Yet along with the restrained murmurings came a surprising show of another sentiment that Richard Nixon craved and never quite got enough of. respect. Henry Kissinger, who had once called his former mentor “odd” and “unpleasant,” praised Nixon’s patriotism and his “coherent and purposeful” foreign policy. Bill Clinton, whose wife began her legal career as an assistant to the House committee that voted to impeach Nixon, expressed appreciation for Nixon’s “wise counsel on so many occasions” and noted that “his country owes him a debt of gratitude.” He agreed to speak at his funeral. Even George McGovern, plain-spoken as ever, said he was ready to let bygones be bygones. Watergate is “ancient history as far as I’m concerned.” he said. “You can’t hold a grudge forever.”
Ronald Reagan summed tip Nixon as a complicated and fascinating man" and no one disputed that. He could whine like a bitter child ("‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore"), but even enemies admired his sheer cussedness. Somehow he always seemed to survive, to thrust himself back into public life in a “new, new” guise that was still, at heart, the same old Nixon.
In his relentless pursuit of 51 percent of the voters, Nixon ended LIP on so many sides of so many issues that his life reads like America after the second world war, hustling here and there, excessive and fickle, yet endlessly resilient. He chased communists, then he embraced communists. He blustered against school busing but made affirmative action the law of the land. He denounced the heavy hand of government and enacted wage and price controls. There was nothing constant about Nixon, except his hunger for power and his insecurity about holding on to it-an insecurity that became his undoing.
Respectful eulogies will not erase the sordidness of Watergate. Nixon and his White House gang lied, cheated and obstructed justice, and they provoked the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Americans can afford to be forgiving only because the Watergate plumbers were inept as well as corrupt, and they finally got caught. While the memory of Nixon strolling the beach in wingtips may be amusing, be was a divisive figure in national life-a manipulator and a polarizer.
Richard Nixon was never, according to his cousin, the writer Jessamyn West, “a little boy you wanted to hug.” His childhood was marred by poverty and the death of an older brother, and though he talked proudly of himself as a self-made man (and sentimentally about his saintly mother), he never shook his sense of being a scrappy outsider. Throughout his school years-at Fuller-ton High, at Whittier College and at Duke Law School-Nixon was painfully shy, fiercely proud and something of a stuffed shirt. Bryce Harlow, a speechwriter and political adviser to Nixon, once speculated that “somebody … a sweetheart, a parent, a dear friend” must have hurt Nixon “so badly he never got over it and never trusted anybody again.” His family was the exception to the rule. Pat and Richard Nixon were married in 1940 when he was a young attorney in Whittier and she was a slim, pretty teacher at Whittier High. They had two girls, Tricia and Julie, and the family was the anchor of Nixon’s restless, turbulent life. But even he described himself as “an introvert in an extrovert’s business.” He rationalized his solitude in terms of his vocation: a vice president can’t afford to have friends, a president can’t let anybody get too close, a politician has no friends. He compensated for his dour reticence with relentless ambition and he dealt with his sense of grievance by lashing out at enemies, real or imagined.
By his own account, he prevailed through sheer doggedness and defiance. “What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,” he told Ken Clawson, a former Washington Post reporter and White House aide. “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, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.” (At Duke Law School, he was mockingly referred to as “Iron Butt” by his less industrious classmates.)
Nixon’s first campaign set the tone for his whole career. Tapped by a group of Republican business leaders, he got out of the navy in January 1946 and almost immediately declared his candidacy for Congress against Democrat Jerry Voorhis, a five-term incumbent. Nixon smeared Voorhis as a communist sympathizer, charging that Voorhis had been endorsed by a political-action committee of the CIO that included known communists. The charge was false, and Nixon, according to historian Stephen Ambrose, knew it. But Voorhis was never able to rebut it, and Nixon won easily in November. When the 80th Congress convened in January 1947, Nixon joined the Republican majority in the House as an eager freshman. To historian Ambrose, Nixon “was a McCarthyite before McCarthy. . . . If he wasn’t the first to use [Red baiting tactics], he was at least among the first class.”
His 1950 campaign for U.S. Senate, against Helen Gahagan Douglas, was no different. Nixon called her “the pink lady.” She retaliated with a sobriquet that stuck, “Tricky Dick.” The Alger Hiss case had already cemented his reputation as a ruthless Red-baiter and launched Nixon on the road to Republican stardom. Hiss was a State Department official who was investigated by the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee in 1948. HUAC, with Nixon leading the charge, tried to link Hiss to communist espionage cells operating in the United States during the 1930s. Hiss denied it. and Nixon produced a witness, Whittaker Chambers, who claimed to have met Hiss at cell meetings. Hiss denied knowing Chambers-but Nixon, in a tense showdown before the committee, forced Hiss to admit that he had lied. The case was clinched when Chambers led HUAC investigators to a hollowed-out pumpkin containing microfilmed copies of State Department papers, some in Hiss’s handwriting. Nixon posed for photographers, studying the film with a magnifying glass, even though it was impossible to read. Hiss was convicted of perjury. As one of the first victims of the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, he became a cause celebre to frightened liberals.
But Nixon was on his way-and in 1952, as a 39-year-old freshman senator, he became Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate. Nixon’s relationship with Ike was never easy. Eisenhower could be as aloof and cold as his vice presidential nominee. Their troubles began during the 1952 campaign, when Nixon himself became the target of a smear campaign. The charge was that Republican fat cats had provided Nixon with an $18,000 slush fund to supplement his Senate salary then $15,000 a year. Eisenhower’s advisers urged him to drop Nixon from the ticket. The general dithered, and Nixon went on national television to defend himself and save his career.
This was the “Checkers” speech, a bathetic but eminently successful attempt to play on public sympathy. Checkers was a cocker spaniel given to the Nixon family by a Republican admirer in Texas and Nixon, shamelessly copying Franklin Roosevelt’s “little dog, Fala,” speech, refused to return the dog to its donor. The ploy triggered an avalanche of supportive mail for his candidacy and quickly became part of the Nixon legend. He stayed on the ticket with Eisenhower and he won handsomely in November. As a political event, the speech proved that television, still in its infancy, was an extremely potent weapon. It also proved that Nixon, still untested in national politics, was an agile and resourceful politician who could do much more than throw bean balls at junior diplomats and obscure congressmen.
Eight years of dutiful apprenticeship to Ike gave Nixon what he wanted in 1960: a crack at the presidency. His race against John Kennedy was a classic of the genre, pitting two immensely able young politicians in the tightest of election years. Kennedy was everything Nixon was not-patrician, self-assured and charming. But Nixon had used his time as vice president well, and he locked up the GOP nomination with the I.O.U.s he had amassed as Eisenhower’s political point man. With the polls nearly even in the fall, Kennedy and Nixon agreed to a series of television debates that decided the election. Nixon may well have won on substance-but from the start Kennedy, especially during the first debate, was the clear winner on style. Nixon, recovering from a minor infection and suffering from a slapdash job of makeup, looked gaunt, tense and unshaven; Kennedy appeared tanned and relaxed. Nixon fought back in the next three debates, but the damage was done-and in November, he lost by 119,000 votes nationwide.
He re-emerged two years later in the first of his many reincarnations, this time as a candidate for governor of California. The voters thought he was using the state as a platform for another presidential campaign and elected Democrat Pat Brown instead. The next day, Nixon called what became known as his “last press conference” and the rancor poured out. “As I leave the press, all I can say is this: for 16 years, ever since the Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of-a lot of fun,” Nixon said. “You’ve had an opportunity to attack me and I think I’ve given as good as I’ve taken … But as I leave you I want you to know-just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore….”
It was all there-the rage, the resentment, the hostility toward the press as a wing of “the liberal establishment.” But Ambrose says that Nixon began to plot his next assault on the presidency within days of the last press conference-‘and that Nixon thought his best chance would come in 1968, not in 1964, when Kennedy was sure to run again. The tumultuous events of the next six years-Kennedy’s assassination, America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam, the civil-rights revolution and the rise of campus radicalism-proved Nixon wrong. But by 1968, history handed him a rich opportunity-the chance to run against a divided Democratic Party and an opponent, Hubert Humphrey, who carried the dual burden of Lyndon Johnson’s unpopularity and the miserable spectacle of the 1968 Chicago convention. Nixon was ready. He had spent 1964 and 1966 working for Republican candidates across the country, and he had assembled a campaign Learn that, unlike the one he had led in 1960, was well organized and lavishly financed.
He and his advisers-Including H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, all Watergate names planned and executed a campaign that almost completely bypassed the national news media with staged events on television. It was a masterpiece of strategy and packaging. Others, including Ronald Reagan, have clearly followed his example. Nixon took the high road, and Agnew, the obscure Maryland pol be picked as his running mate. catered to the growing anger of what came to be known as “the silent majority.” Nixon had a deep sense of the fears and frustrations of ordinary Americans: he felt their resentment and clearly saw the potential of attacking the privileged kids who smoked pot, burned the flag and defied traditional sexual mores. As for Vietnam, Nixon promised that he had a secret plan to end the war.
He didn’t, but it worked anyway and on Election Day, he survived Humphrey’s closing surge to win the presidency at last. Nixon said he hoped to be a president who would bridge the “generation gap,” and in his Inaugural promised to listen to “the heart and conscience” of America. He called on Americans to “lower our voices. muting the vehement argument and passionate dissent.” This was the “new Nixon”-statesmanlike, reassuring and calm. It was a deceptive facade, and it soon fractured.
But if Nixon was a divisive force at home, he did manage to mend ties with his biggest foreign nemesis: the communist world. He used his first term to lay the groundwork for the diplomatic achievements that will always be his monument. The first was to reopen relations with the People’s Republic of China-a stunning coup when it was finally revealed in 1971. The second was stabilizing the arms race and creating detente with the Soviet Union. The strategic-arms treaties Nixon and Kissinger negotiated with Leonid Brezhnev were less than perfect. But they established the principle that the spiraling rivalry in the nuclear-weapons race could be controlled and created a precedent for agreements later negotiated by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Nixon shrewdly timed his triumphal visits to Beijing and Moscow for the 1972 elections, and he was duly praised for his efforts.
Vietnam was different. Nixon knew the war was unwinnable, but he thought that an abrupt American pullout would have disastrous consequences for the United States around the world. Like Johnson before him, he used massive air power in an attempt to coerce the North Vietnamese into making concessions at the bargaining table. He kept secret his decision to bomb North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia because it was illegal-and although he steadily reduced the number of American troops in Vietnam and ultimately ended the draft, Johnson’s nightmare slowly became his own.
And Vietnam led in a roundabout way to Watergate. The connection between the war and the scandal that destroyed a president is ultimately a state of mind: Nixon’s deep hostility toward prominent antiwar activists like Daniel Ellsberg, and the “bunker mentality” that pervaded the White House after the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. Nixon in 1970 was a man besieged. He railed at his opponents in private and struck back at them in secret. The list of his abuses goes far beyond the “third-rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on June 17, 1972. It includes a pattern of illegal conduct that reaches back to 1969 and includes surveillance, bugging, break-ins, political dirty tricks, hush money falsified records and the use of the FBI, the CIA and the IRS for political purposes.
Nixon trampled George McGovern in the election of 1972. But the Watergate conspiracy was steadily unraveling, and so was his presidency. Despite his frantic efforts to block the investigations, Congress, Judge John Sirica and the U.S. Supreme Court pried open Nixon’s secrets for the nation to see. The White House tapes for March 21, 1973, for example, revealed the president of the United States discussing how to ensure that the Watergate burglars kept their silence. “Well, it sounds like a lot of money, a million dollars,” Nixon told John Dean. “Let me say that I think we could get that …” Other tapes displayed his profanity, his pettiness and his malice. “Sheer flesh-crawling repulsion,” the columnist Joseph Alsop wrote. “The back room of a second-rate advertising agency in a suburb of hell.” The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment in July 1974. In August, Nixon became the first president in history to resign.
He spent much of the next two years in self-imposed exile at San Clemente. His emotional state was fragile, and some who knew him did not expect him to survive. “The atmosphere at San Clemente in August and September 1974 lurched between surrealism, fatalism and despair,” a British biographer, Jonathan Aitken, wrote in his 1993 study, “Nixon: A Life.” “One morning he called his senior staff together. . . . [and] sat up in his chair as if he were presiding over a meeting of the Cabinet. ‘I’ve called you here to discuss an important topic,’ he announced, ‘and that is, what are we going to do about the economy this year?”’ The delusionary mood passed, but his health deteriorated. In October he underwent surgery at Long Beach Memorial Hospital to control a potentially fatal attack of phlebitis.
The good news, such as it was, came with Gerald Ford’s decision to grant Nixon a pardon that September. The announcement touched off an explosion of indignation and may have cost Ford the 1976 election; his reasoning was that the country could not withstand the further polarization that a Nixon trial would create. Legally, Nixon’s acceptance of the pardon was an admission of guilt for unspecified crimes, and it was the only confession he ever made. His statement of contrition during a 1977 television interview with David Frost was carefully worded. “Under the circumstances, I would have to say that a reasonable person would call fit] a cover-up,” Nixon said. “I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life. My political life is over.”
But once again he had spoken prematurely. In 1978 Nixon emerged from his isolation with carefully planned appearances in Hyden, Ky., and Biloxi. Miss. He and Pat moved East, first to Manhattan and then to Saddle River, N.J. He began to write, and over the next 14 years produced eight books, including a memoir, “RN,” and several books on global strategy. Many of these works were best sellers. He traveled widely courted journalists and gave advice on politics and policy to Ronald Reagan and other presidents. Nixon, incredibly enough, was back and plainly enjoying himself. In 1990, he presided at the dedication of the $21 million Nixon Library at Yorba Linda, Calif. Ford, Reagan and George Bush attended. Nixon said he had “many memories, some of them good, some of them not so good.”
His impact on history, from the vantage point of 20 years, is surely no better than mixed. His accomplishments in domestic affairs, in the end, bordered on the negligible. His foreign-policy successes, now that Soviet communism is dead, seem as dated as the cold war. Watergate may yet be his monument, and it is evidence of a moral myopia that afflicted him all his life. “Virtue is not what lifts great leaders above others,” he wrote in 1982. “The good and bad alike can be equally driven, equally determined, equally skilled, equally persuasive. Leadership itself is morally neutral; it can be used for good or ill.” He was plainly convinced of that sad theory and he was just as plainly wrong.
SON OF STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ALGER HISS, NOW A STAFF WRITER FOR THE NEW YORKER
By his own reckoning, the Richard Nixon the whole world has heard of-the man who was twice elected president of the United States-could never have existed without my father, Alger Hiss. “Nailing” Hiss as a Soviet spy, Nixon said, was his “First Crisis,” the event that transformed his career. Almost overnight, he was no longer an obscure freshman congressman, but a California senator powerful enough to become Eisenhower’s vice president. I was only 7 when all this began, and it affected me in a way I can’t forget. To my mind, Mr. Nixon’s eagerness for a place on the world stage blinded him to Alger’s candor and devoted loyalty to America. But I’ve never doubted Mr. Nixon’s earnestness. And it still troubles me that in those days sincere people (as well as the not-sincere) ruined thousands of careers and wrecked thousands of lives, apparently without question.
President Nixon seemed unable to let go of the Hiss case. “I always hark back to it,” he told John Dean during Watergate. As recently as 1991, a year before my father had the same idea, Mr. Nixon wrote to Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, Russia’s top military archivist, asking him to check his intelligence files for any Hiss material. General Volkogonov later announced that he could find nothing incriminating. Why had he written to the general? Did he still need to hammer home a point he’d nailed more than 40 years ago? Or was he doubting the one moment in his public life he’d previously considered unimpeachable?
PRODUCER-DIRECTOR OF THE FIRST KENNEDY-NIXON TELEVISED DEBATE. NOWEXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF “60 MINUTES”
Nixon stubbornly refused to let us cover his 5 o’clock shadow with makeup the night of his first debate with Jack Kennedy. It was a fateful mistake and he knew it. At the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, the same makeup person whose services he refused in 1960 was touching him up before be went out to the rostrum to introduce Barry Goldwater. I sat with him in the makeup room and told him, “You know, Mr. Nixon, if you had let this lady make you up four years ago, Barry Goldwater would be going out there now to introduce you.” He thought about it for a moment and said rather wistfully, “You’re probably right.”
It wasn’t the first time he had acknowledged the role that makeup had played in his political career. When he came to CBS to participate in a broadcast right after the Kennedy assassination, I told him much the same thing: that if he had let Franny, the CBS makeup lady, work with him that night in Chicago he might have been president right now. And he shot back, quick as a wink, “Yeah, and I might be dead now, too.”
FORMER WHITE HOUSE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS, NOW EDITOR IN CHIEF OF COPLEY NEWSPAPERS
Much has been written about Nixon’s “character flaws.” But he showed enormous character when he resisted pressure to contest the 1960 presidential election won by John Kennedy Few will know the agony he went through as he hunkered down at Key Biscayne, Fla., a few days after his defeat. He was depressed to the point where he would not speak. Republican leaders and close friends like Bill Casey, Len Hall and Murray Chotiner gathered evidence of fraud in states such as Illinois. Texas, New Mexico and Missouri. He was still pondering the decision when he and Pat went to dinner with a few of us the Saturday night after the election.
As we entered the Key Biscayne Jamaica Inn, the phone rang. The White House had Herbert Hoover on the line. I took the call and learned that Joe Kennedy had asked Hoover to arrange a meeting between Nixon and Kennedy. After talking it over with President Eisenhower, Nixon decided to meet with Kennedy the following Monday. But he also worried about fracturing the country, and decided that contesting the election would throw the nation into turmoil. That Monday he told Kennedy of his decision.
FORMER LT. GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA AND NIXON CABINET MEMBER
After the 1968 election, Lyndon Johnson called and invited Nixon to the White House on our way to a brief Florida vacation. While Johnson met with the president-elect, a senior administration official took me aside. He said we should know that Johnson had a taping system in the White House which could pick up any conversations in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and other adjacent locations. He wanted me to discuss this with the president-elect and advise them on whether we wanted the system removed. On the way to Key Biscayne, I explained the situation to Nixon and asked him what he wanted to do. “Remove it immediately,” he said. “We don’t want anything like that in this administration.”
FORMER SENATOR
He was always very controlled. He had no bad habits, always very studious. Oftentimes when he, Bebe Rebozo and I would go fishing on Bebe’s boat, Nixon would never throw out a line. He was content to sit in a corner of the boat and read some biography or history book.
FORMER WHITE HOUSE SPECIAL COUNSEL
The devious side of Nixon was, in many respects, the secret of his success. I remember when he told Henry Kissinger to call Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and tell him that the president had lost his senses and that he [Kissinger] didn’t know if he could restrain him. He was supposed to tell Dobrynin that Nixon might start using serious weapons in North Vietnam, a dramatic escalation of the war. Nixon laughed as he coached Henry word for word on what to say. Then he sat in the Oval Office, chuckling while Kissinger carried out the mission. All the while he was withdrawing troops from Vietnam.
He called me into his office on another occasion and asked me if I had read Edith Efron’s book about biased network news coverage [“The News Twisters”]. I had. I had also concluded that it was a book destined for obscurity. Nixon then ordered me to get it on the best-seller list. I was used to cryptic instructions, but never one quite like this. After finding the particular far stores that The New York Times and others regularly checked to determine which books were selling, I enlisted the assistance of some Nixon supporters in New York. We literally bought out bookstores. We left the White House with perhaps 2,500 copies gathering dust in the basement,
AND HIS PARTNER BOB WOODWARD UNCOVERED THE WATERGATE SCANDAL AS REPORTERS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
It was early in September 1972-about 10 weeks after the break-in. We had just written a story about the wholesale destruction of documents by principals of President Nixon’s reelection campaign. We had also just learned that the president’s most trusted aide John Mitchell, the former attorney general and manager of the Nixon campaign-had controlled a secret fund that paid for the break-in. Woodward and I were in the vending-machine area off the newsroom floor, about 8 a.m., before the rest of the staff got to the paper. We were both 28 years old. Few people believed the stories we were writing.
Suddenly I felt awed by the implications of what we were uncovering. There was no precedent, no frame of reference-journalistic or presidential. “This president is going to be impeached,” I said to Woodward. He looked at me, shaken, and said, “My God, you’re right. And we can never use that word to anybody at this newspaper. Somebody will think we have an agenda.” We went back to work. The first public talk of impeachment came many months later, during the Watergate Committee hearings.
DAUGHTER OF PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON
If my house burned down, I think my letter from Richard Nixon would be one of the possessions I’d run for first. It is dated July 11, 1974, less than a month before he resigned the presidency. It is simply a note of welcome to America to my daughter Rebekah Johnson, born July 10. In the midst of what must have been as agonizing and turbulent a time as a man could know, he reached out to a little girl who would never see her grandfather (he died a year earlier) to salute her birth and wish her family well: “… We know how proud and happy your father would have been to know you chose his mother’s name for your daughter,” he wrote.
There was no reason for President Nixon to show such a kindness to Rebekah or to me. There was no political gain to be had. It was just an extraordinary act of thoughtfulness from a man in the midst of a terrible ordeal.
COVERED WATERGATE FOR THE NEW YORKER AND IS WRITING A BOOK ABOUT THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY
A remarkable thing about Richard Nixon was the personal relationship he insisted that we have with him. This very remote, pre-New Age man was constantly telling us about his feelings-in his famous “last press conference” of 1962, or his “Checkers speech.” His political autobiography, “Six Crises,” was a closer look into his soul than was comfortable. Nixon repeatedly instructed that his aides read it, to the point where Charles Colson once said, “I think I’ve read it 14 times.” And so when the country went through the drama-with both its frightening and comic moments-of deciding whether this president should be impeached, an astonishing question at first, we went through it with him. He told us how he felt (“The tougher it gets, the cooler I get”). He made personal a constitutional crisis and drew us into his pain. His ordeal became ours. His psyche was of great importance to us because we couldn’t be sure what he would do. I remember a Sunday during Nixon’s greatest crisis of all when the newspapers arrived late. A friend called and said, “They’ve stopped the papers.”
I recall sharply the last time we said a collective goodbye-on Aug. 9, 1974-one of the most bizarre and painful scenes in modern political life. In a farewell speech to his staff in the East Room, he said, his eyes brimming with tears, “My mother was a saint.” He talked, again, about his hard childhood. He read from Theodore Roosevelt’s diary on the occasion of Roosevelt’s wife’s death. He said that this last, crushing defeat was “only a beginning.” He said, touching up his self-portrait to the end, “Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them.” And, like a lot of people who went through that period with him, I was impressed that he had, quite amazingly, arranged his own resurrection. And I hoped that he was at long last at peace.
FORMER CBS CORRESPONDENT, NOW SENIOR NEWS ANALYST FOR NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
As president, Nixon put me on his “Enemies List” with the designation “a real media enemy.” More ominously, he had J. Edgar Hoover launch an investigation into my background in 1971. When that leaked out, the White House devised a preposterous explanation. Press Secretary Ron Ziegler was instructed to say that I was under consideration for a White House appointment that somebody had neglected to tell me about. In time, that was exposed as a lie. The second of three articles of impeachment passed by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 was “Abuse of Power,” citing the use of the FBI for purposes of political reprisal.
Nineteen years later, to my surprise, I was invited to a dinner where he gave an off-the-record briefing on a recent trip to Russia and other former Soviet republics. When I rose to identify myself and ask a question, he responded with no indication that he recognized my name. At the end of the evening, unable to resist the temptation, I approached him. “I’m not sure you will remember me,” I said, “but . . .” He interrupted with a hearty handshake, saying, “Dan Schorr, of course I remember you. Damn near hired you once.”
REPUBLICAN PUBLIC AFFAIRS CONSULTANT
Working for Richard Nixon was like working for the Mafia. You never really left and you never knew when you might be called on to perform a political chore, leak a story, evaluate a speaking request or provide intelligence and gossip. He would have us believe that there was no final campaign for redemption. But in retrospect Nixon’s last campaign was more measured, more painstaking and more difficult than his comeback bid for the presidency.
I recall riding to midtown Manhattan with him in 1975 to attend a New York state Republican Party fund-raiser at which he was to be the guest of honor. It was his first political appearance since his resignation and he was uncertain how he would be received. Before he opened the car door, he looked me in the eye and said, “I hope this isn’t too soon,” The event was a success.
Nixon understood that his resurrection would be contingent on his never reaching for an official role, and by meting out opinions judiciously. “Don’t accept even, speaking request and every request for an interview,” he told Jeanne Kirkpatrick when she left government service. “Speak out when you have something important to say.”
Nixon knew that after the resignation he was relegated to a backstage role in American politics, but he played the part with enthusiasm and tenacity When Ronald Reagan muffed his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, Nixon offered calm assurance. The poll numbers would stabilize, he said. Expectations would soar for Mondale and drop for Reagan. In the second debate, he could put Mondale away with a deft one-liner. That’s exactly what happened.
Nixon was a man who kept his affection deeply in check. When I married in 1991, he sent my wife and me a leatherbound edition of his book “In the Arena,” with the inscription, “To Roger and Nydia Stone-With best wishes for the years ahead,” after which he wrote, “Love,” scratched it out, reconsidered, and then signed “Love, Richard Nixon.”
We spoke three times in the week before his stroke. He was intensely interested in the political repercussions from the Whitewater affair. When poll numbers seemed to indicate that it was having little effect on Clinton’s popularity, he told me that Watergate made no impact until the televised hearings. “The American people don’t believe anything until they see it on television,” be said. “Eighty percent of the people get their news from TV and when Whitewater hearings are televised it will be Clinton’s turn in the bucket.”
