Nixon's Seventh Crisis
MORGAN, EDWARD P.
NATIONAL REPORTS Nixon's Seventh Crisis By Edward ? Morgan San Francisco Richard M. Nixon is writing a book. Its pre-publication title is "Six Crises." The crises relate to his part in the...
...It will take more than "some" to do the trick, especially since much of the state GOP organization is heavily pro-Nixon and a good deal of Republican money is backing him...
...These add up to quite a varied scenario...
...and Joseph Shell, minority leader of the State Legislature, who, with some independent oil money behind him, qualifies as a spokesman of sorts for the GOP right wing...
...Even should he win in June the former Vice President faces the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in California by more than four to three...
...Already it permeates the pre-campaign atmosphere with a kind of radioactive fallout which threatens to make the classic feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys resemble a mild misunderstanding between Damon and Pythias...
...Inevitably, Nixon faces the fight of his life here...
...The opposition is headed by Goodwin ("Goodie") Knight, a clever, colorful and sometimes savagely ruthless campaigner whose hatred for Nixon is something to behold...
...Nixon has at least two other challengers: former lieutenant governor Harold Powers, a candidate with a pseudo-cowboy image who once inclined toward Nelson Rockefeller as his national leader...
...Although Goodie's flamboyant charge that Nixon tried to "buy" his withdrawal from the primary race by the promise of virtually any state appointment he chose has not been taken too seriously, Knight's camp is nevertheless preparing an accusative public review of almost every political difficulty in which Nixon has been involved...
...And the former Vice President may have a not-so-secret weapon in an emerging political combatant named Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, ironically, seems more warmly disposed to support him now than he ever was while in the White House...
...Apparently of more interest to Knight, however, is the story, never completely clarified in the 1960 campaign, of a 1956 loan of $205,000 to Nixon's brother Donald, by Howard Hughes, the aviation millionaire...
...If he loses it, it is generally agreed, his Presidential ambitions must perish...
...For Nixon the risks are great but the stakes are high...
...Edward P. Morgan's program on the A merican Broadcasting network is sponsored by the AFL-CIO...
...It won't make this book, but a seventh crisis is coming up: Nixon's fate in the 1962 race for governor of California...
...In this state, Nixon is caught in bitter internecine Republican warfare—partly of his own making— and for the first time in his life he faces opposition in a primary contest...
...At present, the general feeling of political observers is that Nixon will win the primary, though Knight has wide popularity and insists that "not a day goes by" without "some Democrat" informing him that he is shifting registration in order to vote against Nixon in the primary next June...
...Still, many of Nixon's strategists are worried about the effects of a bruising primary fight on him and the party...
...With Republicans in control of both New York and California in 1964, the Grand Old Party's chances of putting a man in the White House would be immeasurably strengthened...
...The crises relate to his part in the Alger Hiss case, the so-called fund around which Nixon so dramatically wrapped his wife's cloth coat in the 1952 Presidential campaign, his nearly fatal tour of South America, President Eisenhower's illnesses, Nixon's clash with Khrushchev in Russia in 1959 and the Vice President's crisis of defeat in 1960...
...As one San Francisco observer put it, "This man Nixon is always in trouble...
...The latest talk involves questions, some of them intensely partisan, about the propriety of a bargain Nixon made for a house and lot in an exclusive section of Beverly Hills...
...Admittedly, some of those Democrats helped give Nixon the narrow margin by which he carried the state a year ago (one theory has it that much of the support was less proNixon than anti-Catholic...
...Nixon has alienated this group by some rather cold observations on the John Birch Society and a stand against rightto-work legislation, among other things...
...Knight is preparing to do everything in his power to insure their demise...
Vol. 44 • November 1961 • No. 37
