The Arrogance of Power Page 2

  New research strengthens the suspicion that in 1968, on the eve of the election that brought him to the White House, Nixon manipulated the Vietnam War for selfish political ends. Did he, fearful that impending peace negotiations would swing vital votes to his Democratic opponent, covertly urge Thieu to boycott the talks? The prominent Republican Anna Chennault, who met secretly with Nixon and acted as a go-between with the South Vietnamese, claims he did. She eventually came to despise Nixon and stayed away from the funeral.

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  Asked what would be found written on his heart when his life ended, the former president had told an intimate, “That’s easy. One word: Pat!” Nixon was buried next to his wife, and there were touching testimonials at the funeral about their fifty-three-year marriage. Other memories told a sadder story: of prolonged marital difficulty, of physical abuse, of threatened divorce. One of the few times Nixon broke down in public had been a year earlier, at Pat’s funeral. As he struggled to compose himself, he had clutched the hand of a man few outsiders recognized, a trusted psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker.

  Hutschnecker watched Nixon’s burial on television on the other side of the continent, reflecting on the patient who had first come to him with his troubles four decades earlier. Some at the funeral, and others not present, recalled a Nixon who sometimes cracked under the pressures of public office. There had been myriad minor incidents, the slapping of a campaign worker who had criticized him, the time he sat kicking the back of a car seat like a child until an aide walked away in disgust. During the presidency, much more seriously, there had been times when he had seemed uncoordinated, rendered unstable by fatigue, alcohol, and medication. He had reportedly ordered acts of war that aides had chosen to ignore, even slept through a crisis meeting when a heightened stage of nuclear alert was ordered in his name. At the end, a message had gone out to the military that instructions from the White House were to be ignored unless cleared by a senior member of the cabinet.

  In the fifties, after he had begun treating then Vice President Nixon, Dr. Hutschnecker had begun urging that “mental health certificates should be required for political leaders.” In private he had expressed concern at the possibility that Nixon should hold high office.

  Haldeman likened the former president to a “multifaceted quartz crystal. Some facets bright and shining, others dark and mysterious. And all of them constantly changing as the external light rays strike the crystal . . . some smooth and polished, others crude, rough, and sharp. . . .”

  Henry Kissinger has written of the “Walter Mitty dimensions of his personality . . . the absence of any sense of proportion. His self-image of coolness in crisis . . . distorted by the dogged desperation with which he attacked his problems. . . . The titanic struggle among the various personalities within him.”

  At the funeral, the former secretary of state quoted Hamlet: “He was a man; take him for all in all.” In these pages we seek the “all in all” of Richard Nixon, including the parts of him that he and his supporters have preferred to conceal.

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  He belongs to the world, but he is also still very much mine.

  —Richard Nixon’s mother in 1960, when he was forty-seven years old

  He was a dark-haired boy of six, scrubbed and smart in starched white shirt, black bow tie, and knee pants, walking each morning to the Yorba Linda elementary school. In mild weather, like other local children, he made his way along the unpaved road barefoot.

  Richard Milhous Nixon had been born on January 9, 1913, in the do-it-yourself Sears, Roebuck house his father had built on the twelve-acre site in Southern California that he hoped would become a profitable lemon grove. He was the second child born to Frank and Hannah Nixon, the second of five sons, and it was obvious from the start that he was special. “Please call my son Richard and never Dick,” his mother told the teacher. “I named him Richard.”

  “He was one of those rare individuals,” recalled that teacher, Mary George. “He just never had to work for knowledge at all. He was told something and he never forgot. He was a very quiet, studious boy . . . a solemn child who rarely ever smiled or laughed. His mother was a wonderful person. You always knew she was right there with you, because of the work she would do with Richard at home.”

  More than half a century later, with his wife and his own grown children at his side, President Nixon would spend his last minutes in the White House making a farewell speech to his staff—and a battery of television cameras. He would not speak of affairs of state, nor would he apologize for his actions. His face wet with perspiration and tears, his voice quavering, he launched into a disquieting stream-of-consciousness discourse. He asserted that he was not educated, that he had no personal wealth. He claimed he had barely managed to pass his bar exam to become a lawyer. He recalled Theodore Roosevelt, who had overcome his grief over his wife’s death and gone on to become president. He made no reference to his own wife, who had been steadfast for so long. Instead, he eulogized his father and mother, long since dead.

  “I remember my old man,” Nixon told his audience. “I think they would have called him sort of a little man, common man . . . he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California. . . . He sold it before they found oil on it. And then he was a grocer. But he was a great man, because he did his job. . . .

  “My mother,” the president went on, “was a saint. And I think of her two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother for three years in Arizona, and seeing each of them die . . . she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.”

  In this outpouring, delivered at what seemed like the end of a wrecked career, lay the key to its beginnings—and to much else about the man. First, and perhaps above all, it was less than truthful.

  Of course Nixon had been educated. He had attended college and gone on to law school at a respected university, from which he was graduated with highest honors. Far from struggling through the bar exam, he had passed easily. As for his wealth or lack of it, a subject that is still the subject of controversy, suffice it to say here that Nixon was affluent in 1974 and would remain so. It was not true that his father suffered a loss by selling his land, only to have others strike oil on it. In fact, no oil was ever found on the Nixon property.1 Two of the Nixon boys did die tragically young, as he asserted, but only one of them is known to have suffered from tuberculosis. The other died of a brief illness that was never satisfactorily diagnosed.

  Richard Nixon’s life was shot through with lies great and small, whether outright lying, skirting the truth, or embroidering it. It was his lying that most damaged him during Watergate. Yet Nixon even lied to the man to whom he entrusted his fate in his time of crisis, his Watergate lawyer Fred Buzhardt. Buzhardt later remembered the president as “the most transparent liar he had ever met.”

  This same man sometimes championed the truth, not least on the ground that in the long run lying usually backfires. He liked to cite the example of his own first great victory, in seeing to it that Alger Hiss was convicted for lying under oath. “If you lie,” he said, reflecting on Hiss’s fate, “you go to jail for the lie rather than the crime. So believe me, don’t ever lie.”

  “Let us begin,” Nixon exhorted Republicans as he accepted the 1968 nomination for the presidency, “by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and to live with the truth. That’s what we will do.” In the event, not so.

  Some of the untruths Nixon told as president mattered little. There was the claim, convenient when meeting a group of athletes, that he had met his wife at a football game. By all other accounts, including his own, he met her when both auditioned for parts in a play. There was his assertion, useful when addressing French reporters, that he had “majored in French.” In fact his college major had been history. There was his written instruction to his staff—an unusually careles
s lapse—to find some chopsticks, and any chopsticks would suffice, to display in an exhibit commemorating his breakthrough visit to China. He did so in the knowledge that the authentic ivory chopsticks, used at dinner with Mao Zedong, had not been preserved. “That doesn’t make any difference,” he wrote. “We undoubtedly have some chopsticks, ivory or otherwise.”

  Other untruths and deceptions mattered greatly, whether or not they constituted outright lies. These included encouraging the notion that he had what the press called “a secret plan to end the war” at a time, during the 1968 campaign, when the Vietnam conflict was the crucial election issue; assuring the nation that there were no U.S. combat troops in Laos—a lie; most notoriously, denying in a national television address that the United States had been bombing Cambodia, a lie that oddly, Henry Kissinger later recalled, Nixon added unnecessarily to the draft of his speech.2

  Nixon’s master plan to regain credibility during Watergate was dubbed Operation Candor. Yet he lied to the nation, to congressional colleagues, to his closest aides, and to his own attorneys, insisting as late as a year into the scandal that he was “the one person that’s totally blameless in this. . . .” “I have nothing to hide,” he insisted to Senator Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, “and you are authorized to make that statement in my name.” “The danger in this whole thing,” recalled Senator Barry Goldwater, who thought the president was losing his mind and who eventually led a deputation to urge him to resign, “was his constant telling lies.”

  Saddest of all, perhaps, the president lied to his own family, denying that he had had any part in Watergate or the cover-up. “We have every reason to believe him,” his daughter Tricia told an interviewer, “because he has never lied. . . . Richard Nixon is a man who has never lied, not even a white lie, to his family or to the American people. . . .”

  In private, Nixon sometimes dropped all pretense at honesty. Lying as a political ploy, he would say, was just part of the game. “One time,” recalled John Sears, a former deputy counsel, “we were going up to see the Mormon elders at the Mormon cathedral. And we got halfway up the steps, and the band was playing, and the people were watching. And all of a sudden he stopped and said to me, ‘Whatever I say in there, don’t you believe a word of it . . .’ ”

  Len Garment, Nixon’s law colleague before the presidency and later a senior aide, remembered what Nixon told him in a relaxed moment at the Drake Hotel in New York. “He was alone, stretched out on the bed, a phone in one hand and a highball in the other. Nixon, by then reasonably well oiled (it didn’t take much to do the trick . . . it was kind of truth serum in this instance), . . . said, ‘You’re never going to make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.’ ”

  Out of office, Nixon declared on national television that in his view, “dissembling” and “hypocrisy” were necessary to win and hold public office, arguing that there was “a very fine line” between not being candid and “lying in an immoral sense.” Not telling the truth can eventually become as confusing to the chronic liar as it is misleading to his audience, and so it was for Nixon. On occasion, Kissinger thought, the president convinced himself that his distortion of a fact was actually the true fact. “I doubt if he knows himself when he’s not telling the truth,” said presidential aide John Ehrlichman.

  To focus on Nixon’s lying and—if it can be judged a lesser sin—on his dissembling is not undertaken here to prejudge the man, but rather to point up an inherent difficulty faced by anyone who strives to write about him. In many ways Nixon has left his biographers much more to work with than most politicians. His autobiographical work is massive and illuminating, as are the books produced by those who knew him well. Some of those writers, however, are themselves prone to lying; their number includes convicted perjurers. Then there is the unique bounty of the White House tapes. They are priceless raw material, but they too are shot through with Nixonian lies—not all of them easy to identify even now.

  Truth is always elusive for a biographer. It is generally more accessible, though, in the smaller body of material left behind by leaders considered to have been fundamentally honest—a Truman, a Ford, or a Carter—than in the extensive record that is the legacy of a man known to have been a chronic liar. To travel Richard Nixon’s life requires, more than for most subjects, a careful passage through a minefield of lies, lies of varying degrees of seriousness, lies self-serving but in the end self-defeating.

  John Ehrlichman made his observation that Nixon may have lost touch with the truth in 1978, when Nixon’s two-volume autobiography was published. He referred in particular to what the former president had written about his own family. “Read that description of his family,” Ehrlichman told the writer Paul Theroux. “They’re all perfect, right? But what man can say his family’s perfect? Those people are human . . . he makes them into waxwork dummies . . . if he doesn’t come clean about them, how can he come clean about anything else?”

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  The picture of Richard’s boyhood and family life comes down to us, as must most such memories, largely from the family itself and, above all, from the adult Nixon and his mother, Hannah. Their interviews, even the earliest ones, were given with an eye to generating favorable propaganda for a budding politician.

  The acknowledgments page of one early biography, by Bela Kornitzer, gushes with thanks to Nixon and his “great and dedicated” mother. Hannah Nixon cheerfully joined in propagating the yarn about the missed fortune in oil supposedly discovered under the family property after it had been sold. “It’s been a campaign ever since he was born,” she admitted. “All his life, I’ve been his campaigner.” In years to come, incongruous in an otherwise simple decor, a massive, translucent, three-dimensional color photograph of Richard—illuminated at the touch of a button—hung in her house.

  For his part, Nixon forever extolled Hannah’s virtues, which included her pie-making ability—reporters noted that the pies he claimed his mother had gotten up at 5:00 A.M. to bake changed from apple to lemon, and from lemon to cherry, as he moved from one rally to another. Aides were struck by how often Nixon spoke of Hannah even when he was not in the public eye. He was still going on about her, tears welling in his eyes, as he approached his eightieth birthday. “My mother taught me about hard work, endurance, and patience. . . . She sacrificed everything for us. She worked like a dog, through pain and tears and you name it. She was so strong because she put it all in God’s hands. She never gave up. . . . I always knew that women were the stronger sex.”

  Hannah Milhous Nixon—Richard was the only one of her sons to bear her maiden name—came from a long line of Quakers. Her ancestors were Germans who migrated first to Ireland, then in the eighteenth century to what was to become Pennsylvania, and then from one community of Friends to another until they finally settled in California. Hannah was one of nine children born to a prosperous rancher and his wife. Her father’s generation was a tight-knit family of “thee and thou”-ing Quakers, staunch in adherence to tradition, stern in their discipline, and so fiercely clannish that they conceded only reluctantly the biological necessity of marrying outside the Milhous bloodline.

  Hannah was regarded as a quiet, dutiful daughter, who talked of becoming a teacher until, at the age of twenty-three, she dropped out of college to marry Frank Nixon. Frank, then twenty-nine, was of humbler stock. He was one of five children of an impoverished Ohio family, Methodists with combined English, Irish, and Scots roots. He had left school at fourteen to earn a living wherever he could find it. When he was twenty-seven, a job as an omnibus motorman ended after he suffered frostbite while driving at night on an open platform. He led fellow workers in a struggle for better conditions, then left for the warmer climate of Southern California. He roomed in a boardinghouse run by Quakers where, at a Quaker Valentine’s party in 1908, he met Hannah Milhous and wooed and wed her in less than four months.

  The bride not only was “marrying below her station,” as one local put it, but—as a woman who h
ad never once gone out with a man before—had fallen for a fellow who, by his own boast, was currently seeing five girls at once. Frank was to be remembered as a “hot man,” a pincher and a squeezer of females, a “horny bastard,” according to a local lawyer, who would later give up dancing because he became “instantly aroused . . . when his arms went around a woman.”

  Hannah married Frank in the face of her parents’ opposition. Her teenage sister Olive, reflecting the outrage of the family and local Quakers, carved the words “Hannah is a bad girl” on a pepper tree in the yard. Relations eventually improved, however. Hannah’s father provided the couple with a parcel of land to launch them, and the babies soon started to arrive.

  There were to be five children, all boys: Harold, born a year after the wedding; Richard, born during a freak cold snap four years later; Donald in 1915; Arthur in 1918; and Edward—a surprise late arrival—in 1930, when Hannah was forty-five. All but Donald were named after English kings of history or legend. In Richard’s case, Hannah was to explain, she had in mind King Richard the Lionheart, warrior hero of the Crusades.

  As Hannah recounted it, it was tough growing up in the Nixon family. She recalled having had nothing to serve but cornmeal, night after night. Richard once told a reporter of “going to bed many nights after eating only a slice of bread covered with tomato sauce, of knowing what hunger was.” “We were poor,” he said on another occasion. “We had very little.” On other occasions he came closer to the probable truth. “It’s been said our family was poor,” he told the columnist Stewart Alsop, “but we never thought of ourselves as poor. We always had enough to eat, and we never had to depend on anyone else.”