Being Nixon: A Man Divided

Copyright © 2015 by Evan Thomas

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Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Rockefeller Archive Center for permission to reprint excerpts from the diaries of Kenneth Riland from the Kenneth Riland Collection, Diaries, Boxes 1 and 2 housed at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Evan.

Being Nixon : a man divided / Evan Thomas.

pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8129-9536-7

eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9537-4

1. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913–1994. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1969–1974. I. Title.

E856.T48 2015

973.924092—dc23

[B]

2015009669

eBook ISBN 9780812995374

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a

R
ichard Nixon loved the movies. His favorite, contrary to myth, was not
Patton
, the 1970 biopic of the bellicose, war-loving American general George S. Patton. It was
Around the World in 80 Days
, the whimsical, lighthearted 1956 film, based on a Jules Verne novel, about a nineteenth-century British gentleman and his valet who circumnavigate the world on a bet.
¹
“Watch! Here comes the elephant!” Nixon would exclaim, bouncing in his chair at his favorite scene. He sat for over five hundred movies at Camp David and in the White House theater during his five and a half years as president, and the eager moviegoer depicted by his daughter Julie bore no resemblance to the brooding Rex more commonly imagined. “No matter how terrible the first reel is, he always thinks it will get better,” Julie told William Safire when he was working as a presidential speechwriter. “ ‘Give it a chance,’ he’ll say. Oh, we sat through some real lemons. Bebe [Rebozo] would fall asleep, Mother and Tricia would tiptoe out, but Daddy would stick with it. ‘Wait,’ he’d say. ‘Wait—it’ll get better.’ ”
²

Nixon wanted to be upbeat, to be an optimist. He often tried to, as he put it, “buck up” his followers and his family. Late at night, sitting alone in his Executive Office Building hideaway, or the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House, or his lodge at Camp David, he would take out his yellow legal pad and begin making notes about the leader and person he wished to be. He imagined, in the spirit of
his mother’s Quaker faith, “peace at the center”; he would use words like
joyful, serenity
, and
inspirational
.
³

The candidate.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Those descriptive words fit him only occasionally. In his daily life, he was more often fretful. He wished to be seen as cool and calm in crisis, and he could be, but he was subject to episodes of venting and lashing out. He was socially anxious and could be hopelessly, helplessly awkward. At his White House dinner for the artist Andrew Wyeth, he welcomed Wyeth’s daughter-in-law Phyllis, who was in a wheelchair, and exclaimed, “Just last week I met with the Easter Seal children!”
⁴
Nixon was famously clumsy. The president dropped so many medals at awards ceremonies (or inadvertently stabbed the recipient), that Brent Scowcroft, at the time a White House military aide, had the medals affixed with clip-on devices instead of pins.
⁵
Nixon’s almost painful self-consciousness made him seem uncomfortable while doing the simplest human task. Gregg Petersmeyer, a young White House aide, recalled watching the president at a cabinet meeting. When a new person entered the room, Nixon could not bear to turn his head to face him. Instead, his eyes darted sideways to get a peek.
⁶
He was being bashful, but he looked sneaky. Tenderhearted and devoted to his wife and daughters, he could seem callous to them in public.

Hope and fear waged a constant battle in Nixon. At the end of his presidency, fear won out. Nixon was often driven by fear—he was, he believed, surrounded by enemies. At the same time, he understood the hopes and fears of others, the insecurities of the people he memorably named “the Silent Majority.” He was an introvert in an extrovert’s business; incredibly, he was also one of the most successful politicians in American history. Weak at human relations but cunning at power, he made politics into a science and also an art; “for him it had a cadence, precision, and beauty,” wrote his daughter Julie.
⁷
He ran on five national tickets and won four times, the last (1972) in one of the greatest presidential landslides ever. Only Franklin Roosevelt exceeded his electoral record. Though Ronald Reagan usually gets the credit, it was Nixon who created the modern Republican Party,
by breaking the New Deal coalition and siphoning off disaffected Democrats who sensed that the native Californian, born to the lower middle class, was more sensitive to their wants and needs than the liberal elitists Nixon so enthusiastically scorned.

His accomplishments at home and abroad were great: opening up China, achieving arms control with the Soviet Union, ending (if too slowly) the Vietnam War, desegregating the Southern schools, increasing benefits for the elderly and the disabled, creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Indeed, some historians call him a liberal.
⁸
He was not, but he was a crafty activist who loved to outflank and confound his foes.

Did he achieve all this in spite of—or perhaps because of—his anxieties? Nixon’s inclination toward the dark side has long been a cliché. Less understood (possibly even by Nixon himself) is his heroic, if ill-fated, struggle to be a robust, decent, good-hearted person. In the battle against his darker impulses, he fought with a kind of desperate courage. At some level, I believe, he was aware of this struggle, though he gave every indication of a man with little or no self-knowledge.

Nixon believed deeply in his country, and he largely realized his ambition to be a statesman. Nonetheless, anyone listening to the tapes of his White House conversations will cringe—not, perhaps, at the profanity (common among men of his World War II generation under stress) but at the sheer hubris. Nixon and his lieutenants rarely, if ever, stopped to wonder if they possibly were wrong and their opponents were right. Such arrogance was and is probably characteristic of the conversations of most presidents—the Oval Office is a cockpit of sycophancy—but Nixon’s brittle pridefulness was so disturbing and at moments ugly that it makes you want to cry out. (Did he really rail against Jews in government? Yes, he did.)
⁹
Ultimately, Nixon’s obsession with smiting his enemies—combined with an utter inability to confront his friends—was fatal to his presidency.

Even so, his constant attempts to be a better man, generous and big-spirited—and to control his fate, knowing, perhaps, that he was
destined to fail—are poignant. Improbably, this anxious boy from a pinched background believed that he was meant to do great things. Shy and bookish, he wanted to wake up every morning and ask, “What will we accomplish today?”

This is not a book intended to weigh the success and failure of Nixon as a policy maker, and, although the Watergate scandal figures inevitably and prominently, I do not attempt to solve its many mysteries. Rather, I have made an effort to understand what it was like to actually be Nixon. Drawn from the memories of three dozen or so men and women who worked for him as well as from the growing flow of new and rich archival material, this book is a chronicle of a fantastically contradictory and intriguing figure who set out to change the world and, for better and for worse, did just that. The story is best told from the beginning.