Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage - Couverture souple

Frank, Jeffrey

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1416587217 ISBN 13 : 9781416587217

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2013

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Ike and Dick

PROLOGUE

1

The war in Europe ended on May 7, 1945, when the chief of staff of the German army came to a small red schoolhouse in Reims, France, headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight David Eisenhower, and signed Germany’s unconditional surrender. Six weeks later, Eisenhower was in Washington for a parade in his honor. Stores and offices were closed and signs said “Welcome Home, Ike!”—the nickname he’d been given by childhood friends, soldiers, and total strangers. A million citizens watched the olive drab motorcade make its way from National Airport to Capitol Hill, where the general spoke to a cheering joint session of Congress.

In Manhattan on the following day, some four million people turned out to see Ike as his open car traveled through the city. They filled the sidewalks and peered from windows, fire escapes, and almost any perch that let one claim a fleeting glimpse. The motorcade—twenty-one cars, including the newsreel brigade—went from the airport across the Triborough Bridge and entered Central Park at East 96th Street. There it made its way through the park where Eisenhower was applauded by thirty thousand schoolchildren lined up along the side of the road; now and then, a supervising teacher, or a nun in a black habit would tell the kids to step back, to get out of the way.

With music provided by the Army band, the parade reached 60th Street and headed down Fifth Avenue, where the crowds grew thicker, pushing against barricades to see the general, a smiling fifty-five-year-old just under six feet tall, who stood and waved, occasionally returning a salute when he spotted men in uniform, some of whom were on crutches or had empty sleeves. At 44th Street, the police department’s band took over from the Army’s, and then, at 23rd Street, the fire department band replaced the NYPD’s. At Union Square, as the caravan turned east and then motored south along the East River Drive, Eisenhower was able briefly to relax. It was a hot day—temperatures were already in the 90s—and when the cars approached the Fulton Fish Market, the sour air started to fill with a mist of ticker tape and torn paper—seventy-seven tons of it, by one account. Eisenhower again rose to his feet and raised his arms to make them look like stiff cornstalks.

One of the spectators was a Navy man, Lieutenant Commander Richard Milhous Nixon, who in his last months in uniform had been assigned to negotiate contract terminations with defense suppliers and, since the first of the year, had been moving around—from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York, where he happened to be on this June day, on Church Street. He watched the parade from the vantage point of a high window, which gave him an excellent view as the procession moved along lower Broadway. “Maybe I just think it was that way—I was about thirty stories up—but I have the picture that there he came, with his arms outstretched and his face up to the sky, and that even from where I was I could feel the impact of his personality,” Nixon recalled on several occasions. “I could just make him out through the snowstorm of confetti, sitting in the back of his open car, waving and looking up at the cheering thousands like me who filled every window of the towering buildings. His arms were raised high over his head in the gesture that soon became his trademark.” A variation of this—two arms aloft with two fingers held up in victory symbols—would become a Nixon trademark, too.

·  ·  ·

Years later, even after all that happened between them, even though Eisenhower frequently made his life miserable, Nixon still saw him as a large historical figure, distant and even unapproachable despite his startlingly friendly smile. When Nixon talked about him to crowds and reporters, his language could veer toward reverence; in moments of ecstatic campaigning, he might refer to him as a man singled out by destiny, the heroic figure of that victory parade. But as Nixon got to know Eisenhower, he came to see a different man: someone who could radiate kindness and bonhomie while acting with cold indifference and even casual cruelty; and someone comfortable with issues of war and peace but far less so when it came to the problems of his own country and the politics of Washington.

On a personal level, Nixon’s early relationship with Eisenhower, who was old enough to be his father, had a filial aspect, though one without much filial affection. He saw the president as someone who rarely appreciated his contributions and as someone used to rapid, absolute obedience. During his eight years as vice president, he often felt “like a junior officer coming in to see the commanding General,” and sometimes a junior officer who had to endure rebukes and snubs, some of them more imagined than real. The journalist and Nixon confidant Ralph de Toledano told a friend, “There were times when I would find Nixon literally close to tears after a session at the White House during which Eisenhower humiliated Nixon.”

Nixon, though, was an attentive pupil. He observed Eisenhower’s responses to international crises and domestic emergencies and saw the value of an orderly, hierarchical White House, the importance of gestures, and the virtues of patience. Some of these lessons would fade, but Nixon absorbed them with the steady focus of an A student, eager to play a larger role in the eyes of a superior who regarded him as a bright synthesizer rather than as a proponent of imaginative views. Eisenhower did not have a high regard for professional politicians, but he valued Nixon’s logical mind and his expressions of loyalty; and after a time, he listened to his opinions on questions ranging from civilian control of space to civil rights. It was understood that Nixon, as a veteran Red hunter, helped to protect Eisenhower from the resentful Republican right; Eisenhower returned the favor by giving Nixon an increasingly useful veil of moderation. Neither man regarded this as a partnership; vice presidents since the time of John Adams traditionally filled a distinctly peripheral role. But by accident as well as design, their association, in and out of office, grew and that helped to shape the ideology, foreign policy, and domestic goals of the twentieth century.

·  ·  ·

When Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, he was an elderly sixty-two; the war had worn him down—years of heavy smoking, too much coffee, and nonstop stress. When he selected the thirty-nine-year-old Nixon as his running mate, he relied on his advisers, most of whom he didn’t know well and who hadn’t come up with many choices; in any case, he wasn’t personally acquainted with the potential field. Apart from an occasional stateside visit, he’d been away from America (in Panama as a young officer; in the Philippines as an aide to General Douglas MacArthur; in North Africa and Europe during the war) a lot more than he’d been home. He had met Nixon only twice, and briefly—at a Bohemian Grove summer retreat in the summer of 1950 and in Paris in the spring of 1951, when he was at SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. He was aware of all the anti-Communist excitement in the States in which Nixon had played a significant part, but he never recorded an impression of Nixon himself.

On the surface, the two men could not have been less alike. Nixon was a talented speaker, but he often seemed miserable in his political appearances; the journalist Russell Baker saw him as “a painfully lonesome man undergoing an ordeal,” and sympathized with “his discomfort with the obligatory routines of his chosen profession.” As a public man, he knew that he was unloved and sometimes spoke of the pain that cartoonists inflicted (“I’m not exactly amused to see myself pictured as a lowbrow moron,” he said of the Herblock drawings that appeared with some regularity in the Washington Post). The aspect that so delighted caricaturists—the close-set eyes, dark, heavy brows, what Garry Wills called his “spatulate nose”—were all the more striking in contrast to those of Eisenhower, who had an expressive, mobile face (his skin turned dark red when he was angry) and that dazzling grin—a spectacular display of surface warmth. Ike’s appearance sometimes seemed to change as new thoughts occurred to him, which made him seem, as the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart observed, spontaneous and transparently honest.

Despite that surface candor, though, Eisenhower was as private a man as Nixon, and sometimes an intimidating man. Many were struck by his eyes—“those cold blue laserlike eyes,” an early campaign volunteer recalled. When he got angry, his longtime aide Bryce Harlow said, it was like “looking into a Bessemer furnace.” Those moments passed quickly; what was far more difficult was being subjected to his chilliness when, as Harlow put it, “those blue eyes of his turned crystal cold.” Nixon sometimes felt that unsettling chill, even when nothing was said. He came to realize that the president might refer to him in embracing terms—“We are very close. . . . I am very happy that Dick Nixon is my friend”—just as he was aiming to be rid of him. And while Nixon acquired and kept a reputation for duplicity, Eisenhower was equally accomplished in the arts of deception and misdirection. He had no trouble ordering Nixon to undertake some of his nastiest chores, such as firing his top White House aide, and he tried to disassociate himself from Nixon’s meanest campaign rhetoric, as if his vice president was speaking for someone else. As Nixon later put it in a much cited phrase—language over which he carefully deliberated—Eisenhower was “a far more complex and devious man than most people realized.” Nixon’s vice presidential years were sometimes a struggle for survival. He was nearly forced off the ticket—and into political oblivion—in 1952, and Eisenhower wanted to jettison him four years later; both times, Nixon out-waited and outmaneuvered the general. When Nixon lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the most damaging—and memorable—words of the campaign were uttered by Eisenhower. Nixon thought that he knew who his enemies were—Eisenhower’s favorite brother, Milton, had little use for him; the president’s press secretary, James Hagerty, could be distinctly unhelpful when Nixon most needed him, Eisenhower’s close friend General Lucius Clay didn’t trust him—and sometimes he didn’t know whether to number Eisenhower among them.

Nixon was always alert to the trap that he’d gotten himself into: doing what the party and the president expected of him could undermine his future, and it could be worse for him if he rebelled. It was a costly bargain. He was always on call to express the angry id of the party, but when he did so his opponents would resurrect a label he acquired in his 1950 Senate race: “Tricky Dick.” Because of this dilemma, Nixon often acted in a certain carefully controlled way; in his perfect, modulated responses, there was an aura of artifice—not exactly calculating but as if he were measuring and judging each word, the “tight-lipped, over-tense, and slightly perspiring manner of a desperately earnest man determined to make no slightest mistake, but not quite at home and not likely to be,” in the words of William S. White. “I was constantly aware of an inner man, one who was very private, very elusive,” the Eisenhower adviser Gabriel Hauge wrote in an unpublished autobiography, and at the same time, the outward man was much like any striving employee—exceptionally well prepared, taking careful notes, in a constant quest for commendation from a boss whose approval could always lift his uncertain spirits.

·  ·  ·

Even in their worst moments, there was never a real breach; there was, rather, a fluctuating, unspoken level of discomfort. So it was a curious thing that their relationship, which was both political and personal, lasted and evolved as it did for nearly twenty years. Its duration alone was highly unusual. Presidents and vice presidents, whether Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis (America’s first and only Native American vice president) or Franklin Roosevelt and his three running mates, tended to have little or nothing to do with each other in or out of office. Eisenhower and Nixon had much to do with each other although Nixon was never in Ike’s inner circle (his offices were across town, in the Capitol, where he could fulfill his only constitutional duty, as president of the Senate). During his presidency, though, Eisenhower tried to include Nixon in the decision-making machinery of the administration (Nixon kept count of the number of cabinet and National Security Council meetings over which he presided); he used him as a goodwill emissary, sending him to more than fifty countries over eight years while steadily increasing his responsibilities; and there was a barely perceptible shift in power as Eisenhower, limited by the Constitution to two terms and weakened by illness, saw Nixon’s presidential goals become clearer and increasingly plausible.

The two men were also drawn together at the end of Ike’s life for personal reasons: in November 1967, over the general’s objections, his grandson and namesake, Dwight David Eisenhower II, and Nixon’s younger daughter, Julie, both of whom were born in 1948, announced their engagement; a year later, the Eisenhower and Nixon families were united by marriage. Yet even teenagers in love could become entangled in politics when the teenagers belonged to these two families. The relationship between David and Julie played a real part in Nixon’s 1968 comeback campaign and it affected his relationship with Eisenhower, who, though he said that Nixon was ready for the presidency, seemed doubtful about his ability to win, and not entirely pleased by the prospect of actually having him in the White House.
2

In June of 1945, Dick Nixon was in many ways the model of the bright young postwar American professional out to improve his lot, a type recognizable to readers of novels by James Gould Cozzens or Sloan Wilson. He had been a lawyer in his hometown, Whittier, California (named after the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier), and worked briefly in Washington, in the tire-rationing section of the Office of Price Administration. He got a Navy commission in August 1942, and served fourteen months in the South Pacific, in Bougainville; his last Navy assignment brought him to Middle River, Maryland. At thirty-two, he was older than most returning veterans, and he had no clear idea what was next for him, although he would likely return to the Whittier law practice that he’d joined after graduating from Duke in 1937. He had responsibilities now. In June 1940, after an intense and single-minded courtship, he had married Thelma Catherine Ryan, known as Pat, an attractive young woman with dark red hair. Jessamyn West, a Nixon cousin and the author of the novel Friendly Persuasion, thought that Pat looked a little like Marlene Dietrich—“The same slanted, almost Slavic eyes. . . . The same strong nose and clear jawline. The same long torso and fine legs.”

Although Nixon had finished near the top of his law school class (a classmate described him as “a very studious individual—almost fearfully so”), his career options were surprisingly few. He had tried without success to find a position with several New York firms and had even applied to be an FBI agent. He’d given some thought to politics, too. Before the war, Herman Perry, a banker and a Nixon family friend (he’d gone to college with Nixon’s mother), had asked ha...

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“One of the best books ever written about Richard Nixon.... Ike and Dick shows how much life remains in artfully straightforward narrative history.” (The New Yorker)

“Ike and Dick is a highly engrossing political narrative that skillfully takes the reader through the twisted development of a strange relationship that would help shape America’s foreign and domestic agenda for much of the 20th century.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“Engrossing...worthwhile.... At the heart of Ike and Dick are marvelously cringe-inducing anecdotes that capture an awkward relationship that improved over time without ever truly blooming.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Jeffrey Frank is a nimble writer with a clear-eyed understanding of power....[Ike and Dick] reveals the nuances of the complex relationship between Nixon and the man under whom he served as vice president, Dwight Eisenhower, nuances that should resonate with Republicans who are waging an internecine struggle over the future of their party.” (The Miami Herald)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1416587217
• ISBN 13: 9781416587217
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 455