Probably I got this from my mother. My father was a scrapper, a very competitive man, cantankerous even and aggressive, he loved to argue with anybody about anything, and he always instilled this competitive feeling in all of us, we owed him a lot, my brothers and I, even if sometimes we hated his guts. But my mother was just the opposite, a Quaker, a peacemaker, and she taught us — showed us — charity and tolerance and the need to keep your feelings about people separate from your feelings about moral questions. People were weak, of course they were, but that didn’t mean you were supposed to stop loving them, even as you punished them. When my father’s Black Irish temper reared up inside him and he went for his strap or rod, she wouldn’t interfere, she understood the need for rules and the need for punishment and stood by watching while he laid it on (Jesus! he could really set your ass on fire, he scared the hell out of me early on and I learned how to avoid the beatings, even if I had to lie or throw off on others, but he pounded Don’s butt to leather and I used to worry he’d broken poor Harold’s health and crushed little Arthur’s spirit, I still have nightmares about it), but afterwards she always made him forgive us — some of our best family moments came after the strappings were over and Mother was getting us all together again. I suppose I’ve got something of both of them in me—“The Fighting Quaker.” TIME had called me after my nomination last summer, and that was probably the closest anyone had ever got to summing me up. “Richard M. Nixon: Change Trains for the Future.” I liked that touch, it took me back to my childhood in Yorba Linda, and identified me with the westward sweep of Uncle Sam’s evangel. Of course, there were the Democrats’ inevitable malicious jokes later about “the crash of the Federal Express” after the trainwreck here in Washington. And I wasn’t too happy about the anonymous parody I got in the mail shortly after that, titled “The Farting Quacker,” with a picture of me like a train engine chugging butt-backwards — was it my fault I had stomach problems? Some agent of the Phantom, I supposed, like all pornographers and irreligionists. I was used to it by now, I’d been called just about everything as far back as I could remember. When I was in high school, our Latin class put on a play based on Virgil’s Aeneid, it was maybe the most romantic thing that ever happened to me — I was Aeneas and Ola was Queen Dido and we wore white gowns and fell in love — but even then they started called me “Anus” and not even Ola could keep from giggling. Years later, when I was in the Navy, I realized we could have called her Queen Dildo, but we were all too green at the time to know about that. It was amazing we knew about anuses.
I stopped in the Chamber but things were dead in there. Bill Langer was reading off a list of aliens who were being let into the country as permanent residents, and George Smathers and silver-headed old Pat McCarran were making wisecracks about all the goofy names. When Langer was done, Smathers got the floor and announced: “I wish to commend the distinguished Senator from North Dakota for his linguistic ability!” The farmers up in the gallery laughed. Smathers waved at me, and I nodded. He was maybe the best friend I had over here, even if he was a Democrat. We were Senate classmates. In the Florida spring primaries, he’d defeated Senator Claude Pepper by calling him Red Pepper and a nigger-lover. I’d studied his techniques and turned them against the Pink Lady in California, a “brilliant campaign,” as Herb Brownell said, that laid the groundwork for our Party’s national success last fall. Smathers was apparently filling in today as Minority Leader while Lyndon Johnson was out getting his troops formed up for the vote to come — he was showing a lot of promise. Knowland was absent as well, Bob Hendrickson doing the Leader’s job for us. Things were quiet yet stirring. Even with the Chamber at low tide, you could smell the impending battle. My own presence here was electrifying in itself.
I let Bill Purtell, the acting pro tem, know I was around, then wandered back to the Republican Cloakroom. Ev Dirksen, another classmate of mine, was in there, and when he saw me he hunched his shoulders and snarled like a lion — with that curly hair, he looked like one, too! I grabbed up a chair as though to fend him off, cracked an imaginary whip. This got a lot of laughs from the old boys standing around (I have a sense of humor like everybody else, I don’t know why people doubt this), and Ev shrank back, making a sad face like the Cowardly Lion. He was making fun of course of all the pictures in newspapers and magazines of late showing me in the lion’s cage with Sheba, part of my initiation into the Saints & Sinners Club of circus fans. I had suggested through intermediaries that this would be a good year for my old law school at Duke to give me an honorary doctorate, but for some goddamn reason they’d refused me — me, the Vice President of the United States! Some malicious left-wing Democratic cabal on the faculty, I assumed. The rumor I heard was that it was because of the Dean’s Office break-in when I was in my last year there, but that was a lot of sanctimonious bullshit — every student breaks into the Dean’s Office to steal exams or find out results, most common prank in the world, it was just an excuse. So hurriedly, since I’d left this gap in my schedule, we’d arranged this initiation into the Saints & Sinners. Just as well. I’d got a lot more publicity out of it. Though not all the photos were flattering: when Sheba took offense — maybe at the smell of Checkers on me — my own reflexes had been pretty quick, and the news-guys had unfortunately caught the moment of panic. Later, they told me she’d only been yawning, but I didn’t believe it.
“Hey,” Ev rumbled, “I guess you heard about the Rosenbergs taking the Fifth Amendment…?”
“Oh yeah?”
We all perked up.
“Yes, they refused to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incinerate them!”
Dirksen grimaced comically and we all responded with groans and laughter. Dirksen had a wonderfully expressive face, it was a delight to watch it, just the opposite of mine, a real clown’s face — and he knew how to use his hands, too. He had produced one of the great gestures of all time at our Convention last summer, when he’d turned on Tom Dewey, pointing his finger at him and bellowing out as though in mortal pain: “We followed you before!” The finger was pointing all right, and in Dewey’s direction, but it was also as limp as a wet noodle, quivering slightly as though straining feebly and ineffectually to overcome its impotence. He’d given the crowd of delegates plenty of time to stare at that drooping digit and then to roar and moan, before continuing: “And you took us down the road to defeat!” I hoped he’d never turn that finger on me.
“Say,” he continued now, rolling his eyes, “you know what you get when you cross Little Miss Muffet with Red Riding Hood?”
“Naw,” laughed Gene Millikin, “whaddaya get, Ev?”
“A curd-carrying Communist!”
There were a lot of snorts and guffaws, and then Ev trundled off toward the Senate lavatory. I realized I badly needed to piss myself and I probably should have gone along with him, but not only did I feel out of place in there, never having really become a member of this private club (I often got odd surprised stares from other Senators in there, even the janitors were more welcome than I), but also to get to it you had to go through the President’s Room where all the news reporters hung out. According to the legend, the best news sources have always been Senators with “weak bladders and strong minds”—all the more so when the bladders have been weakened by bourbon. There were even women journalists out there, laughing as the Senators hurried through clutching their nuts. To me it was a real indignity, but most Senators didn’t seem to mind, even enjoyed the notoriety of it. It was said that during the debate on the Tidelands Oil Bill, Lyndon Johnson had got trapped by a young socialite reporter and had agreed to an interview provided only she’d come in and hold his pecker for him while he peed — which presumably she did. Scoop of the year. Or, as Lyndon was said to have remarked at the urinal, “Lady, you just struck a gusher!”