Other Characters in the Play
Playwright Herb Brown employs four other characters in the play
to help reveal the personal and political relationship between Eisenhower and
Nixon. Biographical material is
presented on each below.
Thomas E. Dewey
Despite losing two presidential elections (1944, 1948),
Thomas E. Dewey was still the most powerful Republican in the party in the
early 1950s. In part because he did not
want the Robert Taft-conservative wing of the party to dominate and in part
because he really believed that an Eisenhower-Nixon ticket had the best chance
to win back the White House (which the Democrats had held since 1933), and in
part because he wanted to get even for his losses, Dewey worked hard to bring
the two candidates together on the ticket.
He was genuinely taken with Nixon’s strengths—his intensity, his ability
to present complex issues clearly and without notes, his understanding of how
politics worked. And he believed that
Eisenhower was the best prepared candidate to be president. He cajoled, flattered, and threatened
Eisenhower (suggesting that Douglas MacArthur might
run and win—Eisenhower had no love lost for the bombastic general). Dewey came up with the idea of a national
television broadcast and sold Nixon and Eisenhower on it; thus was born the
“Checkers” speech .
Robert A. Taft was known as “Mr. Republican,” but it was really Thomas
Dewey who shaped the comeback of the party in the 1950s. And, as the play notes, Dewey was able to get
President Eisenhower to appoint many of his friends (see Other
Historical Personalities).
From: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/dewey-thomas-bio.html
THOMAS EDMUND DEWEY (b.
Dewey graduated from
the
Although unsuccessful in his first bid for governor (1938),
Dewey was elected for three successive terms beginning in 1942. In
office he earned a reputation for political moderation and administrative
efficiency, putting the state on a pay-as-you-go basis for capital building,
reorganizing departments, and establishing the first state agency to eliminate
discrimination in employment.
As Republican nominee for president in 1944, Dewey was
neither expected nor able to overcome the enormous wartime prestige of the
incumbent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The pollsters flatly predicted
victory for his candidacy in 1948, however, though the political picture was
confused by the entrance of two minority extremist factions--the Progressives
and the States' Rights (Dixiecrat) Party. Waging a
noncommittal campaign purposely designed to avoid offending any segment of the
electorate, Dewey was unexpectedly defeated by President Harry S.
Truman, who surprisingly retained the loyalty of both farm and labour circles.
As a leader of the
eastern Republicans at the 1952 national convention, he played a key role in
the nominations of General Dwight D. Eisenhower for president and Senator
Richard M. Nixon for vice president. At the end of his third term as governor
(1955), Dewey returned to a lucrative private law practice. He remained
a close adviser to Republican administrations but thought his age precluded
acceptance of an offer by President Nixon in 1968 to serve as chief justice of
the U.S. Supreme Court.
Note: The following
is a suspect source, but I include it here as an example of “media” coverage
and conspiracy-mongering (which may or many not have some elements of truth).
From: http://www.murderinc.com/feds/dewey.html
Thomas E. Dewey
-
Thomas E. Dewey
began his career in racket busting in 1931, when he accepted a position as
chief assistant to the U.S. Attorney of New York, George Medalie.
In 1935, he was appointed as to go to work on Organized Crime by Governor
Herbert H. Lehman, after the expulsion of District Attorney William C. Dodge
for having been involved with the Tammany Hall scandals.
Dewey began his
crusade on crime by attacking prostitution, loan sharks, numbers and gambling,
which all eventually lead to the mob bosses running
In 1935, Dutch
Schultz proposed the killing of Dewey. Schultz was also being investigated by
Dewey, which forced Schultz to go into hiding. While in hiding,
Ironically
enough, by saving Dewey's life, the Commission put itself in jeopardy.
In 1936, Dewey
put Luciano on trial for running a "chain
store" of prostitution rings all over
But Dewey did
not stop at Organized Crime. In 1937 he would be elected to District Attorney
of New York, where he prosecuted and won a conviction against Tammany Hall boss
James J. Hines who ran a $1 million numbers racket throughout
Before his
death in 1944, Louis Lepke, a major crime figure in
the National Syndicate, offered a deal to Dewey that could have possibly
ensured him the highest elected position in the
Lepke, having been involved
in racketeering throughout the country, offered to give information on top
figures within the
Later that
year, at the Republican National Convention, Dewey was nominated to compete
against Franklin D. Roosevelt, but ended up loosing badly. After his defeat,
many began to question some of his ethics while in office as the District
Attorney. Although Dewey had put away Lucky Luciano,
he had also approved Luciano's transfer to a low
security prison in 1942 and eventual parole and deportation to
In 1942, it was
reported that German U-boats were spotted in the
Another theory
behind Luciano's good fortune after the sinking of
the Normandie was that he agreed to help
federal investigators not only protect the docks, but contact crime bosses in
Sicily to help the Allied powers defeat Mussolini by helping U.S. Military Intelligence
infiltrate the Axis-held island and eventually liberate all of Italy. In return
for his invaluable help in serving his country, federal agents worked with
Dewey to have Luciano eventually released from
prison.
Later, in
"The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano," Luciano states that Dewey was "on the take" the
entire time he was in office, and had paid Dewey $90,000 to help with his
presidential campaign in return for his freedom. This, as well as other
allegations, ruined Dewey's reputation as a crime buster. He refused to appear
at the Kefauver committee to answer for questions
regarding Luciano's release and other matters
regarding gambling in upstate
MurderINC.COM © 2001
From: http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0084350-0&templatename=/article/article.html
David Ray Papke, MR.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY: THE PROSECUTOR DURING THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO
Vol 34, Number 4, 2003
[The following excerpt from this article on the radio series, “Mr. District Attorney” suggests how “media” was central to the American culture by the 1930s. For the entire article, see http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/toledo/papke34.html ]
. . .
Popular journalism of the era
became particularly intrigued with district attorneys when they joined with law
enforcement in widely publicized campaigns against organized crime. The most
famous crusading district attorney of the time was
Perhaps the most widely read of these reports
was a five-part series which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post
between
The Post's articles on
Dewey were written by Forrest Davis and heavily illustrated.
Dewey turned down offers to
play himself in
Overall,
the variable presence of prosecutors in many types of inter-war popular culture
suggests the social stress of the era. Actual prosecutors' offices had assumed
a degree of sophistication and importance, and this predictably created
possibilities for pop cultural representation. More generally and importantly,
stories of crime and law enforcement were engaging for a society seeking to
find its bearings. Villainous and/or heroic prosecutors were vehicles which
consumers of popular culture could recognize and use to construct meanings.
Prosecutors found a home in popular fiction, journalism and film, and, as will
be emphasized, radio was also a medium which found a place for the prosecutor.
For
further reading on Dewey, see:
Gary
A. Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey (1998).
Harold
I. Gullan, The Upset That Wasn't: Harry S. Truman
and the Crucial Election of 1948 (1998).
R. N.
Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (1984).
Mary
M. Stolberg, Fighting Organized Crime: Politics,
Justice, and the Legacy of Thomas E. Dewey (1995).
Edited from:
http://www.nndb.com/people/357/000094075/
May
1980 From: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~montfell/biographies/a_f/adamss.html
President
Dwight Eisenhower and Sherman Adams at the Mountain View Inn golf course in
Whitefield on
For a list of White House Chiefs of Staff, see http://www.nndb.com/gov/238/000043109/
“Sherman Adams
was one of the most powerful men in Washington D.C. during the six years he
served as Chief of Staff to President Eisenhower. He had virtual control over
White House staff operations and domestic policy. The extent of internal strife
between strong willed personalities was chronicled in his 1961 memoir
"First Hand Report". Among the heated conflicts within the Eisenhower
administration were the best method to handle flamboyant personalities such as
U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy and anti-Communist accuser Whittaker Chambers. Adams
was a frequent broker of such controversies. When Adams resigned in 1958, and
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles died the same year, the administration
went into a two year period that lacked direction.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Adams
1918 World War I service with the United States Marine Corps
1920 Bachelor of Arts degree from
Began career in lumber industry with Black River Lumber Company,
1928-1945 Manager, timberland and lumber operations, the Parker-Young Company,
1941-1944
Member of
1941-1942
Chairman of
1943-1944
Speaker of the
1945-1947
Member of
District
1949-1951
Elected Governor of
1953-1958 Assistant to the President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower
1961
Published memoirs, Firsthand Report
From DDE Library http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/listofholdingshtml/listofholdingsA/ADAMSSHERMANRecords195259.pdf.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
On the
The Enron Chronicles http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/1/16/24120.shtml
Phil Brennan
Back during the Eisenhower administration a House committee
was investigating the ties between Ike's chief of staff, Sherman Adams, and one
Bernard Goldfine, a
Goldfine, it developed, had given Adams, a former
The case excited little media coverage until a committee investigator and Jack
Anderson, then a colleague of scandal-mongering columnist Drew Pearson, were
caught red-handed bugging the hotel suite occupied by two of Goldfine's hastily assembled team of public relations
experts at the very time the men were holding a well-attended
The incident created a media frenzy and put the
investigation on the nation's front pages. Concurrently with the scandal,
President Eisenhower had dispatched troops to
Bored stiff, the legion of reporters sent to cover the landings spent most of
their time hanging around
Almost universally, from their standpoint as practitioners of
Lebanese-Byzantine business transactions, they said their impression was that Goldfine, a trader in textile goods, had given gifts to his
cousin, Adams, and the committee was trying to find out if Adams had failed to
honor his benefactor by refusing to give him what was his due as a result of
his bribes, and was therefore in trouble with the law.
I was reminded of that incident the other day ….
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june98/historians_2-13.html
…
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Vicuna coat,
absolutely, and free hotel rooms from a man named Bernard Goldfine
of
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/richardson.html
re Elliot Richardson:
His legislative skill drew
Sherman Adams
The Yankee Governor
Lumberman, Governor, Special Assistant to the President, Sherman Adams was once
called the second most powerful man in the Nation. Those interviewed include
Former U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell and investigative reporter Jack
Anderson whose reporting led to
(55 min., 1990) $14.95 VHS
http://www.accompanyvideo.com/videopagenh1.htm
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
One of the
first “professional” political operatives,
Chotiner, who is often noted today in articles on
Republican political operative Karl Rove, was involved in the “dirty tricks”
campaigning that spiraled out of control into the Watergate scandal.
Portrait of
Original caption: Murray M. Chotiner, campaign manager for Vice-President Richard Nixon
in
the 1952 campaign, looks at a subpoena requesting his
presence in
questioning regarding his alleged legal services for a blacklisted government contractor.
Image: © Bettmann/CORBIS
Date Photographed:
Location Information:
Beverly Hills, California, USA
Original caption:
Office to pick up a subpoena
ordering him to appear before a Senate Investigating Committee looking into
irregularities in
Army
contracts. Chotiner told the
newsmen, “I cannot divulge confidential communication of a client without his
consent,
But I will be glad to
cooperate with the committee.”
Image: © Bettmann/CORBIS
Date Photographed:
Murray Chotiner 1956
From: Pat Hillings on
Nixon's political consultant
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/37_nixon/filmmore/ra_chotiner.html
American
Experience The
Presidents film
[Hillings
was campaign staff member]
Murray Chotiner was among the first of the political consultants
which are now so popular, or unpopular, as the case may be. Recent books have
come out attacking political consultants in campaigns and that sort of thing.
In those days, most work was done by volunteers. But now political consultants
are the dominant theme, along with the media in the campaigns. Murray Chotiner was one of the first. He was a lawyer, a brilliant
lawyer, from
So when the
time came to find someone to help Richard Nixon run for the Senate, a lot of
his friends in
He was a
mechanic, a nuts and bolts man. He found, for instance, that Nixon was reading
letters in the car as he'd be driving, and signing the letters, letters going
out to people thanking them for their help. And he took them away from him. He
said the only thing he should be doing in that car is thinking of his next
speech. And he did all kinds of things like that that were based on detail. But
Murray Chotiner became a very effective fellow and
was probably the smartest and most experienced political operative in the Nixon
campaign at that time.
Time Magazine Monday, May. 14, 1956
The
name Murray Chotiner, dropped into the Senate
investigation of military uniform procurement frauds a fortnight ago, set
journalistic and political antennas twanging all over Washington. Reason: in
the political context of 1956, the name Chotiner goes
with the name Nixon.A professional political manager,
Lawyer Chotiner has been an important figure in
California G.O.P. politics for 15 years. In 1942 he was field director in the
first campaign for governor waged by Earl Warren, now Chief Justice of the
http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Watergate%20Deaths.html
Murray Chotiner, a long-time friend of Nixon's was killed when a
government truck ran into his car on
According to a
http://www.ajweberman.com/nodules2/nodulec25.htm
EARL WARREN, RICHARD NIXON AND
Earl Warren (born
Pat Nixon
Pat Nixon was a significant force on the political evolution
of Richard Nixon. Pat Nixo, and
Mamie Eisenhower were closer than their two
husbands. Indeed, when Mamie called Pat during the campaign of 1960 and asked her
to make sure Dick did not ask President Eisenhower to campaign (the president’s
doctors declared he was too ill to do
so), Pat complied, and Nixon did not ask Eisenhower for more help. This, of course, led to the perception that
the president did not fully support his vice-president’s candidacy, perhaps a
fatal choice in such a close election.
From: http://www.nixonfoundation.org/TheNixons/PatNixon.shtml
Patricia Nixon, the wife of the 37th President of the
Kate Halberstadt Ryan, born in
Before Mrs.
Nixon was a year old, Kate Ryan, whose first husband had been killed in a
mining accident, persuaded William Ryan to give up mining. The family then
moved from
The future
First Lady had a childhood with no luxuries except that of a warm and loving
family. But this was shattered when her mother died in 1925. At the age of 13,
Mrs. Nixon took over the household duties for her father and her brothers. Two
years later, when she was attending
Her first
ambition was a college education. She enrolled in the
In 1934, she
returned to
Her first job
following graduation was teaching business education courses at
"Those of us who are lucky can remember in our school days who was more than just a teacher. She was a quiet inspiration perhaps, to our secret hopes. Or perhaps she brought out abilities we had never dreamed were in us. Or maybe, as in the case of my high school typing teacher, there was something about her which made us want to be as much like her as possible."
"I was a ninth grader, about fourteen, but I have never
forgotten her. There was something very special about that teacher of mine. The
school was in
Her interest in
drama began during her working days at USC when she earned $25 for a walk-on
part as an extra in the movie "Becky Sharp". In addition to direction
of the high school plays, she joined the Whittier Little Theater group. It was
then that she met Richard Nixon, a young lawyer recently graduated from
They met in
1937, and were married on
One
year later, they moved to
It
was in 1946 that Mr. Nixon entered political life as the Republican candidate
for
Tricia
became the 16th White House bride when she and Edward Finch Cox of
New York were married on
Julie
joined together two Presidential families when she and Dwight David Eisenhower
II were married on 
December 22, 1968, in
New York's Marble Collegiate Church while her father was President-elect.
In 1950, Mr.
Nixon won the election as United States Senator from
As
the wife of the Vice President, Mrs. Nixon accompanied her husband to 53
countries around the world, visiting hospitals and schools by day and dining
with heads of state by night. So effective a good will
ambassador was she that President Eisenhower always sent the Nixons as a team.
She was
staunchly behind her husband during his political campaigns for the Presidency
in 1960, and for the Governorship of California in
1962. Leaving political life after the 1962 elections, the former Vice
President and his wife made their home in
In 1971,
President Nixon was asked by a
Her work in the
White House flowed from her boundless compassion for humanity. She was the
first First Lady to champion volunteerism. She blazed
the literacy trail with the "Right to Read" program. She pushed to
establish new recreational areas in or near big cities for those who could not
afford to visit distant national parks.
She
was a confident player on the world stage, traveling in all to
over 80 countries during her years of public service. She accompanied President
Nixon to the People's Republic of
During
the Nixons' 1969 trip to
At home, Mrs.
Nixon reached out to the American people by inviting them into the people's
house and taking special care, in a singular partnership with White House
Curator Clement Conger, to preserve and enhance it. "The Nixon era was the
greatest single period of collecting in White House history," historian
William Seale
said. "The great collection of White House Americana today is the long
shadow of Mrs. Nixon. The impulse, the idea, and the energy were hers."
She
arranged the first White House tours for the visually and hearing impaired and
inaugurated the famous candlelight tours for people who worked during the day.
And she believed that the house into which she brought so much light should be
lit at night like Washington's other monuments, so she made all the
arrangements and surprised the President by having the floodlights turned on
for the first time as they arrived back at the White House one evening by
helicopter.
In
retirement, Mrs. Nixon was a devoted grandmother to Jennie, Christopher, Alex
Richard, and Melanie. Although she kept her public appearances to a minimum,
polls showed that she remained one of
She
died on
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
For more information on Pat Nixon, see:
Lester David, The Lonely
Lady of
Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
(1986). This is a daughter’s fond portrayal of the First Lady, and as such it
contains private correspondence with family and friends otherwise unavailable
to researchers. Eisenhower’s book is
also based upon staff memorandum, public correspondence, contemporary newspaper
and magazine articles, and press interviews.
National First Ladies Library: http://www.firstladies.org/
Lewis L. Gould (editor), America’s First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacies (2nd edition, 2001).