Columbia College Today

Jules Witcover ’49, ’51J has seen a lot of politicking in his career. Working as a newspaper reporter and then a columnist, he has covered every presidential race from Richard Nixon vs. John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush vs. John Kerry. He has witnessed firsthand the changes in political journalism in the last half-century, from his using a manual typewriter to report on the Eisenhower administration to the current era of laptops and 24/7 news cycles.

The author of more than a dozen books about politics, Witcover captures the excitement and trials of covering the political beat in his new memoir, The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch: Half a Century Pounding the Political Beat. Reminiscing about his 56 years in journalism — 52 of them in Washington, D.C. — Witcover reveals insights about well-known political figures and the political system. Describing his journey from small-town reporter to nationally syndicated columnist, Witcover includes his memories of standing a few feet from Robert F. Kennedy when the presidential candidate was assassinated, watching from the South Lawn as Richard Nixon departed the White House, following Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign and riding the “Straight Talk Express” with John McCain.

In June 1966, suspecting that Nixon was positioning himself for a run at the presidency, Witcover arranged to spend a week with Nixon and his entourage. He describes the experience in this excerpt from the fifth chapter of his memoir, “Nixon and Me.”

Of all the political figures I have encountered in half a century of reporting, none was as baffling, intriguing, and maddening as Richard Milhous Nixon. Upon his death in 1994, I was asked, as the author of The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, an account of his remarkable political comeback and election as president in 1968, to appear on C-SPAN and comment on him. I conveyed the above sentiment by observing that I had always thought that when he passed away, his brain should be willed to science. My reasoning was that, for all his political success, rising to the American political peak, he had a colossal inferiority complex that dominated his personality, and it would be revealing to determine what made him tick.

Witcover captures the exictement and trials of covering the political beat in his new memoir.

It so happened that, as I was offering this and other candid observations about Nixon, unbeknownst to me C-SPAN was showing to viewers scenes of his bereaved family’s arrival for the approaching funeral and of the grieving and the curious public passing by his casket in display of respect. Immediately the C-SPAN switchboard lit up, and the studio’s fax machine started spewing out protests and all manner of condemnation of me. C-SPAN officials told me later that no guest commentator had evoked a public reaction to match the one my remarks about Nixon had triggered. So much for my career on television.

Actually, a few discerning (Democratic) folks wrote me saying they were pleased, or at least amused, to hear what I had said in contrast to the extensive revisionism about Nixon that was spoken and aired at that time. My favorite was the observation of President Bill Clinton in his eulogy. In an obvious reference to Nixon’s Watergate scandal, he intoned that a man should not be judged by one incident in his life, but by his whole career. To that comment I could only say, Amen.

Witcover has covered politics for more than a half-century and written more than a dozen books on the subject.

From my years as a young reporter in Washington, my clearest personal recollection of Richard Nixon is a reference to him made in 1960 at an Eisenhower press conference in the old Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building. That was the famous occasion when a senior colleague asked Eisenhower what decisions of his administration Nixon had been involved in. Eisenhower paused, then said, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” The answer brought unbelieving looks throughout the room. I showed up again the next week to hear if he’d come up with any, but to my astonishment, nobody asked the question. As a junior in the press corps, I was still too intimidated to pose that one to the president of the United States, and it never occurred to me that I might raise the matter.

I didn’t see much of Nixon in 1960 when he ran against John F. Kennedy and lost, or in 1964, when he made a little-recognized effort to throw a monkey wrench into Barry Goldwater’s march to the Republican nomination, in the hope that the party would turn to him again.

It was early in 1966 when Nixon, at a Republican National Committee meeting in Chicago, called on all Republicans to declare a moratorium on campaigning for the 1968 presidential nomination until after the 1966 congressional elections. After the fiasco of Goldwater’s rout by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and the acrimony that followed, Nixon argued, the party had to restore harmony and unity if it was to have any chance of regaining the White House in 1968. He didn’t bother to mention that such a moratorium would freeze other prospective candidates and give him time to reestablish himself as a selfless foot soldier in the GOP ranks, which he then proceeded to do. He publicly predicted that the party would make a record comeback in the fall elections, and he set out personally to see that it happened.

In late June, convinced that Nixon was positioning himself for another presidential run, I spent a week with him as he traveled the country campaigning for Republican congressional candidates. At this time, after his presidential defeat in 1960 and his failure to win the California governorship in 1962, he was widely regarded as a hopeless loser. After his infamous “last press conference” on the night of that latter defeat, in which he promised the assembled press corps, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” it was taken as gospel that he was finished as a national candidate.

I barely knew Nixon, but I had some acquaintance with his press secretary and coat-carrier at the time, a young fellow named Pat Buchanan, who was part of the small Nixon entourage. The first thing I did on arriving at the Sheraton Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit on the appointed Sunday night was to seek him out. Pat had been an editorial writer at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a Newhouse newspaper, and he had dropped by the Washington bureau from time to time before joining Nixon. I knew him as a flaming conservative but personally a pleasant and often funny guy, not above trading wisecracks about the man he always called “The Boss.” Occasionally, I had shared a radio microphone with him in Washington for Station KMOX in St. Louis and later on for what was a very calm forerunner of his combative Crossfire program.

As I got off the elevator on Buchanan’s floor, there was Nixon, waiting for a down car. I introduced myself, saying I would be following him around on his campaign swing that week. It was an awkward moment, but he smiled and we shook hands. For some reason, he felt he had to explain to me what he was doing there. “I just got in from the airport,” he said. “I’ve just met with five or six of the boys, from what you would call the Establishment.” He obviously abhorred a conversational vacuum. We discussed the week’s travel schedule and when I said I hoped I would have a chance to have a conversation with him along the way he assured me we would talk one night before the trip ended. The elevator door opened, he stepped in and pushed the down button.

The next morning on the sidewalk outside the hotel, Pat reintroduced me to Nixon as four or five of us piled into his car for the day’s campaigning around Michigan. Nixon said hello but little more to me, clearly wary. Sizing up the situation, I kept my trap shut all day, satisfied just to observe the great man up close. At the end of the day, he said goodnight as he headed for his hotel room and, according to another aide on the tour, former California congressman Pat Hillings, an exciting fare of milk and cookies before turning in.

It went like that through the succeeding days, Nixon nervously glancing at me out of the corner of his eye from time to time. Reporters in 1966 were not exactly breaking doors down to cover a two-time loser, and I was able to sit in on all breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings at which he spoke, as well as press conferences and hurried conversations with local pols shuttled in and out of his car from airport to hotel and back again. On the small private planes used from city to city, I sat just behind him as he worked and reworked his speeches on a yellow legal pad, leaving off occasionally to read the sports pages of local newspapers. He was, as often reported, an extremely disciplined man.

In his many press conferences along the way as we went south to Alabama, west to Oklahoma, and finally winding up in Roanoke, Virginia, Nixon was ever cautious behind an overdone cordiality. I remember that at the first such encounter, at Cobo Hall in Detroit, where he was to address a convention of the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce, he was all smiles and apologies for being late. He shook hands with the reporters in the first row, much to their surprise, saying, “I’m sorry I held you up. I understand we had a camera crew late. … It wasn’t my fault.” He apologized again for not having a printed text of his remarks: “You’ll have to cover me live. I’m not equipped with staff [to prepare] texts.”

When Nixon wasn’t being cordially apologetic, he was busy reassuring his listeners that he was a man motivated only by a desire to resurrect his party, not himself. He turned away all questions about his own future, insisting he would abide by his own call for a moratorium on presidential politics until the November congressional elections. “You can’t make up the winter book on the presidency,” sports enthusiast Nixon would say, “until you get past the 1966 elections.” He would point out that he had no political staff, adding, “if I were concerned only about 1968, why would I be making three fund-raising speeches in Michigan?” Why, indeed?

After each press conference, Nixon would go out and make a speech of half an hour or more, a panoramic lecture on the domestic and world scene with nary a note. His grasp of the subject would always wow the crowd, but first he would play the stand-up comic, showing that for all the bad press he had received in the past about being a cutthroat political hatchetman, he was really a good guy with a great, self-deprecating sense of humor. He was, he would tell the audience, “a dropout from the electoral college.” He would stop to let photographers arrayed in front of him do their work. “I want to be sure these people get their pictures,” he would say, pausing. Then, “I’ve had trouble with pictures.” Another pause. “I’ve had trouble with television, too.”

... convinced that Nixon was positioning himself for

another presidential run, I spent a week

with him as he traveled the country ...

When the laughter died down, he would continue in the same vein: “A little girl came up to me on the street in New York the other day with a copy of Newsweek opened to a picture of me, and asked me to autograph it. I did, and then she said, ‘Mr. Nixon, that’s a wonderful picture. … It doesn’t look at all like you.’ ” He could tell this story a hundred times and still, after each time, throw his head back with his eyes wide, as if he himself was hearing it for the first time, then grinning happily.

There was always a snappy review of his world travels, including the recollection that “I got stoned in Caracas. I’ll tell you one thing, it’s a lot different from getting stoned at a [providing the name of the host organization] convention!” But it was the serious, experienced Richard Nixon that sold best with his audiences. His speech always included a seminar on Vietnam, “a war that had to be fought to prevent World War III,” and a rallying cry for the Republican Party, which he was selflessly continuing to serve. After the Goldwater debacle, he predicted, a Republican tide would sweep the country in the 1966 congressional elections, because the Democrats were in disarray over the war. But the Republicans would have a chance to regain the White House in 1968 only if they rebuilt their own party in 1966.

In smaller party fund-raising receptions, Nixon was more intimate and confiding of political strategy with the insiders. He always liked to make them feel that they were getting a special peek into the expert political mind he possessed. At such affairs he was the performer and others pitched for money, often without guile. At the home of a big Oklahoma oil man in Tulsa, for example, the host stood on a chair on his crowded patio and instructed: “This is real low pressure. We don’t want anybody to give more than five thousand dollars — that’s the limit. As you go [inside] you’ll see some blank checkbooks. Just think now of what you want to give and then write it right out, while you still have a chance. You may not get the chance again.” The guests chuckled, and Nixon with them.

Witcover (center) during his College days with (left to right) Frank Marcus ’48, Ed Frey ’48, Larry Miles ’48 and Tom Nemia ’48.

Each night after the final speech, Pat Hillings and I, not being addicted to milk and cookies, went down to the hotel bar or elsewhere in the environs where one could find a drink. Hillings told me later that each morning Nixon would get him aside and ask: “What does he want? What’s he going to write about me?” But that was only for openers. After a day or two, the questions became more personal: “Where did you go last night? Did you pick up any girls? Did you score?” Hillings got a big kick out of it. “He lives vicariously,” he told me one day after one of the Nixonian interrogations. “He doesn’t have the nerve to do anything himself, but he likes to hear about it.” Unfortunately, Hillings had little of a titillating nature to report, but that didn’t stop Nixon from asking him every morning.

A s the week wore on, I got nervous. Nixon’s distance made me fear I would never get an interview — essential to the long story I had been assigned to do beyond daily reports. But Buchanan kept reassuring me: “Don’t worry, he’ll talk to you. Just be patient.” So I continued being a fly on the wall, sharing cars and airplanes with Nixon and his aides as he diligently pitched Republican House candidates.

He didn’t exactly snub me; it was more that my presence seemed to make him uncomfortable. It wasn’t the Nixon hostility toward reporters that had flared up in the 1962 “last press conference” and later was revealed in spades in the Watergate tapes. On this trip he was always courteous to me and other reporters encountered along the way. One morning in Birmingham, Alabama, because of a scheduling mix-up, I had to hail a taxi and race to the airport, fearing I had missed the Nixon plane. When I arrived, I saw it sitting out on the runway. It was a sleek six-seat Lear jet loaned to Nixon by Bill Lear, the World War II aviation electronics pioneer. I got a ride out and scrambled aboard, mortified to see Nixon sitting patiently in his regular seat. I apologized profusely for holding him up, but he waved me off and kindly changed the subject. I was impressed with his generosity, and told Hillings so. He smiled and told me: “The rest of us wanted to take off without you, but he said, ‘No, he’s the only reporter we’ve got.’ ”

Nixon also insisted that he was unconcerned about the

image he projected — in the face of much evidence

that he was obsessed with what people thought of him.

The last stop on the tour was Roanoke, for a speech at the Virginia Republicans’ state convention. After it was over, we headed for the airport and the final leg, back to Washington, and still I hadn’t had my interview with Nixon. The Lear jet was gone and in its place was a tired-looking old propeller-driven Beechcraft. Besides Nixon and myself, the only other passengers were Hillings and John Whitaker, a Washington advance man. Hillings sat in the back with Nixon and I took a seat up front. Well, I thought, there goes my interview, after a week of waiting.

The ancient plane rumbled and groaned down the runway and took off. As soon as it leveled off, Hillings came forward and motioned me back to a seat next to Nixon. He greeted me in a relaxed way, apologizing for not having had a chance to talk with me sooner. Whitaker broke out a bottle of Scotch and some ice and we had a drink all around. The plane’s engine was so noisy I was afraid no one could be heard over the drone, but Nixon talked over it in a strong voice, showing no hesitation except declining to discuss his own political future. He was still the party soldier toiling selflessly in the trenches.

Surprisingly, what came out over the next hour, captured on tape, was a self-appraisal that was remarkable in a man who had a reputation for guardedness about himself. It was surprising mostly, however, because the picture he painted of himself was greatly at variance with the Richard Nixon of his public reputation-as a pure political tactician, almost an anti-intellectual, and a hater of the press. One might have thought, in fact, that it was Adlai Stevenson talking:

I wish I had more time to read and write. I’m known as an activist and an organizer, but some people [not identified] have said I’m sort of an egghead in the Republican Party. I don’t write as well as Stevenson, but I work at it. If I had my druthers, I’d like to write two or three books a year, go to one of the fine schools — Oxford, for instance — just teach, read, and write. I’d like to do that better than what I’m doing now. I don’t mean writing is easy for me, but writing phrases that move people, that to me is something. … My best efforts — my acceptance speech in 1960, my Moscow speech, my unity speech at the 1964 convention — all were dredged out by writing my head off.

Astonishingly, he said, “I like the press guys, because

I’m basically like them, because of my own inquisitiveness.”

Presidents today, Nixon argued, are kept so busy doing things that others have to do their thinking for them. … The president should have the luxury of several days just to think. … The danger today is that the American executive submits things to his highest advisers and then decides on the basis of what they tell him. In order to make a decision, an individual should sit on his rear end and dig into the books. … In this respect I’m like Stevenson. He was criticized as governor of Illinois because he always wanted to do his own work and research. Stevenson was a century late. He would have been more at home in the nineteenth century. He was an intellectual and he needed time to contemplate.

This self-comparison with Stevenson surely would have astonished the two-time Democratic presidential nominee, not to mention appalled him. Stevenson’s revulsion from Nixon was well illustrated in a television talk he made on the eve of the 1956 election. “I must say bluntly,” this normally temperate man warned, “that every piece of scientific evidence we have, every lesson of history and experience, indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard Nixon would probably be president within the next four years. I say frankly as a citizen more than a candidate that I recoil at the prospect of Mr. Nixon as custodian of this nation’s future, as guardian of the hydrogen bomb, as representative of America in the world, as commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces.”

Nixon also insisted that he was unconcerned about the image he projected — in the face of much evidence that he was obsessed with what people thought of him. “I believe in never being affected by reports about me,” he said. “I may read some selected clippings a week or so later, when somebody sends them to me, but never the next morning. I never look at myself on TV either. I don’t want to develop those phony, self-conscious contrived things.”

But on the trip that was just winding down, he seemed repeatedly unnatural and self-conscious, smiling at inappropriate moments, gesturing with his arms awkwardly as if he were somehow out of sync. He was always on guard for a trick question and careful not to give offense.

Regarding his well-known combat with the press, Nixon professed that his loss in the California gubernatorial race and that “last press conference” in 1962 had been a blessing in disguise for him. “The press had a guilt complex about their inaccuracy,” he told me. “Since then, they’ve been generally accurate and far more respectful.” Astonishingly, he said, “I like the press guys, because I’m basically like them, because of my own inquisitiveness.” This answer strained my ability to keep a straight face, but somehow I managed.

The old Beechcraft by now was coming in for a landing at Washington National Airport over and past the White House, the occupancy of which Nixon was insisting was the farthest thing from his mind right then. He glanced at the Washington Monument, basking in spotlights, put down his drink, shook hands, and was off into the night, leaving me with much food for thought about this complicated and mysterious man who saw himself so differently from the way many others did.

COLUMBIA FORUM

An Ink-Stained Wretch Captures a Pre-Presidential Richard Nixon

By Jules Witcover ’49