THE NIXON YEARS: DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINTOP

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nation and earned Nixon the enduring enmity of large segments of the U.S. intelligentsia. Emotional revisionists now argue that if Nixon lied in the Watergate affair, his role in the Hiss case was suspect as well. There is no evidence to support that logic. While the country undoubtedly overreacted to the Communist threat, Nixon cannot be faulted for his persistence in the Hiss case, which he pursued with the same investigative doggedness that his own accusers were to demonstrate in Watergate. Later, Nixon wrote in his autobiographical Six Crises that what had hurt Hiss most was not what he had done but that he had lied about it. It is a judgment that may well apply to Nixon himself.

Unchallenged for re-election in 1948, Nixon raised his sights in 1950 and ran for the Senate against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress. It would be, he said, a "rocking, socking campaign." That was putting it mildly. Nixon issued a "pink sheet" showing that Douglas and Vito Marcantonio, a Communist-lining Congressman from New York's East Harlem, had cast 354 identical votes in the House. A lot of others had voted with Marcantonio on many issues, including Nixon, who sided with him 112 times out of roughly 200 votes. Still, the tactic earned Douglas a label that stuck: "The Pink Lady."

Two years later, at the age of 39, Nixon was nominated to be Dwight Eisenhower's running mate on the G.O.P. ticket. In The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White quoted a Republican strategist as explaining: "We took Dick Nixon not because he was right-wing or left-wing but because we were tired, and he came from California."

In the midst of the campaign, Nixon came very close to political oblivion. News stories disclosed that California businessmen had raised an $18,000 fund to ease Nixon's financial burden. With Ike on the verge of dropping him, Nixon proved equal to his first real crisis. On radio and television, he insisted that the fund was used for political and not personal expenses, that he was a man of modest means whose wife did not wear mink but "a respectable Republican cloth coat," and that yes, there was one gift he was going to keep — a black and white cocker spaniel named Checkers. Though many found "the Checkers speech" full of cant and treacly sentimentality, the flood of favorable telegrams persuaded Eisenhower to execute a smart about-face. "You're my boy," he told Nixon.

On the campaign trail, Nixon gave the whole U.S. a good look at the sometimes ugly cut-and-thrust style he had developed in California, freely tossing about phrases like "Adlai the Appeaser" and "Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment." Nobody was to rise to such alliterative heights again for 17 years, when Nixon's own Vice President ("Nixon's Nixon," as Eugene McCarthy called Agnew) started talking about "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the like.

A Near Thing

As second-in-command, Nixon often served as Ike's emissary at home and abroad, tending to G.O.P. matters and visiting nearly threescore foreign countries; on one such trip, Nixon was in real danger when a Communist-led mob in Caracas besieged his car, smashed its windows and covered him with spittle. When Ike was felled by a heart attack in