The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority

355 Pages·2014·3.94 MB·English

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

A A
LSO BY THE UTHOR
The New Majority
Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories
Right from the Beginning
The Great Betrayal
A Republic, Not an Empire
The Death of the West
Where the Right Went Wrong
State of Emergency
Day of Reckoning
Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”
Suicide of a Superpower

Copyright © 2014 by Patrick J. Buchanan
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938–
The greatest comeback / Patrick J. Buchanan. — First edition.
pages cm
1. Presidents—United States—Election—1968. 2. Nixon,
Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913–1994. 3. United States—Politics and government—1963–
1969. 4. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854–)—History—20th century. I. Title.
E851.B83 2014
324.973′0904—dc23 2014007614
ISBN 978-0-553-41863-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-55341864-4
Unless otherwise designated, all photographs are from the author’s collection.
Jacket design by Jess Morphew
Jacket (front) photograph by Dick Halstead/Getty Images
v3.1
TO SHELLEY,
my wife of forty-three years
who was there—right from the beginning
C
ONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION: The Resurrection of Richard Nixon
1. A Loser—in a Party of Losers
2. Rapprochement with the Right
3. Comeback Year
4. The Manila Questions
5. New Recruits
Photo Insert 1
6. The Six-Day War—and After
7. “Year of the Dropouts”
8. Assassinations and Anarchy
Photo Insert 2
9. The Wild Card
10. Montauk and Miami Beach
11. At the “Comrade Hilton”
12. Hearing Footsteps
POSTSCRIPT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
I
NTRODUCTION
The Resurrection of Richard Nixon
BARRING A MIRACLE his political career ended last week.
—Time ON NIXON (NOVEMBER 16, 1962)
“BUCHANAN, WAS THAT you throwing the eggs?” were the first words I
heard from the 37th President of the United States.
His limousine rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue after his inaugural had
been showered with debris. As my future wife, Shelley, and I were
entering the reviewing stand for the inaugural parade, the Secret Service
directed us to step off the planks onto the muddy White House lawn. The
President was right behind us. As he passed by, Richard Nixon looked
over, grinned broadly, and made the crack about the eggs.
It was a sign of the times and the hostile city in which he had taken up
residence. He had won with 43 percent of the vote. A shift of 112,000
votes from Nixon to Vice President Humphrey in California would have
left him with 261 electoral votes, nine short, and thrown the election
into a House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party. In
the final five weeks, Humphrey had closed a 15-point gap and almost
put himself into the history books alongside Truman—and Nixon
alongside Dewey. But the question that puzzled friend and enemy alike
that January morning in 1969 was:
How did he get here?
In The Making of the President 1968, Theodore H. White, chronicler of
presidential campaigns, begins with a passage from Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the
clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner.… Old
Marley was dead as a door-nail.”
That Richard Nixon would be delivering his inaugural address from
the East Front of the Capitol on January 20, 1969, would have been
mind-boggling a few years before. This is not to say that Nixon was not a
man of broad knowledge, high intellectual capacity, or consummate
political skill. He had been seen in the 1950s as the likely successor to
Dwight Eisenhower. As vice president, he had traveled the world,
comported himself with dignity during Ike’s illnesses, survived a mob
attack in Caracas, and come off well in his Kitchen Debate with Soviet
dictator Nikita Khrushchev. In 1960, no one had challenged him for the
Republican nomination.
Yet Nixon had lost. While the election was among the closest in U.S.
history, and there was the aroma of vote fraud in Texas and Chicago,
Nixon was seen as a loser. He had not won an election in his own right
in ten years. He had twice ridden Eisenhower’s coattails into the vice
presidency. In the off-year elections of 1954 and 1958, where he had
been the standard-bearer, the party had sustained crushing defeats. By
the day of Kennedy’s inaugural, conservatives were shouldering aside
Eisenhower Republicans to engage the Eastern Establishment of Dewey
and Rockefeller in a war for the soul of the party. As Democrats had
moved beyond Adlai Stevenson to a new dynamic leader, so had we—to
Barry Goldwater.
Back home in California, Nixon plotted his comeback. He would
challenge Governor Pat Brown in 1962, go to Sacramento, and be
available should the party turn again to him. Should the GOP look to a
new face in ’64, a likely reelection year for JFK, he would finish one
term as governor and pursue the presidential nomination in 1968.
California was replacing New York as first state and the governor’s chair
in the Golden State was an ideal launching pad for a second presidential
run.
But in 1962 Nixon had lost again. He had begun the campaign behind,
but had been gaining ground when the Cuban missile crisis aborted his
surge. Kennedy’s perceived triumph over Khrushchev had given a boost
to every Democrat. Then came the “last press conference,” where Nixon
berated his tormentors and declared himself finished with politics. “It
had seemed the absolute end of a political career,” wrote Norman
Mailer. “Self-pity in public was as irreversible as suicide.” Career over,
Nixon packed up his family and moved to New York, the city of his old
antagonist Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.
So it was that Nixon began the sixties losing to Kennedy, losing to Pat
Brown, quitting politics, and moving east to practice law. He had lost his
political base and seemed to have no political future. How did this
politician of the forties and fifties, an Eisenhower Republican of
moderate views and middle-class values, a two-time loser, emerge from a
decade of assassinations, riots, sexual revolution and social upheaval,
and the rise of a radical New Left and a militant New Right to win the
presidency?
In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway writes of a mystery on the
mountain. “Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen
carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking
at that altitude.” This book is an effort of the aide closest to Nixon in his
now-legendary comeback to explain how he maneuvered through the
conflicts and chaos of that most turbulent decade of the twentieth
century to reach the “western summit”—and become President of the
United States.