After the Fall

by Kasey S. Pipes

  This roadmap for his journey back would be useful for Nixon in the coming months and years. But he could not have foreseen how it would take him through some painful stretches in the road.

  Chapter Five

  The Memoirs

  “Always look to the future.”

  The office looked the same: the oak desk with the phone perched on top of it, the five flags representing the military services guarding the desk, the wooden walls accented by the large windows. But the feel in the room was different. No longer did the office at 4100 Calle Isabella serve as the second office for the president as he labored over decisions of state; now it merely served a former president as a reminder of what had been. And the issues now confronting him were personal.

  Throughout history, men who have fallen from power have experienced battles with what Churchill called the “Black Dog.” Nixon’s proved to be a very strong breed. So his friends continued to worry about him. But they also knew that he needed to hear the truth about the challenges facing him.

  Around Thanksgiving of 1974, Nixon was visited by two old friends—Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp. Rebozo was a Florida banker and longtime friend of Nixon's. Abplanalp was the inventor of the aerosol valve and also a personal friend of Nixon’s going back many years. The two men came to check on their old friend; but they also came to talk business. They were concerned about Nixon’s financial health and recommended some strong medicine. Nixon, they told him, needed to sell his Key Biscayne properties. To help out, the two men would orchestrate the purchase themselves. They proposed to pay Nixon more than one million dollars for those properties.1

  Still, the overriding tone of the meeting was grim. As Abplanalp would later tell a reporter, “We’re not talking about a welfare case; we’re simply talking about shrinking his holdings, making it easier for him to make ends meet.”

  One of the primary sources of potential income discussed during the meeting was getting a book deal. Nixon liked the idea and was eager to get started on writing.

  In spite of his physical and mental state, Nixon knew the cure would be to find some meaningful work. Like other leaders in history who have entered exile, Nixon was beginning think about his legacy and how he could shape it. The ex-president liked to quote Winston Churchill’s answer to the question of how history would regard him. It would treat him kindly, Churchill explained, because, “I intend to write it.” He did, and now Nixon would do the same.

  Having survived the resignation and the surgery, the former president sat in his office in late 1974 and began to think seriously about the book he wanted to write. Nixon hoped to make some money from it; more importantly, he hoped to use it to begin his campaign to win back what he saw as his historical legacy.

  Still, the former president feared that writing his memoirs would prove to be a difficult task. Ron Ziegler was urging him to get moving on the project. “I think Ziegler underestimates what it really takes to write a good book,” he said. “We’ve got anecdotes and stories and great events and philosophical thoughts that would fill volumes, but to put it in readable organizational form is the trick.” In a previous period of defeat in his life, Nixon had written Six Crises, a critically acclaimed book that helped him heal his intellectual wounds after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy.2 But this would be a far more difficult challenge. Now he would have to write a book that covered his entire career—including Watergate.

  As Nixon pondered his past, he couldn’t help but think about the future. San Clemente had served as his home for years. But the real action was on the East Coast. And so in the fall of 1974, he first broached the topic with his two daughters. He mentioned the “possibility of moving to New York,” and they both encouraged the idea. Julie lived in Philadelphia and Tricia lived in New York. They welcomed the possibility that their father would move closer to them.3

  But Nixon was just thinking out loud. A move to the East lay far in the future. For now, he needed to focus on the task at hand.

  As Christmas 1974 approached, sadness filled the air in San Clemente. Julie would remember it as the “lowest point in my father’s life.”

  And the New Year brought more bad news. Watching the Rose Bowl at home, Nixon learned that a verdict had been reached in the trials of the three political aides who had been closest to him. H. R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, and John Ehrlichman had all been found guilty. Though Nixon had avoided having to testify in person in the case because of his bad health, his words from the White House tapes were crucial in the convictions. Nixon took the news hard. He remained discouraged for days.

  Nixon was trying to regain his health. With the aid of Colonel Jack Brennan, his chief of staff, he began visiting the office and trying to maintain a normal schedule. Each day the boss would send for his staff and want to talk shop. He loved talking politics and still maintained a vast intelligence operation in Washington. His friends in Washington would give him the latest gossip on legislation, politics, and polling, and Nixon would send for a staffer and begin discussing the latest D.C. intrigue. One of these was Ken Khachigian, a young lawyer who had first met Nixon during the 1962 gubernatorial campaign when Nixon stopped by the San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, California, where the young Khachigian was a student. Khachigian introduced himself to Nixon after his speech, saying that he was a member of the high school’s debate team.

  “I was in debate in high school, too,” Nixon responded. “In my day you had to learn to be an orator. Nowadays you have to learn to be a conversationalist.”4

  After college and law school, Khachigian found his way onto the 1968 Nixon campaign staff and later worked as a junior staffer in the White House.

  His skills as a researcher and speechwriter had not gone unnoticed by the president. In the fall of 1974, he was summoned to see the deposed leader at San Clemente. “He was down,” Khachigian remembered. “Less so about the resignation than about the financial difficulty he faced.” By 1975, Khachigian was working full-time for Nixon in San Clemente.5

  Loie Gaunt was also there every morning. She had come on board to manage the office. Gaunt had met Nixon for the first time in 1951 and had been one of his best secretaries. Now she would help him try to rebuild his financial health. It would not be easy. The money he was getting from the government totaled only sixty thousand dollars—hardly enough to cover all of his expenses.6

  And his early efforts at maintaining an office schedule weren’t doing much to improve Nixon’s physical or mental health. To cheer him up, Pat decided to celebrate his sixty-second birthday on January 9. She invited many of his old friends, including Rebozo and Abplanalp. She also insisted that they keep it quiet; she wanted the party to be a surprise.

  That afternoon she met all the guests out in front of the house and them took them over to the office. Nixon was shocked when he saw his old friends there to celebrate. After everyone presented Nixon with gifts, they gathered in the living room. Nixon served drinks and urged everyone to eat some of the caviar being served on a silver plate that had been given to him by the Shah of Iran. “The Shah won’t like it if you don’t,” he joked.

  It was the happiest day since he had left Washington. Nixon told his guests that several people had called him to wish him a happy birthday earlier in the day, including Governor Reagan and President Ford. Later during dinner, the ex-president raised his glass to make a toast. He spoke of the importance of friendship. Then with tears in his eyes, he added, “Never dwell on the past. Always look to the future.”

  But after the party ended and the guests returned home, Nixon was left with the still-complicated realities of his life. Later in January, Barry Goldwater came to check on the former president. Nixon appreciated the gesture and enjoyed talking shop with Goldwater. Yet he was enraged the next day when he learned from the paper that Goldwater had revealed the meeting and apparently embellished the conversation, telling reporters that Nixon had said he might want to be the ambassador to China someday.

 
“I never told Goldwater a goddamn thing about wanting to be an ambassador,” Nixon fumed. Then he quickly turned his anger toward the media. “They might have taken whatever Goldwater did say out of context—that’s what the bastards do constantly.”7

  It was a reminder that any attempt Nixon made to reenter the public square would be greeted with more negative press coverage.

  * * *

  But a few days later on February 9, 1975, reporters were the least of Nixon’s concerns. On that day, the six-month transition period after the resignation officially concluded. This meant that the support staff being paid for by the government had to be terminated. And not only did they leave, but they also dismissed the office staffers that they had been using and shipped all of the equipment back to Washington. The impact must have deepened Nixon’s sadness. The last trappings of power were now gone.

  And the news coming from Washington only added to his worries. Nixon had hoped that his deal with Ford would ensure access to his presidential papers. But many in D.C. were outraged by the deal and wanted the government to keep all the papers and the tapes. Not long after the pardon was announced, Congress took action, instructing the General Services Administration to seize the Nixon files. Now Nixon learned that a federal court in Washington had upheld the actions of Congress, which Nixon viewed as stealing his property. But he knew it would be a long fight to get his papers back.

  One of the main reasons he wanted the papers was to help him in his new project: writing the memoirs. Whether he was ready to endure the physically and mentally grueling task of writing his life story was beside the point; Nixon needed the money from a book deal. His friend Swifty Lazar had served as his literary agent and inked a deal with Warner Paperback Library. The publisher would pay $2.5 million in advance royalties for the manuscript. Nixon’s former White House aides Frank Gannon and Diane Sawyer would help research and write it.8

  Later in February, Nixon felt well enough to attempt a round of golf while staying at Sunnylands, but he only made it through the first two holes and then had to stop. Afterward, he joined old friends at the Sunnylands main house for a party of sorts. Governor Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were there along with Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, and others. At the end of the event, Nixon offered a toast. “When you are on top,” he said gesturing at the luxurious home they were gathered in, “it is filled with all your friends. Afterward, you don’t need a house so large.”

  Back at San Clemente the next day, Nixon tried to find solace in routine. He would ride a golf cart over to the office building at the Coast Guard’s Navigational Aid Station where his office was housed. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, as always, he found himself surrounded by fewer people. Now that the transition period had ended, most of the staff had left except for Colonel Brennan, who would soon resign his commission to stay on as chief of staff. Brennan was an inspired choice for that job. He brought military organization and a keen insight into how to schedule Nixon’s time.

  “Don’t make mistakes,” Brennan said to himself on a regular basis. “Don’t let him get hurt.” He wanted to get Nixon active again but didn’t want to expose him to unnecessary risks. He worried about how the public would treat the former president and feared unpleasant encounters. “When the opposite happened and people kept coming over to him to shake his hand, he was boosted right up,” Brennan would say. “That taught me something and set a pattern.” At one event, Brennan and Nixon’s barber, Ken Allan, had arranged for a group of friends to celebrate Nixon at a home in Corona Del Mar. Among those who gathered to salute the former president was Hollywood icon John Wayne. The actor gave Nixon a Boehm sculpture of a horse. Nixon took the gift and held it in his hands as the famous actor began to speak.

  “You know, Mr. President,” Wayne said in his familiar cadence, “it’s kind of ironic I’m giving this horse to you, especially after that rough ride you’ve had in Washington the past couple of years.”

  Nixon didn’t hesitate to respond. “You never know,” he told the crowd, “one day this horse may gallop again.”9

  Brennan and Ron Ziegler still hovered, but the time had come for Ziegler to leave. There simply was no money to pay him. And frankly, he wasn’t needed. Ziegler’s spin often rubbed reporters the wrong way. Still, Nixon disliked confrontation, so when the moment came to inform Ziegler, the former president left it to his chief of staff: “Ron, Jack has something to tell you.”

  With the staff now gone, Nixon and Brennan began to confront the financial challenges facing the former president. And Nixon was more convinced than ever before that the best way to earn money and salvage his reputation would be his memoirs. In early February, the former president began to think seriously about how to go about writing them.

  For that task, Nixon would convene a team to provide research and written drafts for different subjects and chapters comprised of three writers, all of them former staffers. Each of them brought a unique set of talents to the task. Frank Gannon and Diane Sawyer preferred to work from their apartments lest they be consumed in conversation with Nixon. Ken Khachigian worked at Nixon’s office and often found himself consumed in those conversations.

  The organization of the work was largely based on the Randolph Churchill model. Gannon had actually worked on Randolph Churchill’s research staff when the younger Churchill was writing a biography for his father, Winston Churchill. The Churchill model involved setting up “chronological files for every significant day of the subject’s life” and providing “background papers on individual issues.”

  Each day Nixon would sit in his ottoman chair and dictate, sometimes for ten hours at a time. Occasionally the former president would express doubts about the project, and at other times his mind would wander.10 “We’re not making enough progress on the book,” the ex-president would moan from the chair in his office. Then in the next breath he would add, “Do you think Reagan will run in ’76?”11

  Nixon established the writing process: he would call for his writers to join him in the office while he discussed his recollections about his life. They wrote as he talked. He also assigned each of the writers certain topics to research and sometimes requested that drafts of sections or chapters of the story be written.

  Topic by topic, issue by issue, the president and his scribes worked their way through the Nixon story: from his early childhood, to college at Whittier College, to serving in the navy in World War II, to running for Congress, to serving as Ike’s running mate, to the fiasco of the 1960 election, and to redemption in 1968.

  But while the writing process may have provided an escape for Nixon, reality was never far away.

  The prosecutors in Washington continued to investigate Watergate, turning their attention toward Nixon’s close friend Bebe Rebozo. In 1970, Rebozo had received one hundred thousand dollars from Richard Danner, a staffer for Howard Hughes. Ostensibly the money was a campaign contribution, but Rebozo had kept it in his own bank account. He later returned the money to Danner.

  If the money didn’t go to the campaign, then what was the purpose of the donation? Federal investigators believed the money might have been part of a slush fund during Watergate. Could this have been the money Nixon referred to on the Watergate Tapes when he told John Dean he knew he “could get a million dollars. . . .”?

  To connect the dots, prosecutors wanted to interrogate Nixon. Negotiations began that spring of 1975 between Nixon’s lawyers and Henry Ruth, who was now the chief Watergate prosecutor. The agreement reached allowed Nixon to testify at home in California with his lawyer present. Plus, the interrogation would be secret. The testimony was set for June 23.

  When the prosecutors arrived, Nixon greeted them at one of the conference rooms inside the coast guard station. He was nine months removed from the health crisis that had almost killed him. And he was stronger and feeling better than he had since the hospitalization. This was a chance for him to mix it up with the men who had put his friends in jail, and it was a chance to defend Bebe. F
or the next day and a half, Nixon answered questions for eleven hours. And he didn’t give an inch.

  “I told you I didn’t listen to the recording,” he said defiantly, when asked about the missing 18.5 minutes on the tapes. “If you want to ask again, we can go all day on it.” He denied any knowledge of any slush fund and defended Bebe. Above all, he handled the questions in a way that gave the prosecutors almost nothing they could use.12

  On the final morning of the interrogation, Nixon sensed that he had endured his first test since leaving office and aced it. Never one to run from a fight, the former president seemed to relish the chance finally to have his say on Watergate and to push back against what he saw as unfair accusations.

  He told the interrogators, “You probably have been somewhat, perhaps, disappointed that some of my answers have been, well, to put it mildly, rather testy which is not my usual way of trying to answer questions in a legal forum.”13

  Nixon not only had performed well under pressure, but he also had done so well that he had effectively ended the legal threat against his friend. Later that year, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force declined to indict Bebe Rebozo.

  Nixon’s handling of the prosecutors showed that he was capable of sparring successfully with his opponents and prevailing—in private. But before he entered the public square, he needed to finish his book.

  * * *

  Nixon soon returned to his memoirs. The section on Watergate proved to be the hardest challenge. Diane Sawyer was given the task of preparing this part of the book. She created folders with all the material she had found in her research. And she met with Nixon for hours as he worked his way through the Watergate section. The sessions took a toll on her.

  “She would come back from them looking harrowed and sick,” Frank Gannon remembered. “But she always recognized that Nixon had to do it his way, which was to talk himself through each phase of Watergate before dictating. He hated having to think and write about it, not least because there were a lot of things he simply didn’t know about, but in the end he faced up and did it.”14