Richard Nixon – Page 3 – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Eisenhower Crucial to ‘Greatest Engineering Project in World History’

eisenhower-inaugural-photograph-signed-by-four-presidents — A photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1953 – autographed by Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover – realized $8,365 at an October 2006 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

As federal war-game planners considered their objectives in mobilizing a West Coast battle response, railroads were quickly ruled out because they could not carry the amount of equipment involved and some of the weapons, especially tanks, were too heavy for trains and tracks.

Since the Army already had plenty of wheeled and tracked vehicles, dispatching a test expedition by road and having a Motor Transport Corps drive the convoy could prove, once and for all, the superiority of wheels over hoofs or railways. Inexplicably, they failed to include any assumptions about the condition of the roads en route.

At the appointed time in 1919, the convoy gathered at a monument by the South Lawn of the White House. The column was three miles long and consisted of 79 vehicles, including 34 heavy trucks, oil and water pumpers, a mobile blacksmith shop, a tractor, staff observation cars, searchlight carriers, a mobile hospital and other wheeled necessities to support the actual war machines.

Nine vehicles were wrecked en route and 21 men injured – leaving 237 soldiers, 24 officers and 15 observers – including then-Brevet Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower (who kept a concise daily diary). When they arrived in Lincoln Park in San Francisco 62 days later, it was undisputed that the conditions of the roads – essentially non-existent west of the Missouri River – would preclude any timely defense of the West Coast and that any Asian enemy would have been victorious in any battles along the way.

The journey left an indelible impression on the young officer from West Point, who would later be Commander-in-Chief of the nation. The Army and Eisenhower had indisputably proved what many in the capital had suspected. The American West had few, if any, roads that were even remotely usable for military or civilian use.

Only when they reached California and beyond the state capital of Sacramento did the roads become great – with macadamized surfaces, proper drainage, road rules, gas stations and tire-repair depots … all in sufficient quantity to service existing needs.

But this did not appease Eisenhower in the slightest. This great convoy, called into action to deal with a hypothetical threat to the country’s vital West Coast, had crossed 3,251 miles of the country at an average speed of 5.6 mph, making any potential response virtually useless. The vehicles were in fine shape and the men brave and intelligent, but the roads were deplorable. If nothing else, Eisenhower wrote, the experience of this expedition should spur the building – as a national effort – of a fast, safe and properly designed system of transcontinental highways.

This led to the creation of America’s Interstate Highway System – the greatest engineering project in world history … an intrinsic network of high-speed roads built with the sole purpose of uniting the corners, edges and center of this vast nation.

Fittingly, “The Dwight D. Eisenhower National Interstate and Defense Highways Act” was authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 during the second term of the 34th president of the United States. “I LIKE IKE!”

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is President and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

President Nixon’s Resignation Restored Faith in the System

A photograph inscribed by Richard Nixon to Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger sold for nearly $6,000 at an April 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In mid-1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts from a secret Defense Department study, “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy.” The study had been leaked to the press by former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who, joined by his 10-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter, photocopied its 7,000 pages, snipping off the words “Top Secret” from each page.

Better known to the public as the Pentagon Papers, it became a best-seller in book form. While few could understand the arcane language, they knew what it revealed: The government had been lying to them about both the motives and its conduct in Vietnam. By playing David to the government’s Goliath, Ellsberg became a kind of folk hero to the growing anti-war movement. It seemed the only thing the left and right could agree on was their distrust of their own government.

Still, by 1973, the preoccupation was not the war or the sad economy, but a constitutional crisis that carried the name of a Washington luxury apartment and office … Watergate.

When the break-in at the Watergate offices of the DNC was first revealed in June 1972, Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler described it as a “third-rate burglary,” hardly worth reporters’ attention, except for two at The Washington Post. Over the next two years, as the tentacles of a very complicated story reached higher and higher, the president would try to avoid involvement by throwing subordinates overboard, but the dirty water reached the highest office in the land.

Richard Nixon had an amazing public career, starting with Congress in the late 1940s; his pursuit of Alger Hiss; eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s VP; his own run for the presidency in 1960; and then the dramatic comeback to the Oval Office in 1968 … only to face an ignominious departure six years later.

Nixon compiled a 28-year run at or near the center of the world’s stage, but on the morning of Aug. 9, 1974, the 37th president of the United States – his eyes red, his voice shaky – addressed his staff in the East Room, imploring them to never “hate those who hate.” Then he and his wife Pat exited the mansion doors, walked on a fresh red carpet and disappeared into the helicopter Army One.

Nixon was a private citizen seated in a California-bound 707 somewhere over Missouri when Vice President Gerald Ford recited the oath of office as the new president. Chief Justice Warren Burger turned to Senate Leader Hugh Scott. “It worked, Hugh,” he said of the system. “Thank God it worked.”

With a swiftness that restored faith in the system, the forced exit of one leader and the entrance of his successor had been carried off smoothly.

P.S. For movie fans, the 1976 film All the President’s Men, with Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and Jason Robards, is well worth another viewing.

China’s Fall to Communists Launched Dark Period in American History

Andy Warhol’s screenprint *Mao (With Orange Face)*, 1972, realized $47,500 at a May 2015 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

On April 4, 1949, the day the United States and 11 other nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Communist General by the name of Chu Teh began massing a million of Mao Tse-tung’s seasoned troops on the north bank of the Yangtze River. This was the last natural barrier between Mao and the few southern provinces still loyal to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT).

Three weeks later, Chu Teh’s veterans stormed across the Yangtze, but only met token resistance. Chiang had withdrawn 300,000 of his most reliable soldiers to form a rear-guard perimeter around Shanghai. A week later, Chiang fled across the Formosa Strait to Taiwan, along with a cadre of KMT, but it seemed clear that China was a lost cause.

Mao Tse-tung proclaimed Red China’s sovereignty on Sept. 21, 1949 – the same day West Germany declared its sovereignty – and this was followed by Chiang announcing the formation of his new government in Taipei. Chinese politician Sun Yat-sen’s 50-year-old vision for a democratic China was dead, and the U.S. expectation that Chiang would establish the non-communist world’s eastern anchor died with it.

The world now had two Chinas!

The American response was slow. Newspapers had carried regular accounts of the Chinese Communists and the KMT’s slow disintegration, but China was so vast, the geography so unfamiliar and movements of the unmechanized armies so slow, that Americans had lost interest in these distant battles.

However, when the KMT collapsed, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson decided to lay out the entire situation before the American people. On Aug. 5, 1949, the State Department issued a 1,054-page white paper, conceding the world’s largest nation had fallen into communist hands. The chain of events leading to this tragic end was also explained, including the $2 billion that had been largely wasted and the 75 percent of American arms shipments that had fallen into Mao’s hands.

The American people were stunned by this admission. Everything American diplomats had achieved in Europe – the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO – seemed to have been annulled by this disaster in Asia.

The burning question was … who was responsible for losing China?

Richard Nixon of California flatly blamed the Democrats. On Feb. 21, a young congressman from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, said that at Yalta, a “sick” Franklin Roosevelt had given strategic places to the USSR. This, Kennedy concluded, “is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we fought to preserve. What our young men saved, our diplomats and our presidents have frittered away.”

Thus began one of the darkest periods in American history. President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9835 created the “Loyalty Order” program and in 1947, the FBI began stalking “disloyal and subversive persons” by conducting name checks on 2 million federal employees and background checks on 500,000 annual applicants for government jobs. During the program’s five years, the FBI screened over 3 million Americans and conducted 10,000 field interviews. Preliminary indictments were filed against 9,977, of whom 2,961 were arraigned.

Seth Richardson, chairman of the Subversive Activities Control Board, summed up his findings for a Congressional committee: “Not one single case or evidence directing toward a case of espionage has been found by the FBI indicating that a particular case involves a question of espionage.”

In the entertainment industry, “blacklisting” became a form of blackmail and took its toll on a small group for a full decade.

Time has blurred the sharp contours of the Age of Suspicion, but it was a dark period that must never be allowed to recur.

We still don’t know, or agree on, who lost China.

‘Tricky Dick’ Challenged Glamour and Won

Richard Nixon’s 1950 Senatorial poster sold for $812.50 at a November 2015 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

After Richard Nixon graduated from Whitter College in California, he accepted a scholarship to the Duke University law school. He finished third in the class of 1937.

His application to the FBI was accepted, however he was never notified (one of life’s little ironies). So he decided to return to California and passed the bar exam. Then he turned his sights to politics.

In 1950, after three years in the House of Representatives, he had an opportunity to run for the U.S. Senate, and it was simply irresistible.

The Democratic candidate was Helen Gahagan Douglas, who had the distinction of being the first Democratic woman from California elected to Congress in 1944 (things DO change). After three terms, she decided that the Senate was going to be her next step, as well.

As an actress and opera singer married to actor Melvyn Douglas, she was already well connected politically in Washington, D.C. Her social life included an open love affair with a future U.S. President … Lyndon Baines Johnson.

For perspective, one has to remember that in 1950, Margaret Chase Smith from Maine was the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate without first being appointed to finish an unfinished term (typically after their husbands had died).

So here was this glamorous, charismatic woman pitted against a shy, introverted individual who had gained a modicum of notoriety chasing communists, most notably Alger Hiss.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given what we know now, Nixon launched a truly vicious attack campaign, even challenging her basic loyalty. He dubbed her “The Pink Lady” and it worked. He won the election with 59 percent of the vote, becoming the youngest Republican senator at age 32.

This was the campaign that earned him the well-deserved sobriquet “Tricky Dick.”

Helen Gahagan Douglas died on June 28, 1980, at age 79 from breast and lung cancer – a deadly duo that was largely untreatable in those days.

Senator Alan Cranston of California eulogized her on the floor of the Senate, comparing her to the grandest, most eloquent 20th century leaders, rivaling even Eleanor Roosevelt in stature and simple greatness.

Tricky Dick’s career came to a different end, although two recent biographies with totally different tones and content were recently published.

I suspect there will be more in the future.