The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  So it was with a sense of morbid curiosity that I went to New England not long ago to check on "the real Richard Nixon." Not necessarily the "new Nixon," or even the newest model of the old "new Nixon," who is known to the press corps that follows him as "Nixon Mark IV." My assignment was to find the man behind all these masks, or maybe to find that there was no mask at all -- that Richard Milhous Nixon, at age 55, was neither more nor less than what he appeared to be -- a plastic man in a plastic bag, surrounded by hired wizards so cautious as to seem almost plastic themselves. . . These political handlers were chosen this time for their coolness and skill for only one job: to see that Richard Nixon is the next President of the United States.

  One of the handlers, Henry Hyde, presumably felt I was a threat to the Nixon camp. He called Pageant to check me out. This was after he got into my room somehow -- while I was away, eating breakfast -- and read my typewritten notes. The Nixon people, who wore baggy, dark-colored suits and plenty of greasy kid stuff (they looked like models at an Elks Club style show), seemed to feel I was disrespectful because I was dressed like a ski bum. Pageant reassured Mr. Hyde as to the purity of my mission and intentions in spite of my appearance.

  Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

  After 1960, though, I no longer took him seriously. Two years later he blew his bid for the governorship of California and made it overwhelmingly clear that he no longer took himself seriously -- at least not as a politician. He made a national ass of himself by blaming his defeats on the "biased press." He called a press conference and snarled into the microphone: "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my final press conference."

  There is no avoiding the fact that Richard Nixon would not be running for President in 1968 if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated five years earlier. . . and if the GOP hadn't nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. . . which guaranteed the election of Lyndon Johnson, who has since done nearly everything wrong and botched the job so that now even Nixon looks good beside him.

  The situation is so obvious that Nixon, "the political man," can't resist it. And who can blame him for taking his luck where he finds it? He's back on the "fast track" that he likes to talk about, with the Presidency to gain and nothing at all to lose. He's obviously enjoying this campaign. It's a bonus, a free shot, his last chance to stand eyeball to eyeball again with the high rollers.

  Richard Nixon has been in politics all his life; for 21 years he has rolled about as high as a politician can in this country, and his luck has been pretty good. His instincts are those of a professional gambler who wins more often than he loses; his "skill" is nine parts experience to one part natural talent, and his concept of politics is entirely mechanical.

  Nixon is a political technician, and he has hired technicians to help him win this time. As a campaign team, they are formidable. They have old pros, young turks, crippled opponents, and a candidate who once came within an eyelash of beating the late John F. Kennedy.

  The "new Nixon" is above anger, and he rarely has time for casual conversation. His staffers explain to the grumbling press that "Mr. Nixon is busy writing tonight's speech." He is grappling in private, as it were, with the subtle contradictions of the Asian mind. (He slipped once in public during a late February trip to Wisconsin. "This country cannot tolerate a long war," he said. "The Asians have no respect for human lives. They don't care about body counts." The implied racial slur was a departure from his carefully conceived campaign oratory.)

  At one point I asked Ray Price, one of Nixon's chief braintrusters, why the candidate was having such difficulty finding words to echo Dean Rusk's views on Vietnam. Nixon's speeches for the past four nights had been straight out of the Johnson-Rusk handbook on the "domino theory."

  Price looked hurt. "Well," he said slowly, "I really wish you'd done your homework on this. Mr. Nixon has gone to a lot of trouble to clarify his views on Vietnam, and I'm only sorry that -- well. . ." He shook his head sadly, as if he couldn't bring himself to chastise me any further on the hallowed premises of a Howard Johnson's motel.

  We went to his room, where he dug up a reprint on an article from the October 1967 issue of Foreign Affairs. The title was "Asia After Vietnam," and the author was Richard M. Nixon. I was hoping for something more current, but Price was suddenly called off on other business. So I took the article to the bar and went through it several times without finding anything to clear my head. It was thoughtful, articulate, and entirely consistent with the thinking of John Foster Dulles.

  I was disappointed with Price -- for the same reason I'd been disappointed all week with Nixon. In various ways they both assumed that I -- and all the other reporters -- would fail to understand that Nixon was not only being evasive with regard to Vietnam that week but that he was doing it deliberately and for good reason. George Romney's campaign was obviously on its last legs; New Hampshire was sewed up for Nixon, and the best way to maintain that lead was to stay visible and say nothing more controversial than "God Bless America." Romney tried desperately to provoke an argument, but Nixon ignored every challenge.

  Nixon did confess that he had a way to end the war, but he wouldn't tell how. Patriotically he explained why: "No one with this responsibility who is seeking office should give away any of his bargaining positions in advance." (Nixon's wife, Pat, has confidence in his ability to cope with Vietnam. "Dick would never have let Vietnam drag on like this," she says.)

  Both Romney and McCarthy had their Manchester headquarters at the Wayfarer, an elegant, woodsy motel with a comfortable bar and the best dining room in the area. Nixon's Holiday Inn command post was on the other side of town, a grim-looking concrete structure. I asked one of Nixon's advisers why they had chosen such a dreary place. "Well," he replied with a smile, "our only other choice was the Wayfarer -- but we left that for Romney when we found out that it's owned by one of the most prominent political operators in the state -- a Democrat, of course." He chuckled. "Yeah, poor George really stepped into that one."

  Nixon's pros had won another point; there was nothing newsworthy about it, but those who mattered in the state political hierarchy understood, and they were the people Nixon needed to win New Hampshire. Small victories like this add up to delegates. Even before the votes were counted in New Hampshire, GOP strategists said Nixon had already gathered more than 600 of the 667 votes he would need to win the nomination.

  There is no denying his fine understanding of the American political process. I went to New Hampshire expecting to find a braying ass, and I came away convinced that Richard Nixon has one of the best minds in politics. He understands problems very quickly; you can almost hear his brain working when he's faced with a difficult question. He concentrates so visibly that it looks like he's posing, and his answer, when it flows, will nearly always be right, for the situation -- because Nixon's mind is programmed, from long experience, to cope with difficult situations. The fact that he often distorts the question -- and then either answers it dishonestly or uses it to change the subject -- is usually lost in the rhetoric. "I'm really better at dialogue," he says, "The question-and-answer format is good for me. I like it on TV. The set speech is one of those things like the Rotary Club luncheon. I can do it, but if I had my druthers, I'd make it all Q and A." The "old Nixon" would argue in public; the "new Nixon" won't. He has learned this lesson well, even if painfully.

  The "new Nixon" is a very careful man when it comes to publicity; he smiles constantly for the cameras, talks always in f
riendly platitudes, and turns the other cheek to any sign of hostility. His press relations are "just fine," he says, and if anyone mentions that "final press conference" he held in 1962, Nixon just smiles and changes the subject. He is making a conscious effort to avoid antagonizing reporters this time, but he is still very leery of them. Nixon takes all his meals in his room, which he never leaves except to rush off to one of his "drills" -- the term he and his staffers use to mean any speech or public appearance. His staffers sometimes join reporters in the bar, but never Nixon. He neither drinks nor smokes, they say, and bars make him nervous. Humphrey Bogart would have taken a dim view of Nixon. It was Bogart who said, "You can't trust a man who doesn't drink." And it was Raoul Duke who said, "I'd never buy a used car from Nixon unless he was drunk."

  People who talk like that are not the sort that Nixon likes to have around, especially when he's engaged in something else and can't keep an eye on them. Perhaps this explains why his staffers got so upset when I tried to attend a taping session one afternoon at a TV station in Manchester. Nixon was scheduled to make some television commercials, featuring himself and a group of citizens in a question-and-answer session. The press had not been invited; I wanted to watch Nixon, however, in a relaxed and informal setting.

  My request to sit in on the tape session was flatly denied. "This is a commercial taping," said Henry Hyde. "Would Procter & Gamble let you into their studios? Or Ford?" Hyde was a gear and sprocket salesman in Chicago before he became Nixon's press aide, so I wasn't surprised at his weird analogy. I merely shrugged and took a cab that afternoon down to the TV station -- half expecting to be thrown out the moment I showed up. This didn't happen, perhaps because a CBS camera crew was already there and muttering darkly about Nixon's refusal to see them. They left shortly after I arrived, but I hung around to see what would happen.

  The atmosphere was very sinister. Nixon was off in another room, as usual, rehearsing with his cast. They spent an hour getting all the questions right. Meanwhile Hyde and other staffers took turns watching me. None of them knew who the "citizens" who were to appear on the program were, or who had chosen them. "They're just people who want to ask him questions," said Hyde.

  Whoever they were, they were shrouded in great secrecy -- despite the fact that their faces would soon be appearing on local TV screens with monotonous regularity. At one point I was making notes near the studio door when it suddenly flew open and two of Nixon's staffers came at me in a very menacing way. "What are you writing?" snapped one.

  "Notes," I said.

  "Well, write them on the other side of the room," said the other. "Don't stand around this door."

  So I went to the other side of the room and made some more notes about the strange, paranoid behavior that had puzzled me for the past few days. And then I went back to the Holiday Inn and waited for the next "drill."

  Nixon's speeches that week are hardly worth mentioning -- except as indisputable proof that the "old Nixon" is still with us. On Vietnam he echoes Johnson: on domestic issues he talks like Ronald Regan. He is a champion of "free enterprise" at home and "peace with honor" abroad. People with short memories say he sounds in speeches like a "milder version of Goldwater," or a "Johnson without a drawl." But those who recall the 1960 campaign know exactly whom he sounds like: Richard Milhous Nixon.

  And why shouldn't he? Nixon's political philosophy was formed and tested by the time he became Vice-President of the United States at age 40. It served him well enough for the next eight years, and in 1960 nearly half the voters in the country wanted him to be the next President. This is not the background of a man who would find any serious reason, at age 55, to change his political philosophy.

  He has said it himself: "All this talk about 'the new Nixon.' Maybe it's there, but perhaps many people didn't know the old one." He understandably dislikes the implications of the term: The necessity for a "new Nixon" means there must have been something wrong with the old one, and he strongly disputes that notion.

  There is probably some truth in what he says, if only to the extent that he will now talk candidly with individual reporters -- especially those from influential papers and magazines. Some of them have discovered to their amazement, that the "private Nixon" is not the monster they'd always assumed him to be. In private he can be friendly and surprisingly frank, even about himself. This was never the case with the "old Nixon."

  So there is no way of knowing if the "private Nixon" was always so different from the public version. We have only his word, and -- well, he is, after all, a politician running for office, and a very shrewd man. After several days of watching his performance in New Hampshire I suspected that he'd taken a hint from Ronald Reagan and hired a public relations firm to give him a new image. Henry Hyde denied this emphatically, "That's not his style," he said. "Mr. Nixon runs his own campaigns. You'd find that out pretty quick if you worked for him."

  "That's a good idea," I said. "How about it?"

  "What?" he asked humorlessly.

  "A job. I could write him a speech that would change his image in twenty-four hours."

  Henry didn't think much of the idea. Humor is scarce in the Nixon camp. The staffers tell jokes now and then, but they're not very funny. Only Charley McWhorter, the resident political expert, seems to have a sense of the absurd.

  Oddly enough, Nixon himself shows traces of humor. Not often in public, despite his awkward attempts to joke about how bad he looks on television and that sort of thing. ("I understand the skiing is great here," he told one audience. "I've never skied, but" -- he touched his nose -- "I have a personal feeling about it.") Every now and then he will smile spontaneously at something, and it's not the same smile that he beams at photographers.

  At one point I had a long conversation with him about pro football. I'd heard he was a fan, and earlier that night in a speech at a Chamber of Commerce banquet he'd said that he'd bet on Oakland in the Super Bowl. I was curious, and since Ray Price had arranged for me to ride back to Manchester in Nixon's car, I took the opportunity to ask him about it. Actually, I suspected that he didn't know football from pig-hustling and that he mentioned it from time to time only because his wizards had told him it would make him seem like a regular guy.

  But I was wrong. Nixon knows pro football. He'd taken Oakland and six points in the Super Bowl, he said, because Vince Lombardi had told him up in Green Bay that the AFL was much stronger than the sportswriters claimed. Nixon cited Oakland's sustained drive in the second half as evidence of their superiority over the Kansas City team that had challenged the Packers in 1967 and had totally collapsed in the second half. "Oakland didn't fold up," he said. "That second-half drive had Lombardi worried."

  I remembered it, and mentioned the scoring play -- a sideline pass to an unknown receiver named Bill Miller.

  Nixon hesitated for a moment, then smiled broadly and slapped me on the leg. "That's right," he said. "Yes, the Miami boy." I couldn't believe it; he not only knew Miller, but he knew what college he'd played for. It wasn't his factual knowledge of football that stunned me; it was his genuine interest in the game. "You know," he said, "the worst thing about campaigning, for me, is that it ruins my whole football season. I'm a sports buff, you know. If I had another career, I'd be a sportscaster -- or a sportswriter."

  I smiled and lit a cigarette. The scene was so unreal that I felt like laughing out loud -- to find myself zipping along a New England freeway in a big yellow car, being chauffeured around by a detective while I relaxed in the back seat and talked about football with my old buddy Dick Nixon, the man who came within 100,000 votes of causing me to flee the country in 1960. I was on the verge of mentioning this to him, but just then we came to the airport and drove out on the runway, where his chartered Lear Jet was waiting to zap him off to the wild blue yonder of Miami for a "think session" with his staff. (There he rises early and works a 20-hour day. He skimps on food -- breakfast is juice, cereal, and milk; lunch is a sandwich, and dinner might be
roast beef or steak, which he often doesn't finish -- and keeps his weight at a constant 175 pounds. He swims some, suns a lot, yet rarely seems to stop working. "I'll say this -- he has enough stamina to be President," says William P. Rogers, an old friend. "He has the most stamina of any man I have ever known.")

  We talked for a while beside the plane, but by that time I'd thought better of saying anything rude or startling. It had been exceptionally decent of him to give me a ride and an hour of his time, so I controlled the almost irresistible urge to gig him on his embryonic sense of humor.

  It was almost midnight when the sleek little plane boomed down the runway and lifted off toward Florida. I went back to the Holiday Inn and drank for a while with Nick Ruwe, the chief advance man for New Hampshire.

  "I almost had a heart attack tonight when I looked over and saw you poking around that jet engine with a cigarette in your mouth," Ruwe said. He shook his head in disbelief. "My God, what a nightmare!"

  "Sorry," I said. "I didn't realize I was smoking."

  But I remembered leaning on the wing of the plane, an arm's length away from the fully loaded fuel tank. Somebody should have mentioned the cigarette, I thought, and the fact that nobody did makes me wonder now if Nixon's human machinery is really as foolproof as it seems to be. Or perhaps they all noticed I was smoking and -- like Ruwe -- said nothing at all.

  Or perhaps that's beside the point. Senator McCarthy's success in New Hampshire can hardly be attributed to the hard-nosed professionalism of his staff. . . and in his broader context the Nixon campaign seems flawed. There is a cynicism at the core of it, the confident assumption that success in politics depends more on shrewd technique than on the quality of the product. The "old Nixon" didn't make it. Neither did earlier models of the "new Nixon." So now we have "Nixon Mark IV," and as a journalist I suppose it's only fair to say that this latest model might be different and maybe even better in some ways. But as a customer, I wouldn't touch it -- except with a long cattle prod.