After the Fall

by Kasey S. Pipes

“The judgment of tomorrow’s history would severely condemn a false peace.”

  In 1987, Nixon continued to worry about the aftereffects of Reykjavík. There were rumors in Washington that a new summit was being discussed. The Reagan administration remained interested in the idea of reducing an entire class of nuclear missiles. That spring, Secretary of State George Shultz traveled to Moscow to continue working with the Soviets on a potential deal to eliminate mid-range missiles.

  This was Nixon’s primary concern. In some ways, Reagan had pursued diplomacy with the Soviets the way Nixon wanted; he had used SDI as a means of getting the Soviets to the table. But in other ways, Reagan was way off the Nixon script. Talk of entirely eliminating nuclear weapons disturbed the former president. In fact, it disturbed him so much that he decided to do something he had never done before—sharply criticize Reagan in public.

  Nixon decided he wanted a partner to join him in criticizing the president. And there was only one man who had the gravitas to join him in speaking out—Henry Kissinger. The relationship between the former president and his national security advisor had always been a complicated one. But their thinking on world affairs had always been similar. Now the two men decided to issue a joint public statement criticizing the “zero option” that Reagan was proposing, which would essentially eliminate all medium-range missiles. Kissinger was traveling in Europe in April, but he and Nixon spoke by phone and worked on an op-ed outlining their concerns.

  On April 26, 1987, Nixon shocked Washington and dominated the news when the seventeen-hundred-word essay he co-authored with Henry Kissinger questioning Reagan's negotiations with the Soviets appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

  “Every president has an understandable desire to assure his place in history as a peacemaker,” the two men wrote. “But he must always remember that, however he may be hailed in today’s headlines, the judgment of tomorrow’s history would severely condemn a false peace. Because we are deeply concerned about this danger, we who have attended several summits and engaged in many negotiations with Soviet leaders are speaking out jointly for the first time since both of us left office.”

  Nixon and Kissinger urged the Reagan administration to alter its course in the ongoing talks with the Soviets. They wanted any potential removal of intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe to be directly connected to reductions in the Soviets’ overwhelming advantage in conventional forces.

  “If we strike the wrong kind of deal,” Nixon and Kissinger wrote, “we could create the most profound crisis of the NATO alliance in its 40-year history—an alliance sustained by seven administrations of both parties.”1

  If Nixon and Kissinger were hoping the column would become the topic of conversation in Washington, they must have been happy. Everyone was talking about it.

  The White House was blindsided by the op-ed. “We welcome comments from all sides,” White House spokesman Dan Howard said tersely to reporters. “Our position is that we are still in consultation with our allies. Beyond that, we are not going to say anything further about the . . . treaty, except that we expect hard bargaining.”

  The Reagan administration was particularly incensed by the op-ed’s charge that the ongoing negotiations put pressure on NATO. “I don’t think it’s going to prove divisive at all,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle said. “For a long time now, the alliance has agreed that the elimination of intermediate nuclear missiles was the Western negotiating position, and in the Western interest. The only remaining issue that needs to be resolved is how to handle some of those shorter-range systems.”

  And it wasn’t just the people inside the Reagan administration pushing back on the Nixon-Kissinger op-ed. James Reston mocked the piece in his nationally syndicated column, noting that Nixon and Kissinger were now entering the “column-writing business.” He wrote that if “there’s one thing officials hate more than criticism from columnists in general, its public advice from their predecessors in office.” He lambasted the piece as a failure on multiple levels. “Consider your first column. It breaks the first rule of a good column, which is brevity, and it breaks the second rule, which is modesty, and the third rule, which is generosity.”

  But his harshest criticism was directed toward the failure of the Nixon-Kissinger piece to acknowledge what the Reagan administration was trying to accomplish: “They are trying to break a stalemate that has gone on for more than a generation. Like the early steps toward the unification of Europe, they are concentrating on the attainable rather than on the desirable, and hoping to build confidence in slow verifiable stages. For the first time since the invention of the atom bomb, both sides are talking seriously about major cuts in the alarming stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and you dismiss this as worse than nothing.”2

  At the White House, talk turned to what should be done. McFarlane had resigned and the new national security advisor, Frank Carlucci, suggested that Reagan meet with Nixon to air out their differences and see if they couldn’t get back on the same page—and the sooner the better. Reagan agreed. He had little use for Kissinger (he had openly mocked Kissinger’s foreign policy during the 1976 Republican presidential primaries). So he had no interest in meeting with Nixon’s co-author. But he still admired and respected the former president. The White House reached out to Nixon's office and a date was set. Nixon would meet with Reagan on April 27 at the White House.

  Nixon arrived at the White House North Lawn entrance on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh and was taken by elevator up to the residential quarters. It must have brought back a flood of memories for the former president—it marked his first visit to his former living quarters since he had resigned from office thirteen years before.

  Upon arriving upstairs, he was greeted by Carlucci and Chief of Staff Howard Baker. They took him inside the room where Reagan was waiting, dressed in a light brown suit. The two men shook hands and then sat down in two upholstered club chairs separated by an ottoman. Nixon, dressed in his usual blue suit, tried to break the tension with some humor. “I assume that the place isn’t taped,” he joked. Mild laughter greeted the remark. Nixon could tell the president’s mood was not good. “I think I sensed a certain coolness on his part,” he would say later. And he certainly could not have been surprised.

  But the former president was not cowed by Reagan’s “coolness” toward him. Nixon’s post-presidential career as an elder statesman offering his expertise on foreign policy to current presidents had been leading up to this moment for years. Since The Real War, Nixon had been urging a more forceful posture with the Soviets than he had during the days of détente. He recognized the opportunity that Reagan had with Gorbachev and wanted the president to negotiate. Indeed, the very strategy of offering SDI technology to the Soviets came not originally from Reagan, but from Nixon.3 But Nixon wanted Reagan to negotiate the right deal. And he feared that Reagan’s advisors—particularly his old friend George Shultz, serving as Reagan’s secretary of state—were pushing toward a deal that might be unacceptable. Hence, he had written the op-ed to get Reagan’s attention.

  And on that count, the op-ed had been a success. But it had done perhaps more than Nixon wanted it to do. Reagan didn’t like being publicly criticized by a former president.

  Now with Nixon sitting in front of him in the White House residence, Reagan made his own appeal to change Nixon’s mind. Reagan said he believed that his position and Nixon’s position weren’t all that different; Reagan and Baker wondered if it would be possible for Nixon to tell his contacts inside the Soviet government that he was on board with the Reagan approach. Nixon flatly refused.

  “I could see of course what he was driving at,” Nixon later observed, “and pointed out that I didn’t think it was a good idea.” When Reagan continued to press him on the point, the former president again put his foot down. “I’m afraid we just don’t agree on that point,” he said.4

  Nixon used the meeting to press his case with Reagan. Why was the president so willing to e
liminate ballistic missiles and leave the Soviets with an advantage in conventional weapons? Reagan tried to reassure Nixon that when U.S. conventional forces were combined with the conventional forces of Western Europe, the Soviets were outnumbered. Reagan was unimpressed.

  Nixon knew that to convince Reagan to rethink his position he would have to challenge the staff whose advice had helped Reagan form his position. And so he turned his aim on Shultz. “I did get in one shot at Shultz, which I thought was quite effective,” he would write. “I introduced it by saying I didn’t want anyone to get the idea that I had anything against him [Shultz]. I said he had been a great secretary of the treasury, a great secretary of labor, and a great director of OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and that he did an outstanding job of negotiating with [AFL-CIO chairman George] Meany for a period. But I said that negotiating with Meany was much different from negotiating with Gorbachev.”5

  That shot may have seemed effective to Nixon, but it did little to change Reagan’s mind. As the meeting ended, Reagan made little effort to hide his displeasure at the impasse between the two men. “I don’t know whether Nancy was in the residence at the time,” Nixon later observed, “but if she was, he did not suggest that she come in and say hello. My guess is that she is probably as teed off as Shultz is.”

  As Nixon returned home to Saddle River, he sensed that his relationship with Reagan had changed and would not be the same again. It had always been a complicated relationship, but in the first several years of the Reagan administration, Nixon had genuinely tried to help Reagan—while of course trying to help himself, as well. He had encouraged the president and given advice and counsel on the Soviet Union. But now the two men were clearly traveling down different paths. Reagan, sensing that Gorbachev represented a different kind of Soviet leader, believed the time had come to make major concessions. Nixon, still very much a Cold Warrior, doubted that Gorbachev was all that different in his ambitions from Brezhnev or even Krushchev.

  As Nixon would write in a memo about his unhappy meeting with Reagan at the White House, the president seemed “far older, more tired, and less vigorous in person than in public.” In the former president's view, Reagan “candidly, did not seem to be on top of the issues—certainly in no way as knowledgeable as Gorbachev, for example, which of course would not be surprising.” Nixon now believed that there was “no way he [Reagan] can ever be allowed to participate in a private meeting with Gorbachev.”6

  How much this impression was a product of Reagan’s rejection of Nixon’s advice is hard to measure. Like many intellectuals, Nixon tended to think his ideas were the best ones. And when someone didn’t agree with them, he could take it personally. After years in the wilderness following the Watergate scandal, he had enjoyed a special place of privilege in Reagan’s world where he could offer ideas that were often accepted. Now, ironically, the father of détente was urging the conservative Reagan to be more aggressive with the Soviets.

  From this point forward, if Nixon was going to exert any influence on any Reagan policy, it would most likely have to come through Reagan’s staff. And even there, Nixon’s influence was waning. One former staffer, in particular, who had lost his position was very much on Nixon’s mind in these days—not out of any hope that he could still influence Reagan, but because his life was in danger.

  * * *

  While Reagan was working behind the scenes with Soviets in the spring and summer of 1987, he was also dealing with his own political crisis at home. The Iran-Contra scandal had now become hot enough that congressional hearings were being held. Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North became the key figure in the investigation. As a staffer at the National Security Council, North had coordinated the efforts to funnel money to the Nicaraguan Contras. But who had given North the orders to do so? It became increasingly apparent that the orders had been given by Nixon’s friend, Bud McFarlane.

  McFarlane had resigned as national security advisor before the scandal broke. But once it became news, he knew he would be in the line of fire. At his home in suburban Virginia one morning in February, McFarlane took things into his own hands. He went to the medicine cabinet, took out twenty-five Valium pills, and then swallowed them all in an effort to commit suicide. He was revived at the hospital. McFarlane, still completely despondent as he recuperated, dreaded what awaited him—the congressional hearings and likely criminal prosecution. Still, he was cheered up by the cards and flowers that came into his hospital room. President Reagan even called and spoke with him on the phone. When McFarlane told the president that he had let him down, Reagan refused to accept it. “You didn’t fail me at all,’’ the president said to McFarlane. “It was a sensible goal to pursue and you shouldn’t blame yourself because it didn’t work.”

  But perhaps no visitor did as much to lift his spirits as his first visitor. Within hours of the story breaking that McFarlane had tried to kill himself and was at a Washington-area hospital, Richard Nixon arrived to greet his old friend.

  Nixon directly addressed the depression that had led McFarlane to try to kill himself. “He urged me to remember that Churchill and de Gaulle had suffered their ‘black dogs’ and said that even though I would be portrayed by the media as a weak figure, I could overcome the setback of my suicide attempt,” McFarlane would recall.

  Revealingly, Nixon asked McFarlane about his faith. He wanted to know if he was praying and reading the Bible. “I said I was doing a lot of that,” McFarlane remembered. “That’s good,” Nixon answered. “You need an anchor. Your strong faith will take you through this.”7

  As the two men talked, Nixon urged his friend to focus on his future. “From now on, don’t look back,” he said. “Get busy, go earn yourself some money. You’ve done the right things in the past, now look to your future. You can do it.”

  The words meant more to McFarlane than Nixon could have ever known. “Coming from him, I can’t tell you what a tonic that encouragement was,” McFarlane remembered.8

  The words mattered to McFarlane because they were spoken from experience. Here was a man who had gone through the fires of the worst political crisis in American history and had survived. Now all these years later, here he was reflecting on his own journey back into the sunlight. He provided such powerful words of encouragement because he, too, had almost died in 1974—both literally and metaphorically. The advice he gave to his friend was borne of his own experience wrestling with his own darkness. The words were empowering because the words were true. Nixon, McFarlane remembered, “was unbelievably sympathetic” in the hospital visit. In reality, he was really being not sympathetic, but empathetic.

  Ultimately, the Iran Contra scandal didn't become the second coming of Watergate. The president’s advisors had kept Reagan out of it and Reagan made little attempt to help cover for his friends. Ultimately, McFarlane pled guilty to four counts of withholding information from Congress. All were misdemeanors. His sentence was two years’ probation and a fine of twenty thousand dollars. Later, on Christmas Eve 1992, he was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.

  * * *

  The year 1987 saw the Republican Party beginning to look beyond Reagan to the future. Vice President Bush was running for the 1988 GOP nomination and claiming the Reagan mantle. But others were considering running, as well. One who was interested in running and caught Nixon's attention was Kansas senator Robert J. Dole.

  The two men had a relationship that went back to the Nixon presidency. Dole had served as Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman during the Watergate era and then had to face the Kansas voters as he sought reelection to the Senate in 1974. He survived. But it had been a harrowing experience. In 1987, the two were brought together again by a common friend. Robert Ellsworth, a Kansan who had served in the Nixon administration, suggested that Dole visit Nixon in his New York office to get advice as he pondered his next move.

  “I went up to see Nixon I don’t know how many times in ’87,” Dole would say, “to get some foreign policy
ideas because he was always good. I still feel he had more at the tip of his fingers than all the rest of them put together, myself included. I don’t think he was always right, but he had the knowledge and the information.”

  Nixon wasn’t yet sold on Bush and was looking for a viable alternative. Could Dole be the one? After Dole won the Iowa Caucus in January 1988, Nixon publicly criticized Bush as having “insufficient drive.” But when the Bush campaign, led by Lee Atwater, came storming back and all but wrapped up the nomination several weeks later on Super Tuesday, Nixon got on board and said the vice president had “really come into his own.” Not that he had given up on Dole. Nixon called their mutual friend Ellsworth. “Tell him he must keep fighting,” Nixon said to Ellsworth. Dole did, before eventually dropping out and endorsing Bush.9

  Nixon still had reservations about the vice president. He told the media he found Bush to be a “weak individual on television,” but that he would still likely win because of the strong economy. But if the economy turned south, Nixon warned, that would change everything. At that point the Democrats could nominate a “jackass” and still win.

  Meanwhile, Nixon still thought Dole had a future. And Dole still had ambitions. Inside his desk in his Senate office, he maintained a collection of personal notes Nixon had written to him over the years. One of them had come in November 1984, shortly after Dole’s ascension to Senate majority leader. “As Disraeli would have put it,” Nixon wrote, “you have now reached the top of the greasy pole in the Senate. The vote you received is a recognition of your superior brain power and your years of loyalty to the party in many tough battles.”10

  A more personal touch from Nixon had helped shape Dole’s opinion of the man. When the two men first met years ago, Nixon had reached out with his left hand to shake Dole’s non-injured hand. He continued this gesture every time he saw Dole. This small action had a big and lasting impact on Dole.