Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin

I was reading about Silent Coup in other books that I was reading for My Year (or More) of Nixon, and its thesis intrigued me.  I already owned the book, since I had picked it up at a local Goodwill store some time ago.  So I figured that I might as well read it!

I probably should read John Dean’s books in addition to Silent Coup, since Dean sued the authors of Silent Coup for libel.    But I probably won’t read Dean’s books for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Maybe I’ll read them some other time in the future.  January will be over before you know it.  February is coming up, and I have a couple of books to read and blog about for Black History Month (which is in February).  My Year (or More) of Nixon has to come to an end sometime, and January 31, 2014 is an appropriate date to draw it to a close.  Plus, as much as I have grown accustomed to reading books by and about Nixon—-after all, I’ve been doing so for over a year—-I would like to move on to something else.  Some books I will have to save for another time—-such as John Dean’s works.

So what did I think about Silent Coup?  It was all right, I guess.  I don’t know enough to critique its theses.  Moreover, because the book was rather heavy and detailed, it would take me a long time to evaluate each and every paragraph for accuracy, and I don’t want to devote years of my life to unpacking Silent Coup.  I was looking through some other books about Nixon that I have read, and more than one of them criticizes Silent Coup for making leaps in logic.  Maybe it does, but, to me, as a reader, it did come across as fairly well-documented.  It relied on interviews and documents.  It noted contradictions in people’s testimonies, and between what people said and what the record showed (i.e., someone saying there was such-and-such a meeting, when actually there was not such-and-such a meeting on record).  Maybe there were times when the authors of Silent Coup went a bit beyond the evidence to make certain people look more sinister than they actually were.  Still, they ask good questions.

The main villains of the book are Alexander Haig and John Dean.  Haig, according to Colodny and Gettlin, was sabotaging Nixon’s Administration as White House Chief of Staff.  In the story that Silent Coup lays out, Haig was behind leaks, and he himself was the mysterious Deep Throat who was leaking information to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  Colodny and Gettlin even argue that Haig and Woodward had a prior relationship, that Woodward as a Navy man briefed Haig.  Colodny and Gettlin do not buy into Woodward’s portrayal of himself as a political outsider, for they maintain that he was long a part of the establishment.  Why were there forces seeking to sabotage Nixon’s Administration, according to Colodny and Gettlin?  Because there were elements of the military who did not like Nixon’s policies of rapprochement with the Soviet Union and Red China, as well as arms control.

Colodny and Gettlin assert that The Final Days, by Woodward and Bernstein, is essentially Haig’s side of the story—-the propaganda that Haig is behind.  I don’t know.  Granted, Haig wasn’t portrayed too badly in The Final Days: he was loyal to Nixon, yet not blindly loyal.  But The Final Days did include some bad things that Haig did, such as talking badly about Kissinger to Nixon, and about Nixon to Kissinger.  The Final Days also quotes someone who was warning Gerald Ford about Haig, essentially saying that Haig was out for himself.  I don’t think that The Final Days is a complete whitewash of Haig.  But perhaps detractors would argue that The Final Days would have to include some bad details about Haig to look like a credible piece of journalism rather than a whitewash.

On Dean, I have read in other books that Silent Coup‘s thesis is that Dean ordered the Watergate break-in to conceal information there that his girlfriend was associated with a call-girl ring.  That’s certainly a major part of the break-in, according to Silent Coup.  The thing is, though, Dean in Silent Coup does not come across as particularly chivalrous, but rather as ambitious and selfish.  According to Colodny and Gettlin, Dean wanted to work on intelligence to advance himself within the White House ranks; he would look at people’s desks and take credit for their ideas; he broke up with his girlfriend, then decided to marry her because then she couldn’t testify against him.  Silent Coup‘s notorious and controversial thesis was actually the most puzzling and nebulous to me, in light of its portrayal of Dean.

I was looking at David Greenberg’s Nixon’s Shadow, and he says that Nixon in Silent Coup appears “hapless” and “guileless” (page 225).  That’s why he’s so puzzled that Roger Morris supported the book (Morris actually wrote the Foreword to Silent Coup): How could Morris portray Nixon as so manipulative and shady in Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, only to endorse a book that presented Nixon as a victim of Watergate?  But I didn’t think that Nixon came across as “hapless” and “guileless” in Silent Coup.  Granted, Silent Coup does portray him as a victim of Haig and Dean, but it does not depict Nixon as thoroughly innocent, but rather as one who was involved in a cover-up.

This book would probably be a good read for people who are interested in Watergate.  But I also found it to be rather interesting when it came to the human element—-how the characters were depicted: how one could be an insider yet portray himself as an outsider; how people try to rise in the ranks and impress others; and how one may be on the social margins of the elite and yet be able to seduce women by appealing to his contacts (there was one character like that in the book).

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 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!

Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story 3

In today's post about Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, I will use two passages from Julie's book as a starting-point.  The main theme of this post will be resentment and forgiveness.

Throughout my reading thus far of Julie's book, Julie refers to wisdom, insights, or advice that her mother, Pat, gave about interpersonal relations.  Pat would give this advice to some of her students back when she was a teacher, and Pat as the Vice-President's wife sometimes talked about how she was able to connect with people in other countries, even though she did not know them and they were from a different culture.  She said that the smile is the universal language!  On page 189, Julie quotes a letter from Pat, which contained advice that Julie said "reflected [Pat's] philosophy of life".  Julie and Tricia were at a camp, and Julie had complained that some of the girls in her cabin were not particularly nice.  Pat wrote:

"In regard to the girls in your cabin: Just remember that some people are not as friendly and sweet as others.  The main thing is to treat them in a friendly fashion and stay your own sweet self rather than becoming like them.  When you think kind thoughts about them they will change for the better.  That is true all through life.  I love you very, very much!"

On pages 193-194, Julie talks about some of the shenanigans of the Kennedy campaign during the 1960 Presidential election:

"Once during the course of the campaign, Loretta Stuart came to our house to do Mother's hair before a trip.  She asked my mother why the Nixon campaign was not exposing some of the shady tactics of the powerfully financed Kennedy camp.  An example was the anti-Catholic mailers sent out during the Wisconsin primary to heavily Catholic precincts----all postmarked Minnesota, to look as if they were from Hubert H. Humphrey, Kennedy's main opponent in Wisconsin----but in truth they were the work of a friend of Robert Kennedy's.  The demolition of Humphrey in West Virginia also had included the innuendo that he was a draft dodger.  Humphrey was so angered by the Kennedy tactics that he publicly accused the candidate and his brother of 'cheap, low-down, gutter politics.'  In a 1976 autobiography, Humphrey would express his unhappiness with the Kennedy organization in this way: 'Underneath the beautiful exterior there was an element of ruthlessness and toughness that I had trouble either accepting or forgetting.'"

So end the readings.

What is ironic, of course, is that Nixon himself----or at least some of his underlings----was accused of engaging in ruthless campaigning and dirty tricks.  Nixon may have resented what Kennedy did to him, but there are many who would argue that Nixon became like Kennedy in that respect, if he was not like Kennedy already (though some would go further and say that Nixon was much worse).  Pat said that Julie should stay her own sweet self rather than becoming like her unfriendly cabin-mates.  Could Richard Nixon have benefited from such advice?  Or would he have concluded that it was unrealistic in the rough-and-tumble world of politics?

I don't know yet if Julie will address her father's campaign strategies, or the dirty tricks of some of his underlings.  So far in my reading, she has discussed Richard Nixon's races in 1946 and 1950.  Overall, she defends her father's controversial campaigns, saying that he was merely pointing out the records of his Democratic opponents, Jerry Voorhis in 1946 and Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950.  She also portrays the campaigns as grass-roots, stating that her family in 1946 invested a significant amount of its own nest-egg in the campaign, and that ladies in 1950 sewed dresses for Pat.  That kind of gives the campaign a down-home feel, doesn't it?  Of course, Roger Morris and certain other biographers would portray Nixon's campaigns as heavily-financed by rich special interests.  I should note, however, that Julie does depict the 1950 campaign as rough, on both sides.  She seems to acknowledge that her father attacked Douglas, but she also notes that Douglas attacked Nixon.  What surprised me is that, at least thus far, Julie is not particularly critical of Murray Chotiner, Nixon's controversial, take-no-prisoners campaign adviser, even though I have read in a couple of places that Nixon's family did not really care for Chotiner.  Julie narrates that Nixon came to rely more on the advice of his aides rather than that of his wife, but Julie also quotes Chotiner's praise for Pat's toughness!

But back to the topic of resentment and forgiveness!  It's hard for many people to move past resentment and to embrace forgiveness.  Pat, Richard, and maybe even Julie had a difficult time getting past the hurt that others had done to Richard in the political arena.  Maybe Pat still felt that she was following her own philosophy of life in that she was still nice to those people, whenever she came into contact with them.  (I don't know for sure if she was, and Julie in my reading thus far does not explicitly say that she was, but many of us maintain some friendly veneer when we're interacting with people we don't like.)  But I doubt that it was easy for her to think kind thoughts about them!

I think that Pat's philosophy of life is easier when it comes to the everyday snubs that one can regularly or occasionally experience.  If I were to obsess over the people who are not nice, I would not be functional, so I do need to follow Pat's philosophy of life, on some level.  But there are times when following her philosophy of life can be extremely difficult: when one has been attacked in the political arena, for example.  In that case, how would one forgive or at least forget, and move on?

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.

Reinventing Richard Nixon 3

On page 69 of Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession, Daniel Frick states:

"The 'completely pragmatic' and 'cynical' reactions of the Watergate president do not harmonize with the young man whose Quaker family taught him the difference between right and wrong (RN, 628).  Nor do justifying political espionage and lying to Congress and the public illustrate any of the personality traits enshrined in the orthodox success ethic.  Horatio Alger's heroes never said, 'Everybody does it.'"

The tension between morality and cynical pragmatism that Frick highlights is also present on page 93 of Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon: "Looking back, [Nixon's long, yet occasional, therapist, Dr. Arnold] Hutschnecker suspected Nixon had 'guilt feelings' for having pursued politics in the vindictive style of his father rather than on the 'saintly' path of his mother.  Nixon's fervent wish, the doctor felt, was that someday he would be able to say to Hannah, 'Mother, I have made peace.  Now I am worthy of you.'"

Can one get ahead by taking the moral and ethical high ground?  Or is something that a person once told me true: that an honest man cannot make it in this world?  Granted, it is hard for a person to be moral when so many around him or her are immoral: perhaps they are not all breaking the law, but they are primarily looking out for themselves, and they don't care whom they ruin or stomp on to advance.  I think of the politicians Nixon ran against in 1946 and 1950: they were principled people, but Nixon was able to run roughshod over them because he was willing to go on the attack (sometimes fairly, and sometimes not) and to receive the benefits of support from wealthy special interests, who provided him with money.  (I'm relying here on Roger Morris' narrative, which I deem to be credible.)  Did those politicians accomplish anything, for themselves or for others, by standing by their principles?  Perhaps not, even though they may have felt better about themselves than Nixon did (at least according to Hutschnecker's analysis of what Nixon felt).  But we do need more politicians who are principled and who take on the special interests, otherwise our country will stay in the same wretched condition.  I'll also add that people can get ahead by being good, on some level, for, when a person has a reputation for honesty, that can attract customers and employers, both of whom do not want to be taken advantage of.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 19

For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I will use as my starting-point something that Black says on page 614.  The context is the aftermath of a June 10, 1969 press conference that Nixon gave about the Vietnam War.

"It was a very strong performance, and Nixon engaged in what would become a drearily predictable habit: telephoning supporters to a late hour asking them how they thought he had done.  It is astonishing that a man of Nixon's intelligence would not realize how this demonstrable insecurity, when all he had to do was wait for a few hours and he would learn how people thought he had done, would undermine the confidence of his staff."

How are we doing?  Many of us would like to receive positive feedback, or some indication that we are on the right track.  Sometimes, we get that in this world.  At other times, we don't, and we're left wondering how exactly we are doing, and what we can do better.  I don't think that Nixon was always paralyzed by insecurity about how he was doing.  When he was a Congressman investigating the Alger Hiss case, for example, he just did the work that he needed to do, even though he did not know what the exact outcome would be in terms of his own political career.  (Even Roger Morris, who is quite critical of Nixon, acknowledges this.)  That's a good rule of thumb: just keep on doing the work, sowing the seeds, hoping that there will be a harvest.  If you try, you may or may not succeed; if you don't try, you won't succeed.  While being a self-starter is commendable, though, it's still nice to get a pat on the back, every once in a while.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 13

For my blog post today for My Year (or More) of Nixon, I will feature two quotes.  The first is from the book that I am reading now, Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.  The second is from Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician. 

On page 449 of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, Black states the following about Nixon's frustration with Dwight Eisenhower:

"Nixon steadily ran strongly in polls of Republicans expressing a presidential preference, but always said that he was not a candidate for the 1964 nomination.  When Eisenhower enumerated for the press ten Republicans that he thought would be good presidents, and left Nixon out, Nixon let his displeasure be known at a fashionable dinner table.  He knew this would be reported to Eisenhower, who called the next day and said that Nixon had made his point many times that he was not a candidate.  Nixon pointed out that, as reported, Eisenhower was not confining himself to declared, or even likely, candidates, and the former president told a reporter the following week that if there were a 'sudden wave of support' for Nixon, he would certainly be qualified.  Nixon had had about as much of Eisenhower's condescensions as he could take, and referred to his former boss from time to time as 'that senile old bastard,' which was in fact the opinion that he had intermittently had of him since the fund crisis thirteen years before.  Nixon was aware of Eisenhower's qualities and of his historic status, but it was a relief to drop the mask of exaggerated deference, at least occasionally and in private."

On pages 135-136 of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, Roger Morris talks about a possible reason that Richard Nixon as a young man loved football:

"Later, reporters were ever puzzled at why he had played football so long and so punishingly at Whittier and, even with the cheers when he finally got in the game, with such failure and humiliation.  In the end, thought Wood Glover, 'He just enjoyed the game.  He enjoyed being around it.'  He found among the football team, even apart from their locker room bull sessions, the candor and freedom from artifice that he had seen in his father, and that was missing in much of the rest of his universe.  If the Milhouses were a tribe of quiet, compelling women, if debate and academics demanded subtlety and maneuver, the football field was a world of men and a kind of raw honesty.  'I think he liked the contact with those people,' Ingrum said.  'And I'm not too sure that he didn't enjoy it more than he did with just the scholar type, because I think he was challenged from a different standpoint.  You know, the athletes don't give a hoot what they say or when they say it...and I think Dick enjoyed the comradeship and the straightforwardness."

So end the readings!

The reason that I love these passages is that they express how artificial and intimidating the social world can be.  There are so many subtleties and nit-pickings and politics and jerks in the world today, that it's a challenge for neurotypical people to get through this jungle, let alone people with Asperger's, or others who feel as if they don't have a social map!  Nixon was happy when he could take a brief break from his need to be obsequious towards Eisenhower and could express what he really thought about Eisenhower and his history of condescension towards Nixon, even if Nixon could only take that break in private.  And Nixon as a young man probably liked football because it was so raw and honest----it didn't have all the nuancing and subtleties of academia, or the repression of feelings from his Quaker heritage.  Rather, athletes were blunt in saying what they thought, and football involved tackling.  You'd think that people with Asperger's would gravitate towards sports.  But my impression is that this often does not happen.  For one, there are many with Asperger's who lack ability in sports (though there are exceptions).  Second, because Aspies are different, they can be targets of bullying, sometimes by the blunt athletes, who may not feel bound by the rule of propriety that says that one person should not bully another.  I'm not saying that all or even most athletes are like this, but this sort of thing does happen. 

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 5

I have two items for my post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.  We're in the time of the Truman Administration, and Richard Nixon is a United States Senator representing the state of California.  These two items, in my opinion, exemplify Conrad Black's treatment of Nixon and the events surrounding him.

1.  On pages 170-173, Black talks about General Douglas MacArthur's desired strategy for the Korean War, which would lead MacArthur into conflict with President Harry S Truman.  On page 170, Black summarizes MacArthur's stance: "He considered Korea an opportunity to suck into the peninsula and destroy the Chinese Communist army, to bomb China's industrial areas to rubble, and so to weaken the People's Republic that Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists, who had just been chased off the mainland to Taiwan, could return."  Black says that MacArthur has been accused of advocating that the U.S. threaten to use nuclear weapons, but Black believes that this is false (though Black notes on page 171 that President Dwight Eisenhower "would discretely threaten this, to his and America's profit").  Black's opinion is that MacArthur using Chiang's soldiers and providing them with air support "would certainly have broken the stalemate in Korea, with interesting results" (page 171).  Yet, Black doubts that Chiang would have been able to resurrect his own rule in mainland China, for Chiang was corrupt, inept, and unpopular with many in that country.

As Senator, Richard Nixon introduced a bill that would reverse President Truman's recall of General MacArthur.  Nixon in his book, Leaders, says that his speech to the Senate at the time actually distributed the blame between Truman and MacArthur.  Nixon on pages 98-99 of that book quotes himself as saying in that speech: "Let me say that I am not among those who believe that General MacArthur is infallible...I am not among those who think that he has not made decisions which are subject to criticism.  But I do say that in this particular instance he offers an alternative policy which the American people can and will support.  He offers a change from the policies which have led us almost to the brink of disaster in Asia----and that means in the world."  Black not only considers Nixon's proposal in the Senate to be "an unconstitutional usurpation of the prerogatives of the commander in chief", but he also dismisses what Nixon would say in Leaders as "a reinterpretive reading of his remarks" (page 172).  Black goes on to say that MacArthur was insubordinate, but Black is also critical of how Truman handled the situation.  According to Black, Truman could have warned MacArthur privately, or Truman could have left MacArthur as governor of Japan, where MacArthur's contribution was widely acclaimed.  Black states that this "would have blunted the impact of MacArthur's removal", and that the "general was seventy-one and retirement, if decorously executed, would not have been premature" (page 173).

Overall, I found Black's discussion of Truman and MacArthur to be fair and balanced, in that Black talked about what he considered to be the positives and negatives of both men.  On how Black covered Nixon in terms of this situation, I wish that Black had gone into more detail about how Nixon's treatment of his Senate speech in Leaders was "a reinterpetive reading of his remarks", for Nixon in Leaders actually quoted from his own Senate speech.  How exactly would Black interpret Nixon's remarks, if he doesn't buy into how Nixon is interpreting them?  They sound pretty straightforward to me: Nixon did not see MacArthur as infallible!   At the same time, perhaps one could argue that, even if Senator Nixon tried to convey that he was being balanced and fair-minded, the big picture was that Nixon was backing MacArthur.

Incidentally, I read an Amazon review that critiqued Black's treatment of the Korean War.  It's by History Addict, who says:

"The Nixon biography is not quite as good as the FDR study. There are, for example, a few glaring geopolitical mistakes. On several occasions Black writes that the United States should have brought Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army from Taiwan into the wars against Chinese proxies--North Korea and then North Vietnam--and, given that Chinese troops were advising those proxies, let them fight Chinese soldiers themselves. That would in fact have been an enormous error, for Chiang's primary goal in the 1950s and 1960s was to provoke a war between the United States and China both to prevent a Sino-American rapprochement and to increase the odds that the PRC would collapse and he could return in glory to the mainland. Given that goal--and Chiang's cynical and manipulative history--it would have been disastrous to make the United States dependent on his behavior and that of his military."

I'm not sure on what History Addict bases his claims, but my hunch is that they're based on something, since History Addict has read history.  What I'm getting from History Addict's remarks is that Chiang could have decided to sit back and let the U.S. and the Red Chinese duke it out, without involving his own soldiers.  That way, the Communists in China would be weakened and Chiang could return to power, without losing his own men.  History Addict's point is that Chiang would not have wanted for his own soldiers to be involved in the Korean War, so he'd be reluctant to participate in MacArthur's plan.

2.  On page 178, Black addresses the charge that Nixon in one case sought to craft policy to benefit contributors:

"Some critics and historians have made something of the fact that [Nixon] sent in a bill to enable two contributors to his fund to drill for oil on federal land in California.  Nixon did not push hard for the bill, which died.  Nixon didn't lift a finger for the people who had given him a few thousand dollars, which were uncontroversially spent."

I've seen this sort of thing more than once in Black's book: Black attempts to defend Nixon from charges that Nixon was unethical or corrupt.  I don't believe that Black reflexively defends Nixon, mind you, for there are plenty of times when Black is quite critical of Nixon.  Whereas Irwin Gellman in The Contender, for example, disputes that Nixon at the 1952 Republican National Convention was trying to undermine support for Earl Warren and was playing different sides (Robert Taft and Dwight Eisenhower), Black essentially says that Nixon was doing precisely that: that Nixon was claiming to be for Taft to undermine support for Warren, while also supporting Eisenhower (pages 189-190).  On one of the big accusations against Nixon, Black maintains that Nixon was rather shady.  And yet, here and there, Black dismisses some of the other charges that historians have made against Nixon.

The charge that Nixon favored special interests looms large in Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  I'd say that it's a major theme of the entire tome, for, even when talking about California prior to Richard Nixon's birth, Morris refers to the special interests that sought to consolidate their wealth and power in the state.  Jerry Voorhis would go against these special interests, Morris argues, whereas Nixon as a politician would favor them.  Black appears to have a different perspective, however.  While Black acknowledges that Nixon in his campaigns for the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate received a considerable amount of money (something that historians who are more favorable to Nixon tend to downplay, or even deny), Black also disputes that the contributors to Nixon's fund were millionaires (not that Morris says that they were, but Morris does regard them as well-off special interests).  He also seems to deny that their contributions got them any favors from Richard Nixon.  For example, regarding Nixon's political fund, which would be controversial in the 1952 Presidential election, Black notes that Nixon did not know who the donors are (something that Morris disputes).  The implication here may be: How can Nixon benefit contributors, when he does not even know their identity?  At the same time, like Morris, Black acknowledges that Nixon's political fund from the contributions of California businessmen was designed to make Nixon into a high-profiled spokesperson for conservatism (or Morris would say special interests).

These are my impressions so far, and I have not yet finished Black's tome.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 4

For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll talk about Black's discussion of the Alger Hiss case, in which ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy when Hiss served in the U.S. Government.  Congressman Richard Nixon's involvement in bringing down Alger Hiss would launch Nixon to political stardom.

What's interesting about Black's narration and analysis of the case is that, in some areas, his conclusion appears to contradict the body of his presentation.  Black concludes that Hiss was a Communist sympathizer who passed on documents to the Soviet Union, that Hiss was a "loyalty risk", and that Hiss in his first appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) committed perjury when he denied knowing Whittaker Chambers.

Earlier in the book, however, Black seems to see more nuance in the situation.  On page 112, Black says that "all Hiss had really done was deny knowing Chambers from his photograph and dispute Chambers's uncorroborated recollections."  That's not exactly lying under oath, is it?  Hiss just said that he didn't recognize Chambers from his photograph, since Chambers looked like a lot of people; as far as I know, Hiss did not make a blanket, unequivocal statement that he did not know Chambers.  Nixon said that Hiss' equivocations ("as far as I can recall," or words to that effect) were what made Nixon suspicious of Hiss when Hiss first appeared before HUAC.  (Black appears to buy, however, that, even before Hiss' initial appearance before HUAC, Father Cronin was feeding Nixon information about Hiss, which contradicts the story that Nixon often told.  Father Cronin claimed that he fed Nixon information, only to retract that claim in 1990.  What's interesting about Black's acceptance of the idea that Cronin fed Nixon information is that Black wrote his biography about Nixon years after Cronin retracted his claim.)

On page 116, Black disputes the charge that Alger Hiss played a role in getting the Soviet Union three seats in the UN General Assembly.  (Black goes on to say that FDR arranged for the U.S. to have three seats, too, but that FDR and Truman failed to follow through on that right.)  And, on page 138, Black acknowledges that there were problems with the typewriter that was alleged to belong to Alger Hiss, the typewriter on which Hiss supposedly copied State Department documents so they could be passed on to the Soviets.  As Black says, "What the government thought to be the Hiss typewriter they traced to a sale in 1927, two years before company records indicated it was manufactured."  Black then goes on to say that J. Edgar "Hoover himself was reduced almost to demanding that the facts be made to conform to the prosecution's requirement."

Ultimately, in his conclusion, Black says that "The conspiracy of incompetence was far wider than any subversive one, and included Hoover, Clark, Hiss, Chambers, most of HUAC, and many judges and Justice Department officials" (page 144).  Black excludes Nixon from this conspiracy of incompetence, contending that Nixon was courageous and diligent, and that "his pursuit of Hiss was not discreditable", for "Hiss was lying" and "had been a security risk" (page 144).  In my opinion, while Black's criticism in his conclusion of the FBI, HUAC, and others is consistent with his look at the Alger Hiss case in the body of his presentation, his dogmatism about Hiss' guilt is not.  I much prefer how Roger Morris handled the Hiss case: Morris concluded by saying that he did not know if Hiss was a Communist.  Speaking for myself, and based on my reading, I'm not particularly impressed by how Hiss handled himself during the case, nor am I convinced that he was innocent, for he contradicted himself in his testimony.  But I also have questions about some of the "evidence" that was used to convict him, plus Hiss did appear to oppose the three votes for the Soviets at Yalta.  Consequently, I can't be dogmatic about his guilt.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 1

I started Conrad Black's 2007 biography of Richard Nixon, entitled Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.  I was initially hesitant to read Black's book for My Year (or More) of Nixon, since I already have enough books about Nixon to read, plus Black's book is really long (like, over 1,000 pages).  But I found myself visiting Amazon repeatedly to see if the price of Black's book had gone down.  I decided not to buy Black's book, but I checked it out from the library, so I could see if I wanted to read it.  Now, I'm reading it.  I'll see over time if I made a good choice!

I haven't read anything earthshakingly new about Nixon in Black's book up to this point, and I had to get used to Black's prose.  Moreover, after reading Roger Morris' detailed and extensively-documented tome about Nixon's early life and political career up to (and including) 1952, I found Black's discussion of Nixon's childhood, college years, and time at Duke Law School to be very disappointing.  But I'm finding as I continue to read Black's book that I am enjoying it more and more.  Black has been accused by reviewers of being pro-Nixon, of seeing Nixon in a sympathetic light because Black himself has had legal problems (and that accusation, incidentally, is one reason that I was motivated to read Black's book).  But, in my reading thus far, Black strikes me as fair-minded.  I think there are times when he acts as if he is some God-like narrator who knows for certain what really happened, and that gets on my nerves: at least Morris backed up more of his narrative with eyewitness testimony.  But I commend Black for sifting through the strengths and weaknesses of pro- and anti-Nixon narratives.  For example, in his section on Richard Nixon's 1946 Congressional race against Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, Black disputes that the Committee of 100 that asked Nixon to run were huge industrialists, yet he also acknowledges that Nixon received a lot of money for his campaign, and that Nixon's portrayal of Voorhis' record was not particularly accurate.  Overall, Black steers a middle-ground between pro- and anti-Nixon narratives.

I also enjoy when Black calls out Nixon's BS.  For instance, Nixon in his 1946 campaign liked to appeal to his background in the Navy in World War II, and Nixon would talk about what his fellow Navy-men in the foxholes wanted in terms of political policy.  Black says that, for one, Nixon technically was not in a foxhole, and, two, even if he were in a foxhole, the men with him there would probably not be discussing politics with him!

I'm also noticing that Black keeps bringing up Franklin Roosevelt.  Black sometimes compares Nixon to Roosevelt: for example, Black notes that both were not good businessmen.  Black also defends Roosevelt against the right-wing charge that he sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets.  And Black appears to regard the New Deal as something that was alleviating the Great Depression (on some level).  Black is largely regarded as a conservative, and he seems to understand the concerns of business-people who were opposed to the New Deal.  But I appreciate his sympathetic, albeit three-dimensional, portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt.  Incidentally, Black wrote a massive biography of FDR, and I may someday read that, alongside pro-New Deal and conservative anti-New Deal works, as well as Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man.  Black in his biography of Nixon may be bringing up Roosevelt continually to remind us that he wrote a book on FDR.  I prefer to think, though, that Black just can't get FDR out of his system!

This is not exactly the post that I was planning to write today.  I was intending to write about what Black says about how Nixon's social challenges actually made him into an effective politician.  I think I'll save that post for tomorrow.

Nixon Reconsidered 2

I have two items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1. On page 21, we read the following about President Richard Nixon's environmental policy, specifically White House counsel John Ehrlichman's contribution to it:

"Often using poll data, [John] Ehrlichman----with his assistant, Egil [Bud] Krogh; John Whitaker, who served first as Nixon's cabinet secretary and later as undersecretary of the Interior Department; and Whitaker's assistant, Christopher DeMuth----substantially influenced both Nixon's ideas and the content of his environmental legislation by making it into a crisis issue.  In fact, Ehrlichman, who had specialized in land-use law in Seattle, has been described by one forest conservation specialist as 'the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot,' referring to the controversial chief of the U.S. Forest Service under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.  He and Whitaker put Nixon out in front of Congress on environmental issues, especially with respect to the use of the permit authority in the Refuse Act of 1899 to begin to clean up water supplies before Congress passed any 'comprehensive water pollution enforcement plan.'  Curiously, Ehrlichman did not dwell on his own contribution to environmental reform in his 1982 book, Witness to Power, preferring to denigrate Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, whose anti- and then pro-conservation and pollution views he constantly had to counter."

I thought this passage was funny.  John Ehrlichman, "the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot."  Really?  But, come to think of it, I don't know a whole lot about Ehrlichman, since I know of him primarily on account of what I have read about Watergate.  Maybe he was an environmentalist, for all I know!

The part about Ehrlichman not dwelling on his contributions to environmental policy in his 1982 book stood out to me.  I am tempted to think that, whereas Democrats liked to talk about reform, Republicans (specifically the Nixon Administration) were actually bringing it about, and were doing so in a low-key way.  Maybe there's some truth to that (though one should not undervalue the reforms that Democrats brought about).  But I doubt that it's the whole story.  The paragraph opens, after all, by saying that Ehrlichman and others used poll data.  Why would they use poll data, if they wanted their environmental policies to be low-key and unknown to the voters?  My hunch is that they would use poll data because, on some level, they are crafting their policies according to what would be effective politically, in terms of what would effectively advertise the Nixon Administration to the public.  This raises a question that I have asked since I started reading Hoff's book, and that I may continue to ask until I finish it (and perhaps even beyond): to what extent were the Nixon Administration's domestic reforms motivated by a commitment to principle, and to what extent were they politically-motivated attempts to get votes?  The impression that I am getting was that Nixon was quite a politically-calculating person.  But I can't rule out from my reading that there may have been some noble principles motivating Nixon.

2.  On pages 62-63, Hoff talks about the Office of Economic Opportunities' Legal Services Program, which aimed to provide legal services to the poor.  Under the Nixon Administration, Donald Rumsfeld headed the OEC for a while, and (when Rumsfeld was made Counsel) his replacement was Howard Phillips, a conservative who wanted to dismantle the OEC.  Howard Phillips would go on to become a conservative activist, and he passed on recently.

"...in November 1969 Rumsfeld believed that the White House was not supporting his opposition to the so-called Murphy amendment, which would have given each governor veto power over the OEO Legal Services Program funded by that state without the OEO directors being able to override the veto.  This issue arose over Nixon's proposal to turn the Office of Legal Services into a separate government corporation chartered by Congress and funded at the local level with revenue-sharing funds.  Since it was evident that local officials might choose not to use federal funds for such antipoverty programs, critics feared for its survival.  Women and Native American leaders were particularly concerned about continued legal aid for their constituents.  The White House went to great lengths between 1969 and 1973 to respond that the president's intent was to 'make sure that every citizen has access to legal services,' while 'correcting the abuses which went on under this program' and removing 'legal services from the recurring political controversy which has attended it.'  Nixon claimed, for example, in an August 11, 1969, statement to Congress about restructuring OEO that legal services to the poor would be 'strengthened and elevated' by having independent status...Civil rights advocates and antipoverty activists questioned both the motives and intent of the White House and, like Rumsfeld, were against the obvious intent of the Murphy amendment to allow governors to cut back funding for legal services benefiting the poor.  This prompted Ehrlichman, in a carefully worded memorandum, to point out to Nixon that 'in view of Don's [Rumsfeld] public stance and the nature of the opposition to Murphy's amendment you cannot favor the amendment'...Nixon ultimately supported Rumsfeld over those in favor of the Murphy amendment..."

This passage stood out to me for two reasons.  First of all, it brought to my mind a passage that I read in Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  Morris referred to a paper that Nixon wrote as a Duke Law School student that defended legal services for the poor, and Morris regarded that as ironic, in light of Nixon's efforts as President to undermine the Legal Services Program.  The thing is, according to Hoff, Nixon did not feel that he was trying to undermine the Legal Services Program, nor did he as President oppose the provision of legal services to the poor.  His whole point was that he was trying to preserve legal services for the poor by making the program more efficient.  On pages 64-65, Hoff says that Nixon believed that the OEO's provision of money to political groups like the American Indian Movement and the National Welfare Rights Organization was resulting in the "diversion of funds away from representing poor people in the courts."  (This is a line from a news summary, and Nixon indicated agreement with it.)

Was Nixon right on this?  Or would his policy have had deleterious effects on the ability of the poor to be represented in court?  I'm sure this was debated.  One reason that I like Hoff's book so far, however, is that she presents Nixon's characterization of his own domestic policies: we get to hear what he said about his own motives and agendas, not just his detractors' characterizations of them.  Some may say that Nixon was giving the public spin.  Perhaps.  But his side of the story should still be heard, and I would say the same about the perspectives of others in the debate: the political groups who feared the consequences of Nixon's OEO policy, Democrats, etc.

Second, Hoff refers to a concern about Nixon's policy regarding the Legal Services Program: that federal money would be given to the states, and the states would choose not to fund legal services to the poor adequately.  This was actually a widespread criticism of Nixon's New Federalism agenda in general: that it would give money to the states for certain programs, and the states would choose not to spend all of it on those programs, choosing instead to spend it elsewhere, or to use it to balance the state budget.  Unfortunately, as far as I could see (and I have not read all of Hoff's book), Hoff does not adequately address this concern.  She distinguishes Nixon's New Federalism from the policies of Ronald Reagan, whom she says did not particularly care for government involvement even at the state level (which is interesting to me, since Reagan talked about turning over power to the states, and yet it would not surprise me, since there are many Tea-Partier types today who seem to oppose more taxes and spending at the state and local levels, not just the federal).  According to Hoff, Nixon's policy was to give lots of money to state governments, and they would use that money for certain programs.  But Hoff should have rigorously addressed the question: What if the money would go to the state governments, and the state governments would not use all of it for the programs?

I guess that, ultimately, Nixon did oppose an amendment that would allow states not to use money for legal services for the poor.  His good, I suppose.  The thing is, it appears to me that he was doing so for political purposes, and also because (on some level) his arm was being twisted by Don Rumsfeld, whom I never envisioned as a progressive, but that's what he apparently was in this case.  According to Ehrlichman, Rumsfeld was making a stink about the Murphy amendment, and that put Nixon in a position of having to oppose it.  I can't say that Nixon comes across as particularly heroic, here (though I will say that he did come across as more of a progressive hero in his policies regarding Native Americans, at least in what I read about that in Hoff's book).

Nixon Reconsidered 1

I started Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.  I first heard of this book when I was in high school.  I believe it was in 1994, when the book came out.  I had a subscription to the rather conservative Insight magazine (which someone bought for me for my birthday present), and it had an article about Nixon Reconsidered.  According to the article, Hoff's book was arguing that Nixon made significant progressive accomplishments on the domestic front.  I guess that didn't surprise me that much.  Back when I was in the sixth grade, I read Peter Hannaford's book, The Reagans, and (if I recall correctly) it discussed how Reagan was quite critical of President Nixon's proposed Family Assistance Policy (FAP).  In my mind, the fact that Nixon even proposed such a policy told me that Nixon was open to liberal ideas.  Moreover, one of my relatives had a copy of John Bircher Gary Allen's Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask, and I read pieces of it when I visited his house.  At the beginning of the book, Allen quoted someone who complained that, under the Nixon Presidency, liberals get the action, whereas conservatives get the rhetoric.  I knew that Nixon wasn't exactly a conservative, in the Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater sense.

Still, the article in Insight about Hoff's book intrigued me.  I hoped to read Hoff's book someday, and, nineteen years later, that is what I am doing.  Why did Insight's description of the book intrigue me at the time?  Well, although I was aware that Nixon was open to liberal ideas, I really didn't know anything about his accomplishments in the environment and civil rights.  The notion that a Republican President would have a successful track record in making progressive accomplishments on issues of concern to liberal Democrats gave me a sense of glee.  Moreover, I was intrigued by a historian stepping forward and arguing that Nixon was essentially a good President.  My impression at the time was that not many people did that (though some praised his China policy).  My perception (limited as it was) was that Nixon was widely considered to be a crook, a liar, and a villain, and those who thought otherwise were Republicans (like the fictional Alex Keaton) who were blinded by their own partisanship.  But, with Hoff's book, here was someone who was proposing an alternative understanding, one who was arguing that we should reconsider Nixon.

As I said in my post here, I was worried that Hoff's book would be primarily a laundry list of President Nixon's domestic accomplishments, which I thought might get old and dull after a while.  But, as I look at the book's Table of Contents, I see that Hoff discusses other issues as well, such as Nixon's foreign policy, and also Watergate.  The book may be worth reading to get her take on a wide variety of issues pertaining to the Nixon Presidency.

So far, my reading of Hoff's book had not been dull.  I have had to go back and reread sentences because I was mindlessly reading, and something told me that Hoff had just said something profound and so I needed to go back and reread what I just read.  Hoff discusses such issues as Nixon being aprincipled (in her eyes), and also how the "modern industrialized state" and the media have been conducive to "the formation of the aprincipled megastate" (page 12), one that is repressive yet generous, and that justifies morally questionable activities using righteous-sounding terminology.

What particularly interested me in my latest reading, however, was Hoff's discussion of her historical methodology.  She said that she did not want to rely solely on interviews with people "about events that took place a quarter of a century ago", since one cannot always trust people who are interviewed, people who have their own agenda and who may want to rehabilitate their own reputation "by telling researchers or reporters what they want to hear" (page xiv).  Rather than just relying on interviews, Hoff also wanted to look at documents.  The reason that this interested me was that I had just finished Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  Morris does refer to documents, but he also relies a lot on interviews, or the testimony of eyewitnesses.  I wondered if I could really trust what many of these eyewitnesses were saying, or if they had their own agenda, which either clouded their recollection or influenced them to distort the past deliberately.  At the same time, I figured that if more than one eyewitness testified to something, there was greater likelihood that what they related actually happened.  In addition, I wondered if we would have much of a history if we could not, on some level, trust the testimony of eyewitnesses.  I recently watched a YouTube video of Pat Buchanan interviewing Gore Vidal in the 1980's about Vidal's book, Lincoln.  Buchanan appeared to be taking issue with Vidal's claim that Lincoln had syphilis, and Vidal responded that he was basing this on the testimony of someone who knew Lincoln, someone who is actually one of the few sources we have about Lincoln's young adulthood.  If one dismissed this source, Vidal seemed to be implying, we don't have much left about that particular time in Lincoln's life!

Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon 20

I finished Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  In this post, I'll comment on Richard Nixon's fund, which would be controversial during the 1952 Presidential election and would lead to Nixon's famous "Checkers Speech."  I will also offer some overall thoughts about Morris' book.

1.  In my first post about Morris' book, I said that one reason that I wanted to read it was to get an alternative perspective about Richard Nixon's fund.  Essentially, Nixon had a fund from the donations of California businessmen, and there were accusations that Nixon was using some of that money for personal purposes.  Nixon, however, went on national television and argued that the fund was for political purposes, to keep the people of California informed through mail, for example.  Nixon also presented himself as not particularly wealthy, and there were many people who liked Nixon's Checkers Speech because they thought that he came across as one of them.

Did I get an alternative perspective about the fund in reading Morris?  Well, yes and no.  Like others I have read (including Nixon himself), Morris seems to agree that Nixon was not using the fund for his own personal use, even though Morris does say that the fund, by taking care of political expenses, allowed Nixon to have more of his own money at his disposal that he could use for such things as his expensive house.  I made a similar point in my post here.   But Morris still appears to deem the fund to be problematic, since it made Nixon beholden to wealthy special interests, whose desires Nixon would pursue as a Senator, in terms of what policies he would support and oppose.  Morris on page 821 gives examples: "Tyler Woodward's and William Anderson's special oil lease sought at Camp Roberts, the votes for the banking industry, the dairy issue at odds with his other stands, the crusade with Joe Crail and the developers against public housing and rent controls, Dana Smith's tax claim for Red River lumber or his gambling adventure in Havana, the constant battle for Colorado River water for the manufacturers and builders, Alpha Beta, Hollywood promotions and the Malaxa affair..."  According to Morris, the fund provided Nixon with a platform to be a spokesperson for wealthy special interests.  Morris acknowledges that Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson had his fund, too, and Morris does not give Stevenson a free pass.  Rather, Morris laments that little was done in 1952 to address the problem of campaign finance, on both sides.

Morris also does not buy into Nixon's common man persona in the Checkers Speech, for Morris points out that Nixon had two homes, and lots of money.  Nixon even made money making speeches, Morris notes.  At the same time, Morris does appear to take at face value some of the elements of the narrative about the fund that I have read in other books.  Morris says, for example, that Pat Nixon did not really want for Nixon to give the Checkers Speech because she didn't want for people to know how little the Nixons had!  This reminds me of Morris' discussion of how well-off the Nixons were when Nixon was a child and a teenager.  Morris argues that the Nixons were not as poor as Richard would later claim, that they were actually well-off in comparison with their neighbors.  And yet, Morris also quotes a lady who claimed that Richard Nixon's mother, Hannah, was discouraged by how poor her family was.  How could people who are well-off still feel poor?  Maybe it's because it's hard to make a buck stretch, unless one is unbelievably wealthy.

2.  Overall, I liked Morris' book.  It had information that I did not find in other books by and about Richard Nixon that I have read.  In how many other books, for example, can you read about Nixon's notes on the text of his Checkers Speech, notes that indicate what Nixon chose to say, and what he chose to omit?  The book is worth reading on account of its vast information, particularly when that information contradicts standard narratives that are out there and repeated.  Morris' critics have said that Morris' book is a lot of narrative, but not a whole lot of documentation.  I respectfully disagree, for Morris often appeals to the testimony of eyewitnesses.

I guess that my one complaint about the book is that it's a little one-sided.  I'm not saying that Morris' book is partisan, for Morris criticizes both Republicans and Democrats.  But Morris' book largely depicts Nixon as an ambitious politician who was a friend of special interests and who was not afraid to mow people down to achieve his goals.  I didn't see much of a human side to Nixon in my reading of Morris' book, but rather Nixon came across primarily as an ambitious political machine.  The exception would be Morris' narrative about Nixon's early life----the time from his childhood through his time in the navy.  There, I got to see Nixon's likes and dislikes, and also certain redeeming aspects to Nixon's character.  It's when Morris talks about Nixon's entrance into national politics (with his 1946 House race) that Morris becomes more one-sided (even though Morris does have some snark earlier than that, as when he points out Nixon's flaws as a lawyer and an unsuccessful businessman).

Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon 19

I have two items for my blog post today about Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  The context is the 1952 race for the Presidency between Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson.  Richard Nixon was Eisenhower's running-mate.

1.  On page 751, Morris talks about Nixon's criticism of Stevenson's stance on the Korean War:
"When the Stevenson camp at the end of August alluded to 'a plan' for ending the Korean War but then refused to reveal details as a matter of national security, Nixon lashed back.  'If he has had such a plan he should have disclosed it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff...[and] if he does not have such a plan he should honestly tell the American people that he has no easy solution to the Korean War,' he said in an indignant statement.  'Mr. Stevenson is putting out bait for votes and working a cruel hoax on the men fighting and dying in Korea and their families and loved ones...if he continues to leave the impression...that he has some magic formula which could bring the Korean War to an end on an honorable basis.'  Sixteen years later, Richard Nixon would campaign for the Presidency on his own 'secret plan' to end another bitter and unpopular Asian war."

Nixon himself, in volume 1 of his memoirs, denies that he was claiming in 1968 to have a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War.  Nixon states on pages 368-369:

"As a candidate it would have been foolhardy, and as a prospective President, improper, for me to outline specific plans in detail.  I did not have the full range of information or the intelligence resources available to [President Lyndon] Johnson.  And even if I had been able to formulate specific 'plans,' it would have been absurd to make them public.  In the field of diplomacy, premature disclosure can often doom even the best-laid plans...I never said that I had a 'plan,' much less a 'secret plan,' to end the war; I was deliberately straightforward about the difficulty of finding a solution.  As I told the AP on March 14, 1968, there was 'no magic formula, no gimmick.  If I had a gimmick I would tell Lyndon Johnson.'"

Was Nixon inconsistent, as Morris argues?  I would ultimately say "no."  Both in his criticism of Stevenson and in his memoirs, Nixon says that one should tell people in charge if one has a plan for ending a war, which is different from going public with one's plan.  But I'm taking Nixon at his word that he did not claim to have a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War, and I don't know what the facts are about that.

2.  In my post tomorrow, I will get more into Morris' discussion of Nixon's fund from the donations of California businessmen, which was controversial in the 1952 Presidential election and led to Nixon's famous "Checkers Speech."  What I want to mention in today's post is something on pages 787-788: Morris talks about the reaction of Nixon's father, Frank, to the Fund.

"Back in Whittier the anguish was still deeper.  Joe Johnson, Frank's old friend from Yorba Linda, went by their house on Anaconda as the Fund scandal grew and found Frank sick in bed but furious with his famous son.  He was 'very disgusted with Dick that he would ever let himself get into that position,' Johnson recalled.  'There was no earthly reason for it and he was pretty near mad [at] the guy...no reason to take that money.'  Only afterward did Richard Nixon learn that Frank Nixon was nearly hysterical during the episode that seemed to doom his son's meteoric career, and even beyond throughout the general election.  'I found out,' he acknowledged later, 'that my proud and combative father had been reduced to bouts of weeping as each new smear surfaced.'"

I've long wondered what exactly Frank Nixon thought about Richard Nixon during Nixon's political career (the part during which Frank was alive, of course).  Frank was very opinionated and outspoken when it came to politics.  He detested political corruption, such as the Teapot Dome Scandal.  And there were seasons in his life when Frank was quite progressive: he helped workers organize for better working conditions, he was critical of big business, and he became a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  In light of all that, what would he think of Nixon getting the backing of big business, Nixon's support for Taft-Hartley (which restricted union activity), or Nixon's overall opposition to the New Deal?

Of course, there were also times when Frank was a Republican.  Frank once supported the Republican Party on account of its support for a tight currency (which would mean less inflation), and he also chided his wife Hannah for voting for Woodrow Wilson.  Maybe Frank came to agree with his son Richard about the downsides to New Deal government programs.  I don't know.  I have a hard time envisioning Frank letting go of his antipathy towards big business and his championing of the common man.

Much of what I have read about Frank's views on Richard Nixon the politician has been in the writings of Nixon himself.  In Nixon's telling, Frank was rooting for Richard, and Frank was saddened by the accusations against his famous son, implying that Frank did not think that the accusations were true.  Roger Morris' narration of what Frank's friend Joe Johnson said exposed me for the first time to another perspective on Frank: that Frank was upset and disappointed with his son.  That doesn't mean that Frank believed the accusations against his son, however, for Frank may have simply thought that Nixon's fund was foolish in that it had the potential to bring about the misunderstanding that Nixon was corrupt.

I should note that Morris' quote of Joe Johnson is one of many reasons that Morris' book is an excellent biography, and I'd even go so far as to say that it is the best book that I have read thus far for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Morris brings in all kinds of eyewitnesses in his research, many of whom did not feature in the other biographies of Nixon that I have read.

Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon 18

I have two items for my blog post today about Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  The context is the 1952 race for the Republican nomination for President.  It has been alleged that Richard Nixon, even though as a Californian he was pledged to vote for Governor Earl Warren, was actually promoting Dwight Eisenhower, seeking to weaken Warren's hold on the California delegates.  According to this narrative, Nixon was angling to get the Vice-Presidential slot.  You can read about Nixon's response to this charge, as well as Irwin Gellman's defense of Nixon, in my post here.

1.  On page 685 of Morris' book, we read the following:

"Before the end of May, Senator Nixon had become not simply one more name for the Vice Presidency whispered about Washington or the hustings, the campaign's time-honored bait to attract disparate ambitions and support.  He was, from the Roosevelt and Mayflower, a part of secret and strategic deliberations at which his would-be rivals could only guess.  With unfailing instinct for improving his position still further, even for the intramural politics of the eventual regime that was taking shape in the Eisenhower candidacy, he boldly wrote John Foster Dulles in mid-May, enclosing highlights of his Waldorf-Astoria speech.  Dulles remained an influential force in the GOP eastern establishment, albeit not a member of the Dewey-Clay inner group.  They May letter made sure Dulles understood the Senator's rising stock with the other powers in the campaign.  It came, too, as part of a continuing Nixon correspondence that periodically and none too subtly reminded the shadow secretary of state of their mutual history in the Hiss case, and of the potential political embarrassment to Dulles in the early Carnegie Endowment ties to Hiss.  Nixon would vouch for Dulles with the right if the occasion arose, his letters suggested, and Dulles was well advised to support the senator's ambitions in turn."

This passage essentially presents Richard Nixon as ambitiously pursuing the Vice-Presidential slot, which contrasts with the aw-shucks attitude that Nixon implies that he had.  According to Morris, even Nixon's speech to the Waldorf-Astoria, which impressed Thomas Dewey, was Nixon's way of promoting himself for the VP slot.  Nixon was energetically proclaiming in that speech that the Republicans needed to conduct a fighting campaign that would be principled yet also draw Democrats and independents.  Incidentally, that was the kind of campaign that Nixon conducted in his 1950 Senate race.  At a Bible study group one time, we were reading Genesis, and we were at the part where Joseph was suggesting that the Pharaoh set a wise person over Egypt who would supervise the collection of grain in preparation for the coming famine (Genesis 41:33-36).  Someone in the group said that Joseph wasn't pointing to himself when he recommended that Pharaoh do that.  Well, Morris is implying that Nixon in his Waldorf-Astoria was implicitly pointing to himself as one who would be an effective VP candidate.  Nixon was angling for power, in short.

2.  On pages 708-709, we read the following:

"'Warren had very little if any chance of getting the nomination,' John Dinkelspiel remembered Nixon telling them.  'The California delegation would effectively insure [sic] Eisenhower's victory...[and] if they could be counted on by the Eisenhower people, would have a very strong effect on the convention.'  Otherwise, Nixon warned, California would be 'left at the post' as Eisenhower moved on to the nomination in any case.  He also spoke movingly, as listeners later recounted, about the 'Taft fraud in Texas and Georgia,' and told them they would have a chance to vote early on the fair-play amendment, 'moral issues regarding Texas and Georgia where Taft stole the votes.'  They must join the Eisenhower bandwagon with no more delay.  When some delegates asked about breaking their oath to Warren, Hillings reportedly told them 'that that would be all right because the law provided no penalty for that.'  In any case, Dinkelspiel and others remembered Nixon urging 'that it should be made publicly known that the delegation would throw its strength to Eisenhower as soon as it could.'  As Dinkelspiel recalled, he argued 'either that the delegation should note vote for Warren on the first ballot, if Warren were willing, or if he insisted that the delegation keep its pledge, that it be made known in advance that the delegation at least on the second ballot would vote for Eisenhower rather than Taft, not just sit back and not state its position.'  And while the senator himself did not immodestly mention the subject of those meetings, his men soon spread word of California's expected reward for the defection.  'If they acted quickly and did not waste their votes,' one writer reported, 'the delegation could suggest Nixon as Vice President.'"

Morris goes on to say that Earl Warren would write years later that "During the night, the Nixon delegates----but not the senator as far as I know----held caucuses and urged other delegates to vote for General Eisenhower on the first ballot."  But Morris refers to Dinkelspiel and "others" who claimed that Nixon himself was directly involved in urging the California delegates to vote for Eisenhower.
What I wonder is why the California delegates were required to vote for Warren in the first place.