Being Nixon: A Man Divided (24 page)

From his reading, Nixon knew that Kissinger looked at the world in the way he did. Like his nineteenth-century hero, Klemens von Metternich, Kissinger was a practitioner of realpolitik. He believed in searching for a balance of power. Nixon’s greatest dream was to be the statesman who created a new world order that preserved American preeminence, if not dominance, by balancing the power of its friends and foes. Nixon understood instinctively that Kissinger could help him shape bold plans into reality. Together, they would leave a remarkable legacy of diplomatic achievement. But they did not always agree on who should get the credit—usually, Nixon was the idea man, Kissinger the executioner—and their relationship was Shakespearean in its jealousies, passions, and betrayals. Rarely have two men been at once so perfectly and awfully matched.

Nixon wrote that the “combination was unlikely—the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic.”
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But he must have sensed that in many important ways, they were alike. Kissinger may have gone to Harvard, but he had been an outsider there, lonely. As a professor, Kissinger may have been a star, but he was never entirely accepted by the Yankee hierarchy. Kissinger knew what it was like to be condescended to by McGeorge Bundy, the high Wasp Harvard dean and JFK’s assistant for national security.
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Like Nixon, Kissinger loved to surprise and confound his enemies. Like Nixon, he preferred secrecy and harbored a devious streak. During the campaign, Nixon had been impressed by Kissinger’s ability to work behind the scenes feeding information to the Nixon camp. But this knowledge raised an obvious question in Nixon’s mind. If Kissinger had snuck around behind the backs of the Democrats, what was to stop him from doing the same to Nixon? According to Kissinger’s biographer Walter Isaacson, Nixon told one of Kissinger’s rivals at
the outset of his administration, “I don’t trust Henry, but I can use him.”
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There were other differences. A gifted courtier, Kissinger was funny and charming. Unlike Nixon, he joked about himself in ways that disarmed others, particularly cynical journalists. By the time Nixon came along, Kissinger was no dumpy academic; he had bought a Mercedes and a sunlamp and had learned how to flirt. He also knew how to manipulate people, including Nixon, whose insecurities he could read at a glance. He sensed that Nixon was not nearly so black-and-white as he appeared to be and that his ambivalence could be exploited. “Nixon was afraid of Harvard, and he was attracted to it,” Kissinger told the author. “He aspired to it.”
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Another nineteenth-century statesman whom Kissinger admired was Prince Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck’s genius, Kissinger saw from close study, was the ability to deal with contending forces “by manipulating their antagonisms.”
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Like Nixon, Kissinger knew how to play off his enemies and rivals. But Kissinger also knew how to play off Nixon against Nixon.

On November 28,
Nixon flew back to Key Biscayne, this time on the Boeing 707 used as Air Force One, generously loaned by President Johnson. Bill Safire watched with amusement as Nixon swiveled around in the president’s easy chair, pushed a button that elevated the coffee table into a desk, put up his feet, and grinned: “It sure beats losing.” Nixon was in high spirits. With Safire, he discussed possible cabinet choices. Nelson Rockefeller had been suggested for several different posts. “At Treasury,” Safire said, “what about David Rockefeller—no, you can’t have two Rockefellers in the Cabinet.” Nixon answered, deadpan: “Is there a law that you have to have one?”
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In Key Biscayne, Nixon had bought two houses, dim within and barely furnished, next door to his friend Bebe Rebozo. Lugging around briefing books, Nixon pretended to work and mostly tried to catch up on months of lost sleep. There were awkward dinners with
the new staff, at which Nixon announced that he wanted
Victory at Sea
played frequently at the Inaugural. The president-elect tried to tease Haldeman’s wife, Jo, asking her, “How’s the drinking problem?” The Haldemans were Christian Scientists and teetotalers. Mrs. Haldeman smiled gamely and played along, which got harder when Nixon repeated the joke every time he saw her.
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Pat Nixon, normally very warm with her own family, was a little reserved with Mrs. Haldeman. Julie observed that her mother was “putting her mind into neutral” so that she could cope with the avalanche ahead.
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Nixon took a few minutes to pay a consolation visit to Hubert Humphrey. Dwight Chapin came into an upstairs waiting room at Opa Locka Air Force Base to find Nixon with his arm around Humphrey, who was dabbing his face with a handkerchief. On the plane home, Nixon said to Chapin, referring to Humphrey’s close loss, “That’s so hard, so tough. It’s so tough,” said Nixon. “But I never cried.”
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On his Sunday
mornings in New York City, Nixon had often attended Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church. Nixon liked Dr. Peale’s sermons, which discouraged self-examination of one’s flaws and weaknesses as a trap set by trendy psychiatrists. Instead, he preached “the power of positive thinking,” the title of his 1952 mega-bestseller. On December 22, Nixon walked Julie down the aisle of Dr. Peale’s church to give her away to David Eisenhower. Julie was effervescent and lovely but also tough-minded. She had endured a lot, including seeing her beloved father mocked in the Smith College student newspaper.
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Earnest and thoughtful, out of step with his pot-smoking, antiwar classmates at Amherst, David had served as head of Youth for Nixon. (His grandfather, President Eisenhower, had offered him a hundred dollars to get his hair cut for the wedding. David got a light trim but never collected.) Julie and David would provide a refuge of positive thinking for Nixon in the years ahead, a source of love to a man who needed affection but sometimes had trouble showing it. Suffering from the flu on Julie’s wedding day,
Nixon wondered if maybe he should have spent more time with his daughter, but he also felt “tremendous joy and pride,” he wrote, as he danced with the bride to “Edelweiss” from
The Sound of Music
.
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Julie, who had wanted to marry before her family entered the fishbowl of the White House, refused to allow press at the wedding. On Christmas Day, she and David slipped away from their Florida honeymoon cottage to surprise her parents at Key Biscayne. Nixon insisted on a post-dinner fire. The fireplace had never been used before, and smoke steadily began to fill the room, Julie recalled. “My father kept repeating, as if to reassure himself, ‘Isn’t this wonderful? Isn’t this fun having a fire and being here together?’ Eyes began to water; it became harder to breathe. ‘My mother was the first to slip quietly out….David lay down on the floor next to the dogs, who had stretched out very low in order to breathe more easily.’ ” Soon, even the dogs gave up, and Manolo and “several Secret Service agents” put out the fire.
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“As 1968 came to a close,” Nixon recorded in his memoirs, “I was a happy man.”
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Inauguration Day, January
20, 1969, dawned gray and cold. The sun came out, but a raw wind blew on the thousands massed at the East Front of the Capitol. H. R. Haldeman began the diary he would keep for the rest of his time as Nixon’s chief of staff:

Most outstanding moment: fanfare, Nixon and Pat Nixon come to top of steps, stand at attention for musical salute. Expression on his face was unforgettable, this was the time! He had arrived, he was in full command, someone said he felt he saw rays coming from his eyes. Great ovation. Then slowly, dignified, down the steps to the front of the platform.
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Arthur Burns, a longtime Nixon economics adviser who had been given the title of “Counsellor” and cabinet rank, recalled watching Nixon “closely as he walked down the steps of the Capitol. I could not detect a touch of humility in his demeanor or in his facial expression.
This bothered me very much.”
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Kissinger, seated nearby, observed that Nixon’s “jaw jutted defiantly and yet he seemed uncertain, as if unsure that he was really there.” The sharp-eyed Kissinger cattily recorded that Nixon’s pants legs were, “as always, a trifle short.”
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Nixon’s address, written by him with help from Safire, Ray Price, and others, included a wise call to “lower our voices….We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another.” Nixon was not temperamentally suited to fulfill his mother’s gentle Quakerisms, but he absolutely believed one simple declarative sentence, later carved on his gravestone, that he had written himself: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”
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As he rode in his limousine on the parade route up Pennsylvania Avenue, he noticed a cluster of signs. “Nixon’s the One….the Number One War Criminal” said one. “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” read another. Protesters were burning little American flags handed out by the Boy Scouts.
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At Twelfth Street, the rocks and bottles, beer cans and pieces of garbage began to fly, and the riot cops moved in. Nixon was “angry that a group of protesters carrying a Vietcong flag had made us captives in our car,” he recalled. So, as soon as the limo had swung up Fifteenth Street, where the crowds were cheering again, Nixon “ordered the driver to open the sun roof and let the other agents know that Pat and I were going to stand up so the people could see us.”
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Nixon emerged defiant, with his arms raised up in Ike’s V-for-Victory sign—which had, more recently, been adopted as a peace symbol by the youth protest movement. Nixon relished recapturing the flag.

Nixon moved to rid the White House of ghosts. His first diary entry was: “H check EOB for bugs.”
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He wanted Haldeman to make sure that nobody, particularly LBJ, was bugging the old Executive Office Building, where Nixon decided to establish his “hideaway office.”
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The Oval Office was too ceremonial. Nixon would spend much of his time in a homey office in the Executive Office Building across a closed-off street from the West Wing, where he could take naps in the afternoon. The naps were kept secret, marked on the calendar
as “staff time.” Nixon was determined to be seen working at all times, and he did work, prodigiously. But, in his constant battle with sleeplessness, he needed afternoon respite.
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In the evening, he sometimes read in the Lincoln Sitting Room, his feet up on his favorite brown ottoman, brought from New York by Pat.

Nixon looked under his bed on the first night and saw a mass of electronic gear for LBJ’s taping system. Out it went.
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,
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So did the three TV sets, which LBJ had liked to watch simultaneously, as well as the two wire service tickers. LBJ had installed on his phone sixty-four separate buttons to reach staffers, and he had ordered phones put in bathroom stalls so he could reach them anywhere.

Nixon slept only four hours his first night. He stepped into the shower and tried to figure out LBJ’s complicated panel of knobs controlling the various jets and showerheads. The blast of water nearly knocked him down. While he was shaving, he remembered a hidden safe LBJ had showed him in November. He reached in and found one thin folder containing the casualty list in Vietnam on LBJ’s last day. In Johnson’s last year of office 14,835 men had been killed, 95,798 wounded. Those ghosts would not go away. Nixon closed the folder and put it back in the safe.
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After Nixon’s first
week in office, Haldeman wrote in his diary that the “P,” as he referred to the president, “still loves every minute and shows it all the time.” Nixon especially loved the pomp of office. After the first formal diplomatic reception, Haldeman described Nixon following the Color Guard as the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” “P was like a little kid or a wooden soldier, arms still, trying not to look as tickled as he obviously was. P really ate it up….He loves being P!”
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Nixon counted on Haldeman to run his office. (He was borrowing,
as he often did, from President Eisenhower: the model was Ike’s coldly efficient chief of staff, Sherman Adams.) The forty-two-year-old, permanently tanned Californian with a buzz cut was the only staffer who had permission to awaken the president. He did everything from making sure the right cottage cheese was flown in weekly from Knudsen’s Dairy in Los Angeles for Nixon’s spartan lunch (cottage cheese, canned pineapple ring, rye crackers, skim milk) to trying, futilely, to make Nixon’s new dog, an Irish setter named King Timahoe, like his master (“he’s trying dog biscuits, no use,” Haldeman recorded in his diary).
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The perfectionist chief of staff set up a “tickler system” to make sure that Nixon’s commands, issued via Haldeman, were being obeyed. More consequentially, as time went on, Haldeman acted as a restraint on Nixon’s impulses. Increasingly, he understood when
not
to carry out Nixon’s orders. Nixon, in a rare moment of self-awareness, wanted it so.
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Nixon told Haldeman, “I must build a wall around me.”
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He wanted to keep hangers-on and favor-seekers away, as well as annoying or self-aggrandizing cabinet officers and congressional leaders. “Basically, the Boss doesn’t like to see people,” Bill Safire wrote in his diary after ten weeks at the White House. “That’s what this machinery is set up to avoid—and to give him time to think.”
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Staffers began noticing that Nixon was referring to himself in the third person, as “RN.” He wanted to emulate de Gaulle, majestic in his remoteness. As Nixon’s sympathetic biographer Conrad Black pointed out, “De Gaulle, in referring to himself in the third person, was imitating Julius Caesar. This was a hazardous road for Nixon to take….”
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Gradually, over time, Nixon’s campaign “body man,” now his “special assistant,” Dwight Chapin, observed that in the White House “Nixon’s character began to change. He became more formal and aloof—worst of all, he wouldn’t see congressmen and senators. He made a lot of enemies that way.”
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