As Julie put it, what came through was love of the people of the countries she visited for her, and, on her part, love for them.
Sometimes our family was called square and as far as we were concerned, that was just fine. In the environment of Washington, “square” often means rooted in principles that ignore chic, transitory fashions.
On our first Sunday in the White House we held the first White House worship service in the East Room. It was our idea to have these short inspirational services, each conducted by a distinguished preacher of a different faith and with choirs from different parts of the country. Each time we would invite between two and three hundred people—from congressional leaders to White House policemen and telephone operators. The worship services meant Pat and I could avoid the exploitation of religion that too often took place when we attended regular church services outside and were accompanied by television crews and pursued by large numbers of tourists and curiosity-seekers who had no interest whatever in the service. This bothered me personally, and I thought that it must be an irritating nuisance and distraction to the others who had come to worship.
There was a flurry of criticism about the worship services. Traditionalists said that they were too watered down to be meaningful; nonbelievers said religion had no place in the White House; and editorialists complained that we were breaking down the separation between church and state. But Pat and I consider the worship services to have been among the high points of our years in the White House. They gave many thousands of people an opportunity to join us. More important, they set a national example of reverence.
Our whole family has always loved theatre, movies, and music. Our favorite relaxation after dinner at Camp David or in Florida or California was to watch a movie. Sometimes we would experiment with films we had never heard of; sometimes we would choose current hits; and sometimes old family favorites.
Pat and I looked forward to the evenings of entertainment at the White House as much as any of our guests. We felt that performers invited to entertain after state dinners should reflect the whole spectrum of American tastes—and, incidentally, our own eclectic preferences. Among the hundreds of memorable evenings, I particularly remember Golda Meir rushing impulsively to embrace Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein when they performed after a state dinner in her honor. Beverly Sills, Roberta Peters, Merle Haggard, and the Carpenters covered the range from classical to country and rock. Pearl Bailey was her warmly humorous and inimitable self; and Frank Sinatra, in his first appearance at the White House, had tears in his eyes when he thanked me afterward. Tony Bennett, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Art Linkletter, and Bob Hope were among the others who came to perform.
In addition to the after-dinner entertainment, Pat initiated a series of special Evenings at the White House to which guests were invited to enjoy the artistry of a great performer, whether it was Nicol Williamson reading from Hamlet, Red Skelton cracking jokes, or Sammy Davis, Jr., singing and dancing. Sammy and his wife spent the night with us after his performance and—in fulfillment of a lifelong dream—he slept in the Lincoln Bedroom.
More than once, in performances that would have dismayed my Aunt Jane, I sat down at the piano for some rollicking sing-alongs of old favorites like “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “God Bless America.”
In addition to honoring the performing arts, Pat also took a special interest in handicrafts and the fine arts. She welcomed many craft groups to the White House and their work was often displayed in the East Wing corridor. Pat was also the first First Lady ever to arrange a one-man art exhibition at the White House, inviting Andrew Wyeth to show some of his paintings in the East Room.
Except for the POW dinner in 1973, which was a unique historical event, I think that the most memorable of all our White House social occasions was Duke Ellington’s seventieth birthday on April 29, 1969, when I presented him with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. We invited more than 200 guests, including Cab Calloway, Earl Hines, Billy Eckstine, Mahalia Jackson, Harold Arlen, and Richard Rodgers. In making the presentation, I said, “In the royalty of American music, no man swings more or stands higher than the Duke.”
I braved the piano accompaniment to “Happy Birthday” and when the formal program was over, and some of the greatest jazz musicians had performed some of his greatest songs, I said, “I think we all ought to hear from one more pianist.” I went over to Duke’s chair and led him to the piano.
The room was hushed as he sat quietly for a moment. Then he said he would improvise a melody. “I shall pick a name—gentle, graceful—something like Patricia,” he said.
And when he started to play it was lyrical, delicate, and beautiful—like Pat.
1972
My attitude and outlook as this climactic year began were reflected in a note I dictated on January 9, 1972—my fifty-ninth birthday.
Diary
The 59th year, now complete, has been perhaps the most successful from the standpoint of accomplishment to date. The 60th offers immense opportunities and, of course, equally great dangers. The main thing is to maintain a cool and objective attitude throughout and if possible to stay above the battle and not be buffeted by ups and downs in the polls and by the inevitable political attacks.
On the third anniversary of my inauguration as President, I held a dinner for the Cabinet and the White House senior staff. In my after-dinner remarks I talked about the year ahead: “This is January 20, 1972, and tonight the fourth quarter begins. The football analogy tells us that the fourth quarter really determines the game,” I began. “We are only here for about four quarters—maybe longer, but you can only assume the fourth quarter. But in those four quarters, let us be sure that nothing was left undone that could have been done to make this a more decent country, in terms of our relations between ourselves and in terms of all the infinite problems we have.”
PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS: 1972
On January 5, 1972, I sent a letter to the chairman of my New Hampshire campaign committee announcing my candidacy for re-election. Eleven Democrats and two other Republicans sought the presidential nomination in 1972. The other Republicans were antiwar California Congressman Paul McCloskey and right-wing Ohio Congressman John Ashbrook.
Some of the Democratic candidates—Edmund Muskie, George McGovern, Wilbur Mills, and Vance Hartke—were already campaigning in New Hampshire, each hoping to make a national impact by a decisive showing in this first primary contest on March 7. Others—including Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace, Henry Jackson, and John Lindsay—calculated that it was better not to risk an initial battering but to emerge as fresh faces in the second primary a week later in Florida.
Because the Republican National Committee would have to preserve an official neutrality until the convention and because after our 1970 experience I wanted to keep politics out of the White House, I decided to set up a separate campaign organization. It was called the Committee to Re-elect the President, a name we abbreviated with the initials CRP.
The front-runner on the Democratic side was Edmund Muskie. At the end of 1971 he was running even with me in the public opinion polls. Muskie’s liabilities were an explosive temper and a reputation in political circles for indecisiveness. His principal problem was the ambition of his former running mate, Hubert Humphrey, whose entry into the race would draw away from him the support and votes of many traditional rank-and-file Democrats.
Of the other Democratic candidates, George Wallace was the one we had to take most seriously. If he ran again as a third-party candidate, he would undoubtedly draw a large number of conservative votes from me.
George McGovern, the extreme liberal dark horse, attracted only mild interest because his chances of getting the nomination seemed so remote. If by some miracle he could be nominated, I had no doubt that he would be the easiest Democrat to beat. The hardest would be the one who resolutely avowed his noncandidacy: Teddy Kennedy.
Noncandidacy would have been the best strategy for K
ennedy in any event, but he probably had no choice in the aftermath of the party at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, in July 1969, when his car went off a bridge and a young woman in the car was drowned. Kennedy was given nationwide television time to explain his version of the events. His speech was finely crafted, but many felt that his story was full of gaps and contradictions. I could not help thinking that if anyone other than a Kennedy had been involved and had given such a patently unacceptable explanation, the media and the public would not have permitted him to survive in public life.
Personally, however, I felt deeply sorry for Ted Kennedy. When I saw him at a meeting in the Cabinet Room a few days later, I was shocked by how pale and shaken he looked. I spoke to him in the Oval Office for a few minutes afterward and tried to reassure him that he must resolve to overcome this tragedy and go on with his life.
In politics it is possible to feel genuine personal concern for an opponent and still be coldly objective about his position as a competitor. Even as I felt real sympathy for Teddy Kennedy, I recognized, as he must have done, the far-reaching political implications of this personal tragedy. In the short term, I knew that Chappaquiddick would undermine Kennedy’s role as a leader of the opposition to the administration’s policies. In the longer term, it would be one of his greatest liabilities if he decided to run for President in 1972.
It was clear that the full story of what had happened that night on Chappaquiddick had not come out, and I suspected that the press would not try very hard to uncover it. Therefore I told Ehrlichman to have someone investigate the case for us and get the real facts out. “Don’t let up on this for a minute,” I said. “Just put yourself in their place if something like this had happened to us.” In fact, our private investigator was unable to turn up anything besides rumors.
After a grand jury heard the case, the presiding judge, James Boyle, issued a report stating that Kennedy could not have been telling the truth in his testimony. Kennedy immediately issued a statement saying that Judge Boyle’s report was “not justified.” Public opinion polls showed that most people did not think that Kennedy was telling the truth about Chappaquiddick; but they also showed that Massachusetts voters did not think he should have to resign from the Senate because of it. The following year they gave him an overwhelming vote of confidence by returning him to the Senate with 63 percent of the vote. Even with Chappaquiddick to overcome, Teddy Kennedy would still have been the most formidable Democratic nominee in 1972.
I thought that Muskie had a fair chance of beating me and that Humphrey, backed by labor, could come very close. Any Democrat would have the advantage of the sheer size of the Democratic party, which in 1972 outregistered the Republican party by millions of voters. It also seemed possible that they would have the added assistance of George Wallace running against me at the head of a third party.
Finally, it seemed increasingly likely that all of the candidates would be able to campaign against a war that I was not going to be able to win and that I would not yet be able to end.
George McGovern was the most extreme of the antiwar candidates. His solution to an immensely complex problem was appealingly easy to his supporters. “If I were President,” he said, “it would take me twenty-four hours and the stroke of a pen to terminate all military operations in Southeast Asia.” He said he would withdraw all troops within ninety days, whether or not our POWs were released. He said that President Thieu should plan to flee to whatever country would take him. Even if the POWs were not released, McGovern would not resume fighting because, as he put it during the campaign, “begging is better than bombing.”
The difference between McGovern and the other Democrats on Vietnam was fundamental: for the others, the war was an issue; for McGovern, it was a cause.
Muskie beat McGovern in New Hampshire, 46 percent to 37 percent. Considering Muskie’s commanding lead at the beginning of the campaign, the commentators described the 9 percent margin as a serious setback for him. Virtually overnight this media attention transformed McGovern from a fringe candidate to a serious contender.
In the second primary, in Florida, George Wallace aroused the voters with his call to “send a message to Washington.” The message was: no busing. Wallace won the Florida primary with 41.5 percent of the votes. Hubert Humphrey was second. Senator Henry Jackson was third. Muskie, who had denounced Wallace as a racist, came in fourth with only 8.8 percent.
McGovern won the important Wisconsin primary on April 4 and also won in Massachusetts and Nebraska. To me his steady climb was as welcome to watch as it was almost unbelievable to behold. By the end of the spring, only Humphrey and Kennedy were left to stop him.
On our side, the primary results were no less gratifying because they were expected; despite the fact that I did no campaigning, I received overwhelming majorities in all the Republican primaries.
CHINA
At 7:30 on the evening of July 15, 1971, I spoke to the nation from a television studio in Burbank, California. I talked for only three and a half minutes, but my words produced one of the greatest diplomatic surprises of the century.
I began, “I have requested this television time tonight to announce a major development in our efforts to build a lasting peace in the world.” Then I read an announcement that was being made at that very moment in Peking:
Premier Chou En-lai and Dr. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, held talks in Peking from July 9 to 11, 1971. Knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China, Premier Chou En-lai, on behalf of the Government of the People’s Republic of China, has extended an invitation to President Nixon to visit China at an appropriate date before May 1972. President Nixon has accepted the invitation with pleasure.
The meeting between the leaders of China and the United States is to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries and also to exchange views on questions of concern to the two sides.
Behind this brief announcement lay more than two years of complex, subtle, and determined diplomatic signals and negotiations. Despite the almost miraculous secrecy we had been able to maintain, the China initiative was actually one of the most publicly prepared surprises in history.
The first time I raised the idea of the importance of relations between the United States and Communist China was in my article in Foreign Affairs in 1967. In my inaugural address I had referred indirectly to it when I said, “We seek an open world . . . a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation.” Less than two weeks later, on February 1, I wrote a memorandum to Kissinger urging that we give every encouragement to the attitude that the administration was exploring possibilities of rapprochement with the Chinese. “This, of course, should be done privately and should under no circumstances get into the public prints from this direction,” I added. During 1969 the Chinese ignored the few low-level signals of interest we sent them, and it was not until 1970 that we began a serious approach to opening a dialogue to see where, if anywhere, it might lead.
The first serious public step in the China initiative had been taken in February 1970 when I sent the first Foreign Policy Report to Congress. The section on China began:
The Chinese are a great and vital people who should not remain isolated from the international community. . . .
The principles underlying our relations with Communist China are similar to those governing our policies toward the U.S.S.R. United States policy is not likely soon to have much impact on China’s behavior, let alone its ideological outlook. But it is certainly in our interest, and in the interest of peace and stability in Asia and the world, that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking.
The leaders in Peking clearly understood the significance of the language in this report. Two days later, during a meeting in Warsaw with U.S. Ambassador Walter Stoessel, the Chinese ambassador dramatically suggested moving their hitherto sporadic and unproductive meetings to Peking. He a
lso hinted that they would welcome a high-ranking American official as head of the delegation.
In March 1970 the State Department announced a relaxation of most of the official restrictions against travel to Communist China; in April we announced a further easing of trade controls.
Plans for moving the Warsaw talks to Peking received a setback in May when the Chinese canceled a scheduled meeting in protest of the Cambodian operation. For a few weeks it seemed as if the China initiative had collapsed. But the underlying logic of the initiative was based on clear-cut assessments of mutually advantageous interests, and I was not surprised when, after a few months, the Chinese signaled that they were willing to resume our diplomatic minuet. In July, they released American Roman Catholic Bishop James Edward Walsh, who had been arrested in 1958 and held as a prisoner for twelve years.
Early in October I gave an interview to Time magazine. I said that: “If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don’t, I want my children to.”
On October 25 President Yahya Khan of Pakistan came to see me, and I used the occasion to establish the “Yahya channel.” We had discussed the idea in general terms when I saw him on my visit to Pakistan in July 1969. Now I told him that we had decided to try to normalize our relations with China, and I asked for his help as an intermediary.
“Of course we will do anything we can to help,” Yahya said, “but you must know how difficult this will be. Old enemies do not easily become new friends. It will be slow, and you must be prepared for setbacks.”
The next day President Ceauescu of Romania arrived on a state visit. I had also discussed the need for a new Chinese-American relationship with him in Bucharest in 1969. My toast at the dinner in his honor was the first occasion on which an American President had intentionally referred to Communist China by its official name, the People’s Republic of China; even my Foreign Policy Report had called it “Communist China.” This was a significant diplomatic signal.
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