The Landmark Political Series

Theodore H. White

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062027115
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The classic you-are-there account of the Nixon-McGovern election by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times –bestselling author: "A brilliant analysis." — Commentary The Making of the President 1972 chronicles both the Democratic and the Republican parties as they jockeyed for position toward the end of Richard M. Nixon's turbulent first term. Theodore White illuminates the cinematic moments that shaped the campaign—the attempt on George Wallace's life, Edmund Muskie crying in the snow in New Hampshire, the swift rise and fall of Tom Eagleton, and the ongoing anguish of Vietnam—leading inexorably to a second chaotic collapse among the Democrats and a landslide victory for Nixon. Yet even as the president's highest ambitions were confirmed, White watches aghast as the "new Nixon" of 1968 is eclipsed by the corrupt Nixon of old—a Shakespearean conclusion to an astonishing political epoch. "The byzantine events of 1972 unfold here like a timebomb ticking away—Nixon's dramatic foreign adventures, the Muskie bust and the McGovern phenomenon, the President's deliberate surrogate campaign, the Democrats' bloodletting at Miami Beach and the beginning of the destruction of George Stanley McGovern as a viable candidate." — Kirkus Reviews "One of America's most celebrated political writers." — The New York Times "Among the most influential and gifted journalists of the twentieth century. More than anyone else, White changed the way American politics and government are covered, and in the process he had a major impact on the politicians as well." — Chicago Tribune Includes a new foreword by Cokie Roberts

CHAPTER ONE

THE SOLITARY MAN

IT was to be Richard Nixon’s last rally—and they wanted to make it splendid for him.

He had campaigned across the country the day before—in Chicago, Tulsa and Providence. This afternoon, Saturday, November 4th, 1972, he left the White House at 1:35 under clear blue skies, to prop-stop on his way home to vote in California. An hour’s flight brought him in over the red earth and slash pine of the Piedmont to his first stop—a rally at Greensboro, North Carolina. He alighted to deliver the Presidential embrace to two obscure Republican candidates, for Senate and Governor, and was exhilarated when, returning to his plane, the crowd broke through the barriers—cheering and rushing him, snatching off one of his cufflinks in the crush. At dusk he paused again to speak at Albuquerque, the setting sun shafting shadows over the iron-gray mountains until, as he spoke, there he was alone in the darkness, silhouetted in floodlights. And then it was off again in the night for Ontario, California, twenty-five miles from his boyhood home, Whittier, for the last rally ever of Richard Nixon, candidate.

Everything his advance men could do had been done before he got there. But the rally was more than what they had prepared. Cowbells were clanking, hooters sounding, holiday horns blaring as his black limousine rolled down the roped-off lane from the plane toward the platform. There were perhaps 20,000 in the high stands and on the folding chairs, another 10,000 spilling over onto the field, and now they squeezed against the ropes—pounding on his car, clanging bells, squirting noise in his face. Somewhere in the distance a dozen bass drums were booming to the rhythm of clapping, but their thump-thud-thump was all but lost in the shrieks, the squeals, the roar of the crowd. It was a family crowd, and for the first time in a Republican rally in 1972 I noticed that blacks were present, too. The crowd surged, the car crawled, and he stood and waved while the roar rose higher and the crowd caught the thump of the bass drums and began to chant, “Four More Years, Four More Years, Four More Years.” Little boys in colored football helmets were snatching drifting balloons from the air and cracking them pop-open, with the subdued crack of gunshots. A little Indian boy in a bright orange jacket sitting on his father’s head almost tumbled into the President’s car. The Secret Service ran ahead, pushing and shoving a way through the crowd that strained at the ropes of the lane. The car began to roll faster, and you could look up and see the panorama. Rallies in America are, by now, almost a thing of the past. There has been no tidal flooding of hundreds of thousands of people into the streets since Lyndon Johnson barnstormed New England in the fall of 1964, in the days before Americans learned how much easier it is to watch the candidates on evening television than in the street. But tonight was the old pageant, like a torchlight parade of Chicago Democrats, and was to be remembered as a moment of politics in passage: the arc lights criss-crossed the night sky with shafts of red, white and blue visible for thirty miles, the grandstand flags were repeated like tiny petals in the hands of thousands of youngsters. On the floodlit platform glistened what appeared to be an acre of bands—twenty-four of them, one learned later. The fan-bells of the tubas glistened like medallions in the distant rows—brass, gold, silver, blue and white. And the drum majorettes, a full corps of them in the uniforms of all the local high schools, were high-kicking with the music, pompoms in red and purple and green bouncing, shakos dancing. Then the music faded, and while the roar slowly died down, Richard and Pat Nixon were advancing to three tangerine-colored seats set alone on the forestage where Governor Ronald Reagan waited for them.

Richard Nixon had started here in Ontario, California, twenty-seven years ago—with some unremembered speech against Congressman Jerry Voorhis in the then 12th California Congressional. He had come a long way between that beginning and this return. One hoped now to catch a moment of poetry, or nostalgia, or even the sentimentality that could have been expected from Richard Nixon years ago. This crowd, if crowds have a personality, ached to cheer or cry. “No one loves Richard Nixon” had been one of the dominant clichés of American pohtics for years; but this crowd loved Richard Nixon, as did millions of others.

He came on easily, with no histrionics. He began by saying he had come that day from North Carolina, the home state of writer Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe had written that “you can’t go home again”—but this crowd, he said, proved Wolfe was wrong. It was here, exactly twelve years ago, at one o’clock in the morning before the election in 1960, he recalled, that he had held his last rally of the campaign against Kennedy; California had been good to him that year. And he hoped he had kept the faith.

Then he settled into this, the last of his countless thousands of rally speeches, discarding his text, and this reporter watched the man he had followed for so many years in American politics. The Nixon of other years used to approach the rostrum on his toes, and, once there, his body-sway was an entertainment. His hips used to weave; sometimes one leg would curl up behind him; his hands would flail, weave, jab with an imaginary uppercut at his opponent. In emotional moments his eyes would close. His rhetoric would slash, pound, wander back through his boyhood and memories; he was, at one stage, the easiest public bleeder in American politics except for Hubert Humphrey; and at his peak he could arouse his partisans to frenzy.

Now there was neither frenzy nor sentiment in this Nixon, the President—and listening to him was a perplexity. So much in this man was persistent, consecutive, carrying through twenty-five years of national politics. The phrases floating over the sound system were part of what one had to recognize now, finally, as an unshakable philosophy. The key phrase, for example, tonight was, “I bring you Peace With Honor, not Peace With Surrender.” He had first phrased it twelve years ago, against John F. Kennedy in 1960, as “How to Keep the Peace Without Surrender.” And then his exhortation, the same as far back as one could remember, “Vote for What’s Best for America”; and all the other phrases coming from the sound system: “Keep America Strong,” “Strengthen the Peace Forces against the Crime Forces.” They were old, all heard so often they had slipped from conscious retention.

Only in retrospect did one realize how much the substance of the man had changed. Not simply the newly grave, flat, unemotional tone of his voice, but the thinking. One could imagine him here, at his first rally, a freshman in politics, flogging the Democrats, as all Republicans did that postwar year, over the meat shortage and the meat prices and the meat rationing. One could imagine him, even better, inveighing, as he was to do for so many years, against the peril of Communism—above all, against the peril of Red China. But tonight, what his last rally heard was a statement of the essence of his case for re-election, as if he were a lawyer presenting a brief in court: He had brought peace. When he came to office, he said, 300 Americans a week were being killed in Vietnam; we had been on a collision course to greater war. Had he not acted, he told them, “we would have gone down the road to inevitable confrontation and nuclear confrontation and the end of civilization—I could not let this happen.” And of China, yesterday’s red menace, he was telling them, “Think of what it means fifteen years from now if they have a nuclear capability and there is no communication between us … nations of different philosophy must meet at the conference table.”

The speech was simple, clear, forceful, but un-ringing. He was his own man, the President; he was not beseeching, or courting, or politicking; he was simply explaining.

But now he was coming to the end of his remarks. He gripped the lectern firmly with both hands and leaned forward, the wind ballooning his jacket out behind him. “Here in Ontario,” he said, “in November, 1945,1 held my first rally. Tonight as I speak to you in Ontario, it is the last time I will speak to you as candidate for any office—and this is the best rally. Thank you. Thank you.” The old Nixon would have twanged every sentiment, would have tried to bring tears to the eyes, would have explored the limits of nostalgia. One waited for more. But he was through—like that, his last farewell to the stump.

It was a moment before the crowd realized that this last speech was over. And then, though wanting more, more, they cheered against the rising sound of the clanging, the singing, the beating of the drums. Nixon strolled across the platform shaking hands with old friends, occasionally reaching down to sign an autograph, his gravity gone and a wide, very boyish grin creasing his face. Then, abruptly, he vanished, leaving through a side gate to the helicopter that would lift him to San Clemente. There, that weekend, he would be studying the cables from Vietnam and, all by himself, putting the finishing touches on his personal plan for reorganizing the American government.

Of his re-election he had no doubt, nor did anyone else. He could spend the next few days at ease, carving a new outline for the next Presidency, imagining how he could make American government work if the power came to him in the measure he expected, and how America, by his design, could carve a new peace in the world.

Neither he nor anyone on his staff that weekend could conceive that the affirmative plebiscite on the Nixon record, so obviously swelling, would leave him so vulnerable and so isolated in the term to come. Very shortly, however, Richard Nixon was to become more powerful and more solitary than he had ever been before in his life—but that was not to happen until Tuesday, voting day.

On Tuesday, November 7th, the schedule called for him to board Air Force One at El Toro Marine Base in California, for the flight back to Washington, at 10:20 A.M.

Dawn had come four hours earlier through a low overhanging mist, the sun staining the undersides of the cloud bars pink. By voting time a cluster of fifty people—schoolteachers and schoolchildren, early-rising retirees and housewives—had already gathered at the Concordia Elementary School, a sand-colored stucco schoolhouse less than a mile from the President’s Pacific seaside home in San Clemente. There, at exactly seven, a little boy shrilled, “Ooh—there’s his big limousine now,” and the black limousine was rolling along the oval drive lined by dwarf palms, cypresses and pines. At 7:01, as the President and Mrs. Nixon stepped out, Judge Mary Stamp stood before him, raised her hand in ceremony and said, “Hear ye, hear ye, the polls are now open.”

Voter Number One of Precinct 48/146’s 545 enrolled voters was thereupon handed his pink, newspaper-size ballot and the little blue electronic stamp which makes the balloting results machine-readable, and disappeared into Voting Booth Two. There were no less than twenty-four propositions and bond issues on the ballot in Congressional District 42 in California—two local, twenty-two statewide. Running the gamut from plebiscites on pot, pornography and the death penalty to the preservation of California’s coastal beauties, the ballot reflected concerns which had scarcely been shadows on the mind when Richard Nixon had entered politics twenty-seven years earlier. Now he took his time—five minutes and twenty seconds—in examining and voting on each’ proposition. Then he lingered to be photographed, handed out White House pens to the election clerks, autographed a picture thrust at him and, eleven minutes after his arrival, was en route back to his office in the summer White House.

By this time, in the East millions of voters had been balloting for hours; and as he was going through his mail with Rose Mary Woods, his secretary, she was interrupted by a telephone call. It was the first published tally on the wires: Dixville Notch in New Hampshire had voted 16 for the President, 3 for McGovern. Four years earlier Dixville Notch had voted 8 for Humphrey, 4 for Nixon. The President, as Miss Woods recalled, said nothing—only smiled, then went back to the mail. Miss Woods keeps ready a sampling of the more human mail gleaned from the torrent that floods the White House—letters from children, from bereaved parents of soldiers, from well-wishers, in the hand-scrawled style that yields the beat of emotion. When the President is not too busy, he enjoys reading such letters. And this was what he did that morning until his helicopter came to the pad outside his gate to take him to El Toro Marine Base, where Air Force One waited to carry him back to Washington.

/Air Force One was airborne at 10:24, climbed over the tawny Santa Ana Mountains, rose over the huge Irvine ranch, nine times the size of Manhattan, cut quickly through low-hanging fog and in ten minutes was cruising at 33,000 feet over the desert, en route to Washington.

Except for Henry Kissinger, those admitted into the privileged forward compartments were all veterans of a similar flight made exactly four years before on Election Day, from Los Angeles to New York. In 1968 the mood had been both somber and comradely, the mood halfway between apprehension and anticipation, the plane festooned with balloons. The candidate that year had exerted himself to show the characteristic consideration that binds his personal followers to his career—sending for them and their wives, in groups of two and three, to thank and soothe them. Now he sat alone in the forward compartment of Air Force One; and the conversation in the compartments behind was laced with nostalgia and recall.

Air Force One, the President’s plane, invites little conviviality. It had come into service in 1962 for John F. Kennedy, had been altered somewhat by Lyndon Johnson, then again been reconfigured to suit Richard Nixon’s personality. Johnson, a public man, had occasionally worked behind a plate-glass window so that anyone admitted forward to the working area could see the President of the United States doing his job. Now the plane reflected Richard Nixon’s compulsive wish for privacy, and was severely hierarchical in configuration; he was invisible. The crew, the half-dozen rotating members of the press pool and Mrs. Nixon’s hairdresser occupied the tail compartment, and none of them could go forward beyond it. Next forward came a staff-and-VIP guest compartment, decorated with two maps, one of America, the other of the world. Forward again came the working area, with its lounge, typewriters, desks and reproduction machines, served by the operational hard core—Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Ziegler. (It was in this area that Lyndon Johnson had stood and taken the oath of office on November 22nd, 1963, the blood-soaked Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him.) Forward of the working area came the President’s territory—a reception lounge for important visitors, usually occupied by Mrs. Nixon, the décor of the lounge all gold and blue, with bowls of fresh-cut flowers and hard candies adding color. Then a Presidential office; and finally the President’s personal lair, no bigger than a Pullman compartment, where he could work alone at a tiny desk, from the one easy chair; or, when he chose, open out the folding bed and take a nap. Forward of that compartment were the Secret Service men, and yet farther forward, in the nose of the plane, a fifteen-foot panel of winking lights, buttons, switches, teletype and coding machines which reached to the signal consoles in Washington and the Pentagon and patched the President, if he chose, into every corner of his country and the globe, or, as Commander-in-Chief, to each of the nine Specified or Unified Commands of the Armed Forces. No one ventured forward from the rear of the plane to staff territory without permission; and no one on the staff, except Haldeman and Ziegler, ventured forth from staff territory to President’s territory without being asked.

The mood was placid, “like coming home from an easy win at a football game,” said someone contrasting it with the tension of the flight of 1968. There was Ziegler, constantly on the phone, relaying incoming press reports. Each Election Day, election officials in every state are asked by the press how the voting is going; and, invariably, every official reports that the voting is heavy and his state will set a record. So, today, too, officials were proclaiming that this election would set a record. All such predictions are true; given the growth of American population, each election turns out a larger total number than the election before. But over the past twelve years the percentage of those Americans eligible to vote who actually choose to vote has been dropping; and thus the record vote of 1972 was to turn out to be, in percentage terms, the lowest since 1948.

Champagne was served with a Mexican-American lunch and someone noted that it was the same which Nixon had taken with him for the Peking trip in February—a Napa Valley California champagne (Schwansberg 1970). Restlessly, Henry Kissinger paced the aisles, entertaining friends with his raconteur’s flair, telling stories of a visit to Lyndon Johnson in Texas. Johnson had apparently mistaken him for a German dignitary (Kiesinger?) and lectured him on the Teutons of the Southwest. LBJ’s home district was a German enclave; and had been the only district to side with the Union in Texas during the Civil War because, said LBJ, “Germans and Negroes have a natural friendship”; and, again, LBJ had told Kissinger how he had caused picnic tables, instead of hotdog stands, to be installed around the LBJ ranch “because Germans are people who like picnics.” Then Kissinger retired to the seclusion of the operations section to work out chess problems. In the working compartment forward they were playing a game, guessing how the nation’s newspapers would handle tomorrow’s story, inventing headlines. Ziegler brought the guests his favorite—the Washington Post, said Ziegler, would probably banner the elections as “MC GOVERN SWEEPS D.C.,” with a subhead reading “Nixon Carries Nation”

Finch, the oldest veteran on Nixon’s staff, was musing about the Cabinet changes to come, and the need for the President to address himself to the Watergate problem immediately after the election; but he did not see the President on the plane except in the presence of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the Watergate affair was not brought up.

The plane bore few problems. There was a complication created by a technicians’ strike at CBS which might make it necessary for the President to decide whether to cross picket lines when he went to the Shoreham Hotel that night to address jubilant Republicans. But that was settled before the plane crossed the Mississippi. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler, Finch discussed what should be their victory line, and the tone of the Republican spokesmen who would have to fill time on the air in what they felt would be a runaway election. They would be generous to the press this time—if asked, they would say they had had a fair shake; they would talk policy and issues, taking their text from the President’s fourteen radio campaign speeches; and they hoped that when the night’s returns were in they would be able to claim a “functional majority” in Congress. There seemed no doubt of this majority; shortly after eleven the UPI flash to the plane from the East had read, “At mid-afternoon, the first incomplete compilation of national returns gave Nixon 216 votes to 26 for McGovern—a majority of 89 percent.” And down below, as the plane moved effortlessly across the Rocky Mountains, the face of the land was serene, snow-powder reaching down the slopes to the Plains states. There was nothing to be noted different from any other day in the land below when its people vote except, if one stretched the imagination, the highways seemed more bare than usual.

It was about half an hour before we touched down at Andrews Air Force Base that I was asked forward to the President’s territory. He was sitting alone, the shades half drawn in his tiny cubicle, his hands neatly crossed over his knees, which were bent up so his feet could rest on the desk; beside him on the floor was a briefcase, with the familiar yell...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION
• PROLOGUE: THE END OF THE POSTWAR WORLD
• CHAPTER ONE THE SOLITARY MAN
• CHAPTER TWO THE ROAD TO CEDAR POINT: FROM THE LIBERAL IDEA TO THE LIBERAL THEOLOGY
• CHAPTER THREE THE VIEW FROM KEY BISCAYNE: BLUE COLLARS AND BREAD-AND-BUTTER
• CHAPTER FOUR THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES: A PARTY IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY
• CHAPTER FIVE MCGOVERN’S ARMY
• CHAPTER SIX THE WEB OF NUMBERS: A MESSAGE FROM THE CENSUS TO POLITICS
• CHAPTER SEVEN CONFRONTATION AT MIAMI
• CHAPTER EIGHT THE EAGLETON AFFAIR
• CHAPTER NINE RICHARD NIXON’S CAMPAIGN: “OUT THERE”
• CHAPTER TEN POWER STRUGGLE: PRESIDENT VERSUS PRESS
• CHAPTER ELEVEN THE WATERGATE AFFAIR
• CHAPTER TWELVE THE SHAPING OF THE MANDATE: MEN AND MACHINERY
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE: VERDICT IN NOVEMBER
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN TEMPTATION OF POWER
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ALSO BY THEODORE H. WHITE
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• Copyright
• About the Publisher