THE VICE-PRESIDENCY: On One Son’s Mind

As American Airlines Flight 901, nonstop from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, winged over Arizona one night last week, Passenger Francis A. Nixon, 75, lapsed into a semicoma, stricken with a gastric hemorrhage. Captain Joe Glass, the plane’s veteran pilot, radioed for an ambulance and landed the DC-6 at Phoenix. Minutes later, Frank Nixon was receiving blood transfusions at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The patient’s son, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, was promptly notified, although his mother Hannah Nixon hated “to distress him right now when he has so much on his mind.”

Secret Pencilings. On Dick Nixon’s mind was the secret report he would deliver to the next morning’s National Security Council meeting. For three days he had closeted himself in a secluded Capitol office, writing observations of and conclusions from his ten-week inspection of the Far and Near East. At the meeting, the NSC’s 177th, Nixon pulled the penciled results from a file folder, read and talked for an hour and a half. Whatever it was he said, it made a good impression: his audience, consisting of the President, four Cabinet members, the Chiefs of Staff and other top officials, clapped. Never before had the NSC’s members burst into a shower of applause.

That evening, indefatigable Dick Nixon made a second report, this time to the people. Over a half-hour nationwide radio-TV hookup, in his chatty manner, the Vice President described the problems and aspirations of Asian peoples, and their vulnerability to Communism. He said: “We shook hands with over 100,000 people . . . Why see these ordinary people? . . . We wanted them to know America, and we wanted to know them.” Nixon recalled that the “very wise and very young” King of Siam had summed up his people’s needs: military assistance, economic assistance and understanding. “Significantly enough, he told me that understanding was the most important of the three.”

Dirty Word. Traveler Nixon reported “a great well of friendship for America,” but warned: “There are millions of people in this area of the world who honestly believe in their hearts that the U.S. is just as great a threat to peace as are the Soviet Union and Communist China . . . We are not getting our message across.” He added that the Eisenhower Administration is finally “bringing to the world the true picture of American power.”

Turning to Indo-China, Nixon, neatly pinning on the Communists the dirty word “colonialism,” said: “The U.S. supports the Associated States of Indo-China in their understandable aspiration for independence, but we know that [if] the French leave Indo-China . . . the forces of Communist colonialism . . . would enslave them.”

The rejection of Communism by the overseas Chinese, Nixon found, is “one of the most spectacular developments” in Asia. “What are the reasons?” he asked himself, and answered: “I talked to a farmer … He told me how he, his wife and two small children had walked for a hundred miles through the mainland of China until they arrived at the [Hong Kong] border . . . The reason was that his only brother was blind . . . He couldn’t produce as much as the Communists required . . . The Communists took him away and shot him.”

After the speech, Dick Nixon was free to spend Christmas with his wife and daughters. On Christmas Eve from Phoenix came cheering news: doctors reported that Nixon’s father was “responding beautifully.” By deciding to land at the nearest field, Pilot Glass had probably saved Frank Nixon’s life, they said. Much relieved, the Vice President departed alone the day after Christmas for a brief Florida vacation, leaving Pat to look after the girls, who were recovering from the flu.