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The Democrats got their revenge when the press discovered and trumpeted that Nixon had a secret slush fund of $18,000 provided by California businessmen to help finance his activities. Nixon insisted that the fund was perfectly legal and was used solely for routine political expenses, but the smell of scandal thickened. At Eisenhower's urging, Nixon went before a TV audience estimated at 58 million with an impassioned defense of his honesty. "Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime we've got is honestly ours," he said. The only personal present he had received was "a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate. Black-and-white spotted. And our little girl -- Tricia, the six-year-old -- named it Checkers. And you know, the kids love that dog." Hundreds of thousands of listeners cabled or wrote their support of Nixon, and Eisenhower settled his future by saying publicly, "You're my boy!"
Eisenhower won 55% of the vote, and the freshman Senator from California, still only 39, found himself the second youngest Vice President. He also found that a President and Vice President rarely like each other very much, because the latter's only real job is to wait for the former's death. Nixon faced the great test of this uneasy relationship when Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in September 1955. It was up to Nixon to chair Cabinet meetings and generally run the White House machinery without ever seeming to covet the power that lay just beyond his fingertips. He did the job tactfully and skillfully throughout the weeks of Eisenhower's recovery.
One major function of modern Vice Presidents is to travel, and Nixon turned himself into a latter-day Marco Polo: nine trips to 61 countries. Everywhere he went, he conferred, orated, debated, press-conferenced. In Moscow to open a U.S. trade exhibit in 1959, Nixon got into a finger-pointing argument on communism with Soviet Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in the kitchen of an American model home.
To some extent, Vice Presidents' tasks are defined by their own skills and experiences. Nixon knew more about politics than almost anyone else in Eisenhower's Administration, so he became the G.O.P.'s chief campaigner. When Eisenhower's second term expired, Nixon was the inevitable successor; he was nominated to run against the Democrats' John F. Kennedy.
Eisenhower and others warned Nixon not to accept Kennedy's challenge to a televised debate -- Nixon was the Vice President, after all, and far better known than the junior Senator from Massachusetts -- but Nixon took pride in his long experience as a debater. He also ignored advice to rest up for the debate and went on campaigning strenuously until the last minute. So what a record 80 million Americans saw on their TV screens was a devastating contrast. Kennedy looked fresh, tanned, vibrant; Nixon looked unshaven, baggy- eyed, surly. The era of the politics of TV imagery had begun, and the debates were a major victory for Kennedy.