Just Plain Dick by Kevin Mattson

Author:Kevin Mattson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2012-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, back at the Benson Hotel, things were in a flurry with meetings and phone calls. As the afternoon wore on, Dick took a call from the man who had done so much to get him into the position in the first place, Tom Dewey. Throughout the course of the crisis, Dewey had transformed himself into what Dick Nixon had been in the spring—the inside dopester. Dewey opened with ominous words for Nixon: “Did Ike tell you that he went to lunch with a lot of his old friends today, and that every one of them except one thought you ought to get off the ticket?” As Dewey told Nixon this, Eisenhower was at a dinner meeting where he was hearing the same opinion. Nixon got nervous and depressed, knowing that conversations were taking place behind his back and now expecting another Stassen-style betrayal. After all, Dewey was one of those Eastern Republicans who took newspapers seriously. Instead, Dewey doled out his advice: “I think you ought to go on television. I don’t think Ike should make the decision. Make the American people do it.”

What better way to allow Ike’s evasiveness to solicit a solution to the problem? Dick got excited about the prospect. But how to make it work? Dewey had more to say on that: “At the conclusion of the program ask people to wire in their verdict to you in Los Angeles, and you will probably get over a million replies and that will give you three or four days to think it over. At the end of that time you can say that it was 60 percent against you and 40 percent for you—say you are getting off as that is not enough [support]. If it’s 90 to 10, stay on.” This could serve as a moment of direct democracy, the people’s voice being heard, which sounded strange coming from such a stiff and Establishment man as Tom Dewey. But it appeared the best way to solve the problem without hurting Ike. Dewey explained, “If you stay on it isn’t blamed on Ike, and if you get off it isn’t blamed on Ike. All the guys here in New York agree with me.”67

Nixon, ever the “organization man,” took a great-minds-think-alike approach, saying that he was considering a television appearance just as Dewey outlined. Chotiner and Humphreys had been pressing the idea, too. Then Nixon looked at his watch and told Dewey he had to leave for the Temple Beth Israel for a dinner speech. Maybe they could talk again in the near future as things got closer to the actual televised talk. Dewey suggested they’d be in touch. Though Dewey was sounding nervous, he still had a warm spot in his heart for his young recruit, at least at that moment.

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