Audition (41 page)

I thought of all the times that I had been with Nixon, this awkward man who had always been kind to me. I had interviewed him several times. I had covered Tricia’s wedding. As I watched him announce his resignation, I felt both anger and pity. Mostly I thought how devastating this must be to Pat Nixon. She never seemed to have had a close relationship with her husband. The fact that they rarely communicated must have made her all the more lonely, grappling with a situation she could not control, which was going to drag her down, too, and this so soon after her triumph in China.

In the midst of this intriguing time, I did interviews with people who had nothing to do with politics. Liza Minnelli, for example, who was wowing everyone in a sold-out engagement at the Winter Garden in New York; Henry Fonda, who was winning accolades portraying the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow on Broadway; Maria Callas, the fiery Greek opera diva who had lost her longtime lover, Aristotle Onassis, to Jackie Kennedy.

The Callas interview had a special appeal. For years people had speculated as to how she felt when Onassis jilted her. Callas admitted in our interview that she and Jackie had never met and that furthermore, she’d never wanted to meet her. She implied that Onassis had actually proposed to her several times (which I didn’t believe) but that she was wary of marriage, having been married once before. She kept talking about how all she wanted was for Onassis to be happy, but it was obvious from her protestations that she herself was heartbroken. Her career, which she had given up for Onassis, was all but over, and so was any hope of rekindling her relationship with him. When eventually Onassis and Jackie split up, Callas came back into his life, but it was, reportedly, never the same.

Most of my interviews, however, dealt with Watergate—with Senator Ted Kennedy; with Martha Mitchell, whose soon-to-be-ex-husband, former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, would be found guilty of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice and serve nineteen months in prison; with Jeb Magruder, Nixon’s deputy campaign director, who was charged with perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice and spent seven months in prison; with Gail Magruder, Jeb’s wife, who said her husband’s prison sentence was an “anticlimax” after all they’d been through. Haldeman, too, went to prison and spent eighteen months behind bars, convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

The pivotal figure in all this, of course, remained Richard Nixon, with whom I would continue to have a professional relationship. So I will now digress.

After resigning the presidency, Nixon repaired to his house in San Clemente, California, taking with him his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and his young assistant press secretary, Diane Sawyer. I had no contact with him during this period, though I wrote him often, hoping for an interview. When he finally did do his first interview in 1977, it was not with me but with the British television journalist David Frost.

David, now Sir David and a good friend of mine, paid Nixon a reported $600,000 for the series of taped interviews over a twenty-four-hour period which were then boiled down into four ninety-minute programs. The most interesting, of course, was the section on Watergate. Because of the presidential pardon Nixon was granted by Gerald Ford, who replaced him as president, Nixon never had to stand trial for his role in Watergate, so no one had as yet heard his side of the story. Nixon had approval over the interview with David, which was taped and edited. There was such curiosity about the former president, and David was such a good interviewer, that the programs were syndicated and seen in seventy countries around the world. To this day, there is still curiosity. In 2007 the play
Frost/Nixon
, based on those interviews, opened on Broadway after playing in London. It was a huge success and was then made into a movie.

Nixon came back into my life in 1980, three years after the Frost interviews. He approached the networks to promote a book he’d written about foreign policy and the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union. It was titled
The Real War.
But Nixon set conditions for the potential interview. He would do it only if it was live and therefore without any editing. Nixon’s first choice was
60 Minutes
on CBS, but Don Hewitt, the program’s producer, never allowed anything live and he turned Nixon down. It was Don’s loss and my gain.

I was at ABC by then, and I sat down with Nixon on May 8 in our New York studio for a live one-hour interview. I had long since developed my own way of preparing for an interview. I wrote down on three-by-five cards as many questions as I could think of, then asked anyone who walked into the office, whether it was somebody delivering the mail, a production assistant, or a hairdresser, “If you could ask any question of [whomever], what would it be?” It was very productive. For this interview with Nixon I had so many questions that I could have done six hours with him. I must have written over a hundred questions on my cards, which, as was my custom, I cut down and cut down again and cut down yet again.

This was my predicament: If I was too tough on the former president, people would feel sorry for him, and those who still had some admiration or affection for him would turn against me. On the other hand, if I was too soft on him, the criticism would be, “Why didn’t the news department choose somebody tougher to do the interview?” It was a delicate balancing act. I finally divided the questions into foreign and domestic policy segments, Watergate, and also a more personal segment. I wanted to give him the opportunity, if he wanted, to talk about such things as what faith meant to him, how his family had helped him get through the resignation and his subsequent health crisis with phlebitis. Even though he had resisted personal questions during my very first interview with him while he was president, I thought he might welcome them now. I saved these questions for near the end of the interview.

But the final question was key: was he sorry he hadn’t burned the tapes that led to his resignation? For this last question, I told my director to give me a thirty-second cue at the end of the interview. I wanted to give Nixon very limited time to say yes or no, rather than skirt the issue.

We met in the studio. Nixon was his usual awkward self, trying to be friendly to the crew by making a slightly off-color joke. We put makeup on him because he had a propensity to sweat. Some people felt this had cost him the election during a 1960 television debate with John F. Kennedy. (Those who heard the debate on radio thought Nixon had won, while those who saw Nixon sweating on television thought JFK had won.) Then we began the interview, live.

Nixon was superb on foreign policy but reluctant to talk about Watergate. When I asked him whether he felt responsible for the distrust and cynicism Americans now felt toward their leaders, Nixon replied: “I think under the circumstances that with Watergate now six years past, we’re at a time when it is time to move forward to the future and not dwell on the past.”

I pressed, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to talk further about Watergate. But he really stonewalled me toward the end of the interview when I got to the personal questions. When I asked him why “people who have written books about you, who worked for you, people who are close to you in one way or another, say that you are cold, remote, and that they are unable to reach you?” he replied, “Why are you interviewing me, then?” I answered by saying I was not talking about whether
I
found him cold and remote, I was quoting people like Henry Kissinger, to which Nixon curtly responded: “Why don’t we get serious.”

I went on, saying that I was sorry that he found “these questions unserious” and reminded him that people “are interested in you, the man, and your feelings,” but he would have none of it. I next wanted to give him that chance to talk about how he got through the dark days. Was it his faith? Were there friends? I was trying to induce some sympathy for him, but he was not about to allow me to go there. When I asked him if, in the early days after Watergate, there were times “when you thought you might go under, emotionally,” Nixon bristled and said: “Not at all.” Period. Silence.

There was nothing to do then but to go back to the foreign policy questions, the ones I hadn’t asked yet.

But I couldn’t find the right cards.

Even today, more than twenty-five years later, revisiting that moment makes my stomach tighten. I couldn’t frantically shuffle and reshuffle the cards on live television, so I had no recourse but to wing it. Fortunately, since I write my own questions and I’d written them one hundred times before the interview, I remembered them. We hurtled toward the last segment of the interview, talking about his case for increasing the military budget, the lack of congressional support for it, the upcoming presidential election (which would see Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter), the downfall of the shah of Iran, and finally—the thirty-second cue.

“In the few seconds we have left now, and there’s almost just time for a yes or no—are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”

Nixon replied that everyone he’d spoken to in Europe had said to him, “Why didn’t you burn the tapes?” “The answer is,” he said, “I probably should have.”

“If you had to do it all over again, you’d burn them?” I pressed in the last seconds.

“Yes, I think so,” Nixon said. “Because they were private conversations subject to misinterpretation, as we have all seen.”

There. I’d gotten him to say what would make headlines the next day.

“Thank you for being with us,” I said. And the interview was over.

When we took off our microphones and I stood up to shake his hand, I realized I was ice cold from the strain of having done the last ten minutes of the interview without any written questions. There we stood, Nixon perspiring through his makeup, and me frigid. It was then, when I stood up, that I saw that damn pile of questions on my chair. I had put them under my fanny when I thought we were through with the foreign policy segment and had been sitting on them the whole time.

N
IXON EVIDENTLY DID NOT
object to the interview, and we continued to have a good relationship. I did two other interviews with him, one in 1982 following the death of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, another in 1985 after the publication of his fifth book,
No More Vietnams
. But then—silence. For a reason not of my making.

Soon after Tom Murphy and Capital Cities bought ABC in 1986, the entertainment department bought Woodward and Bernstein’s second book about Watergate,
The Final Days
, to make into a television movie. Nixon did everything he could to prevent the movie from being made. He was protecting his wife, he said. Mrs. Nixon had had two strokes since her husband left office, and he was worried about her. “I, myself, speak about what I’ve been through, but you know, for a woman to suffer in silence during the difficult last days in the White House and the days thereafter, which were even worse, is much more difficult,” he had told me in our earlier interview about his book. He was afraid now that the ABC movie, which covered that exact time period, might cause his wife to have another stroke.

His plea, however, fell on deaf ears. ABC could have canceled the movie but they didn’t. It was already finished, and they insisted on running it. (It got very low ratings, by the way.) But Richard Nixon never spoke to me on the air again. When I approached him later for another interview, he turned me down. He liked me personally, he said, but I got my paycheck from ABC.

Pat Nixon did not have another stroke after seeing the ABC movie, but her health continued to deteriorate. She died of lung cancer on June 22, 1993. I covered her televised funeral at the Richard Nixon Library and his birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon was visibly upset. That supposedly cold, remote man cried uncontrollably at the service.

I recently learned from a young assistant of Nixon’s, Monica Crowley, that after Mrs. Nixon’s death, he had a change of heart about me and his boycott of ABC. Nixon had written another book,
Beyond Peace
, and had decided to do an interview with me. He talked to Monica about rearranging his study for the camera and lights and told her he was looking forward to talking to me. But it was not to be. Nixon suffered a massive stroke on April 18, 1994, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. He died four days later, at eighty-one. The book was published posthumously.

Ten months after his wife’s funeral I was back in Yorba Linda to cover his. Richard Nixon was the first U.S. president I interviewed, and he played an important role in my early career. He had always been considerate toward me. His death marked the end of a painful era for America, but it also touched me in a personal way and made me sad.

End of my digression on Nixon. Back to the 1970s and another death that really did change my life. In April 1974, I was in California when the call came from New York: Frank McGee was dead at fifty-two. Frank
dead
? I couldn’t believe it. We all thought he was sick, but we had no idea how ill he’d been. It turned out that he’d had bone cancer. He must have been in great pain, but he did the program almost every morning until the day he died and never said a word about it to any of us.

I immediately flew back to New York and was on
Today
the very next day. We were all in shock, as were our viewers. I received hundreds of letters of sympathy from people all over the country, a testament to the seemingly pleasant—and totally false—relationship I’d had with Frank.

Frank’s wife and his children were at his funeral. Mamye was nowhere in sight. Shortly after everyone returned to the office, the drama deepened. Mamye and Stuart Schulberg got into a fight, and he fired her. Though he later apologized and offered to help her transfer to another department at NBC, Mamye decided to sue NBC for racial discrimination. The situation created a terrible rift on the show, pitting Mamye’s supporters and friends against Schulberg and the more senior members on the program. In the end the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity dismissed her complaint of racism. Mamye had left
Today
by then to work elsewhere at NBC, and things calmed down. None of this, not even the lawsuit, ever got into the papers.