Being Nixon: A Man Divided (18 page)

Nixon may have been broadly joking with Sears; it was sometimes hard to know. Nixon liked to crack lame jokes: “I got stoned in Caracas. I’ll tell you one thing, it’s a lot different from getting stoned at a Jaycees convention.”
⁴¹
His speeches could be a little stagy and, to his critics at least, a bit mawkish. But he was sensitive and thoughtful, too. When a congressional candidate who had begged Nixon to stump for him got cold feet and embarrassingly told the crowd that Nixon was on the platform of his own volition, Nixon just played along. Why? Sears asked. “I was afraid his mother was there,” Nixon answered, not cynical at all. “Mothers don’t understand all that happens in politics. I didn’t want to criticize him in front of his mother.”
⁴²

On election night, November 6, 1966, Nixon was joyous when the returns showed a huge Republican rally—a net of forty-seven House seats, three Senate seats, and eight governorships. Nixon had backed winners in the vast majority of the thirty-five states and nearly eighty congressional districts where he had campaigned. At his headquarters at the Drake Hotel in Manhattan, he lay on the bed, “a phone in one hand and a highball in the other,” Garment recalled. By then “reasonably well-oiled (it didn’t take much to do the trick),” Nixon said “ ‘You’re never going to make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.’ ”
⁴³
Nixon may have just been jabbing at Garment for being a boy scout; on the other hand, Nixon did believe that deviousness was an important attribute for a successful politician.

“This is too great a night to go home!” Nixon exclaimed as they went into the night to hail a cab. “We won! We won!” he shouted to an aide. “Let’s go to El Morocco and have some spaghetti!”
⁴⁴
(An odd choice for such a famous nightclub. “It was a whim,” Nixon later explained. “I had never been there.”)
⁴⁵

On the day before Thanksgiving, Nixon’s money men—investment
bankers Peter Flanigan and Maurice Stans—told him that the time had come to make a move if he intended to run in 1968. He needed to head off Rockefeller and an up-and-coming conservative and heir to the Goldwater vote named Ronald Reagan, who had just unseated Pat Brown in California.
⁴⁶

The advice of the money men was not welcome at home. At Christmas time, on a bleak day, Pat, Julie, and Tricia huddled together on the beach at Key West, their legs wrapped in towels. “My mother said flatly, almost tonelessly, that she could not face another presidential race. She spoke of the ‘humiliation’ of defeat.’ ”
⁴⁷

In the beginning
of 1967, Nixon declared a “moratorium” on politics. He did not travel any more around the country, making speeches, raising money, wooing Republicans, picking up IOUs. Rather, he disappeared into his study to read political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Pascal, Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. He read Toynbee, Gibbon, and the memoirs of statesmen (all of Churchill’s), biography, and some fiction, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (but not, unfortunately, the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, or Shakespeare).
⁴⁸

Nixon’s “holiday from politics” was a shrewd maneuver. Nixon was justifiably proud of his sense of political timing, and 1967 was a good time to be off the political stage, if not out of the country. Race, sex, and war were colliding in ways so extreme that America seemed on the brink of revolution. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” chanted the college kids. Some were desperate to hang on to their draft deferments in order to avoid the fate of their fifteen thousand or so peers—mostly non-college—thus far killed in Vietnam. Some were ducking military service; many were moved by sincere antiwar sentiment. Meanwhile, polls showed that a quarter of the country wanted to use nuclear weapons to win the war.
⁴⁹
Rioting by blacks in Detroit was so severe that LBJ had to send in paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to suppress sniper fire and looting. In the Long Island, N.Y., suburb of North Amityville, a mob of
blacks yelled “Kill those cops” and threw Molotov cocktails at meetings intended to improve police-community relations.
⁵⁰
Crime was soaring, and with it, middle-class fear. Closer to home, Tricia Nixon was afraid to go across town to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, near seedy Times Square, to meet her boyfriend traveling from Princeton.
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The Harris polling organization devised an “alienation index” to measure public anger: It was off the charts. And politicians tried to ride the wave without getting rolled. In California, Governor Ronald Reagan, a former actor, found an audience by inveighing against the “morality and decency gap.”
⁵²

While other Republicans—principally, Michigan governor George Romney and, to a lesser extent, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller—uneasily exposed themselves to the roiled public, Nixon was offstage. He was preparing himself. He heard that the Kennedy family was creating an Institute of Politics at Harvard, as a kind of think tank for out-of-office Democrats. After brooding for a while about East Coast wealth and privilege, he became inspired and created his own, highly personalized tutorial. He had his in-house academic, a Columbia Business School professor named Martin Anderson, and a new assistant named Patrick Buchanan bring in deep thinkers, particularly conservative economists like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. Nixon never stopped ridiculing academics—he liked to point out that when Frederick the Great wanted to punish a German province, he appointed a professor as governor. But he listened to scholars and thinkers in his fashion (usually by spouting his own theories and then querying, “Or am I wrong?”)
⁵³
He did not like long-winded or didactic seminars, preferring to work the telephone, which he could use without looking anyone in the eye and which he could abruptly hang up. Annelise Anderson, Martin’s wife, recalled that her husband wrote a libertarian argument for ending the draft and creating an all-volunteer armed force. “Marty heard nothing from Nixon,” she recalled, but the Andersons gathered from others that he was calling around, testing the idea, which in 1967 was very radical, opposed by the military and the foreign
policy establishment. Finally, Nixon simply announced to Robert Semple of
The New York Times
that, if elected president, he would end the draft. (And he did.)
⁵⁴

Nixon liked to bluster that he had no interest in domestic or “local” policy issues. On the day he lost the California governor’s race in 1962, he gloomily told speechwriter Stephen Hess, “At least I’ll never have to talk about crap like dope addiction again.” His domestic policy platform for the 1968 election would be a collection of bland bromides designed mostly not to offend interest groups. Nixon was hardly an expert on the ins and outs of social policy. Indeed, walking out of their first meeting in November 1968, his chief domestic adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan would say to a friend, “He’s ignorant! He doesn’t know anything!”
⁵⁵
But, as Moynihan would soon learn to his delight, Nixon was ready to learn. The very fact that Nixon would hire a liberal intellectual Harvard professor as his chief domestic policy adviser suggests Nixon’s openness to new and transformative ideas. As he read philosophy and the biographies of statesmen in the winter of 1967, he was preparing intellectually for the sort of bold strokes that would confound his enemies as president.

Nixon’s main interest remained foreign policy, partly because presidents can have more impact in an arena where they are less often checked and second-guessed by the legislative branch. In mid-1960s America, foreign policy was still the main event for an aspiring chief executive. LBJ was flailing in anguish as the Vietnam War undermined his Great Society. Nixon was already thinking beyond Vietnam, scribbling into the night on his yellow notepads, searching for a model that would preserve American preeminence in a world of enemies and rivals large and small.

That spring of 1967, he traveled abroad, opening doors for law clients, but making sure to renew his acquaintances from his journeys as vice president and to meet new and upcoming world leaders. In Israel, he was snubbed by the leadership in the socialist government, but the far-sighted chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, Yitzhak Rabin, took him on a helicopter ride to show him Israel’s strategic vulnerability—the
Golan Heights, the short distance of ten miles from the West Bank to the sea.
⁵⁶
Nixon could see with his own eyes the challenge of peacekeeping in a world where ancient enemies lived on top of each other.

In Paris, he met with the French president, Charles de Gaulle. It was their second visit. In 1963, still tending the wounds of the “Last Press Conference,” Nixon had been served a simple lunch by “Le Grand Charles” in the garden of the Élysée Palace. The towering de Gaulle had stood to offer a toast to Nixon: that he had suffered defeats—like de Gaulle, like France, like others born to greatness—but that he would be back to serve his nation in some “very high capacity.”
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Nixon was fascinated by de Gaulle and his mystique of the leader. In Nixon’s personal library, one of the most heavily underlined books was a 1932 volume of de Gaulle’s lectures,
The Edge of the Sword
. The passages underscored by Nixon are specifications on a blueprint to the New Nixon, not the periodic political “New Nixon” who popped up at campaign time to try to get along with the press, but someone deeper, more mystical—Nixon the Statesman, striving for peace on earth:

Powerful personalities…capable of standing up to the tests of great events frequently lack that surface charm which wins popularity in ordinary life. Strong characters are, as a rule, rough, disagreeable, and aggressive.

Great men of action have always been of the meditative type. They have without exception possessed to a very high degree the faculty of withdrawing into themselves.

And also, some self-identification:

There is nothing harder for the human spirit to bear than being cold-shouldered.
⁵⁸

In de Gaulle, Nixon saw a model of
l’homme serieux
, to be admired and, if possible, emulated—reserved, aloof, dignified; grand and all-powerful. De Gaulle’s impact on Nixon is hard to overemphasize. Nixon placed Teddy Roosevelt (“in the arena”) and Woodrow Wilson (the thinker who acts) in his pantheon, but first among equals was de Gaulle.

In West Germany on his European swing in the summer of 1967, Nixon also met with Konrad Adenauer, the great Cold War statesman known as “Der Alte,” “the Old One.” “Der Alte” had some interesting geostrategic advice for Nixon: Tilt American policy toward Red China to counterbalance the growing Soviet threat. Four years earlier, de Gaulle had advised much the same course, urging Nixon to open China to the West.
⁵⁹

Nixon was listening. To establish his bona fides with the intellectual elite, he wrote an article for the journal
Foreign Affairs
, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, an East Coast Establishment bastion, called “Asia After Vietnam.” (“You know, he really
is
interesting,” the editor of
Foreign Affairs
told Nixon aide Ray Price).
⁶⁰
The key sentence began, “In the long run, it means pulling China back into the world community….”
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But the import of that sentence was lost at the time, missed by reporters more focused on Nixon’s immediate political ambitions.

Nixon’s audition with “the Powers That Be” of the business and political worlds came at Bohemian Grove, the summer camp of the establishment, in July 1967. There is a telling photo hanging over the bar in one of the camps, Hillbillies, of Nixon with Dwight Eisenhower at lunch in the Grove. A group hovers fawningly around Ike, while Nixon sits alone, as usual, across the table.
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But Nixon was no longer the outsider, the supplicant. He had been asked to give the Lakeside Speech. “If I were to choose the speech that gave me the most pleasure and satisfaction of my political career, it would be my Lakeside Speech at the Bohemian Grove in July 1967,” Nixon recalled. The speech was off the record and so got no media attention. “But it was an unparalleled opportunity to reach some of the most
important and significant men, not just from California but from across the country.”
⁶³

Typically, Nixon skipped all the Hi Jinks and Low Jinks and his cabin at Cave Man and holed up for a week in a cheap motel outside the Grove, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of a paper bucket and laboring over his speech. Nixon began with a usual jape: “It’s much more pleasant to get stoned in Bohemia than in Caracas.” But he quickly launched into a sophisticated tour of the world that brought the tycoons and senators and governors roaring to their feet.
^64
,
*
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Reading the speech many years later, it is difficult to understand what moved them so. Nixon’s tour of the horizon is intelligent and carefully considered but hardly inspiring. But his
manner
—confident and effortlessly knowledgeable—was inspiring. Nixon offered a hardheaded, realistic view of the many challenges America faced around the world and called for patience, strength, and wisdom—suggesting, neither too baldly nor too subtly, that he was the one who embodied these qualities. His words, nonetheless, came as a soothing tonic to a gathering of power brokers who saw their power threatened by the convulsions of the 1960s. There, amid the cavorting bankers and lawyers, Nixon emerged as de Gaulle’s
homme serieux
. The Orthogonian had won the Franklin endorsement.

Bowling alone.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum