Being Nixon: A Man Divided (61 page)

N
ixon was not content to hobnob with opinion-makers and tycoons. He wanted to be on the inside, counseling presidents. His successors were not always eager for his advice, but Nixon was undeterred and, by a steady flow of memos and letters, public and private, he eventually achieved the status of respected elder statesmen at the White House. With the last of his successors, Bill Clinton, he became an unlikely consigliere. The term
wise man
can be a misnomer for Former Greats who come calling on the president. Often, they are operating on out-of-date information, and their biases can harden with age. But, characteristically, Nixon did his homework and made an effort to be realistic about the politics and exigencies faced by his successors.

Having saved Nixon from likely prosecution, Ford wanted to keep his distance. The 38th president was furious when the 37th president visited China in February 1976, three days before the New Hampshire primary. Ford was trying to fend off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, who was accusing Ford of going soft on communism. It did not help Ford’s cause for TV viewers to see Nixon toasting Chairman Mao. “Nixon is a shit,” said Brent Scowcroft, Ford’s usually restrained national security adviser.
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Jimmy Carter more or less snubbed Nixon, refusing the small courtesy of letting the former president stay at the White House guest
quarters, Blair House, when Nixon came east for Hubert Humphrey’s funeral in 1978.
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But Ronald Reagan was receptive to a back-channel relationship with Nixon—as long as it remained secret. “I am yours to command,” Nixon wrote Reagan, who had successfully reassembled Nixon’s Silent Majority by appealing to disaffected Democrats.
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Nixon showered Reagan with “Eyes Only” memos on everything from brass-knuckle politics to lofty geostrategy. Reagan listened: He accepted Nixon’s recommendation of Al Haig to become secretary of state. A confidential memo on January 14, 1982, from Nixon to William Clark, Reagan’s national security adviser, gives a flavor of Nixon’s cagey advice:

This brings me to a very delicate suggestion. During the Eisenhower years, [John Foster] Dulles played the role of the hawk and allowed Eisenhower, who was just as tough as Dulles, to be the great conciliator. During my presidency, it was the other way around. Kissinger, due in part to his concern about his relationships with academics and the liberals in the media, played the reasonable dove and I was the intractable hawk….

At Pat’s funeral.

Reuters/Corbis

Nixon suggested that Haig could play the hardliner with the Soviets, leaving Reagan to be the conciliator. The prickly, controlling Haig was soon pushed out at State, but Nixon kept on urging Reagan to set up good-cop/bad-cop dynamics in his administration. “You need at least two or three nut-cutters who will take on the opposition so that you can take the high road,” Nixon wrote Reagan in November 1982.
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When Reagan proposed abolishing nuclear weapons to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik Summit in the fall of 1986, Nixon concluded that Reagan had himself gone soft on communism, if not soft in the head. He surfaced his doubts in public—in a shared op-ed with Kissinger in April 1987 wondering if Reagan had been somehow seduced by Gorbachev. The shot across the bow was felt. Two days later, Reagan invited Nixon to the Residence in the
White House—Nixon’s first visit since August 1974, when his staff had been burning documents in the fireplaces.
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They met in Reagan’s study, a room that had served as Nixon’s and LBJ’s bedroom. Nixon reminisced that he had once sat in that room as Lady Bird crawled into bed with LBJ. Reagan offered cocktails; Nixon declined. “I assume this place isn’t taped!” Nixon joked to forced laughter. Would Nixon support Reagan’s attempt to get an arms control treaty with the Soviets on intermediate range missiles? Nixon declined. He was “no longer Reagan’s to command,” noted Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs in their book
The Presidents Club
.
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Nixon’s relationship to Reagan’s successor was problematic. Nixon told his family that he thought Bush was “the perfect vice president.”
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Bush had his own doubts about Nixon, which he expressed in a perceptive letter to his four sons in July 1974, three weeks before Nixon resigned:

He is enormously complicated. He is capable of great kindness….I am not that close to him as a warm personal friend, for he holds people off some. But I’ve been around him enough to see some humor and to feel some kindness….He has enormous hang-ups. He is unable to get close to people. It’s almost as if he’s afraid to be reamed in some way—people who respect him and want to be friends get only so close—and then it is clear—no more!

Bush was sensitive enough to know what Nixon thought of him: “Deep in his heart he feels I’m soft, not tough enough, not willing to do the ‘gut job’ that his political instincts have taught him must be done.”
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Nonetheless, Nixon tried to tutor Bush, offering his blunt if somewhat banal advice from his own experience in presidential debates (“above all, don’t get bogged down with the facts”) and trying to stiffen his resolve in foreign policy.
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In particular, he tried to steer Bush away from backing Gorbachev and instead swinging U.S. support
to a rougher but more democratic rival, Boris Yeltsin. Presciently, Nixon understood that Russia was at great risk of reverting to autocracy after the fall of communism. Yeltsin, in Nixon’s view, stood the best chance of rooting a democracy. On a trip to Moscow in 1991, in a conversation with three carefully chosen newsmen, Nixon looked at the Soviet Union through his own prism: “Gorbachev is Wall Street and Yeltsin is Main Street; Gorbachev is Georgetown drawing rooms and Yeltsin is the Newark factory gate.” Nixon’s populist instincts were right: Yeltsin, with the Bush administration’s somewhat belated support, supplanted Gorbachev.
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Nixon understood Russia in part because he kept traveling there—eight trips as an ex-president. Hugh Sidey asked him how he could deal so handily with an “Evil Empire,” in Reagan’s famous description. “Because I’m evil,” Nixon answered, tongue-in-cheek.
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Nixon refused to
cash in as an ex-president by sitting on corporate boards and taking directors’ or speaking fees. He supported himself by writing nine books, a mélange of memoir and foreign policy advice with titles like
In the Arena
and
Real Peace
. The books were moderately interesting and sold moderately well. In 1990, he hired an attractive young researcher, a political science student named Monica Crowley, who later published two books of her own reminiscences,
Nixon Off the Record
and
Nixon in Winter
. The Nixons had moved from their estate to a smaller, more manageable townhouse in suburban New Jersey, and Nixon established himself in a book-lined study he called “the Eagle’s Nest.” One afternoon, Crowley found Nixon, feet up, watching
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, chuckling away at the sitcom. Mortified, he dropped the remote control and said, “Well, you caught me. You know I don’t watch the tube, but every once in a while I like to see what’s out there.”

Gradually, Nixon began to confide in Crowley, even shyly and innocently flirt a bit. When Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, Nixon related the gossip that Barbara Bush was ready to “kill” James Baker,
Bush’s closest aide. “Politics is not for the faint of heart,” Nixon told Crowley. “Even grizzled types like me get bruised.” He paused with a smile. “Never admit it, though.”
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The hardball Nixon never quite went away: He threatened both Bush and Clinton with going public against them if they did not listen to his advice on Russia. Nixon was anxious when Clinton at first ignored his phone calls and memos. He blamed Hillary Clinton, who had worked on Nixon’s impeachment for the House Judiciary Committee. At last, after keeping Nixon waiting on the phone for over an hour, Clinton responded to Nixon on Russian policy. Nixon was ecstatic when he told Crowley about the phone call the next morning. “He was very respectful but with no sickening bullshit,” Nixon said. “It was the best conversation with a president I’ve had since I was president….He really let his hair down. This guy does a lot of thinking.”
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Clinton for his part was impressed by Nixon’s lucidity and conviction. “The thing that struck me about Nixon was that he really cared about [Russia] and that his mind was working great,” Clinton told Duffy and Gibbs.
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The best natural glad-hander ever to occupy the Oval Office bonded with quite possibly the worst, because both men understood the need for redemption. Nixon recognized Clinton as a fellow policy wonk and undertook to tutor him in foreign policy. Clinton played the avid pupil in phone calls and at a meeting at the White House, where even Hillary was friendly.
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Nonetheless, Nixon was wounded when Clinton failed to attend the funeral of Pat Nixon (he sent an emissary, his lawyer friend Vernon Jordan, instead). Pat’s death at the age of eighty-one in June 1993 came as an enormous blow to Nixon.
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The Nixons had grown closer since leaving the White House. Crowley observed that they were solicitous and affectionate with each other, in their courtly way. “He was always attentive,” recalled Heidi Retter, their housekeeper. “He wouldn’t sit down for dinner until she came downstairs, and he always pulled out her chair. He would try to think of things she liked, small treats and favors.”
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Pat told Crowley, “Dick can be quite romantic, you know. I think that would surprise a lot of people.”
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A
sometime smoker, Pat suffered from emphysema and finally succumbed to lung cancer.

On a cloudy, humid day at the newly built Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Nixon followed his wife’s flag-draped casket. As he came into view of the mourners, a gathering of some three hundred people, he broke down. In the audience, Rose Woods exclaimed, “Oh dear.” Seated, Nixon began sobbing uncontrollably. His torso slumped and his shoulders heaved up and down as Billy Graham tried to comfort him.

After the service, the guests milled about in the foyer of the lobby, reminiscing. Bryce Harlow recalled that Nixon was a man who, hearing the fall of a raindrop, could predict a downpour three weeks in the future. But, Harlow added, he believed that someone in Nixon’s past had hurt him deeply and wondered what might have happened if, as a boy, he had been well loved.

No one expected Nixon to appear after his public breakdown. But suddenly there he was, standing on a riser, no lectern, no microphone, no notes. His black suit seemed to hang on him. Without preamble, he began talking. In a strong baritone, he said that he never would have succeeded “mentally or physically without Pat.” He asked himself, what was his favorite campaign? He answered, “1952.” He explained that at “whistle stops,” the band always played “You Are My Sunshine,” and that reminded him of Pat. “She was the sunshine of my life,” he said. He recalled how she had recovered from her stroke (he strongly implied that it had been caused by reading Woodward and Bernstein’s
The Final Days
) by riding an exercise bike as her brow was covered with perspiration. “She never quit,” he said.

Sensing the emotion rising, he spied George McGovern across the room. “Of course George should be here,” said Nixon, becoming again the total-recall politician, “because Pat’s forebears were from South Dakota!”

It was a bravura performance. Afterward, Nixon shook everyone’s hand. Watching from the audience, Ed Cox realized that, without
his companion of more than five decades, his father-in-law might not have so long to live himself.
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Still, he plowed ahead. He visited Russia for the tenth time as an ex-president in the late winter of 1994. The trip did not go well. Yeltsin canceled a meeting, and Nixon caught the flu. Back in New Jersey, he was correcting the galleys of his latest book,
Beyond Peace
, and he stepped out into the April sunshine for a moment. He was sunning himself when the stroke hit. His housekeeper found him, looking dazed. “I knew right away because the right side of his face was hanging down,” Retter recalled. “He was clinging to the door frame. I couldn’t get him to let go.”
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He died four days later, on April 22, 1994, at the age of eighty-one. Clinton offered the family a state funeral, but Nixon had wanted to be buried at the Nixon Library, built beside his childhood home in Yorba Linda. Clinton had called the family, angling, in a subtle, gracious sort of way, for an invitation to deliver the eulogy. The family invited him to do so, along with Senator Bob Dole, Governor of California Pete Wilson, and Billy Graham. Henry Kissinger called, asking if he could also give a eulogy. At first, the family balked—they were not inclined to give Kissinger “one more opportunity for self-aggrandizement,” recalled a family friend. But then they relented, as long as Kissinger promised to be clear about who was the teacher and who the pupil.

It rained hard the day before the funeral, but thousands stood in line, for as long as eighteen hours, to say good-bye. Four thousand people, including all the living presidents—Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—attended the service, under gray skies, before the modest white bungalow that Nixon’s father had built. Governor Wilson borrowed a favorite Nixon line from Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.” Clinton said, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” Dole, through tears, said, “I believe the second half of the 20th century will be known as the Age of Nixon. Why was he the most durable public figure of our time?
Not because he gave the most eloquent speeches, but because he provided the most effective leadership. Not because he won every battle, but because he always embodied the deepest feeling of the people he led.”

Kissinger spoke first. He was the most direct, and he stated the simplest truth about the man they had come to mourn: “He achieved greatly and he suffered greatly, but he never gave up.”
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