Tricky Dick. That’s what we called him. Never to his face, though. Well, maybe a few times to his face; the man was one hell of a poker player. Back when he was in the Navy, Dick bluffed a senior officer out of $1,500…with a pair of twos! Can you believe that? Fifteen-hundred gone on a pair of twos! Still, that’s peanuts compared to what he did to us in Chicago.
Those of us working the Warren campaign had high hopes in ’52. We thought the Governor could get the nomination as a compromise candidate. Taft was too conservative, and Eisenhower…well, we didn’t know what to expect with Eisenhower.
“Eisenhower’s an unknown,” Dick would say. “You don’t even know where the man stands most of the time.” And as much as I hate to say it, Dick had a point. Hell, we hadn’t even known whether Ike was a Democrat or a Republican till a few months before the convention. And that Kraut name of his didn’t help.
All these years and I’m still not sure how Nixon managed to pull it off. Lots of backroom deals, I guess. You know; cigars and midnight phone calls and the like. Me? I was out on the floor the whole time, fighting hard for the Governor. So imagine how I felt when I heard California was throwing in with Bob Taft. And the second those undecideds heard...well, "avalanche" doesn't even come close.
You know, I almost feel sorry for Dick. I think he really thought that he was going to get the V.P. slot right then and there. But we’d just nominated Bob Taft, for crying out loud! I mean, the man made that egghead Stevenson look like Marlon Brando. No, no, we needed a running mate that could really fire the crowd up. And boy did we find one…
Tricky Dick. [Laughs] I tell you; by the time that convention was over, I was calling him a lot worse.
—James “Jim” McEvoy, quoted in Better Dead than Red: An American Memoir, by Studs Terkel