This is an irony I have learned to live with. Old men, liking me, tended to make the paradoxical assumption that I could win votes among the young and women voters, the province of happy-go-lucky studs like Eisenhower — just as it had been my experience, and not Ike’s, that had kept our Party’s professionals, the old boys, from bolting the ticket last fall. They had made the obvious surface choices at the Convention last summer: Eisenhower was the candidate of the Eastern Establishment, so a Westerner was needed for balance. Eisenhower was old and easy-going and had lived much of his life abroad, he needed a sidekick who was, as Herb Brownell described me, “a young aggressive fellow who knew the domestic issues — the President could be presented to the country as one who would stand up against the Communists in the international sphere, and Nixon would lead the fight in the discussion of the domestic issues.”
But in fact, though all too few understood this, it went much deeper than that. Likable Ike’s open-faced friendliness and easy smile won a lot of votes, but some people began to suspect he might be a little simple. Any man on the street past thirty knows there’s a lot more to politics — at home and abroad — than plain talk and friendly handshakes. Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy. We all know this: politics is a dirty, combative, dangerous game, it’s not something to grin at like a doped monkey. A beloved leader is no leader at all. Gregariousness is a liability if you live close to the center. Crusaders all make one mistake: they leave home. Optimists buy the wrong used cars, take it from a guy who’s sold them. And never trust any man who’s “clean as a hound’s tooth”: it’s clear he’s never been out in the real world when the shit’s hit the fan.
So everybody liked Ike, that casual straightforward bumbler — me they called Tricky Dick. I hated this at first, it was a brutal thing to fight, but eventually I discovered it won votes. Uncle Sam probably didn’t like being called Yankee Doodle at first either, but eventually he stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. And as these plays on my name got filthier, I even started picking up some votes among women and young people. I’m not very interested in the philosophy of any gimmick or policy, only its efficacy. It’s not the content that counts, but the impact — and that attitude itself is efficacious at the polls. Ike was so accustomed to being loved, even apathy offended him. When some guy up in Racine, Wisconsin, borrowing from the 1948 campaign, invented the phrase “Phewey on Eisenhewey!”, the General was genuinely upset and wouldn’t associate with Tom Dewey for days. If the Democrats had hit him hard enough, portrayed him as a pompous disloyal fraud and something of a helpless moron to boot, if they’d ridiculed his cronies and dragged old Mamie through the mud as they should have, he’d have probably quit. In fact, I knew he could still quit, any day, he was already losing interest.
“I believe the United States is strong enough to expose to the world,” he was saying now, “its differing viewpoints, from those of what we call almost the man who has Socialist leanings to the man who is so far to the extreme right that it takes a telescope to find him, but that is America and let’s don’t be afraid to show it, to the world, because we believe that form of government, those facts, that kind of thinking, that kind of combination of things has produced the greatest system of government that the world has produced, that is what we believe, that is what I am talking about.”
Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the weak links in the American press system, was trying in his tenacious hangdog way to stir up trouble with further questions about this, when Herb Brownell, the Attorney General, came in, looking dark and secretive. Of course, this was easy for Brownell with that high dome and fixed gaze, he always gave you the impression there was nothing he didn’t know, even when he was half dozing, but today he looked less cool and collected than usual. He motioned me aside. We huddled, scowling importantly, and the newsguys watched us; I was beginning to catch on to some of these angles. “Pete Brandt’s trying to get up a fight between Ike and Joe,” I whispered.
Herb didn’t seem to hear me. Up close, I realized he was very agitated. “It’s all off, Dick!” he whined. “Douglas called it off!”
“Off?” I said. “What’s off, Herb?”
“The executions! The Rosenbergs! The anniversary! Tomorrow night!”
My heart jumped, seemed to lodge in my throat. I worried that the reporters would notice this, but there was nothing I could do about it. I’d been very tense about this thing since that golf game with Uncle Sam over the weekend, and I wasn’t sure whether this new situation was good or bad. I was pretty sure Uncle Sam wouldn’t like it — we’d been building up toward this thing for two years, everything was ready up in Times Square, we’d thought the last hurdle had been cleared: and now this! The fat was really in the fire! Or rather, it wasn’t…. There’d been delays before, of course — Uncle Sam had originally scheduled the executions just before the balloon drop at our Inaugural Ball last January — but none so shocking as this. On the other hand, I realized, it at least gave me more time. I’d been pressing very hard, going over everything, and I still hadn’t figured out what it was Uncle Sam wanted me to do. I’d thought I was safe, I who’d single-handedly vanquished Alger Hiss and put Voorhis and the Pink Lady to rout, but now I was feeling vulnerable again.
“But I… I thought the Supreme Court had recessed!” I whispered.
“They have!” wheezed Herb. “Douglas waited until all the other Justices had left town on their vacations, and then issued a stay of execution! It’s a helluva mess!”
“We’ve got to get word to the General, before one of these organ grinders asks the wrong question,” I said.
“Generally speaking,” the President was saying, “that is exactly what I believe. But I do say I don’t have to be a party to my own self-destruction, that is the limit and the other limit I draw is decency, we have certain books we bar from the mails, and all that sort of thing, I think that is perfectly proper and I would do it now, I don’t believe that standards of essential human dignity ought to be violated in these things. And human decency.”
I scratched out a note: ROSENBERG EXECUTIONS CALLED OFF! and passed it to the press secretary, Jim Hagerty. Hagerty blanched, seemed uncertain what to do with it. I motioned toward the President, but Jim seemed reluctant to pass it on. Probably afraid the Old Man would read it out loud like an announcement. Or get confused and become completely unintelligible. Maybe even blow his stack.
“How many of you have read Stalin’s Problems of Leninism?” the President was asking the reporters. We didn’t even know he knew the title. “How many of you have really studied Karl Marx and looked at the evolution of the Marxian theory down to the present application?” Everybody thought he had said “Martian theory” and he was getting a lot of laughs. This was very successful, the reporters had completely forgotten what they’d asked him, but I thought: My God, I could never do this! I wrote a new note: URGENT BUSINESS! BRING THIS CONFERENCE TO A CLOSE! and handed it to Jim. Jim added in PLEASE and AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, passed it on to the General, who was just saying: “Of course we shouldn’t give that text to a Communist teacher and say, Now. Take your students off, and try to lead them astray any more than you would give them, let us say Al Capone’s book on how to be a crook!” Nobody knew any longer what text he was talking about.