Richard Reeves - President Nixon: Alone in the White House

ALSO BY RICHARD REEVES

President Kennedy: Profile of Power

Running in Place: How Bill Clinton Disappointed America

The Reagan Detour

What the People Know: Freedom and the Press

Passage to Pehsawar: Pakistan Between the Hindu Kush and the Arabian Sea

American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America

Jet Lag: The Running Commentary of a Bicoastal Reporter

Convention

Old Faces of 1976

A Ford, Not a Lincoln

This book is for my father, the HONORABLE FURMAN W. REEVES

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Copyright 2001 by Reeves-ONeill, Inc.

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First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2007

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Reeves, Richard.

President Nixon : alone in the White House/Richard Reeves

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-94 2. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. 3. United StatesPolitics and government1969-1974. I. Title.

E856.R44 2001

973.924092dc21 2001034417 [B]

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-80231-2

ISBN-10: 0-684-80231-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-2719-3 (Pbk)
eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-2565-6

ISBN-10: 0-7432-2719-0 (Pbk)

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Contents

Introduction

A mind forever voyaging through the strange seas of thought, alone.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, Book 3

ON MAY 17, 2000, more than two hundred men and women got together at the Capital Hilton hotel in Washington for a dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of an organization they called the February Group, named that because it had been organized in February 1975. It was a prosperous crowd, not young, and many of those present looked vaguely familiar, as if you had seen them on television once. And you had. The group was an informal alumni organization of people who had served the thirty-seventh President, Richard M. Nixon. Christopher Cox, a grandson of the late President, led the group in pledging allegiance to the American flag. Many of the men there wore flag lapel pins, as their leader had done in the White House from 1969 to 1974. Christophers mother, Tricia Nixon Cox, a middle-aged woman now, but forever young for millions of Americans who remembered her wedding in that house on June 12, 1971, introduced the main speaker, former senator Robert Dole, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee during part of the Nixon administration.

The second half of the century that just ended could be called The Era of Nixon, Dole said. The most extraordinary thing about his presidency was not the way it ended, but that it happened.

President Nixon would have agreed with that. His rise to the presidency was an amazing triumph of will and intelligence. He was not born for the job. In fact, he sometimes described himself, quite accurately, as an introvert in an extroverts business. Most politicians, good and bad, are men who cant stand to be alone. Nixon did not like to be with people. One of the many odd little notes I came across in years of going through his papers was a memo, dated April 13, 1970, to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, about a visit from his classmates at Whittier College, a small Quaker school in Orange County, California: You might have them on an occasion where we have an Evening at the White House or a church service. This would be better than a reception for them alone where I would have to get into too much conversation.

He was always a man alone. A strange man of uncomfortable shyness, who functioned best alone with his thoughts and the yellow legal pads he favored, or in set pieces where he literally memorized every word he had to say. , he was a formidable presence, not the cardboard man many remember. The people at the Hilton talked a great deal among themselves about what made the boss tick, just as they had every day in the famous years.

, who was head of Nixons Domestic Council for a time and became a vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank, told me of a flight on Air Force One, seated in the back next to Mrs. Robert Finch, whose husband had worked with Nixon for almost twenty years and was considered the Presidents closest friend in politics, even called the son Nixon never had. You know him so well, Price began. Carol Finch seemed surprised, answering, We dont know him at all. Haldeman, who spent hours each day alone with the President, always claimed that Nixon did not know how many children he had, or their names.

, who was President Dwight D. Eisenhowers personal secretary, kept a diary. One entry, made on August 30, 1960, told of Eisenhower visiting Vice President Nixon, who was in the hospital for treatment of a knee infection. She wrote: He mentioned again, as he has several times, that the VP has very few friends. Of course the difference to me is obviousthe President is a man of integrity, and sincere in his every action, be it possibly wrong. He radiates this, everyone knows it, everybody trusts and loves him. But the Vice President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.

He had learned how to act. Nixon had memorized his lines, as he had

And, alone, as he thought or as he watched others, he studied their words and actions and he calculated their motives. Like most of us, he could judge them only by what he knew of himself. More often than not, he thought other people were like him. But they were not. The power and opportunity of the presidency sometimes brought out the best in him, but it brought out more of the worst because he trusted almost no one. He assumed the worst in people, and he brought out the worst in them. He was too suspicious, his judgments were too harsh, too negative. He clung to the word and the idea of being tough. He thought that was what had brought him to the edge of greatness. But that was what betrayed him. He could not open himself to other men and he could not open himself to greatness.

I set out in this book, as I had before with President John F. Kennedy, a man whose grace and image tormented President Nixon every day, to reconstruct the Nixon presidency as it looked from the center. I was interested in what he knew and when he knew it and what he actually didsometimes day by day, sometimes hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. As before, I hoped to get close to knowing what it was like to be president, something only forty-two men have known. But Richard Nixon at the center did not look outward in the way of Kennedy and most other politicians. Nixon still looked inward, which is why this book begins with his dialogues with himself, the hopes and fears and calculations scrawled on his yellow pads in his hours alone in his hideaway offices and late at night in his study, the room where Abraham Lincoln once slept.