Why We Liked Dick

...Republican headquarters in Washington alone received 300,000 letters and telegrams, as well as petitions signed by over a million people...

...It was a contest of class more than of issues...

...Instead he was Nixon, with the ski-jump nose and the jowls, the mortgages that were personally burdensome and yet embarrassingly modest...

...He had risen through the State Department like a bubble toward the surface...

...He was exactly life size...

...One saw Nixon in a way one never saw Kennedy...

...I was born in 1913...

...Kennedy showed us what he wanted us to see...

...They were emergent...

...What I am going to do—and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics—I am going at this time to give this television and radio audience a complete financial history of everything I have earned, everything I have spent, everything I owe," said Nixon...

...That was the Nixon that Nixon longed to be...

...Nixon, the foremost anticommunist in the country...

...Hiss had everything they wanted, and what he had was in some unsaid way really theirs...

...she voted for him—but just by being unapologetically himself, Kennedy had made them feel less real...

...he was even lying in the clever way Nixon lied...

...It was precisely those qualities in my parents that made them identify with Nixon that caused me to gravitate to Kennedy...

...Pat's cloth coat He began by whipping Alger Hiss...

...Nixon showed us himself showing us what he wanted us to see...

...No one had ever touched Nixon...

...Leo Rangell, a psychiatrist who moved to Southern California the same year Nixon was elected, observed the mixed reactions Nixon evoked...

...he was always yearning for dignity and status, and yet when he had first come to Washington, The Washington Post had him spotted as "the greenest Congressman in town" His friend and congressional classmate John Kennedy summed him up abruptly: "No class" That was an insult that implicitly included the millions of Americans who were, like my parents, earnest strivers, self-made people, who had seen their own parents fail and knew more of hardship than of ease...

...I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat...

...many of them were just now learning which fork to use at dinner, but these people, who had lived near the bottom of society, whose childhood world had been a squalid city block or godforsaken stretch of farmland, were now buying decent homes, even sending their children to private schools...

...He had been handed everything on the silver platter of class...

...Harvard awarded Nixon an academic prize in high school, but he couldn't afford to go there...

...He had stood at Roosevelt's shoulder at the Yalta Conference and helped to found the United Nations...

...It was an arresting moment in my father's life...

...Nixon became their angry representative, their score-settler, "a kind of dragon-slayer," as he later described himself...

...Nixon appealed to emotions that were not so easy to admire or understand...

...Herblock caricatured the New Nixon in 1960 as a smiling, well-shaven mask covering the familiar stubbled monster underneath...

...WHY WE LIKED DICK by Lawrence Wright Did everyone you knew always hate Nixon...

...after the speech, Daddy was a Nixon man...

...Perhaps a similar allure of wealth and glamour had drawn my father toward Roosevelt in his own teen-age years...

...He was above ground and they were somewhere below...

...He never cared to play the role of the rustic...

...he spoke of a missile gap (when none existed...

...It hit Nixon during the first debate, when Kennedy opened with a surprise attack on communism and the do-nothing Eisenhower administration...

...Until the Checkers speech, my father, then a vice president of a small bank in Abilene, Texas, had no real idea who Nixon was...

...And of course, the dog, perhaps the most famous campaign donation in history: "black and white, spotted, and our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers" In describing himself, Nixon might have been describing my parents or millions of other Americans who had worked hard but were still on the outside, who did not— "like Governor Stevenson" —inherit fortunes, who had ambitions but no advantages...

...Even when I was a child, and Nixon was vice president, I heard of the New Nixon...

...Out it came, the family grocery store, the hard years of education, the inflated war record ("I guess I'm entitled to a couple of battle stars . .."), his wife's job as a stenographer, their 1950 Oldsmobile, their modest inheritances, their mortgages, a loan of $4,500 from the Riggs Bank in Washington, another of $3,500 from his parents, no stocks, no bonds, no interest in any business...

...The New Nixon mask might have had another face: John F. Kennedy...

...He longed for native charm...

...Hard work and money were their only resources...

...Although Hiss had had his own tortured beginnings in Baltimore (his father slit his throat when Alger was three), by the time he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1948 he was an advertisement for Eastern Establishment...

...Kennedy agreed upon...

...He wanted to be a man of wealth and influence...

...In these millions of no-class Americans were deep reservoirs of resentment...

...Before the Checkers speech, Nixon was no one in my father's mind...

...The Establishment protected itself...

...a man who could never get off a funny line...

...My parents didn't love Nixon, but he came to represent them in ways they couldn't control...

...Old Nixon dreamed of the day he would finally arrive, and then he could become the gracious and secure New Nixon, able to relax, let down his guard, cultivate friends, be generous to his enemies...

...Nixon had discovered an electorate no one had known was there...

...It must be hard for today's young, as it was for me growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, to understand why Richard Nixon was so popular in his time...

...it even In Nixon we saw ourselves —a man of extraordinary ordinariness who was trying to be something more...

...He was a sinner yearning for salvation, but not very earnestly...

...Whereas, Nixon...

...Kennedy was the American dream personified, a completely secure personality...

...The Hiss case brought Nixon attention...

...That's what Nixon hated about Alger Hiss...

...When his personal political fund was uncovered in the 1952 campaign ("Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond his Salary," said the New York Post), and Eisenhower was preparing to dump him from the ticket, Nixon defended himself before the largest television audience ever...

...More than any of his many opponents, he represented the fears and hopes Lawrence Wright is a writer in Austin, Texas-who is working on a memoir on growing up in the Southwest during the 1950s and 1960s...

...the drudgery of life told on him...

...they differed not on goals but on measures to achieve those goals . . . mumble, mumble, what could he say...

...He was square, empty of charisma, shy— "an introvert in an extrovert's profession," as he said of himself—and so stiff that when Sammy Davis Jr...

...The unofficial count of letters and telegrams sent to Nixon, Eisenhower, local television stations, and local party offices was over two million...

...What we saw in Nixon was a duality we didn't see in more polished performers on the public stage...

...Nixon was always undergoing renovation, always reforming himself...

...But the big firms in New York gave him the cold shoulder...

...Money seemed to give Kennedy and Roosevelt extra vitality, despite their chronic poor health...

...His vices were as cornmon as his talents...

...Two years after that Nixon was on the winning ticket with Eisenhower, and the entire country was beginning to arrange itself on one side or the other...

...Most Americans were a part of the vast and expectant middle class...

...It's no wonder that men like my father, who started with so little, looked at Hiss with the same cool loathing that Nixon did...

...Who can say they have seen his real face...

...He had been a secretary for Oliver Wendell Holmes, and had gone on to practice in prestigious firms in Boston and New York before drifting into government—and the Communist Party...

...Nixon went to Congress in 1946, the year before I was born...

...Of course he had heard of Eisenhower's puzzling selection of the 39-year-old freshman senator from California, and he had probably read Nixon's name in the newspapers during the Hiss trial, but he had never seen Nixon until this moment, when Nixon was fighting for his reputation and career...

...He came into office on a wave of savage red-baiting that set the tone of domestic and international politics for the next quartercentury...

...Hiss had not earned his easy access to money and power by hard work, nor had he fought to defend the system that gave it to him...

...The speech made Nixon into a national figure, almost on a par with Eisenhower himself...

...The hatred directed at Nixon after that would always have an element of classismthe wealthy, the privileged, the intellectuals on the one side, and Nixon on the other with the forgotten Americans, the Silent Majority...

...Nixon made claims on their emotions without their consent...

...It was a personal thing...

...Ambition and uncertainty were their distinguishing features...

...He began to personify certain attitudes they endorsed...

...The gap between Kennedy's natural gifts and resources, and those of Nixon, was like the distance between a god and a mortal...

...The reality of the man was dismayingly evident...

...Nixon and the resentful, avenging, no-class Americans that he represented believed instinctively that the Establishment was in league with the communists, and the ringing denials of Hiss's guilt gave shape to the conspiracy...

...But it also made him the permanent enemy of the Eastern Establishment...

...More than any other politician, Nixon represented the aspiration of this grasping, highly charged middle class to better itself...

...Their vision of America had become, in subtle ways, Nixon's America...

...They were moving upward through the social strata in unprecedented numbers...

...They didn't hold it against Kennedy personally—at least Mother didn't...

...Until this point my father's life paralleled Nixon's almost exactly—local college, law school scholarship, years of deprivation, struggle, and rejection, and the war...

...In the space between the man and the mask, the Old Nixon and the New, lay the anxiety of the age...

...He was no more concerned whether Hiss was [a communist] than a billy goat...

...Alger Hiss was too important to go...

...a vice president whom even the president refused to take seriously...

...Stevenson was one of the first to speculate on the phenomenon of multiple Nixons...

...As Robert Stripling, HUAC's chief investigator later said, "Nixon had set his hat for Hiss...

...Unlike Rep...

...In Nixon we saw ourselves—he was neither a hero nor a prince, but a man of extraordinary ordinariness who was trying to be something more...

...Nixon nailed Hiss, but even after Hiss was convicted of perjury, many members of the Eastern Establishment continued to defend him and deny his guilt...

...Nixon was nearly speechless...

...He had none of the qualitites we associate with "modern" leaders...

...Then he went to war...

...In some subconscious way, the attacks on Nixon after that—the derision directed at the speech, Stevenson's erudite loathing, Eisenhower's obvious snubs, the Herblock cartoons—reflected upon those same people who had spontaneously identified themselves with Nixon...

...We would start out with daily press conferences and end with none," Klein wrote...

...He went back to Whittier and became a divorce lawyer...

...They feared and hated communism, and there was Rep...

...Kennedy had meant Nixon had neither style nor grace, but it was also true that Nixon, and people like him, were economically classless...

...For people like my parents, the Kennedys were the kind of people they dreamed of being, but the Nixons were the kind of people they were...

...I was struck with a feeling of something awesome and uncanny, even, if you will believe it now, ominous and frightening, in the public's willing acceptance of the style and tone of his words...

...In Kennedy we saw the American Prince assuming his throne...

...He was a protege of men like Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, rulers of the Establishment...

...Nixon knew where the lines had been drawn...

...he posted an electric fence between himself and everyone else, including his wife...

...They were proud of their country, and there was Nixon, the Goodwill Ambassador being stoned in Caracas, or standing up to Khrushchev in the kitchen debate...

...They were not, or did not feel themselves to be, members of as stable or as static an institution as the European bourgeoisie...

...This is a man of many masks," said Adlai Stevenson in 1956...

...Nixon the star student couldn't even get a job at the FBI...

...He was an irresistible force, a democratic urge...

...Kennedy was using all his own themes, bashing Khrushchev, Castro, the Chinese...

...He was a product of Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law...

...A god and a mortal The presidential election of 1960 divided America for the rest of the generation between Kennedy-haters and Nixon-haters...

...But the lesson everyone drew from the Old Nixon is that he would never catch up to the New Nixon, and this knowledge was alienation itself, for if Nixon couldn't close the distance, how could we...

...Few people loved Nixon as they loved Eisenhower and Kennedy and even Adlai Stevenson, and yet Nixon was popular in a way these men had never been...

...They had more money than power, more ambition than position, more enthusiasm than taste...

...Nixon, on the other hand, was fit but worn...

...He was fearful of falling off the track, of sliding back to his origins...

...In Eisenhower we saw the contented hero playing out his presidency on the golf course...

...In the battle of merit versus privilege, they had seen the advantages of old wealth and connections and credentials...

...hugged him at the Republican National Convention in 1972 it was one of the most surprising gestures I had ever seen...

...Despite defeats that would have ended most political careers, he went on to become president and to receive one of the greatest mandates of his time...

...Nixon, Hiss was witty, handsome, beautifully dressed...

...They were fluid...

...There was much, Nixon said, that he and Sen...

...My own earliest feelings about Nixon were sensations of sympathy and discomfort, what one might experience when watching a performer flub his lines—or, if not actually flub them, carry them off so poorly that one is too aware of the effort, the acting, the awkward reaching of the man for the role...

...The problem with the New Nixon was that he was invariably accused of being the Old Nixon in disguise...

...the uncritical and compliant acceptance of the artificiality, the obvious opportunism, the insincerity, and the questionable credibility which came across in his every utterance...

...He cast an occasional lovesick glance at the tan and handsome and wealthy and secure and sexy and charming politician who was destroying him...

...He would have liked to have been handsome...

...Nixon at once polarized people into those who felt this way about him and those who did not . ." The emotional rift that Nixon opened in California's Twelfth District in the first postwar election would eventually become the fault line of American politics...

...after he graduated from his hometown college in Whittier, California, he went to Duke law school on a $250 tuition scholarship and earned money by working in the law library...

...they contained three million signatures...

...They loved Eisenhower, and there was Vice-President Nixon, the Eisenhower loyalist and chief defender, although Ike himself had always treated Nixon like an unwanted pet...

...Nixon was not under attack because he was unscrupulous, but because he was an outsider, a usurper, an avenger of the new world...

...got him on the ticket with Eisenhower...

...Four years later it had split the state of California with Nixon's election to the Senate over Helen Gahagan Douglas...

...and aspirations and resentments of his age...

...They had not grown up in a world of crystal and careful manners...

...Herb Klein, Nixon's press secretary, wrote that every campaign began with a New Nixon, who disappeared midway as the candidate began to feel mistreated by the press, and gradually withdrew...

...he accused the administration of coddling Castro (when he had already been briefed on the plans for the Cuban invasion...

...Old Nixon was the aggressive, no-class newcomer on the make...

...They were moving off the land and into the suburbs, out of the old metropolis of the North and East and into the booming cities of the West...

...He was resentful of those ahead of him in line, those who already had it made...

...They had not chosen Nixon to lead them, but they had seen themselves in Nixon's place, and they believed that what would happen to Nixon would have happened to them...

...Nixon was watching another version of himself, the ruthless campaigner, hitting the same notes that Nixon so often had hit...

...One would never say about Nixon, as even Lyndon Johnson's bitterest enemies said about him, that he was larger than life...

...From his earliest entry into politics, Nixon was hated intensely, and even his supporters had to forgive his awkward manner...

...There was always that feeling about Nixon, the amateur actor, of the leadenness, the pretense, the hopeless mortality of community theater...