Being Nixon: A Man Divided (33 page)

“Agitated and uneasy,” as he described himself, he went to the Lincoln Sitting Room and began making phone calls—forty-seven calls between 9:22
P.M
. and 1:55
A.M
. Then he slept for a little and started calling again. He called Kissinger eight times. He called Haldeman seven times and Rose Woods four times. He called Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale and two newswomen, Helen Thomas of UPI (1:22
A.M
. and 3:50
A.M
.) and Nancy Dickerson of NBC.
⁵⁰
He called Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson to complain about fifty junior foreign service officers who had signed a letter opposing the Cambodian invasion. “This is the President,” Nixon told the half-asleep career diplomat. “I want all those sons of bitches fired in the morning!”
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Looking out the windows as the blackness turned to gray, he could see small groups of people starting to gather on the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument. He put Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto on the record player and, at 4:22
A.M
., placed a final call, to his valet, Manolo Sanchez. As Sanchez came in with a cup of coffee, Nixon asked him if he had ever been to the Lincoln Memorial at night. Manolo said that he had not. “Impulsively,” Nixon recalled, “I said, ‘Let’s go look at it now.”
⁵²
So began what Haldeman would record in his diary as “the weirdest day so far.”
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“
S
earchlight is on the lawn. Searchlight has asked for a car.”
¹
In the Secret Service Command Post, Egil “Bud” Krogh gave a start. Krogh was a young White House staffer working for Ehrlichman on Justice Department matters. He was the “duty officer” on that curious May night, and the last thing he expected was to be jumping in a car shortly before 5
A.M
. to chase after the president on the way to the Lincoln Memorial. Running up the Memorial’s marble steps, he caught up with Nixon as he stood before the majestic statue of the Great Emancipator. The president had “bags under his eyes,” he noted. “He was flushed, drawn, exhausted,” Krogh later recalled.
²

But the president was moved and excited, too. Nixon was making a pilgrimage. His grandmother Milhous had idealized Lincoln; Nixon had read all ten volumes of Lincoln’s biography by Lincoln’s young secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay.
³
He wanted to feel a bond with a predecessor who had kept the nation together during another, greater civil war. He began reading to Manolo from the inscriptions—the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural—on the temple walls.

By now, “a few small groups of students had begun to congregate in the rotunda of the Memorial,” Nixon recalled. He walked over to a group of eight males, dressed in the scruffy uniform of fatigue jackets and jeans, their hair long and unkempt, their sleep-deprived eyes wide as they encountered the 37th president of the United States.
Nixon did his best to reach out to the dumbstruck boys. “I know that probably most of you think I’m an SOB,” he said, “but I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.” He recalled that as a young man, in the late 1930s as war loomed in Europe, he had wanted to believe that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had found a way to stay out of war. He had thought that Winston Churchill, who wanted to fight the Nazis, “was a madman,” said Nixon. “In retrospect,” he expounded to the students, “I now realize that I was wrong. I think now that Chamberlain was a good man, but that Churchill was a wiser man.”

Haldeman.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Churchill was not a marble statue or a remote historical figure to Nixon. In 1954, President Eisenhower, eager to educate his young vice president, had summoned Nixon to meet the visiting Churchill at a White House dinner. Two days later Nixon had been Churchill’s dinner partner at the British embassy. A fascinated, worshipful Nixon had talked about the defense of the West with the great man; Nixon’s patriotism and idealism had been enlivened and enriched.
⁴

Now Nixon was trying to interest half-dazed students in a figure who was little more than a ghost to them, irrelevant to the passions of the day. Churchill was the glorious living past to Nixon; he was a “Dead White Male” to student radicals who hung Che Guevara posters in their dorm rooms.

Nixon might have despaired of his dim-eyed interlocutors, who thought the president was loopy. But he earnestly kept on. “I then tried to move the conversation into areas where I could draw them out,” he recalled in an account he wrote the next day. He talked about how young people should not miss opportunities to travel and revealed that he hoped to open up “the great mainland of China.” But then, talking about Russia, he veered into arms control and lost his audience again. Still, he tried. He talked about “those elements of the spirit that really matter,” as he put it in his diary. “I said candidly and honestly that I didn’t have the answer, but I knew that young people today were searching, as I was searching forty years ago, for an answer to this problem. I just wanted to be sure that all of them
realized that ending the war, and cleaning up the streets and the air and the water, was not going to solve spiritual hunger, which all of us have and which, of course, has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time.”
⁵

By this time, the rising sun over the Capitol was turning the granite memorial pink, and Manolo was signaling that the Secret Service was agitated, or as agitated as men trained to project calm might let on. The agents, “petrified with apprehension,” Nixon recalled, were worried that protest rally leaders would try to make a scene. In the world turned upside down of May 1970, the president of the United States was not safe standing at the base of Lincoln’s statue.

Nixon walked down the steps, shaking hands with more students, and got in his limousine. A guy with a beard flipped him the bird. Nixon (or so he later told an aide) gave him the finger right back.
⁶

The tour was not over. Nixon wanted Manolo to see Congress. Before long, the president’s valet was standing at the Speaker’s Rostrum while the president, reliving his days in the 46th Congress, clamored, “Speak! Speak!” Manolo said he was proud to be a U.S. citizen, and Nixon and a couple of cleaning ladies applauded. One of them, Mrs. Carrie Moore, asked Nixon to sign her Bible. Nixon held her hand for a moment. “You know,” he said, “my mother was a saint.” His voice thickened. “You be a saint, too,” he said, and Mrs. Moore replied, “I’ll try, Mr. President.”
⁷

Then it was on to the Rib Room of the Mayflower Hotel for breakfast. Nixon skipped his usual—wheat germ—and ordered eggs and hash. “The last time I had this was on a train,” he said to his anxious retinue, which by now included Haldeman and the White House physician, Dr. Walter Tkach, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, and Appointments Secretary Dwight Chapin, as well as his original minder, Bud Krogh. Nixon was unable to finish his hearty breakfast. Time to go. They headed for the limousines….

But Nixon wanted to walk the half-mile back to the White House. “Stop him, stop him,” Haldeman mouthed to Krogh over the roof of the limo. Krogh gently grabbed Nixon’s arm and said, “Mr. President,
you can’t walk back. There’s no way in.” The ring of buses and troops around the White House made pedestrian access difficult.

Nixon pulled his arm away. Krogh looked back to Haldeman, who again mouthed, “Stop him.” More forcibly, Krogh grabbed Nixon’s arm, who again yanked it away and glowered at his by now extremely uncomfortable thirty-year-old aide. But he got in the car. Inside the limo, Nixon grumbled, “Whose idea was those goddamned buses?” Haldeman, who had a sense of humor, drily answered, “It was Bud’s idea.”
⁸

In his diary that night, Haldeman wrote, “Very weird. P completely beat and just rambling on, but obviously too tired to go to sleep….I am concerned about his condition. The decision, the speech, the aftermath killings, riots, press, etc.; the press conference, the student confrontation have all taken their toll, and he has had very little sleep for a long time and his judgment, temper, and mood suffer badly as a result.” Haldeman was admiring of Nixon’s courage but worried that “the letdown will be huge.”
⁹

Colonel Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s assistant, was working in his office after midnight when the president—who by now was virtually sleepwalking—appeared in his doorway. “He was slightly disheveled—tie a little askew, coat unbuttoned, hair slightly tousled,” Haig recalled. “These signs of disorder were so small that they might have passed unremarked upon in a man less meticulously well-groomed than Nixon. In him they were very noticeable.”

Nixon smiled, “also a rare event when he was in private,” wrote Haig. Kissinger’s aide recalled Nixon telling him, “We’ve had a tough day, Al. Things are bad out there. But we’ve got to stick to our guns. We’ve done the right thing and we have to go on.” Haig realized that Nixon had come to his office in the middle of the night to “buck me up,” as he put it. The Cambodian operation, code-named “Total Victory” by the South Vietnamese, who code-named every major offensive “Total Victory,”
¹⁰
had captured large amounts of North Vietnamese weapons and materiél with few casualties, but the elusive communist COSVN had just moved west, deeper into the jungle.
Haig, a highly decorated hawk, had wanted to press on, but Nixon was keeping his promise to pull back once the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook were cleared. (He had no choice: Congress set a date for withdrawal.) Nixon knew that Haig was disappointed. “It was his way of telling me, to whom he owed no explanation of any kind, that he agreed with the advice I had given him, even though political considerations had caused him to modify his decision,” Haig wrote.
¹¹

The president, worn, emotionally drained, but forging on, was trying to be the good leader he wanted desperately to be. One follower who was mightily impressed was young Bud Krogh. In a report on the strange trip to the Lincoln Memorial, Krogh, writing his boss John Ehrlichman, observed that the students had been “too stunned to respond at all” and that “the students were geared only for the kind of dialogue or rapping which hardly any of us is capable of doing.”
¹²
But Krogh had been deeply inspired by Nixon’s compassion and effort to understand the students and his bravery in going out among them. Krogh knew that he would do anything for Nixon.
¹³

Nixon was unfairly
pilloried for his dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial. But his emotionalism throughout the Cambodia episode did not well serve him or the country. The better side of Nixon, the president who came to office pledging to “lower our voices” and restore calm to the country, had given way to the excitable, divisive Nixon. It is no wonder that the country felt whipsawed. On April 20, Nixon had announced that he was withdrawing 150,000 troops and declared Vietnamization a success. On April 30, ten days later, he sounded as if the Apocalypse was nigh. The modest military gains garnered by the incursion were far outweighed by the torment at home, as his own defense secretary, Melvin Laird, had warned. Rather than guard against his tendency to lash out, Nixon had given vent to his emotions. Indeed, he had seemed to relish the crisis in a self-dramatizing way, imagining himself, as he saluted George Washington and watched
Patton
at least one too many times, chasing the enemy through the jungle alongside his loyal Marine aide, Colonel Brennan.
Nixon was not behaving like the cool-handed leader he so admired. He was too eager to ride his own emotional roller coaster.

The crash came soon enough. The press coverage of the Lincoln Memorial visit was almost jeering. One of the students told reporters that Nixon had spouted condescending irrelevancies about surfing and football, and that became the storyline. Nixon, who had briefly brought up surfing with a California student and football with a Syracuse student, was stung. He behaved peevishly, as he did when wounded. His irritation with a disloyal cabinet secretary deepened. On May 6, Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel had written a letter urging Nixon to open up lines of communication to young people. The letter leaked before Nixon saw it, and Nixon was furious. Instead of direct confrontation, however, Nixon took the unusually petty step of ordering the White House tennis court—used by Hickel and other cabinet officers, but not by Nixon—“removed immediately.”
¹⁴
On May 11, two days after his early morning ramble, Nixon wanted to fire Hickel, but instead he was “still demanding the tennis court be removed,” Haldeman wearily noted. The chief of staff, a tennis player himself, stalled until Nixon forgot about it. Hickel was eventually eased out in November.

In his diary entry for that day, Haldeman went on, “E[hrlichman] got pretty direct with P when he was boring in on bad reports from kids about his Lincoln Memorial bit. E told him he was tired and not very effective. This made him mad, and it came up several times later in the day. Real trouble is, he is just totally pooped and is not up to his usual performance.”
¹⁵

The hardhats gave him a brief restorative boost. On May 8, the day before his trip to the Lincoln Memorial, a wave of construction workers had charged into an antiwar demonstration in downtown Manhattan. Shouting “All the way U-S-A!” and “Love it or leave it!” the hardhats sang “God Bless America” and beat up some hippies and a stray Wall Street lawyer or two. Some of the construction workers wielded pipes wrapped in American flags. A few hardhats got carried away and ripped the Episcopal Church banner, with its red
cross of St. Andrew, off the gate of Trinity Church. They apparently mistook it for a Vietcong flag.
¹⁶

Accused by Mayor John Lindsay of fomenting a “hard hat riot,” Peter Brennan, chief of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, flexed his muscles on May 20 by turning out one hundred thousand construction workers to march on City Hall with banners like “Lindsay for Mayor of Hanoi.” (Lindsay had lowered the flags at City Hall after Kent State.) Nixon loved it. “Thank God for the hard hats,” he enthused and invited Brennan to the White House on May 26. Brennan gave Nixon a hardhat emblazoned “Commander in Chief.” (In 1973 Nixon made Brennan secretary of labor.) Two days later, Nixon, invited by the Reverend Billy Graham, spoke at Youth Day in the University of Tennessee football stadium before eighty thousand people. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes guarded the stage and a paltry protest was hooted down.

Nixon’s political antennae were quivering. A Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of Americans held the protesters responsible for the Kent State shootings, while only 11 percent blamed the National Guardsmen. Once again, Nixon eyed the cultural divide between the longhairs and their liberal supporters in the elite press and the rest of America that disapproved of permissiveness and disrespect. Though they were the majority, these voters, in particular blue-collar whites who had traditionally voted Democratic, felt like “forgotten people.” Nixon would not forget them. In Orange Country, California, a Republican state senator observed, “Every time they burn another building, Republican registration goes up.”
¹⁷

Nixon liked to
bolster morale and create bonds with small, jokey, sweet ceremonies. After the 1952 Fund Crisis, he had initiated his staff and some loyal reporters into the “Order of the Hound’s Tooth,” a play on Eisenhower’s admonition that Nixon would have to prove he was “cleaner than a hound’s tooth” to stay on the ticket.
¹⁸
Now, he had Bebe Rebozo’s girlfriend sew up some heart-shaped blue cloth medals, which he duly awarded to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger
on Air Force One en route from a break in Key Biscayne in mid-May. He declared the pieces of cloth to be “Blue Heart” medals for all they had endured and suffered and for “those who are true blue.” “This will be our secret,” he said.
¹⁹