Chapter 5

FISHER AND NIXON:

LONELY MEN OF FAITH

NEITHER MAX FISHER nor Richard Nixon can place the exact year they met, but both men indicate that it was probably 1959. Fisher recalls that he went to Washington to talk with then-Vice President Nixon about a problem facing the United Jewish Appeal. After the 1956 Suez Crisis, Arab spokesmen argued that the U.S. government, in granting the UJAtax-exempt status, was underwriting Israel’s “mil- itary aggression.” Senator Allen J. Ellender, a Democrat from Louisi- ana, called for an investigation into the UJA’s status. Since the right to deduct UJA gifts from their taxes was a substantial incentive to major contributors, American Jewish fund-raisers were concerned about the call for an investigation, and a battle ensued.

At their first meeting, Fisher told Nixon about the conflict. Nixon was sympathetic and promised to look into it. Eventually, the inves- tigation was repulsed by Senator Jacob K. Javits, a Republican from New York, and other legislators. (In the long run, the issue was put to rest by a group led by the United Israel Appeal’s Gottlieb Hammer and Maurice M. Boukstein, and by the designation of a separate nonprofit corporation that would oversee the funds funneled to Israel.) Fisher and Nixon arranged to meet more regularly, a routine they would maintain until Nixon entered the White House in 1969, when their visits had to be fit into the president’s schedule.

“We saw the world pretty much the same way right from the start,” Nixon says. “We didn’t drink booze. We never played golf. We never played poker. I never partied with Max or was on a boat for a weekend

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with him. We liked it better that way. We discussed politics. I might say, ‘How about a bite of lunch?’ and we’d talk. And it was never those martini lunches with us. Max was serious. We could discuss issues.” “We shared the same philosophy,” adds Fisher. “In those early years, we had a lot of long philosophical discussions, especially about the Middle East. Dick is a great admirer of the Israelis. We also talked about the Russians and his attitude toward China. He had traveled so much; he had read so much. He was quite a student.”

Fisher and Nixon soon found that they also shared an obsessive in- terest in their work —to the exclusion of nearly everything else. One of Nixon’s classmates at Duke Law School, echoing the consensus on Nixon during those days, recalled that he was “the hardest-working man I ever met.” On the campaign trail, it was said that Nixon worked “like a horse,” and it was a trait that he respected in others. In 1968, Nixon told Garry Wills, author of Nixon Agonistes: “I have seen those who have nothing to do ... the people just lying around at Palm Beach. Nothing could be more pitiful.” Wills observed that when Nixon made this statement “his voice had contempt in it, not pity.”

Fisher, by 1959, could have afforded to sun himself forever in Palm Beach; he did, along with his family, vacation at his apartment there in the winter. But free time jangled Fisher’s nerves; he was incapable of relaxing. Instead, he sat, picking at a bowl of grapes or a platter of chocolate-chip cookies —the choice depending on whether or not he was dieting that week —and leafed through The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Jerusalem Post, piling the sections of newsprint at his feet. Then he dialed the phone. There was always another detail to check or a deal to investigate and, as soon as he could schedule it, a meeting to attend. It was as though Fisher was still the insecure Salem Boy Scout and athlete trying to disprove his father’s accusation that he was wasting his life.

Fisher’s lawyer and friend Jason Honigman recalls that “Max was always working, always probing into something. Once, we were on business in New York and sleeping in the same [hotel suite]. I was awakened at six o’clock in the morning by this simmering noise. Then I caught on. Max was talking business on the telephone. There is anoth-

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er incident I remember, a Saturday-night party at the Standard Club [a private club in Detroit’s Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel]. Max was there with Margie and another couple, George Patterson [president of Buckeye Pipeline] and his wife, who had been Max’s secretary at Aurora. The four of them had just come from a cruise in the Caribbean. George’s face was red as a beet, but Max was as pale as the morning he left. So I said to George: ‘I assume Max isn’t sunburned because he spent his vacation on the phone.’And [George] said, ‘Of course.’”

The Fisher-Nixon rapport was not built solely on the attraction of kindred spirits. An ample portion rested on the conventional quid pro quo of politics. Since Fisher had achieved some newsworthy financial success with the Ohio Oil-Aurora merger, Nixon had to realize that in Fisher he had a potentially generous backer for his 1960 try at the White House. In November 1958 — months before the initial Nix- on-Fisher meeting — Nixon had decided to run and had a campaign manager and finance chairman in place.

Fisher’s motivations for supporting Nixon were less obvious. He respected him, particularly his hard-line stance against Soviet expan- sionism. Nixon was going to be the candidate, no question about it, and therefore represented an opportunity. Fisher suspected that his own entree into national politics would come through a partnership with a president that merged sympathetic visions of the world, a com- patible personal relationship and, the usual bill of fare, hefty financial support. Fisher also believed in the standard Republican torch song that the country required less government, not more, and that a healthy economy, strengthened through the unencumbered growth of private enterprise, was good for everyone, regardless of where they stood on the economic ladder.

But by the close of the 1950s, Fisher’s feelings toward his Repub- licanism were changing. If, in the 1940 presidential election, he had switched his vote from FDR to his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, because he believed that no one should occupy the Oval Of- fice beyond two terms, Fisher had now come to see his party affili - ation in an increasingly practical light. His Republicanism was less reflective of his moderately-to-the-right political convictions than of

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his Jewishness, and the reasoning behind it was as elementary as the logic that induced investors to diversify their portfolios.

Fisher says: “I thought it was a mistake for the Jewish community to be locked in by the Democrats because they were taken for granted. Every election the Democrats knew they could count on 75 or 80 per- cent of the Jewish vote. They didn’t even have to go out and listen to the concerns of [the Jewish community]. They didn’t have to work for it. This was one of the big arguments I made [to Jews].”

However, it was not an argument he would make effectively until the 1968 election; he was in 1960 only beginning to enter the leadership of the national Jewish community and therefore lacked a constituency. As always, Fisher began his fund-raising efforts with his own check. He cannot recall the precise amount of his contribution — somewhere in the range of $10,000, a decent sum in a campaign that collected approximately $2 million. Then he got on the phone and drummed up support. It was not until the final days that the Nixon campaign people realized the range of Fisher’s skill.

In 1960, Nixon pledged to campaign in every state, and he was, despite the protests of his staff, determined to keep his promise. And so on the Sunday before the election he flew to Anchorage, Alaska. Next, Nixon moved on to Madison, Wisconsin, and then on Monday, to Detroit, Michigan, where a telethon was scheduled.

In Six Crises, Nixon recalled that he “had wanted to have several telethons in the last days of the campaign but funds had not been avail- able. Only three days before air-time were we able to obtain enough contributions to finance this one show.”

David J. Mahoney, then-president of the Good Humor Company (and later the head of Norton-Simon), was helping with the Nixon campaign. Mahoney explains how Nixon managed to raise the money for the telethon. “I was in Washington, D.C.,” says Mahoney, “when I got a call from [Nixon campaign manager Robert] Finch. Finch was in Alaska, overseeing Nixon’s visit, and he said that we had a serious problem. Because the polls were predicting that the race was too close to call, the TV station in Detroit [WXYZ] wanted their payment in advance for the telethon. That made sense: losers sometimes don’t pay

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their bills. The problem, Finch said, was that we didn’t have enough money for the buy. Then he asked me to meet him at the Cadillac Hotel in Detroit to see what we could do about it.”

Mahoney met Finch the following day. They got busy on the phones, but could not come up with the money. Finch, Mahoney says, phoned Nixon; Nixon said he had a friend in Detroit they should try — Max Fisher. “I can’t recall the exact amount,” Mahoney says to- day. “But it must have been close to $250,000 that we needed. And Max raised it right away. If there hadn’t been a Fisher, there wouldn’t have been a telethon.”

The 1960 presidential election was the closest in American his- tory. Nixon carried three more states than Kennedy, but lost in the Electoral College, 303 to 219. There were 68.8 million votes cast and, with the shift of one-tenth of 1 percent of the vote, Nixon would have been president.

Fisher, naturally, was disappointed, but he was about to discover an aspect of Nixon that increased his admiration for him and confirmed his belief that he would have been the right man for the job and per- haps still would be. Following the election, rumors of voting fraud began to circulate. The rumors focused on Texas, Vice President-elect Lyndon B. Johnson’s home state, and Cook County, Illinois, where Mayor Richard J. Daley, chief of Chicago’s monolithic Democratic machine, had delivered a dubious Kennedy vote. (Years later, Fisher heard the story of Edward Bennett Williams, the powerful Washington attorney —and, for a while, Nixon enemy —who decided to heal his rift with Nixon by inviting him to lunch at the exclusive Manhattan restaurant, Le Cirque. At lunch, Williams told Nixon that when Daley was dying Williams visited him, and Daley said: “God forgive me for stealing Illinois from Nixon in 1960.”) Because the rumors appeared to have a hint of truth and because Kennedy’s margin of victory had been so narrow, many of Nixon’s friends and associates urged him to demand a recount.

Fisher attended a meeting in which several people tried to persuade Nixon to ask for a review. Nixon replied that a recount would create chaos, leading to bitterness across the country and a loss of confidence

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in the election process. Finally, it would serve as a sad example to all of those nations who were striving to establish democracies. Nix- on concluded that not demanding a recount was his only responsible course of action.

Fisher left the meeting impressed by Nixon’s response. Paradoxi- cally, despite his deep disappointment over Nixon’s defeat, it can be claimed that Nixon’s loss brought him closer to Fisher —and provided Fisher with a greater opportunity —than if he had won.

***

In part, Fisher’s chance to befriend Nixon came because Nixon did not have a smooth transition into private life. Upon leaving the vice presidency, he accepted a consulting job at the Los Angeles law firm of Adams, Duque and Hazeltine. His wife remained behind in Wash- ington so their daughters could finish school, and Nixon moved out to California alone, renting a small apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, where he passed his evenings eating TV dinners and reading. It was not, Nixon confessed in his memoirs, RN, an easy time. One of the ma- jor difficulties was that since losing the election, Nixon had started to notice a sharp falling-off of friends. What hurt the worst, he remarked, was to see that those for whom he “had done the most were often the first to desert.”

Fisher was not one of the friends who deserted. Shortly after Elec- tion Day, he wrote Nixon, and by early December, Nixon replied: “Pat and I want you to know how very much we appreciated the letter which you sent us after the election. Amessage of congratulations after winning an election is of course always appreciated although not unex- pected. But nothing could have meant more to us than to receive such a warm and thoughtful message after losing. Your act of thoughtfulness will always remain close to our hearts.”

Nixon wrote Fisher again on January 3, 1961, telling him how he and his office staff had been busy, “dig[ging] its way out from under the mass of mail that has come to us in the days since November 8. Nixon said he sensed in himself and his supporters “a renewed deter-

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mination to continue to fight for [their] principles.” He then assured Fisher that he “intend[ed] to do everything that I can in working for those principles in the years ahead.”

For Fisher, the message was clear. Nixon, despite his loss, was still running.

And Fisher continued to treat Nixon as a candidate. The two men maintained their steady flow of correspondence and phone calls and, whenever possible, got together to discuss domestic politics and for- eign affairs. In view of Nixon’s painful discovery after the 1960 elec- tion — the flight of his fair-weather political friends — it becomes clearer why he valued Fisher’s enduring interest in his career and why he would, in 1989, talk of his “unbounded admiration and affectionate friendship for Max.”

“Max Fisher,” says Nixon, “is a solid man, and there are very few solid people in anything, especially in the big business community. I’m not against them, but they’re very enthusiastic only if you’re winning. They didn’t get there by supporting losers. But if Max be- lieved in an individual, he’d stand by him. Max had qualities of great personal loyalty.”

Nixon was going to need those qualities, because he could not keep away from politics. By the spring of 1961, Nixon was increasingly in- terested in taking up the role of titular leader of the Republican Party. He agreed to write a book, which later became Six Crises, and he was writing political columns for the Times-Mirror syndicate. In May, Nix- on began a speaking tour. He stated that he was making the tour as a private citizen, but his talks were blatantly political. On May 9, Nixon was in Detroit, addressing a capacity crowd of newsmen, broadcasters and businessmen at a Detroit Press Club luncheon.

Nixon, appearing far more rested than during his Detroit campaign stops in 1960, spoke for over an hour. He told the audience that the United States must maintain a nonbelligerent but firm attitude toward the Soviet Union. He exhorted the businessmen “to work for the Re- publican Party,” and advised Michigan Republicans to beef up their organizations in urban areas. To win the Negro vote, he observed, the Republicans must continue a program “that talks with Negroes, not

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down to them.” He added that his party leadership would be along the middle ground, “in the Eisenhower tradition.”

Fisher was unable to attend Nixon’s talk —he was out of town — but two days later they spoke on the telephone. Fisher told Nixon that he had been tremendously pleased with the press coverage and the reactions of people to his visit. Fisher said that Nixon had made a good start at solving some of the political problems in Michigan by bringing them into focus, adding that he “[felt] more of this should be done.” Due to his speeches, Nixon found himself in the national limelight as the leader of the “loyal opposition,” and it was not long before the pressure on him to seek the governorship of California escalated. Polls indicated that he could defeat the incumbent, Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, by a margin of 5 to 3. Nixon stewed over the decision during the summer. Eisenhower, Thomas E. Dewey and a number of Nixon supporters — including Fisher — felt that the governorship could be Nixon’s springboard back onto the national scene.

In July, two weeks after his fifty-third birthday, Fisher wrote to Nix - on: “I have been following with a great deal of interest your speech- es and your columns, and [I] think they have been very constructive. However, I would like to add some comments which I have heard in my travels, [from] many people who are good friends of yours and [from] others who are looking into the future for leadership. These revolve around your re-entry into the political field in the near future. To a naive observer, as I sit here, it appears to me that you could win the election for governor hands down, which would result in some very definite pluses [for your] long-range plans.

“First of all, one must consider that California will be the largest state in the Union in the future, and the man who speaks from the fo- rum of the highest office of [that] state would certainly carry a great deal of prestige nationally and internationally. Secondly, it would be a great help to the Republican Party to have the state of California locked up. More important, the fact that you could command an elec- tion to this top post would be a tremendous demonstration to most people of your ability to command a following now and in the future. The impact of this to me would be tremendous and would go a long

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way toward welding some dissident factions in the Republican Party, as well as giving greatest impact to messages on the national and in- ternational level. I certainly hope that you are giving this matter some consideration. Meanwhile, these comments are worth about as much as you pay for them, but I really have a sincere desire for [you to suc- ceed] in your future plans.”

In terms of predicting a Nixon victory, what a Wall Street Journal reporter referred to as Fisher’s “keen sense of timing” failed him. Nix- on would later claim that “the importunings of many close friends” convinced him to try for the governorship, but on August 15, 1961, he was still ambivalent about becoming a candidate. He wrote Fisher. “I have been leaning strongly against the idea of running for what appear to me to be some compelling reasons. Before I make a final decision, I will be in touch with you again. I can’t tell you how much I sincerely appreciate your taking the time and trouble to pass along your own rec- ommendation. Our mutual friend, Cliff Folger, [also] takes your point of view.”

Clifford Folger was a banker and former U.S. Ambassador to Bel- gium. He had also been, in the 1950s, the GOP’s finance chairman and then, in 1960, he had served as Nixon’s finance chairman during his presidential campaign. Now, on Tuesday evening, August 29, Fisher flew from Detroit to Washington, D.C., to attend a dinner at Folger’s home. Nixon was there, and during the meal Fisher discussed the pros and cons of Nixon’s being governor of California. The governorship may well have provided a prestigious platform and a pathway to the Oval Office, but Nixon was convinced that Kennedy would be unbeat - able in 1964. Then, too, Nixon was not all that certain he wanted to be a governor. Fisher understood Nixon’s hesitancy, but he was concerned that Nixon not lose his place in public life or be overshadowed: Nelson Rockefeller was running for governor in New York and William W. Scranton in Pennsylvania.

Despite his ambivalence —or perhaps because of it —Nixon wel- comed the chance to hear the thinking of an inner circle of advisers. Over the Labor Day weekend, he wrote Fisher: “It was certainly most thoughtful and generous of you to take the time, particularly on such

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short notice, to come to [the Folgers’]. This is a difficult decision but I feel most fortunate in having the benefit of your thinking as to what I should do.”

On September 27, Nixon announced that he would seek the gover- norship of California in 1962. Governor Pat Brown publicly responded that Nixon “sees the governorship of this state only as a steppingstone for his own presidential ambitions.” It was a charge that would be echoed throughout the campaign. Californians, pollsters soon discov- ered, came to accept it. One poll showed that 36 percent thought that Nixon was truly interested in serving as governor, while 64 percent be- lieved that he was far more interested in running for president. What- ever the truth of the charge, the White House —at least his try for it in 1960 —was much on Nixon’s mind. During the fall, Nixon wistfully told Fisher: “As I looked at my desk calendar this morning, it seemed hardly possible that a year had gone since our campaign of 1960 came to a close. I would not want this day to pass without ... [telling] you again how deeply grateful I am for all that you did for our cause. No candidate for the presidency could have had a more dedicated and loy- al group of supporters.”

Fisher believed that Nixon still had his eye on the White House. On March 14, Nixon mailed Fisher an autographed advance copy of Six Crises. (Nixon sent dozens out to prominent Republicans.) Fisher’s reply to the gift is revealing, for it illuminates what Fisher perceived as Nixon’s mixed feelings about his race in California. After thanking Nixon for the book, Fisher said: “I am more convinced than ever that what I have felt always of your ability to fill the highest office is con - firmed. Good luck to you in your forthcoming campaign. I will be in touch with Cliff Folger since I would like to be as helpful as possible.” Fisher was helpful: his best recollection is that he gave somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 to Nixon’s gubernatorial campaign. The dollars that Fisher contributed were small compared to what he would contribute to Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and almost negligible when compared to the millions he would raise for him in those election years. (Nixon’s entire 1962 race cost $1.42 million.) But it would seem that the reality of Fisher’s continued confidence was drawing Nixon

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closer to him. Fisher’s willingness to be involved, to put his money up, was heightened because Nixon was having trouble raising funds. Large contributors who were willing to aid a potential president were reluctant to write checks when the stakes were a governorship.

In July, two days before Fisher turned fifty-four, he flew to Wash - ington for another dinner with the Nixons at the Folgers’ house. For a while, the dinner conversation centered on the California race. But then the discussion became more general, drifting toward the politi- cian’s difficult lot, and Nixon told the group that “constant and loyal friends in political life are rare indeed,” and he felt particularly fortu- nate to be among those sort of friends now.

In a note thanking Fisher for taking the time to fly to Washington, Nix - on expressed what may well have been his premonition that he would lose the governorship. For if he intended to move into the governor’s residence in Sacramento, it seemed odd that he would conclude his note with “[Pat and I] hope it will not be too long before you will be out this way so that we can welcome you in our new home in Beverly Hills.” On Election Day, November 7, 1962, Nixon watched the returns on his television in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That evening, Fisher phoned him from Detroit.

“It doesn’t look like I’m going to quite make it,” Nixon said. “I’m glad things are going better for Republicans in Michigan.”

The next morning, after Governor Brown had defeated him, Nixon went to face reporters. By his own account, he “looked terrible and felt worse,” and he angrily told the journalists: “You won’t have Nix- on to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

It was a statement that would trail Nixon like an unfortunate shad- ow, establishing him as a “sore loser,” an image that, as he stated in RN, he would fight against in his 1968 bid for the presidency. But in 1962, the prevailing wisdom was that Nixon was walking out of history. The next day, in The New York Times, James Reston wrote that Nixon “will have to be left to the historians and the psychological novelists.” Four days later, on ABC television, Howard K. Smith hosted a special, “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.”

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Fisher, of course, was distressed by the loss in California, partly because he had encouraged his friend to run and also because he real- ized that without a political base, Nixon’s chances to become president were limited. Even though he saw Nixon’s biting retirement statement on the news, Fisher felt that he was far from through with politics. Soon after the gubernatorial race, he wrote to Nixon: “This is just to let you know we are thinking of you and hoping we can continue our very fine relationship. It is unfortunate that there have to be losers in political battles, but I remember your philosophy on this and it is my hope that this will not be the end of political activity for you. However, whatever you do I would like to hear from you.”

Nixon’s reply arrived in the form of gift. “In view of the frost dam- age to the citrus crop across the nation,” said the enclosed letter, “I thought you might enjoy these navel oranges, grown in a frost-free area in the foothills of Southern California.”

The letter did not mention politics. On the surface, Nixon’s exit appeared complete.

***

In the winter of 1963, Nixon believed he was ruling himself out as an active political figure for the foreseeable future by relocating to New York City and joining a renowned Wall Street law firm, which shortly became Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander.

Nixon, although he told The Los Angeles Times that Manhat- tan was very exciting — “the fast track” — was having difficul - ty adjusting. One of Nixon’s new partners was Leonard Garment, a litigating partner at the firm. Eleven years Nixon’s junior, Gar - ment, a Jew born in Brooklyn, was a former saxophonist with the big bands of Woody Herman and Henry Jerome, a self-described “band manager and general utility musician.” He would play a large role in Nixon’s 1968 campaign and would serve in both Nixon ad- ministrations and under President Gerald R. Ford. Garment also would become a close friend and associate of Fisher. He was the one who had arranged the Edward Bennett Williams-Nixon lunch

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at Le Cirque and then told Fisher of Mayor Daley’s dying regret of stealing the 1960 election from Nixon.

When Nixon began his stint on Wall Street, Garment noticed that the former vice president seemed to feel out of synch.

“I took it upon myself to help him become oriented to a New York law firm,” Garment says. “I knew that he was uncomfortable with the jar - gon and all that. Mymotives were: one, my great personal curiosity about [Nixon] —he was a man out of history, suddenly my partner, and I was very interested in seeing what made him function; number two, I had a self-interest in him as an up-and-coming partner to fit him into the firm and help him establish credentials as a lawyer; and three, I was aware, from the time he joined the firm, that he was not finished with politics.

“But Wall Street,” Garment continues, “was not Nixon’s natural field of action. In politics, people are very direct —it’s almost a phys - ical encounter. However, on Wall Street, it’s a very complicated, con- voluted language. And then you have country clubs and golf and the private clubs in town. That was not Richard Nixon’s cup of tea.” Fisher met often with Nixon in New York, but Fisher saw that the erstwhile candidate was unquestionably cut off from politics, that he was wandering —in the words of William Safire, who would become a speechwriter for President Nixon and then a columnist for The New York Times —in the “wilderness.” Nixon had no power base and slim hope of establishing one, since NewYork’s Republican Party was con- trolled by Governor Rockefeller, who also coveted the White House. Still, Fisher and Nixon continued to discuss politics and foreign affairs, and Nixon, now the outsider, began to sense a kinship with Fisher. “Max,” says Nixon, “was never part of the big-business Eastern Es- tablishment, though he had a lot more stroke than most of them. And he had his lines into more than Marathon Oil. But just as I was never the candidate of Wall Street —I was the candidate of Main Street — Max was the [Bernard] Baruch of the heartland. Baruch was influential because people thought he was so wise and smart; that’s because he was part of the Eastern Establishment. Max [would become] a key adviser to presidents, and a very influential one, more so than Baruch ever was. But the general public knew little about him.”

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Nixon was correct in assessing that Fisher perceived himself as an outsider because of his origins, but it was not because Fisher was a child of the heartland. Rather, it was because Fisher was Jewish, a fact that in Fisher’s mind influenced how he conducted himself in every facet of business, philanthropy and politics.

“In order to be successful,” says Fisher, “you have to be good at what you’re doing. But because I was Jewish I always felt that I had to be twice as good.”

Fisher’s discussions with Nixon led him to conclude (as Garment had) that Nixon was not as removed from the arena as it appeared. In early 1964, Barry Goldwater had decided to contest President Lyndon Johnson in the upcoming presidential election. Politically, Goldwater and LBJ were seated on opposite sides of the Great Society ballroom. Johnson was on the left, an updated version of his hero, FDR, with an aggressive stance on social programs and civil rights. Goldwater, conversely, appealed to those who desired a simpler America, before the advent of government safety-net systems. Goldwater was also a hard-liner on the deployment of military force. He claimed that he would consider giving field commanders control over the use of tacti - cal nuclear weapons, and he became a proponent of an escalated effort in Vietnam. He was popular with Southern segregationists and a smat- tering of formalized groups on the radical right — notably, the John Birch Society —and although Goldwater stated that he did not agree with many of the Birchers’ views, he said that he “refused to engage in any wholesale condemnation of them.”

It was not just the Democrats who attacked Goldwater. He managed to alienate moderate Republicans, Fisher and Nixon among them. And so in the first week of June 1964, when Nixon, en route to the National Governors’ Conference in Cleveland, came to Detroit for a fund-raiser, he had a private breakfast meeting at the Book-Cadillac Hotel with Governor Romney of Michigan and Fisher.

Romney, a popular centrist Republican with a strong record on civil rights, had been critical of Goldwater’s “extremism.” Nixon and Fisher, like all liberal and mainstream Republicans, were concerned about the effect of Goldwater’s rightist stance on party unity; losing the White

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House was one thing, but the fallout in statehouses and in Congress was potentially disastrous. So now, over breakfast, Nixon attempted to convince Romney to challenge Goldwater for the nomination. Romney was not sure he was ready to make that move. Fisher said that he felt it was far too early for the governor to seek national office; the party was hopelessly divided, the election machinery was not in place, and Romney’s reputation was still circumscribed by Michigan’s borders. The breakfast broke up, and from this point, the story grows mud- dled, the truth depending on whose version one accepts.

Romney and Nixon traveled separately to Cleveland; Fisher re- mained in Detroit. The governor and Nixon conferred again during the conference. Nixon spoke to reporters and flew on to Baltimore to board a plane for a business trip to London. Here, though, the tale shifts. The press started to spread the word of a Romney candidacy. According to Jules Witcover, in The Resurrection of Richard Nixon (published in 1970), when Nixon arrived in Baltimore, his aide John Whitaker told him: “It’s on the radio that Romney’s not going to run.”

Nixon was stunned. He said: “What do you mean he’s not going to run? He told me he was.”

Romney claims that he never said he was going to enter the race. Fisher, who does not remember Romney ever agreeing to become a candidate, does recall that Nixon phoned him from Baltimore, saying that he had not told reporters Romney was going to challenge Gold- water. Nixon apologized for the mix-up and asked Fisher to pass the message along to the governor.

By the summer of 1964, the relationship between Fisher and Nix- on began to shift, becoming more personal —particularly for two men whom associates often characterized as strictly businesslike and distant. Leonard Garment, who observed the Fisher-Nixon friendship for more than two decades, felt that it was based on their similarities. “They are both men of action,” says Garment, “both dependent on being part of large events. They are very pragmatic people, distrustful of the big gesture and a lot of talk about clout. Now in Max’s case, he made money and achieved status and then he wanted to reach the next stage —to be a player on the field of politics. [So they had] that

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in common. And Richard Nixon had real admiration for Max. He saw him as somebody who had come out of the Midwest, not wealthy, who worked hard and eventually [earned his fortune]. There are very simi- lar elements to both lives: relentless work and deprivation and struggle and then getting up the ladder. So I think there was a real empathy between them. They were both very ambitious, hard-working men who had finally broken through to a kind of clear horizon.”

The emotional foundation of their friendship, then, was a blend of constricted pasts and expansive futures, of memory and dreams, and by the summer of 1964 they were close enough for Nixon to let down his guard and show Fisher another side of his personality, a side not generally known to the public.

Nixon, despite his claims that he was “the candidate of Main Street, not Wall Street,” had traditionally been seen as someone who cared little for the common man. It was a perception that Kennedy exploited in 1960.

Historian Stephen Ambrose writes: “Kennedy had never spent one day of his life at manual labor for pay, yet he managed to duplicate the FDR miracle of convincing millions that he was a real friend of the poor workingman. Nixon had worked at manual jobs every day of his life until he became a lawyer, but even his maudlin accounts of his youthful poverty failed to convince most people that he cared one fig for the common laborer.”

The side of Nixon that did indeed care for the common man was what he revealed to Fisher in an exchange of letters beginning in July 1964. For all of the light it sheds on Nixon, it also indicates the turn his friendship with Fisher was taking.

“Dear Max,” Nixon wrote. “As you know, I get my hair cut in the — barbershop. John, the barber, was originally from [Europe]. Alex, who shines shoes, handles the telephone appointments and acts as valet for the shop, also came from [Europe]. When [Alex] lived [overseas], he worked as a stone dresser, which I understand is a highly skilled type of masonry for which there is no demand in this country. “When I was in the barbershop last week, Alex had just returned from Detroit where he had spent six weeks with his wife and children. This was the

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heartrending story he told me. His wife has had a very serious nervous breakdown and is now receiving shock treatment in one of the public institutions in Detroit. For four weeks, Alex went to the various em- ployment offices and tried to get a job as a laborer, maintenance man or anything else that might be available. He was unable to get work there and had to return to New York in order to be able to send at least a small sum each week to his family.

“[Alex] was obviously desperate in his desire to find some kind of work in Detroit so that he could be with his wife and his children during this period. As he put it to me, ‘I would willingly let somebody cut off my right hand if it would mean getting a job in Detroit.’

“I do not know why he and his wife have been separated in the first place. I do know that his desire to be with her and to provide for her and the children is genuine in every respect. He fears that if he is un- able to return to Detroit, his wife may commit suicide because of her very disturbed mental condition.

“I hesitate to ask someone as busy as you are to look into a matter of this type, but I thought that possibly through some of your many con- tacts in the business and political world you might find some company or individual who could provide employment for Alex in the mainte- nance or common-laborer category.

“Perhaps the next time you are in [New York], you might like to check out Alex’s story yourself. In any event, I felt compelled to pass it on to you.”

A cursory glance at Nixon’s childhood can partially explain why Nixon “felt compelled” to pass Alex’s troubles on to Fisher. There were the financial hardships suffered by Nixon’s family; the terminal illnesses of two brothers; and the painful three-year separation from his mother when she moved from Whittier, California, to Prescott, Ari- zona, to nurse his oldest brother, Harold, who was dying from tubercu- losis. So when he became aware of Alex, an immigrant in search of his small slice of the American dream while beset by family and financial problems, Nixon’s urge to assist him must have been overpowering. Fisher, too, as a youngster, had endured the struggle of his father to provide for his family, and the ensuing separation from his parents and

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siblings when he was left behind with his uncle in Salem, so William could set up a business in Cleveland. He also found Alex’s story com- pelling and soon after receiving Nixon’s letter, Fisher replied to him: “I suppose somewhere in Detroit we probably could find a job for Alex. But before doing so, I would like to have a little background on what work he has done in the past and how much he is earning at the present time. If you will have him write me a letter directly as to what he has done in the last few years, I will try to find something for him.” Nixon did not wait for Alex to contact Fisher. Instead, he took it upon himself to discover the specifics of Alex’s background and to send them to Fisher.

“This is in further reference to Alex,” Nixon wrote. “He will be forty years old [this year], speaks good English with a slight accent, makes a good personal appearance, and is in good health. He has been at [the barbershop] since March 1963 as the valet, but also handles appointments for the barber by phone and serves as the cashier. From January 1962 to February 1963, he worked at —as an elevator opera- tor; during 1960 and 1961 he worked at —as the porter/maintenance man; before that he had a similar job at —. All of these jobs were in New York City. He has never worked in a gasoline service station, but his English is certainly good enough to do so, and I know of no reason why he couldn’t perform such a job well. Again, my appreciation for your willingness to take an interest in this matter.”

Three days later, Fisher instructed his corporate attorney, Max Is- berg, to get in touch with Alex and help place him in a job at one of Speedway 79’s gas stations.

***

It is not surprising that Nixon approached Fisher with a request to use his influence. Besides the healthy amount of clout he had around town, by the early 1960s, Fisher was celebrated for his charitable instincts. He once told an interviewer that he “always felt a great obligation to the community because of the great success of Aurora. You can’t take without giving something back.”

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As the interviewer observed, though, Fisher’s gift-giving and fund-raising had become a vocation. And to some degree it had re- wards beyond an altruistic glow. Fisher was, after all, publicly ac- claimed for his charity work. Apavilion at Detroit’s Sinai Hospital is named for him and his wife, as is a third-floor sunroom of the Detroit Jewish Home for the Aged and a gymnasium in West Bloomfield, Michigan. There is the community center in Ramla, Israel, and a park in Jerusalem (an honor he shares with Al Taubman). Then there are the scholarships that send students to study in Israel; and the Max Fisher Scholarships in Salem, Ohio. His office walls are crammed with honorary doctorates from colleges and universities — Ohio State, Eastern Michigan, Gratz, Yeshiva and others. There are also proclamations of Max M. Fisher Days, the Salvation Army’s William Booth Award, plaques, citations and certificates of every size and hue, and an oceanic silver-gold-and-glass montage praising his gen- erosity and fund-raising efforts.

Yet, far away from the public fanfare of conventional philanthropy, with its ribbon-cutting ceremonies, stately dinners and photographers capturing 1,000-watt smiles for society pages, stood Fisher the private benefactor, who gave in secret, who spotted someone in need and of- fered to help, his rewards more solitary, more personal. It was a feature of Fisher’s philanthropic activity that he never alluded to in interviews, and he must have kept it quiet around Detroit because reporters, who habitually questioned him on the minutiae of his charity work, did not even bother to ask him about it.

It is difficult to say when it began; Fisher claims he cannot recall, but his brother-in-law, Stanley Burkoff, discovered it in 1963. Burkoff had recently brought his family to Detroit from Toronto, and, unknowingly, started to frequent the same downtown barbershop as Fisher. Burkoff noticed that the barber and manicurist were unusu- ally attentive to him.

“I didn’t understand why I received such good service,” says Burkoff. “Until one afternoon Max came up in the conversation and I learned that he had put the barber’s son, and the manicurist’s daughter, through college.”

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There were other examples of men and women whom Fisher helped. Some were relatives of friends or employees; others, strangers, simply sought him out, made their case and were helped with tuition bills, down payments for houses and medical expenses. One afternoon, a longtime associate of Fisher phoned him upon inheriting a real estate company that was hard-pressed for cash. He told Fisher that the com- pany was about to go under and, by the end of the day, a signed, blank check was on its way, eventually to be filled in for $500,000. Joseph Nederlander, who, among other interests, operates the Fisher Theatre, recalls that producers whose shows were in trouble often came to Fish- er to bail them out; some loans were repaid, some were not.

“But Max never put any pressure on anyone,” says Nederlander. “He helped you and that was it. If you paid him back — fine. If you didn’t — that was fine, too.” A more extreme illustration of Fisher’s confidential philanthropy —since it involved not only his money but his time —was that of Joseph J. Wright.

Wright began working at the Fishers’ Franklin home when he was a sixteen-year-old high-school student at Brother Rice, a Catholic school in Birmingham, Michigan. Wright raked leaves, polished floors and performed a variety of odd jobs, part-time during the school year, full-time in the summer. His relationship with Fisher was casual: they would just say hello or chat about local sports.

In the winter of Wright’s senior year in high school, his father com- mitted suicide. Wright phoned the Fishers’ house manager, Richard Morse, and told him why he would be unable to come to work. Morse, in turn, called the Fishers, who were in Palm Beach, and told them what had happened.

Two days after the funeral, Fisher flew up from Florida, and Wright received a call that he wanted to see him. Wright drove over to the house. Fisher was waiting for him in the glass-walled garden room. The room, where Fisher conducts his business at home, is furnished with bright chintz-covered sofas and chairs centered around a low glass table and overlooks the Fishers’ pool and the eighth fairway of the Franklin Hills Country Club.

Wright sat across from him, and Fisher quietly said: “Joe, this is a

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situation, like others are going to be in your life, that can either destroy you or make you a stronger person. You have a lot of responsibility now. You’re the oldest in your family [Wright had three sisters and a brother]. The ball is in your court. But I’ll do anything I can to help you.” Wright was unaware of it, but this was a standard Fisher reaction to a problem, particularly one laced with tragedy. Fisher would offer a series of cliches —what technicians of the English language refer to as “dead metaphors.” But because Fisher himself believed so fiercely in what he was saying, the metaphors were transformed into a layman’s homily on conquering adversity. Fisher would sit back, stretch out his long legs, and, in his soft voice, pass along a folksy wisdom that might have sound- ed more appropriate coming from a nineteenth-century country lawyer than a present-day industrialist and investor. The effect was heightened by the deep furrows in Fisher’s forehead, the sad expression in his dark eyes, and by the fact, which was not lost on Wright, that Fisher’s power and wealth created a number of opportunities.

“I was stunned,” recalls Wright. “Here he was, Max Fisher. His associates are presidents and prime ministers, senators and CEOs, and he was taking the time out to help a kid who rakes leaves. I’m not Jewish and this wasn’t the United Foundation. [The help Fisher was offering] was not about flag-waving or fanfare. It was just a guy who cares about people.”

That afternoon in the garden room, Wright, although embarrassed, explained to Fisher that he had developed a problem with drugs and that his grades were terrible.

“You’ve got to put that all behind you now,” Fisher replied. “It’s time to take the bull by the horns.”

Wright returned to work at the Fishers’ on weekends, and he talked regularly with Max about his plans. As a result, Wright says, he decid- ed to attend Oakland Community College and “busted my ass to get into a good four-year school.”

Wright was accepted at Michigan State. He was nervous about go- ing, doubted that he could handle the more competitive scholastic re- quirements. Fisher encouraged him to enroll, and the Fisher Founda- tion paid for Wright’s room and board, tuition and books.

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“Given my family circumstances,” Wright says, “there was no other way I could have gone to school without the money from the founda- tion. And Mr. Fisher was strict. He wanted nothing less than a B aver- age out of me and he got it. But it wasn’t a complete freebie. [To earn spending money], I continued working part-time for him. We would sit down every six weeks or so and he would question me about school and review my grades.”

Wright graduated from Michigan State and, at Fisher’s urging, de- cided to attend graduate school. Wright applied to the Detroit College of Law, and while his grades were adequate, Wright was concerned that his law-board scores were not high enough. And so Wright went to Fisher’s office and told him about his concern.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Fisher asked.

“He knew,” Wright says, “but he wouldn’t let him take the indirect route. So I asked him, flat out, ‘Can you help me?’”

Smiling, Fisher quipped: “I hope I don’t have to build them a library.” “I don’t think I’ll need that much help,” Wright said. Fisher asked Wright for a Detroit School of Law brochure, and Wright handed one to him. Fisher scanned the list of trustees, recognized a name and had his assistant call him. Fisher took the phone and said to the trustee: “I’ve got a young man here who works for me and wants to go to your law school. I’d like you to talk to him. No, no, next week’s no good. How about today? He’s here now. I’ll send him over to see you.”

Wright was accepted by the Detroit School of Law. The Fisher Foundation paid for his tuition and books and loaned him money to cover his living expenses. Fisher continued to meet with Wright to discuss his academic career.

“I had gotten a poor grade,” says Wright, “and I went to Mr. Fisher’s office to tell him about it. I remember that I was very nervous. I was perspiring.”

“Hey,” Fisher said when he saw Wright, “you’re sweating. You don’t have to be nervous around me. I’m your friend. What happened? Did you flunk a course?”

“Yes,” Wright answered.

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“So take it over again,” said Fisher. “And let me know how you make out.”

“I got a B the second time,” says Wright. “My motivation was that I didn’t want to disappoint him. When I graduated from law school, he gave me a check for $500.”

Joseph Wright went on to become a product-liability attorney at a prestigious Detroit law firm. The job, he is proud to say, he got on his own.

Explains Wright: “I wanted one day to be able to go back to Mr. Fisher and say: ‘Look what you helped me accomplish.’ I feel so much love for him it’s unbelievable.”

***

In biographical detail, the parallels between the lives of Fisher and Nixon are marked. Born five years apart (1908 and 1913), and grow - ing up in small Quaker towns (Salem and Whittier), their boyhoods spanned the cusp of the era before technology altered the face of their country forever. These were —as purveyors of nostalgia assure us — the halcyon days of America, days of clear rushing streams and boys marching through woods with fishing poles fashioned from mop han - dles and string, genteel days so radically at odds with the nuclear age, when both men ascended toward the pinnacle of their power. Nixon’s mother, Hannah, was a diligent homemaker, and his father, Frank, an industrious shopkeeper, much in the mold of Mollie and William Fish- er. More than a half-century later, when Nixon wrote about his parents in his memoirs, he could well have been describing Fisher’s percep- tions of Mollie and William.

“My father,” Nixon remembered, “was a scrappy, belligerent fight - er.... He left me a respect for learning and hard work, and the will to keep fighting no matter what the odds. My mother loved me complete - ly and selflessly, and her special legacy was ... the determination never to despair.”

Nixon and Fisher grew up working in their fathers’ stores. As teen- agers, both were enthusiastic athletes who found inspiration in the dis-

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cipline of their high-school football coaches, who were active in school clubs and fraternities (frequently heading them), and who, due to the limited financial resources of their families, required scholarships and jobs to finish their educations. Both met with early success: by the age of forty Fisher was well en route to amassing his fortune; Nixon was vice president. Although certain aspects of their lives may have varied (Fisher was more athletic, Nixon more intellectual), the themes Leon- ard Garment mentioned — deprivation, turmoil, hard work and their belief in their ability to shape their futures —were interchangeable. One could flip through the pages of a considerable catalogue of American men born between 1908 and 1913 who could recount jour- neys akin to Fisher’s and Nixon’s, from modest, quaint-and-nameless- town childhoods to a middle age that flourished in the urban halls of answered prayers and privilege. Therefore, it is not merely the back- ground that formed their bond, but it is the analogous temperaments that came along for the ride, temperaments that engaged the concealed territories of each man’s mind. Here, in these darker places, Fisher and Nixon were men more guarded than most. Regardless of the public necessities of their chosen professions, they nursed a passion for priva- cy, a secret love of secrets, devout in their belief that emotionally one should never tip one’s hand. Thus, neither man had much tolerance for personal conflict; they found it excruciating. When challenged by a lacework of potentially explosive political complexities, their impulse was to sidestep nimbly to the wings, to tug on the cable and curtain backstage, giving their penchant for secrecy full rein.

In foreign affairs and the politicking within the American Jewish community, this proclivity would prove to be a propitious match. However, in another arena, where Nixon was concerned, it also would underlie his resignation from office.

Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie, commenting on Six Crises, said that in the book she detected a “kind of terror” in Nixon’s “fear of loss of control.” It was a fear that Fisher shared. He had one steadfast rule in dealing with conflict, personal and professional: “You stay calm,” Fisher says. “You have to control your emotions.”

As to be expected of men who strive for control, Fisher and Nixon

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were generally guarded. Initially, what is most striking about this in- gredient of their personalities is that since they played their emotional cards close to their vests, despite two decades of meetings and lunches and letter writing and conversations over the phone, they knew lit- tle of each other’s background. Whatever bonds abided between them abided in silence, remaining wholly intuitive. The similarities between their lives were too remarkable to ignore, and yet before each began reading about the other they were unaware of them. (In 1981, when Nixon was told by an interviewer that Fisher had grown up in a Quaker town in Ohio, much like the town Nixon himself had lived in, Nixon was astounded.) It was not until May 1978, when Nixon sent Fisher a copy of RN, that Fisher’s knowledge of Nixon’s past exceeded what the press had written about him. And the same was true with Nixon’s knowledge of Fisher. In January 1982, Nixon, traveling to Florida, dashed off a note to Fisher that demonstrated just how uninformed he was about his friend’s background.

“On a flight to Miami,” Nixon wrote, “I picked up the airline mag - azine K saw the fine [profile of] you from Forbes. What a career you have had? My only reservation is whether the $100,000,000 [estimate of your net worth] might be on the low side in view of your Horatio Alger successes in your business career?”

Predictably, another aspect of each man’s seeking emotional disci- pline was that Fisher and Nixon had a potent dislike of personal con- flict, both having learned to dislike it as children while encountering their fathers’ anger.

Nixon recalled: “It was [my father’s] temper that impressed me most as a small child.... He was a strict and stern disciplinarian.... Per- haps my own aversion to personal confrontation dates back to these early recollections.”

Fisher, too, as a youngster, preferred to dodge William’s wrath — es- pecially his criticism —as opposed to meeting it directly. As an adult, Fisher was known to go to great lengths to avoid open conflict. His reputation as a consensus builder within the American Jewish com- munity was founded on his need to view events in their least divisive light. Better, he thought, to solve everything off in the wings. Better

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yet, to cast everything that appears to be a battle as nothing more than a misunderstanding or, at worst, a mild difference of opinion among friends. This was, in Fisher’s case, the foundation of his pragmatism. “I always see good in people,” Fisher says. “You can look at a per- son and if you look at his faults, he’s a devil; if you look at his virtues, he’s a saint. [But] there’s no such thing as a devil or a saint. I am an optimist and focus on the best side of the people. The result is —I get along. You know, people have fixed ideas about a person. ‘Oh,’ they’ll say, ‘that guy’s screwy.’ I take [people] on balance. As long as I get a1ong with them.

The portraits that emerge from this sketch of Fisher and Nixon are of two men who are controlled and reticent. Yet Nixon pursued the most visible office in the world; Fisher ventured out on a smaller — although highly visible —scale in the Jewish community. The politi- cally pragmatic basis of the Fisher-Nixon alliance is contained within this paradox.

Nixon once remarked that the media portrayed the late President Herbert Hoover as “sour, stiff, and sullen,” but the truth, Nixon claimed, was that Hoover “was an introvert in an extrovert’s pro- fession.” Nixon’s image in the press approximated Hoover’s, and it may be that Nixon, in observing Hoover, was divulging something of himself. It has been said of Nixon that he was a president with the soul of a secretary of state, and this assertion is not limited to Nix- on’s love of foreign policy. Instead, it captures the aura of privacy, of distance, that Nixon maintained —if not in an ivory tower then in numerous private offices.

Because occupying a leadership platform in the American Jewish community is a far narrower stage than the Oval Office, Fisher’s dis - tance was more complete than Nixon’s. He moved through Washing- ton unobserved, with rare exception, by those outside the inner sanc- tums of government. Fisher was so secretive that even Marjorie could not track him down when calls came to their Michigan home. Maybe, she would tell the caller, Max was in Palm Beach; try him there. No, he wasn’t in Florida. How about New York? No. Washington? No again. Well, he’s not supposed to leave for Israel until next week.

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Even associates who attended Fisher’s confidential talks with lead - ers were uninformed about other avenues of influence that Fisher walked. Jacob Stein, for one, who as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations participated in many private meetings with Fisher and Henry Kissinger on Israel and Soviet Jewry, had no idea that Fisher was also back-channeling on the same issues with Attorney General John N. Mitchell. The reason that Stein did not know: Fisher never told him. Seymour Milstein, an old and trusted friend who along with Fisher would guide United Brands, was aware that Fisher had contacts in politics, but never realized the level of his involvement until one morning, while sitting with Fisher in a New York hotel suite, there was a knock on the door. When Fisher opened it, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was in the door- way. He had come to talk.

Throughout each one of his years spent in secrecy, when the spe- cialized fruits of his efforts were devoured by the more substantial appetites of history and credited to others, Fisher seriously contemplat- ed pursuing public life. He was offered ambassadorships and Cabinet posts, and he regularly refused them. But to stand before the footlights was a constant temptation, a rainbow just out of reach.

“I thought about it a lot,” says Fisher. “I could have had a public career. But I turned it down. I’m not sure why.”

There are some readily identifiable components to his resistance. There is Fisher’s innate shyness and his fear —mastered in his fifties — of addressing crowds. Then there are the random humiliations of public office, the rude invasion of privacy. Fisher had worked too hard to control his world; publicity, in the form of unwanted scrutiny and criticism by the press, would have forced him to relinquish his control, and this was not the sort of life he envisioned. Finally, and what may be the underpinning of his refusal, was that Fisher believed his obscu- rity, his reveling in secrets as the insider’s insider, was the source of his enduring and singular power, what gave him the flexibility to move from president to president, from Washington to Jerusalem, from the issues of arms shipments to the fluctuations in Israeli-American rela - tions. He was never too closely identified with one president or prime

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minister or secretary of state or senator because hardly anyone beyond a select circle could identify him at all. His diplomatic ghost ship was exclusive, with a passenger list of one.

And so it was that Nixon, a public man longing for privacy, and Fisher, a private man with his eye on center stage, became friends. Yet in the early 1960s, the world knew little of their friendship. Fisher was far more identified with another presidential hopeful. In fact, at his “last press conference,” Nixon commented that the most significant results of the 1962 election were the Republican gubernatorial win- ners in four major states —Nelson Rockefeller in New York, William Scranton in Pennsylvania, James J. Rhodes in Ohio and George Rom- ney in Michigan.

Fisher had helped pave the way to Lansing for Romney; he had, more accurately, been responsible for financing it. And in one of those quirks of history —one of those puzzling coincidences that seems en- tirely logical from the distance of two decades —Romney also would become a thread in the Fisher-Nixon story, a strand inextricably woven within the tale.

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Chapter 6

FISHER AND ROMNEY AND

THE LEGACYOFTHE SIX-DAY WAR

MAX FISHER MET George Romney in 1962. Perhaps by then it was only a matter of time before Romney was approached to enter pol- itics. As political writer Theodore W. White observed, Romney could have been a candidate ordered up out of “Hollywood’s Central Cast- ing,” and in the aftermath of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, politi- cos were starting to understand the magic that television possessed to sway voters.

Romney was a natural for television. His all-American, square- jawed good looks were accentuated by his silvered shock of hair and laser-blue eyes. He had worked his way through Latter-Day Saints University in Salt Lake City, Utah, and served as a Mormon mission- ary in Europe. By 1938, at the age of thirty-one, Romney was lobbying for the Automobile Manufacturers Association. Impressed by Rom- ney’s record, George Mason, chairman of Nash-Kelvinator, hired him in 1948 as his special assistant. American Motors was formed through the Nash-Kelvinator-Hudson merger and when Mason died, Romney took over the corporation.

By 1959, American Motors, on the strength of its compact car, the Rambler, was showing profits of $60 million. Michigan was not doing as well. The state general fund was so depleted that 26,000 state em- ployees could not cash their paychecks. The problem was an outmoded state constitution and a feud between Democratic Governor G. Men- nen Williams and the Republican-controlled Legislature. Soapy Wil- liams, so named because his maternal grandfather founded the Men-

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nen Company, a soap and pharmaceutical firm, was elected governor for six consecutive terms between 1948 and 1960, a record unequaled in the United States. (In 1960, when Williams accepted a Kennedy appointment as assistant secretary of state for African affairs, he was replaced by his machine’s choice, John B. Swainson.) Williams was noted for his trademark crew cut, green polka-dot bow ties and his avid backing of a state tax on personal income and corporate profits, which Republican legislators opposed, producing a stalemate.

To break the deadlock, Romney organized a statewide committee, Citizens for Michigan, whose purpose was to direct public action to- ward “a more responsible political climate.” He gathered a coterie of powerful men, among them Robert S. McNamara, head of Ford Motor Company and later secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Through the efforts of Citizens for Michigan, voters approved a referendum in favor of a constitutional convention. “ConCon” con- vened in Lansing in October of 1961, with Romney as a delegate, and when the rewriting was complete, Michigan had a constitution that was lauded as one of the outstanding charters in the nation.

For years, people had urged Romney to pursue politics. Richard Nixon was one; Robert McNamara was another. And when Romney fi - nally determined his course, he did so in a way that was consistent with his Mormon faith. On February 8, 1962, he began praying and fasting for twenty-four hours. When he was done, he declared that he would seek the Republican gubernatorial nomination. A campaign manag- er was selected, Arthur G. Elliott Jr., the chairman of the Republican organization in Oakland County, home to many of Michigan’s well- heeled Republicans, including Max Fisher. Signing up a high-powered fund-raiser was a priority. Richard VanDusen, a young attorney on the rise who was among Romney’s inner circle, was given the assignment of recruiting one.

VanDusen and Romney agreed that Jason Honigman, a Detroit law- yer and former Republican candidate for Michigan attorney general, would be the best choice for the job. And so it was, in the winter of 1962, that VanDusen and Romney met with Honigman and invited him to sign on as finance chairman.

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Honigman had one problem: “I hate asking people for money,” he told them.

But, Honigman added, he had a friend and client, Max Fisher, who would be terrific. Max had gumption, Honigman said, and was not ap - prehensive about asking people for money or handing them back their checks when he thought they were not being as munificent as possible. Romney replied that he had heard of Fisher through his wife, Lenore, who was familiar with Fisher’s work at Detroit’s United Foundation, and he would like to talk to him. Honigman promised that he would get in touch with Fisher.

Years before, Honigman and Fisher had struck up a friendship at the Franklin Hills Country Club. By 1962, Honigman was handling much of Fisher’s legal work. Beyond business, the two men shared a casual attitude toward golf. Despite the snowbound Michigan winters, they conceded that in the interest of health they should exercise. So, on occasional weekends, while waiting for a football game to start on TV, they tramped behind Fisher’s house to the course at Franklin Hills and proceeded to drive, chip and putt through the snow.

After talking with Honigman, Fisher says, “I was intrigued. Rom- ney was a popular figure and he had a great reputation for integrity. He was controversial, but he was right about calling those big American cars ‘gas-guzzling dinosaurs’ and years ahead of his time. I thought he was top-notch.”

Fisher was scheduled to fly to a board meeting at Marathon Oil in Findlay, Ohio, and he arranged to meet Romney at a hangar-office out at Pontiac Airport, a private airfield.

“We visited out there for an hour,” says Romney. “Max wanted to know my basic philosophy and I told him. I was impressed by him and thought he would make an excellent finance chairman. But it wasn’t a case of his selling me; I was selling him.”

“We just hit it off,” says Fisher of that meeting. As for Romney’s qualifications, Fisher felt that he might do for Michigan what he had done at American Motors. And his moderate attitudes also appealed to Fisher. There was Romney’s position on race —one that was dia- metrically opposed to the Mormon church, which claimed, according

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to Theodore White, “that blacks were eternally consigned to outer darkness in the Hall of God.” Ignoring the political backlash, Rom- ney called for the dismissal of Richard Durant, a key Republican leader in Michigan, because he had affiliated himself with the John Birch Society. Romney also directed his campaign staff to reach out to the black community. Albert B. Chennault, a black builder, would serve as his treasurer, and Charles M. Tucker Jr., a black business executive who had been active in the civil-rights movement, would oversee race relations.

The basis of Fisher’s support for Romney was multifaceted, encom- passing more than their communal nest under the moderate wing of the Republican Party. In May, already three months into the campaign, Fisher told one Romney contributor: “The way things have been going in Michigan, we are certainly due for some changes.” In light of this remark it is probably safe to say that Fisher would have aided any mid- dle-of-the-road Republican gubernatorial candidate. But Fisher recog- nized that Romney was not merely any candidate: he had a rugged, apple-pie charisma. His metamorphosis from blue-collar worker to head of American Motors, combined with the triumph of the Rambler, had the quality of a fairy tale. His picture had graced the cover of Time and he had been favorably profiled in numerous national magazines. Undeniably, he had potential for office outside of Michigan — perhaps the presidency. And as nebulous as Fisher’s political ambitions were in 1962, it is unlikely that they were confined to his home state.

First, though, Fisher had to win the approval of Romney’s closest advisers —Elliott and VanDusen —and another meeting was sched- uled a few days after the Fisher-Romney chat at Pontiac. On a bitter cold evening, Fisher rode to Romney’s house in Bloomfield Hills. El - liott and VanDusen were there and the four men sat by the living-room fireplace. Elliott, the single party regular in the group, was impressed by Fisher’s practical questions on the mechanics of Romney’s cam- paign structure and policy. Elliott might have been less impressed if he knew that, according to Fisher, he was posing the questions to see if signing on would be —borrowing an expression from the oil business —“pouring money down a dry hole.”

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Upon concluding that Romney would be a viable candidate, Fisher stood in front of the fireplace and quietly said: “I believe in leadership giving,” a phrase that was new to Romney and his men, but one that Fisher used regularly when fund-raising. “I don’t think I can effec- tively go out and ask people for money if I haven’t given, and if the candidate hasn’t given, and if the people close to the candidate haven’t given. So I want your check, George. And I want your check, Dick, and I want your check, Art. Right now.”

The three men complied. Then Fisher wrote a check of his own — for $20,000. From then on, even before the official announcement of his position, Fisher was accepted into Romney’s inner circle, filling a role beyond his duties as finance chairman.

Richard VanDusen explains: “At the outset, Max indicated that if he was going to be responsible for raising money he felt that it was important for him to have some participation in how it was spent. That gave him access to discussions on campaign direction and strategy. Max was very wise in the way he used that access. His suggestions were good and he didn’t come in and throw his weight around. He had a nice sense of discretion as to when his comments were appropriate and when he should listen.”

On March 28, 1962, George Romney formally announced that he was appointing Fisher as his finance chairman.

“Getting Max,” says VanDusen, “was a real coup. I don’t know that we appreciated at the time how much of a coup it was. He was a con- summate pro.”

Fisher’s professionalism was essential —as was his need to direct his area of responsibility alone —since Romney, other than appearing at functions, wished to remain aloof from raising money. “I didn’t want to pay attention to [the fund-raising],” Romney says, “because that left me in a freer position politically. I had an understanding with Max that he would raise it properly with no involvement on my part. And he got it done.” Fisher constructed a Republican fund-raising network from the ground up. Remer Tyson, a national political correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers who followed Fisher for over a decade while at the Detroit Free Press, recalled that at the time “the Republi-

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can Party in Michigan was Max Fisher and a telephone.” Fisher circled the state, speaking on behalf of Romney and assembling his machine. He gathered small groups, building upon them, pyramiding support, and he discovered that political fund-raising was not dissimilar from chasing charitable contributions.

“You’ve got to be a giver yourself,” says Fisher. “But the real secret is to get people to give without feeling fleeced. If people disappoint me, if they don’t give as much as I think they should, it troubles me, but it doesn’t destroy my faith in them. Their contributions may be small, but it’s better than nothing. Sure, I’d like them to give me a big piece of pie. And some people will give you a big piece; some a little. It takes a combination to put the whole thing together.”

Agroup that had the potential to cut out some larger slices for Rom- ney was the leadership of the Big Three —Chrysler, Ford and General Motors. The problem was that when Romney was at American Motors, he attacked their control of the car market and they considered this an ungrateful response to their having encouraged him to produce the Rambler back when American Motors was floundering. (The notion of producing a compact was partially an outgrowth of conversations Romney held with Harlow H. Curtice, president of General Motors.) Consequently, in the beginning, with the exception of Henry Ford II, the Big Three leaders were not eager to contribute to Romney. Fisher knew of the difficulty, and had even heard a story from an acquain - tance, Elton F. MacDonald, who charged that Romney’s behavior to- ward General Motors surpassed ingratitude. In the 1950s, MacDonald said, Romney had “begged Harlow Curtice to stop General Motors from taking any of [American Motors’] dealers —which Curtice did.” But Fisher felt that Big Three support was indispensable to a Rom- ney victory and so, he says, “I wooed them.”

A GM executive, who asked not to be identified, told The Detroit News, “We know Romney’s bent on dissolving the big motor com- panies, but most of us have contributed something to his [campaign] anyway. Max Fisher ... [has] gotten to just about everybody.”

Fisher says that he gave the Big Three leaders his standard, com- mon-sense fund-raising pitch. “I went to see them face-to-face,” says

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Fisher, “which is required when you’re dealing with that level of lead- ership. And I told them: ‘Look, the Democrats have been in control of Michigan for fourteen years. They have the unions behind them; they’re very strong. But Republicans —Romney —will be better for industry, better for you. And he needs your help.’ That’s how I con- vinced them to donate to George[’s campaign].”

Fisher may have been underestimating the value of his personal involvement. It was not false modesty, but rather his predilection for not digging at causes that were buried too far beneath the surface. According to Henry Ford II, Fisher’s ability to raise funds for Rom- ney was not solely based on his entreaty to the economic sensibilities of corporate leaders.

“Let me describe the influence of Max Fisher this way,” says Ford. “There are some things you do only because it’s Max Fisher asking you to do them.”

Anteing up for Romney would appear to be one of them. Among those who contributed was General Motors executive Semon E. “Bunk- ie” Knudsen, who in the early 1960s transformed GM’s stodgy Pontiac line into some of the hottest cars on the market. Knudsen, says Fisher, was suitably forthcoming: he handed over a check for $5,000. Fisher augmented his tête-à-têtes with a series of dinners, the bread-and-but- ter of major-league fund-raising. Among other places, he organized them at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, the Knollwood Country Club in West Bloomfield Hills, the Little Club in Grosse Point and at the country club where he belonged, Franklin Hills.

VanDusen, who attended many of the dinners, had never seen any- thing like it.

“I remember the dinner at Franklin Hills vividly,” he says. “It was my first exposure to that high-powered method of fund-raising. I had heard about it, but never experienced it firsthand. Max got the group warmed up by telling them how important it was [to have Romney elected governor] and what a great opportunity we had to bring Mich- igan back, to get the economy on the right track again. Max obvious- ly had everything primed. Because then Al Borman, who owned the [Farmer Jack] supermarket chain, stood up and gave his ‘banana ped-

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dler’ speech. Borman talked about what a marvelous country America is that it allows a humble banana peddler to rise to economic success. ‘This country has been good to me,’ Borman said. ‘And this state has been good to me. And I will give X.’ I don’t remember the amount Borman pledged, but it was substantial. And then, one after the other, everybody rose to make their contributions. I found myself so moved that I wrote another check. I did not get up and say, ‘Here I come down the sawdust trail.’ But I really was so caught up in the occasion that even though I had already made a contribution I considered substan- tial, I made another one.”

Elliott, too, was amazed. “I was at a fund-raising dinner Max had at the Knollwood Country Club in West Bloomfield Hills,” says El - liott. “Max gets up and gives his very sincere, very nice hearts-and- flowers talk. Then Romney spoke. After that, Max worked the room. People stood — I’m sure Max had set some of this up beforehand — and said what they would give. I was stunned. You have to re- member: this was 1962, when a $100 contribution to a politician was considered significant. And yet in about a half-hour, Max raised over $100,000. I had never seen this type of fund-raising or these kind of results. It was revolutionary.”

Supplementing these appeals, Fisher contacted everyone within his rapidly growing reach. His social and business life, his Jewish and nonsectarian fund-raising, had always dovetailed, and now he took ad- vantage of the connections. Al Taubman, the Sucher family, builders George Seyburn and Louis Berry, oil man Harold McClure and hun- dreds more —all were solicited and came through for Fisher. And he did not stop there. Even when a friend made a contribution, Fisher nudged them a step further. Using their display of interest as a fulcrum, he enlisted them in his cause. Edward C. Levy Sr. is a good illustration of how this practice worked. Levy, who lived across the street from the Fishers on Fairway Hills Drive, contributed $1,000 to Romney’s campaign. Upon thanking Levy for his donation, Fisher notified him that he should now consider himself “a committee of one whose goal it is to raise at least $1,000 from your friends and associates.” In the event Levy required a little help, Fisher sent him a pack of pledge

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cards. Nor did Fisher limit his endeavors to Michigan. He went to his old friend Nathan Appleman in NewYork, and to California, soliciting Leonard Friedman of Beverly Hills, who ran a highly successful steel business. Fisher knew Friedman through their fund-raising efforts on behalf of Jewish causes. He told Friedman that he was so enthusiastic about Romney he had taken on the job of finance manager and “of course we will require a tremendous amount of money to combat the great reserves of the unions in financing politics.” Next, Fisher shifted to Dallas, Texas. He contacted oil man Jake L. Hamon, who responded with a generous check, saying that the contribution should be made in Fisher’s name because “a Texan in Michigan is a liability. I am for [Romney] but don’t care for any credit in this matter.”

It was the sort of discretion Fisher appreciated, a discretion for which he would become noted. He told Hamon that Romney wanted to thank him personally for his check, “but in deference to your remarks will wait until he meets you.”

Throughout the campaign, the focus of Romney’s attack on Gov- ernor Swainson was the alarming loss of jobs in Michigan. Between 1956 and 1962, said Romney, 300,000 workers had deserted the la- bor force. Swainson countered by having President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson swing through Michigan to campaign for him, a strategy that backfired, for it provided Romney with an opening for some first-rate sniping. “We’d better get leadership,” he commented, “that doesn’t need ... coattails to get re-elected.”

Fisher had to keep at his task until November, and when he was fin - ished he had raised just under a million dollars, a sum that, according to Arthur Elliott, Romney and his staff considered “amazing.”

‘“With Max in charge,” says Elliott, “we never ran out of money and we always paid our bills.”

On Election Day, Romney squeaked past Swainson, capturing 1,419,046 votes to the incumbent’s 1,340,549. Ballot-splitting by Democrats was cited as the basis for Romney’s victory. The moderate Republican had bitten deeper into the vote of labor and the black com- munity than any Republican had been able to do since 1948.

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***

Romney’s win gave Fisher what he had hoped for: a working relation- ship with a high-profile governor. Two years later, Romney won again, but the Republican Party, as Fisher, Nixon and Romney had feared, was reeling from Goldwater’s decisive defeat in his 1964 race for the presidency against Johnson. (LBJ outdistanced Goldwater by more than 16 million popular votes, and in the Electoral College by a vote of 486 to 52.) The party itself was split into warring factions on the right and left, with no candidate to bring them together in the center.

“I know,” Nixon wrote Fisher after the election, “there are some who believe that a public repudiation of Goldwater would be good for the ‘image’ of the party. The argument goes that the number of hard- core Goldwater voters is only four or five million and that 1964 proved that this group cannot elect a candidate. However, the converse of this proposition is that while the hard-core supporters cannot elect a candi- date, they can certainly defeat one [in 1968] if they decide to sit it out.” There appeared to be no Republican who could seriously challenge Johnson in the next presidential election. But then in 1966, Romney was resoundingly re-elected again, which thrust him into the national spotlight, and pundits — Fisher among them — were describing the governor as “presidential timber.” In the ‘66 race, Romney defeated Zolton Ferency, the Democratic state chairman, by a 568,000-vote margin, astonishing observers by capturing 50 percent of the labor vote and 34 percent of the black vote, constituencies normally hostile to Republicans but warming to Romney’s (and Nelson Rockefeller’s and Jacob Javits’s) liberal Republicanism. Since the national machine of both parties endeavors to elect not only a president, but also a con- federation of candidates to advance that president’s agenda, Romney attracted the attention of Republican kingmakers because he had long coattails: Michigan Republicans won the five congressional seats they were seeking and sent Robert P. Griffin to the U.S. Senate.

Nor did Romney’s victory go unnoticed by the national press corps. The Michigan election was held on November 8, 1966. By December 11, even before Romney was sworn in for his third term, the Detroit

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Free Press was publishing the results of a nationwide survey, conduct- ed by a team of eight Knight Newspaper reporters from around the country. The reporters had toured thirty states from Maine to Califor- nia, talking to nearly 200 Republican governors, senators, party offi - cials, county chairmen and political experts. And what the reporters discovered was very good news for Romney: “The dynamic governor of Michigan,” wrote Free Press Washington staffer Robert S. Boyd, “has it within his power to capture the Republican presidential nomi- nation in 1968.” The survey also uncovered three major impediments to a successful Romney candidacy: the governor had to get out of Lan- sing and campaign; he had to boost his stature in the area of foreign policy; and he had to lay to rest the doubts about his personality — his tendency to appear holier-than-thou. Fisher felt this personality trait was an outgrowth of Romney’s genuine commitment to his Mormon ideals, a deep faith that was sometimes mistaken for imperiousness. Others, though, did not consider this idealism sufficient when selecting a president. “Being a super Boy Scout,” The Washington Star said of Romney, “is not enough.”

There was a fourth requirement for a victorious candidate, though this one was not unique to Romney. Jim Farley, one of the masterminds behind FDR’s 1932 presidential victory, identified the key to winning elections by remarking: “There are three requirements for a political campaign. The first is money; the second is money; and the third is money.” And in this pivotal area, the Knight Newspaper survey judged that Romney was in excellent shape. The survey said: “Romney’s chief money man, Detroit oil magnate Max M. Fisher, heads the United Jew- ish Appeal and is one of the most influential men in American Jewry. Romney, incidentally, addressed that organization in New York Thurs- day night [December 8].”

Fisher insisted that Romney speak to the UJA. During the past four years, he and Romney had reassembled the state’s Republican ma- chinery, establishing a dynasty of moderate Republicans that held the Statehouse into the 1980s. In the process, Fisher tucked himself into an influential niche within Michigan’s Republican Party. From his job as Romney’s finance chairman in 1962, he moved on to the job of

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Republican state finance chairman, a position he held until 1969. He served as a delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, and was soon to begin heading up the finance commit - tee for Romney’s campaign for the presidency.

The dinner at which Fisher presented Romney was no run-of-the- mill UJAreception. UJAexecutive vice president Rabbi Herbert Fried- man said that invitations had been restricted to “a very thin layer of the apex of American Jewish life.” (So many people wished to attend that the site had to be switched to the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-As- toria Hotel from a smaller room at the New York Hilton.). Over 600 guests sat at tables set with gold cloths and ivory candles, and danced to the music of the Lester Lanin orchestra. Despite the evening’s fri- volity, and its resemblance to an aristocrat’s ball, the purpose was to raise money, large amounts of it, for the affair was what is known on the fund-raising circuit as a “call dinner.” After a meal of rock Cornish hen, the doors were closed to the press, and guests were called by name from the dais to announce their contributions. The minimum pledge was $10,000, a sum The New York Times declared “a record.” The exact size of each donation was not revealed, but numerous individual gifts were said to exceed $333,000.

Romney was impressed. In his speech, he saluted the generosity of the guests: “American citizens, armed with this sense of respon- sibility, and blessed with greater material prosperity than any nation in history must give leadership in rebuilding and healing a torn and damaged world.”

It was Romney’s pet sermon, one he had been preaching since he announced the formation of Citizens for Michigan before he ran for governor. It was also an approach favored by Jewish self-help orga- nizations. And so Romney had to wonder: if this group can raise this much for a cause, then what could they do for a moderate Republican presidential contender who agreed with them?

For Fisher, as a fund-raiser and chairman of the UJA, providing Romney with an expanded Jewish forum was a logical move. Begin- ning in 1962, he had canvassed Detroit’s Jewish community biannual- ly for Romney’s gubernatorial races and the community had delivered.

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Since Romney was now contemplating national office, it followed that Fisher would present him to a more formidable national body.

But December 8, 1966, marked a more significant moment in Fish - er’s political quest. There was more at stake here: the Oval Office, not the statehouse, and the likelihood of a position of consequence for Fisher, an opportunity for input beyond local issues. In Fisher’s case, this meant problems dear to the heart of the American Jewish commu- nity; it meant Israel. The circumstances were transparently political. Fisher was arranging a betrothal. In short, bringing George Romney to address “the apex of Jewish American life” was Max Fisher’s first overt attempt to politicize American Jewry on behalf of the Republican Party. What made it such a monumental step for Fisher was his tim- ing, because by December 1966, when he introduced Romney at the Waldorf-Astoria, American Jews were on the brink of becoming more cohesive —and therefore a more potent lobbying and voting bloc — than ever before in their history.

The opportunity was created by a serious threat to Israel’s survival. During the following year, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, then ousted the Unit- ed Nations Emergency Force from the Sinai, replacing them with the Egyptian Army. Israel petitioned President Johnson to uphold Eisen- hower’s promise, made in 1956, to keep the Straits open, and while LBJ did not deny U.S. commitments to the freedom of shipping, he ad- vised the Israelis to wait for an international flotilla to break the block - ade. Johnson had his own problems: opposition to the war in Vietnam was escalating daily, as though in proportion to the rising American body count, and his attention was centered on his own waning popu- larity and besieged foreign policy.

***

On May 26, Fisher was sailing in the Greek Isles with Marjorie, and Henry Ford II and his second wife, Cristina, when a call came from Herbert Friedman, executive vice president of the UJA. Things were approaching the boiling point, Friedman said, and he and

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Fisher were needed in Israel. Fisher immediately flew to Tel Aviv, landing at Lydda.

In a speech to the UJA, Fisher later recalled his arrival in Israel: “The one moment I shall never forget,” he said, “is the moment we stepped from the plane when the people at the airport and the people we met everywhere saw us and said, ‘They are here! The American Jews are here! They have come!’ In a critical hour —in your name — I was able to bring a message of complete support and I was able to assure them that American Jews would give full help. I was never more privileged and never more honored.”

Fisher was taken to a meeting with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and his Cabinet that lasted six hours. When they finished, Eshkol escorted him out of the office; it was then that the prime minister introduced Fisher to an Israeli with whom much of his later work between Wash- ington and Jerusalem would be entwined: Yitzhak Rabin.

Rabin, who was serving as chief of staff of the defense forces at the time, recalls: “There was a tension period prior to the Six-Day War. It was during what we call the hamtana — the waiting period. Eshkol was talking with leaders of the Jewish communities, especially from the United States. The leaders came over to learn about the situation. It was after midnight that I arrived. Max came out of a talk with Esh- kol and it was the first time I met him. We had a little talk in which I explained to Max the awful situation of the Arab countries mobilizing around Israel and the almost inevitable consequences of it. Political negotiations had not produced any results. I told Max that even though we had lost the strategic surprise element, at least the tactical surprise element must be retained by us. It was a relatively short conversation because I had to go to sleep.”

Fisher listened to the assessments of how much money would be required during and after the fighting. “The estimates,” he said later, were “beyond belief.” Harold Berry, who was vice president of the Fisher-New Center Company, remembers encountering Fisher at a board meeting of the corporation after his visit to Israel. Fisher was obviously distressed. The exhaustion of his traveling was etched on his face, deepening the furrows of his forehead, the lines around his

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eyes and mouth. When the meeting was finished, Berry walked over to Fisher and asked him how he was feeling. Fisher shrugged.

“Max,” Berry said, “what’s going on in Israel?”

Fisher gazed at the younger man. Then he said: “There’s going to be war.”

On June 5, 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, Fisher was in Detroit. He scheduled a fast fund-raising session at a friend’s house. Then he flew to New York to oversee the national fund-raising from UJA headquarters, and he found himself in the midst of what will be remembered as one of the American Jewish community’s finest hours. Although the majority of local communities had recently completed their annual UJA drives prior to the war (raising $65 million), emer- gency funds flowered and money poured in. Fisher, for all of his ex - perience with fund drives, was astounded. He later described what transpired to The Jerusalem Post: “I just can’t emphasize enough this unity of the leadership of all the communities. Everybody had to give up their particular plans to raise more for Israel. It was unprecedent- ed. There is a much deeper feeling for Jewish causes among Ameri- can Jews than some people realize.” Synagogues froze their expan- sion funds; businessmen applied for personal loans and donated the proceeds to the UJA. In fifteen minutes, $15 million was raised at a NewYork luncheon. In Boston, fifty families contributed $2.5 million. Overnight, the Jews of St. Louis raised $1.2 million; those in Cleve- land in excess of $3 million.

Fisher entered into a round of speech making and fundraising. He spoke at a UJABig Gifts meeting at the Americana Hotel in New York and from a nationally televised hookup from UJA headquarters. The UJA had sent a delegation to Israel to witness the effects of the war, and across the United States, in city after city, Jews now listened to the report. Then Fisher came on again. “It is clear,” he said, “we must con- tinue as we began —with full vigor. This means that every communi- ty, every leader, every worker, every Jew must dedicate themselves to raising every last possible dollar.”

The success of the Israel Emergency Fund exceeded any other previous campaign in the history of the American Jewish communi-

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ty. Within the initial month, $100 million rolled in; in September, the figure passed $180 million with an additional $100 million worth of Israel bonds purchased. In all, during 1967, between the regular and emergency campaigns, American Jews raised $240 million in dona- tions and $190 million in bonds.

The stunning Israeli victory over the Arab armies resulted in more than a torrent of funds. A Zionist priority was immigration, aliyah. On the eve of the war, in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Efroyin v. Rusk, the justices reversed precedent, holding that Congress did not possess the power to deprive Americans of their citizenship without their consent. (The issue arose because an American citizen had voted in an Israeli election.) Now, in light of this reversal, Americans could hold dual citi- zenship, Israeli and American, and Israel’s government quickly revised its immigration laws to enable Americans to obtain Israeli citizenship without having to give up their American rights. In the wake of this de- cision and the war, the number of American immigrants to Israel jumped nearly 50 percent, while temporary residency doubled.

The Six-Day War had a long-term energizing effect on Jews through- out the United States. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, ex- plains that up until 1967 “a certain degree of [American Jewish support for Israel] remained reluctant.... The old anti-Zionist doctrines might have been consigned to the trash can of history, but the sentiments that had accompanied them still fluttered in many a Jewish heart. Mostly they took the form of a disposition to blame Israel for the trouble it was in with the Arabs.... Some of us can still remember ... the almost vin- dictive relish with which certain former non-Zionists joined the Eisen- hower administration in pressuring Israel to retreat from the Sinai [in 1956]. We can also remember how eagerly many of these same people rushed to condemn the seizure of Eichmann by Israel as a violation of international law. But not even this kind of thing could manage to survive the Six-Day War.... Confronted with Nasser’s explicit threat to drive [Israel’s] Jewish inhabitants into the sea, and faced with a world prepared to watch him do it, the Jews of America went through a kind of mass conversion to Zionism.... Thus did Israel now truly become the ‘religion’ of American Jews.”

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Fisher was quick to recognize the change. Four months after the fighting ended, he was in Israel. He was awarded Bar-Ilan University’s first honorary doctorate and then, later, at the Tel Aviv Hilton, he spoke at the Prime Minister’s Dinner of the UJA’s thirteenth study mission. In a speech entitled “From the Heights of June,” Fisher said: “From June 5 through June 10, [Israeli] Defense Forces and Israel’s people changed the Middle East. But, in the same month of June, American Jews changed all ideas of their love for Israel —all estimates of what they are prepared to do for its brave people. To our great joy, it was our young men and women, so many of whom you see here, who made it crystal clear that the cause of Israel’s people is their own great cause as well.”

All of this — the renaissance of pride, the flourishing cohesive - ness among Jews in the United States with the security of Israel at its core, Romney’s front-running and Fisher’s role in the governor’s budding campaign, the open field for the Republican nomination for the presidency coupled with LBJ’s plummeting popularity — coin- cided with Fisher’s own rise as the symbolic head of the American Jewish community.

By now, Fisher was an established force in numerous major na- tional Jewish organizations from — alphabetically — the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to the United Jewish Appeal. The perception of Fisher as the leader of this newly invigorated American Jewish polity, along with his seat in Romney’s inner circle, increased his visibility and was beginning to draw attention. Roger Kahn (later famous as the author of The Boys of Summer, his tale of the Brook- lyn Dodgers then and now) was, in between 1966 and 1967, working on The Passionate People, a study of what it means to be a Jew in America. Kahn was particularly interested in anti-Semitism and came to Detroit to interview Fisher. In his book, Kahn, after cataloguing Fisher’s business triumphs and multifaceted contributions to Detroit, commented, “On the way to his fortune, Max Fisher became a devout Zionist.” Kahn then quoted a conservative automobile executive. “‘To tell you the truth,’” said the executive, “‘I respect [Fisher] for it. I re- spect almost everything about [him]. He’s a straightforward guy. Noth-

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ing devious about him. You never have to wonder how he stands.... He’s done a lot to open the eyes around here to what kind of people the nicer type of Jew can be.’”

Leaving aside that dubious homage, Kahn moved on to Denver, Colorado. And it was there, in a city that Kahn characterized as “com- pletely and rigidly separatist” with respect to Christians and Jews, that the author unearthed the deeper meaning of Fisher’s developing im- portance to the Jewish community. “A point about our town,” a local stockbroker told Kahn, “is that we’ve never once had a major nation- al Jewish leadership figure like Max Fisher here. Maybe that’s why things are the way they are.”

If Fisher’s star was ascending over the national Jewish community, it had already climbed to exaggerated heights in Michigan. During the Six-Day War, Jews in Ann Arbor convened to raise emergency funds for Israel. Professor William Haber of the University of Michigan, who chaired the gathering, recalls: “We assembled on the second night of the war. The whole [Jewish] community was at Temple Beth Israel; the place was packed. Aman who usually only gave $500 [as a yearly donation to the UJA] suddenly sprang up and said, ‘Mr. Chairman, I rise to make an announcement: I am prepared to give $20,000 on the condition that you get Max Fisher to get a tanker and fill it with oil and break the blockade at the Straits of Tiran.’”

Haber says: “Here’s a meeting in AnnArbor and a guy who probably never met Max Fisher. But Max is the symbol. Sure, Max Fisher can get a tanker, and sure Max Fisher would know how to put oil in it, and he even had enough influence to break open the Straits of Tiran. What are we doing just sitting here and talking, the guy wanted to know. I’ll give you the money for the oil; let Max get the tanker. That’s the symbolism of Max Fisher throughout the Jewish world. Don’t just get [some rich big shot]. Get Max Fisher —a doer, a leader, recognized.”

***

Fisher never doubted his ability to raise money. But what was required, he thought, was what Eisenhower had told him he could have used in

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1956 — a voice at the White House that would bring the American Jewish community’s fear for Israel to the attention of the president. So Fisher aimed his political energies beyond the borders of Detroit. And the media started to track him, as though the story of his ascendancy were an entertaining sidebar to the more substantial story of Romney’s march toward Washington. Now, whenever Fisher was asked about his success, he more often than not gave the impression that he owed it all to the grace of smiling fortune. One interviewer asked him how his oil company survived the Depression. And Fisher, who, in the 1930s had an oil expert at University of Michigan tutoring him, who traveled the country hunting down deals and fresh sources of crude, who regularly made 2 a.m. jaunts to oil refineries to talk with the men working grave - yard, replied: “[We survived the Depression because] we had one great advantage. I didn’t know any better.”

“I never felt like I had it made,” Fisher was to say repeatedly, long after it was obvious that he had achieved far more than most.

There had always been something self-deprecating about Fisher, as if he could not assimilate this new image of himself into the old. This feeling was heightened by his own gnawing lack of satisfaction with his accomplishments. But that was a conflict that had plagued him since college and would continue to plague him into his eighties: after all, vast success rarely satisfies the vast hunger that creates it. Fisher’s view of himself, on the other hand, was not wholly inaccurate. Much of what he accomplished depended on events well out of his control. Just as World War II and its aftermath of shortages created opportuni- ties in the oil industry, so did the Six-Day War, by bringing Israel to the forefront of American Jewish consciousness, sharpen the political appetite of that constituency. And Fisher was ready to combine his communal work with his political beliefs.

Romney began organizing his push for the nomination. Along with Fisher he went to a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria and was joined by J. Willard Marriott, a Mormon and Romney supporter who headed the national motor-hotel chain; Clifford Folger, Nixon’s finance chairman in 1960; Leonard Hall, former chairman of the Republican National Committee; and several Romney aides. The parley attracted the atten-

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tion of The New York Times. Upon learning of the meeting, a reporter approached Romney, who again repudiated the claim that he was a candidate. Later, Fisher was asked by the same reporter if it was not unusual for the session to be convened in New York as most of those attending were from Michigan. He replied that it just happened to be convenient for everyone and that he had been in town pursuing his duties at the UJA.

Although Fisher had been tight-lipped in New York, once he re- turned to Franklin he momentarily dropped his guard and spoke about Romney’s aspirations with Patricia B. Smith, who was profiling Fisher for the Sunday magazine section of the Detroit Free Press. Her feature, headlined “Detroit’s Gentle, Massive Max Fisher,” encased Fisher in the cotton-candy aura his hometown press habitually reserved for him. The lead-in full-page photograph caught Fisher, pensive as a Talmu- dic sage, sitting on a low wall beneath a leafy tree outside his house in Franklin, with the family toy poodle, Tiger, nestling against him. Smith touched on the “happy mosaic” of Fisher’s boyhood, his “Hora- tio Alger” career and, apparently impressed by his height and broad shoulders, deduced that Fisher was “quite unshakable.”

Toward the conclusion of the article, she asked him about Romney and he replied: “Romney is a man of integrity ... who can set an ex- ample.... He has been a success as a man of business, a family man, a governor. He would be a great symbol.”

Fisher revealed nothing of his own hopes, and Smith did not press him. She wrote: “If Romney should become president one wonders what might be in mind for his great backer. Max Fisher says he has no plans for himself.” The interview was vintage Fisher. He succeeded in projecting what Kahn had called his “benevolent presence,” acting as though there were no reward in it for him if Romney were to win the White House. Smith also quoted Romney in her story. The governor said of Fisher: “He has a rare gift of empathy and great organizing abil- ity. He is a leader who inspires others by doing.... He avoids offense and has a warm, friendly personality.”

Romney had sufficient cause to be flattering. Looking back at the nascent days of his campaign, he says: “Max was an exceptional

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fund-raiser. [But] he was more than that for me; he was an adviser. Max would come over [to my house in Bloomfield Hills] every week and we would discuss politics — state, national and so on. He had a wide acquaintance with many people of significance. And he had this ability to give good advice.”

It was Fisher’s acquaintance with people of significance and Rom - ney’s increasing respect for his advice that led him to advise the gov- ernor in 1966 on a potential vice presidential running mate. From Fisher’s perspective, it would have been a dream ticket, combining the governor of his home state with a man who was arguably the most powerful Jewish holder of national office in the country, Sen - ator Jacob Javits of New York. (The only other Jewish presence of equal stature on the national scene was Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut. However, Connecticut lacked New York’s punch in the Electoral College, and alas, Ribicoff was a Democrat.) Elected to the Senate in 1956, Javits was an old-time liberal Republican and a tireless defender of Israel. He was four years older than Fisher and had been acquainted with him since the 1950s, when Javits had gone to Detroit to speak at a fund-raiser. They had been friends ever since. Both men were unique as Jewish Republicans, Javits aligned along the left wing of the party, Fisher nearer the center. The two constant concerns they had in common were the direction of Republican poli- tics —especially in the wake of Goldwater and the rise of the party’s right wing — and the relationship of the United States and Israel. Fisher and Javits often met in Washington and New York, but for the most part kept in close touch through frequent phone calls. Javits’s widow, Marian, remembers that Fisher was in the habit of calling her husband early on Sunday mornings, waking her. Sleepily, Marian would answer the phone, mumbling that “Jack would call him back.” According to Marian, Jack, as a rule, invariably reached over and took the phone.

In his autobiography, Javits writes that it was “through Max that I was invited to a rather ceremonial lunch at Governor Romney’s sum- mer mansion on Mackinac Island in Lake Michigan.” Javits went to the mansion with his wife, Max and Marjorie, cruising on the Fishers’

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boat from Detroit. After the social pleasantries, the talk got down to politics. Romney, Javits and Fisher discussed their fears that the Re- publican Party would never recover from Goldwater unless it took a new, more liberal direction. Then they discussed Romney’s emergence as a presidential candidate. Fisher cannot recall who initially brought up Javits as a running mate, although he had broached the idea to the governor several times before. In addition to the ideological affinity between Romney and Javits, the three men saw numerous advantages to the proposed ticket. It would be well balanced in geographic and ethnic backgrounds, and by the differing governmental experience of the governor and senator. Javits’s considerable experience in foreign affairs and national legislation would complement Romney’s excellent domestic record in business and state administration.

Soon after the luncheon, Romney told reporters that if he were nominated, then Javits would be his choice as vice president. Since Romney was so far ahead of the pack of Republican contenders, his announcement stirred up enormous political speculation.

Javits remembered: “The press was suddenly beating on my door ... and I certainly did nothing to quiet the talk.... U.S. News and World Re- port weighed in with the story declaring that Rockefeller had not only urged the Republican Party to nominate Romney and Javits but was pledging the ticket all kinds of support. A couple of weeks later I was on the cover of Time, the subject of a favorable story that commented on the idea of my becoming vice president: ‘Audacious, perhaps. But preposterous? Not really.’”

With mounting satisfaction, Fisher watched his matchmaking take hold. Well into 1967, Romney remained the favorite to be tagged as the Republican presidential candidate, but his nomination was by no means assured. Rockefeller, because of his personal fortune and his state’s commanding presence in the country and the Electoral College, was always a possibility. And Richard Nixon was still a candidate, though due to his losses to Kennedy and to Governor Brown, he was saddled with a loser’s image, an impression that he could not carry an election without Ike as a running mate. Aleading Colorado Republican confirmed this opinion to the political experts from the Knight News -

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