Read Online The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate by James Rosen - Free Book Online

Southern-themed party Martha threw to celebrate the merger, and at which Nixon did, indeed, play piano—and only once did the Mitchells ever socialize at the Nixons’ Fifth Avenue apartment, at a law firm Christmas party. At neither event were the two couples alone with each other. 3
    “When Dick Nixon first came back here to practice law in my firm,” Mitchell told a friend in 1968, “he was a beaten man.” The native Californian’s path to Wall Street had been rocky and jagged. Fueled by a peculiar mixture of intellectual brilliance and seething class envy, principled anti-communism and naked careerism, Nixon had vaulted to the highest stratum of American political life with a speed and polarizing effect unseen before or since. As a young lawyer, navy veteran, and congressman representing Whittier, California, in the forties, he campaigned ferociously against the putative communist sympathies of his Democratic opponents and pressed for the prosecution of Alger Hiss, a favorite son of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers, as a Soviet spy. The congressman skillfully used his perch on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and the country’s emerging mass media to attain national recognition and ascend to the Senate. There Nixon cast himself as a palatable alternative to the far less disciplined, more reckless and toxic anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy; more quietly, the Californian intervened to ensure early civil rights bills made it onto the Senate floor.
    Tapped by Dwight Eisenhower to serve as his vice presidential running mate in 1952, Nixon soon confronted unfounded ethics charges, which he rebutted with a dramatic prime-time address on nationwide television: the “Checkers” speech, so named because of its author’s corny, yet canny, evocation of his daughters’ beloved cocker spaniel. Simultaneously an appeal to average Americans and an oblique challenge to General Eisenhower’s manliness in the political arena, the Checkers speech marked an innovative use of the new medium of television and saved Nixon’s spot on the GOP ticket. As vice president over the next eight years, he traveled widely, strengthening his grasp of foreign policy and elevating the office itself. In tense encounters with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and anti-American rioters in Venezuela, and then again when Eisenhower was temporarily incapacitated by a heart attack, Nixon kept his poise and drew applause, even from opponents, for his erect bearing and coolness under fire.
    Yet the estrangement from Eisenhower continued (he “saw DDE alone about 6 times in the whole deal,” Nixon would later tell H. R. Haldeman); and when Nixon ran for president himself, against John F. Kennedy in 1960, Eisenhower, pressed at the height of the campaign to name one major idea of Nixon’s that he had adopted, snapped before concluding a news conference: “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” As a world-class debater, experienced television performer, and better-traveled candidate, the vice president should, by all rights, have enjoyed a decided advantage in televised debates against Kennedy; but the “cool” medium favored the handsomer, more relaxed senator from Massachusetts, and served to even the playing field between them. Nixon’s loss on election night was both heartbreakingly close and very likely the result of voter fraud in swing states.
    Even more humiliating, Nixon lost by a decisive margin when he sought, two years later, to reestablish his political base with a run for the governorship of California. Flush with embarrassment and the one or two drinks it took for him to exhibit the effects of intoxication, Nixon capped his electoral defeat in the wee hours of the morning by angrily confronting the news media, which he had always regarded as antagonistic, with a shrill cry of self-immolation: “For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of fun, a lot