The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Nixon was now prepared to utter the word others had so scrupulously avoided—to Rose Woods. It was she who was to tell the family that he had “irrevocably” decided to resign. Only an hour had passed since Edward Cox had again called Senator Griffin. His mother-in-law Pat, he said, had told him the president was still “not talking about resignation.” The family, he added, continued to worry about Nixon’s mental condition.

  Now at last though, the troubled mind had fixed its course, and the oft-told denouement began. After the senators had left, the Nixons ate a final family supper in the White House. “We spoke only of light things,” Julie would recall. Her father had decreed that “we not talk about it anymore.” Nixon had, however, arranged for the house photographer to come in. Teary, fixed-smile pictures were taken over Pat’s protests.

  Later there was a distraught, agonized session, alone with a compassionate Kissinger. Strong drink was taken, by Nixon’s account from the same bottle of brandy from which they had once toasted the breakthrough to China. The two men knelt to pray together, Nixon was to claim, though whether they actually got on their knees was a detail lost to Kissinger’s memory.

  Later still, more nocturnal phone calls, including one that Kissinger’s aide Lawrence Eagleburger thought “drunk . . . out of control.” Yet the president’s loyal speechwriter Ray Price thought the three calls he received “absolutely rational.” The last one came around 5:00 A.M.

  Thursday morning, the 8th. A things-to-do list for Haig, some last business with a piece of legislation—Nixon insisting on vetoing the agricultural appropriations bill. Some judges to appoint, resignations to accept. Business as usual was best, Haig thought—at a time when nothing at all was usual. The next step was a meeting with Gerald Ford, to say “I know you’ll do a good job.”

  In the afternoon, with possible prosecution in mind, Nixon forced jollity in a conversation with Haig. “Lenin and Gandhi did some of their best writing in jail.” The same lines, fatalistically this time, in a talk with attorney Fred Buzhardt. And worry, one more time, on a familiar theme: “I’ve never quit before in my life. . . . You don’t quit!”

  “There’ll be no tears from me,” the president had assured Goldwater the previous day. Yet he had cried, reportedly, with Kissinger, and now he cried with the representatives and senators who came to make their farewells. “I just hope,” he managed to say, “I haven’t let you down.”

  A half hour later Nixon appeared on television to tell the nation he would go at noon the following day. He was composed and fluent and closed with a benediction: “May God’s grace be with you in the days ahead.” No apology, however. With his family afterward, embraces. “Suddenly I began to shake violently,” he recalled, “and Tricia reached over to hold me. ‘Daddy!’ she exclaimed. ‘The perspiration is coming clear through your coat!’ I told them not to worry.”

  Hearing noise from the street, Pat drew her husband to a window. Her elder daughter, recognizing the chant as “Jail to the Chief,” tried to drown it out by talking loudly. From outside, the Nixon women were seen drawing curtains that had never been seen closed before, not even after the Kennedy assassination.

  Nixon was back on the phone that night. He had an apology for Len Garment, the Democrat who had switched allegiance to him, who had camped with him in Elmer Bobst’s pool house, listened to him say he would do anything to stay in public life—“except see a shrink.”

  “Sorry, I let you down,” the president said now. What would the special prosecutor do about him? Would he be indicted? Garment said he thought not. Then: “Well, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Some of the best writing’s been done in jail.” For the third time that day, a reference to Gandhi. No good night. Just a click, and the line going dead.

  Friday, August 9. Morning found Nixon in the Lincoln Sitting Room, memoirs of past presidents piled in front of him. Haig brought him a letter addressed to Henry Kissinger. The political death warrant, requiring signature.

  Dear Mr. Secretary,

  I hearby resign the Office of President of the United States.

  Sincerely,

  Richard Nixon

  Time running out. In the elevator on the way down to the East Room, an aide explained precisely where family members were to stand for the television cameras. “Oh, Dick,” Pat said in anguished tones, “you can’t have it televised.”

  But he did, rambling on emotionally before the assembled cabinet and staff and the watching nation. Disjointed, unconnected sequences about money (the lack of it), his father, and his mother, who “was a saint.”

  Nixon quoted Theodore Roosevelt on the death of his young wife: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out of my life forever.” Another man’s personal grief, borrowed to evoke the loss of the presidency.

  From the inappropriate to the almost inevitable—recourse once to TR’s line about the man in the arena who fails while daring greatly.13

  Then: “We think that when we suffer a defeat, that all is ended. . . . Not true. It is only a beginning, always. . . .”

  By the time he finished, many of those present were weeping. Those at center stage held back the tears. Ford’s wife Betty said, “Have a nice trip, Dick.” Then Nixon was walking with Pat to the helicopter that would take them to Andrews Air Force Base, to Air Force One, and so on to California.

  Looking back at the White House, at the door of the helicopter, the man who had failed greatly smiled hugely, made the V for Victory sign with both hands, arms spread wide. As the plane took off, Pat murmured, “It’s so sad. It’s so sad.”

  Technically the presidency remained Nixon’s until noon eastern standard time. Air Force One was somewhere over Missouri when Gerald Ford took the oath of office and told the nation, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Nixon was sipping a martini as the new president spoke, with not Pat but Ziegler at his side.

  At that moment of transition Air Force One lost its presidential call sign. Protocol had already changed. As Nixon boarded the plane, he had been seen off not by a saluting general, as was customary, but by a mere colonel. It rankled, and a complaint was sent to a high-level Defense Department official as the aircraft flew west.

  Then there was the matter of the “nuclear football,” the “black box”—in reality a briefcase—that then, as now, remained close to the president at all times. On the ground it was chained to the wrist of an army warrant officer. In flight aboard Air Force One, it was stored in a safe just forward of the president’s compartment. The black box had traveled with Nixon to China, to the Soviet Union, and everywhere else he had gone.

  It contained the nuclear launch codes, in those days printed on plastic-encased rectangles the size and shape of playing cards. When bent, and the plastic popped open, the cards would reveal the digits that authenticated presidential approval for a nuclear strike. Given the other precautions Defense Secretary Schlesinger had taken, it seems possible that Nixon’s black box had probably been effectively disarmed for some time. Alexander Haig reportedly confided as much to the special prosecutor.

  Nixon apparently was not aware of that precaution. The night before he left the White House, it is said, he had told his visitors from Congress that the black box would travel with him as usual on the flight to California. It had not. The secure briefcase was not on board, not resting in the safe a few feet away from the man sipping a martini in the presidential compartment.

  The power had gone from Richard Nixon. When Air Force One set down at El Toro Marine Air Station, near San Clemente, a sizable crowd was waiting. As the fallen president walked over to shake hands, a humming—at first indistinct, hesitant—began to arise from the throng. Gradually it became clearer, more confident.

  The people were singing, “God Bless America.”

  _____

  Two decades later, a seventy-three-year-old man sat at the piano in the embassy of the United States in Moscow, giving an impromptu rendition of that same tune. Everyone sang along. The pianist was Richar
d Nixon, on a “private visit” that included meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Two months earlier, Newsweek had run a cover story on him headlined, “HE’S BACK: THE REHABILITATION OF RICHARD NIXON.” The feature was a public endorsement of the recognition President Jimmy Carter had long since given him by quietly consulting him on foreign affairs. Every president that followed—Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—did likewise. After the scandal of Watergate, Nixon had found for himself a role of eminent respectability, that of the nation’s elder statesman. Once again he had achieved a degree of resurrection, if not a full return from the political dead.

  The story of that remarkable, carefully paced recovery is not the subject of this book. As one observer put it, the disgraced leader of the United States spent the years that remained to him “running for the ex-presidency.” If proof was needed that he had achieved that goal, it came at his death in 1994, when all his successors saw him to his rest as a national hero.

  A month after Nixon’s resignation, President Gerald Ford had granted his predecessor a blanket pardon for all crimes he had committed or possibly committed during the presidency. There had been a real likelihood he would be prosecuted, and the foreman of the Watergate grand jury has recalled ruefully that Ford’s action “shortcircuited our efforts to get to the bottom of the thing.” “This is justice?” asked another.

  Nixon’s former aide Egil Krogh, himself just recently released from jail, had visited San Clemente before the pardon came through. “Do you feel guilty, Mr. President?” he had asked. Nixon answered, “No I don’t. I just don’t.” When Ford required him to issue a statement of contrition, he offered only “regret and pain” at the anguish his “mistakes and misjudgments” had caused. Later, laying the ground rules for the writing of his memoirs, he told his staff, “We won’t grovel, we won’t confess, we won’t do a mea culpa.”

  It is said that Nixon once admitted to a Quaker pastor, in private: “I did wrong, but I’ll live with it.” Publicly, he never offered a clear-cut apology. Watergate, he had assured Charles Colson in a letter before the resignation, would become “only a footnote in history.” Asked by ABC television’s Barbara Walters whether he thought history would be kind to him, he responded with a quotation from Winston Churchill: “History will be very kind to me, because I intend to write it.” Nixon had by that time already written his memoirs, a thousand pages long and with the imperial title RN inscribed on its cover with a grand flourish. Eight more books were to follow.

  In retirement in North Carolina, former Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin had a characteristic comment on the autobiography. Nixon, he declared, had “obeyed Mark Twain’s injunction in writing about Watergate: ‘The truth is very precious; use it sparingly.’ ”

  One of Nixon’s own, who had himself served time in prison for perjury, sounded a warning note even before the memoirs came out. “Someday,” Jeb Magruder wrote, “Richard Nixon and his apologists will try to rewrite history, claiming that this tragic president was betrayed by his underlings and railroaded out of office by his enemies. When that time comes . . . it would help to have the record at hand.”

  “If there was any dominant sentiment,” historian Barbara Tuchman recalled of the first phase of Watergate, “it was reluctance to believe ill of the President and a desperate desire to sweep all the horrid doings under the rug and let him maintain his fiction of untainted rectitude. Americans have an over-developed tendency to president-worship. The public wants to believe the president—any president—is good . . . we put worship where the power is, which is an unwise arrangement.”

  Since Tuchman wrote those words, and because of what they learned at Watergate, Americans are perhaps today less ready to trust blindly in their leaders. This may be a positive outcome of a melancholy time. The downside, however, is that Richard Nixon’s abuses and deceptions may have led many citizens not to trust their leaders at all.

  Author’s Notes

  * * *

  See list of abbreviations on pages 609–610.

  Chapter 1

  1. Nixon claimed more than once that his father sold the Yorba Linda land only to learn later that “oil that would have made us millionaires” was discovered on it. His mother made the same claim. In 1970, on a drive with Henry Kissinger, Nixon said oil had been found after his parents sold the Whittier property they had operated as a store and gas station from 1922 until the forties. In fact, oil was found only on a site Nixon’s father considered, but decided against, purchasing in 1922. (FB, p. 30–; Good Housekeeping, June 1960; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, op. cit., p. 1185; MO, p. 6–; Earl Mazo, op. cit., p. 14 fn.)

  2. Nixon’s statements on the Vietnam War and related issues will be assessed in chapter 23.

  Chapter 2

  1. Exactly what he had dreamed of and when is not clear. The Jonathan Aitken biography, which had Nixon’s full cooperation, cites an eighth-grade school essay in which Nixon said he hoped to attend Whittier College, then do a postgraduate course at Columbia University, in New York. A reference a few pages later cites the same essay as indicating merely that Nixon longed to “go East” for his university education. (Pat, p. 85; JA, p. 30, and see MEM, p. 14.)

  2. The Lois Elliott story seemed uncertain when first mentioned in a 1970 Life article. Later, by interviewing Elliott for his book Nixon vs. Nixon, Dr. David Abrahamsen was able to verify it. (Life, Nov. 6, 1970; Abrahamsen, op. cit., pp. 111, 250, line 1.)

  3. Hannah Nixon claimed he made this remark to her. She dated it, however, to 1922 and in Yorba Linda. Yet the long-running investigation of Teapot Dome did not start until late 1923, and the family was living in Whittier by that time. Nixon’s aunt Jane Beeson was certain he made the declaration to her, in her house, and she was probably right. Nixon’s mother, who told the story as political propaganda for her son, may have thought it would play better as a “mother-son” conversation. (Kenneth Harris int. of RN, SF Chronicle, Nov. 24, 1968; Good Housekeeping, Gardner, op. cit., p. 24–; FB, p. 523, n. 13; MO, p. 881, n. 83.)

  4. Duke University proposed the honorary doctorate again in 1961. Still smarting from the previous rebuff, however, Nixon declined to accept. (Durham Morning Herald, June 15, 1961.)

  Chapter 3

  1. Ola Welsh did marry the man for whom she left Nixon, Gail Jobe, and was still married to him when interviewed for this book in 1996. She quoted Nixon as saying he loved her in an interview for Jonathan Aitken’s biography of Nixon. Roger Morris’s biography, however, reports that she could not remember if he ever said, “I love you.” Ola told Dr. David Abrahamsen she could not recall if he even said he liked her. The author has credited her remarks on the subject to Aitken, who appears to have interviewed her most extensively. (JA, p. 61; MO, p. 169; Abrahamsen, op. cit., p. 107.)

  2. Pat Nixon also said Nixon proposed that first night. Nevertheless, while one might expect the couple themselves to have the story right, the author believes in this case that Elizabeth Cloes’s account is more likely to be credible. (Mazo, op. cit., p. 31; Kenneth Harris int. Miami Herald, Jan. 19, 1969.)

  3. In letters home Pat Ryan was specifically referring to herself as not married as late as February 1934. If there was a first marriage in the New York period, it was almost certainly not to Dr. Francis Vincent Duke, the Irish-born suitor mentioned in this chapter. There is no reference to a first marriage in Dr. Duke’s 1965 obituary, and unlike the putative husband interviewed by Maxine Cheshire, Duke never lived in New Orleans. It is clear that Pat dated several different men while in New York. She returned to California in August 1934. (Duke: NYT, March 24, 1965; Journal of the American Medical Association, June 21, 1965, p. 1115; NY dates: Pat, p. 38.)

  4. The case was Schee v. Holt, a family dispute case that began in the fall of 1937, when Marie Schee sued to get back money she had lent to her uncle, Otto Steuer. She was awarded judgment, with the right to demand the sale of Steuer’s house, a sale that went wrong under Nixon’s supervision. As a result, Schee f
ound herself liable to lose all she had won and sued Wingert and Bewley for malpractice. The firm settled out of court. The process dragged on until 1942. (The most detailed coverage of the case is in FB; David Abrahamsen, op. cit., p. 123–, and MO, p. 189–; case files are listed at FB, p. 527.)

  5. American organized crime, in the person of Meyer Lansky, had taken over Havana’s two casinos and its racetrack in 1938. According to sources interviewed for this book, including Lansky’s close associate Vincent Alo, Nixon met Lansky in Cuba, perhaps initially on the 1941 visit. This alleged connection will be probed in chapter 12. (Robert Lacey, Little Man, Boston: Little, Brown, 1991, pp. 108–, 469, n. 23; Charles Rappeleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso, New York: Doubleday, 1991, p. 144; ints. Vincent Alo, Jack Clarke.)

  6. Nixon’s Navy record indicates that he went to the South Pacific in the spring of 1943 and served first in New Caledonia and then in Vella Lavella, not under Japanese attack at the time. He was transferred to the Northern Solomons in January 1944. His first posting there, the island of Bougainville, was largely in U.S. hands when he arrived. Fighting did continue for a month or so, though it was not concentrated on the area where Nixon was stationed. In his memoirs Nixon mentioned a Japanese assault during which he had to shelter in a bunker. There were some bombing raids on Green Island, his next posting, but fewer than at Bougainville. One of Nixon’s friends said, “The only real danger was the possibility of a banyan tree falling on you during a storm.” Nixon’s lasting memory was of the carnage when a B-29 bomber exploded on landing. Two authors, Fawn Brodie and Dr. David Abrahamsen, have critically examined Nixon’s war record. Although Brodie, like Abrahamsen, was generally unfriendly toward Nixon, she argued convincingly that he was not guilty of intentionally fabricating his military experiences during his early political campaigning. Rather, he “blurred and embroidered and failed to correct exaggerations he encouraged among friendly biographers and journalists.” On the available evidence, this author agrees with Brodie’s view. (FB, ch. XII; Abrahamsen, op. cit., ch. 8; MEM, p. 28.)