Being Nixon: A Man Divided (62 page)

Farewell.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

T
hree years after Nixon resigned, his chief speechwriter Ray Price wrote a memoir discussing Nixon’s “light side”—“exceptionally considerate, exceptionally caring, sentimental, generous of spirit, kind”—and his “dark side”—“angry, vindictive, ill-tempered, mean-spirited.” (Nixon’s “calculating, devious, manipulative parts are ones that I consign to neither side,” wrote Price; “these are necessary tools of statecraft.”)

Price continued:

The light side and the dark side are both there, and over the years these have been at constant war with one another. I have seen the light side far more in evidence than I have the dark, and everyone I know who has worked closely with him agrees: while both are part of the “real” Nixon, the light side is by far the larger part, more central, the one that he himself identifies with.
¹

The black-hearted Nixon has been a cartoon version ever since Herblock first drew a caricature of Nixon crawling out of the sewer in the early 1950s.
²
Far from a cynic, say his defenders, Nixon was a romantic. Nixon’s family members still argue that, if anything, Nixon was too idealistic, and that he was clumsy at dirty tricks, certainly no match for the Kennedys in that department. The loyalists protest too much. Though Nixon usually wanted to do “the right thing,” anyone
listening to the White House tapes would wonder about his moral sensibility as he discussed hush money with John Dean. Still, it’s true that Watergate got out of hand in part because Nixon was too shy, too trusting to confront his own staff on exactly what happened and who was to blame.
³

A Manichaean divide between light and dark is useful in religion and literature and possibly political science, but it is a device, a construct. There was only one Nixon. In Nixon the light and dark strains are inextricably intertwined, impossible to disentangle. They fed each other. Nixon’s strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. The drive that propelled him also crippled him. The underdog’s sensitivity that made him farsighted also blinded him. He wanted to show that he was hard because he felt soft. He learned how to be popular because he felt rejected. He was the lonely everyman to the end.

It is said that great men often compartmentalize.
⁴
They are able to separate their emotions, their inner and outer lives, freeing their drive for greatness from the limiting demands of family life and ordinary human wants and needs. Nixon certainly tried to separate his political or presidential being from his needier self. In his written communications and even verbally (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”), he would refer to a third-person Nixon—an almost disembodied “RN” or just “the President.” To his detractors, of course, he was Tricky Dick, the deceiver, the malign faker. Nixon could be heedless about the truth, and he was, like most successful public figures, an actor who presented an idealized version of himself. But he was a very good actor. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded at inventing a true World Leader, able to take his place on the global stage alongside some formidable personages. So personally ill at ease that he could not look his doctor in the eye,
⁵
he was perfectly confident in the presence of historical figures from de Gaulle to Mao. How, an insightful Nixon observer once asked me, could you say he was insecure when these powerful men regarded him with such respect?
⁶

Nixon often played the role of RN with skill and courage. But he failed to realize that separating RN, the cool hand at global poker,
from the vulnerability and yearning of Richard, the desperate-to-please child of Frank and Hannah, was impossible. Nixon’s effort to rise above or separate from his neediness was admirable in some ways, but it was also self-deceiving and, in the end, self-destructive. If he had been more self-aware—if he had not pretended so much, tried so hard to be someone he was not—he could have watched for and compensated for his weaknesses, channeled his emotions without succumbing to their excesses.

The question I kept asking as I wrote this book is whether Nixon could see the true Nixon. “No,” Brent Scowcroft told me, “but sometimes I think he took a peek.”
⁷
That sounds about right. At some deep, possibly subconscious level, Nixon seems to have understood that he was locked in a titanic battle between hope and fear, and he struggled, bravely if not always wisely, against the dark. Nixon keenly felt the snubs and slights from his youth and even more so, in later years, the scorn of the East Coast elite. He was not paranoid; the press and the “Georgetown set” really were out to get him. He must have been aware of his insecurities and his tendency to rub old wounds and to lash out. In
Six Crises
, he acknowledged—almost seemed to welcome—his messy emotions at times of high stress. But, rigidly determined not to reveal weakness, even to his intimates, he would not, or could not, see the harm in projecting a false and brittle facade, in extolling the tough-guy “nut-cutter.” Deeply thoughtful about the world, he was not insightful about his impact on others. In particular, he could not see how his festering resentments and anger would create a mood of reckless arrogance among some of his subordinates.

To the end, Nixon resisted self-analysis. “I’ve never believed that any individual can analyze themself [
sic
],” he told Frank Gannon in a recorded interview in 1983. “I know that’s the ‘hep’ thing these days. It’s what you learn in political science classes, and that’s what you learn in psychology classes, and—and I know that everybody’s supposed to sit about—around in rap sessions and say, ‘Well, these are my weaknesses, these are my strengths,’ true confessions and all
that stuff. But it’s always turned me off. I don’t think I’m really very good at it.”
⁸

Far more important, Nixon argued, was “to believe deeply in a great cause.” Skeptics might say Nixon’s true cause was his own political advancement, and certainly, he could be coldly manipulative as he pushed past his rivals. But, as Price observed, he could also use cunning and ruthlessness as the tools of statesmanship. There can be no doubt that Nixon believed in America, in its power and purpose and essential goodness. He devoted his life to serving his country. Nixon bemoaned the rise of the “Me Generation,” the baby boomers preoccupied with self-realization and self-affirmation. It is ironic that Nixon, by discrediting faith in government through the Watergate scandal, contributed mightily to this inward push, away from selflessness and service.

Nixon’s story is a lesson in the limits of power—of hubris and of human frailty. Consumed by ambition, he took on enormous burdens and risks and, just as he ascended to the heights, elected by a landslide to rule as the most powerful man in the world, he fell, as dramatically as if he were a tragic hero in an ancient myth or parable. Aeschylus wrote that from suffering comes wisdom; Nixon’s tragedy was that he did
not
gain wisdom, at least about himself, from suffering—certainly, not until it was too late to save his presidency.

And yet, there is something affecting about a president who cries out, as his family and friends get up to walk out on a bad movie, “Wait! Wait! It’ll get better!” Nixon’s optimism and resiliency may have been defensive, bulwarks in his own battle against self-doubt, but they were nonetheless necessary and even admirable. Even in his bleakest hour he knew he was not done. As the helicopter rose above the Washington Monument on his last day in August 1974, Ed Cox, sitting beside him, said, “You’ll be back in ten years, sir.” Nixon just nodded.
⁹

At critical moments, Nixon was not able to confront his own weaknesses, and he was too averse to conflict and too distracted to tame heedless subordinates. But by intelligence and grit, he accomplished
great feats for his country and himself, not the least of which was getting elected, sometimes by overwhelming majorities, when he had to brace himself just to make small talk. He may have lacked self-knowledge, but he knew this: that he could be beaten down, counted out, and yet—always and no matter what the obstacles—rise again.

It is one of the mysteries—and glories—of human nature that sinners can become saints. But only in prayers of another world are saints truly cleansed of sin. Often the most convincing moralists are the very ones who feel the temptation to sin most strongly. Some turn out to be hypocrites, but that does not mean their sermons are hollow. Very few, if any, great men or women are pure of heart, but inner torment and even a touch of wickedness can be catalysts to greatness.

Nixon was no saint. But the fears and insecurities that led him into sinfulness also gave him the drive to push past self-doubt, to pretend to be cheerful, to dare to be brave, to see, often though sadly not always, the light in the dark.

To my daughters

Louisa and Mary

I
n 1988, Nixon came to
Newsweek
magazine, where I worked, to talk to a group of editors and writers. After his talk, he came up to me and said, “Your grandfather was a great man.” I was taken aback—I had never met Nixon and I was one of thirty or forty people in the room. Not sure of what to say, I spluttered something about how he had been a good grandfather. My father’s father, Norman Thomas, had been the leader of the Socialist Party in America for many years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Nixon, in his careful, always-prepared way, must have looked at the attendance list and done some homework.

I spent twenty-four years at
Newsweek
, the magazine then owned by the Washington Post Company, Nixon’s nemesis. By many measures, I am a creature of the East Coast media establishment. Old Nixon hands might have been suspicious of me, and I’m sure some were, but they were helpful in my research nonetheless. I told them that I wanted to get past the cartoon version of Nixon, and they trusted me enough to try to explain a highly complicated, deeply flawed, but capable and fascinating figure.

I want to thank, first, Robert Odle, a Washington lawyer and pro bono counsel to the Nixon Foundation, who opened many doors for me. Rob and I didn’t always agree about Nixon, but he was always thoughtful in his arguments and gracious with me. I owe a debt to the many former Nixon aides and cabinet members who spoke with me:
Marjorie Acker, Robert Bostock, Lucy Winchester Breathitt, Jack Brennan, Steve Bull, Jack Carley, Henry Cashen, Dwight Chapin, John Dean, Chris DeMuth, Fred Fielding, Peter Flanigan, Frank Gannon, William Gavin, David Gergen, Richard Hauser, Larry Higby, Lee Huebner, Ken Khachigian, Henry Kissinger, Egil Krogh, Melvin Laird, John Lehman, Fred Malek, Paul O’Neill, Gregg Petersmeyer, Ray Price, Jonathan Rose, Donald Rumsfeld, Don Santarelli, Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz, Stuart Spencer, Connie Stuart, William Timmons, Ron Walker, Charles Wardell, and John Whitaker.

In particular, I want to thank Doug Hallett, who was an aide to Chuck Colson, and Jack Carley for their insights into Nixon. Frank Gannon, who helped Nixon with his memoirs and spent many hours with the man, was an invaluable resource to me.

Edward Nixon, Nixon’s younger brother, was gracious and informative when my wife, Oscie, and I visited him at his home outside of Seattle. For reasons I understand, other members of Nixon’s immediate family chose not to speak with me, although I did receive guidance from a source close to the family who wishes to remain anonymous.

Oscie and I had a very pleasant and interesting lunch with Jo Haldeman, Bob Haldeman’s widow, who permitted me to read her unpublished memoir. Haldeman’s full, unedited diary, available at the Nixon Library, was a crucial source. So, too, were his handwritten notes of his meetings with Nixon, also at the Library. The Nixon-Haldeman memo file is the best source on what Nixon was thinking and agitating about, particularly on personnel and media issues. For his more spontaneous reactions, his marginalia on the president’s daily news summary are revealing. Some of Nixon’s late-night musings on his yellow pads are available at the Library, as are a large cache of his school papers and much of his correspondence. His ten-thousand-page diary remains closed, though he quotes extensively from it in his memoirs. John Ehrlichman’s handwritten notes of his meetings with Nixon, at the Hoover Library at Stanford, are less complete than Haldeman’s but are also significant. My thanks to
Peter Ehrlichman for talking to me about his father. Thanks, too, to Susan Eisenhower, who lived with the Nixons at the White House in the volatile spring of 1970 and gave me an interesting, empathetic insight.

The White House tapes capture less than two and a half years of his presidency, but they are a mother lode. Since there are three thousand hours available, I needed experienced guides. The one scholar who has listened to all, or almost all, of the tapes is Luke Nichter at Texas A&M. Luke and his coauthor of
The Nixon Tapes
, Doug Brinkley, were very helpful to me. I also used John Dean’s
The Nixon Defense
and Stanley Kutler’s
Abuse of Power
—massive and crucial works on the hard-to-decipher tapes. At the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Ken Hughes has made important contributions to deciphering the mysteries of the tapes, and I am grateful to him for sitting down with me to talk through the 1968 October Surprise.

Oscie and I spent several weeks listening to tapes at the Nixon Library, mostly digital versions of the National Archives originals. I often visited Luke Nichter’s website
nixontapes.org
. Any student of the Nixon tapes should start at Nichter’s meticulous site.

The transcripts of the tapes quoted in the book were made by me.

I was fortunate to be advised by some Watergate scholars. James Rosen, author of an excellent biography of John Mitchell, is deeply versed on the topic and read my manuscript carefully. So, too, Geoff Shepard, who was a young White House lawyer engaged in Nixon’s defense and is still turning up evidence to support his cause. Max Holland, author of
Leak
, a brilliant study of the source known as “Deep Throat”—FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt—gave me generous and shrewd advice. Tim Naftali, the former head of the Nixon Library, shared his strongly held and informed view of Nixon; I used many of the oral histories conducted by him for the Library. Of Nixon scholars, Melvin Small has to be one of the best; he offered useful feedback on my manuscript (warning me, for example, to be careful with the memoirs of “that old thespian” Nixon). Thomas Schwartz at Vanderbilt was helpful on Vietnam, as was Jeff Kimball at Miami
of Ohio. Annelise Anderson at the Hoover Institute explained the origins of the all-volunteer army, and Earl Silbert, the federal prosecutor on Watergate, and Richard Ben-Veniste, the lead lawyer in the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s office, helped me think through some of the many enduring puzzles.

Thanks to my friends Robin West and Ted Barreaux for their Nixon reminiscences and to Rick Smith for introducing me to Darrell Trent and Brent Byers for their Nixon memories from Bohemian Grove.

Oscie and I spent about two months at the Nixon Library, where we were well taken care of by archivists Meghan Lee and Pamla Eisenberg and by archives director Gregg Cumming and audio-visual specialist Ryan Pettigrew. Jonathan Movroydis and Sandy Quinn at the Nixon Foundation opened up the Jonathan Aitken papers and gave me access to Nixon’s private library, enabling me to see his many underlinings in his favorite books. At the Nixon Library, my friend and longtime researcher Mike Hill was with us for some of that time (working profitably on Henry Kissinger’s phone calls and documentation from October 1973) and ventured as well to the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress in Washington (Safire, Garment, and Haig papers), the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas (Woodward and Bernstein papers), and the Virginia Historical Society (David Bruce papers). Thanks to Elizabeth Moynihan for access to Pat Moynihan’s papers as well as for her lively recollections. Mike wishes to thank Rick Watson at the Ransom Center; Jeff Flannery, head of the Manuscript Reading Room, and Patrick Kerwin at the LOC; and Nelson Lankford at the VHS. My thanks to Joe Dmohowski at Whittier College for access to a great oral history collection, an unpublished early biography of Nixon, and his deep knowledge of Quaker Whittier. (Thanks, too, to Hubert Perry, Nixon’s Whittier College contemporary, for sharing his recollections.) Stephanie George at California State–Fullerton helped me with hundreds more oral histories of Nixon’s early days. My appreciation to my friend Peter Drummey for showing me the Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society; to Jon Darman for some Saturday Night Massacre memorabilia from the private papers of his father, Richard Darman; to Amy Fitch at the Rockefeller Archives for help with the diary of Dr. Kenneth Riland (and to Richard Norton Smith for alerting me to it); to Susan Luftshein at the University of Southern California for the Herb Klein papers; to the reference librarians at Harvard University, which houses the papers of Theodore White; to Dan Linke at Princeton University’s Mudd Library, which houses the John Foster Dulles and Arthur Krock papers. My friend Paul Miles, former professor of history at Princeton, shared with me valuable oral histories from the David Halberstam papers at Boston University, and Dr. Matthew Beland at Drew University made available the extensive Bela Kornitzer papers.

I learned about the Kornitzer papers, a treasure trove, from Irwin Gellman. Irv is the only scholar who has read the millions of papers at the Nixon Library. In addition to being the best-informed Nixon expert, he is remarkably generous. I spent many hours on the phone with Irv as he patiently walked me through the vast collections of and about Richard Nixon. He helped me avoid dumb mistakes and forced me to try to think through what the record actually shows about Nixon. Irv was finishing the second of what I hope will be many volumes on the life of Nixon.

I am in a long line of Nixon biographers, including Garry Wills, Tom Wicker, Roger Morris, Conrad Black, Jonathan Aitken, Herbert Parmet, Will Swift, Stephen Ambrose, and Richard Reeves. I drew gratefully on their work. I also learned from Rick Perlstein’s studies on the rise of conservatism and David Greenberg’s brilliant
Nixon’s Shadow
. Dan Frick has written smartly about the impact of Nixon on American culture, and Mark Feeney offers a very clever, original take in
Nixon at the Movies
. The best novel about Nixon is
Watergate
by Thomas Mallon. Chris Matthews’s
Kennedy and Nixon
offers a close and feeling look at a relationship that could have been imagined by Shakespeare.

I was fortunate to talk to a variety of journalists who covered
Nixon over the years, including Tom Brokaw of NBC and Strobe Talbott and Michael Kramer, formerly from
Time
. Cynthia Helms, widow of CIA director Richard Helms, offered valuable insights on the Georgetown set that so despised (not too strong a word) Richard Nixon.

I rely on the advice and help of old friends in the writing business, including Michael Beschloss, Stephen Smith, Ann McDaniel, and Walter Isaacson (whose biography of Kissinger was invaluable). Diane Brookes was a smart sounding board. My friend Jon Meacham has helped my family and me for many years, again and again. This book was Jon’s idea and he brought it to Random House and greatly influenced my thinking. At RH, my immense gratitude to Gina Centrello, who runs the show; Will Murphy, my gifted line and story editor; his able assistant, Mika Kasuga; my excellent publicist, Greg Kubie; and my superb copy editors, Martin Schneider and Steve Messina. Victoria Wong produced the beautiful book and photo design, and Sally Marvin, the director of publicity, and Benjamin Dreyer, the Random House executive managing editor, performed miracles at the close.

My agent, Amanda Urban, is peerless. She knows how I count on her.

My closest friend (and editor), my wife, Oscie, has helped me every step of the way. My loving mother-in-law, Oscie Freear, took good care of us in California while we were working at the Nixon Library. To my wonderful daughters, Louisa and Mary, who help me understand human nature, I dedicate this book.