The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

9
Confront Your Dark Side
The Law of Repression
eople are rarely who they seem to be. Lurking beneath their
polite, affable exterior is inevitably a dark, shadow side
consisting of the insecurities and the aggressive, selfish impulses they
repress and carefully conceal from public view. This dark side leaks
out in behavior that will baffle and harm you. Learn to recognize the
signs of the Shadow before they become toxic. See people’s overt traits
—toughness, saintliness, et cetera—as covering up the opposite
quality. You must become aware of your own dark side. In being
conscious of it you can control and channel the creative energies that
lurk in your unconscious. By integrating the dark side into your
personality, you will be a more complete human and will radiate an
authenticity that will draw people to you.
The Dark Side
On November 5, 1968, Republican Richard Nixon accomplished
perhaps the greatest comeback in American political history, narrowly
defeating his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, to become the
thirty-seventh president of the United States. Only eight years earlier
he had lost his first attempt at the presidency to John F. Kennedy in a
devastating fashion. The election was extremely close, but clearly some
voting shenanigans in Illinois, orchestrated by the Democratic Party
machine in Chicago, played a role in his defeat. Two years later he lost
badly in the race to become the governor of California. Bitter at how
the press had hounded and provoked him throughout the race, he
addressed the media the day after this defeat and concluded by saying,
“Just think of how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have

---

Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last
press conference.”
The response to these words was overwhelmingly negative. He was
accused of wallowing in self-pity. ABC News ran a half-hour special
called “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” A Time magazine
article on him concluded: “Barring a miracle, Richard Nixon can never
hope to be elected to any political office again.”
By all accounts his political career should have been over in 1962.
But Richard Nixon’s life had been an endless series of crises and
setbacks that had only made him more determined. As a young man
his dream was to attend an Ivy League school, the key to attaining
power in America. Young Richard was exceptionally ambitious. His
family, however, was relatively poor and could not afford to pay for
such an education. He overcame this seemingly insuperable barrier by
transforming himself into a superior student, earning the nickname
“Iron Butt” for his inhuman work habits, and managed to land a
scholarship to the law school at Duke University. To keep the
scholarship he had to remain at the top of his class, which he did
through the kind of hard work few others could endure.
After several years in the U.S. Senate, in 1952 Dwight D.
Eisenhower had chosen him to be his running mate as vice president
on the Republican ticket, but quickly regretted the choice. Nixon had
kept a secret fund from the Republican Party that he had supposedly
used for private purposes. In fact he was innocent of the charges, but
Eisenhower did not feel comfortable with him, and this was the excuse
to get rid of him. Cutting him loose in this way would almost certainly
ruin Nixon’s political career. Once again he rose to the challenge,
appearing on live television and delivering the speech of his life,
defending himself against the charges. It was so effective, the public
clamored for Eisenhower to keep him on the ticket. He went on to
serve eight years as vice president.
And so, the crushing defeats of 1960 and 1962 would again be the
means of toughening himself up and resurrecting his career. He was
like a cat with nine lives. Nothing could kill him. He laid low for a few
years, then came charging back for the 1968 election. He was now the
“new Nixon,” more relaxed and affable, a man who liked bowling and
corny jokes. And having learned all the lessons from his various
defeats, he ran one of the smoothest and savviest campaigns in modern

---

history and made all of his enemies and doubters eat crow when he
defeated Humphrey.
In becoming president, he had seemingly reached the apex of
power. But in his mind there was yet one more challenge to overcome,
perhaps the greatest of all. Nixon’s liberal enemies saw him as a
political animal, one who would resort to any kind of trickery to win an
election. To the East Coast elites who hated him, he was the hick from
Whittier, California, too obvious in his ambition. Nixon was
determined to prove them all wrong. He was not who they thought he
was. He was an idealist at heart, not a ruthless politician. His beloved
mother, Hannah, was a devout Quaker who had instilled in him the
importance of treating all people equally and promoting peace in the
world. He wanted to craft a legacy as one of the greatest presidents in
history. For the sake of his mother, who had died earlier that year, he
wanted to embody her Quaker ideals and show his detractors how
deeply they had misread him.
His political icons were men like French president Charles de
Gaulle, whom he had met and greatly admired. De Gaulle had crafted a
persona that radiated authority and love of country. Nixon would do
the same. In his notebooks he began to refer to himself as “RN”—the
world leader version of himself. RN would be strong, resolute,
compassionate yet completely masculine. The America he was to lead
was riven by antiwar protests, riots in the cities, a rising crime rate. He
would end the war and work toward world peace; at home he would
bring prosperity to all Americans, stand for law and order, and instill a
sense of decency the country had lost. Accomplishing this, he would
take his place among the presidents he revered—Abraham Lincoln and
Woodrow Wilson. And he would will this into existence, as he always
had done.
In his first months he moved quickly. He assembled a top-notch
cabinet, including the brilliant Henry Kissinger as his national security
adviser. For his personal staff he preferred clean-cut young men who
would be fiercely loyal to him and serve as tools to realize his great
ambitions for America. This would include Bob Haldeman, his chief of
staff; John Ehrlichman, in charge of domestic policy; John Dean, the
White House counsel; and Charles Colson, a White House aide.
He didn’t want intellectuals around him; he wanted go-getters. But
Nixon was not naive. He understood that in politics loyalty was

---

ephemeral. And so early on in his administration he installed a secret
voice-activated taping system throughout the White House that only a
select few would know about. In this way he could keep discreet tabs
on his staff and preemptively discover any possible turncoats or
leakers among them. It would provide evidence he could use later on if
anyone tried to misrepresent any conversations with him. And best of
all, once his presidency was over, the edited tapes could be used to
demonstrate his greatness as a leader, the clear and rational way he
came to his decisions. The tapes would secure his legacy.
As the first few years went by, Nixon worked to execute his plan. He
was an active president. He signed bills to protect the environment, the
health of workers, and the rights of consumers. On the foreign front,
he struggled to wind down the war in Vietnam, with limited success.
But soon he laid the groundwork for his first visit to the Soviet Union
and his celebrated trip to China and signed into law an agreement with
the Soviets to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This was just
the start of what he would bring about.
And yet despite the relative smoothness of these first years,
something strange began to stir within Richard Nixon. He could not
shake these feelings of anxiety, something he had been prone to his
entire life. It started to come out in his closed-door meetings with his
personal staff, late at night over some drinks. Nixon would begin to
share with them stories from his colorful past, and in the process he
would go over some of his old political wounds, and bitterness would
rise up from deep within.
He was particularly obsessed with the Alger Hiss case. Alger Hiss
was an important staffer in the State Department who in 1948 had
been accused of being a communist spy. Hiss denied the charges.
Dapper and elegant, he was the darling of the liberals. Nixon, at the
time a junior congressman from California, smelled a phony. While
other congressmen decided to leave Hiss alone, Nixon, representing
the House Un-American Activities Committee, kept investigating. In
an interview with Hiss, as Nixon reminded him of the law against
perjury, Hiss replied, “I am familiar with the law. I attended Harvard
Law School. I believe yours was Whittier?” (a reference to the lowly
undergraduate college Nixon had attended).
Relentless in his pursuit of Hiss, Nixon was successful in getting
him indicted for perjury, and Hiss went to prison. This victory made

---

Nixon famous but, as he told his staff members, it earned him the
eternal wrath of East Coast elites, who saw him as the unctuous upstart
from Whittier. In the 1950s these elites, many of them Harvard
graduates, quietly kept Nixon and his wife, Pat, out of their social
circles, limiting Nixon’s political contacts. Their allies in the press
ridiculed him mercilessly for any misstatement or possible misdeed.
Yes, Nixon was no angel. He liked winning, but the hypocrisy of these
liberals galled him—Bobby Kennedy was the king of political dirty
tricks, and yet what reporter publicized this?
As he went deeper and deeper into these stories night after night
with his staff, he reminded them that this past was still very much
alive. The old enemies were still at work against him. There was CBS
correspondent Daniel Schorr, who seemed to hate Nixon with unusual
zeal. His reports from Vietnam always managed to highlight the worst
aspects of the war and make Nixon look bad. There was Katharine
Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper that seemed
to have a personal vendetta against him going back many years. She
was the doyenne of the Georgetown social scene, which had snubbed
him and Pat for years. Worst of all, there was Larry O’Brien, now the
chairman of the Democratic Party, who as a key adviser in the Kennedy
administration had managed to get Nixon audited by the IRS. As
Nixon saw it, O’Brien was the evil genius of politics, a man who would
do anything to prevent Nixon’s reelection in 1972.
His enemies were everywhere and they were relentless—planting
negative stories in the press, procuring embarrassing leaks from within
the bureaucracy, spying on him, ready to pounce on the slightest whiff
of scandal. And what, he would ask his staff, are we doing on our side?
If his team did nothing to respond to this, they would have only
themselves to blame. His legacy, his ambitions were at stake. As the
stories began to pile up of antiwar demonstrations and leaks about his
administration’s Vietnam War effort, Nixon became red-hot with anger
and frustration, the talk with his staff heating up on both sides. Once,
as Colson talked about getting revenge on some particularly
nettlesome opponents, Nixon chimed in, “One day we will get them—
we’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And then we’ll stick
our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right?”
When informed that many of the staff at the Bureau of Labor
Statistics were Jews, he felt that was probably the reason for some bad
economic numbers coming from there. “The government is full of

---

Jews,” he told Haldeman. “Most Jews are disloyal.” They were the
mainstay of the East Coast establishment that worked so hard against
him. Another time he told Haldeman, “Please get me the names of the
Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats. . . .
Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?” Auditing them
would be in order. He had other harsh ideas for how to hurt Katharine
Graham and embarrass Daniel Schorr.
Nixon also began to feel increasingly anxious about his public
image, so critical to his legacy. He badgered his staff, and even Henry
Kissinger, to promote to the press his strong leadership style. In
interviews, they should refer to him as Mr. Peace, and Kissinger should
not be getting so much credit. He wanted to know what the elites at the