As had been his custom in the years since Watergate, Nixon’s main form of intellectual exercise came from researching and writing books. In 1989, he began working on what would become his seventh book since leaving the White House. For this one, which would eventually be called In the Arena, Nixon focused inward. When Simon & Schuster announced the book later that year, the publisher quoted Nixon saying that it would be “the most personal book I have ever written.”
But there were occasional signs that Nixon’s fear of becoming out of shape mentally was not entirely unjustified. Like most people in their late seventies, he was slowing down a bit.
His editor at Simon & Schuster was Michael Korda, a well-established New York editor who had also edited Graham Greene and Joan Dideon. Korda attended one of Nixon’s famous dinners at his home in 1989. Nixon began by offering everyone a daiquiri. “The recipe was said to be one of his more closely guarded secrets,” Korda recalled and said that it was indeed very good. “The president’s claim that he made the best daiquiri ever was the truth.” But things went downhill from there. At dinner, Nixon offered one of his usual monologues on world events. But on this particular night Nixon began using the third person to describe himself. Korda found it odd but thought no more about it. Then later, after dinner, Nixon announced that he would provide a tour of the house. He seemed confused. “At one point, he opened a closet door, apparently thinking that it was the door to his study, then slammed it shut hastily, with a muttered oath,” Korda recalled. When the former president did finally make his way to the study, he again reverted to the third person to announce: “This is where Nixon works.” Korda left that night sensing that perhaps old age was catching up with Nixon.9
Still, Nixon forged ahead. And there was much in the news to keep his mind active. Most notably, events in China came to the forefront that June when the Chinese Army entered Tiananmen Square to crush an uprising of students who were protesting for freedom.
The images of the tanks rolling through the square shocked the world and roiled policymakers in Washington. Almost immediately Congressional leaders of both parties began demanding that the Bush administration impose sanctions on the Chinese government.
Sitting in his office in New Jersey, Nixon followed the news and saw the proposals coming out of Washington as overreactions. He believed his effort to open the door to China in 1972 had been a signature achievement that had made the world safer. He didn’t want to see that achievement abandoned in an emotional reaction from Washington. For that matter, neither did the Bush White House. When President Bush suspended military aid to China but refused to impose any further sanctions, Nixon publicly supported him. “Those on the far right who oppose any relations with China will demand economic and diplomatic sanctions,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. “So will the human rights lobby, which calls for punishing every regime that does not live up to our standards regardless of our interests or those of the millions living under those regimes, whom sanctions would hurt the most.”
Instead, Nixon urged the U.S. to take the long view and consider any decision on China as part of the larger American foreign policy strategy. “Whatever happens in the future, it is imperative that Sino-American relations remain strong so the United States can help maintain the balance among China, Japan, and the Soviet Union.” He also suggested that those in Washington who were outraged at the events in China were exhibiting naivety. “No one who knows China should be surprised when its leaders turn to violence to pursue their political goals,” he wrote. “They have done far worse before Tiananmen Square.”10
“The Chinese got along without the West for a quarter-century and they could do so again,” Nixon told the media. “If we force them back into their angry isolation from the West, we risk prompting a potentially disastrous entente between the two great Communist powers.”
But for Nixon, the U.S.-China relationship was personal. He quickly decided it wasn’t enough to just write an op-ed suggesting a way forward. Perhaps no one had better relationships inside the Chinese government than he did. Why not take advantage of that? Why not try to bridge the gap with China one more time? Nixon decided the time had come to return to China.
Nixon didn’t ask permission from the Bush White House, but he did let the president know he intended to go to China. In October, Nixon landed in China and began a whirlwind of events and meetings. When he met with Deng Xiaoping, he gave brutally honest advice. “I have watched Sino-U.S. relations closely for seventeen years,” he said. “There has never been a worse crisis than now in those relations.” Later at a banquet held in his honor, Nixon warned that another tragedy like Tiananmen Square “would be the death of a relationship and of policies that have served so well.”11
On November 5, Nixon found himself back at the White House. In a lengthy discussion over dinner that included the president, the first lady, the vice president, the national security advisor, and the FBI director, Nixon gave an account of his trip.
The meeting had been set up in part because the Bush White House wanted to know firsthand how the Nixon trip to China had gone. But it was also in part because the president and his team weren’t happy with Nixon’s candor in China. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater suggested to reporters that the Bush administration did not like the tone of Nixon’s comments.
For two hours, Nixon held court at the White House and described his meetings in China. When reporters found out about the meeting between Bush and Nixon two days later, Fitzwater responded to their questions tersely, saying that the president appreciated Nixon’s report but that “our general policy has not changed.”12
Back home in Saddle River, Nixon prepared a memo for congressional leaders about his trip. In it he said bluntly that there was little that could be done to find an agreement on Tiananmen Square. The difference in opinion, he wrote, “is totally unbridgeable.” In fact, the Chinese had pushed back when Nixon raised the topic of Tiananmen. “They believe the American reaction was an unacceptable intrusion in their internal affairs,” he wrote to the congressional leaders.
Nixon was trying to strike a balance on China. He understood the domestic political pressures on Congress to get tough on China. And so he had bluntly told the Chinese that another such tragedy could damage the relationship between the two countries. But he also knew what he had known since 1972—that China was not going away. And U.S. policy had to acknowledge China’s growing power and importance. “China will provide a huge market for the advanced industrial countries,” he wrote in his memo to congressional leaders. “Do we want to rule ourselves out and leave that potential market to the Japanese and the Europeans?”
In the end, the fever in Washington over China finally broke. Events in Europe soon interceded and changed the conversation. But once again Nixon had played a role in a foreign policy debate that would have lasting implications. His meetings in both China and Washington had helped calm passions on both sides. Who else could have spoken so bluntly to the Chinese but the man who had done so much to bring them into the modern world? And who else could have helped tone down the rhetoric in Washington except the elder statesman who had just used his personal clout with China to put them on notice that there must never be another Tiananmen?
And his policy prescriptions had largely been right. Nixon had sternly warned the Chinese to knock it off while also cautioning U.S. lawmakers of both parties that they couldn’t overreact, given China’s growing size and importance in Asia. It was his last great contribution to American foreign policy. The U.S.-China relationship could easily have been destroyed in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. In the end, the man who helped save it was the man who had helped start it in 1972.
* * *
With his shuttle diplomacy to China and Washington concluded, Nixon returned to finishing the manuscript for his latest book. As had been previously announced, his book would be part memoir. The book was divided into chapters with simple titles like “Philosophy” or “Purpose” or
“Struggle.” And as he had done with previous books, Nixon carefully planned out a media push to promote its publication.
Time magazine showcased Nixon on its April 2, 1990, cover with the headline, “Nixon: In an emotional memoir, he describes the agony of his exile and his struggle for renewal.” Inside, readers were presented with excerpts from the book, as well as an interview with the former president. It marked the sixty-seventh time Nixon had appeared on the magazine’s cover.13
Though not as revealing as his many media critics wanted it to be, the book did offer new insights in Nixon’s life and career. It was in this book that Nixon first hinted that Pat’s stroke in 1976 had been caused in part by her reading Final Days—the Woodward and Bernstein account of the end of the Nixon presidency.
But as always, it was his take on world affairs that most readers were interested in reading. Nixon continued his journey back to the right on the Cold War. “In geopolitics,” he wrote, “the game never ends. There is no point at which all sides cash in their chips.” If Ronald Reagan had urged a policy of “trust, but verify,” Nixon seemed to advocate for a policy of verify, but don’t trust. He urged the U.S. to be wary of providing economic aid to the Soviets now that it was becoming clear that their economy was faltering. Instead, he urged the Soviet Union to end its domination of Eastern Europe and reduce its conventional weapons before the U.S. offered any economic help.
And he returned again to the first conversation he had had with Gorbachev on his Moscow trip just a few years before. In retelling the story, Nixon again stressed what had been a key principle of his during the Reagan years: the power of SDI as leverage with the Soviets. “Our most spirited discussion with Gorbachev involved the Strategic Defense Initiative,” he wrote. “He said it was a myth that the Soviet Union opposed SDI because it feared the huge cost to the economy or because it could not keep up technologically. He was emphatic in declaring that the Soviet Union would be able to evade and overcome any SDI system that the U.S. might eventually deploy.” Nixon described in detail how Gorbachev had tried to reframe the debate about SDI. “His major objection to SDI,” he insisted, was that it would “inevitably lead to increased tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and destroy any chance for a new, less confrontational relationship.”14
Gorbachev’s arguments, Nixon now claimed in his writing, left him unpersuaded. “He made these points vigorously and persuasively, but there is no doubt whatever in my mind that his major concern was and remains that the huge cost of competing with the U.S. in developing SDI would bankrupt the already strapped Soviet economy.” The book also included Nixon’s domestic policy prescriptions, which clearly indicated that he had become a man without a party. Perhaps no issue had brought more new voters into the GOP than Reagan’s embrace of pro-life policies. Evangelicals who had voted for Carter in 1976 now proudly called themselves Republicans. Nixon wanted none of it. “In 1980, the Republican nominee for Senate in Colorado, Mary Estill Buchanan, lost in a very close election,” he wrote. “I was surprised when a Republican friend told me that he had not voted for her. I asked why. He replied, ‘She was wrong on abortion.’ As a result, we got six more years of Gary Hart, who was wrong on everything.”15
Nixon also wrote in favor of the controversial idea of federal assistance for catastrophic health care. President Reagan had supported and signed the bill in 1988. But Republicans repealed it when costs skyrocketed. Still, Nixon wrote that while he opposed “compulsory national health insurance, I have always supported federal assistance for catastrophic health care. My strong feelings in this respect are a direct result of losing two brothers to TB.”
On welfare, Nixon struck a more conservative note. Essentially calling for welfare reform, Nixon wrote that the “difficulty comes in setting the level of support to the less fortunate. If set too low, it causes unnecessary hardship. If set too high, it creates disincentives to achieving self-sufficiency and fosters dependency. Our objective should therefore be a welfare system structured not to trap the poor in dependency but to enable them to escape poverty.”16
Nixon had always been something of a domestic policy enigma. The man reviled by the Left for campaigning on law and order was the same man who as president extended affirmative action in federal hiring and helped create the Environmental Protection Agency. In the Reagan era, Nixon’s domestic views were out of step with the direction of his party.
But as a president and as an elder statesman, Nixon had always seen foreign policy as the first priority. And it was here that his views were still widely regarded and valued by leaders in both parties. In fact, when Gorbachev came later that year to Washington seeking economic assistance, Nixon’s warnings against providing such aid almost certainly helped the Bush administration and Congress resist the urge to help the Soviets.
Perhaps the most revealing moments in the book came when Nixon described how he had tried to find his way out of the wilderness he found himself in after Watergate:
Those first years after resigning the presidency were profoundly difficult and painful. As I look back over those years in the wilderness, I would say that I was sustained by always bearing in mind 3 principles:
1. Put the past behind you. Analyze & understand the reasons for your defeat, but do not become obsessed with what was lost. Think instead about what is left to do.
2. Don’t let your critics get to you. Remember that they win only if they divert you into fighting them rather than driving toward your goals.
3. Devote your time to a goal larger than yourself. Avoid the temptation of living simply for pleasure or striving only to leave a larger estate.17
Nixon then took the lesson of his own failure and tried to apply it directly to his audience. “While few people will experience a loss as devastating as resigning from the presidency,” he wrote, “these principles remain valid for the defeats we all suffer, whether in business, in sports, or in personal life. The key is to live for something more important than your life. As Einstein said, ‘Only a life lived for others is worth living.’ ”
* * *
On July 19, 1990, the dream of a presidential library became a reality at long last. The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace would be different from other presidential libraries because it still would not control the actual presidential records. But the twenty-five-million-dollar pink limestone facility situated next to the white frame kit house Nixon’s father had built was a beautiful addition to the Yorba Linda community.
A crowd of fifty thousand people gathered on the grounds for the opening. Longtime Nixon advance specialist Ron Walker orchestrated an elaborate celebration with balloons, bands, dancers, and the dramatic release of two hundred white doves. Joining the festivities was Reverend Billy Graham, who led a prayer. Also included in the formal program were former presidents Ford and Reagan, as well as current president Bush. Bush went out of his way to praise Nixon and salute his achievements. “Richard Nixon helped change the course not only of America but of the entire world,” he told the crowd. “Today, as the movement towards democracy sweeps our globe, you can take great personal pride that history will say of you: ‘Here was a true architect of peace.’ ”18
In his own speech, Nixon waxed philosophical about his career. “Won some, lost some, all interesting,” he told the crowd in quite an understatement. Then he pointed at the house behind him. The house, which his father had ordered from Sears and built with his own hands, still stood and looked in decent condition. But it was a modest, unassuming structure. Nixon told the crowd that it was “a long way from Yorba Linda to the White House.” He added, “I believe in the American dream because I have seen it come true in my own life.” As the ceremony ended, Nixon joined several guests inside the library for a lunch catered by Chasen’s, one of Nixon's favorite restaurants. That night, Nixon joined another fifteen hundred friends at the Century Plaza Hotel up the road in Los Angeles for a celebratory dinner.
The press coverage of the day’s events
was, predictably, more critical. R. W. Apple noted in the New York Times that Watergate had never been mentioned during the entire ceremony. Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose had told Apple that the building represented “more of a museum than a library” and denounced it. “He never, ever gives up,” Ambrose said. “You see what Nixon wants you to see. So the cover-up continues.”19
If Nixon ever read those comments, he never let on. He loved seeing the crowd and he reveled in being with so many of his old staffers, including Henry Kissinger, William Simon, and Rose Mary Woods. Ron Ziegler also attended and found himself emotionally moved by the celebration. “There were times when it would have been easy, in the days at San Clemente after the resignation, to walk into the ocean with a bottle of Chivas under your arm,” he said. “But he didn’t.’ ”20
In the coming years, Nixon would carefully watch events at his beloved library, which would be run by his trusted aide and friend John Taylor. He wanted the library to succeed. And he often called with suggestions. “I’m watching George Will speak at the Reagan Library on C-SPAN,” he called and said to John Taylor one night. “Why I am not watching him at the Nixon Library?”21
But on the night of the grand opening of his library, Nixon could not have been happier. After the banquet in Los Angeles had concluded, Nixon turned to his longtime friend Ron Walker, who had put the day together. “I guess this is one of the happiest days of my life,” he said.22
Chapter Eighteen
The Last Mile
“But now all I can do is offer advice.”
Throughout 1989, the events unfolding in Eastern Europe had commanded Nixon’s attention. Proof that the Cold War was ending came in November of that year when East Germans began crossing through checkpoints at the Berlin Wall and the Communists did not stop them. Freedom at last was coming to Eastern Europe. By 1990, the wall itself was torn down.
After the Fall Page 20