When the Mob Came for Nixon: Courage Under Fire in Caracas

Richard Nixon was a man of courage.

When Vice President JD Vance recently declared at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library that “his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so,” he put into words something that has become increasingly evident. Thanks also to the extraordinary efforts of the Richard Nixon Foundation, the record of America’s 37th president—beyond Watergate—is undergoing a remarkable reexamination and reevaluation. Among a younger generation in particular, this renewed fascination with Nixon has even acquired its own distinctly modern name: “#Nixonmaxxxing.”

On May 13, 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon arrived in Caracas on what was supposed to be the final stop of an eighteen-day goodwill mission through South America. Instead, he and his wife, Pat, walked into one of the most dangerous episodes ever faced by a sitting American vice president abroad. Venezuela was only months removed from the overthrow of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, anti-American feeling was being aggressively exploited by the Communist left, and Nixon had already encountered violent demonstrations in Peru. But nothing prepared the American party for Caracas. Even before Nixon left the airport, demonstrators shouted insults, blew whistles, waved hostile placards, hurled stones and subjected both Dick and Pat Nixon to what a subsequent Secret Service account described as showers of human spittle and chewing tobacco. Contemporary TIME reporting described older organizers whipping up a student crowd carrying slogans associated with international Communism. Nixon nevertheless proceeded with the mission rather than retreating.

The hostility began almost immediately. As the Nixons walked toward their automobiles, demonstrators spat at them so heavily that, once safely inside the cars, both Dick and Pat reportedly used handkerchiefs to wipe the saliva from their faces and clothing. Protesters attempted to drape banners across the windshields of the motorcade vehicles in an effort to obstruct the drivers’ vision. Pat Nixon, displaying remarkable composure of her own, even reached toward one jeering teenage girl and took her hand, momentarily silencing her. The motorcade nevertheless pressed ahead toward Caracas.

The danger rapidly became more serious. Nixon was scheduled to lay a wreath at the tomb of Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of South America. But the American naval attaché carrying the wreath ahead of the vice president was attacked, roughed up and the wreath itself destroyed. The official State Department report described a mob numbering roughly 4,000 blocking the route through Caracas and recorded that the Venezuelan police escort fled as the crowd closed in. The vice presidential party was suddenly left in a nearly indefensible position in the middle of an enraged mob. Windows were smashed, members of Nixon’s party were cut by flying glass, and the official cars were battered as demonstrators attempted to prevent them from moving. According to the State Department report transmitted to Washington that afternoon, Venezuelan security had effectively collapsed at the critical moment; only the eventual appearance of troops with fixed bayonets helped open a path through the crowd.

The assault on Nixon’s automobile was frighteningly physical. As the caravan slowed in heavy traffic in the working-class Catia district, rioters surged toward the vice president’s limousine from both sides of the street. They tore the American and Venezuelan flags from the car and hammered its body and doors with clubs, pipes and brass artillery-shell casings. Stones described by contemporary reporters as roughly the size of grapefruit were hurled repeatedly against the supposedly protective safety glass. The barrage became so severe that the glass began splintering inward, showering the occupants. At least one fragment struck Nixon near the temple, close to his right eye, although he was not seriously injured.

The mob did not merely throw objects from a distance. Men crowded directly against the limousine, beat on its roof and windows, kicked its sides and attempted to immobilize it. Nixon’s motorcade was trapped as the crowd pressed tighter around the vehicle. At various points the attackers began rocking the limousine from side to side in an apparent attempt to overturn it with the vice president and the other passengers still inside. Other accounts describe rioters using heavy objects almost as battering rams against the thick windows. For somewhere around a quarter of an hour, Nixon and those around him could not know whether the glass would hold, whether the crowd would succeed in overturning the car, or whether an attacker might force his way inside.

Inside the automobile with Nixon was Lieutenant Colonel Vernon Walters, the brilliant linguist and Army officer who was serving as the vice president’s interpreter and who would later rise to major general, become Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Walters was himself wounded when the limousine’s glass shattered inward, cutting him around the mouth and leaving him, as he later vividly recalled, with a mouth full of glass. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Óscar García Velutini, who was also riding in the car, was cut as well. The official State Department account specifically recorded Walters’ facial injury and the Foreign Minister’s wounded arm.

Walters’ later recollection provides one of the most revealing eyewitness accounts of Nixon’s conduct during those minutes. Decades afterward, Walters told The Washington Post, “Nixon never lost his cool in that car.” Walters remembered the mob “beating on the roof and throwing stones” while Nixon remained composed. Even more remarkably, according to Walters, he continued acting as Nixon’s interpreter despite the glass in his mouth as Nixon verbally challenged members of the hostile crowd to debate him rather than attack him. Walters and Nixon would remember May 13 for years afterward with grim humor, referring to the anniversary as their “rock ’n’ roll day”—a reference to the rocks thrown at the limousine and the violent rocking of the car itself.

That testimony is particularly significant because Walters was not reconstructing events from a distant vantage point. He was inside the car, bleeding, as the attack occurred. His judgment was therefore based upon observing Nixon at extraordinarily close range under immediate physical threat. Nixon was not posing for cameras or delivering a prepared speech about courage. He was trapped in a battered automobile, surrounded by a screaming crowd, while glass broke around him and men attempted to rock the vehicle over. Walters’ recollection that Nixon never lost his composure is powerful evidence of how the vice president actually reacted when the possibility of serious injury or death became real.

Nixon himself later remembered the instant when the danger became unmistakable: “we might be killed.” The fear was hardly imaginary. Contemporary American reporting bluntly stated that his life had been in danger. A New York Herald Tribune editorial reprinted in the Congressional Record described his ordeal as a “trial by fire,” noting that the car was wrecked by stones and pipes, its glass broken, Walters cut by flying glass, the flags ripped away, and the automobile covered with spit and rotten eggs. Nixon’s response after emerging from the ordeal was characteristically defiant: “I’m all right. They cannot frighten me.”

What stands out most dramatically is Nixon’s composure while all this was happening around him. Secret Service agents believed the vice president’s life was in danger and prepared to use their weapons. Yet Nixon understood that gunfire into a Venezuelan crowd could transform a vicious street attack into an international catastrophe. Accounts of the incident record that he instructed the agent in charge, Jack Sherwood, not to open fire except on Nixon’s order. No shots were fired. It was an extraordinary exercise of restraint: Nixon was not making this decision from the safety of Washington but from inside a besieged automobile whose windows were being smashed while a mob attempted to overturn it. The Nixon Presidential Library today describes his “calm resolve” as helping prevent an already explosive confrontation from becoming an even more serious international incident. The Library’s collection still contains shattered glass from Nixon’s limousine and unused ammunition carried by American security personnel that day.

Nor was Washington treating the danger as political theater. Within hours, the highest levels of the Eisenhower administration were contemplating emergency military measures. Admiral Arleigh Burke ordered 500 airborne Marines prepared for immediate dispatch to Caracas, subject to State Department clearance. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was told that officials did not know how they would safely get Nixon out of the country, and the possibility of using a helicopter was discussed. Eisenhower’s position, relayed by his aides, was unmistakable: if Venezuela could not guarantee the vice president’s safety, the United States was prepared to consider doing so itself.

The ordeal also revealed something about Nixon that his political caricature has often obscured. He possessed remarkable physical courage. This had already been demonstrated days earlier in Lima, when he confronted hostile demonstrators rather than hiding from them; President Dwight Eisenhower personally wired him that his “courage, patience and calmness” had earned him new respect at home. Caracas presented an incomparably greater test. Nixon had Pat nearby, members of his party were bleeding, security had broken down and there was no certainty that the mob could be stopped. Yet there is no record of Nixon panicking or losing command of himself. His concern remained both getting his party to safety and preventing his protectors from responding in a manner that could cost Venezuelan lives. Walters’ eyewitness testimony—“Nixon never lost his cool in that car”—provides perhaps the most concise verdict on his behavior during the crisis.

There was also substantial contemporary evidence that the violence was not merely a spontaneous eruption of anti-American sentiment. American officials on the scene reported to Washington on May 13 that the attack was “undoubtedly” organized by Communists. The State Department’s subsequent analysis concluded that the confrontations had been directed primarily by communist-led organizations. Two weeks later, CIA Director Allen Dulles reported that the demonstrations in Lima and Caracas had been well organized and were “undoubtedly Communist instigated,” although his assessment importantly added that the Communists were exploiting authentic Latin American grievances over aspects of American policy. Thus, calling the Caracas violence communist-inspired is not a retrospective political embellishment; it reflects the assessment recorded in official American documents produced at the time.

Indeed, the organization and escalation of the demonstrations were difficult to miss. Nixon had encountered agitation elsewhere on the tour, but Caracas was different in its coordination and violence. Demonstrators were waiting at the airport; another hostile concentration had assembled at the Bolívar tomb; roadblocks impeded the motorcade; and crowds repeatedly converged on Nixon’s vehicles. The Congressional Record noted contemporary reports that the disturbances had escalated from jostling in Buenos Aires to stone throwing in Peru and finally to the far more dangerous violence in Venezuela. Whatever legitimate political grievances existed in Venezuela, attacking the official representative of the United States, smashing his automobile and attempting to overturn it with the vice president and other passengers inside had passed far beyond political protest.

Nixon also refused to allow the attackers to turn the episode into an indictment of the Venezuelan people. That distinction was important. The Communist organizers and violent demonstrators did not represent Venezuela, and Nixon knew it. The State Department reached much the same conclusion, believing that revulsion at the violence among ordinary Latin Americans might ultimately undermine the radicals who had organized it. Even Eisenhower, while condemning the incidents, emphasized that they could not erase the underlying friendship between the peoples of the Americas. Nixon’s refusal to respond with indiscriminate hostility was therefore more than good manners. It served the diplomatic purpose for which he had undertaken the trip in the first place.

America’s reaction when Nixon came home demonstrated how profoundly the episode had affected the country. On May 15, the vice president and Mrs. Nixon landed at Washington National Airport to a reception almost unimaginable for an ordinary vice-presidential return from a diplomatic tour. Contemporary reporting estimated the airport crowd at more than 15,000 people—ordinary citizens, students carrying welcoming signs, bands, diplomats, members of Congress, Cabinet officials and President Eisenhower himself. Even political opponents joined the reception. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was among those who welcomed Nixon home, greeting him warmly in a remarkable display of bipartisan solidarity. What had begun as a goodwill tour had ended with the country rallying around a vice president who had faced unmistakable physical danger abroad.

The Caracas attack deserves to be remembered as more than an exotic Cold War anecdote. Nixon went into an exceptionally hostile environment as the representative of his country, was subjected to personal humiliation, saw his wife abused, found himself trapped inside an automobile under a potentially lethal assault, and nevertheless maintained his composure. The shattered windows, the stones and clubs, Walters bleeding from the mouth, the attempt to rock the limousine over, armed Secret Service agents waiting for permission to fire, and Marines preparing for possible deployment all demonstrate how serious the danger actually was. Nixon neither surrendered his dignity nor permitted panic to dictate his actions. That is why he later chose the South American journey as one of the defining episodes in his book, Six Crises, and why the battered limousine glass and unused ammunition carried by American security personnel were eventually preserved as historical artifacts. Whatever judgments history makes about the long and complicated political career of Richard Nixon, Caracas provides unusually tangible evidence of one quality that even many of his adversaries came to recognize: when confronted by genuine physical danger, Richard Nixon was a man of courage.