Richard Milhous Nixon

Republican - California
1953-61

It’s hard to imagine that Richard Nixon—all jowls and beady-eyed suspicion—was ever a youthful man, but there was a time when Nixon could answer the ad for someone “young, vigorous, ready to learn”, and that was in 1952 when WWII hero and GOP standard-bearer Dwight Eisenhower was looking for a running mate. In Nixon, he got one of the party’s conservative young turks who could bridge the gap between two generations of Republicans, an ardent anti-Communist and designated party attack dog, and a left-coast native who could help deliver California’s 32 electoral votes.

Nixon got a chance to take the next step in a meteoric rise to the top of a party that still looked askance at him. He had never in his life been a warm and gregarious glad-hander, and his last six years in politics did nothing to change that. He was as cold, stony, and eyes-on-his-books as he’d been throughout his ascetic Quaker upbringing.

Now, after nearly 20 years of Democratic rule, the Republicans had the chance to take back the White House. They had their first choice in war hero Dwight Eisenhower, and his choice for his running mate was 39-year-old junior Senator Richard Nixon from California, whose first trip to the Executive Branch would begin a chapter in American politics that’s still reverberating today. And but for an adorable wet-nosed little puppy, it was a long, wrenching, and scandalous chapter that very nearly didn’t happen at all.

CHECKERED PASS: The 1952 election erupted in scandal in September with a New York Post headline decrying a “SECRET NIXON FUND”. It wasn’t a money pile of Watergate proportions by any stretch. It amounted to $18,250 in contributions by fellow Republicans that Nixon claimed were expense reimbursements, and an independent audit confirmed that there was nothing to the stink. Still, the Democrats were salivating at the opportunity to take out Eisenhower’s tough young lieutenant (even though there was a more unseemly stench rising from a larger pile of cash in Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson’s corner). The pro-Republican New York Herald and some around Eisenhower began calling for Nixon to resign from the ticket. When Nixon heard that the Herald had opined that he should go, he suspected that this was Eisenhower’s preference as well. It didn’t help when Eisenhower, speaking with reporters, wondered aloud why should we be running this campaign “if we ourselves aren’t as clean as hound’s tooth.”, and that mail and counsel coming into the campaign suggested an even split over whether he should stay or go.

Nixon very nearly stepped down at this, but his friend Harold Stassen urged him to stay on. Nixon wanted the exonerating blessing that Eisenhower had seemed to offer when the scandal first broke. Eisenhower wasn’t about to commit himself, prompting Nixon to exhort Ike “General, there comes a time in matters like this when you need to either shit or get off the pot!”

Ike wasn’t moved, and Nixon’s television plea went forward. The Republican party ponied up $75,000 to pay for Nixon’s television appearance to explain a fairly legitimate, innocuous $18,000, but there was some feeling within the GOP that Ike couldn’t win without Nixon (After Truman’s Lazarus rise in 1948, the party was more than a little skittish when anyone crowed about poll numbers).

Nixon turned in a masterful performance, and almost single-handedly gave birth to the modern media mea culpa (though in this instance there really was nothing for which to take the blame). He looked dolefully at the camera, and in minute detail defended the probity of his personal and campaign finances. He trotted out a line he’d used when he’d been heckled at a Eugene, Oregon campaign appearance a few days earlier, saying his wife Pat didn’t wear a mink coat but “a respectable Republican cloth coat.”

The sap verily gushed when he went in for his mawkish climax, and defiantly claimed that the one gift he did accept which may have been inappropriate was “a little cocker spaniel dog…black and white, spotted, and our little girl, Tricia, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids…loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”

It was a treacly, gag-inducing triumph that future generations of public figures would ape. The messages poured in to Republican headquarters in Washington DC, running some 350 to 1 in favor of Nixon. Ike kept him on the ticket, and never again gave serious thought to dumping him. Well, until 1956, at least.

THE NIX IS IN: Though he would live another eight years after leaving office, Dwight Eisenhower was not wholly in his prime during his Presidency, and the endless mornings and afternoons on the golf course did little to inspire confidence in his physical stature. With a heart attack in 1955 and surgery for ileitis in June of the next year, there was serious consideration that Richard Nixon could be a heartbeat or a lower intestinal obstruction away from the Presidency. Eisenhower was also disappointed that Nixon’s popularity hadn’t improved during his first term in office and that he was still regarded as little more than an attack dog. True to from, Ike kept his options open and remained coy about keeping Nixon on the ticket for a second run, and Nixon’s old friend, Harold Stassen, stepped up with a “Dump Nixon” drive, citing polls that showed Ike would lose up to six points with Nixon on the ticket.

The Democrats seized the opportunity for some election-year fear mongering and cautioned that “the career and character of Richard Nixon pose a somber issue in the 1956 campaign.” The again-nominee Adlai Stevenson all but started shoveling dirt on Ike’s face by cautioning that “every piece of scientific evidence…indicates that a Republican victory would mean that Richard Nixon would probably be president of this country within the next four years.”

In the end, Nixon toned down the scowl and the snarling and Ike kept him on board—though it took Nixon inviting himself to remain on the ticket that forced Ike’s hand. The Vice President spent his second term carrying Administration water, arguing with Khrushchev in the fake kitchen, and preparing to be the next Vice President since Martin Van Buren not to succeed his boss.

LIMA BEANED: In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower sent Vice President Nixon on a goodwill visit to Peru and several other South American countries. Their motorcade was assaulted in Caracas, Venezuela, to the point that the limo driver had to turn on the windshield wipers to clear away the spit that was coming from the crowd, rocks broke the car’s windows and cut Nixon and the Venezuelan foreign minister, and a Secret Service agent drew his revolver, resigning that if they were all going to die at the hands of this mob then he was going to see how many he could with them.

Things were little better in Lima, Peru, where Nixon was greeted by a large crowd of young enthusiastic Communists pelting him with rocks. In an unorthodox effort to defuse the situation, Nixon called the crowd “the worst kind of cowards”. The adulation from the locals continued outside Nixon’s hotel, where the Vice President of the United States responded to a man who spat in his face by kicking him square in the shins.