William Gardner - Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House
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Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House: summary, description and annotation
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William Safire was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon from 1968 to 1973. During that time, as a Washington insider, Safire was able to observe the thirty-seventh president in his entirety: as noble and mean-spirited; as good and bad; as a man desirous of greatness. Rarely has there been a White House memoir more intimate or revealing in its exploration of the great events that took place before the fall of Watergate. In this anecdotal history, Nixon and his associates come alive, not as caricatures, but as men with high and low purpose: Henry Kissinger, William Rogers, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and Arthur Burns struggle not just for power, but for ideals. As William Safire says in his Prologue: In this memoir, which is neither a biography of [Nixon] nor an autobiography of me nor a narrative history of our times, there is an attempt to figure out what was good and bad about him, what he was trying to do and how well he succeeded, how he used and affected some of the people around him, and an effort not to lose sight of all that went right in examining what went wrong. The book is divided into ten sections, in which run three main themes: the President, the Partisan, and the Person. As a president, Safire discusses Nixon and the Vietnam War, foreign policy, economics, and race relations. As a partisan, he discusses Nixons attempt to form an alignment across party lines, successful in many respects before the president tolerated the excesses that eventually corrupted his administration. And as a person, Safire finds that Nixon was a mixture of Woodrow Wilson, Machiavelli, Theodore Roosevelt, and Shakespeares Cassius--an idealistic conniver evoking the strenuous life while he thinks too much. This paperback edition of a classic primary source for historians includes a new introduction by its author. Studded with direct quotations that put the reader in the room where history was being made, Before the Fall is a realistic, shades-of-gray study of the Nixon years.
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BEFORE THE FALL
BEFORE THE FALL
AN INSIDE VIEW
OF THE PRE-WATERGATE WHITE HOUSE
OF THE PRE-WATERGATE WHITE HOUSE
WILLIAM SAFIRE
WITH A 2005 PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR
Originally published in 1975 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Published 1977 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
New material this edition copyright 2005 by William Safire.
Copyright 1975 by William Safire.
Preface to the 1977 Edition copyright 1977 by William Safire.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2005041717
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Safire, William, 1929-
Before the fall : an inside view of the pre-Watergate White House/William Safire.
p. cm.
Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1975.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-4128-0466-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. United StatesPolitics and government1969-1974. 2. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913- I. Title.
E855.S232005
973.924092dc22 2005041717
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0466-0 (pbk)
The Way to San Jose by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, copyright 1968 by Blue Seas Music, Inc. & Jac Music Co., Inc. All rights reserved.
For Annabel
CONTENTS
LIST OF PLATES
There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself, while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant to serve the humblest as well as the most powerful, with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, and remembered it with pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great.
We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts
Woodrow Wilson
Inaugural Address
March 4, 1913
My life was changed in a moment of lucky hesitation.
It was the first day of spring in 1973. Despite what seemed to me to be some minor media flap during the campaign about a bizarre incident at the Watergate building, and despite the intense anti-Vietnam War passions swirling through the country, Richard Nixon had won reelection with a stunning 61 percent of the vote.
Nixon had refused to debate George McGovern, but Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, had told me late in the campaign I could do a written debate in the Washington Post with McGoverns campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz. After Nixons landslide, conservative writers were suddenly in demand; because I had just demonstrated an aptitude for partisan columnizing, both the New York Times and Washington Post approached me with offers of a job as columnistthe most coveted assignment in journalism. I consulted Stewart Alsop, who was then writing the best column in the business for Newsweek. The Graham family is wonderful to work for, Stew said, and the Post is on the rise, but face itthere is only one New York Times.
After choosing the Times, I informed Haldeman, whose instant reaction was that it would be a good idea to have a friendly voice on that influential op-editorial page. He directed my fellow speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, to draft a nice note from the president to Arthur O. Punch Sulzberger, congratulating him on his acquisition of a contrary view for that liberal page; such a gesture would show that Nixon bore no grudge for his ill treatment by the Times editorialists. The chief of staff later told me that Pat drafted the letter but Nixon refused to sign it, preferring to bear his grudge.
I did want to get a traditional farewell note to grace my wall, so I wrote a letter from Nixon to me praising my selfless, dedicated service over the years. A pal of mine in his outer office signed it with the presidential autopen and got the official White House framer to frame it. With that somewhat phony souvenir in hand, I packed up a few belongings and trudged out of my office in room 123 of the Old Executive Office building and crossed the street to the West Wing to say goodbye to a few of the old Nixon hands with whom I had worked since the early 60s.
A Secret Service agent I knew was outside the door to the Oval Office. He shook my hand in farewell and said, You want to say goodbye to the Old Man? Hes inside there with his lawyer.
Thats when I hesitated. If I asked to shake hands goodbye, a secretary would have knocked and poked her head in, and Nixonwho knew I intended to write a book about my dozen years through ups and downs with himwould surely wave me in and wish me well, even to work at what he liked to call that rag. But he wasnt much at small talk, and had made clear he wasnt all that happy at my choice of future newspaper employment. So I shook my head, no, I didnt want to bother him, and kept on going to my car, turning in my parking pass at the gate.
At about that moment of that March morning, I later learned, Nixon was meeting with his counsel, John Dean, later accused of being an architect of the cover-up, who was telling him about the break-in and obstruction of justice that had become, in Deans phrase, a cancer on the presidency. Had I gone in, Nixon would probably have told me to listen to the lawyers worrisome story. He might well have asked me, a former PR man, to make some suggestions about how to handle it, and perhaps to draft a statement in his style, which was my specialty. That fateful Nixon-Dean meeting, of course, was secretly taped, and whatever I would have said would have ultimately made me a grand jury witness, possibly a target of hot-eyed prosecution, and certainly a great embarrassment to the Times.
But I walked on past that dark confabulation and out into the sunshine of a spring day. That was some break for me, three decades ago.
In the year afterward, as the Nixon presidency was crumbling, I was getting the hang of column writing by day while writing Before the Fall at white heat at night. The title (conceived after the book was finished, which was soon after the Nixon presidency was also finished) was a play on the title of Arthur Millers After the Fall, a play centered on Marilyn Monroe, the phrase in turn evocative of John Miltons Paradise Lost dealing with the fall of the angels. I liked the satanic metaphor, though Nixons post-Watergate political demise, though accurately described by his successor as our long national nightmare, was not quite on the scale of the banishment of Lucifer from Heaven after rebelling against Gods establishment.
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