4
The second half of the 1970s was not a happy time for the United States. Vietnam, the event that had defined the ethos, the culture, and the politics of the 1960s, came to a sorry end, with our allies clinging to helicopter skids or packing their families into crude and leaky boats, seeking liberty but gaining mostly death. The Russians, professing détente but playing some very familiar power games, were on the move everywhere from Angola to Mozambique to Afghanistan. And little Israel had again overcome two Soviet-backed heavies, Egypt and Syria, ensuring its continued survival.
But just barely. And the Arab world had retaliated against the United States for supporting the “Zionist entity” by announcing an embargo of oil destined for U.S. ports. Americans, who in their business and recreational habits tended to treat oil as costing zero, suddenly found themselves short of the precious commodity, suffering simultaneously sticker shock on the one hand and line rage on the other.
Even moves that bore the stamp of U.S. initiative seemed more accommodations to reality than displays of superpower prerogative. Détente, rather than a show of U.S. strength, appeared an effort to check the worldwide Soviet momentum in exchange for membership in a magic kingdom where wheat could be had at bargain prices and twelve ounces of Stolichnaya fetched an equal amount of Fanta. In arms control, too, the United States seemed inclined to accept a modest Soviet lead in both offensive and defensive systems in order to halt a race that would produce a far wider disparity.
Here and there a ray of light did shine through. The European states—particularly France and Italy—finally beat back efforts by Communist parties to win a cabinet seat or two in their respective governments, a development that would have given “Eurocommunism” a mighty push and that might also have played havoc with NATO. The Russians got something they had wanted as well: signatures by the NATO countries on an agreement known as the Helsinki Accords, which pledged all parties not to employ force to change the postwar boundaries of Europe. To many American hard-liners, this was Henry Kissinger’s final act of Metternichian amorality—de facto acceptance of a totalitarian order imposed on defenseless populations by Soviet bayonets.
Never would they receive Nixon’s temperamental genius back into their good graces. A former Kissinger NSC colleague, Hal Sonnenfeldt, wondered what all the fuss was about. After all, with the passage of thirty years since the war had ended, the relationship between the Soviet Union and its sister socialist states had become “organic.”
Domestically, the country was also at loose ends. The racial issue, so elemental when the question was legal segregation versus equality under the law and the goal was the sort of unity of citizenship articulated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream speech, had become something far more nuanced when quotas and set-asides replaced equal opportunity, “We want Black Power” replaced “We shall overcome,” and Bobby Seale and his Black Panthers struck terror into the hearts of whites no less palpably than the whitehooded rabble that called itself the Ku Klux Klan had terrorized blacks in the deep South. Reflecting the views of the man who had named them to the Supreme Court, the Nixon justices had voted to end de jure segregation in the southern schools. But they drew the line against forced busing across multiple districts to achieve racial balance in areas of de facto segregation.
Meanwhile, for much of the decade, inflation and unemployment were both on the rise, introducing such terms as “stagflation” and “misery index” into the political-economic lexicon. Having enjoyed the prosperity of the World War II victor, whose industrial infrastructure had never faced attack, the United States now faced new economic challenges from Europe and Japan. During Nixon’s presidency, the United States did not always find itself in a competitive position. Toyota produced cars that outperformed Fords and Chevys; Mercedes-Benz more than matched Cadillac’s appeal for the upscale driver. Increasingly, Americans watched their favorite shows on Sony television sets and shaved with electric razors made by Braun. Rather than letting market forces hold sway, Nixon, on August 15, 1971, declared a ninety-day wage and price freeze in order to gain control of an inflation rate of only 4 percent. Nearly a thousand days and four “phases,” one Mideast war, and one oil embargo later, inflation was prancing along in the double digits and Nixon declared the “freeze” over. He would later write that the freeze “went against my every instinct about what is good for the American economy.” He had acted because congressional Democrats had passed authorizing legislation and were screaming for him to use it.
From his hideaway in San Clemente, however, Nixon paid little attention to foreign or domestic issues during the first phase of his retirement. For the first time in his adult life, he was out of the arena, and in those early days, friends who saw Nixon described him as broke and depressed, his life without apparent purpose. It was on the West Coast, just a month and a week after leaving office, that the former president was struck by phlebitis, and a month and a week after that when a dime-sized embolism was discovered in his chest. Following surgery, he suffered a precipitate drop in blood pressure and nearly died.
“How he survived the humiliation of leaving the presidency is inconceivable,” marveled Brent Scowcroft years later. “But he did. And he came back. Talk about an unbelievable will.”
Scowcroft had gotten to know Nixon well, having first come to the White House as the chief military assistant. He regarded the breakthrough with China as a history-changing event and admired Nixon’s comeback, even at this early stage, for its demonstration of sheer doggedness. He also understood the dark side of the man, the demons, the rages, the afternoon drinking. He remembered a fight between Nixon and Kissinger, after which a boozy Nixon told Scowcroft to put the Joint Chiefs of Staff on alert, they were going to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This was long after “peace with honor” had been declared, and Scowcroft ignored Nixon, defying a direct presidential order. The incident was never mentioned between them again.
Former members of the Nixon White House team recount that the best among them, like Scowcroft, knew when to disregard his histrionics. The tragedy of Watergate may be that not everybody did.
Never one to stay down, however, Nixon took his illness as one more enemy he would have to vanquish and was back at work as soon as his doctors would allow, zipping to and from his office in a golf cart. “He was determined to get on,” said Ray Price, “to focus on his memoirs.” When I asked Nixon in our interviews how he thought history would remember him, he said, “That depends who writes the history.” Now Nixon set about the task, producing thousands of pages—so much material, in fact, that his publishing company would later be forced to fly in two additional editors.
In the meantime, Nixon had his “gang of four”—Gannon, Sawyer, Khachigian, and Price. A strategic thinker by nature, Nixon now found himself heading his own campaign. Only this time, the seat desired was as a member in good standing of the former presidents’ club. All his efforts were geared toward this goal. And if he needed a reminder of what was at stake, there was a constant string of humiliations from the White House—funds withheld, briefings curtailed, privileges denied.
Indeed, there was nothing accidental about Nixon’s effort to return to public life. On the contrary, one could argue it began the day after his resignation, when Marine Master Sergeant William Gulley arrived on the scene with eleven cartons of Nixon’s personal items, surreptitiously removed from the White House. Before he was discovered, Sergeant Gulley had delivered some four hundred thousand pounds of Nixon’s belongings. Litigation regarding possession of and control of access to the former president’s “private” papers would span more than a decade. Nixon was ready for the fight. He might have resigned, but he was not about to roll over and play dead.
In the end, Nixon’s period of physical recovery lasted more than a year and included a book contract, our interview agreement, lots of golf with Brennan, a number of talks with Kissinger, and word from Beijing via his daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower and her husband, David, that Chairman Mao, known to be suffering from cancer, would welcome a visit by Nixon. It was just the kind of opening Nixon had hoped for. The White House was aghast. At State, Kissinger was apoplectic. Ford was having trouble enough establishing his gravitas on the world stage. The last thing anyone in the administration wanted was for Ford to be upstaged by Nixon—even if the former president could contain his penchant for making his own foreign policy.
“Of course he thought about his rehabilitation,” said a close friend and adviser, Dimitri Simes, in a recent interview. But that was not the only reason he traveled. “He also felt he was doing something important and necessary to him.”
Nixon arrived in Beijing on February 21, 1976. The Chinese provided transportation and a warm welcome. Nixon spent an hour and forty minutes with Mao. There was no masking Nixon’s satisfaction with this, his first postpresidency trip abroad. China was a very important country, and its leaders treated him almost as a visiting chief of state. Lesser countries would soon compete for his attention. All seemed to share a sense that fell somewhere between indulgence and outrage over a statesman of Nixon’s stature being ridden out of office for the most nominal of offenses. Watergate—which to so many Americans symbolized profound constitutional abuse—to many people around the world epitomized the immaturity of the United States as an international muscleman. Though the Ford administration opposed Nixon’s visit, Secretary Kissinger called to request a briefing upon his return, suggesting that Lieutenant General Vernon Walters fly to the West Coast to receive it. Taking his fight for ex-president privileges to the streets, Nixon insisted on Brent Scowcroft, Ford’s national security adviser. His request was granted, and for the first time in a long time, the score was 1–0, Richard Nixon.
When we discussed the China visit fairly early in our sessions, Nixon recalled that Mao was “shriveled and old…. But if you watched his hands—the thing I remembered…his hands never got old. They were very fine, delicate hands.” I was intrigued by the observation, and I suddenly had a thought as to how I might satisfy Jim Reston’s yearning for psychological material while still holding our story line.
“Did you feel at that moment in almost another world in the sense that you were reliving that triumphant visit of ’72?”
“You know, I know those, those movies, you know, with time machines and so forth are very interesting,” replied Nixon, condescendingly. “My daughter Tricia rather likes them, and Julie to a less extent. But I don’t watch them and I don’t read much about them.” Lesson: Forget once and for all trying to get Nixon to psychoanalyze himself. The moment he feels you’re putting him on the couch, he heads for the hills. There were few virtues Nixon admired more than control. He fancied himself in control of his own self and remarked that Tricia had been “just as controlled” in the final days as she had on her wedding day. As for Pat, “She’s very controlled, very strong.” Even the speechwriter Ray Price earned kudos from the boss for “being a controlled person who seldom shows his emotion.” As for Nixon himself: “I don’t like to show my emotions either.” Take that, you psychohistorians!
By 1978, when Nixon published his memoirs, the country was experiencing “Oil Shock II,” occasioned by the outbreak of civil war in Iran under Shah Reza Pahlavi, the United States’ foremost strategic ally in the Persian Gulf region. The shah would leave the country the following January. Stricken with leukemia, he was provided sanctuary by the government of Mexico, where Nixon would visit him in Cuernavaca later that year.
Having myself interviewed the shah, in his only interview during his exile, I have often thought of how much I would have enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversation. Despite differences of religion, nationality, and political systems, I fancy the two had much in common. Each had a deep love for his country and a guiding strategic vision for its respective future. Nixon wanted to engineer a second American century. He thought the country must act to support its friends and punish its enemies, often moving through surrogates, ever wary of making commitments it was not prepared to support. The shah wanted his country to be the dominant regional power, the ally of choice of the United States, which had through a coup engineered his return to power in the early 1950s. His mantra was modernization. He sought to use his country’s burgeoning oil wealth to educate its citizens, modernize its institutions and economic habits, and defeat the reactionary influence of the fundamentalist clergy. It was all in vain.
Both men made critical enemies along the way. Nixon, from his first campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas, his successful investigation of Alger Hiss, the Checkers speech, his “last press conference,” his Southern Strategy, and his Watergate excesses, spent nearly thirty years touching the raw nerves of partisan Democrats, “wine-and-cheese” liberals, eastern media types, and “good government” progressives. The shah faced foes from the mosque and the bazaar, the centers of piety and tradition, plus increasingly from the victims, or families of victims, of his authoritarian excesses. Each of the two had a dark side that contributed to his political demise. Nixon believed he was above the law, while the shah believed he was the law. Nixon hated his enemies and set no limits in countering them. The shah saw his enemies as traitors because he saw himself as the state. Both men might have ended their crises early by moving more decisively—Nixon by burning the tapes, the shah by sweeping the streets clean of demonstrators and using all his diplomatic clout to silence the Ayatollah Khomeini’s incendiary broadcasts from Paris. But in the end, both men brought themselves down, Nixon by resignation, the shah by leaving Iran for medical treatment as the revolutionaries seized power, after which he realized that there was no battle left to win. Nixon did not want to put the nation through the trauma of a Senate trial; the shah believed in his heart that, as he told me, “a ruler should not stay in power by spilling the blood of his people.”
The shah was an inconvenient guest, as there was always the danger his enemies would vent their wrath on the host country. President Jimmy Carter, with U.S. hostages to worry about, offered sanctuary in the United States only on the condition he abdicate. Nixon was outraged. Under Iranian tradition, the line of succession to the Peacock Throne is relinquished only when a shah abdicates or loses his head. The shah declined Mr. Carter’s hospitality and moved to Cairo, where he died in July 1980. Carter sent no official party to the funeral but did provide transportation and Secret Service support for Nixon and his son-in-law Edward Cox. Nixon delivered a short eulogy, calling the shah “a real man.” His line of succession remains intact.
As time passed, Nixon’s travels proliferated. He visited dozens of countries and spoke with kings, prime ministers, party chairmen, legislators, and strongmen. At eighty-one, he visited the Soviet Union with his friend Robert Ellsworth, the political director of Nixon’s 1968 campaign and former ambassador to NATO. They were on a bumpy Soviet air force flight, and Nixon was weary.
“Why are you going to all this trouble?” Ellsworth asked.
“So that I can influence world affairs,” replied Nixon.
As his frequent-flier miles added up, it occurred to more than one administration that Nixon was conducting his own foreign policy. Scowcroft, who remained in touch with Nixon throughout the Ford presidency and beyond, certainly heard that complaint. So did others. What he was doing was unprecedented. No one had ever said that former presidents had to recuse themselves to monasteries—normally they stay connected through places such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the annual Conference on Western Security in Munich, Germany. Nixon pursued his own agenda. He traveled so widely, maintained so many sources, and acquired so much firsthand experience that he became in effect the world’s premier foreign affairs journalist.
But while his status abroad continued to flourish, little had changed for Nixon at home. By mid-1978, Nixon’s situation, like the country’s, seemed unsettled if not bleak. As Jonathan Aitken wrote in the biography Nixon: A Life:
Nixon’s future in 1978, at the age of sixty-five, did not look particularly bright. He was still continuously referred to in the press as “the disgraced ex-President.” The Carter White House was treating him with a pronounced meanness of spirit, restricting his briefings and other courtesies normally extended to former presidents, to the minimum. There were no indications in the polls that his low standing with the public was improving. Yet, on the wider horizons, Nixon knew he had both a domestic and an international constituency whose admiration for his achievements had not been unduly diminished by the shenanigans of Watergate. It was to these groups that he now turned in his quest for political acceptance.
All of this was about to change. Nixon had been accumulating speaking invitations—by midyear 1978, a breathtaking one hundred thousand of them. He had declined them all for fear of embarrassing his hosts, but now he was gaining confidence. He was ready to test the waters.
Nixon began in the friendly confines of Hyden, Kentucky, described by Time magazine as “a remote eastern Kentucky coal mining town of 500, Republican since the Civil War, where the virtue of loyalty has been toughened into a kind of clannish defiance. ‘All Nixon did was stand by his friends,’ said the local motel owner. ‘And that is one of the traits of us mountain people.’”
Hyden was also the recipient of a Nixon-generated revenue-sharing program, which had helped the town build a $2.5 million recreation center. Landing in ninety-degree heat, Nixon found a thousand townspeople waiting for him, some sporting campaign buttons and even the thick volume housing his memoirs. As four high school musicians played “Hail to the Chief,” Nixon plunged into the small crowd as though it were a pack of rural Californians replacing Congressman Jerry Voorhis with a returning naval officer named Richard Nixon. A few months later, Nixon repeated the exercise on a Veterans Day celebration in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Nixon also made his first Washington appearance that year, coming back to the capital to attend the funeral of Hubert Humphrey. Days before he died, Humphrey had phoned Nixon, and the two men had spoken at length. Ken Khachigian, still working with Nixon, described the conversation as “deep and sentimental, like two old capos recalling past battles without rancor.” The trip made Nixon nervous, and his discomfort was not mitigated when President Jimmy Carter—in yet another snub—refused to invite him to stay in a Lafayette Square presidential guest facility. Nixon holed up at a friend’s house in Virginia, where he considered canceling all plans but the funeral. In office, Nixon had often worried over his choices. “He would make a big decision, then go up to Camp David and agonize over whether he did the right thing,” remembered Scowcroft. “He would absolutely torture himself.” Now Nixon wondered if he should have even come to Washington. Following the funeral, he tried to beg off from a reception hosted by Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, but Baker insisted he attend. Nixon relented and managed to get through the event. And on January 29, 1979, when Carter held a state dinner in Washington for visiting Chinese strongman Deng Xiaoping, he made certain that Nixon was at the table. Nixon’s perseverance was paying off.
Nixon also accepted an invitation to address the Oxford Union in Britain. Despite a handful of protesters gathered outside, the audience greeted his talk on foreign policy and world affairs with a standing ovation. While in England, he met privately with Margaret Thatcher and spoke before a packed meeting room at the House of Commons. He was on a roll now, gaining confidence with each event, suggesting a reverence for Theodore Roosevelt when he told a friendly columnist, Nick Thimmesch,
A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits. My philosophy is that no matter how many times you are knocked down, you get off that floor even if you are bloody, battered, and beaten, and just keep slugging—providing you have something to live for. If you have something you believe in, something worth fighting for, the greatest test is not when you are standing but when you are down on that floor. You’ve got to get up and start banging again. Get up—and start banging again.
As if to prove he was ready for a tougher venue, Nixon began searching for a home in New York City and moved there early in 1980. He was back. Critics be damned.
Public success, for Nixon, seemed to go hand in hand with the quieting of private demons. Prior to his move, he reconciled with Bob Haldeman, freshly released from jail, and entertained 250 guests at a party honoring John Mitchell. Nixon’s toast: “John Mitchell has friends, and he stands by them.” His memoirs, meanwhile, though treated roughly by most critics, became an international best seller. Having saved his Watergate preparation until after our interviews, it came as no surprise to me that little of his narrative differed from his testimony at our “trial.”
Nixon’s New York routine has been amply chronicled: awake at 5 A.M., walking briskly along Third and Second Avenues, usually clad in a dark blue suit. His exercise completed, Nixon would get to work reading, writing, and telephoning. The day was punctuated by lunch at a fashionable restaurant, followed by dinner at home and hours of reading or watching sports and public affairs on television. “He was always strategizing—in politics, in football, in foreign policy,” said Ray Price. “He was always trying to strategize the game while he was watching the game.” Nixon wanted John Connally to win the 1980 GOP nomination, but George Bush emerged as Ronald Reagan’s most formidable challenger, while Connally spent more money per delegate vote than any candidate in the history of presidential politics. Nixon was not yet respectable enough to attend the GOP convention or mingle publicly with party leaders, but Reagan privately sought his advice throughout the campaign, as he would again in 1984.
Nixon’s second postresignation book, The Real War, was published in June 1980 and, like his memoirs, received bad reviews while vaulting to the top of best-seller lists. Rereading the book, even today, it is difficult to interpret it in any fashion other than as an application for membership in the same club of hard-liners who had opposed his own efforts at détente and arms control. Nixon argues that the Soviet Union, as an orthodox Communist power, is trying to take over the world and is positioning itself to do so by rapidly surpassing the West in military might. Whereas Nixon the president saw détente as a way of identifying areas of common interests and establishing a network of personal relationships that could prevent a crisis from boiling over into war, the former president now saw détente more as a trap for the gullible. Whereas the president saw additional numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, as meaningless once deterrence had been achieved, the former president now favored the same kind of nuclear war–fighting capabilities and strategic defenses that critics used to undermine his negotiation efforts. One example: the first SALT agreement had provided the Soviets with small numerical advantages in terms of ICBMs and submarine launchers but made no mention of restrictions on intercontinental bombers, a weapon that had been in the U.S. arsenal since the dawn of the Cold War but that the Soviets had never developed. The Jackson Amendment to the accord, however, provided for equal number of launchers from all systems, including aircraft. Therefore, to reach Jacksonian equality, the United States might well have had to dismantle weapons it had earlier deployed. Stunningly, Nixon now endorsed the Jackson Amendment.
The most charitable explanation for Nixon’s reversal is that since his departure, the presidency had fallen into the hands of Jimmy Carter, an inexperienced player on the world stage whose high intelligence never translated itself into hardheaded strategic thinking. Nixon’s rant against softheaded diplomacy was perhaps meant to serve as a splash of cold water in the face of this new president. On the other hand, Nixon was one of the more sophisticated political analysts of his time. Quite likely, he saw the Republican Party evolving toward a more conservative center of gravity and felt this attitude reflected in the hard-line positions toward Moscow that most Republicans were supporting.
Back on the East Coast, Nixon spent most of the 1980s generating a library of books on leadership and foreign affairs. Following his memoirs, Nixon published The Real War; Leaders; Real Peace; No More Vietnams; 1999: Victory Without War; and In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal. The last was an interesting effort by the former president to set the record straight as regards the major clashes of his life and to draw from those events life lessons worthy of retention. It also stands out as Nixon’s most blatant attempt to rewrite his own history.
Early in his book, Mr. Nixon recites a number of so-called myths that have come to burden his account of the Watergate episode and his involvement—or noninvolvement—in it. A fresh examination suggests that in certain of the cases, Mr. Nixon established straw men whose existence seems to be only for purposes of their destruction. Others quibble with words; still others stretch the facts. So that the record will again be clear, I should like to review Mr. Nixon’s claims not only in light of the evidence that was known at the time of our interviews or acknowledged during the interviews but in the context of works by other authors using material that has come to light since 1974. Let me deal with them in the order in which they appear in Mr. Nixon’s book.
1. “The most blatantly false myth,” Nixon says, “was that I ordered the break-in at the Democratic Headquarters.”
This hardly qualifies as a “myth” because, as best as I can determine, it has few if any adherents. No evidence to date suggests that Mr. Nixon knew of the break-in before it occurred or specifically ordered it. It would have been appropriate for the former president to inform us of where this myth was accepted. As of now it appears more a fantasy than a fact. That was why we hadn’t raised the question.
2. “The most politically damaging myth was that I personally ordered the payment of money to Howard Hunt and the other original defendants to keep them silent.” Mr. Nixon goes on to acknowledge that “I did discuss this possibility during a meeting with John Dean and Bob Haldeman on March 21, 1973. In the tape recording of the meeting, it is clear that I considered paying the money.”
“Considered paying the money,” indeed. In perhaps the most famous exchange of the interviews, I confronted Mr. Nixon with sixteen examples of moments when he not only approved of the payment of hush money to the defendants but kept pulling his associates back to the subject whenever the conversation strayed. Mr. Nixon admitted he had been told that the money was necessary to “keep the defendants on the reservation” or to keep them from “blowing.” In a tradition later made famous by Bill Clinton and the verb “is,” Mr. Nixon insisted that one first had to appreciate what “blowing” meant before condemning him for endorsing the plan.
Here we must restate a matter of law that seemed as alien to Mr. Nixon’s thinking as it is central to the thinking of any attorney involved in a criminal case. Very simply, if you conspire to subvert justice by paying money to keep a defendant quiet or by fraudulently seeking the cooperation of one government agency to call off another, thereby limiting the scope of the investigation, you are guilty of obstructing justice—even if your motive is only to avert political embarrassment.
3. “The most serious myth—and the one that ultimately forced me to resign—was that on my specific orders the CIA obstructed the FBI from pursuing its criminal investigation of the Watergate break-in.”
The response to this is best left to the Nixon people themselves. In his account of his association with Nixon during these trying days, Ray Price describes how he was busily working on a Nixon speech, pledging to continue his battle against impeachment, when he got word to report immediately to the office of Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need a resignation speech.” White House Council J. Fred Buzhardt had just listened to the infamous tape of June 23, 1972, in which Nixon tells Bob Haldeman to use the CIA to blunt the FBI Watergate investigation.
During that conversation, Nixon tells Haldeman, “When you get in these people, when you…get these people in, say: ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the president just feels that,’ ah, without going into the details…don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, ‘the president believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’ And, ah, because these people are plugging for, for keeps, and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!”
Buzhardt described the tapes as “a disaster,” saying that they were the “smoking pistol” that tied Nixon directly, and at the very outset, to the cover-up. Haig and the imported White House counsel, James D. St. Clair, had read the transcripts. “They were every bit as bad as Buzhardt said they were. The tapes had to be turned over, and that meant the battle was lost.” Nixon would later claim that his conduct had been purged on July 6 when, after being warned by FBI Director-Designate L. Patrick Gray that his aides were trying to “mortally wound” the president, Nixon instructed Gray to perform a thorough investigation. During the interviews, I noted for Mr. Nixon’s benefit that even by his own reckoning he had participated in the cover-up from June 23 to July 6. But the more important fact is that, as mentioned above, while telling Gray to go ahead with his investigation, on the one hand, Mr. Nixon was conspiring with his top aides to keep the full story, including the involvement of Hunt and Liddy, from ever surfacing.
4. “The most preposterous myth was that I, or members of the White House staff, erased 18.5 minutes of incriminating conversation from one of the White House tapes.”
No one has accused Nixon of deliberately erasing the eighteen and a half minutes, but the circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing is strong. For one thing, a panel of technical experts that examined the tape, discounted the possibility—suggested by the president’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods—that the erasure was probably due to a “transcribing error.” Instead, the panel found between five and nine manual erasures responsible for creating the gap. Only three people had access to the machine: Ms. Woods, President Nixon, and an aide named Steve Bull. To date, no wrongdoing has been proven with respect to the erasures. At one point Al Haig suggested that only a “devil theory” could account for the gap.
Regarding the material itself, Haldeman’s notes refer only to the specific action the president ordered him to take in response to the break-in—a public relations offensive plus examining the Executive Office Building for recording devices possibly planted by the Democrats. In his book, The Ends of Power, Haldeman fleshes out his conversation with Nixon in a manner distinctly less benign:
NIXON: Colson can talk about the president, if he cracks. You know I was on Colson’s tail for months to nail Larry O’Brien on the Hughes deal. Colson told me he was going to get the information I wanted one way or another. And that was O’Brien’s office they were bugging, wasn’t it? Colson’s boy, Hunt, Christ!
HALDEMAN: Still, Magruder didn’t even mention Colson.
NIXON: He will.
HALDEMAN: Why?
NIXON: Colson called him and got the whole operation started. Right from the goddamn White House. With Hunt and Liddy sitting in his lap. I just hope the FBI doesn’t check the office log and put it together with that Hunt and Liddy meeting in Colson’s office.
5. “The most one-sided myth was that I used government agencies illegally by asking Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz to order Internal Revenue Service audits of a political adversary Larry O’Brien.”
Nixon admits this charge but adds, “I have no regrets for that action.” He cites past instances of alleged IRS harassment of his own supporters, including the evangelist Billy Graham. Dozens of people were targeted by the Nixon administration for especially aggressive treatment by the IRS. Rather than a criminal action, a number of observers have concluded that Nixon’s action was more an abuse of power and could well have formed one basis for an article of impeachment.
6. “The most hypocritical myth was that the Nixon administration sold ambassadorships to major political contributors.”
Nixon appears to have carried the practice of rewarding big contributors with ambassadorships to excess. In his book Watergate, Fred Emery notes that thirteen ambassadors named after 1972 had contributed a total of $706,000 to the Nixon campaign. On the day in 1974 when Nixon publicly denied selling ambassadorships, Emery notes that the president’s private lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, pleaded guilty to selling ambassadorships in exchange for immunity on all other charges.
7. “The most personally disturbing myth was that I deliberately lied throughout the Watergate period in my press conferences and in my speeches.”
As noted in the interviews, Nixon told the American people on August 15, 1973, that he had asked for John Dean to write a report regarding White House involvement in the Watergate cover-up. “If anybody at the White House or high up in my campaign had been involved in wrongdoing of any kind, I wanted the White House to take the lead in making that known. On March twenty-first I instructed Dean to write a complete report on all that he knew on the Watergate matter.” As I noted in responding to Nixon, the president had already asked for a “self-serving goddamn statement” denying the culpability of principal figures. When Dean told Nixon that the original Liddy plan had involved bugging, “you told him to omit that fact in his document and state it was for…the plan was for ‘totally legal’ intelligence operations.” The president had also told acting Attorney General Henry Petersen that Dean had produced a report that was “accurate, but it was not full.” No such report had been prepared. In his public statements, the president conveyed one untruth after another, as he later admitted during our interview on April 15, 1977:
“Now under all these circumstances, my reactions in some of the statements and press conferences and so forth after that, I want to say right here and now, I said things that were not true. Most of them were fundamentally true on the big issues, but without going so far as I should have gone, and saying, perhaps, that I had considered other things but not done them.”
8. “The most widely believed myth was that I ordered massive illegal wiretapping and surveillance of political opponents, members of the House and Senate, and news media reporters.”
Based upon existing law, Nixon appears to be correct in that the wiretapping he ordered had legitimate national security roots. What appears to have run afoul of the law was the Huston plan, which authorized so-called black-bag jobs against Weathermen, Black Panthers, and others suspected of plotting violence. The plan’s life was short if not sweet; Nixon countermanded his own order after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to cooperate.
9. “A related accusation was that I ordered members of the White House staff to arrange the break-in to the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, in September 1971.”
None of the Nixon tapes released to date had revealed any direct connection between Mr. Nixon and the Fielding break-in. However, tapes released in 1996 did specifically link Mr. Nixon to the order for a covert action against the Brookings Institution, but there is no evidence it was ever carried out.
10. “The most ridiculous myth was that I was the first President to tape some of my conversations.”
I have not heard anyone say Nixon was the only president to tape some conversations. But evidence suggests that Nixon’s system was by far the most elaborate.
11. “The most unfair myth—and the one that most angered me—was that I profited from my service as President.”
Another straw man; no reputable individual has made that charge.
12. “The most vicious myth was that I tried to cheat on my income taxes.”
In March 1974, the Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation issued a report after Nixon asked it to review two questionable tax entries he had made on his returns for 1969 and 1970. The committee concluded that Nixon owed more than $300,000 in back taxes, resulting from his having taken a $482,000 deduction for the gift of his vice presidential papers and his failure to report a $142,000 profit on the sale of his Manhattan apartment in 1969.
Mr. Nixon conceded that the vice-presidential papers transaction might not have been completed before a law banning such deductions took effect; indeed, a deed and other papers regarding the transaction had been backdated in order to meet the deadline. Although Mr. Nixon escaped the possibility of prosecution because of President Ford’s pardon, three men, including one administration official, were criminally prosecuted for their roles in the fraud.
It is hard to imagine what motivated Mr. Nixon to reopen old wounds that, for the most part, had been self-inflicted. Whether the subject was the break-in, the cover-up, payment of hush money, acts of perjury, or broader deceptions practiced on the American people, close associates of Richard Nixon went to jail for many of the things that involved the president himself. Some zest for meaningless combat, a desire to settle scores that had long since been settled, and an almost inexplicable desire to respond aggressively to perceived acts of persecution seem to have been characteristics that Nixon carried to the grave.
Other Nixon books followed. They, too, would have their critics, but once again, Richard Nixon would cry all the way to the bank, the airport, and the television studio. By the mid-1980s, he was persona grata just about everywhere. The Reagan presidential campaign, which four years earlier had secretly sought his advice, now threw the sashes back and let the starlight in. One Nixon memo surviving from that campaign advises, “The president should again make the point that during his watch not one inch of territory has come under Communist domination or been lost to the West. This is under stark contrast to what happened during the previous administration, when Ethiopia and Nicaragua came under Communist domination and Iran was lost to the West.” Nixon also remained coolheaded after Reagan’s slothful performance against Walter Mondale in the first of their two presidential debates. Though he felt it would have been wise for the campaign to come up with a line or two Reagan could use to defuse the question of age, Nixon urged the Reagan forces not to worry, the debates were not that important. “What this adds up to,” he said, “is that debates can affect the result, but only by two or three points—not massively. With all the polls indicating that Reagan is ahead now by between 15 and 20 points, there is no way the debate by itself will tighten up the race significantly.”
Clearly Nixon was reveling in his newfound celebrity. In his fine book Nixon in Exile, Robert Sam Anson described a typical Nixon dinner party, strictly stag, with guest lists that included old White House aides, visiting English celebrities, and experts on the economy such as Herbert Stein, Alan Greenspan, Peter Petersen, and Arthur Burns. Conversation would be serious and profound, Nixon directing the flow with well-structured questions. The dinner was always Chinese. A Nixon dinner party, however, rarely lasted beyond 10:30 P.M., when “the host would shoot a glance at the most upright of his guests and announce, ‘Well, I promised to get so-and-so to the local house of ill-repute by 11 so I guess we ought to call it a night.’”
Still, despite his celebrity status and emerging role in domestic politics, Nixon’s eye was always on foreign affairs. As the decade progressed, his interest in China was overshadowed by the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was during this period that Nixon first encountered Dimitri Simes, a Soviet intellectual who had emigrated to the United States in the early 1970s. Simes was unusual in that his mother was a distinguished defense lawyer in Moscow and Simes himself was a member of the Institute of World Economic and International Relations, a sure ticket to success, status, and privilege in the Moscow of that era. Even after he emigrated, Simes stayed in touch with former colleagues, giving him an impressive insight into economic and political conditions inside the Soviet Union but cloaking Simes himself with an aura of suspicion in certain hard-line American circles—one he had difficulty expunging.
Simes and Nixon became acquainted in the mid-1980s after Simes wrote a Christian Science Monitor column calling Nixon a great patriot with a dark side that he had allowed to define his presidency. Nixon then sent Simes a couple of columns, which Simes critiqued with candor. After Nixon’s chief of staff, John Taylor, organized a meeting in New York, Nixon suggested that Simes become a formal adviser. “At first we corresponded, then he phoned, then he asked me to phone him, then we met in person, and then at some point, he asked me how he should respond to certain events.” The two would become fast friends.
Simes had two goals for Nixon: (1) he wanted him to go to the Soviet Union with some frequency so that he could develop a more intuitive feel for the place while also getting to know a range of Russians that went beyond Gorbachev and his senior advisers; and, more immediately, (2) he wanted to get Nixon speaking publicly in Washington, the sine qua non of a complete comeback and the most convincing measure of the scale of his comeback.
At the time, Simes was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. The irony was not lost on Nixon. Carnegie’s first president had been Alger Hiss. Simes enlisted the support of Tom Hughes, Carnegie’s president in the mid-1980s, and Nixon received an invitation to speak. “The first time Nixon spoke, he was brilliant and got a standing ovation,” Simes recalls. “Nixon loved every second of it. You could see a certain delicious irony in doing it at Alger Hiss’s place.”
Nixon and Simes traveled to the Soviet Union together for the first time in 1988. Earlier in the year, talk of a coup had been dismissed by most intellectuals, who reasoned that the prize was not worth the risk. “It would be like conducting a coup in Lebanon,” suggested Sergei M. Rogov, director of the Institute for the USA and Canadian Studies. But as time passed, the military lost confidence that Gorbachev’s reforms would make a difference. They saw the country drifting toward unrestrained freedom, which they equated with the “rule of the mob,” and thought a coup would be the only way to save communism, a system with which the military was more comfortable than were most other elements in Soviet society.
Simes and Nixon’s analysis went further. They both concluded that the Soviet Union was in the process of disintegrating and that the opportunities for constructive U.S. action were many.
After Nixon returned from Moscow, he went to see Vice President George H. W. Bush. Bush extended the meeting to include James Baker and lunch. Simes recalled, “What a treat it was for Nixon. He felt like once again he was back in the arena.”
The pair traveled again to Russia but this time also included Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, West Germany, East Germany, and Britain. Nixon became convinced that Gorbachev—for all his humanism—lacked the support of the Russian people and would never be able to govern effectively. Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s principal rival for power, was the better bet. For all his personal weaknesses, he was more likely a democrat at heart and, in any event, was likely to prevail.
In August 1991, the coup leaders struck while Gorbachev was vacationing at a Black Sea resort. The coup quickly collapsed as the Russian people rose up against the coup masters, their courage forever symbolized by Boris Yeltsin mounting a tank and telling the military not to fire. By then it was obvious that although Gorbachev might return to office, he would never return to power.
Whoever succeeded Gorbachev, Nixon and Simes believed, would take over a country in peril. The political system would be lucky to escape civil war. The external empire had already dissolved, and the internal empire was quickly fading. The economy was structurally corrupt and was in the kind of shape that only three quarters of a century of communism could bring about. The situation was pregnant with the danger of economic collapse, institutional collapse, civil war, mass rioting, and a special peril resulting from the enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons and equipment during a period of disintegrating central or even local authority. Nixon felt that the United States must recognize that it alone was a world superpower and that what it did with respect to Moscow during a very brief period would have a profound influence upon the question of whether there would be a “new American century” and what its condition would be. This meant providing not only political support for Yeltsin but also massive economic assistance to the Soviet Union to enable it to surmount the crisis through which it was passing. Nixon articulated these views during an April appearance on the television program 60 Minutes; in two books, 1999: Victory Without War and Seize the Moment; and in an assortment of newspaper commentaries.
In 1989, Nixon would hire his last foreign policy research assistant, Monica Crowley, fresh out of Colgate University—again following an exchange of letters. She appears to have regarded it as her mission to become Nixon’s Boswell, capturing every word he uttered whether on foreign affairs, U.S. politics, the requisites of politics, the media, or the world’s future. She has published two books about Nixon: Nixon off the Record and Nixon in Winter. It would be impossible for anyone to have so high a percentage of his words preserved for posterity without at times appearing boring, redundant, petty, short-tempered, and downright supercilious toward one and all. This is certainly true of Nixon. But, particularly during the period of the disintegration of the USSR, her work presents an accurate picture of Nixon’s thoughts and words. Crowley describes in Nixon in Winter an April 12, 1990, speech to the Boston World Affairs Council in which Nixon urged an assortment of policies to help the countries that had broken away from Soviet domination:
He advocated only very modest defense cuts. He urged a restructuring of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to make it more responsive to the needs of the new era. He supported opening the economic and military sectors of the European Community to the newly free nations of Eastern Europe when they showed an irreversible commitment to democracy and free markets. And above all, he warned that the United States must be prepared to aid the democratic forces in these regions or face new confrontations.
Following the failed Moscow coup and Gorbachev’s crescendoing loss of control, Nixon increasingly felt that the administration of George Bush was being far too timid in seizing the opportunities. He also grumbled that Bush was doing little to prepare for the coming presidential elections and was mishandling the economy. In Nixon off the Record, Crowley offers this snapshot of Nixon’s attitude:
Goddam it! Why the hell isn’t he showing some leadership? I’ll tell you something. When the shit hits the fan and his gang comes to me for advice, I’m not going to provide it unless they are willing to thank me publicly. Neither Reagan nor Bush did that after all these years of my advice, and frankly I have had it. They’ll find me when they need me, but I may not be available.
Nixon underlined his feeling when, in preparation for a conference, “America’s Role in the Emerging World,” he wrote an essay titled “How the West Lost the Cold War,” in which he described administration policies towards Russia as “penny-ante” and “pathetically inadequate.” At the conference, held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., amid a glittering cast of national security celebrities, Nixon gave what was widely perceived as a zinger of a speech while Bush seemed to lack completely any sense of urgency regarding events in Russia. In fact, of course, President Bush himself was rather proud of his policy toward the disintegrating Soviet empire. He quite deliberately played it low key because he felt that any hint of triumphalism on the part of the United States might provoke the Communist old guard to attempt to halt the collapse of the old regime.
Still, Nixon hoped Bush would be reelected and had no qualms about delivering unrequested memos offering the advice of a president who had carried all but one state in his quest for reelection and who had been invited to offer strategic help to Ronald Reagan in a reelection bid that had carried all but two states. Before the primary season ended, H. Ross Perot visited Nixon’s home for a freewheeling political discussion and Pat Buchanan had received the accumulated wisdom of a man he once described as “like a father to me.” Nixon was not asked for advice by Bill Clinton, whose character flaws he frequently grumbled about, but that did not keep him from sending the victorious Clinton a note praising him for running one of the great campaigns in history. Within months, Nixon would find himself a welcome visitor at the Clinton White House, where his advice was sought on a variety of issues and his political instincts were no less prized.
Pat Nixon died on June 22, 1993, after a long battle with lung cancer. Nixon was deeply annoyed when Clinton picked an emissary, Vernon Jordan, to attend the funeral as his representative. Those who knew the couple best say that Nixon admired his wife’s coolness under fire, her dogged allegiance to him over the years, her role in raising two daughters he adored, and her consistently good judgment, especially about people. The funeral was held at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda four days later. Crowley described the scene as follows:
The small crowd stood as Mrs. Nixon’s coffin was brought in and the former first family filed in behind it. Haldeman, who was seated directly in front of me, whispered suddenly, “The president’s lost it.” I looked at Nixon. At the sight of the casket and the guests, he had broken down and sobbed uncontrollably, shoulders hunched forward, frame trembling, tears pouring from watery eyes. The collapse in pain and sorrow became one of the day’s searing images and shocked even Nixon when he saw the film of it later.
Nixon’s loneliness following Pat’s death was painfully evident to those closest to him. Crowley, of course, was in touch with him daily, often for many hours. He also leaned on Dimitri Simes for companionship. “We shared many drinks by phone,” Simes recalls. “My days often started with a call from him at 8 A.M. and ended with a call at 11 P.M.” Their talks often concluded with Nixon describing what he was drinking, how much he had sipped, and even the fact that he was crawling into bed and turning out the light.
On March 3, 1994, Clinton called Nixon from the White House to discuss what would be the former president’s final trip to Russia. Upon arrival in Moscow, Nixon met with opponents of the Yeltsin government. The man Clinton had described as the appropriate person for Washington to support retaliated for this insult by revoking Nixon’s invitation to visit the Kremlin and pulling his government limousines and bodyguards. Nixon met with members of the press and expressed disappointment with Yeltsin but praised his commitment to political and economic reform. Upon returning to the United States, he dictated a memo to Clinton on the Russian situation.
One of the last pictures of Nixon shows him addressing, in animated fashion, an audience that included, among others, Les Aspin, Joseph Nye, and John Deutsch. According to Simes, Nixon held the audience spellbound for more than an hour and seemed in total control of both his material and himself. But as he walked out of the building, his legs went limp, and Simes and a colleague had to practically drag him to his car. Nixon, undoubtedly, was a man who simply would never give up.
On April 17, as he prepared to view the edits on his latest book, Beyond Peace, Nixon suffered a massive stroke. He died five days later in New York City.
At his funeral President Clinton said, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”
By any reasonable standard, Nixon’s resurgence represents one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of American politics. He achieved it methodically and with patience, first by putting his financial life in order and working himself back into a position of robust health; second, by facing up to Watergate and related charges against him, as he did during many hours of interrogation during Frost/Nixon; third, by leading from strength—his relationships with Chinese and Russian leaders and insights into both societies; fourth, by moving back to the East Coast, the intellectual and political heart of the nation; and finally, by exercising self-control, playing his game within its natural limits, not trying to push the envelope further than common sense dictated.
Yet the humiliating circumstances of his departure from Washington were never far from his mind. “He was not delusional,” recalled Dimitri Simes. “There are people who make great mistakes and never accept them. Nixon knew the mistakes he had made. He said to me, ‘I never expect you to defend the indefensible.’”
Bob Ellsworth recalls a dinner meeting with Nixon where the former president repeated the words he used during Frost/Nixon a decade earlier, “When I asked him about Watergate, he said, ‘Goddamn it, Bob, I gave my enemies a sword and they stuck it in me.’ And then he shoved his napkin in his mouth and chewed on it.”
With the exception of his self-aggrandizing rebuke to various Watergate “myths” in his book In the Arena, in the later years of his life Nixon seemed to accept the fact that his actions, or inactions, had contributed to the greatest American political scandal in history. Whether he ever appreciated the depth of the threat Watergate posed to the U.S. system of government remains a matter of some debate.