Crooked Read online

  When biographers tell the story of our courtship, the emphasis is on my prolonged, almost pathologically dogged pursuit—everyone dwells on the fact that I would chauffeur her anywhere she liked, even on dates with other men. History has managed to make even the great romance of my life a snide humiliation.

  Not that I knew what I was doing. I was in my middle twenties but this was the beginning of my romantic life and I had only very vague ideas about what I was looking for. I was absurdly passionate about her but I had no insight whatsoever as to why.

  I’d like to say that love made me a better man but it didn’t, and I don’t actually see how love could ever make anybody better.

  All I learned at the time was that when I wanted something I behaved with all the dignity of a rookie soldier panicking in a foxhole. I courted her with exactly the same no-brakes determination with which I later ran for public office.

  Like an eons-buried elder god or a vast extradimensional intelligence, the heart lives by unreadable codes and incomprehensible motives, knows nothing of dignity or humanity, and more often than not brings only destruction and madness on those who are exposed to its baleful cravings. You could say we recognized each other. She sensed that I was as desperate as she was, as angry as she was, and that I was struggling to go places and would maybe do something stupid and interesting.

  It took me years to learn that Pat’s life made no more sense than mine did. Pat’s father started as a miner, failed at that, and then became a failed farmer. He and her mother both died before she was sixteen. She’d dug in the dirt on her parents’ farm and worked at department stores and cleaned at a bank and driven an elderly couple across the country for money; she’d cared for tuberculosis patients and been an extra in films and taught bookkeeping at Whittier Union. She was enormously intelligent and uncomfortably aware that it didn’t matter, that she was going to be poor her whole life, and on some level she was on the verge of going insane.

  We didn’t know how to be in love, or live together, or any of it, so we made it up. We were grown-ups, yes, but young ones. Still with a great deal to find out about ourselves and each other, secrets that would take years and decades to come out. Still with ample room to make a lifetime’s worth of stupid decisions as our partner looked on. We moved in together, we set up house and tried to make a home that looked roughly like our parents’ homes, partly as a kind of private joke, mostly because it was time to act like grown-ups and we didn’t know how else to do it.

  We’d been married only a few months before I left for the war. We’d write to each other while I was in the Pacific. I wrote her long, intense, almost hallucinatory letters about my ambitions, about what we’d do, about who I thought I was and what my purpose was. What I thought we were. Hers were more polite, remote. She was keeping house, working in the war administration.

  When I saw her next we were like college friends meeting up again, a couple of years later, to see who we’d grown into. To see if we were still friends. To see what we had to contend with, now that we were suddenly in the same house together again, husband and wife. Or were we even friends?

  This is a tale of espionage and betrayal and the dark secrets of a decades-long cold war. It is a story of otherworldly horror, of strange nameless forces that lie beneath the reality we know. In other words, it is the story of a marriage.

  At thirty-three I had come back to Whittier. My family expected I would settle myself but I couldn’t shake the idea that my life hadn’t really begun yet, not the real one. It seemed as if this were my last great chance: I would reinvent myself or else close myself off forever.

  I read Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, anything at all for a glimpse of a faraway place. I went to the public library and found a directory of law firms in New York and wrote them long, courteous letters while picturing myself in a glamorous snow-covered city with sophisticated men and women. I mailed in an application for work at the FBI. None of them wrote back.

  But one day a letter arrived from the Republican National Committee inviting me to come in for an interview. They were looking for someone to run for Congress against the Democrat Jerry Voorhis. It didn’t take much in those days; I was a lawyer and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Navy; no criminal record.

  The first thing I did was bring the idea to Pat.

  “You mean Congress as in government?” she said. “You’re going to be in an election? Oh, honey, no. You can’t.”

  “Of course I can. I was class president, wasn’t I?” I told her.

  “But you’re…I love you, Dick, but you’re not…”

  “Not what?” I asked.

  “I mean, you’re not exactly a statesman, are you? You’re, well, you have to know things for that, don’t you? About oil prices and unwed mothers and foreign-exchange rates. And people have to vote for you.”

  I knew what she meant, however she meant it. I was grimly competent at making small talk because I’d learned it by rote and strenuous self-coaching. At larger functions I strained heroically for the effect of joviality and bulled through any surface awkwardness by force of will.

  “It’s just an interview. Is it all right if I go in for that?” I asked.

  “Go on, go ahead. My blessing.”

  I did go, along with the other would-be Nixons, local businessmen, eminent lawyers, a minor-league baseball player, a crowd of hopefuls in the waiting room of history. I was chosen to run.

  It turned out I had natural advantages that applied to politics and no other situation whatsoever. I had a slyly acute sense that we were moving into an interesting historical moment. The war had concluded triumphantly. Peace would reign; the great rebuilding would commence. Europe was exhausted and devastated but Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would set up the international chessboard again with the rattle bag of leftover pieces.

  All I saw was darkness and suspicion. The great powers had won the war together but they weren’t friends. The Soviets had lost the most and were angrily determined to make up for it. The British were clinging to an outsize notion of their own importance, and Roosevelt was only weeks from death. It was like a formal dinner party for starving children: a brief mutual sizing-up followed by a barely decorous rush for food that would degenerate into a panicked frenzy.

  The bright moral and strategic clarity of the last war vanished, leaving us with a tarnished world of intrigue, proxy fights, and a queer black humor. Even the pretense of civility was owed to simple terror, to the horror that had appeared at the war’s end. The new strategic language was all calculated risk, bloodthirsty audacity. The image of towering mushroom clouds swallowed all ideas of heroism; it made all the worries that had come before seem naive and quaintly Victorian.

  It was, it turned out, exactly the kind of climate that a shrewd, pushy, ignorant person such as myself could turn to his advantage.

  My other asset was that, as I discovered, I wasn’t a nice person. Jerry Voorhis was a well-liked, Yale-educated incumbent Democrat and I was an underfunded rookie. I took liberties. I bribed, I pulled any strings I could, I begged favors, co-opted any press members who would return my calls and seemed open to a deal. I misrepresented Voorhis’s record and made insinuations just short of slander.

  And okay, yes, very well, Jerry Voorhis was not a Communist. But there were a range of things a person could do that were akin to Communism or trended toward it. Restrictions on commerce, price regulations; the relationship was—look, a campaign rally isn’t a graduate philosophy seminar. I hardly had time to go into details, but I was pretty sure I was right on the basics.

  And Communists were bad, weren’t they? We were talking about Stalin and company here, so without knowing too much about it, even then I could say with certainty they weren’t the greatest.

  I fought Jerry Voorhis in all the ways I would have deplored in the abstract but that seemed reasonable in this particular instance—which is to say, when I wanted a thing very badly and felt that I should have it. Jerry Voorhi
s was perfectly competent and one of the nicer people I have ever met in politics. He just didn’t know what I was going to be like. He was expecting a gentleman.

  I never hid any of this from Pat. She knew that we had very little funding and only a few viable options. She believed I was doing it for the right reasons, that this was a small price to pay to get a decent man into Congress (or at least a man who was decent before the campaign and had very sincerely promised to become decent again once he got there).

  I’m being diplomatic, because there’s a more obvious reason why Pat didn’t worry about my electoral scruples, which was that she didn’t think it could possibly matter, because she didn’t think anyone would vote for me.

  I saw her point. Even with the benefit of youth, the Nixon face was never beautiful. And then what it turned into! Pear-shaped and heavy about the mouth. The brow and the jowls and the five o’clock shadow. It might at least have had a gritty bulldog force if it weren’t for the whoop-de-do swoop of the nose.

  I once said I was an introvert in an extrovert’s profession, but that was only a polite way of saying that people didn’t especially like me. I was an abysmal public speaker. I did solemnity and righteous anger passably well, and I could manage an effortful smile telling a joke or bantering with the press, but for the rest of it I lapsed into a kind of rigid neutral glare, the outward shell of frantic self-consciousness and social panic. The only impression I made completely naturally was that of commonness. For better or worse, no one ever mistook me for a member of the elite.

  What did I think I was doing? Why run at all?

  I played football in college, and I was terrible. Our school was so small they had to let me on the team no matter how badly I played. I’d sit there on the bench but when we were far ahead or hopelessly behind, the crowd of students and alums would start chanting “Nixon! Nixon!” until the coaches sent me in and they’d all roar with laughter when I trotted onto the field. The ball would be snapped and I’d be knocked down by hits I never saw coming from college kids who had learned somewhere how to move like tigers. Why did I do it? I wanted to belong to something, be the all-American boy I never was and never could be, the loss that broke my heart before I quite knew I had one. So fuck them if they tried to keep me out. Let them try.

  Much later I understood that I wasn’t expected to win at all. Anyone who knew anything considered Voorhis unbeatable, and the Republicans needed somebody to run against him purely for form’s sake. In fact, I was the only one involved in the race naive enough to think it was going to be any kind of contest.

  No one took a poll during the congressional campaign. We simply made our speeches and tried our little ploys, and when the day came, they counted and we sat and waited for the numbers: 49,994 for him, 65,886 for me. I was terrible at football, but this was a game I could win.

  Pat and I sat together in the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena toward the end of our third party of the night, blurry from champagne, numbed with celebration and fatigue. I’d played the piano; someone’s pants had been thrown at the ceiling and still hung from the chandelier.

  “What am I doing?” I asked her. “Remind me why we did this.”

  “We’re getting on,” she told me. “Going somewhere. We couldn’t stay here. Is it that scary?”

  “I’m just worried. Being a lawyer made sense. I don’t know what this is.”

  “It’s going to be interesting,” she said. “We’ll make it up as we go along. And whatever you say out there, I’m going to know it’s not really you, all right? I’ll know.”

  “All right.”

  “We won this. We whipped them good. Nixon’s the one,” she said.

  It had been our campaign slogan: “Nixon’s the One.”

  Is it possible some people simply aren’t designed to win? That there are people who would be better off losing every day of their lives? That if you’re the wrong sort of person, winning just breaks something in you?

  I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because—and why this should be I’ll never know—I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.

  Chapter Three

  August 1948

  “No one recruited me. I had become convinced that the society in which we live, Western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism. I did not understand the causes of the crisis or know what to do about it. But I felt that, as an intelligent man, I must do something.”

  I was sitting in a large conference room in the Commodore Hotel in New York listening to a man named David Whittaker Chambers explain how he’d become a Communist spy. This was one of my congressional appointments, the House Un-American Activities Committee, set up a decade ago to hunt for Fascist fifth columnists during the Second World War.

  David Whittaker Chambers was a pale and lumpish man with an enormous head, a scholar and translator and senior editor at Time magazine. He had a high-flown academic style of speech composed of long, precise, mesmerizingly dull sentences, perhaps because he’d been giving this same testimony for years to various military and civilian agencies without any result. As he spoke, he listed to one side like a slowly sinking ship. It gave the effect of a man on the brink of succumbing to a soporific drug.

  I shifted in my seat, conscious of wasted time and wasted opportunities. This was congressional busywork. I paid a dogged sort of attention but I knew by then that all signs pointed to my being a one-term congressman destined for a quick trip home to Whittier. I should be making speeches on the House floor, I thought. I should be seizing the headlines.

  When you get to Washington you feel triumphant. You’ve won an election and a place in the political elite. And then you realize that everyone else there won an election too, because that is how people get to Washington. And that Washington itself is a new and different game, and the skills that won you that election have nothing to do with the skills you need now. There are four hundred and thirty-five people in the United States House of Representatives, and they’re not all going to be president, and in two years many of them will be going home, never to return. Whatever act you came up with in the provinces to fool Ma and Pa Voter isn’t going to matter to the people here. They’ve all seen it.

  It’s very seldom mentioned, but I have very nearly the best academic record among United States presidents (due credit to Clinton and Wilson). It’s true that I was smarter than the kids around me and I worked very hard. I think it’s okay for me to say this. When I arrived in Washington I still, at the age of thirty-three, genuinely believed that people cared.

  Maybe it’s true that nobody likes a know-it-all, and maybe it isn’t. It comes down to the same thing because, as it turned out, nobody liked Dick Nixon. I needed to project an image of confidence and connections and money, the things that draw powerful people and wealthy backers. I needed to be anyone but the desperate, lonely striver who worked his way up from his parents’ grocery store. That was an inspiring story back home, but it played very poorly in the drawing rooms of the nation’s capital.

  Four or five nights out of the week, Pat and I would play the new game. We would climb in a taxi and go to that night’s reception, testimonial dinner, cocktail party, anywhere we were even halfway welcome. We would chat up lobbyists and staffers and I’d sweat through the latest in a succession of midpriced rental tuxedos.

  And at the end of each long, boozy evening I’d find myself in the wood-paneled anteroom of a well-to-do Georgetown home bidding good night to the slightly baffled hostess who was straining to remember how she’d come to invite this strange, doggedly earnest couple, Richard Nixon and his anxious, vaguel
y heartbroken wife.

  Once in a while I’d see Jack. I was making my political debut at the exact same moment as the rookie congressman from Massachusetts who turned out to be the most prodigiously attractive politician of our generation. It was one thing to play politics badly; it was quite another to do it while being treated to the sight of a man playing the game as few others ever have. Jack was the one who taught me to truly crave political office. I wanted to hold a room spellbound, I wanted to change laws, I wanted to stand in front of a crowd of people who were shouting my name in righteousness or exultation and smile and drink it all in, the way he did. And later, every one of those things would happen for me. It’s just the meaning that was changed, like light through a distorting lens. Tragedy for him; farce for me.

  I’m the last man to heap further pieties on his legacy, but it was a particular thing to have known Jack Kennedy as a creature of raw potential. Before I met him, I didn’t understand what a politician could be: someone in whom charisma, sex, intellect, and historical moment all came together. I’d ride home in the taxi and think about Kennedy and the way people’s eyes tracked him at a party, the way even my own unwilling heart lurched when he looked at me and smiled. Even the unconscious cells of your body wanted him to like you.

  At the age of thirty-one he was an object lesson in what nascent political talent looked like. I could see it; political strategists could see it. Most of all, my wife could see it. Being married, it turned out, only made every bit of this worse. It wasn’t as if I were a stranger to social humiliation. I’d always shrugged it off. Nixon can take it, I told myself and I could have lived through it again except now there was Pat. From the start she’d told me she wasn’t a political wife but she would do her duty, and she did. She laughed at jokes and stopped at two drinks and scraped up party invitations and lunch dates, but it wasn’t working.