by Curt Smith
Nixon prized nuance, respected the writing craft, and authored ten books—most best sellers. He told Ray Price, “I am an introvert in an extrovert’s profession,” yet he became the tribune of people who never read the New York Times. His goal was a new political, even cultural, majority. He almost made it. Instead, photos in his Manhattan office catapulted a visitor back in time—Nixon with Brezhnev or Golda Meir; Nixon with Chou En-Lai (now more often referred to as Zhou Enlai); Nixon speaking, waving, deplaning; Nixon in a motorcade, flinging high the V.
When I left college, the shadow on those walls was a president believing that “politics is poetry, not prose.” When I saw him last, in 1991, he was frail and hunched, quizzing me about the Bush administration and suggesting that I run for Congress. He was wary of raising taxes, supportive of Bush in the then Persian Gulf War, and curious about the president in a way residual and personal. “I’ve known George since Prescott Bush was in the Senate,” he told me, chuckling. “Both great competitors. Prescott’d play golf with President Eisenhower, who loved the game, and was famous—infamous— for never letting Ike win even once.”
Nixon had lost Texas by 46,233 votes in 1960 and 138,960 in 1968. By late 1969 his popularity had bloomed in Bush’s adopted state. He vowed peace with honor in Southeast Asia, nominated a southern justice for the Supreme Court, unleashed Vice President Spiro Agnew to bash “radiclibs” (radical liberals), and gave the unbeaten University of Texas his own national football title plaque when it edged Arkansas, 15–14, in December 1969. Nixon already regarded Bush almost as a protégé. Bush reciprocated the affection, worried only that RN resented his Ivy lineage—“this inferiority thing—such a waste.”
About this time Nixon convinced Bush to vacate his House seat to again oppose Ralph Yarborough for the Senate. “This guy’s a nut, really extreme,” said Poppy, confidently, after swamping Robert Morris in the 1970 GOP primary, 87.6 to 12.4 percent. “We can knock his block off in the middle.” He might have, except that Yarborough lost the Democratic primary to ex-congressman Lloyd Bentsen, who destroyed Bush’s campaign strategy: keep the Dems on the liberal fringe. Bentsen appealed to each part of his party, ignored Nixon stumping for Bush, and belied Agnew’s attempt to tar him with the Left: “Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions, and tigers alike,” he said. “I’d swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Viet Nam.”
Bush had relished clubbing Yarborough from the right. Bentsen’s upset threw Poppy off his game. It became an ugly race, old stereotypes again au courant: Daddy’s little rich boy, Eastern dilettante, Ivy Leaguer. Years later Bentsen called Bush “the only Texan I know who eats lobster with his chili. . . . He and Barbara had a little down-home quiche cook off.” (The 1988 election was Poppy’s revenge eaten cold.) Bush lost to Bentsen, 53.4 to 46.6 percent—muddying and, some said, crippling his political future. “If not dead,” said a friend, “he needed extreme CPR.”
Bush had a dwindling base and growing reputation as a loser. He did, however, have two friends. One, inadvertently, was now-ex-governor Connally, a Democrat, whom Bush blamed for rallying Bentsen’s base. A month after Poppy’s loss, Nixon, wowed by Connally’s command of a then-presidential task force, was set to name him treasury secretary. “You can’t give me a job before you take care of him [Bush],” Connally warned. Bush’s second friend agreed. Nixon had asked Bush to risk a safe House seat, vowing a high administration post—“a soft landing”—if he lost. Mr. Smooth, Bush’s self-styled sobriquet, was also a Nixon loyalist. Each was a pragmatist: fiscally sane, hawkish on Vietnam, centrist on civil rights, tough on law and order. The difference was their background; among many things, Nixon had likely never eaten quiche.
“As a personal favorite of Nixon’s,” Theodore White wrote, Bush was considered for a White House post or Republican National Committee (RNC) chair. Instead, Bush pitched himself as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, then Nixon. “He explained that the reason for his interest in the U.N. was . . . that for too long the President had not been represented there by anyone who was a strong [Nixon] advocate,” Haldeman’s notes recall. “There was a dearth of Nixon advocacy in New York City. . . . [Bush] could fill that need in New York social circles.” Bush got the post, smiling when in 1972 RN became the first GOP nominee since Theodore Roosevelt to almost carry the city. By any reckoning, without Nixon’s late 1970 help, Bush could not have leapt from Texas to DC—therefore, could not have erased his onus as a two-time loser— thus, almost surely would never have become president.
Bush’s presidency, even vice presidency, accented foreign policy. It really began at the UN eighteen years before his presidential oath. On October 25, 1971, the People’s Republic of China, the Communist government of 750 million people Nixon was to visit in February 1972, was admitted to the UN, and America’s longtime ally, the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government of 14 million people on the island of Taiwan, was ejected. Tanzanians danced in the aisles. “The problem is not Taiwan,” Nixon told National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. “The problem is the U.N.” He never blamed Bush. That December NBC telecast A Day in the Life of the President. Nixon asked that a “show call” to Bush about Pakistan-Indian refugees be included. Next morning at the UN, Bush slashed $87 million of nonmilitary aid to India, calling it the “clear aggressor.” Nixon was confident his new ambassador could finesse politics, not only policy.
Before the 1972 Watergate Office Building burglary and cover-up by the Nixon administration and campaign wrecked his grand design, the president had planned a government reorganization, telling Haldeman to “eliminate the politicians [from the cabinet], except George Bush. He’d do anything for the cause.” To Nixon, government’s cause should be the executive branch returning to the middle class constitutional power “that over the years elites have taken away,” among them, the media, Congress, the judiciary, interest groups, bureaucracy, and think tanks. Each was arrogant, radical, and hostile to Mid-America.
Bush’s new cause was to chair the RNC as the president’s man, touting this New American Revolution. It began historically November 7, 1972. On NBC Nightly News, anchorman John Chancellor said, not liking it, “This is the most spectacular landslide election in the history of United States politics.” Only 12 percent of blacks backed RN vs. McGovern—the only group in America to almost universally spurn him. By contrast, Nixon won more than one in three Democrats, nearly four in ten Jews, and a majority of the Catholic vote— the first Republican president to do so. He took half of the youth vote in the first election in which eighteen-year-olds could cast a ballot— and a vast majority of whites in every southern state. Nixon won 60.7 percent of the vote, 47,149,841 votes to 29,172,767—America’s greatest-ever margin—and 49 of 50 states, losing only Massachusetts.
In a song of the season, Bush expected to hear Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken” in late 1972 and early 1973 at the RNC. Instead, Barry Maguire’s “Eve of Destruction” soon seemed more applicable. “I knew people at the campaign were arrogant,” said Washington Post publisher Ben Bradlee of Watergate. “It never occurred to me that they were stupid.” As chairman, Bush, admiring Nixon’s foreign policy, grateful for past help, and uncritical of his word, believed the president’s profession of innocence. “I just never thought,” he said, much later, “that the president would lie.”
Officials were charged, plea-bargained, and pled innocent or guilty. Replaced by Gerald Ford, Agnew resigned as vice president, conceding graft as Maryland governor in 1967–68. Nixon’s Gallup approval fell from 68 percent in February 1973 to 23 percent by fall. The Republicans lost a special congressional election in a bedrock Michigan district. Daily, Bush phoned, cajoling restless GOPers for time: things will turn. The president, he said, had been ill served by aides. Enemies, wanting a last pound of flesh, were all around. Ironically, given the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, completing a second term as governor of Califor
nia in 1974, was perhaps the sole Republican to match Bush’s public loyalty. “Someday,” he said, “I think people will look back at Watergate and say, ‘Now, what was that all about?’”
That Monday, August 5, the White House released a June 23, 1972, tape of Nixon’s voice telling the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to halt a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) probe of the break-in that would politically hurt reelection—an obstruction of justice. After being briefed, Bush attended a next-day cabinet meeting during which Nixon said he had committed no impeachable offense and would not resign, then proceeded to discuss every issue but the elephant in the room. “The atmosphere was entirely unreal,” Bush recalled. After a time Nixon’s new chief of staff, Gen. Alexander Haig, heard stirring from a person not sitting at the cabinet table.
“It was George Bush, who as a guest of the President occupied one of the two straight chairs along the wall,” Haig wrote in his 1994 book, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World: A Memoir. “He seemed to be asking for the floor. When Nixon failed to recognize him, he spoke anyway. Watergate was the vital question, he said. It was sapping public confidence. Until it was settled, the economy and the country as a whole would suffer. Nixon should resign.”
Bush thought Nixon looked “beleaguered, worn down by stress, detached from reality.” The cabinet looked shocked, Haig said, that an RNC chairman would ask a Republican president—his once mentor, having rescued Bush from 1970 eclipse—to resign. After Nixon had left, Bush approached Haig, asking, “What are we going to do?”
“We get him up to the mountaintop,” Haig said of resigning. “Then he comes down again, then we get him up again.”
That night Bush recalled his father, who had died two years earlier of lung cancer at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York. “I’m really glad he’s not alive,” Bush fils said. “It would have killed him to see this happen. He thought we were the party of virtue and all bosses were Democrats.” Nixon alone, the party reeling, his loyalties irreconcilable, Bush penned a note. He delivered it Wednesday morn.
“Dear Mr. President,” Bush’s letter began.
It is my considered judgment that you should now resign. I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways. My own view is that I would now ill serve a President, whose massive accomplishments I will always respect and whose family I love, if I did not now give you my judgment. Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now firmly feel resignation is best for this country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country. This letter is made much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always have for you. If you do leave office history will properly record your achievements with a lasting respect.
Bush was wrong, as Nixon might have told him. “History,” he advised Henry Kissinger, “depends on who writes it.” One survey after another shows historians leaning left. Loathing Nixon in life, they would hardly rehabilitate him in death. Thursday night the thirty-seventh president resigned his office in his thirty-seventh Oval Office address. Next day Nixon bid his staff, including Bush, a tender, defiant, bitter, bittersweet, moving, haunting, and unforgettable farewell, his wife and family standing behind him in the East Room. He recalled his father; said, “My mother was a saint”; thought “the greatness comes . . . when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes”; and sought lightness amid the dark—“only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” It traumatized. It mesmerized. Tens of millions sobbed. The rest were glad to see him go.
To Bush, writing in his diary, entries he kept as president and before, “there was an aura of sadness, like somebody died. One couldn’t help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame.” Bush felt betrayed. Nixon had put him at the point as RNC chair, then lied to his protégé, which meant that Bush inadvertently lied to the public— intolerable to the Bush code. Nixon’s family was different: almost family to George and Barbara Bush.
The gulf between the Bushes on one hand and intellectuals, arts, and journalists on the other was especially wide toward the woman whose Gallup Poll approval-disapproval ratio hit a nonpareil 9 to 1 for American First Ladies in 1969 (54 percent approve, 6 disapprove, balance no opinion). Bush later said, “She became a mirror of America’s heart, and love.” Mrs. Bush recalled, “She was a sensational, gracious, and thoughtful First Lady.” Asked what word would engrave his heart if it were opened after he died, Nixon said, simply, “Pat.”
In March 1991, on the eve of Pat Nixon’s seventy-ninth birthday, I took to the Nixons’ New Jersey home a giant card arrayed with photos of her life and signatures of nearly two hundred Bush and White House career staffers who once had worked for her.
Unpacking it, I pled for patience: “I’m the most unmechanical person you’ll ever meet.” Playfully, she replied, “No, you’re not. Dick is.” I had never met Mrs. Nixon. For two hours we spoke of family, work, and travel. It was like talking to your mother.
The great CBS journalist Mike Wallace, who died in 2012 at ninety-three, interviewed hundreds of people in his life: Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK, Malcolm X, LBJ. In 2003 he named the one person he had hoped but failed to add. Pat Nixon “was a genuine, lovely, fine woman,” the 60 Minutes television host said. “Warm, smart as the dickens, a wonderful mother.” In her case political correctness spurns self-evident evidence.
In an age of angst and change, Mrs. Nixon showed how a woman could fuse family and a career—her country. Too often feminism demands the freedom to choose a life—until it invokes motherhood and/or tradition. Sadly, such hypocrisy has found a home at the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, the birthplace of women’s rights. Like Nixon’s presidency, its hall of fame opened in 1969, yearly inducting honorees—247 so far.
The hall hails Democrat Bella Abzug, but not Republican Jeane Kirkpatrick; Nancy Pelosi, not Condoleezza Rice; Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Shirley Chisholm, Geraldine Ferraro, Barbara Jordan, Barbara Mikulski, Janet Reno, Patricia Schroeder, and Donna Shalala vs. Betty Ford, Oveta Culp Hobby, Elizabeth Dole, and Margaret Chase Smith. Other GOPers need not apply, despite Mrs. Bush’s enormous popularity shown herein and Mrs. Nixon making the Gallup Poll top-ten most admired women list an amazing sixteen times from 1959 to 1979.
At first the hall falsely said Mrs. Nixon had not been nominated— except that she and Mrs. Bush have. Its next excuse was that they hadn’t passed a screening committee. How could they, given its uberliberal tilt? Mrs. Clinton fancied a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” In Pat Nixon, outcome-based bias snubs a woman who as a child nursed two dying parents, was orphaned, kept house for two brothers, then had five jobs in college. In 1968 journalist and future hall inductee Gloria Steinem asked what she had wanted to be growing up. Pat replied, “I never had time to think about things like that—who I wanted to be, or who I admired. I’m not like all you . . . all those people who had it easy. I had to work.”
The cum laude Southern California graduate got her master’s degree, earned an airplane pilot’s license, and became a teacher, an economist, and 1953–61 U.S. Second Lady, ditching protocol to visit schools, orphans’ homes, even a leper colony in Panama. In 1958 a communist mob in Caracas nearly killed the Nixons by attacking their car. Said a Los Angeles Times reporter: “Pat was stronger than any man.” As 1969–74 First Lady, she became the first to visit the Soviet Union and China; travel alone to a foreign country, Peru, to bring earthquake relief; and receive its highest honor, Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun. At the same time, children mobbed her on four continents. “I have known the wives of six presidents,” said Leonid Brezhnev’s wife, “and Mrs. Nixon is the nicest.”
Pat was the fi
rst First Lady to urge a woman Supreme Court justice, address a televised GOP Convention, attend a cabinet meeting, and back equal pay for equal work. In Yugoslavia Mrs. Nixon said its parliament and our Congress had too few women; in Liberia she became the first president’s wife to officially represent America abroad; in Vietnam she rode an open helicopter into a combat zone to meet wounded servicemen in the line of fire. Snubbing her, how could any hall of fame be so out of touch, out to lunch? Mrs. Nixon began the “Right to Read” and “Parks to People” programs, lit the White House at night, and created tours for the blind and handicapped. “She did wonderful work in improving the White House history,” said longtime curator Clement Conger of her restoring furniture, paintings, and other artifacts, leaving no time or wish for self-promotion. She answered by hand every letter addressed to her. Above all, as Bush observed, she raised two self-reliant, unspoiled daughters—difficult for a celebrity, especially in the mutually assured destruction culture of the early 1970s.
Amid Watergate, Pat’s bravery stunned famed reporter Helen Thomas, who also should be in the hall. “God! Look at her!” she marveled at a White House reception. “What a woman! How does she do it?” Nixon thought he knew. “Incredible inner strength,” he said. “My God, if she’d been the wife of a liberal, the press would have canonized her.”
“I know the truth,” Pat once said, almost biblically, “and the truth sustains me.” In 1969 Duke Ellington marked his seventieth birthday by improvising a melody in the East Room. “I shall pick a name,” he said, “gentle, graceful, something like Patricia.” Pat Nixon was kept from the truth during Watergate. Today’s truth is that a women’s hall of fame without Pat Nixon—or Barbara Bush, as this work suggests—is unworthy of the name.