter doubts that Mark Felt even was Deep Throat, notwithstanding what Felt and Woodward said.  In this column, she states: " The fictional Deep Throat knew things Felt could not possibly have known, such as the 18 1/2-minute gap on one of the White House tapes. Only six people knew about the gap when Woodward reported it. All of them worked at the White House. Felt not only didn't work at the White House, but when the story broke, he also didn't even work at the FBI anymore."

This article puzzles over how Felt could have known about the missing 18 and 1/2 minutes and raises a possible solution: "How did Mark Felt know about the deliberate erasures on the tape when Rose Mary Woods herself did not discover the added soft-buzz erasures until November 6, 1973? Did the theorized White House lawyer somehow tip off Felt after making the soft-buzz erasures?"  In this scenario, Deep Throat was not the one who made the erasures, but a White House lawyer who allegedly made some of the erasures may have tipped Felt off about them.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 10

On page 461 of Nixon: A Life, Jonathan Aitken states:

"...Nixon abroad had a personal style that was far more assured, confident and dignified than the image he portrayed at home.  At close quarters with his fellow Americans he could be socially inept and visually insecure.  Yet when travelling overseas, as if by the wave of a magic wand, he discarded his domestic complexes and resentments.  From the moment of arrival on foreign soil he exuded strength and often warmth.  A small part of this transformation may have been due to the realisation that he was usually being welcomed by people who admired him for his humble origins; who neither knew nor cared whether Whittier was an Ivy League university; and whose respect for his abilities went back a long time to the days when he had first begun to acquire his detailed knowledge about the affairs of their own country."

It's good when a person can find his or her niche, isn't it?  I long for social settings in which interaction with people is not such an uphill battle.  Is it all right to have that kind of longing, or does that feed into any notion I may have that my social struggles are always somebody else's fault----that the problem is my environment, not me?  Well, I don't want to get to the point where I am only blaming others without taking a good hard look at myself and what I may be doing wrong.  At the same time, there are some people and places that are more accepting and less judgmental than others.  That's just a fact.  I am not overly optimistic that I will be socially accepted in those sorts of settings, mind you, but perhaps I could thrive better in those settings than in other settings.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 9

What has been salient to me in my reading of Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life are Aitken's stories about Richard Nixon's compassion, generosity, and kindness.  Aitken tells two stories that I particularly enjoyed.

The first story was Aitken's story about the Donnellys.  Dorothy Cox Donnelly was Richard Nixon's appointments secretary when he was Vice-President, and her husband was a lobbyist who served on the Civil Aeronautics Board's staff.  Both were Republicans, and there was a strong possibility that both would be removed from their jobs once President John F. Kennedy entered office.  Their finances were fragile, and they were worried.  But Richard Nixon interceded for them with Kennedy.  Nixon asked if a job could be found for either Donnelly, and Kennedy replied, "Oh yes, sure, I remember Dorothy from your Senate office----the little one with the bun on the back of her head."  Aitken goes on to narrate that "To the amazement of the CAB, its Republican appointee was confirmed to his post a few days later on the orders of the White House" (page 292).

The second story was set in 1969, when Nixon was about to enter to Presidency, while President Lyndon Johnson and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (against whom Nixon ran for President in 1968) were about to leave.  On the day of his inauguration, Nixon remembered what it was like back when he was the departing Vice-President, and President Kennedy and Vice-President Johnson were taking over.  Aitken calls it Nixon's "Cinderella-like exit from the Vice Presidency in 1960, when all facilities, including his car, were withdrawn at the stroke of midnight" (page 371).  Aitken narrates how Nixon resolved to treat Humphrey differently when Humphrey was exiting the Vice-Presidency:

"In addition to the warm public and private tributes he paid to his election opponent, Nixon personally supervised all the arrangements for Humphrey's last hours in Washington.  These included putting an Air Force jet at the ex-Vice President's disposal, choosing a bouquet of Muriel Humphrey's favourite flowers to be handed to her as she got on to the aircraft, and attaching to them a handwritten note of presidential thanks for the couple's twenty-five years of public service.  The son of Hannah Nixon had not forgotten the importance of small acts of kindness."

Bruce Mazlish, in In Search of Nixon, said that Nixon could be generous from a position of strength, but he usually could not ask for help himself.  What are reasons to be compassionate for others?  So we can feel good about ourselves and have power as benefactors?  Because we don't want someone else to experience the pain that we experienced?  Because we have genuine compassion for people in a predicament?  Because we believe that we have an obligation to do so, either to God, or to the goal of creating a humane and generous society?

These are all reasons that people are generous.  Some may be generous for a mixture of one or more of these reasons.  In a number of people, one reason may predominate.  I hope to be generous out of a genuine sense of compassion, or a recognition of the shared humanity and vulnerability of both me and also the person I am helping.  There has been a tendency within me to treat people who need help as charity-cases for my benevolence, and perhaps the reason for that is that I have a hard time appreciating their humanity, since I am primarily looking to make myself feel better, or I think that looking at their humanity will turn me off from them, since I don't particularly like people.  (I can, say, help a blind person as a blind person who needs my help, but, once I look at the blind person as simply a person, I can begin to feel alienated from him or her, the same way that I feel alienated from most people.)  What I should remember is that we are all selves, that even those who may not like me are people with thoughts, feelings, experiences, and lives, and thus they deserve my compassion when they are experiencing hard times, the same way that I would deserve compassion were I experiencing hard times.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 8

For my blog post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, my focus will be on the Nixon Administration's enemies list.  This will not be a comprehensive post, going into what many authors have said about the topic.  Rather, I just want to highlight some passages that I found interesting.

Richard Nixon, in his book In the Arena, talks a bit about the enemies list.  On page 249, he states: "During Watergate, much attention was paid to the 'enemies list' that a member of the White House staff had prepared.  I never saw it.  Regrettably, some on the list were my personal friends."

(On another topic, as I look at that same page of In the Arena, I see a noteworthy passage that I must have missed when I read the book the first time around.  Nixon says that Harry Truman in the 1948 Presidential election implied that Nazis were supporting his opponent, Republican Thomas Dewey.  Nixon also states that "Ideally, candidates should hammer each other without destroying each other."  That brought to my mind a couple of things.  First of all, I wrote a post in which I critiqued Pat Buchanan's claim that those who supported Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" campaign against Dewey were hypocritical to then criticize Nixon's hard-hitting Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas.  If Truman was somehow linking Dewey with Nazism, however, then I'd say that Truman's campaign was more below-the-belt than I thought!  Second, while Nixon criticizes campaigns that destroy the other candidate, there are people who contend that Nixon actually destroyed his opponents, Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas.  Roger Morris on the American Experience documentary about Nixon said that Nixon's campaigns destroyed them politically, and nearly personally, and that this engendered a lot of bitterness.  But back to the White House enemies list!)

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Richard Nixon's youngest daughter, talks some about the enemies list in her biography of Pat Nixon, entitled Pat Nixon: The Untold Story.  On page 376, Julie argues that White House Counsel John Dean, who would reveal the existence of the enemies list in his testimony before Congress against the President, was himself the one who came up with it:

"Among the most titillating revelations from Dean were the 'enemies lists.'  Dean produced a memo, composed by himself, on 'dealing with our political enemies.'  In addition to a list of twenty prime political opponents, whom Dean recommended that the Administration target, were several lists of names running into the hundreds, which were to be referred to in determining who received White House jobs and invitations.  In his book, With Nixon, Ray Price points out that when he learned from Dean's testimony of the existence of the lists, he called them 'Dean's enemy lists,' because 'after all, it was Dean who proposed the unused plan to 'screw our enemies,' and Dean who collected the lists in his filing cabinet.'"

Julie goes on to argue that the Joint Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation found that the tax audits of those on the lists were no more severe than they were for others.  She also states that there were some on the list who were there "for no apparent reason."  She tells the story of how heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, who was on the list, still extended to her parents an offer of friendship, for he realized that they "had nothing to do with the lists" (page 377).

Going on to Richard Nixon's memoirs, Nixon states the following on page 441 of volume 2:

"[John Dean] talked about my attempt to have the IRS do checks on our political opponents with no attempt to show how widespread the practice had been among the Democrats in previous years.  The fact that we had hired a political investigator was treated as a sinister innovation, when in fact checking up on the political opposition has been part of politics since time out of mind.  We paid our investigator with political funds; other administrations had even used the FBI.  Dean produced an 'enemies list,' which even he has since admitted was vastly overplayed by the media."

Here, Nixon does not necessarily contradict what he said in In the Arena, but his focus is different: he justifies doing research on his political opponents, and even having the IRS do checks on some of them, on the grounds that this was customary in politics.

Jonathan Aitken refers to John Ehrlichman's statement that Nixon was assigning people odd jobs for investigation, some of them having to do with investigating political opponents, or the motives of a writer who criticized Julie.  Ehrlichman became concerned that this type of work "could not legitimately be funded by the taxpayer" (Ehrlichman, quoted on page 417).  Eventually, John Dean would do some of that work.  Aitken refers to Dean's August 16, 1971 memorandum, "Dealing with Our Political Enemies," which (according to Aitken) recommended that a list be compiled of the Administration's political enemies and that "various government agencies such as the IRS should be encouraged 'to screw them'" (Aitken cites for this page 104 of Silent Coup).  But Aitken says that Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman denied seeing the memorandum and that "no action was taken to implement its recommendations" (page 418).  On page 419, however, Aitken quotes Charles Colson's statement that the atmosphere at the White House tended to reward people who brought "negative intelligence" (Colson's words) on the Administration's political opponents.

UPDATE: Was Dean responsible for the enemies list?  On page 297 of President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Richard Reeves states: "Beginning on January 25, [1971?,] one of those new assistants, George Bell, began to work on implementing a new Nixon idea: organizing the staff to prepare lists of friends and enemies."  Reeves narrates that Haldeman saw a few of the lists, put together by Bell and Charles Colson, and was asking for clarification about them.  If Reeves is correct, then Dean probably was not solely responsible for the enemies list. 

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 7

Richard Nixon has been accused of sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks during his 1968 run for U.S. President.  Did Richard Nixon, using Anna Chennault as a go-between, try to convince South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks, thereby depriving the Democrats of an opportunity to take credit for a peaceful resolution of the Vietnam War?  Did Chennault, speaking for Nixon, claim to Thieu that he could get a better deal from Nixon were Nixon to become President?

Overall, Jonathan Aitken in Nixon: A Life, appears to be skeptical about this.  Aitken acknowledges that prominent Nixon campaign adviser John Mitchell spoke once with Chennault about the peace talks, but he doubts that Nixon was personally involved in Chennault's activities.  Aitken says that Nixon regarded Chennault as a "self-promoting chatterbox" (Aitken's words), and he seems to be saying that Chennault acted on her own initiative, since she opposed Lyndon Johnson's proposed deal with North Vietnam.  Aitken on page 366 states that "The telephone intercepts had...specifically recorded Mrs Chennault telling the South Vietnamese embassy that Nixon did not know what she was up to", yet Aitken goes on to say that "She may well have taken Nixon's name in vain during her conversations with her friends in Saigon..."

On the preceding page, Aitken says that "even if Nixon, through Mitchell, was something more than an innocent bystander in the contact with Mrs Chennault, he was certainly not a guilty party to the breakdown of the peace talks."  According to Aitken, Thieu had his own reasons not to participate in the Paris Peace Talks, and he did not need prompting from Chennault or the Nixon campaign to act as he did.  Regarding Lyndon Johnson's belief that Nixon was sabotaging the peace talks, Aitken says that LBJ was paranoid, and he contends that neither the wiretaps on the phones of Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell, nor the bugging of Nixon's plane, uncovered "any evidence of collusion" (page 465).  (NOTE: I have read in a couple of places that the allegation that Nixon's campaign plane was bugged was false.)  Moreover, according to Aitken, the reason that Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey did not go public with the accusation that Nixon sought to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks was that he did not believe that Nixon would do such a thing.

Aitken's narration of this appears to be rather contradictory, but he still offers perhaps the best defense of Nixon that I have read so far.  Was there solid evidence that Nixon was working through Chennault to sabotage the peace talks?  Or were Mitchell and Chennault acting on their own initiative?  Aitken does well to cast doubt on Chennault's claim that she was speaking for Nixon to the South Vietnamese, as she herself claimed on a few occasions that such was not the case.  But, as I say here, using Stephen Ambrose's biography of Nixon as my source, "Lyndon Johnson apparently had evidence that Nixon adviser John Mitchell, claiming to speak for Nixon, had asked Chennault to try to persuade Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks."  Would Mitchell claim to speak for Nixon, without that being the case?

The answer to the question of whether Nixon knew about the activities of Mitchell and Chennault may revolve around how involved Nixon was in the details of his campaign.  There were times when Nixon was supposedly obsessed with the details of his campaign and intimately involved in what his campaign did.  But there were also arguably times when he had a more hands-off approach when it came to what his underlings did.  Watergate, in my opinion, is a good example of that.

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 5

On page 266 of Nixon: A Life, Jonathan Aitken relays a story that Elliott Richardson told him about Vice-President Richard Nixon.  Richardson at the time was acting Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).  Richardson under President Nixon would serve as Under-Secretary of State, HEW Secretary, Secretary of Defense, and Attorney General.  Richardson resigned from his Attorney General position because he refused to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, notwithstanding pressure from President Nixon to do so.  Richardson would still go on to serve in the Ford Administration, as Ambassador to Great Britain and Secretary of Commerce.  Because of the variety of offices that he held, he was known as "The Man for All Positions."

When Richardson was acting HEW Secretary in 1959, which was during Dwight Eisenhower's Presidency, there was an occasion when Nixon spoke up at a Cabinet meeting, and Richardson actually appreciated this.  Ordinarily, Nixon would keep quiet at these meetings in 1959.  I'm not entirely clear why, but Richardson says that Nixon felt agitated because the Eisenhower Administration was making decisions without considering their negative impact on Nixon's coming 1960 run for President.  Aitken states on page 266:

"One occasion when Nixon did not keep his mouth shut at a Cabinet meeting in 1959 elicited the admiration and gratitude of Richardson, who was on the verge of resignation over the Administration's refusal to accept a bill which would provide certain federal guarantees and subsidies for bonds funding the expansion of higher education.  The bill was brought back to the Cabinet for one last discussion.  The HEW Secretary, Arthur Fleming, made his pitch and Eisenhower asked for views.  'Just about everyone was against it at first,' recalled Richardson.  'Ezra Taft Benson, the Agriculture Secretary, said it was an unwelcome intrusion of government.  Bob Anderson, the Secretary of the Treasury, said it required an excessive commitment of federal funding.  Our allies deserted us one by one.  The bill looked completely lost, until the Vice President spoke up.  In a series of well-timed interventions Nixon got Anderson to admit that the bill would have very little impact on the budget in the first year or two.  Then he had everyone agreeing that there was no objection to the bill in principle since the Government was already giving all sorts of subsidies to higher education.  Finally he gave his own interpretation of the HEW data of the need for higher educational institutions, ending up by asking, 'Can there be any doubt Mr President, that this bill meets an important national priority?'  There was a tiny spluttering around the table but no one opposed it any more, so Ike looked rather grim nodded and said, 'All right----send it up.'  It was a quite extraordinarily skillful performance by Nixon.  He had won the bill almost single-handed, and I was extremely grateful to him since I was saved from the need to resign.  Quite an irony, when you consider what happened to me in 1973.[']"

Ezra Taft Benson's opposition to the funding of higher education did not surprise me, since Benson was sympathetic towards the arch-conservative John Birch Society (whose founder, Robert Welch, argued that Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist conspiracy).  Benson was one of the endorsements of Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy on the book's back cover.  Just looking at some of the titles of his published works is eye-opening.  I'm looking especially at the title Civil Rights, Tool of Communist Deception.  See here. 


Richardson's story is cool, for a variety of reasons.  For one, this account is an example of why Aitken's book is so good.  Richardson, who left the Nixon Administration in protest, was years later reflecting on something positive that Richard Nixon did as Eisenhower's Vice-President, and he was making this reflection to Jonathan Aitken.  I've read a number of books about Nixon, and many of them rely (at least in part) on interviews, but the quality of the interviews in Aitken's book particularly impresses me.  Second, I'm impressed by how Nixon was able to sway the atmosphere of the room from opposing federal funding for higher education to supporting it.  While Nixon has long been characterized as socially-inept, he had to have talent to pull this off.  He probably could do so because he had a commanding presence and was able to articulate his position in an intelligent, reasonable manner.  Third, this passage highlights Nixon's centrist ideology, as Nixon supported a federal role for higher education, when conservatives within Eisenhower's Cabinet were against that.  Perhaps Nixon's stance was rooted in the importance of higher education in his own life: it allowed a working-class youth like him to go into law and then politics.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 4

In my latest reading of Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, Aitken's narration of Richard Nixon's controversial 1950 Senate campaign was, well, interesting.  I have read things that try to defend Nixon's activity during that time, or at least to portray Nixon as not-so-horrible.  Irwin Gellman's The Contender is one example.  So is Richard Nixon's narration of the event in his memoirs.  And Julie Nixon Eisenhower states that both Nixon and his Democratic opponent, Helen Douglas, were harsh to one another, probably against the narrative that focuses largely on her father's attacks on Douglas.

But Aitken took this sort of pro-Nixon or Nixon sympathizing narrative to a whole new level.  He says that Douglas was worse than Nixon in terms of attacks.  Aitken also seems to imply that the infamous Pink Sheet----in which Nixon compared Douglas' voting record with that of far left Congressman Vito Marcantonio----came after Douglas' Yellow Sheet attacking Nixon and comparing his voting record with that of Marcantonio.  Aitken also departs from the typical narrative that Nixon's controversial take-no-prisoners campaign aide, Murray Chotiner, was encouraging Nixon to run a brutal Red-baiting campaign against Douglas.  According to Aitken, Chotiner was encouraging Nixon to focus on domestic issues, rather than his role in the Alger Hiss case.  But Nixon did not take Chotiner's advice, Aitken narrates.  And, against the charge that Nixon exploited anti-Semitism in his campaign (since Douglas' husband was Jewish), Aitken points out that Nixon repudiated anti-Semitism in a manner that drew praise from the Anti-Defamation League, and also that Murray Chotiner himself was Jewish.  Aitken is not completely defensive of Nixon, however, for he argues (like many biographers) that the Pink Sheet was rather misleading.

I think that Aitken raised some valid points in his discussion of the 1950 campaign, or at least points that are worthy of discussion.  Most narrations that I have read about the event appear to presume that Nixon brought up Marcantonio first, and that Douglas only compared Nixon with Marcantonio after Nixon's Pink Sheet.  But many of the narrations that I have read----even those that depict Nixon as the bad guy and Douglas as a victim----point out examples of Douglas' name-calling and attacks on her political opponents.  I doubt that she was above reproach.  Aitken does well to highlight that, and he does so in more detail than anything else I have read up to this point.  I do believe that Aitken's narrative was incomplete, however, or failed to take into account certain considerations.  Aitken, for example, notes examples of Nixon criticizing and repudiating Joseph McCarthy, but some of the other books I have read suggest that Nixon praised McCarthy in pro-McCarthy areas of California, while criticizing him in the more moderate areas of the state.

Other interesting items in my latest reading include stories about Nixon's kindnesses to others (such as his secretaries and constituents who visited him in Washington, D.C.); the account of Nixon's long-time secretary, Rose Mary Woods, that Nixon in interviewing her did not probe into her religious or political affiliations, and Woods' narration of her Catholic family's victimization at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan when she was growing up (the Klan burned crosses on her lawn); and Nixon's reliance on his religious faith in getting through the 1952 Fund controversy.  These are things that I have not found in other books by and about Nixon.  Nixon himself probably recognized the need to appear modest, so he does not harp on his kind deeds in his writings.  Nixon also expressed aversion towards wearing religion on one's sleeve, and that may explain why he does not talk much about his faith in Six Crises and his memoirs.   Regarding Rose Mary Woods' accounts, Aitken's discussion of that shows how his book is a reservoir of interviews with key people whom many did not get to interview.

Also noteworthy is Aitken's narration of Nixon's work for Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican Convention.  Like many biographers, except for Gellman, Aitken depicts Nixon as supporting Eisenhower at the convention and seeking to undermine Earl Warren's hold on the California delegates, and Aitken does so with more clarity than other narrations I have read.  In his clarity, however, Aitken does leave some things out, such as Roger Morris' claim that Nixon at the convention was pretending to support arch-conservative candidate Robert Taft to the Taftites.

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 2

I was thinking about Fawn Brodie's biography of Richard Nixon while I was reading Jonathan Aitken's more positive portrayal.  Brodie speculated that Richard Nixon was unloved by his parents, and that this contributed to his political hunger.  But Aitken referred to examples of Nixon being loved by his father, and also by his extended family.  On page 84, Aitken talks about how Nixon's father, Frank, worked at Nixon's orange juice company (or, actually, Nixon was one of the owners of it), Citrifrost, for free.  Aitken also tells about how Richard was a favorite of his grandmother, Almira Milhous, and how many in Nixon's family envisioned him accomplishing great things, perhaps even being President.

Brodie chooses to focus on other things, however.  If I recall correctly, she made the point that Frank Nixon required his son Richard to pay him back for the time that Frank contributed to Nixon's expenses at law school.  Sounds cold?  Sure, but Frank also worked at Nixon's orange juice company for free.  Doesn't that count?  Both are part of a larger picture.

I was thinking about Brodie's discussion of Nixon's war record when reading Aitken's narration of that.  Brodie essentially argues that Nixon exaggerated his own war record, and she bases that (among other things) on contradictory stories that Nixon himself told about it.  Aitken, however, appears to accept Nixon's story that he was in foxholes due to bombing.  Incidentally, it interested me when reading Julie Nixon Eisenhower's biography of Pat that Julie did not mention foxholes or bombing when discussing Nixon's war record.

Roger Morris' biography also came to my mind as I was reading Aitken.  Morris argued that Nixon was heavily financed by wealthy special interests in his 1946 congressional campaign.  Aitken, however, depicts a time when Nixon was actually outspent and out-staffed by the Democrats in 1946, and he notes that Nixon used a lot of his poker winnings for his campaign.  Aitken quotes an eyewitness who related that Pat was complaining to him about the lack of money.  Aitken, however, goes on to say that Republican money started to come in.  That makes me wonder: perhaps Morris and Aitken are both correct.  Maybe there was a time when Nixon's campaign was financially struggling, but that problem was soon corrected.  One would have to set up a timeline and plot when authors say events happened in order to get a fairly accurate view of the situation, perhaps.

I'd like to make one more point, which is not particularly relevant to my discussion in this post thus far.  James Stewart----not the actor----served with Nixon in World War II, and Stewart said that Nixon at that time did not particularly care for General Douglas MacArthur.  Stewart stated that Nixon felt MacArthur "was prolonging the hostilities through personal vanity" (Stewart's words, quoted on page 104).  That's pretty intriguing, considering Nixon's support for MacArthur during the Korean War, and Nixon's rather positive portrayal of MacArthur in his book, Leaders (though Nixon does criticize MacArthur's insensitivity at least one time in that book).  That makes me wonder about the stages of evolution of Richard Nixon's belief system, and I have been curious about this topic before.  Irwin Gellman in The Contender narrates that Richard Nixon was not anti-Soviet during World War II, since he deemed Hitler to be the greater threat, and that Nixon's awareness of the threat of internal Communism really took off when he began serving on the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  But, if that is correct, I wondered, why did Nixon run a Red-baiting campaign in 1946, before he even became a Congressman?  From what I have read in many books about Nixon, Nixon during his youth was a Republican; and yet that wasn't an absolute, for Nixon admired Woodrow Wilson, and Nixon could manifest certain liberal ideas in an essay that he wrote as a Whittier College student.  One can probably put Nixon into a box as effectively as one can put his father in a box: both had convictions, on some level (Frank probably more so than Richard), but their beliefs could fluctuate.

Anyway, that's my rambling Nixon post for the day!

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.