May 13, 1958: A goodwill tour of South America fails to generate goodwill, as a motorcade containing Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, and his wife, Pat Nixon, is attacked by demonstrators in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.
A recent worldwide drop in commodity prices that badly affected South American economies, coupled with increasing Soviet overtures in the Western Hemisphere, led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to decide that a tour by a major U.S. functionary was necessary to demonstrate U.S. commitment to the region. Nixon retrospectively wrote that he didn't want to take the trip; but, as a good soldier for the old General, he did it anyway.
The tour was to see the Nixons visit every independent country in South America except Brazil, which he had visited the year before; and Chile, whose leadership were scheduled to be out of the country during the time period of the visit, making a visit there all but pointless.
The tour began in Uruguay on April 28. Although there were some protestors, for the most part, the visit to that country was a success. In Argentina, the Nixons attended the inauguration of President Arturo Frondizi. And in Lima, the capital of Peru, things started out well. The Vice President shook hands with students at the University of San Marcos. But others started throwing rocks, and one grazed Nixon's neck. As his Secret Service protection got him out, another rock hit him in the face.
When he got to his next stop, in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, he received a diplomatic cable from Eisenhower:
Better crowds greeted Nixon in Quito, and in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, where he laid a wreath at a statue of the country's 1st President, the man regarded as the liberator of South America, Simón Bolívar. So far, the incident in Lima could be written off as an anomaly. And had that been the worst of it, the moment would still have been noted in the American media, but it would have relatively minor.
It was on to Caracas -- ironically, Bolívar's birthplace, and also his burial place. Earlier in the year, Venezuela had overthrown its U.S.-backed right-wing dictator, Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez, and the U.S. gave him safe haven. (Later, he was taken in by the fascist regime of Francisco Franco in Spain, where he lived until his death in 2001.) A leftist Admiral, Wolfgang Enrique Larrazábal, became provisional President, but lost the subsequent election to former President Rómulo Ernesto Betancourt, who had U.S. backing.
Therefore, the people of Venezuela were seriously split on whether they liked America in general, or Nixon in particular. Nixon would campaign for President in 1960 -- and, as it turned out, in 1968 and 1972 -- as a middle-of-the-road politician, conservative in the traditional sense but not as a radical right-winger. But from his 1st campaign for Congress in 1946 through 1958, his image, both at home and abroad, was as a hard-right anti-Communist, opposed to organized labor, although civil rights leaders had reason to consider him sympathetic to their cause.
Still, there was concern going into his visit to Caracas. The Municipal Council passed a resolution effectively declaring him persona non grata. As with President John F. Kennedy's visit to Dallas in 1963, there were people recommending that he skip Venezuela, including the CIA station chief there, the U.S. Ambassador to the country, and embassy staff.
But, as Nixon would later tell the nation, he had never been a quitter. He went forward. There was already a demonstration at the airport when he landed, and the national and local police had a hard time keeping it away from him. People tried to spit on Nixon, including with tobacco.
As the Nixons traveled by motorcade through Caracas, the vehicle carrying them was slowed to a crawl by heavy traffic. A crowd of several hundred people rushed to the car, stoning it, and banging on the windows with their fists. When the mob began rocking the car back and forth in an attempt to overturn it, Secret Service agents, believing the Vice President's life was in jeopardy, drew their firearms, and prepared to begin shooting into the crowd. Nixon ordered Secret Service agent-in-charge Jack Sherwood to hold fire and shoot only on his orders. No shots were fired.
Nixon would later recount that Venezuelan Foreign Minister Óscar García Velutini, who was traveling with him, was "close to hysterics," and kept repeating "This is terrible, this is terrible." According to Nixon, Velutini explained the police inaction was because the Communists "helped us overthrow Pérez Jiménez and we are trying to find a way to work with them."
Nixon's longtime secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who would still be with him at the end in 1974, was injured by flying glass when the windows of the car in which she was riding, following Nixon, were smashed. Vernon Walters, then a mid-ranking U.S. Army officer serving as Nixon's translator, and later to be a Lieutenant General and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, ended up with a "mouthful of glass." Velutini was also hit by shards of the limousine's supposedly "shatter-proof" glass.
Sources differ as to whether a path for the car was cleared by the Caracas police, the Venezuelan Army, or the U.S. press corps' flatbed truck. The Nixons made it to the U.S. Embassy, and the Army and the U.S. Marine Corps (which is traditionally in charge of guarding U.S. Embassies) gave the building a heavier guard than usual. Nixon met with members of the ruling junta, who formally apologized for the disruption.
Eisenhower was furious at the attack on Nixon, and, at one point, told his staff, "I am about ready to go put my uniform on." He sent the aircraft carrier USS Tarawa to the Venezuelan coast, and Nixon's planned laying of a wreath at Bolívar's tomb was canceled. He and his wife left Caracas 7 hours earlier than previously planned, took the same route back to the airport, with the Army having cleared the streets, and safely flew back to Puerto Rico.
Eisenhower, seen by most Americans as being above taking a personal approach to things, did so on this occasion, directing the reception for the Nixon party's return. The Nixons deplaned before a cheering crowd of 10,000 people, including the Congressional leadership, and Ambassadors from most Latin American countries. "Ike" personally greeted Nixon at the airport, and the two then traveled to the White House along a route lined by 100,000 people. Nixon recommended decorations for all 12 of his protection agents, and Ike agreed without hesitation.
Most news sources praised Nixon's courage under fire, and said that, rather than making him look weak, his having gone through the attack unscathed would help him should he choose to run for President in 1960. The usually liberal magazine The New Republic demurred, suggesting the attack was what would now be called a "false flag operation," staged and designed to help him in said election.
Watching what happened to Nixon on television, Kennedy, then running for re-election as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, and preparing to run for the Democratic Party's nomination for President in 1960, which would put him on a collision course with Nixon, he told his brother and campaign manager, Robert F. Kennedy, "I'd like to think it was just his personality."
But he also knew that the demonstrators had a point: Under the Eisenhower-Nixon Administration, America hadn't exactly observed what Franklin Roosevelt had called a "Good Neighbor Policy." JFK asked his advisors, "If we offer the Third World freedom, and the Communists offer them food, who do you think they're going to side with?" This led to, among other things, the Kennedy campaign's stressing of foreign policy considerably more than domestic policy; and, once in office, the Alliance for Progress, aimed at improving relations with Latin America.
Needing something to do after leaving the Vice Presidency, and not being President, Nixon wrote a memoir about his political experiences to that point. He titled it Six Crises. In addition to the 1958 trip to South America, he included the Alger Hiss case, what became known as the Checkers Speech, his role as "Acting President" after Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, his "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, and his loss to Kennedy in 1960.
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May 13, 1958 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played:
* The New York Yankees beat the Baltimore Orioles, 3-0 at Yankee Stadium. Don Larsen pitched a 4-hit shutout, and helped his own cause with a home run. Mickey Mantle went 1-for-4, Yogi Berra went 0-for-4, and Norm Siebern went 3-for-4.
For the Orioles, Brooks Robinson went 1-for-4. Clifford "Connie" Johnson was the losing pitcher. He pitched in the Negro Leagues from 1940 to 1948, the previously all-white minor leagues until 1953, and then in the previously all-white majors until 1958. In 1990, Johnson would be interviewed, alongside his former Kansas City Monarchs teammate Alfred "Slick" Surratt, who did not reach the major leagues, for their Negro League experiences, by documentarian Ken Burns for his miniseries Baseball.
* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Milwaukee Braves, 5-2 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Robin Roberts went the distance for the win. Hank Aaron hit a home run. There was plenty more where that came from.
* The Boston Red Sox beat the Washington Senators, 9-8 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Ted Williams went 1-for-1... with 3 walks.
* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Cincinnati Redlegs (as the Reds were known from 1953 to 1959), 6-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Roberto Clemente went 0-for-4, but Bill Mazeroski went 3-for-3 with a home run and a walk. Frank Robinson went 2-for-5.
* The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians, 11-1 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (It was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) Al Kaline went 0-for-4. The lone Cleveland run came on a home run by Roger Maris.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Cubs, 5-3 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. For the Cubs, Ernie Banks went 0-for-3, but had an RBI on a sacrifice fly. For the Cardinals, Stan Musial singled as a pinch-hitter, to collect his 3,000th career hit. It was the 1st major baseball milestone recorded on television.
* The Chicago White Sox beat the Kansas City Athletics, 9-2 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium.
* And the San Francisco Giants beat their arch-rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, 16-9 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Yes, that was (and remains) a football stadium. No, that's not a football score. Giant starting pitcher Mike McCormack didn't get out of the 1st inning, and neither his reliefer Ramon Monzant nor Dodger starter Don Newcombe got out of the 3rd. Sandy Koufax hadn't yet found his control, and got hit hard, too.
Remember: The Coliseum's left-field fence was just 251 feet away. And so, there seemed to be more projectiles flying there that day than in Caracas. Home runs were hit by: For the Giants, 2 each by Willie Mays and Daryl Spencer, and 1 by Orlando Cepeda; and, for the Dodgers, 2 by Charlie Neal, and 1 each by Carl Furillo and Gil Hodges. Mays was 5-for-5 with 4 RBIs, and Spencer was 4-for-6 with 6 RBIs.
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