Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  The Corsicans have a reputation for being unfriendly. They certainly look gloomy, and their character is incontestably dour; but they are not smug or critical, they can be helpful and they seem genuinely interested in strangers. "Simple in manner and thoroughly obliging," wrote Edward Lear; "anxious to please the traveler, yet free from compliment and servility." One old woman in the market at Ile-Rousse told me in pidgin Italian that she thought Americans were "sweet". It is not a sentiment I have heard expressed anywhere else in Europe.

  Nixon's Neighborhood

  [1977]

  The San Clemente "City Song" was written in 1970 by Marjorie and Walter Botts before, as one San Clemente surfer put it, "they caught the crook." When a local group such as the Elks or the Junior Woman's Club meet they often sing San Clemente by the Sea:

  There's a spot so breathtaking

  Where waves are softly breaking

  And the sands are like a golden shawl.

  There I take my troubles

  And just like bubbles

  They disappear into nothing at all.

  The last verse is about the Nixons ("The native folk are joyful that they picked this lovely town"). These days that verse is not usually sung.

  There I take my troubles. Having seen an aerial photograph of it, the Nixons moved there in 1969 and dubbed the Spanish-style, twenties house ("Damas" on the Ladies, "Caballeros" on the Gents) the Western White House. After his resignation he fled there and he has been pretty much in residence ever since. Yet he is not at all a ghost figure: he plays golf regularly at a local club and his servant Manolo Sanchez makes a weekly trip to the nearby Alpha-Beta Supermarket to buy food; Pat has been spotted strolling on the old rum-runners' path to the beach (the town was founded by smugglers and bootleggers) and Mr Nixon often waves to the townsfolk from his limousine. Some people wave back. Opinion in town is about equally divided on the man. Last year the San Clemente Sun-Post asked three hundred and fifty local residents, "Are you still interested in reading news about Richard Nixon?" 47% said yes, 53% said no. Nearly everyone I spoke to said it was a real shame he had to resign. So what if he was crooked? They say: all politicians are crooked. But it was still a blow to civic pride that their leading citizen was just like the rest.

  The surfers are the exception. They are delighted that he was forced to resign, because the best surfing waves on that part of the coast rise in frothy peaks below "La Casa Pacifica." While Nixon was President, the Secret Service declared the beach a security area. "It was a problem," says Dave, a surfer who looks—as surfers do—like John the Baptist. "We still surfed there, but if we got near the beach they grabbed our boards and confiscated them."

  Now the beach is open again to surfers, morning joggers, pot-smokers ("Are you a pig?" one surfer asked me), beer-drinkers (a six-pack at sundown on Nixon's beach is an especially favored recreation), dog-lovers, time-killers, strollers—the town is full of people old and young who, like Mr Nixon, are in retreat from the world. "But it isn't what you might think—a sleepy small town," a lady told me. "A lot of wealthy people live here. Real important people with character, like bank presidents. And there's no smog."

  Under clear skies, the town (pop. 28,000) of bleeding pastels and dusty palmettos and hamburger joints seems to tumble down a hillside of biscuity cliffs, pausing in clumps on the main street, El Camino Real ("The Royal Road"), and continuing to the lizard-haunted shore where a cosy wooden pier puts one in mind of Heme Bay. Its most bizarre feature is never mentioned: the town is sliced in half by the ten lane San Diego Freeway, Interstate 5. Mr Nixon lives on the posh, ocean side of the freeway in a house on a five-acre corner plot of the Cyprus Shore Estate. Many of those hundred Cyprus Shore families are millionaires, who have chosen San Clemente for the reason its planner Ole Hanson chose it in 1925: "This will be a place where a man can breathe." Hanson was a nimble real estate speculator. He bought two thousand acres; he decreed that all the houses would have red-tiled roofs and be white, and no blacks would live in them. Hanson went broke, but remains a local hero. He was in character and career remarkably like Mr Nixon, a busted operator. "And to this day," says Warren Estes, editor of the Sun-Post, "you won't see many blacks in San Clemente."

  Cyprus Shore Estate is so closely guarded even the police stay out ("We have real neat parties," the son of a resident told me), and Nixon's house, a fortress within that fortress, is impenetrable to anyone who hasn't got a contract with Mr Nixon. It is secured by a system of walls, hidden mikes, tv cameras, and chain-link fences that make it seem like Gulag-by-the-Sea. It is amazing that a house on such high ground is so hidden. It can't be seen from the hills or the freeway or the drive; it is invisible to surfers and yachtsmen, and though it is smack on the Amtrak railway line to San Diego, all the train-traveler sees is a board fence and beyond it an eight-foot wall; and beyond that the dense trees and green closed-circuit tv cameras on Nixon's bluffs. You can walk a mile and a half along its perimeter from El Presidente Road down to the shore and see nothing more than cypresses and the out-buildings of the Coast Guard Station, which are Nixon's sentry-boxes. It can only be seen from a helicopter. If the helicopter comes in too low, the guards say, "We'll deal with you as if you came over the wall"—they'll shoot.

  "You look over the wall from Nixon's garden," says the film-maker Peter Bogdanovich, and he laughed as he remembered the party he went to at the house a few years ago. "You expect to see the ocean or the beach. But no—there's a huge chain-link fence and a railway track! About ten times a day the train goes by, clackedy-clack, whistle blowing. That's his idea of privacy."

  "Who said Nixon was a hermit?" said Warren Estes. "You call a regular golfer a hermit? No, he doesn't address the Elks now, but he didn't before he was dumped. He's interested in the South Coast Boys' Club. They're building a gym—he throws a few bucks their way. Sure, if things had been different he would have shown up at a Rams football game, but he's no Howard Hughes. Go up to the golf course—you'll probably see him."

  I had been turned away by the telephone operator ("President's office," she'd said) and by the polite security guard, Mr Richard Phillips, at the Cyprus Shore gate. ("What Nixon did was awful dumb," he said. "But I still think he's a smart man and I wave to him when he goes by in his car—that man pays my salary.") I had been rebuffed by the Coast Guard and Nixon's publisher, Warner Books; I had been flummoxed by the fences and the screens of trees. A bad week for me because it had been a bad week for Mr Nixon: his golf pro had received more than the usual hate-mail and the day before I arrived a lady had shown up at Cyprus Shore waving a pair of scissors in the direction of La Casa Pacifica. "It wasn't funny," said Mr Phillips. "She was going to kill him with them scissors."

  Shore Cliffs Golf Club does not seem a natural choice for either a golfer or even an ordinary paranoiac. It is on a slide area. Because it is in the process of being sold it is in a state of scruffy neglect. The club house is uncared for. The restaurant has been closed for months, the bar is empty, the fairways are brown and pitted. The entire place is bisected by Interstate Five—nine holes on this side, nine holes on the other and a narrow tunnel under the freeway connects them. There is a housing estate along the margins of the course and the boxy yellow bungalows are so close their windows sometimes get broken. "I shanked one through a glass sliding-door a few weeks back," said Jack Wright, a leathery old member in a birdbill cap. Ground squirrels frolic on the course; and the club is only semi-private: Anyone who can afford the $3.50 daily membership plus $8 for a self-drive golf-cart (there are no caddies) can play at Shore Cliffs.

  Mr Nixon plays three or four times a week. Why? For one thing they made him an Honorary Member, so he plays free and gets three self-drive carts—secret servicemen in the front and rear carts, Nixon and his partner in the middle one. "He likes it here a whole lot," said Homer Welborne, a senior member. "They'd pick on him at the municipal course. Hell, early on, they picked on him here—heckled him—'Did you cheat on the course?' That kind of thing."
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  "He's got to play golf. He's writing a book," says Tom Perrin the Club's pro, who gets the hate-mail (How can a liar and a cheat play free at your club? No wonder the country's sick, etc.) "He told one of the members 'Writing's driving me crazy.' He's got to whack a golf-ball around, for his sanity. But, man, he gets around the course like lightning. Twenty-seven holes in two and a half hours, that's twice as fast as anyone else. He still gets good scores. The course is a par seventy-one and Nixon shoots in the eighties—eighty-four, eighty-five."

  But a year ago, Homer Welborne's partner, Dick Hulbert, found a score card blowing down one of the fairways. He showed me this interesting item. One player's name was pencilled in as "Jack," the other as "The President"—odd, since he had been out of office for months. "Jack" (Col John Brennan, Nixon's aide) had shot a respectable eighty-three, "The President" a duffer's one hundred and three. Hulbert said, "Maybe he's improved since then," and he grinned in disbelief. "Aw, he's a good guy!"

  Homer said, "Oh, sure. He's very plebeian. Always says hello, poses for pictures, gives autographs. We've all had our picture taken with him. Stick around, he might be over today. Anyone can get his picture taken with him."

  I stuck around. It was bright and cool, the sea twinkling, Freeway traffic roared past the ninth hole.

  "You waiting for the President?" asked Roland Bennett ("the only black assistant pro this side of Watts").

  "The former President," I said.

  "Yeah, well, he might be up today. But we haven't had a call. We always get a call beforehand. 'The President is coming in half an hour,' they say. Then six FBI guys and Nixon and Brennan hop out of their cars and the next thing you know they're teeing off. They don't waste no time. He says hi to me. Once or twice he asked me if I wanted to play with him."

  "That's quite an honor, isn't it?"

  "Quite an honor for him to play with a pro! But I'm too busy."

  Unlike the surfers, none of the golfers had an unkind word for Mr Nixon. "We're so used to seeing him we don't pay too much attention to him," said John Perrin. "But there is one strange thing about him. He only plays with Brennan. If Brennan's out of town Nixon doesn't play golf. Now that's a bit unusual."

  "You mean abnormal?" I asked.

  "Let's say kind of peculiar," said Perrin. "He'll only play with one certain guy. Most golfers will play with anyone. I'm not saying he's not a wonderful person, but he's funny in some ways. Like the time he almost got a hole-in-one. Up to then he hadn't joined the Hole-in-One Club. It's like insurance. You pay a dollar and if you get a hole-in-one you win a jackpot, about seventy bucks, which you spend buying everyone a drink. He didn't join, then one day he almost got a hole-in-one, then he paid his dollar. It's peculiar."

  The "Hole-in-One Club" board on the back of the bar listed a newly-printed name among the others, Richard Nixon.

  "You're out of luck. I don't think he's coming today. Brennan must be out of town." Perrin squinted across town. "Probably working on his book."

  The book was mentioned by many people I met in San Clemente. In Southern California, a book is considered a mysterious thing, even by the college students who gather on Nixon's beach to turn on. One of these, Martin Nelsen ("I think Nixon's a real neat guy. If you could see his house you'd know it was a prime place."), majors in Ornamental Horticulture at Pasadena. He hopes to get an MA and possibly a PhD in Ornamental Horticulture and become America's answer to Capability Brown. He spoke with awe of Nixon's book, so did Mr Phillips, the security guard, and Brian Sardoz, the scuba diver, and Mrs Dorothy Symms of San Clemente Secretarial Services, publisher of Fishcarts to Fiestas, the Story of San Clemente.

  "I met the man who's writing Mr Nixon's book," said Mrs Symms.

  I said, "Isn't Mr Nixon writing the book?"

  "No. There's a man doing it for him. He writes all the movie stars' books. He's a very famous writer. You say you're from England? Oh, this man wrote Winston Churchill's memoirs, too."

  Mrs Symms thinks Nixon is "just great," but seemed defensive, almost embarrassed, when I mentioned his name. It is a common reaction in San Clemente. The name is spoken. They sigh and sort of smack their lips. Oh gosh and then: Look, all politicians are crooked. But it is clear they have been down in the dumps since Watergate. After all, the Kennedys started a real estate boom in Hyannisport. It might have happened there.

  There are no Nixon pictures in town and apart from the ten cent postcards ("The Richard M Nixon Home") nothing to indicate that he lives there. "Did you see the museum?" people ask. But it is hardly that. It is a collection of Nixoniana in the lobby of the San Clemente Inn, called the "A Little Bit of History Museum." No mention of Watergate or the resignation, though one framed Nixon letter refers to "these difficult times." On display are Nixon's golf-balls and spare golf-bag, some expensive bicentennial junk, mementos (menus, fans) from the China visit, election buttons ("Lithuanians for President Nixon"), a copy of Mao's poems open to "The PLA Captures Nanking, April 1949" and thirty-two "thank you" letters, addressed to the former manager of the San Clemente Inn, Mr Paul Presley. The museum was Presley's idea. He seems to have been an inexhaustible gift-giver: thank you for the patriotic scroll, thank you for the nice letter, thank you for the banquet, thank you for the hospitality, thanks for finding Henry Kissinger a house at Cyprus Shore, thank you for your congratulatory telegram, thanks for the birthday cake—and all ending with the wild oversized signature, Richard Nixon. The wobbly handwriting ("P.S. Thanks also for the beautiful flowers!") speaks volumes, but the museum is uninspiring, even a bit of a joke. Mr Presley, who retired last year, is known as a "Nixon freak." There are not many in San Clemente. They are decent folk. If asked, most people will say they have nothing against him, but you get the impression that they'd prefer not to be asked.

  Nixon's Memoirs

  [1978]

  The artichoke John Ehrlichman was defoliating with big brown fingers seemed an apt metaphor for the Nixon years—somewhere beneath the goop and scales of this thistle was a misshapen heart. Quite by coincidence, Mr Ehrlichman and I were having lunch together on the day Mr Nixon's memoirs were released to reviewers. He had recently been released from prison. Although we had never met before, we had corresponded—he had helped me penetrate the mysteries of San Clemente, I had offered him (unsolicited) literary advice. Radiating good health—he played tennis every day and ran the prison's power station every night—an attentive listener twice my size, he could have passed for my parole officer. Yet it was Mr Ehrlichman who had been the model prisoner for two years: he wrote two novels, a dissertation on alternative sentencing, and compiled a dossier on the Mexican illegal immigrants and drug-smugglers who were his fellow convicts. He took up painting, he learned Spanish. He did not become a "Born Again" Christian like Mr Colson, or a fink like John Dean, or a cantankerous old fat-head like Mr Mitchell. And unlike his former employer, he has not written a White House memoir.

  I wondered whether he could give me a litmus test for the veracity of the Memoirs. How does one know when Mr Nixon is not telling the truth?

  "I doubt if he knows himself when he's not telling the truth," said Mr Ehrlichman. "But read that description of his family. They're all perfect, right? But what man can say his family's perfect? Those people are human—they sweat, they get upset, they get sore feet. He makes them into waxwork dummies. It's a serious injustice—and if he doesn't come clean about them, how could he come clean about anything else?"

  I told him that I had read some of the book and that it struck me as nothing short of amazing that so far Mr Nixon's career had been entirely triumphant—even his defeats were victories. Mr Ehrlichman smiled broadly, "Ah, that's Vintage Nixon."

  And I suppose it is, which is why this enormous doorstop of a book, 1,200 pages of self-justification, is such a soulless uncontrite document. Vintage Nixon is Election Poster Nixon, the beaky face, the empty rhetoric, the fighting gesture, the neatly selected memories. "College football at Wintrier gave me a chance to get to know the coa
ch, Wallace 'Chief Newman. I think that I admired him more and learned more from him than from any man I have ever known aside from my father." This is a piece of "Chief" Newman's wisdom: "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser."

  No one ever accused Mr Nixon of being a good loser, but he seldom loses in this book. You will say: But he lost the Presidential campaign of 1960 to John Kennedy! Mr Nixon says: Not really. The votes were not counted correctly, "many Republican leaders were ... urging me to contest the results and demand recounts," the Chicago results were plainly cooked, and "There is no doubt that there was substantial vote fraud..." In a farrago of poisonous innuendo, Mr Nixon implies that he actually beat Kennedy.

  "This fellow has a silver tongue," said one of Mr Nixon's early political opponents. Mr Nixon makes no such claims, though he alludes more than once to "my rocking socking style" and he is constantly pushing other people's praise into his narrative. The Indian leader, Rajagopalachari, said to him, "Younger men must be found to conduct the fight. Younger men like you." ("Infinitely wise," Mr Nixon remarks of Rajaji.) "This is one of the young men I have been telling you about and I want you to get acquainted with him," said Eisenhower to Churchill, when introducing the fidgeting Vice-President in 1954. "You are the man to lead the country!" screams his maid, Fina, summoned ("after dinner") to hear his decision to run: "This was determined before you were born!" A few years later a girl in a crowd cries, "I love and respect you so much!" ("Even though we were leaving, I danced with her for a few minutes.") And a glowing testimonial from Harold Wilson—the scribble is reproduced on a full page: "You can't guarantee being born a lord. It is possible—you've shown it—to be born a gentleman." Put that in your pipe and puff on it!