Being Nixon: A Man Divided (36 page)

Still, Nixon could be crafty and veiled, especially when he was talking to Kissinger. One can read hundreds of pages of transcripts of Nixon and Kissinger conversing without ever knowing for sure the intentions of either. Rivals at pettiness, born manipulators, and geniuses at the darker side of diplomacy, they at once distrusted and needed each other. It did not help the relationship between the president and his national security adviser that Kissinger, on the job and on his frequent social rounds, hinted to newsmen that he was a restraining force on the “madman” president. And Nixon tired of Kissinger’s histrionics and paranoia about Bill Rogers at State. “All this really worries the P,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on August 17. “P realizes K’s basically jealous of any idea not his own.”
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Nixon had assigned Middle East strategy to Rogers instead of Kissinger because he wanted to signal that he was impervious to the pressures of the Israel lobby. The president “had his doubts whether my Jewish faith might warp my judgment,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.
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Kissinger, naturally, did his best to undermine Rogers’s Middle East peace plans and succeeded; vain but not crafty, Rogers was no match at intramural swordplay.

Despite occasional outbursts of frustration, Nixon by and large tolerated Kissinger’s diva act. He understood that Kissinger was just as clever and devious as he was. Scornful of the CIA, he counted on Kissinger to run covert operations. In September of 1970, he and Kissinger were furious that the CIA had failed to stop the election of the leftist leader of Chile, Salvador Allende; “the CIA isn’t worth a damn,” Nixon railed.
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(Cynically, CIA Director Richard Helms told his wife Cynthia that he thought Nixon was fronting for his old law
client, PepsiCo, whose interests were being threatened by Chilean socialists.)
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Kissinger and Nixon saw covert action as an integral tool of statecraft. Kissinger was put in charge of a “Track II” operation to subvert the Chilean government that three years later helped cause Allende’s overthrow and murder.
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Interviewed by David Frost after he left the presidency, Nixon commented on Kissinger’s “mood swings” and suggested that he tried to exert a calming influence, never too high or too low, on his mercurial national security adviser. When Kissinger second-guessed a decision, Nixon would say, “Remember Lot’s wife, Henry. Never look back.”
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At times, Nixon could be as emotional as Kissinger, but it suited Nixon to see himself as the calm and steady one; it was true that, at the depth of a crisis, Nixon often became serene, almost eerily so. Perhaps it was useful to have others raging around him so that he could play the role he saw for himself, as the cool hand in the crisis—which he often was.

Kissinger never regarded himself as Nixon’s friend, but he tried to understand him and came to admire him. He believed that Nixon had been unloved as a child but fought to compensate by achieving greatness. While he made fun of Nixon as “Walter Mitty,” he also saw Nixon’s sweet side, mawkish when he tried too hard but touching in its sincerity. “He had a kind of desperate courage,” Kissinger told the author.
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In his 1982 memoir
Years of Upheaval
, Kissinger wrote, “No modern president could have been less equipped by nature for political life.”
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Kissinger knew that for Nixon, entering a crowded room or talking to a stranger required an enormous act of will.

In August of 1970, Nixon summoned Kissinger to ride with him and Bebe Rebozo to visit his childhood home in Yorba Linda. The three men and a Secret Service agent climbed into a nondescript brown Lincoln and headed up from San Clemente. When they arrived at the modest bungalow, two other cars filled with press and security pulled up behind them. This was the usual presidential retinue, but suddenly Nixon began yelling at them to leave; he “lost his composure
as I had never seen him do before or after,” wrote Kissinger. “The orders were delivered at the top of his voice—itself an event so unprecedented that the Secret Service broke every regulation in the book and departed, followed by the press pool.”

“When we were alone again Nixon became more relaxed than I have ever seen him,” Kissinger recounted. In Whittier, Nixon pointed out the old family gas station, the small college, the nondescript hotel where he had begun his unlikely political career as the underdog Republican candidate. “As he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental. There was no moral to the tale except how easily it could have been otherwise,” wrote Kissinger. Then Nixon got lost in the canyons of Beverly Hills looking for the fancy house he had built during his brief stint as an L.A. lawyer, and “the relaxed, almost affable Nixon gave way to the agitated, nervous Nixon with whom I was familiar.”
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Foreign policy was
Nixon’s first love, but electoral politics finished a close second. Nixon loved playing chief campaign strategist, partly because he knew he was good at it. On the morning of September 9, he held forth for an hour and forty-five minutes with his political advisers, recounting old war stories and laying down a plan of attack for the 1970 midterm elections in November. (Chotiner sat in on the conversation “like the Ghost of Christmas past,” recalled Bill Safire, who was there along with Pat Buchanan.) “The P was really in his element,” recorded Haldeman.
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“Have you all read the Scammon-Wattenberg book?” Nixon asked. “The Democrats are all reading it.” In
The Real Majority
, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued that the election would come down to which party could win the hypothetical forty-seven-year-old Dayton, Ohio, housewife whose husband was a machinist. She was concerned with “the Social Issue,” wrote the authors, which, roughly speaking, meant fear of crime and declining morality brought on by hippies and black militants. “Permissiveness
is the key theme,” said Nixon.
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The Democratic Party regulars were scurrying to distance themselves from student radicals and angry blacks by becoming centrists. Don’t let them, said Nixon—a Republican candidate should put his Democratic opponent on the defensive by saying, “I don’t question his sincerity—he deeply believes in his radical philosophy.” This will cause the Democrat to squawk, “Gee, I’m not a radical,” said Nixon.
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On September 24, Nixon tutored his vice president, his lead paratrooper in the culture wars. Using punchy alliterative scripts written by Buchanan and Safire, Agnew was going around the country denouncing “pusillanimous pussyfooters” and “vicars of vacillation.” Nixon wanted him to pick fights with the peaceniks and the Yippies. “If the vice-president were slightly roughed up by these thugs nothing better could happen for our cause. If anybody brushed up against Mrs. Agnew, tell her to fall down,” Nixon instructed.
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But the Agnew show was getting old, Safire noted, verging into self-parody. The vice president had coined his own term—radic-lib—which “sounded ominously like the ‘comsymp’ of the John Birchers to some liberal commentators,” recalled Safire.
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The GOP was sinking in the polls. Fearing that the Republicans would lose as many as thirty-five seats in the House—the historic norm for the party in power during the first midterm elections—Nixon decided to take to the hustings himself for the final two weeks of the campaign.
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“It’s time for the Silent Majority to stand up and be counted!” Nixon told crowds across the country.
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Nixon seemed to relish his return to the stump, though his social awkwardness never went away. In St. Petersburg, Florida, a policeman was severely injured when his
motorcycle flipped over while driving in the presidential motorcade. In his considerate way, Nixon rushed from his limousine to express his sympathies. As was his way, he also didn’t know what to say, blurting to the policeman who lay bleeding on the ground, “Do you like your work?”
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Nixon’s protectors had learned to wear old suits when they traveled into raucous, unruly crowds—his body man, Steve Bull, had once been cut by a protester wielding a razor blade—but the demonstrators were particularly loud and nasty as Nixon approached the San Jose, California, municipal auditorium on October 29.
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Inside, five thousand uneasy boosters could hear the roar of the angry crowd outside; at one point, protesters tried to bash through the doors.

Haldeman saw an opportunity for Nixon’s favorite kind of showmanship. “We wanted some confrontation and there were no hecklers in the hall, so we stalled the departure a little so they could zero in outside, and they sure did,” he wrote in his diary that night.
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Nixon lit a match by climbing on the hood of his limousine and thrusting his arms out in his V-for-victory salute. The crowd reacted explosively. “I couldn’t resist,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “Suddenly rocks and eggs and vegetables were flying everywhere.”
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The Secret Service hustled the president into his limo, but the staff bus got caught behind a stalled car. Windows shattered. “Just like Caracas!” exclaimed Rose Woods. “She hit the deck in the aisle, shouting at the rest of us to do the same,” wrote Safire.
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That night at the Western White House, the president was too wound up to sleep. In the heat of campaigning, Nixon’s penchant for brooding could give way to a kind of joyful giddiness. In his wry, telegraphic style, Haldeman described the evening after the storm in his diary:

After arrival in San Clemente, P went home, then kept calling with ideas about how to push the line. Then called and asked, “How are things at your place?” I said fine and started to talk. He interrupted and said we’re having a fire here. Laughed and said house had caught fire from his den fireplace. Told me to
come on over. Place full of smoke, hoses, firemen, and water. Not too much damage. P took me in his bedroom (he was padding around the patio in pajamas, slippers, and weird bathrobe when I arrived), said there was no problem. It was full of smoke. I could hardly breathe. He said he loved smoke and would sleep there. I talked him into the guest house. We went over there, had a beer, and talked about the day. Finally to bed about 1:00.

A really weird day, especially the last parts of it. He was very tired, but in great humor. Pulled down his pajamas and showed me horrible bruise on his thigh from motorcade in Rochester.

All through the day he delighted in giving the “V” to peaceniks.
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On Election Day,
the Republicans lost nine House seats and gained two in the Senate. It was a respectable showing by the incumbent president’s party at the midterm, but the press for the most part declared victory for the Democrats. In his election night TV speech, the Democratic champion, Senator Edmund Muskie, had appeared Lincolnesque, speaking in a soft, solemn voice about the “politics of hope” versus the “politics of fear” from his misty cottage in Maine. For his nationally televised address, delivered at a harshly lit rally in Phoenix, Nixon had delivered a strident get-tough speech that made even his allies wince. “He looked like he was running for sheriff,” scoffed John Mitchell, normally a law-and-order stalwart.
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Bruised again by the press in the wake of the election, Nixon was seized by one of his occasional bouts of self-pity. Traveling to Paris in early November for the funeral of his hero Charles de Gaulle, he wanted to go to a “good restaurant” for lunch but his aides convinced him to keep a low profile. “P then sulked about never gets to do anything fun that he wants to do, always has to do what’s right,” wrote Haldeman.
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But, as ever, he was determined to rally, to be positive. He tried to put on a good show for his family. “My father was the member of the
family who most enjoyed the White House,” recalled Julie. “As he stepped out of the elevator for dinner, the family could expect to hear a jaunty two-note whistle. He was upbeat and wanted us to be also.”
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On November 15, two days after returning from Paris, Nixon repaired to the Lincoln Sitting Room to write down what, as he put it, “I have learned about myself and the Presidency. From this experience I conclude: The primary contribution a President can make is on Spiritual lift.” He listed, as he had the year before, the joyful human qualities he wished to embody and project:

Need for optimistic upbeat psychology.

Need for stimulating people to talk to.

Need for dignity, kindness, drive, youth, brevity, Spiritual quality
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Nixon’s dreaminess was duly translated—and deadened—by the too-efficient White House bureaucracy. In early December, a memo went out from Dwight Chapin that staffers were to sit in on meetings to record the president’s “warmth.” These “anecdotalists”—primarily White House aide Dick Moore and speechwriters Safire, Buchanan, and Price—dutifully set out to find heart-warming human interest stories about the president that could be fed to the press. Naturally, even the most access-hungry reporters resisted such obvious attempts to fluff the president.
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The same day that Nixon ordered his staff to contrive feel-good stories, Nixon received some genuinely good news—a small signal from a faraway source that was momentous in its significance. On December 9, at 6
P.M
., Kissinger was visited in his office by the Pakistani ambassador bearing an envelope containing a handwritten missive on white, blue-lined paper. It was a personal message from Chou En-Lai, the prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, to President Richard Nixon. After some obligatory agitprop about Taiwan, the message stated that a “special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking.”