Being Nixon: A Man Divided (26 page)

Within six months, Nixon was on to his dilatory aides. “I have an uneasy feeling that many of the items that I send out for action are disregarded when any staff member just reaches the conclusion that it is unreasonable or unattainable,” Nixon wrote his chief of staff on June 16. Notably, suggesting that he
wanted
to be protected from himself, the president added: “I respect this kind of judgment.” But he insisted that he be informed when no action was taken. Often, he wasn’t.
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Nixon reached out
to his most recalcitrant foe,
The Washington Post
, through its colorful editor, who was not yet famous but was becoming quite a force, potentially a dangerous one to Nixon. On a Saturday morning, the president telephoned Bradlee at his office at the newspaper on Fifteenth Street, just to chat. Nixon was no doubt ill at ease—he knew that Bradlee had been not just cordial with JFK but a close personal friend. In his recollection of the call, Bradlee, who like Nixon had learned to swear in the navy, was characteristically profane and dismissive of the president:

By God, one morning the operator said that the President was on the phone. I thought it was [humor columnist] Art Buchwald
or somebody pulling my leg—and it was Nixon! It was most uncomfortable, awkward; there was no way to explain the call, except that somebody had said: “You know, you ought to try to get to know Bradlee.” He talked about OPA [the World War II Office of Price Administration] and tire prices; I didn’t give a shit. He tried it two more times and then realized it was a bad, bad idea.
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Nixon had the misfortune of coming to power at a time when the press was hardening in opposition to authority. The “credibility gap” created by President Johnson’s lies about the Vietnam War and the rising ferment of the 1960s had produced a new generation of journalists who were hypercritical—sometimes, like Bradlee, swaggeringly so.
The Washington Post
was becoming a bastion of doubters. “You could certainly say that from the mid-60s onward we became a more anti-establishment paper than we had ever been,” recalled Bradlee. “As far as the presidency was concerned there was an awe for the office under [Russ] Wiggins, my predecessor. I guess I changed all that. By the time Nixon got in we were already anti–White House, and we sure stayed that way.”
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The Washington Post
may have been “anti-establishment,” but it was, at the same time, the Establishment, the hometown paper and favorite organ of the Georgetown set. Nixon tried, in ways that usually backfired, to make some inroads or at least send out peace feelers. In addition to telephoning Bradlee at his office, he used Henry Kissinger as a kind of ambassador to the court of Katharine Graham. The
Post
’s owner, who had taken over the paper five years earlier after her brilliant but unstable husband, Phil, had killed himself, had her own insecurities and was uncomfortable in the role of rival to the throne. But in Nixon’s worldview, she would increasingly loom as a threatening usurper.

Mrs. Graham’s closest friend, columnist Joe Alsop, was inclined to support Nixon’s muscular foreign policy, and Nixon wanted Kissinger to stoke Alsop with flattery and leaks. On February 14, Kissinger,
who taped some calls, recorded Nixon telling him, “Very subtly you can let Alsop know” that Nixon intended to be resolute on foreign policy. “He is already writing that. If you can convince Alsop—you know what I mean.”
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Two days earlier, Nixon had hosted his first formal dinner at the White House—a birthday party for Alice Longworth. The only other guests, besides the Nixons and Mrs. Longworth, were Kissinger, Joe Alsop, and his wife, Susan Mary Alsop. “Nixon would have Henry perform, and he would sit back and beam with pride, as if Henry were some sort of prized possession,” Mrs. Alsop recalled. Nixon would lean toward his dinner partner and say, “Mrs. Longworth, I think you’ll be interested in what Henry has to say about that.”
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In March, Nixon called Mrs. Graham and suggested that she invite Kissinger to “an editorial lunch to brief us on administration thinking on Vietnam,” she recalled in her memoirs. “It was clear that Henry was brilliant and at lunch that day he was both funny and articulate.” The “lunch was the start of a long relationship with the paper and me,” Graham wrote.
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Before long, Kissinger was a regular at dinner at Mrs. Graham’s and, even more frequently, at the Georgetown salon hosted by her best friend, Polly Wisner, the widow of the late CIA chief of covert operations, Frank Wisner. Cynthia Helms, the wife of CIA Director Richard Helms, was a frequent guest and joined in the fun as Kissinger made self-deprecating jokes and slyly mocked the president, usually for going overboard before Kissinger could restrain him. “Henry was the center of attention at Polly’s. He made Nixon a cartoon. There was no empathy for the President in that room,” Mrs. Helms said. At tables for eight crammed in amid Mrs. Wisner’s French antiques, there was a thrilling sense of being in the know—indeed, socially, intellectually, even morally, a cut above. “Nixon called us the ‘Georgetown Set,’ ” recalled Mrs. Helms. “I don’t think we knew we were until he called us that.”
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John Freeman, the new British Ambassador, took up his duties in February and was immediately folded into the capital elite. He was shocked by the animus against the president. “Nixon was treated
abominably by Georgetown society,” he told Jonathan Aitken. “It was not just a question of political disagreements. Really beastly attitudes were on display towards him, largely to do with social class.”

Freeman recalled “one not uncharacteristic example of this at Mrs. Alice Longworth’s house one evening….Over drinks before dinner she asked me what I thought of the new President. I gave some sort of respectful reply. Alice then hushed up the whole company, saying in her wickedest voice, ‘How extraordinary! Listen. The Ambassador thinks well of Mr. Nixon! Such a common little man!’ and her guests all roared with laughter.”
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How wounded Nixon would have been! To know that his singular upper-crust ally—“Mrs. L.,” as he affectionately called her, his one faithful defender among the Washington cognoscenti—was taking such gleeful pleasure in sneering at him as a “common little man,” even if, as was likely, she was indulging in broad irony. Mrs. Longworth liked to play the provocateur and was no doubt taking malicious pleasure in shocking her British guest. Still, her betrayal would have confirmed Nixon’s suspicions, not just about Georgetown but more existentially about why he needed to keep his guard up. He would have stoically filed Mrs. L.’s slight away with other hurts in the place where he stored grudges and grievances—to be burned later as fuel. Nonetheless, Nixon was human, and he could not have helped but feel hurt when the whisperings of a supporter’s perfidy came back to him as malevolent gossip. (Nixon heard about some of Kissinger’s
lèse-majesté
from Haldeman, who had his own spies; other betrayals he probably intuited.) On some evenings, Nixon would joke with Haldeman about where Kissinger might be. “I guess Henry’s out with his Georgetown friends,” Nixon would say and brood for a moment. “He would joke about it,” recalled John Connally, who later became one of Nixon’s closest advisers. “But it bothered him badly.”
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The president tried to be philosophical. Career army officer Vernon Walters, Nixon’s translator to the Caracas mob in 1958, later installed by Nixon to be deputy director (and Nixon watchdog) at the CIA, told Nixon that Kissinger was making snide comments about him at
Washington parties. “I know this,” Nixon replied. “Kissinger likes to be liked and I understand that.”
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On February 17,
Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, called on Nixon in the Oval Office. An experienced diplomat, Dobrynin was neither heavy-handed nor fearful of his Kremlin masters like many communist-bloc envoys, Kissinger wrote in
White House Years
. With Nixon, on this raw winter’s day, the Soviet Ambassador hinted at the idea of a summit meeting between Nixon and his Kremlin opposite, Leonid Brezhnev. Nixon, “in the formal manner he adopted when he was keyed up,” recalled Kissinger, replied cautiously, but he indicated he was interested. Determined to create a new balance of power, Nixon wanted to make Moscow a realpolitik partner in a new world order, not some scary Marxist aggressor waving nuclear missiles and spouting off about world revolution. The French word was
détente;
Nixon’s savvy pursuit of it would push the nuclear superpowers away from the brink.
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At Kissinger’s suggestion, the White House and Kremlin decided to open a back channel—direct, secret communications that cut out the bureaucracy. About once a month—as often as every day during tense periods—Dobrynin would slip into the White House through a little-used and little-noticed entrance in the East Wing and join Kissinger in the Map Room, where the two men would begin the long, tedious, and vital slog toward a nuclear arms control treaty. The State Department would be left on the sidelines and in the dark. Nixon had made his old friend Bill Rogers secretary of state; Rogers had been an adviser to Nixon during the Hiss case, the Checkers speech, and other Nixon crises. But Rogers, Eisenhower’s last attorney general and a lawyer at heart, tired of Nixon’s endless geostrategic conversations with Kissinger and forfeited his place at the foreign policy table.
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Kissinger was only too happy to cut out Rogers, and Nixon, too, sought the sort of close control and secrecy provided by “The Channel,” as the Dobrynin-Kissinger relationship was called. Kissinger, in his insouciant way, admitted to “vanity and quest for power” as “less
elevated motives” for wishing to monopolize the relationship to America’s greatest adversary and potential partner for peace. After that first meeting with Dobrynin, Kissinger wrote, “It was characteristic of Nixon’s insecurity with personal encounters that he called me into his office four times that day for reassurance that he had done well.”
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Nixon’s insecurities were
so evident that they made easy targets, but he could perform with surprising confidence and generosity of spirit. Eager to be seen as a statesman and wishing to repair alliances frayed by time and distress over the Vietnam War, he left for Europe on a ten-day trip after barely a month in the White House. In London, he ran straight into a flap caused by his overzealous aides. Britain’s ambassador to the United States, John Freeman—the very one who noted Nixon’s shabby treatment by Georgetown society—was supposed to accompany Nixon to a welcoming dinner at the home of the prime minister, 10 Downing Street. Freeman’s appointment to Washington had been an awkward mistake—misreading U.S. politics, the Labor Government of Harold Wilson had picked Freeman, a leftist editor of the
New Statesman
, in anticipation of a Hubert Humphrey victory. In his role of partisan journalist, Freeman had been harshly critical of Nixon as an unprincipled right-wing hack. So when Nixon’s overprotective minders saw Freeman’s name on the guest list, they rashly attempted to strike it off.
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The story leaked, as it was sure to. Wisely, Nixon ordered his staff to stop fussing about Freeman. Then, with the carefully rehearsed “impromptu” eloquence he often showed when called on to speak at formal occasions, he rose after dinner and began by saying that American journalists had written far worse things about him than Freeman had. “Some say there’s a new Nixon and wonder if there’s a new Freeman,” he went on. “I would like to think that’s all behind us. After all, he’s the new diplomat and I’m the new statesman.” The guests, in British clubman style, thumped the table and called out, “Hear! Hear!” On the back of his menu, Prime Minister Wilson wrote Nixon a note: “That was one of the
kindest and most generous acts I have known in a quarter of a century of politics. Just proves my point. You can’t guarantee being born a lord. It is possible—you’ve shown it—to be born a gentleman.”
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Nixon did not pause long in Berlin—“a Kennedy city,” he said, recalling JFK’s stirring “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech—and from a speech he struck a mention of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—“That’s a Kennedy song,” he said, remembering that Robert Kennedy had used it as an anthem in his 1968 campaign.
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Peering out the window of Air Force One on an icy morning in Paris, Nixon saw that President de Gaulle, standing erect at the foot of the stairway, was not wearing an overcoat. Nixon took off his overcoat. De Gaulle spoke without notes. Nixon spoke without notes.
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In his own mind, Kissinger had been giving Nixon only a “B plus” on the trip, and was weary from staying up late reassuring a happy but slurry Nixon in his suite at Claridge’s. “Nixon desperately wanted to be told how well he had done,” recalled Kissinger. “As he would do on so many other occasions, he asked me to recount his conspicuous role in the day’s events over and over again.”
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But on the freezing tarmac at Orly Airport, as he watched his boss keep pace with “Le Grand Charles,” Kissinger turned to William Safire and said, “God, to stand up there without notes and say the right thing, do you have any idea what that takes?”
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At the Élysée Palace, de Gaulle lectured Nixon about China. Better to recognize the Red Chinese when they need the United States as a counterweight to Russia, said de Gaulle, than to wait until China was a fully capable nuclear power and the United States would hold fewer chips. Nixon was listening closely. He had read that a Kremlin military official had compared Chairman Mao to Hitler and that Chinese and Russian troops were skirmishing on the border. Nixon knew the old adage, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The president’s resourceful mind was already turning.
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On the most difficult question facing him, Nixon asked de Gaulle, “Mr. President, what would you do regarding Vietnam?”