"We Are Not Going to be Outbid"

By 1960, Richard Nixon had, undergone eight years of solid apprenticeship for the Presidency. He had performed well. His pragmatic principles had proven sufficiently flexible to contort to any particular position that might be required by the President or his New York bosses. Richard Nixon was like the little boy in the fourth grade who wanted to be in the fifth graders' club. He wasn't quite sure what the club was all about or just who-all were in it, but nonetheless he had done everything possible to please the big boys in the hope that he might himself be initiated.

Part of Nixon's frustration stemmed from the fact that he had never been accepted or trusted by Eisenhower. This distrust dated from the "Checkers speech." Shortly before Nixon went on the air, he received a phone call from Dewey telling him that Ike's advisers, and therefore obviously Ike, wanted him to end his TV program by offering his resignation to Ike. Dewey also asked Nixon to have telegrams of "Yea" or "Nay" in response to Nixon's plea sent to Los Angeles. The "Checkers speech" was really a behind-the-scenes duel between Nixon and Eisenhower.

Nixon didn't offer his resignation, but he ended the program by asking listeners to send their telegrams to the Republican National Committee in Washington, and said that he would leave to the Committee the decision as to whether or not he would stay on the ticket. Nixon was showing Ike and his backers that when it came to political in-fighting he had not come to town on a load of pumpkins with straw hanging out of his ears. The Republican National Committee was in the hands of party regulars and not Eisenhower people. Had the telegrams been sent to Los Angeles, as Dewey requested, the decision as to whether to keep Nixon on the ticket would still have been in Eisenhower's hands. Through this maneuver, Nixon saved his position on the ticket, and therefore his political career, but he paid a high price for it. Throughout, the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration, Eisenhower treated Nixon like a lowly clerk and an expendable errand boy. Although Nixon sat in on high-level strategy meetings, his advice was never sought. He was also deliberately left out of Ike's social life, and there were rooms in the White House that Nixon had never seen until LBJ gave him a tour in late 1968.

During his years in the Vice Presidency, Nixon obviously had not been taken into the conspiratorial apparatus, although he certainly recognized its existence. His following of the Eisenhower program with its purging of Conservatives from the higher echelons of the party was doubtless pragmatic and opportunistic, an attempt to convince the Insiders that he could be trusted and would play their game. Some, as Paul Hoffman observed, still did not trust him. He had to fend off a movement headed by Harold Stassen (CFR) to remove him from the number two slot on the ticket in 1956. Ike had already suffered a heart attack, and there was a chance that if Ike died and Nixon became President, he might revert to the position of his anti-communist days. The Stassen coterie wanted as veep, just in case, either Presidential assistant Sherman Adams (CFR) or Nixon's old tutor, Christian Herter (CFR), both of whom were known to be trustworthy.

For a time, Ike seemed to be wavering, and he offered Nixon a cabinet post—any one he wanted, "except the State Department, which was reserved for Dulles." (You'd better believe it was!) But the faction of Insiders supporting Nixon was stronger than the clique attempting to oust him. The Vice President's supporters included Leonard Hall [CFR], Dr. Milton Eisenhower [CFR], Dewey [CFR], and Sidney J. Weinberg [BAC] (Business Advisory Council). In fact Weinberg, reportedly Eisenhower's boss—possibly acting for staunch Eisenhower supporter and top Democrat Bernard Baruch—told Eisenhower, "I am for Dick Nixon 100%." Weinberg, had supported Nixon for the number two spot on the ticket in 1952 and was an advisor to Nixon in his 1960 Presidential races.

[NOTE: Strangely, after supporting Nixon for so many years, Weinberg turned up as Hubert Humphrey's chief money raiser in 1968. This certainly dispels any idea that Weinberg had become more Conservative since his days of enlisting business support for FDR. Since party labels mean nothing to Insiders like Weinberg, he could jump from one CFR candidate to another with the ease of a gazelle hurdling a mud puddle. Weinberg's place on the Nixon team was reportedly taken, after his defection, by Kuhn, Loeb and Company partner Lewis L. Strauss [CFR].]

As 1960 neared, more and more was heard of the "new" Nixon. The "new" Nixon was not the shoddy Red baiter, the shrill campaigner of yore who resorted to sneaky debater's tricks, but a matured, statesman-like man sobered by his experiences in the Vice Presidency. Stewart Alsop commented:

"He wanted to be President very much, and he knew that he had a chance, perhaps a good chance, to become President. But he also knew—for he is anything but a fool—that a reputation as an extremist and partisan would sharply reduce that chance. Hence his change of political style."

A man's motives are always mixed, and no doubt it is true that Nixon changed his political style after 1954 in part for purely practical political reasons. But does the change go deeper than that? There were times when he slipped back into old Nixonisms, as in this statement before an audience in Cleveland in January 1958:

"If we have nothing to offer other than a pale carbon copy of the New Deal, if our only purpose is to gain and retain power, the Republican Party no longer has any reason to exist, and it ought to go out of business."

But after the 1958 mid-term elections such rhetoric disappeared from Nixon's verbal ammunition stockpile. Now, the strategy was to publicize just how Liberal the "new" Nixon, the "real" Nixon, really was. During the latter years of the Eisenhower administration, sophisticated Liberals knew he was in their camp. Richard Wilson, chief of Look magazine's Washington Bureau, telegraphed this in a feature article for Look titled "The Big Change in Richard Nixon." Wilson raved on and on about the "new Nixon," declaring:

"He has made a distinct turn to the left. When the choice has been between the Republican right and the Republican left, Nixon has sided with the Republican left . . . The years, then, are building up in Nixon a set of convictions he did not have four years ago. As he grows with these convictions, and becomes better known, voters will find a basis to judge his political readiness to go beyond his training stage—and into the White House."

Nixon himself was beginning to adjust his image with the rank and file. Biographer William Costello mentions:

"In another departure from party orthodoxy, he argued in favor of making liberals as well as conservatives feel at home in Republican ranks; he told a Philadelphia breakfast rally there was need for both conservative and liberal points of view in a healthy party . . ."

The New York Times reported that Nixon had begun "a quiet courtship of Republican liberals and moderates." The theme was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, which duly noted: On foreign policy, he called himself "a liberal rather than a conservative because I have an international view rather than an isolationist view on foreign policy . . ." On economic matters he is " . . . trying to avoid getting obsessed with the idea (of balancing the budget)."

The very Liberal Chicago Sun Times, on December 31, 1959, did its bit toward debunking the idea that Nixon was still a Conservative:

". . The Democrats have stepped up their campaign to label Vice President Nixon as the darling of that reactionary fringe of the GOP known as the Old Guard. This is political hokum. The Old Guard—or what little is left of it—notoriously stands for isolationism and against social reform.

"Nixon is an internationalist in the tradition of Wendell Willkie, for whom he campaigned in 1940. He is an outspoken champion of the United Nations, of a stronger world court even at the cost of modifying U.S. sovereignty, of generous foreign aid . . ."

As part of his presidential build-up, Nixon arranged for a trip to Russia in the summer of 1959. He went strictly on his own hook, as Eisenhower refused to give him any mission, but merely told him what subjects to avoid so as not to muddy the waters for the negotiations that were already going on behind the scenes. Ostensibly he was to "probe for areas of possible East-West agreement . . . and impress the Soviets with America's sincere desire for peace . . . "

Of course, anyone who knew as much about Communism as Nixon did was aware of the fact that the Communists had been cynically using "America's sincere desire for peace" to, their advantage ever since FDR agreed to recognize the Soviet Union in 1933. The idea that the Kremlin believes that we are really warmongers, and that therefore we must prove our good faith over and over while never requiring any positive acts of good faith from the Communists, is so much hogwash.

Once Nixon was in Moscow, Khrushchev quickly put him on the defensive by becoming highly irate about Congress' having passed a resolution commemorating "Captive Nations Week," which demanded that the United States "continue" [sic] its efforts to win the release of the millions of peoples held in the Soviet prison camp of nations. Nixon told Khrushchev, "This was a foolish resolution." "Do you mean to say that the members of Congress are fools?" Khrushchev asked. "This is just a private conversation," Nixon cleverly countered.

In another dazzling display of verbal brilliance, the Vice President told the lovable Butcher of Budapest:

"There are some instances where you may be ahead of us—for example, in the development of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer space; there may be some instances in which we are ahead of you—in color television, for instance."

Khrushchev reportedly was polite and did not burst out laughing. Nixon, however, got even the next day when the two visited the American National Exhibition, a sort of county fair, which was being shown in Moscow. While in an exhibit of a typical American kitchen, the famous "kitchen debate" occurred, in which Nixon was graciously permitted to shake his finger in the Soviet tyrant's face for the benefit of press cameramen. That shot may have been worth a million votes.

As the Republican National Convention approached, it became obvious that Nixon had the nomination sewed up tight. For nine years he had been stumping nearly every town and hamlet in the country for the Republican party and all of its candidates. His years on the creamed chicken circuit may have been responsible for considerable indigestion, but in their course Nixon had collected a bushel-basketful of political I.O.U.'s. The Republican National Convention was foreclosure time for the Californian.

As early as the previous March, polls showed that the Vice President was the favorite of 64 percent of the country's Republicans, so there seemed to be little to worry about as convention time neared. Yet in mid-May, Nelson Rockefeller, newly elected governor of New York, tried to stick his nose into the Presidential tent. Rockefeller had no chance of getting the nomination, yet Rocky's mere entrance onto the scene seems to have earned him a bargaining position with Nixon. When Rockefeller found he could not lay claim to the actual nomination, he moved to dictate policy from behind the scenes. A meeting was thus arranged between Nixon and Rockefeller for the Saturday before the Republican Convention opened in Chicago.

In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White noted that Nixon accepted all the Rockefeller terms for this meeting, including provisions "that Nixon telephone Rockefeller personally with his request for a meeting; that they meet at the Rockefeller apartment . . . that their meeting be secret and later be announced in a press release from the Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting be clearly announced as taking place at the Vice President's request; that the statement of policy issuing from it be long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary communique."

As a result of the meeting, a four-way telephone circuit was set up linking Rockefeller protege Charles Percy (chairman of the Republican Platform Committee and a board member of Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank), a second Rockefeller deputy in Chicago, Nixon, and Rockefeller. What finally emerged was the fourteen points of the famous Compact of Fifth Avenue.

The Republican Platform Committee had been meeting in Chicago for an entire week, laboriously pounding out a platform reflecting the views of Republicans from all fifty states. Now the Platform Committee was handed the Rockefeller-Nixon orders: Forget the effort and the time you have spent to come to Chicago at your own expense, hear witnesses, and draft a document to submit to the Convention—throw it all out and accept the Rockefeller-Nixon platform worked out, in secret, eight hundred and thirty miles from the Convention site. The Liberals were ecstatic; here was their kind of democracy in action!

The Wall Street Journal of July 25, 1960, claimed that the Fifth Avenue meeting was not a Rockefeller coup but a Nixon victory; that Nixon had needed a rationalization for dumping the party Conservatives. As a result of the meeting, the Journal stated:

". . . a little band of conservatives within the party, of whom Senator Goldwater is symbol and spokesman, are shoved to the sidelines . . . First impressions to the contrary, Mr. Nixon has achieved all this without giving Mr. Rockefeller a single important concession he did not want to make.

"This is not to deny that the fourteen points are very liberal indeed; they comprise a platform akin in many ways to the Democratic platform and they are a far cry from the things that conservative men think the Republican party ought to stand for . . . But as you go down the fourteen points, one by one, it's clear they reflect the Nixon brand of liberalism . . .

"Actually Mr. Nixon has rather skillfully used the Rockefeller meeting to get a few liberal planks into the platform which he already wanted but which he was having trouble getting through the platform committee . . . Thus it is that in one burst of speed Richard Nixon has accomplished three maneuvers—defied the conservative wing of the party, cut loose from President Eisenhower and neatly outflanked his major opponent within the party . . .Mr. Nixon's risk is that conservative voters will be outraged enough to stay away from the polls and that his liberal gesture will not in fact gain any liberal votes from the Democrats . . .

"In doing so he has moved the Republican party a little more to the left on the political spectrum, a thing that is bound to be sad not only to men of conservative mind, but also to those who would like to see the philosophic differences that divide the country sharpened into clear political issues. Once more we are going to be deprived of that kind of a choice in a presidential election.

"As a matter of tactics, Mr. Nixon with this platform abandons the deep South and conservatives everywhere to whatever they can make of the Democratic platform."

Another Wall Street Journal article of the same day concluded that the Rockefeller-Nixon agreement "brings the spotlight shining once more on a facet of his public image he has long labored to eradicate; that of 'Tricky Dick', the politician who sacrifices principle to expediency."

The Chicago Tribune headlined its editorial on the Nixon-Rockefeller meeting, "Grant Surrenders to Lee." The welfare platform dictated by Rockefeller and Nixon, which included an endorsement of the objectives of Communist inspired sit-ins in the South, was called by Senator Goldwater "the Munich of the Republican Party."

Republicans everywhere understood the meaning and significance of the new Rockefeller-Nixon alliance. Nixon had purged himself of his independence to become acceptable to the Insiders of the International Left. As Theodore White put it:

"Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop of the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by the open compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the platform committee had been wiped out. A single night's meeting of the two men in a millionaire's triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, eight hundred and thirty miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see."

Nixon confirmed the alliance by accepting as his running mate one of the foremost darlings of the international clique, a discredited instigator of the smear-Taft maneuver of 1952 and of the anti-McCarthy smear of 1954, Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge then proceeded to virtually sit out the campaign. Newsweek of March 23, 1964, phrased it more delicately: "His laziness became legend."

The Rockefeller-Nixon meeting certainly made it plain that Nixon was willing to pay the price Taft had been unwilling to pay. But the significance of the meeting may go much deeper than that. Rockefeller represented much more than a mere political rival. He was acting as a political power broker not just for himself, but for brother David of the mammoth Chase Manhattan Bank and the coterie of international bankers who form the nucleus of the Insiders' Council on Foreign Relations.

It is very possible, though we shall never find out for sure, that at this time Nixon was initiated into one of the outer circles of the conspiracy. For the truth is that there was no need to crawl to Rockefeller. Nixon had the nomination in the bag regardless of what Rockefeller did. Rockefeller's influence in the Republican party is immense at the apex and quite small at the grassroots base. He is like the owner of a professional football team who cannot make the team he owns.

Though Rockefeller would doubtless trade his left ear lobe for the Presidency, he is forced to operate through others at the Presidential level. Nixon is perfect for this. Nixon can deliver the grass roots and Rockefeller can deliver the CFR Establishment. The two men may dislike each other intensely, but they need each other. It may be that they are not even as great personal enemies as they appear to be. Nixon and Rockefeller were close friends during the Eisenhower Administration and Rocky sent Nixon this telegram in 1956: "Under you and the President the Republican party is now emerging, at home and abroad, as the great liberal party of the future."

Stewart Alsop (CFR) indicates in his book Nixon and Rockefeller that the two men are really Leftwing birds of a feather:

"There are in fact, it should be noted, no sharp ideological differences between Rockefeller and Nixon, as there were between Dewey and Taft and Eisenhower and Taft. When Rockefeller worked in Washington for the first Eisenhower administration, he often found an ally in Nixon on such issues as foreign aid. The difference is really a difference of style and background and approach to politics—above all, the difference between a professional, partisan politician, a 'regular,' and a seeming amateur with an air of being above partisanship. It is a choice which has confronted the Republican party before, although in different form."

From a political standpoint, the most that Rockefeller could offer was the delivery of New York State in the election, and it was extremely doubtful that he could deliver that. To top it off, after receiving credit for dictating the Republican platform. Rockefeller, for all practical purposes, sat out the election, thus helping to ensure Nixon's defeat. Rockefeller may have figured that if Nixon were defeated in 1960, he, Rockefeller, would have the inside shot at the nomination in 1964.

But there can be little doubt that Nixon knew what he was doing. Although it appeared to the man in the street that he had made a foolish bargain and had sold out for a mess of pottage, actually Nixon had insured his long-run political career. Of course, Mr. Nixon could have chosen to fight the conspiracy, but having seen the depth of its power during the Eisenhower administration, he apparently figured it was much easier to join the conspirators than to fight them. Otherwise his actions in 1960 make little sense, and whatever he is, Nixon is a shrewd politician.

That there was a deal of monstrous proportions is beyond question. In analyzing Nixon's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, the Wall Street Journal of August 1, 1960, noted:

"He does not reject any particular Federal activity—whether it be Federal medical help for the aged. Federal aid to education, or Federal foreign aid—on the ideological ground that it is something the central government has no right to do."

Of course, Nixon did throw a bone to the dejected Conservatives, proclaiming in his acceptance speech: "The only answer to a strategy of victory for the Communist world is the strategy of victory for the free world." But, as the Journal commented, "Exactly what Mr. Nixon has in mind in this regard will have to await clarification." That clarification never came.

In the 1960 campaign Nixon attempted a feat more difficult than passing a camel through the eye of a needle. He tried to outpromise the Democrats. Newsweek of July 11, 1960 quoted him as saying:

"We are not going to be outbid . . . We can reach goals the so-called economic liberals of the Galbraith-Schlesinger school can never reach. We can show that we can produce better schools, hospitals, health, higher living standards."

And Nixon knew what he was doing. He was now advocating more of the very same policies he had once denounced so vociferously as socialist and Communist. On July 29, 1960, the Wall Street Journal even headlined an article, "Nixon Aims to Wed Fiscal Responsibility to Welfare State." As the Journal explained:

". . . the Republican party this year stands on a platform that borrows much from this modern liberalism. In the area of civil rights, and welfare legislation, in the acceptance of big Government spending, the Republican party is once more seeking to meet the Democratic party on its own ground . . .

"Mr. Nixon is going to completely ignore any distinction between conservatives and liberals in wide political areas . . . He will accept it as proper for the Government to intervene in the nation's business, to take on for the people some of the obligations which were once left to them individually—the path is straight from social security to socialized medical care. In that sense the Roosevelt revolution is complete; Mr. Nixon, if elected, will not dismantle the welfare state."

The only difference the Journal could find between the Democrats and Republicans was that the Democrats promised socialism through deficit spending, while the Nixon Republicans promised socialism with balanced budgets. Either way, America was to be the loser.

Before the campaign even started, Nixon had announced that internal subversion was a dead issue, stating:

"Domestic Communism is no longer a political issue. The danger has receded a great deal in the last few years, domestically, mainly because we have become increasingly aware of it. The Communists used to fool an awful lot of well meaning people who were not Communists. There is still a group, a small group that can be fooled. "

And, as if to make sure that nobody missed how completely he had joined the socialist team, candidate Nixon added:

"If we have to choose in allocating funds between military programs and economic, information, and other non-military programs, I would put the emphasis on the non-military programs, and take a gamble on the military programs."

In a book put out for the campaign, biographer Earl Mazo reported that Richard Nixon personally "considers himself a 'radical' when it comes to the goals he would set for the country (his definition of 'radical' being the 'opposite of conservative')."

In his campaign against fellow CFR member Senator John Kennedy, Richard Nixon regularly pulled his punches. Who will ever forget Nixon's "I agree with Mr. Kennedy. . ." statements on the TV debates?

He never discussed what informed Republicans considered to be his best issue: the Senate records of Kennedy and Johnson—including Senator Kennedy's sponsorship of legislation to repeal the loyalty oath provision of the National Defense Education Act, his vigorous support of Communist revolutionaries in Algeria, and his backing of the repeal of the Battle Act provision, which prohibited the sending of strategic materials to Iron Curtain countries. And Nixon never even mentioned Mr. Johnson's killing of the bill to restore to the states the right to punish subversion.

Instead, like Willkie and Dewey before him, Richard Nixon conducted a campaign using the orthodox "New York strategy," concentrating his efforts on the big cities at the expense of rural areas, the West, and the South. Nixon failed as Willkie and Dewey had failed before him because he simply could not force the Liberal East and Conservative West into a single phalanx. The principal irony of Mr. Nixon's campaign was that he could very probably have won every state he did win without any effort to project a "new Nixon." And had he not turned Left, he might have picked up in the South the votes he needed to become President in 1960.

It had, indeed, been a strange campaign—especially considering that it was waged by one whose long suit was two-fisted campaigning. Gone were the thumb-in-the-eye, ear-biting, shin-kicking campaigns of yore. Nixon had suddenly become dignified. No more rolling in the dirt. Now it was tea and crumpets with the opponent. Republicans kept waiting for Nixon "to take the gloves off." But Nixon had traded his boxing gloves for the white fawnskin variety. An exasperated Brent Bozell wrote in his National Review column:

"M-moment, that point in future time when Richard Nixon throws off the camouflage and hauls up his true conservative colors, moves steadily forward along its inexorable path to infinity. Nixon's Moment of Truth was scheduled for early 1960 when he would become an "avowed" candidate and in that capacity would speak his "real" mind. When spring turned to summer and not much had happened besides the avowal, the deadline was set ahead to the Republican convention. Then the Vice President would step forward: Since his official status as party standard-bearer would take precedence over the inhibiting responsibilities of his present office, Nixon would at last be free to elaborate on his differences with the [Eisenhower] administration. Now these differences have begun to emerge and they all point the wrong way. Conservatives have steeled themselves, accordingly, to yet another postponement—we will be patient through the campaign, but watch the smoke after Inauguration Day!

"Many conservatives were telling themselves that last week, but very few of them believed it."

On election day Kennedy edged Nixon by an eyelash and that with the aid of many of the dear departed in Texas and in Cook County, Illinois, who returned from the hereafter to vote the straight Democratic ticket. With Texas and Illinois in the Republican column, Nixon would have been elected President.

The New York Times' very liberal Tom Wicker made a noteworthy point regarding vote frauds:

"A shift of only 4,480 popular votes from Kennedy to Nixon in Illinois, where there were highly plausible charges of fraud, and 4,491 in Missouri would have given neither man an electoral majority and thrown the decision into the House of Representatives. If an additional 1,148 votes had been counted for Nixon in New Mexico, 58 from Hawaii, and 1,247 in Nevada he would have won an outright majority in the electoral college . . . Any experienced reporter or politician knows that that few votes can easily be "swung" in any state by fraud or honest error."

In a post-election report following the Kennedy-Nixon race, Richard Wilson, the veteran Washington correspondent and columnist, wrote in Look magazine, in an article entitled "How To Steal An Election":

"For the first time, many thousands of Americans suddenly realized that elections can be stolen. They only half-believed it before 1960, as part of our historical lore . . . Many, many thousands of voters and civic-minded people in several leading states no longer take the easy-going attitude toward election frauds."

The thievery in Texas, where such things were traditional whenever Lyndon Johnson was involved in a race, was so blatant that Texas political reporters were screaming for some national media representative to pick up the story. At least 100,000 votes had been stolen and the Kennedy-Johnson ticket carried the state by only 46,000. New York Herald Tribune reporter Earl Mazo did a four-part article detailing how the election was stolen. Nixon invited Mazo over to his office and Mazo assumed Nixon was finally going to call for a federal investigation. Instead, to Mazo's shock, Nixon told him:

"Earl, those are interesting articles you are writing—but no one steals the presidency of the United States." Mazo states: "I thought he might be kidding. But never was a man more deadly serious. . . he enumerated potential international crises that could be dealt with only by the President of a united country, and not a nation torn by the kind of partisan bitterness and chaos that inevitably would result from an official challenge of the election result." Nixon claimed: "Our country can't afford the agony of a constitutional crisis —and I damn well will not be a party to creating one just to become President or anything else."

Nixon pleaded with Mazo to cancel the eight remaining articles he had prepared on how the election was stolen. It is obvious from Mazo's statements that he was sure Nixon had been defrauded. But Nixon apparently was willing to reward the thieves. He was strangely magnanimous, for a man who for years had moved heaven and earth to claw his way to the top of the political heap.

This odd behavior from a man who had earned a well-justified reputation for political ruthlessness naturally triggered a bevy of rumors. Most of them centered on widely circulated unconfirmed stories that Kennedy had information about a large Caribbean gambling debt Nixon had run up, a real estate scandal in California, or strange actions by Nixon's closest friend, "Sweet Bebe" Rebozo.

More plausible is the theory that Nixon knew the timing was not right for him and that the Insiders wanted Kennedy. Nixon wanted to be President all right, and expected to be. But he was far-sighted enough in 1961 to realize that his way of helping the Insiders to advance, by posing as an anti-communist who continuously had to yield to Communist pressures to avoid worse results—which had been the formula during the Eisenhower years—was not going to be the formula preferred by the top Insiders for the next eight-year stretch, 1961 through 1968.

For the last thirty years the Insiders have been carrying out this strategy in America by alternating swings of the pendulum. In 1961 they were ready for another eight-year period of driving this country down the road to Communism by direct measures, carried out under a President whose political strength depended on his open support of Communism disguised as Liberalism. Nixon did not fit that picture, and knew it well. The last thing he wanted was, as President, to be bucking Insider plans; or, alternatively, to lose his own political following by failing to do so. It was going to be 1969 before those bosses would want another Eisenhower in the White House. And Nixon was by no means reluctant to wait.

The next episode in the strange political career of Richard Nixon, following his eyelash defeat (if that is what it was) by JFK, was his strange quest for the governorship of California. This undertaking is still shrouded in mystery and, as with so many other important stories, the men who know are not about to talk. What we do know is that Nixon's decision to run for the governorship of the Smog State was tied in with the political ambitions of two other men, former California Assemblyman Joe Shell and Nelson Rockefeller. Shell, a former captain of the USC football team, was a hard-nosed Conservative with political ambitions; and at this time (the early '60's) Rockefeller had not undergone a divorce and his aspirations to be President were much more realistic than they were later to become.

In early 1962, Shell contacted Nixon, who was then practicing law in Beverly Hills, to see if the former Vice President had any intention of seeking the governorship. Shell was realistic enough to know that he would have no chance against the universally known Nixon in a primary fight for the Republican nomination, and he did not propose to waste time and money in trying. Nixon assured Shell that under no circumstances would he become a candidate for the governorship. Based on Nixon's unqualified declaration that he was not interested. Shell filed for the governorship in the primary.

Some weeks later Shell received a "courtesy" phone call from Nelson Rockefeller. After an exchange of pleasantries. Rockefeller asked Shell where he would stand if he were elected governor and thereby became the leader of the California delegation to the 1964 Republican nominating convention. Shell replied that he was sorry to have to say that he would not be in Rockefeller's corner. This rather abruptly terminated the "courtesy" call. One week later to the day, a Friday, Rockefeller's secretary called Shell's secretary and announced that Richard Nixon would be entering the California gubernatorial race.

We can only speculate on just what kind of hold Rockefeller had over Nixon, or what kind of deal Rockefeller had made with Nixon either personally or as a member of the Insider Establishment. Jules Witcover, in his recent book The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, reveals:

"It has been widely assumed that Nixon ran for governor in 1962 because he was unable to resist local and state pressures from important Republicans in California. Although it is true such pressures were great, the strongest persuasion came not from California but from Republican powers and friends in the East . . ."

Later, Witcover adds:

"There were many others, though, who thought Nixon needed it [the California governorship] if he hoped to make another serious try at the Presidency. They were the same members of 'the Eastern Establishment'—that rather formless collection of Republican moderates best symbolized by the last Republican Presidential loser, Thomas E. Dewey of New York—who had masterminded Dwight D. Eisenhower's two party nominations and had helped Nixon nail down the Republican nomination in 1960. Several times in early and mid-1961, Nixon and Finch traveled back to New York and Washington to confer with Dewey, Herbert Brownell, Jr., William P. Rogers, Clifford Folger, the old Eisenhower and Nixon finance man, Leonard W. Hall, General Eisenhower's campaign manager . . "

Harold "Butch" Powers, who had also entered the primary, bowed out with this statement:

"The kingmakers, whoever they may be and wherever they live, have decreed in effect that California Republicans shall take a discard from the rubble heap of national politics . . ."

It has been claimed that Nixon had to run if he was to retain any semblance of national party leadership, and that the California governorship was a forum for such leadership. Subsequent happenings have proved this was not true.

Nixon defeated Shell handily in the primary and appeared to be a shoo-in against Democrat incumbent Edmund G. Brown. Under Brown, known as "Pat" to his friends and "Bumbles", to his critics, taxes had skyrocketed, while everything else seemed to be disintegrating. In addition, "Bumbles," referred to by Time Magazine as "a tower of jelly," had a penchant for inserting his foot in his mouth and was not particularly popular with rank and file Democrats. Also, unlike the Presidential race in which Nixon had had to defend the administration, this one found him free to attack, to exploit the numerous weak spots in Brown's record.

Reflecting all these factors, early summer polls showed Nixon leading Brown by 53 to 37 percent, with 10 percent undecided. Even if he lost all of the undecided vote, he would still win handily. Yet somehow Nixon managed to blow the election in the state he had carried comfortably in his 1960 Presidential race.

Nixon, the man famed for his slick, hard-hitting campaigns, proceeded to conduct a stumbling, amateurish campaign that left his supporters aghast. The campaign seemed to be dogged by bad luck from the beginning. An airliner crashed, killing Richard Jones (CFR), who was carrying a valise with $65,000 in cash, widely reported to be funds from the Establishment for the Nixon campaign. Another problem was the $205,000 loan made to Richard Nixon's mother, Hannah, in 1951, by the Hughes Tool Company. Every time the subject was brought up, Nixon would say how happy he was that someone had asked him that question. You can imagine how happy he was. Nixon always prefaces his "answer" to a tough question by telling you how ecstatic he is that you are trying to nail him. Next, he says that he wants to make himself "perfectly clear," and then you know the double talk is about to begin—but it will be the most sincere double talk you have ever heard.

In this case Nixon explained that his mother had put up a piece of property as collateral for the loan, and that the lot meant a great deal to his mother. This, of course, did not answer the question of whether it is moral or ethical for a politician in high office to permit his family to receive a secret loan from a major defense contractor.

Nixon's brother, Donald, not Hannah Nixon, was the recipient of the $205,000. He never paid it back, but instead went through bankruptcy, and the Hughes Tool Company wound up with the property.

Another embarrassing matter that was brought up during the gubernatorial campaign was the fact that Nixon, who had always been a strong champion of civil rights and who was a member of the NAACP, had bought a home in Washington, D.C., the deed to which contained a restrictive clause forbidding its sale to Negroes. Lawsa mercy, that was embarrassing.

Nixon had won fame as a campaigner by always being on the attack. But in 1962, he ran a strangely defensive campaign. "Bumbles" Brown was not only subject to attack because of his incompetence; he also was more vulnerable to "Redbaiting" than the "Pink Lady," Helen Gahagan Douglas, had been. Pat Brown had been president of the Northern California chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, cited by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." But Nixon never mentioned that.

Brown was also closely tied to the California Democratic Council (CDC), which, according to a former FBI undercover operative, had been formed with the help of the Communist Party. The CDC's stand on virtually all issues was unbelievably identical with the official Communist Party line as set down in Party publications. Not only did Nixon not broach this serious issue, he actually took steps against Republican Conservatives who wished to make an issue of Brown's strange bedfellows.

And then there was Proposition 24, the Francis Amendment, to outlaw the Communist Party. Half a million voters signed petitions to put this anti-subversive measure on the ballot. William F. Knowland's Oakland Tribune editorial on October 29, 1962, stated:

"Every such law, even if perfectly written, is challenged and subjected to court test . . . This will undoubtedly happen again, and if Proposition 24 has faulty sections, they will be eliminated by court action . . . On the other hand, the measure contains certain provisions that are vitally needed."

The Communists were all against Proposition 24. Pat Brown and his CDC cohorts were against it, the entire Leftist claque was against it, and so was Richard Nixon. Nixon claimed that the proposed law was unconstitutional, although the measure had been carefully drawn up by a battery of constitutional attorneys to avoid the very pitfalls Nixon claimed were in the bill. Strangely, Nixon spent much of his effort in attacking Proposition 24 instead of Pat Brown.

Even more strangely, Nixon devoted much time to attacking incumbent Republican Congressman John Rousselot and Edgar Hiestand because of their membership in The John Birch Society. Richard Nixon, the man with the reputation of being "the great unifier" of Party factions, the man who could support such ultra-Leftists as Clifford "Hopeless" Case (CFR) and Jacob Javits (CFR), was now reading two incumbent Conservatives out of the party. This despite Nixon's pre-primary pledge of full support for the entire state GOP slate. In retrospect, it appears quite obvious that Nixon pursued this suicidal course under orders from headquarters—New York. Nixon alienated Conservatives in both parties, and many of them either did not vote for any gubernatorial candidate in the election, or voted for an unknown dentist who was running for governor as a patriotic Conservative, on the Prohibition Party ticket. The Nixon-Brown race drove many people to the "dry" candidate.

The result was a debacle. Forced to run on a campaign format dictated by Establishment Insiders, Nixon's former 53 percent lead evaporated into a defeat by 300,000 votes. At the same time Dr. Max Rafferty was running for State Superintendent of Education on a Conservative platform, and even with the all-out opposition of all Liberal-labor forces, he wound up winning by more than 210,000 votes. Rafferty received over 500,000 more votes than Nixon.

Operating under the conditions imposed on him by Rockefeller and the Establishment was undoubtedly a particularly frustrating experience. Losing to JFK by a hair-breadth was certainly no disgrace, but losing (or, in essence, being forced to take a dive) to Brown was humiliating. The morning after his defeat Nixon made his famous farewell to politics speech ("You don't have Nixon to kick around any more"), in which he lambasted the media for their bias. The whole thing had been a nightmare, and on that morning Nixon probably believed that his political career was deader than the mahjongg craze.

Among those factors contributing to Nixon's defeat was the widely held suspicion that Nixon wanted the California governorship as a stepping stone to a second try for the Presidency. This belief was given impetus on election eve, when Nixon inadvertently referred to himself on television as the prospective "Governor of the United States." But this was not actually the case. By this time Nixon knew full well that the strategy of the Insiders called for eight years of rather overt moves toward building an all-powerful socialist state, and that his time had not yet come. And he also knew that his patience would be rewarded. Jules Witcover in The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, revealed some facts concerning Nixon's California race:

Nixon was not seeking a stepping-stone to a 1964 rematch against John F. Kennedy; he was seeking a sanctuary from it. Far from wanting to use the state-house in Sacramento to launch another Presidential bid in 1964, as Brown successfully charged in the 1962 campaign, Nixon actually had hoped to use it as a four-year hiding place, from which he could avoid making another losing race against Kennedy. Inherent in his decision to run for governor was a Presidential timetable not of 1964, but of 1968, when he finally did make his second try. Thus, though he lost in California in 1962, the gubernatorial contest in the end served the political purposes intended at the start—to keep Nixon off the national ballot in 1964 and to make him the Republican Party's logical choice in 1968! The circumstances that produced both these results never of course were anticipated. But because Richard Nixon did not win in California in 1962 and did not run for President in 1964, he was able to emerge again in 1968, when his party found itself with a rare opportunity for victory, but facing a leadership vacuum.

Following the disastrous loss to Brown, Nixon picked up his family and shuffled off to New York to join the Wall Street law firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander and Mitchell. [ A former partner in the firm had been notorious Communist-fronter Roger Baldwin, founder of the A.C.L.U.]

The deal was reportedly arranged by Nixon's old friend, Elmer Bobst, of Warner Lambert Pharmaceutical Co. The firm did not seek Nixon. Nixon moved into Nelson Rockefeller's apartment building at 810 Fifth Avenue, into the same apartment where Nixon and Rockefeller had arranged the infamous "Compact of Fifth Avenue" in 1960. After Rockefeller re-married he had moved into an apartment on the other side of the building. Thus, all during Nixon's stay in New York he and Rocky were neighbors. It does seem unusual that one would buy an apartment from and become a neighbor of someone who is supposed to be one's political arch-enemy. Just how this, and Nixon's joining a New York law firm, fit in with his consenting to be Rocky's hatchet man against Joe Shell, we cannot tell. Those who know the story behind this story are not talking, and it is a line of questioning that most reporters do not care to follow.

While Nixon's job with Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander and Mitchell was reputedly arranged by Elmer Bobst and not Rockefeller, the Mitchell of the firm was John Mitchell, now the Attorney General, who was Rockefeller's personal attorney. Furthermore, columnist Leonard Lyons, on September 6, 1968, reported that the firm handles much of Chase Manhattan's (Rockefeller's) trust business. Bobst is listed as a member of the highly secret Pilgrim Society, which is even closer to the inner circle of the conspiracy than the CFR.

When Nixon left Washington, he reportedly had little more than an old Oldsmobile automobile, Pat's respectable Republican cloth coat, and a government pension. While in law practice Nixon had an income of $200,000 per year, of which more than half went to pay for the apartment in Rocky's building. By 1968, he reported his net worth as $515,830, while assigning a value of only $45,000 to his partnership in his increasingly flourishing law firm.

Nixon listed total assets of $858,190 and liabilities of $342,360. Most of his assets represented Florida and New York real estate. All of this reveals a remarkable use of capital, considering that income taxes on $200,000 are substantial. Nixon was reportedly paying $70,000 a year in income taxes, and $109,500 a year in payments and taxes on his cooperative apartment, which alone would eat up $180,000 of his $200,000 salary. In addition, there was the unknown cost of his limousine and chaffeur and his constant traveling all over the country and the world, plus the normal costs of first-class living in New York City.

During this time Nixon was also moving up in social circles. Theodore White informs us: "He himself [Nixon] belonged uptown to the Links Club, the most Establishment of New York's Establishment clubs. Downtown, he belonged to the Recess Club and India House . . ." Nixon also joined three exclusive and expensive golf clubs.

It may be that the frugal Mr. Nixon acquired the investment capital that mushroomed into $858,190 in assets by faithfully plugging his change into a piggy bank. Then again, it may have been part of Nixon's deal with Rockefeller and the Insiders that Mr. Nixon's personal poverty problems should be solved.

It was while Nixon was studying for the New York bar examination and enjoying his newly acquired life of luxury that the phenomenon known as the Goldwater Movement was burgeoning across the land.