Being Nixon: A Man Divided (59 page)

Kissinger began to perspire. He wanted to free himself. He got up to leave the Lincoln Sitting Room, but Nixon steered him to the Lincoln Bedroom next door. The president told Kissinger that every night he followed the practice of his Quaker mother of kneeling and silently praying before bed. Nixon asked Kissinger to pray with him now, “and we knelt,” Nixon recalled.

“My own recollection is less clear on whether I actually knelt,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs. He had not prayed in many years, and praying in his religion did not involve kneeling.

Kissinger was drenched with sweat when he returned to his office and found Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger. “Nothing I have ever been through has been so traumatic,” he said, and filled them in on the details. Kissinger’s private line to Nixon rang. Eagleburger picked up an extension to listen in. Nixon begged Kissinger not to tell anyone about what had occurred or that he had seen the president weep. It would show weakness.

The story was leaked to
The Washington Post
within a few days. In Woodward and Bernstein’s book,
The Final Days
, Nixon was portrayed as sobbing and beating the carpet, crying out, “What have I done? What has happened?” In his memoir Kissinger said he did not remember this. Like the image of Nixon talking to portraits, the truth, whatever it was, has long since blurred into myth.
⁵⁰

Nixon showed grace
at the end. On the morning of Thursday, August 8, his last full day as president, Nixon met with his successor, Gerald Ford. Ford asked Nixon if he had any advice. Nixon responded that the only man who would be “absolutely indispensible” was Henry Kissinger. There was no one else with Kissinger’s “wisdom and tenacity.” Nixon told Ford about a call he had received from Eisenhower the night before his inaugural in 1969, when Ike said it was the last time he could call him “Dick.” Nixon said to Ford, “It’s
the same with me. From now on, Jerry, you are Mr. President.” Ford’s eyes welled up, as did Nixon’s.
⁵¹

At 8
P.M
. on the eve of his resignation, there were more tears at a farewell session with longtime supporters in the Cabinet Room. The hallways smelled faintly of burnt paper; some aides were throwing documents into their office fireplaces. Nixon was scheduled to address the nation at 9 o’clock. He was crying so hard that the makeup lady, Lillian Brown, was worried that he wouldn’t be able to make it through his speech.
⁵²
Slowly, Nixon was able to master his emotions. When the red light went on at 9:01
P.M.
, he was calm. “This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office,” he began. He explained that he no longer had the political support to stay in office. Quitting, he said, “is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.” But for the good of the nation, the time had come. “Then,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “I came to the most difficult sentence I shall ever have to speak”:

Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

He wanted the healing to begin, he said. “To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving, I do so with this prayer: May God’s grace be with you in the days ahead.”

The red light blinked off. Nixon returned to the Family Quarters and found Pat, Tricia, Julie, David, and Ed. “Slowly, instinctively,” Nixon recalled, “we embraced in a tender huddle, drawn together by love and faith.”

Suddenly, Nixon began to shake violently. Tricia reached over to hold him. “Daddy!” she exclaimed. “The perspiration is coming clear through your coat!” Nixon tried to reassure them, it was just a passing chill.

“A tragicomic scene followed,” Nixon recalled. In her diary that night, Tricia recorded it:

On Pennsylvania Avenue voices of a crowd chanting were heard. Mama misinterpreted and thought the group was one of supporters when actually it consisted of the same people who throughout Daddy’s presidency had hounded his every effort. Now they were singing, “Jail to the Chief.”

Mama tried to propel Daddy toward the window so that he could see the crowd. Ed and I tried desperately to talk loudly so as to drown them out. We hoped Daddy would not hear their sick message. Even so, I am sure this last injustice did not escape him.
⁵³

“
I
woke with a start,” Nixon recalled of his last morning in the White House. He had slept for four hours, more than usual. Shortly before 9:30
A.M.
, he found his family waiting in the hallway of the Family Quarters. Pat was wearing a pale pink and white dress and dark glasses; she had barely slept in the previous two days, which she had spent packing up the family belongings. Only that morning had she begun to weep.

The farewell ceremony with the White House staff was scheduled for 9:30
A.M
. Steve Bull, Nixon’s personal aide, explained where everyone should stand in the East Room and mentioned that there would be three TV cameras. “At that news, Pat and Tricia became very upset,” Nixon recalled. “It was too much, they said, after all the agony television had caused us.” Nixon was firm. Television had saved him (the Checkers speech) and hurt him (the first Kennedy debate), but he knew that he had been one of the first politicians to exploit the power of television to reach over the “elites” to the masses. Nixon, in this moment, was thinking more about his place in history than about his family, who, he knew, would support him regardless. “That’s the way it has to be,” he said. “We owe it to our supporters. We owe it to the people.”

Nixon was “fighting a floodtide of emotions” as he began to speak. The night before, working on his speech while his son-in-law Ed Cox retrieved his favorite books from their shelves, Nixon had
remarked that he was caught up in a “Greek tragedy,” one that had to “play out.” Nixon had been matter-of-fact, not maudlin, with Cox.
¹
But standing before his staff and his followers, he did not hide his feelings. He talked, with an edge of populist resentment, about his father’s bad luck. He was sentimental about his mother (“a saint”) and then began reading from a tribute Theodore Roosevelt had written to his dead wife, Alice, which ended: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out of my life forever.” The audience was a little puzzled that Nixon chose to talk about Roosevelt’s wife and not his own wife standing behind him. In his memoirs, he explained that he couldn’t talk about his own family without breaking down. His point in his farewell remarks was that Roosevelt was only in his twenties when he thought the light had gone out of his life forever, but that he had rallied from despair. Speaking softly, with unpolished eloquence and from the heart, Nixon said of defeat:

It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain….

Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
²

The last night.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

A flash of self-knowledge, disguised as advice—and then it passed. Nixon refused to be introspective, at least for long. Too much self-reflection was, he believed, a sign of weakness; he was unable to see that lack of self-awareness
was
his weakness.

As the audience snuffled and sobbed and applauded, Nixon and his family swept out the door, down the stone steps, and on toward the helicopter that would fly the Nixons to exile. Just before he
ducked into the aircraft, Nixon turned, flung out his victory salute, and smiled broadly.

Inside the helicopter there was silence.
³
Nixon thought he heard his wife say, “It’s so sad, it’s so sad.”
⁴
But Nixon was already thinking “not of the past but of the future,” he later recounted. “What could I do now? What? It seems presumptuous that I thought it then, but I did. That’s the way it was. A little couplet kept coming into my head that I had received from Clare Booth Luce in the spring of 1973 when Watergate had just exploded all over the place. It was the ballad of Sir Andrew Barton:

I am hurt but I am not slain

I’ll lie me down and bleed awhile

Then I’ll rise and fight again.
⁵

Some of the
young lawyers in the office of the special prosecutor were pressing Leon Jaworski to indict the former president. A Gallup poll showed that a majority of Americans wanted Nixon to face a criminal trial.
⁶
At his confirmation hearing for vice president in the fall of 1973, Gerald Ford had said that if he became president he would not issue a pardon because the country “wouldn’t stand for it.” But now that he was president, Ford knew that a criminal trial for Nixon would drag on for at least two years and tear the country apart. In early September, after less than a month in office, Ford secretly sent his private attorney, Benton Becker, to San Clemente to negotiate a pardon.

By a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the acceptance of a federal pardon represents an admission of guilt. Nixon did not believe he was guilty of anything more than stupidity. For two days, Nixon’s lawyers dickered with Becker over the statement Nixon would sign. “Contrition is bullshit,” said Ron Ziegler, the former spokesman who was acting as Nixon’s chief of staff in exile. Finally, Becker, under orders
from Ford, delivered a now-or-never ultimatum. He threatened to get on a plane and go home.

Ford’s lawyer was at last granted an audience with the former president. Nixon was standing in an unadorned office in a temporary building near Casa Pacifica. He was formally dressed in a suit, as always, but his shirt collar seemed too large. He offered Becker a weak handshake and sat down. Becker started to explain to Nixon that a pardon entailed a confession of guilt.

“Where do you live?” asked Nixon. When Becker answered “Washington,” Nixon began asking how he thought the Redskins would do in the football season just begun. After twenty minutes of such filibustering, Becker got up to leave. He was in a car about to depart for the airport when he was summoned back to Nixon’s office.

The former president seemed contrite. “You’ve been a gentleman,” Nixon said to the young lawyer. “We’ve had enough bullies.” His voice faltered. “I want to give you something. But look around the office. I don’t have anything anymore. They took it all away from me.”

Becker awkwardly tried to reassure Nixon, but the former president fumbled around in his desk drawer and finally produced some cuff links. “I used to have all kinds of things, ashtrays, you know, paperweights and all that. Lots of them,” he said. “I’m sorry this is the best I have now.”

Becker returned to Washington with Nixon’s signature accepting the pardon and a statement from Nixon very indirectly acknowledging wrongdoing. The young lawyer told Ford that he wasn’t a medical doctor, but he wasn’t sure Nixon would live much longer.
^7
,
*
¹

On September 8, the day Ford announced the pardon to an explosion
of criticism, Nixon said to Pat, “This is the most humiliating day of my life.” That night, he felt a stabbing pain in his lower abdomen. His phlebitis had returned, more dangerous than ever. An unusually large blood clot threatened to break off and move to his heart. Nixon stubbornly refused to go to the hospital, saying that if he did, he’d “never get out alive.”

In late September, Ken Clawson, who had run the White House communications shop after Herb Klein, visited Casa Pacifica and found Nixon staring out at the ocean, his swollen leg elevated on the ottoman. For the briefest of moments, Nixon let down his guard with Clawson while describing how he had learned how to fight back. He spoke in general terms but was obviously referring to himself. “What starts the process, really, are the laughs and snubs and slights you get when you are a kid. Sometimes, it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn you can change those attitudes by excellence, by personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”

Clawson asked him about his leg. “They say it’s very bad,” Nixon answered. “But I’ve already told them to go to hell. I’ve told them I wasn’t setting foot outside the wall around my property no matter what. They can cut off the damn leg, let it rot, or just wait for the clot to reach the end zone. I don’t care.”

Clawson was speechless. Nixon looked at him closely. “You see, don’t you? You’ve got to be tough. You can’t break, boy, even when there’s nothing left. You can’t admit, even to yourself, that it is gone. Now some people we both know think that you’ve got to go stand in the middle of the bull ring and cry,
‘mea culpa, mea culpa,’
while the crowd is hissing and booing and spitting on you. But a man doesn’t cry.” Nixon clenched the pipe stem in his teeth. “I don’t cry. You don’t cry.” Both men became teary-eyed.
⁹

The leg worsened, swelling to three times its normal size. On October 30, Nixon was finally convinced that he needed emergency surgery.
Weakly sitting up in bed after the operation, his eyelids began to flutter, and he passed out. Attempts to revive him were fruitless. A nurse slapped his face, urgently repeating, “Richard, wake up, Richard!”
¹⁰
He was near death from internal bleeding.

Nixon came to, briefly. He later recalled the nurse calling him by a name only his mother had used. Then he drifted away again. Three hours later, after a massive transfusion, he regained consciousness to find his doctor anxiously hovering.
¹¹
He asked to see Pat. Nixon later recalled:

I now knew that I was in pretty desperate shape. Throughout the time we have known each other, Pat and I have seldom revealed our physical disabilities to each other. This time I couldn’t help it. I said that I didn’t think I was going to make it.

She gripped my hand and said almost fiercely, “Dick, you can’t talk that way. You have got to make it. You must not give up.” As she spoke, my thoughts went back again to the Fund crisis in 1952. Just before we went on stage for the broadcast, when I was trying to get all of my thoughts together for the most important speech of my life, I told her, “I just don’t think I can go through with this one.” She grasped me firmly by the hand and said, “Of course you can.” The words were the same but now there was a difference. Then I had something larger than myself to fight for. Now it seemed that I had nothing left to fight for except my own life.
¹²

Slowly, through the winter and spring of 1975, he recovered. Jack Brennan, the Marine colonel and former military aide who would become Nixon’s chief of staff after Ziegler departed, took him to play golf every day. Nixon was not a natural golfer—his swing was painfully herky-jerky—but he compensated with determination. (True White House story: “I scored 128 today,” Nixon announces. “Your golf game is getting better,” says Kissinger. “I was
bowling
, Henry,” Nixon snaps.) Every day Brennan, a scratch golfer with saintly patience,
headed out with Nixon to a small public course. “It was a real lousy course, but it was empty—no hecklers,” Brennan recalled. “His swing never got better, but he was so disciplined that he could just plunk it down the course.”
¹³

Pat found her own solace. “Gardening became my Mother’s salvation,” Julie wrote. “Many days she worked side by side with our gardener for seven hours or more.” She removed a rose garden and replaced it with purple, pink, and white flowers. She also read, mostly long historical novels by Taylor Caldwell laced with conspiracies and intrigues. She came to believe that Watergate was “partly an international scheme, or at the very least that double agents were involved,” wrote Julie.
¹⁴

On July 7, 1976, Pat suffered a stroke. “In the morning, she had read part of
The Final Days
, which, despite my Father’s protests, she had finally borrowed from one of the secretaries in his office,” Julie recorded. Woodward and Bernstein’s huge bestseller portrayed her as a lonely drunk, but “for Mother, the most unbearable part of the book was the analysis of her marriage as loveless,” wrote Julie. Feeling listless and ill, Pat could barely walk when she went to bed. The next morning, she struggled to the kitchen to make coffee for her husband, but could not open the lid on the coffee can. As her husband watched her, he noticed that the right side of her mouth was drooping and that she was slurring her words. He said nothing, quickly downed his juice, and announced that he was going to the office. Instead, he woke up Julie. “I think your mommy had a stroke,” he said.

The Nixons’ mutual aversion to sharing their suffering had reached a low point that morning. But as Pat recovered in the weeks ahead, her husband was tender, in his own fashion. Julie recalled:

From the very first day he established a ritual for his daily morning visit with Mother: he would come into her room very upbeat, kiss her on the cheek, and then say immediately, “Well, let me feel your grip.” Mother, who could barely lift her hand from
where it lay inert, a heavy weight by her body, each day gritted her teeth and tried determinedly to grasp his fingers, and each day she grew stronger.
¹⁵

The Nixons were
in financial trouble. They owed back taxes and lawyers’ fees that would run into the millions of dollars. There was a staff to maintain, and Democrats in Congress kept cutting back the former president’s stipend. Nixon was “worried about food on the table, literally,” recalled Ken Khachigian, a White House aide who had come west with the Nixons. “We were working with balance sheets. It was sad. He agonized, keeping it from Mrs. Nixon. He was sleepless about it.”
¹⁶
Ed Cox and Tricia loaned his father-in-law their personal savings.
¹⁷

Rebozo and Abplanalp helped out, buying Key Biscayne from Nixon for about $2 million. Nixon hired the flashiest agent in Los Angeles, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, to negotiate a book contract (over $2 million) for his memoirs. Lazar also sold, for slightly less than $600,000 (plus 20 percent of the profits), a long (twenty-eight-hour) sit-down with David Frost, a TV celebrity interviewer from England known for light but lively and provocative chats.
¹⁸

For twelve days in the spring of 1976, Frost and Nixon met on a set in a rented house near Casa Pacifica. Frost, at first, was outmatched. The former president seemed smarter, better prepared, almost cocky as he batted away the interviewer’s questions or launched forth on self-serving soliloquies. “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” he asserted. (Nixon elaborated that when national security was at stake, “the President’s decision in that one instant is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating the law. Otherwise, they’re in an impossible situation.”) Searching, vainly, for self-reflection, Frost asked about Nixon’s parting admonition not to hate your enemies because, as Nixon had put it, “you then destroy yourself.” Nixon non-answered by talking about his respect for the White House barber, Milton Pitts, and concluded
by quoting Coach Newman’s homily that a loser’s anger should be directed at himself, not his opponent. Frost egged on the ex-president to take a swipe at Kissinger for back-stabbing. Nixon answered with an air of weary patience, cleverly comparing Kissinger to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who so liked to be wickedly provocative at Georgetown dinner parties. Before they sat down on the sixth day of the interviewing, Nixon greeted Frost by casually inquiring, “Well, did you do any fornicating this weekend?”
¹⁹