6
I saw Richard Nixon only once more. It was a little over a week later, just after the second program on foreign policy had been broadcast. The reaction to the interviews by both press and public had been greater than I could have dreamt possible. John and I had completed the editing of the third and fourth programs, and I was leaving California. Before I left, I drove to San Clemente with Caroline Cushing to say farewell to Richard Nixon.
“Hello, Mr. President,” I begin.
“Hello…David.” It is an affectionate greeting in its way. Never before has he called me by my first name. Four weeks ago I would have predicted that, once the post-Easter interrogation was over, we would have no communication between us, not even the pre-tense of a relationship. Yet Nixon told his friends that he regarded the interviews as “tough but fair,” two words that one would have said were mutually exclusive in his vocabulary. He is full of surprises.
The opinion polls and the press, which have been so positive about the program, have not been as positive about him. I feel I should murmur my condolences. None is in order. He had expected nothing better from the media. “You knew they’d crap on that, didn’t you?” he asks. The mail coming to San Clemente has been pretty good. And many of his friends and former colleagues have told him he did much to purge the poison of Watergate from his own system, and perhaps the country’s.
There are globes in Richard Nixon’s house and globes in his office. He looks at them often, studies them, cradles them with his hands as a gypsy fortune-teller does her crystal ball. There is a certain mysticism about it all. It seems the closest he comes to the formal practice of religion.
I look at Richard Nixon, and I see the face of tragedy. He is an intelligent man, in many ways an incredibly able man. He thinks clearly, and he speaks well. He is a man to whom history has relevance. He has a sophisticated understanding of world affairs, a nice touch for dealing with other leaders. He might have made a good secretary of state. Perhaps a great one.
Yet of all the strengths he has talked about, the one he has ignored strikes me as the most critical. And that is the strength that comes from a nation’s belief in the essential rightness of its own cause, in the integrity of its own vision, in the justice of its own ends, in the basic goodness of its own deeds. And that is the strength that was undermined, the faith that was shaken, by Vietnam abroad and by Watergate at home. When Richard Nixon talks so sincerely, so articulately, of the developments that he fears and deplores—a reluctance on the part of the United States to assume its global responsibilities as he defines them and a weakened presidency that makes it more difficult to shake the nation out of its lethargy—he is talking, in part at least, of his own legacy.
But that part of our conversation is over. And once again he confounds the caricatures of himself. He takes Caroline by the hand, firmly, warmly—this man supposedly so uncomfortable with women. He takes her to the window. “Out there is China,” he tells her, pointing and gazing in a dreamy way. “Let me show you the garden…” and he leads her out onto the patio. “Brezhnev slept in that room,” he tells her. “A great swordsman. The Russians are, you know. Have you read Tolstoy? Anna Karenina, very romantic…”
They return. For a moment, the usually somber cloud has lifted. Manolo Sanchez brings some more blanc de blancs. “Get the caviar the shah sent us for Christmas, Manolo.” Manolo is requested to do his favorite imitation: of Henry Kissinger biting his nails, clutching his files, and losing his toothbrush. There is a moment of genuine gaiety. And then the spell is broken. The more somber tone returns. But for a moment it was there. And I had not expected it. Any more than four weeks ago I would have expected him to touch me as he had in our Watergate sessions. To break down, as he had, the barriers to intimacy that he had erected so painstakingly through the years.
But we have trespassed upon his solitude for long enough. It is time to go. We leave him standing by the window, gazing toward the ocean. He has made us feel at home. This man normally so ill at ease with people. Perhaps even more ill at ease with himself. A good mind, with a thirst for nobility. A sad man, who so wanted to be great.
As we drive away, I look back and I wish him peace at the center.