was part of a nineteen-member delegation chaired by Representative Christian Herter, a patrician Republican from Massachusetts tasked with investigating the devastation of the war. President Truman hoped the bipartisan delegation’s well-publicized trip would help him win congressional approval for the Marshall Plan, his ambitious, multibillion-dollar aid package to reconstruct Europe. Truman’s sweeping proposal was generating stiff opposition from GOP conservatives, who saw it as another example of Democratic extravagance.
Back home in Whittier, California, one of the conservative businessmen who had helped pave Dick Nixon’s successful entry into politics the previous year warned the young congressman not to be taken in by the slick State Department types during the European junket. The country could only rid itself of “the hangover philosophies of the New Deal” if Republican congressmen like Nixon were “wise enough to refuse to be drawn into support of a dangerously unworkable and profoundly inflationary foreign policy.”
Herter, a Boston Brahmin who was married to a Standard Oil heiress, was part of the bipartisan, internationalist political elite who rejected this type of thinking as narrow-minded and isolationist. Herter’s circle saw the Marshall Plan not only as an essential antidote to the growing appeal of Communism in poverty-stricken Western Europe, but as a financial boon for America’s export industries and international banks, which would profit enormously from the revival of European markets. Herter asked one of his oldest friends to accompany the delegation—Allen Dulles, a man who shared his views and was well known for his powers of persuasion. (Dulles had another motive for backing the Marshall Plan: he and Frank Wisner would later use funds skimmed from the program to finance their anti-Soviet operations in Europe.) As young diplomats in Bern during World War I, Dulles and Herter had shared the joys of bachelor life. Now, the Herter Committee’s round-trip, transatlantic journey and lengthy tour of Europe—a political expedition that would stretch for longer than two months—would give Dulles and Herter ample opportunity to win over conservative skeptics like young Dick Nixon.
The opulent accommodations on board the Queen Mary were a far cry from the drab veterans’ halls and school auditoriums where Nixon had been spending his days just a few months earlier on the campaign trail. On the eve of his trip, Nixon had earnestly declared, “This will be no junket. It will be no cross-Atlantic cocktail party.” But in between delegation meetings, the luxury liner offered a wealth of diversions, from its grand, three-story-high dining salon, to its elegant, tiled swimming pool, to its Art Deco–style observation bar with dazzling ocean views. The storied cruise ship had hosted the likes of Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, Winston Churchill, and General Eisenhower. It was all heady stuff for the thirty-four-year-old Nixon, whose Quaker family’s grocery store and gas station had always wobbled on the brink of bankruptcy.
Throughout his career, Nixon’s all-consuming ambition was fueled by resentment and envy, by the sense that he would always be excluded from the top decks where men like Allen Dulles and Christian Herter belonged. When Nixon was finishing law school at Duke University in 1937, he spent a frigid Christmas week in New York searching for a starting position with a prestigious Wall Street firm. He managed to get on the appointments calendar at Sullivan and Cromwell, the firm of his dreams. As he waited in the lobby, he marveled at the “thick, luxurious carpets and the fine oak paneling,” a picture of corporate power and comfort that stayed with him for many years. But he did not meet the Dulles brothers during his job interview, and Sullivan and Cromwell—which, like all the top New York firms of the day, drew their young talent almost exclusively from the Ivy League—showed no interest in this product of Whittier College and Duke Law. Nixon, who could only afford a room in the Sloane House YMCA on West Thirty-Fourth Street during his weeklong job hunt, felt a bitter sense of rejection by the time he returned to school. “He was not charmed by New York,” remembered a Duke classmate of Nixon’s. He felt the city had kicked him in the teeth.
Yet here he was, ten years later, being wined and dined on the Queen Mary in the same privileged company as Allen Dulles. The spymaster and Herter took the young congressman under their wing during the ocean crossing. They schooled him about the importance of foreign aid as a facilitator of U.S. economic and political interests. By the time the delegation returned to the United States in early October, Nixon was fully on board as a supporter of the Marshall Plan. The congressman’s new enthusiasm for Truman’s ambitious proposal did not go down well with his conservative supporters back home. But Nixon was shrewd enough to figure out that senior members of the GOP’s East Coast elite like Dulles and Herter could be of more benefit to him than the Southern California citrus growers and businessmen who had launched his career.
The political relationship forged between the rising politician from California and Dulles’s East Coast circle would become one of the most significant partnerships of the postwar era. Nixon grew into a potent political weapon for the Dulles group, a cunning operator who managed to accrue solidly conservative credentials with the Republican Party’s popular base while dependably serving the interests of the GOP’s privileged leadership class. Together, the Dulles circle and Richard Nixon would bring about a sharp, rightward shift in the nation’s politics, driving out the surviving elements of the New Deal regime in Washington and establishing a new ruling order that was much more in tune with the Dulles circle’s financial interests. The Dulles-Nixon alliance proved masterful at exploiting the Cold War panic that gripped the nation, using it to root out Rooseveltian true believers from government, along with a few genuine Communist infiltrators who posed a marginal threat to national security. When Washington’s anti-Communist witch hunt raged out of control and threatened to consume even those who had lit the flame, Nixon again proved of great use to Dulles, working with him to keep the inferno within safe boundaries. In return for his services, Nixon won the patronage of the kingmakers in the Dulles circle, ensuring the politician’s steady rise toward Washington’s top throne.
Years later, after Nixon’s climb to power was stalled by his loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, Dulles sent Nixon a warm letter, reminiscing about their relationship and noting that “we have worked together since the days of the mission on the Marshall Plan.” The Dulles-Nixon alliance actually preceded their voyage on the Queen Mary, but the spymaster was understandably loath to officially record its true origins. According to John Loftus, the former Justice Department Nazi hunter, the two men first came in contact in late 1945, when young naval officer Richard Nixon was shuttling up and down the East Coast, wrapping up war-related business for the Navy. While sifting through the military paperwork, Nixon came across eye-opening Nazi documents that had been shipped to an old torpedo factory on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Some of these documents revealed how the Dulles brothers had helped launder Nazi funds during the war. Loftus, citing confidential intelligence sources, alleged that Dulles and Nixon proceeded to cut a deal. “Allen Dulles,” reported Loftus, “told him to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return, [Dulles] arranged to finance the young man’s first congressional campaign against Jerry Voorhis.”
Dulles and his clients in the banking and oil industries had ample reason to target Voorhis, a five-term Democratic congressman and ardent New Dealer from Nixon’s home district in Southern California. The crusading congressman was a particularly troublesome thorn in the sides of Wall Street and Big Oil. Voorhis shook the banking industry by pushing for the federal government to take over the nation’s privately owned, regional Federal Reserve Banks—a radical proposal that briefly won President Roosevelt’s support, but ultimately failed to overcome the banking lobby. Voorhis was more successful in his efforts to curb the power of the major oil companies. In 1943, after learning that the Navy was about to grant Standard Oil exclusive drilling rights in the sprawling Elk Hills naval reserve in central California, Voorhis exposed the sweetheart deal and succeeded in blocking it. The congressman earned yet more of the oil industry’s wrath by taking aim at one of the industry’s most cherished tax breaks, the oil depletion allowance, and by
