It was a gamble that Nixon was prepared to take because he felt that it was crucial for the United States. He had always taken risks—as a young officer in the navy, when he passed the time (and made a lot of money) playing poker, and, later, as a politician. He had not spent those long and often difficult years making his way to the presidency to be a caretaker. And the United States needed some good news. The war in Vietnam had cost the country much, in lives, in money, and in reputation. It had led to deep divisions at home and a loss of influence and prestige abroad. The failure of the United States to finish, much less win, the war had contributed to a decline in American power. But it had only contributed; the extraordinary military and economic dominance that the United States had possessed from the end of the Second World War to the start of the 1960s could not last forever.
That dominance had been, in part, the product of the times. In 1945, other world powers lay defeated or, like Britain, so weakened by the huge costs of victory that they could no longer play a world role. The Soviet Union had great military strength and, by 1949, its own atomic bomb, but it had to make good the hideous costs of Hitler’s invasion and of the war. By the end of the 1960s, though, western Europe and Japan had revived. The Soviet Union, although it would never be an economic power to match the United States, was investing heavily in its military. Newly independent countries such as India were playing their parts in the world. China’s potential remained a question mark; the Communists had brought unity, but for much of the time since 1949 Mao’s policies had sent the country down wasteful and destructive paths. Nevertheless, the Chinese revolution had become a model and an inspiration in many Third World countries.
Throughout the 1960s, Nixon worked on a political career that most people thought was over after his defeat by John F. Kennedy in the presidential race of 1960 and his even more humiliating failure to win the governorship of California in 1962. And he continued to develop his ideas on his favorite area of public policy, international relations. In the summer of 1967, he was invited to California to give the Lakeside Speech at Bohemian Grove, an institution that could only exist in North America, where rich and powerful men enjoy the arts and the simple, contemplative life for a couple of weeks in carefully rustic luxury. Nixon later said that he got more pleasure out of that speech—“the first milestone on my road to the presidency”—than any other in his career.7 In what would become known as the Nixon Doctrine, he argued that the United States could no longer afford to fight other nations’ wars. Although the United States would offer support, its allies must be prepared to stand on their own feet. On the other hand, there were encouraging signs on the world scene. The Soviet leaders were still striving for Communist domination of the world, but they did not want war with the United States. Moreover, the Communist monolith had broken apart and China and the Soviet Union were at loggerheads. Nixon came to this realization, he told Chou when they finally met, in those years in the 1960s when he was out of office and traveling about the world.8
Nixon, it has often been said, especially by his supporters, was the only American president of the late twentieth century who could have taken advantage of the split in the Communist world and made the breakthrough in China-U.S. relations. The man and the times were right for each other. As Nixon himself once told an interviewer, the mark of a leader “is whether he can give history a nudge.”9 For the United States to refuse to deal with a major Asian power and one, moreover, that was the world’s most populous country had never made much sense. As Nixon himself had written in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, “Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”10 In a revealing comparison, he said that dealing with China was like dealing with angry blacks in America’s ghettos: “In each case a potentially destructive force has to be curbed; in each case an outlaw element has to be brought within the law; in each case dialogues have to be opened.” In the short term, China would simply have to be contained; in the longer term, though, it ought to be brought back into the community of nations.11 His article did not show the slightest sympathy for Chinese Communism; nor did it hold out much hope for an immediate change in China’s relations with the world. By the time he was president, however, Nixon was starting to become more optimistic. In the election campaign, he repeated his warnings about the dangers of leaving China outside the international system and referred obliquely to them in his inaugural address in January 1969: “We seek an open world—open to ideas, open to the exchange of goods and people—a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation.”12
By the early 1970s, both the United States and China realized that the world had changed and that they needed new friends. As Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and close collaborator, wrote years later, “For both sides necessity dictated that a rapprochement occur, and the attempt had to be made no matter who governed in either country.”13 And while public opinion did not matter in China, it did in the United States, and Americans, by and large, no longer felt the antipathy and fear toward Chinese Communism that had been such a feature of American politics in the 1950s.
Moreover, Nixon had banked the political capital he needed at home. Dealing with Communists was always tricky during the Cold War. American public opinion had been slow to recognize the threat from the Soviet Union immediately after the Second World War, but once convinced that the threat was real, it had become seized with the idea that Communists were very powerful and that they were everywhere, in Russia, in the center of Europe, in Asia, and throughout American society. Nixon himself had ridden to power by calling to those fears, no matter how exaggerated they sometimes were. His anti-Communist credentials were beyond challenge. From the time he had first entered politics in California, running against the liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis in 1946, he had charged that his opponents were soft on Communism or worse. Nixon’s campaigning, with its insinuation and accusation and its reliance on unproven statistics and stories, won him the name “Tricky Dick,” but it worked. Americans listened to his repeated and forceful warnings about the threat that Communism posed to the United States and to American society. They watched as he stood up to Communists around the world, whether swapping boasts with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow or defying the mobs who spat at him and tried to turn his car over in Venezuela.
Nixon’s other great advantage was that he had the determination, the intelligence, and the knowledge to sense the currents in history and to take advantage of them. And he loved foreign policy. Indeed, he much preferred it to dealing with importunate congressmen and the minutiae of schools or highway building. “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President,” he told the journalist Theodore White in an interview during the presidential campaign. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy.”14 While presidents had always given State of the Union addresses to Congress, Nixon also started making annual reports on the world situation. And he made it quite clear from the moment he took office that he was going to use an enhanced National Security Council to run major foreign policy issues out of the White House. His first appointment, the morning after his inauguration in January 1969, was with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. The first formal meeting he called was of his new NSC. Six weeks later, he was off on his first foreign trip, to see European leaders, among them a man he revered, Charles de Gaulle.
In the long and rambling conversations he had with his few intimates, Nixon returned constantly to the subject of the great leader, the man who boldly went on ahead, dragging his nation with him and changing the world. De Gaulle, of course. Winston Churchill—a favorite, it seems, with many American presidents, including George W. Bush. And General George Patton. The movie, starring George C. Scott,
was one of Nixon’s favorites, and he kept a biography of Patton beside his bed.15 Such great leaders, in Nixon’s view, were usually lonely and often misunderstood, but they nevertheless worked indefatigably to advance the interests of their nations. “There were never tired decisions,” he told Kissinger in one of their phone conversations, “only tired commanders.”16
The world, with its great issues, was, for Nixon, where the leader could show what he was made of. He had prepared himself thoroughly for this moment. As vice president, he had traveled more than any of his predecesors; in the 1960s, before his run for president, when he was meant to be a private citizen, he had toured the world incessantly, meeting with local leaders and browbeating American diplomats as though he were still in office. A low-ranking foreign service officer who had to entertain him in Hong Kong remembered his “tremendous intellectual curiosity.” Nixon asked question after question, “picking my brain for everything and anything I could tell him about China.”17 Marshall Green, later assistant secretary of state with responsibility for East Asia during the Nixon administration, met Nixon in Indonesia in 1967 and had long conversations with him, which Nixon tape-recorded for later reference. “I remembered him as the best informed on foreign affairs of all the luminaries who visited Jakarta during my four years there,” Green said.18 The result of all the travel and the hours of questioning and conversation was that Nixon was the best-prepared president on foreign policy until Clinton. He also knew many foreign heads of state and foreign ministers personally.
Nixon has often been described as a realist, coldly calculating the best way to advance American interests in a dangerous and anarchic world. And, indeed, he could often sound like the great nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston, whose formulation remains the credo of realists: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.” In 1970, in his report to Congress, Nixon explained that the first goal of his administration’s foreign policy was to support American interests. “The more that policy is based on a realistic assessment of our and others’ interests, the more effective our role in the world can be. We are not involved in the world because we have commitments; we have commitments because we are involved. Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”19 Great powers always looked out for their own national interests, he told his White House staff just after the announcement that he was to visit China, “or else they’re played for suckers by those powers that do.”20 Interests could coincide, and it was the wise statesman who could see this and be ready to negotiate.
Nixon chose the portraits of the three presidents he admired most for the cabinet office in the White House. Dwight Eisenhower was a revered leader in war and peace, loved by Americans as Nixon never would be. Theodore Roosevelt was a fighter, the man who willed himself to be strong and brave. Nixon often quoted admiringly his image of the bloodstained and weary man in the arena, “who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”21 (Nixon used that passage in his resignation speech.) The one he identified most with, though, was the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was not only brilliant intellectually but “a man of thought who could act.”22 Wilson, as Nixon saw it, had also worked for peace in the world. “For the first time, because the people of the world want peace, and the leaders of the world are afraid of war, the times are on the side of peace.” Although the sentence comes from Nixon’s inaugural address, it could just as easily have been uttered by Wilson himself. For his desk in the White House, Nixon chose the Wilson desk. Like others of Nixon’s gestures, it went slightly awry. The desk, it later turned out, had belonged to another Wilson altogether, Henry, a shoemaker who had risen to be Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president.23
Nixon, unlike many of his more conservative Republican supporters, was not an isolationist. He maintained that the United States should have joined the League of Nations in the interwar years and that it had done the right thing in joining the United Nations after the Second World War. In the 1940s, he had supported the Marshall Plan to aid western Europe; he was in favor of committing American troops to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and in the 1950s he was prepared to see the United States join alliances around the world in order to contain Communism.24 Indeed, he worried that the experience of Vietnam and the preoccupation of the country’s elites with domestic problems would turn the United States inward.25 He also believed the United States was and ought to be a force for good in the world. As he told Kissinger, “Nations must have great ideas or they cease to be great.”26 His great idea was to lead the United States to build permanent peace in the world. In his inaugural address, which he largely wrote himself (as he did all his major speeches), he called on his fellow Americans and on the world: “Let us take as our goal: Where peace is unknown, make it welcome; where peace is fragile, make it strong; where peace is temporary, make it permanent.”27
Then and since, his critics have dismissed such rhetoric as Nixon’s cynical attempt to conceal his own moral vacuum. That is wrong. Nixon did many immoral things in his life, but he longed to be good. In the notes that he wrote endlessly to himself on his favorite yellow legal pads, he exhorted himself to provide moral leadership, to be the national conscience of his country.28 If he often behaved like his father, who was a loudmouthed and opinionated bully, he longed to be more like his saintly mother. A devout Quaker, she gave all her children a profoundly religious upbringing. For decades, Nixon carried a note in his wallet that she had given him in 1953 when he became vice president. It said, “I know that you will keep your relationship with your Maker as it should be, for after all, that as you must know is the most important thing in this life.”29
Even historians who disapprove of psychohistory find themselves tempted irresistibly when it comes to Richard Nixon. It is partly the fact that he inspired such strong feelings. It is partly the contradictions. He was a statesman of distinction who, as his tapes revealed, could talk with insight and understanding about the role of the United States in the world and then flail the next moment at his enemies, real or imagined, in crude, racist, and scatological terms. (Thanks to those tapes, whose existence Nixon seemed to have forgotten about from day to day, we know a great deal about a deeply private and secretive man.) He was a man who wanted to be great, who told himself at the start of 1970, “Be worthy of 1st man in nation and in world,” yet who was capable of such petty meanness and did so much to damage American public life.30 He was vicious and relentless in attacking others; in one of his first campaigns, he successfully painted Helen Gahagan Douglas as a Communist sympathizer, “pink right down to her underwear.”31 Yet later he told a British journalist, “I’m sorry about that episode. I was a very young man.” When the regret was reported, though, he denied it furiously.32
He came from small-town America and liked to see himself as a Horatio Alger figure, triumphing against all odds. He talked about the simple values of his youth: hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety, decency. Yet his own finances and his acquisition of properties in Florida and California raised many eyebrows, especially when he spent government money on refurbishing them. He spoke, he always said, to ordinary American men and women, yet he could also say, “You’ve got to be a little evil to understand those people out there. You have to have known the dark side of life to understand those people.” He knew Middle Americans did not care about what he loved most—foreign policy. “They don’t know anything about what you’re doing on SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] and all these other things,” he said more in amusement than anger. “They just want things to simmer down and be quiet, and to them we have not accomplished very much.”33
He loathed the hippies of the 1960s, with their drugs, their rejection of work, and their sexual freedom. On the other hand, he was fas
cinated by the sexual peccadilloes of others. He ordered a round-the-clock watch on Senator Edward Kennedy in the hopes of catching him with, as Nixon put it, a “babe.”34 He made clumsy jokes about Kissinger’s reputedly extravagant sex life. He envied and even admired John F. Kennedy but also railed against the East Coast establishment and the Georgetown intellectuals of Washington. His tastes remained resolutely middlebrow. He loved American musicals and wept unabashedly at Carousel. (He was particularly moved by the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”)35 One of his favorite movies was Around the World in Eighty Days. “Watch—watch this!” he would urge the audience in the White House screening room. “Here comes the elephant!”36
According to an aide who knew him well, he deliberately played down his own intellectual side to portray himself as a good old boy.37 He told bad locker-room jokes. He talked incessantly about sports. That part was not an act; he loved sports, especially football. When he was at college, he turned out for the team, year after year, although he rarely got to play. At practices a skinny Nixon would face much bigger players, but the coach would not let up on him or them. “So I’d have to knock the little guy for a loop,” remembered another player who had been responsible for blocking. “Oh, my gosh did he take it.”38
Nixon always prided himself on his iron determination and his capacity for work. Like the ninety-nine-pound weakling in the Atlas advertisement, he had shown those who’d once laughed at or underestimated him. “If you are reasonably intelligent,” he told an old friend from his law school days, “and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”39 Kissinger, who came to know him well, said that Nixon always believed, though, that he was going to lose in the end. Once, as Nixon waited for a flight in Saigon, he told an American diplomat that it was sure to be late, adding, “If anything bad can happen to me, it will.”40 Tom Wicker, who wrote one of the more sympathetic biographies, watched him in the 1960 campaign: “painfully conscious of slights and failures, a man who has imposed upon himself a self-control so rigid as to be all but visible.”41
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