THE TRUTH ABOUT NIXON
Shannon, William V.
The Truth About Nixon by WILLIAM V. SHANNON This is the sixth of a series of articles exploring Presidential possibilities for 1960. The seventh in the series, scheduled for April, will be a...
...There may be few votes to be won from ordinary voters, but Nixon was building credit with the people who counted if he was to get the Presidential nomination—the influential bankers, politicians, and publishers...
...There is the juxtaposition of words, as when Nixon, in 1952, in the course of accusing Truman and Stevenson of tolerating Communists in the government, called them 'traitors to the high principles of the Democratic Party.' In the context of those days when McCarthy rode high, the words 'traitor' and 'Democratic Party' were the words that remained in his hearers' minds...
...Similarly, on April 16, 1954 speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, Nixon said: "If, to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and Indo-China, we must take the risk now by putting our boys in, I think the executive branch has to take the politically unpopular decision and do it, and I personally support such a position...
...Eisenhower...
...The country could stand any number of mistakes and regressive policies in the management of its domestic affairs...
...In each case," the New York Times reported recently, Nixon "has reflected the Eisenhower Administration's which both the President and Mr...
...Our best and greatest Presidents were men of character and moral worth which enabled them to serve as exemplars for their own and later times...
...He has blocked off potential competitors on the avenues to the throne by his presence and his manipulations...
...Up until that time, Nixon had simply carried out the job for which he was chosen by the party managers in 1952: the job of hatchetman and handshaker for an Administration headed by a politically inexperienced general...
...He has always been preoccupied with the "appearance of leadership" rather than leadership itself...
...in 1952 when, as General Eisenhower's running mate, he made several reckless speeches, and again in 1954 when he tried to keep alive McCarthyism and Communistsin-government as profitable issues but with no success...
...If anything would properly account for a dramatic change in a man's character and outlook, it would be a traumatic experience of some kind...
...On some matters, Nixon's position has shifted with the pressures...
...The result of Nixon's courting of the New York financiers and politicians and their extended period of "looking him over" was the emergence of the "new Nixon...
...In 1953, Nixon boasted that the Administration had extricated the country from the land war in Korea but the following year he came out in favor of involving our forces in another land war on the continent of Asia if it was necessary to save Indochina...
...Nixon appears to be a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work...
...one has only to think of Washington and Lincoln and Wilson, each so different from the other but alike in their fierce integrity...
...The motif of the old Nixon's career, in Alsop's words, was the use of "specious and sleazy debating tricks...
...On civil rights for Negroes and other minorities, Nixon has a mixed record...
...He voted against the Taft-EUender-Wagner housing bill in 1948 and again in 1949, when it passed...
...He is neither brilliant nor notably talented, but he is somewhat above average in intelligence...
...They never do...
...He seemed to favor the liberalized tariff program of reciprocal trade, but voted for crippling amendments...
...Here certainly was no great divide in Nixon's career...
...He has repeatedly said foolish and demagogic words that are bad enough coming from a Senator or a Vice President but would be disastrous coming from a President...
...Richard Nixon's soiled record as a campaigner, his reactionary views as a domestic legislator, and his evasive, opportunist, and self-contra dictory record in foreign affairs dis qualify him...
...As remedies, Nixon proposed a Congressional resolution making "reasonable price stability" a specific goal of federal policy, a curtailment of government spending, and permission to the Treasury to raise the rate of interest on long-term government bonds...
...His industry is perhaps more than average...
...In that year," he writes, "Nixon came closest to justifying Walter Lippmann's description of him as a 'ruthless partisan . . . [who] does not have within his conscience those scruples which the country has the right to expect in the President of the United States/ " Alsop cites a classic example of Nixon's technique which occurred in the spring of 1954 when in the course of a telecast defending the Administration's foreign policies, he made a famous aside...
...Or it is blandly suggested that with the passage of the years he has grown...
...The weight of the charge against Nixon is that he has not given any hint that he could provide this kind of high example...
...As a Congressman, Nixon at Congressional hearings and at Labor Department hearings in California participated actively on behalf of the big corporate farms that employ migratory Mexican laborers at low wages and sometimes under frightful conditions...
...He seemed to be on both sides of American policy regarding Korea and Indo-China...
...He uses practical means that may sometimes be impugned...
...This is also why Nixon in 1956 and 1957 became such an articulate missionary on behalf of foreign aid...
...A President should be an educator and a spokesman of a people whose destiny is greatness...
...The seventh in the series, scheduled for April, will be a portrait of Senator Hubert H. Humphrey by Michael Amrine...
...He must have sound judgment and steady nerves in a time of recurring crises...
...The "new Nixon," it is contended, is greatly changed from the "old Nixon...
...There are those who are cheerily optimistic that he would grow in the job...
...Nixon hold to be a cause of inflation...
...An example from the fund speech: 'Every penny of it was used to pay for political expenses that I did not think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States.' In fact, the purpose of the fund was to meet expenses which could not be charged to the taxpayers of the United States...
...By each of these five standards, Richard Milhous Nixon, the certain Republican candidate for President, fails...
...He moves from intervention to anti-intervention with the same ease and lack of anguish with which a copywriter might transfer his loyalties from Camels to Chesterfields...
...Nixon has a weakness for heroics and theatrical gestures...
...Nixon has been the man on the scene...
...There is the use of the undeniable statement with a false implication...
...The truth is that the new Nixon, On housing, his record is extremely conservative...
...There is little in his demeanor and his public record to inspire confidence and much to provoke anxiety...
...Nixon's hope of future reward depended upon his doing that job well, and he did it the only way he knew...
...And unless some substitute action can be effective, then inflation won't be controlled...
...But in the years before and after 1951, he opposed rent control, voting for weakening amendments in 1949 and against extension of it in 1950 and 1952...
...The Presidency is a place for great ness...
...The question arises: why did he change...
...He attended several skull sessions arranged by Dewey to exchange views and hear expert briefings, particularly on foreign affairs...
...The self-confident and the cruel are both tough, but if self-confidence is a strength, cruelty is a weakness...
...His speeches and arguments, if dully phrased and often disingenuous, are invariably lucid and well-organized...
...He cast one vote for renewal of rent control in 1951 during the Korean War and that one vote is repeatedly cited to show his "independence" from the real estate lobby...
...But on the votes on the crucial amendments, he repeatedly sided with the enemies of these welfare programs...
...Nixon is probably the most hated major politician in American life today, but this would not matter if he had substantial achievements and a positive record...
...The New Nixon, Like the Old, Is a Man Ever on the Make It was all reminiscent of Dewey's own soporific 1948 campaign...
...He had early begun to cultivate former Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had been instrumental in selecting him as Eisenhower's running mate in 1952...
...Rogers began his Washington career back in the 80th Congress of 1947-48 when he served as a Dewey contact man with the "wrong side" of the Republican Party, the isolationists and Midwestern conservatives...
...The business about being "the best-trained Vice-President in history" is a myth...
...Moreover, political men do not habitually use words lightly, or regard them as of no lasting importance...
...Nixon's repeated use of reckless, inflammatory, and defaming language is not a series of momentary indiscretions...
...In later speeches, he praised the Administration for avoiding hostilities in Indo-China although he had told the newspaper editors that he personally supported intervention with American boys...
...each of us is entitled to make his own assessment of its significance...
...His plane landed in Washington during a driving rainstorm...
...These accomplishments are no different from those of thousands of other students, but they are nonetheless praiseworthy and, in Nixon's case, particularly important because hard work, tenacity, and singleminded ambition are still his outstanding positive character traits...
...his mind seems quick, alert, orderly, and logical...
...Yet patently it had no reforming effect...
...He asked his rhetorical question, moreover, not when he was a young Congressman .. . but when he had already been Vice-President of the United States for two years . . . That rhetorical question explains why, to some reasonable and fair-minded people, the case against Nixon is a convincing case...
...on the contrary, he has stirred doubt, antagonism, and anxiety...
...The change is simply dated from the end of the 1954 campaign when his "white collar McCarthyism" failed to hold Congress for the Republicans...
...Consider a few of these debating tricks...
...He is also a man of violent passions beneath that tightly controlled exterior...
...Thus again, the implication of what he said was false...
...What is wrong with Nixon is his negative, empty record, the absence of his accomplishments, the paucity of his talents, the very ordinariness of the man...
...Nixon voted several times during his four years in the House and his two years in the Senate in favor of the tidelands oil giveaway, for abolition of federal regulation of natural gas prices, and against reduction of the 27.5 per cent oil depletion allowance...
...Nixon has done nothing...
...The ease with which demonstrations were whipped up against him in his disastrous tour of Latin America proves how hard it is to wear one face at home and another abroad...
...He describes the pressures for increased spending as 'irresponsible.' ". . . More important still, while a budget deficit when the economy is operating at capacity can certainly be a cause of inflation, to balance the budget does not cure the inflation...
...Nixon, though he blames the spiral, makes no claim that budget-balancing would stop it...
...It was Nixon's vote that broke the tie and killed a major school aid bill early in the present session of Congress...
...The Truth About Nixon by WILLIAM V. SHANNON This is the sixth of a series of articles exploring Presidential possibilities for 1960...
...Most had umbrellas but at Nixon's request they did not open them...
...Nixon Stirs Doubt, Antagonism, and Anxiety Throughout the 1956 campaign, Richard Nixon told audiences: "Now at last we have a President we can hold up to our children as an example...
...Helen Gahagan Douglas, the famous actress and wife of actor Melvyn Douglas...
...A specious availability caused him to be placed on the ticket as a makeweight with General Eisenhower in 1952, and for eight years he has managed to retain that post...
...After Eisenhower's heart attack, Nixon, for the first time, realized in a palpable way that the Presidency might be within his own grasp...
...Another explanation is more logical...
...For five of those eight years, the President's fragile health has given Nixon an unusual leverage on the party machinery...
...Thus, on August 31, 1953, speaking before the American Legion Convention in St...
...He has roughly the same order of mental competence as the usual run of lawyers and business managers...
...T o make his implication, Nixon made use of both an essentially specious 'Communist issue* and a sleazy debater's trick, the rhetorical question...
...The new resolution . . . would give the Administration no power it does not now possess...
...If Governor Nelson Rockefeller had captured the governorship of New York four years earlier, subsequent national political history might have been much different...
...At that very time, these same men of power decided to "take up" Nixon as a protege and give him a close inspection...
...The most extraordinary of these episodes occurred in August, 1955 when President Eisenhower returned from the Geneva summit conferences...
...These four campaigns, one local, one statewide, and two nationwide, are the basis of the picture of the "old Nixon...
...In discussing these and other examples of Nixon's political techniques of smear and innuendo, Alsop notes that 1954 was a year of particularly flagrant behavior...
...Innocence until proved guilty is an adequate position in criminal court but it is no persuasive plea for making a man President of the United States, the grandest, most honored, most powerful public office to which an American can aspire...
...Galbraith and other economists quickly pointed out that price stability "has been a goal of federal policy for generations...
...Nixon and all top officials were on hand to greet him...
...But Nixon failed to point out that the vast majority of these people were fired for reasons having nothing to do with subversion, that many of them were hired initially by the Eisenhower Administration itself, and that the total included not a single known Communist...
...Nixon is usually depicted as a newer, more progressive Republican, but on all housing issues he was much more reactionary than was Senator Taft...
...In Nixon's case, the near-catastrophe of the "secret fund" disclosures leading up to his Checkers speech called in doubt his political methods and put his career in jeopardy...
...In 1947, as a freshman in the 80th Congress, he supported the House Republican leadership in favoring a cut in the school lunch program of $30,000,000...
...Ambition alone is not enough...
...He soon met Nixon, introduced him to Dewey, and laid the basis of later events...
...But as it was in the winter of 1955-56, Nixon, if he proved satisfactory, was about the best available...
...Having quoted Alsop at such length, I must in fairness add that he deprecates the importance of this evidence in making his over-all assessment of the man, but the evidence he cites is nevertheless incontrovertible...
...Nor in seeking to persuade us that he has done something does he show a high regard for intelligence...
...First, the Presidency is a place of moral leadership...
...His stated opinions on foreign affairs follow no clear pattern, now bristling with threats of massive retaliation, then later enthusiastically endorsing friendly talks with the Russians...
...During those eight years he established the pattern of behavior from which the more recent "new Nixon" is said to depart...
...The ambitious Vice President dropped his hatchet and began to impersonate a statesman...
...Fifth, a President should have sympathy for and comprehension of the needs and emotional drives of the colored and the impoverished and the restless peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose national and social revolutions may transform the world scene in the last forty years of this century...
...The one great danger was that he would be vetoed by the Eastern, internationalist faction which controls the Republican Party, This group repeatedly blocked the late Senator Robert A. Taft because it suspected his isolationist views...
...Nixon's third recommendation, for an increase in interest rates, "represents a continuation of the [high interest rate] policy he was asked to improve...
...This emptiness and these glaring deficiencies are more significant than the intermittent squalor of his methods or whether he is conservative or liberal...
...Every politician has enemies and is the object of controversy...
...He is industrious enough...
...America should have a leader who can communicate and collaborate with the leaders of the underdeveloped countries...
...Now he began to be drawn more fully into the inner circle of the "Dewey crowd" in New York...
...This group provides Nixon with a useful sounding board for speeches about what he has done for the Negro...
...it is a considered procedure for which he must be held responsible...
...He is frequently going off rashly and half-cocked, whether to libel a political opponent, put American troops into a ground war in Indo-China, drag the Chief Justice into partisan politics, plunge himself into a mob in Caracas, or charge some innocent State Department employe with "undercutting" the Administration...
...He has always been fiercely ambitious...
...The change-over would be persuasive if his defenders could point to some single event or series of events that caused this beneficial transformation...
...It was purely a play to the galleries, for example, for Nixon to visit Caracas and plunge into the howling mob after his previous narrow escape in Lima and the repeated warnings of danger...
...Ironically, Nixon in this passage summed up several of the reasons why the country cannot risk putting him in the White House...
...Perhaps the crispest analysis of this curious political behavior came from Richard H. Rovere, writing in Harper's: "What stands out in any consideration of the whole record is the flexibility that suggests an almost total indifference to policy...
...As a Senator, for example, he endorsed the old Bricker Amendment which would have undermined the President's constitutional authority on foreign policy, but as Vice-President he supported the Administration when President Eisenhower opposed the amendment...
...Fourth, a President in the 1960's governs under the shadow of nuclear danger...
...Nixon Tries to Tidy Up For the Eastern King-Makers One counter-argument adduced in Nixon's favor is that these "sleazy debating tricks" are only words and, after all, are not most politicians heated or somewhat careless in their use of words...
...Nixon's strongest qualities are intelligence and industriousness...
...Nixon's tendency to swing back and forth on major issues shows up vividly in the field of foreign affairs...
...He is intelligent enough...
...He supported the Marshall Plan, but ducked a vote on Point Four appropriations...
...A different argument often advanced in recent years in Nixon's behalf is that he has "matured...
...The truth about Nixon is that he is not big enough for the biggest job in the world...
...The new, smoother, more unctuous, more careful Nixon began to emerge only in the winter of 1955-56, after President Eisenhower's heart attack...
...But as Vice-President, he has used his authority as presiding officer of the Senate to assist in bringing liberal civil rights bills to a vote...
...On social welfare legislation such as social security, minimum wages, and the school lunch program, Nixon occasionally voted for such measures on final passage because the battle is usually over when the final roll call comes...
...The commission, in fact, has accomplished very little...
...He voted for an anti-poll tax bill in 1949...
...This is why he abruptly shifted in the 1956 campaign to a steady diet of bland, platitudinous speeches...
...As a student in high school, at Whittier College, and in Duke University Law School, he had to carry outside jobs, but he pushed himself to find time for extra-curricular activities and maintain scholarship grades...
...A fortnight later, Nixon was quoted by the New York Herald Tribune as saying that the Administration must avoid sending American troops to fight in Indo-China or anywhere else "if we can...
...If Nixon himself occupies the White House, will we be able to make that statement...
...The best of intentions are vain if the man in the White House is not practiced in the arts of political leadership and astute in party management...
...THERE ARE five tests by which we should measure a man seeking the Presidency in the 1960's...
...Moreover, if prices reflect the power of the unions and the compensating action of the corporations, then government intervention does not have the damaging consequences that Mr...
...Policies are products to be sold the public— this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market...
...That is because balancing the budget will not arrest the wage-price spiral...
...Now he dropped all negative references...
...To elect a man to the Presidency is to cast a vote of confidence in his character...
...Third, the Chief Executive must be just that: an effective executive...
...He is at the apex of a vast governmental structure employing millions of persons and spending billions of dollars...
...Nixon looked up from his script and asked, as though on the spur of the moment: 'And incidentally, in mentioning Secretary Dulles, isn't it wonderful finally to have a Secretary of State who isn't taken in by the Communists?' "Nixon didn't say that Dean G. Acheson and George Marshall were 'taken in by the Communists.' But he very clearly implied it, and the implication is grossly misleading...
...Nixon is also chairman of the President's commission on non-discrimination in government contracts...
...then in 1950, when he defeated for the Senate Mrs...
...Two years later, he was back on the stump using the same tricks and techniques he had used before the trauma of the fund fight...
...What is in grave doubt is his judgment, his inner calmness, his self-confidence...
...Cases move through its toils at a leisurely pace, often taking three or four years and not getting anywhere...
...The next year he voted against adding 750,000 workers to the social security program...
...However, we cannot allow the matter to rest there...
...He feared the unfortunate symbolism of the umbrella which had been Neville Chamberlain's trademark when he met another dictator seventeen years earlier at Munich...
...Stewart Alsop, the former member of the team of brothers who wrote the famous syndicated column and now an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, is favorably disposed toward Nixon as a potential President and makes an almost plausible case in his defense...
...Let's recognize right now that the decision to go into Korea was right because the Communists had to be stopped...
...Nixon, however, has no visible claims to the office of President...
...They belong to what I call the "reform school theory" of the Presidency...
...Most politicians most of the time value, or overvalue, what they say, choose their words with care, and have fairly clearly in mind what effects they hope to achieve by their words...
...Opinions on Foreign Affairs Follow No Clear Pattern The most crucial area of a modern President's responsibilities is that of foreign affairs...
...If Paris was worth a Mass to Henry IV, the White House was worth a few unpopular speeches to Richard Nixon...
...They were motivated principally by the consideration that their faction had no suitable candidate to replace Mr...
...Rogers was a talent spotter with an eye for bright young men...
...Nixon and his colleagues condemn...
...What intervention does is substitute public regulation for what Mr...
...For then such intervention doesn't interfere with the reading of priorities and scarcities—the unions and the corporations have already spoiled that...
...It is here that Richard Nixon poses the greatest difficulty...
...Nixon proved quite satisfactory...
...Preoccupation with appearances is a weakness Nixon has sometimes indulged to fantastic extremes...
...there has been widespread awareness that he might, at any moment, become President through an act of fate...
...This explains why he is sometimes called a "young fogey...
...The campaigns on which these misgivings are founded were his first, in 1946, when he defeated incumbent Democratic Representative Jerry Voorhis, now the president of the Cooperative League of America...
...The fact is, however, that a politician's words are his deeds...
...His formal job was as legal counsel for Senators Owen Brewster and Homer Ferguson, the fumble-and-stumble twins...
...There are grounds for deep concern...
...Shannon, Washington correspondent and columnist for the New York Post, has watched Richard M. Nixon at close range, as Congressman, Senator, and Vice President, for more than a decade.—THE EDITORS...
...But a year later, in his 1954 election eve speech, he charged that the Truman Administration's "wrong policy" had "resulted in a war, a war in Korea that cost us 140,000 American boys as casualties...
...A close associate of Nixon in this development was William Rogers, later to become President Eisenhower's Attorney General in the second Administration...
...In 1952, he joined with Taft in signing a minority report opposing a Fair Employment Practices Act with enforcement powers...
...Second, a President must be a sagacious politician...
...There is the trick of the coupling of categories, as in the 1954 campaign statement: 'We have driven the Communists, the fellow travelers, and the security risks out of government by thousands.' It is true that several thousand so-called 'security risks' were dropped in the early Eisenhower years to appease McCarthy...
...A politician so reactionary as Nixon on domestic economic issues cannot convincingly portray himself abroad as the liberal champion of the oppressed and underprivileged...
...It has been proclaimed repeatedly and with passion...
...Nixon Is Concerned With Techniques More Than Issues Nixon's voting record as a legislator ended, of course, when he became Vice President, but he has had seven opportunities to break ties during his incumbency as presiding officer of the Senate...
...The issues at stake involved major conflicts between the liberal and conservative blocs and dealt with significant controversies on federal aid to education, agriculture, veterans and organized labor...
...It is in this context that Nixon's shabby record as a campaigner counts heavily against him...
...T o this Mr...
...In 1949, he voted for a particularly unfair amendment that successfully deprived 1,000,000 low-paid workers the protection of a 75-cent minimum wage...
...The speech-making, traveling, hand-shaking, and paper-shuffling Nixon has done for more than seven years provide no clues as to what kind of chief executive he would be...
...These other votes are usually glossed over or not mentioned by those depicting him as a liberal or middle-of-the-roader...
...This is why there was a new note of nebulous liberalism such as his rosy prediction of the early arrival of a four-day week and his announcement that he was a card-carrying member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...Unless a man has a record in executive office—which Nixon does not—his words, next to his votes in Congress, are the most important materials we have on which to base a judgment...
...Nixon is indifferent...
...It is awkward to question a man's character because we will never know for certain what kind of a President Nixon would make unless he becomes President...
...Nixon is also enamored of the idea that words are a substitute for policy...
...He was vaguely for federal aid for school construction when the Eisenhower Administration was sponsoring such a bill but subsequently he went on record against federal aid to education when the President's interest in the matter waned...
...A reporter has only to misquote a politician slightly or criticize him mildly to arouse an extraordinarily outraged reaction...
...No one could feel safe if the hydrogen bomb were in such imprudent hands...
...In describing the kind of President America needs, Nixon in January 1960 said: "The American people and the free world need in the Presidency a man who has judgment, a man who in a crisis will be cool, a man who won't go off half-cocked and give an appearance of leadership when, actually, his speaking out might be disastrous to the whole world...
...No man, in the full sense of the term, is qualified to be President of the United States, but measured against the standard of the ideal candidate, Nixon falls so far short he is demonstrably unfit...
...Nixon determined to pay court to the financiers and politicians who had successively nominated Willkie, Dewey, and Eisenhower...
...He was a slugger in what he himself called "rocking, socking campaigns" and, alternatively, he cut up his opponents by fast debating methods...
...Galbraith concluded: "The judgment to be rendered seems to me clear...
...Louis, Nixon said that in his decision to halt Communist aggression in Korea, former President Truman was right and "deserves the credit for it...
...And that vote against federal aid to education came less than a week after Nixon told a Republican dinner in Chicago that "inadequate classrooms, underpaid teachers, and flabby standards are weaknesses we must constantly strive to eliminate...
...Nixon and his associates have condemned as bad private control by unions and companies...
...The White House is hardly a training school where political delinquents are made into statesmen by the magic of their surroundings...
...Nixon likes to point to these speeches as proof of the authenticity of his conviction because "there are no votes to be won defending foreign aid...
...Having cited his intelligence and industriousness, one has about exhausted the list of Nixon's strong points...
...For this reason, it is worth quoting from Alsop's recent book, Nixon and Rockefeller, on this phase of Nixon's career...
...The suggestion for curtailed government expenditure, the Harvard economist observed, "runs into the familiar problem that some of the things for which higher expenditures have been sought—schools, housing, defense, law enforcement, conservation—are rather urgent...
...As a Senator, he was for cutting public housing units from 50,000 annually down to 5,000 in 1951 and against any public housing authorization at all in 1952...
...What it might not survive would be a President with bad judgment and erratic instincts in foreign policy...
...He had voted for the Marshall Plan as a member of the House, but he had previously not been averse to making the standard Republican speech about "waste and extravagance" in foreign aid...
...An additional factor often mentioned by his advocates is a certain inner toughness, but this is, in Nixon, a considerably more ambiguous and complex strain than is usually described...
Vol. 24 • March 1960 • No. 3
