470
RICHARD KLUGER
palm after it had passed to theirs." He was, as
Life
magazine well knew
in giving him an assignment to cover the campaign, no ordinary observer;
he came to the task with a sizable anti-Nixon bias and thus "kept daily
at the scrubbing of my prejudices." But f"l,irness was an ineffective
detergent: his prejudices kept being vindicated. Despite his concern that
he was too fair, Harris's
Life
article (printed at the end of the book)
and the book itself prove as corrosive an indictment of a major political
figure as we have-more so than Victor Lasky's artless assault on
John Kennedy because there was never any doubt of Lasky's intention.
Few will forget the Herblock cartoon of Nixon during the 1960
Presidential campaign, rising blackbearded and malevolent from a man–
hole as
if
to spread some dreadful contagion across the land. (It probably
was not included in the gallery of caricatures that Harris saw in the
Nixons' Beverly Hills home; I seem to remember, with some sympathy,
his being asked how he kept it from his daughters' sight.) But Harris's
portrait of Nixon is not a close-up of · villainy personified. There is
nothing at all said here, for example, about Helen Gahagan Douglas or
Jerry Voorhis or the Hughes Tool Co. Rather, Harris found that Nixon's
basic problem was, simply, low intellect.
Of all the things Harris heard during the campaign, none was more
damning than the remark by a young college professor ghostwriting
Nixon's speeches. "He decides the positions he wants to take," the fellow
told Harris, "and we find the facts for him." Nixon hardly needed such
assistance to clinch Harris's disfavor. To a San Diego crowd, in a state,
mind you, that cares fervently about public education, Nixon opened
one address: "What are our schools for if not for indoctrination against
Communism?" To an outdoor gathering of sportsmen, he promised "the
best Communist control of any state
in
the U.S." Before one Elks Club
gathering he linked Communism to "big government" and "big govern–
ment," in turn, to the administration of Governor Brown; no unmounted
elk could miss the syllogism. In contrast to this kind of jousting with
genies, Pat Brown was saying things like, "Listen, here's the problem of
the average fellow making his living in California: he's growing lettuce
in his backyard, and he's asking himself a question-CHow am I going
to water it, and will a freeway run through it?' "
I t was not, Harris insists, merely that the Republicans made him
wear a Nixon button when he was covering their camp and that the
Democrats didn't care what he wore, or that the Republicans billed him
promptly for his travel expenses and the Democrats never did-it was
Nixon himself who left Harris reeling with disbelief. In fact Harris
never got over the first words Nixon said to him. Harris told him he
