Being Nixon: A Man Divided (49 page)

F
or Nixon, the night of November 7, 1972, should have been the greatest in his life. He won reelection to the presidency by one of the greatest landslides in history, 47,169,841 votes to Senator McGovern’s 29,172,767. Nixon swept every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He was the first Republican to win the Catholic vote, and he had done surprisingly well with labor and youth. He had even won 35 percent of Democrats.

The stock market was up, inflation was down, and the world, thanks in no small part to the efforts of President Nixon, seemed to be a more peaceful place.

But Nixon was not at peace. In his memoir, he would later write, “I am at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over me that victorious night….”
¹

Election Day had
started well enough. On a gray, misty morning, Nixon voted in San Clemente, California, near the Western White House. No one on Nixon’s staff was surprised when the president dropped his ballot on the floor, though press secretary Ron Ziegler called out, “Stop it! Stop it! No pictures!” to press photographers.
²
That afternoon, flying east aboard Air Force One, Theodore White, the veteran campaign chronicler, was “struck” by the president’s “somber, almost emotionless mood,” but he wrote it off to “weariness.”
³
Following dinner, Nixon retired from his family to go to the
Lincoln Sitting Room to listen to
Victory at Sea
on the record player, with the volume turned up. “We in the family all seemed to be in different rooms in the second and third floors of the White House during most of election night,” his daughter Julie recalled. This was normal; Nixon was following his usual election night practice of secluding himself.
⁴

With Bebe Rebozo.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

An hour after dinner, a cap on one of the president’s front teeth fell off, requiring emergency dental work. It hurt very much, and Nixon knew that if he smiled too widely the temporary cap might fall off, so he was a little subdued when he later appeared before the cameras to declare victory around midnight.
⁵
Retiring to his hideaway in the Executive Office Building, he reclined in his easy chair and began badgering Haldeman for more precise vote totals. Haldeman was used to this. Still, recalled Larry Higby, Haldeman’s aide, “It was sort of grim that evening. We couldn’t get results and he got frustrated. He kept calling and calling. ‘What are we hearing?’ We thought he’d be walking around saying, ‘We did it! Great job!’ People were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ It was just weird.”
⁶

Summoned to Nixon’s hideaway after 1
A.M
., Chuck Colson watched while Nixon composed a telegram accepting McGovern’s concession. Usually, Nixon was gracious with his defeated foes; he could empathize. But this time the words would not come. Speechwriters kept trying. “No, I won’t say that,” Nixon grumbled, flinging the sheet of paper across the little table between Colson and Haldeman.
⁷
As dawn approached, the president kept on muttering about the poor returns in congressional races.

A few days later, Nixon tried to rationalize what he described in his memoirs as “a curious feeling, perhaps a foreboding, that muted my enjoyment of this triumphal moment….” In his diary he wrote:

I had determined before the election evening to make it as memorable a one as possible for everyone concerned. The tooth episode probably interfered to a considerable extent. Certainly by
the time I had to prepare for the office telecast I was not as upbeat as I should have been.

The rest of the family seemed to think they got enough of a thrill out of it. I think the very fact that the victory was so overwhelming made up for any failure on my part to react more enthusiastically than I did.
⁸

On the morning
after the historic landslide, the senior staff of the White House was instructed to assemble in the Roosevelt Room. Many shuffled in looking sleepy-eyed and hungover.
⁹
Kissinger had joined the victory celebration at the Shoreham Hotel the evening before, but in his memoirs he recorded, in his slightly formal manner, that the “festivities seemed…to lack the boisterous spontaneity that usually marked such events.” Now, as the national security adviser watched Nixon enter the room through the door from the Oval Office at precisely 11
A.M
., the president seemed “not at all elated,” wrote Kissinger. “Rather he was grim and remote as if the more fateful period of his life still lay ahead.”

Nixon’s election night melancholia had not worn off. The president seemed “perfunctory” as he thanked his staff, Kissinger observed. Looking worn, sounding vexed, Nixon launched off on one of his riffs from the biography of Disraeli about “exhausted volcanoes,” by which he apparently meant his staff and the cabinet.
¹⁰

Herb Klein, Nixon’s communications director, was struck by Nixon’s dour mood. He knew that the cap on the president’s front tooth had fallen off the night before as he was preparing for his TV victory speech. “Momentarily, I thought that was the problem,” Klein recalled. But then he realized that Nixon’s discomfort reached deeper.
¹¹
Abruptly ending his own remarks, Nixon turned the meeting over to his chief of staff and walked out of the room. With his brush cut, faded tan, and cold eyes, Haldeman glowered at the by-now awakened assemblage. “I stood up and, in chilling tones that actor Robert
Vaughn
*
¹
might envy, told the numb-struck staff members that each and every one of them must have his resignation on my desk by nightfall. Period,” Haldeman recalled saying.
¹²

Peter Flanigan, a longtime Nixon loyalist and presidential assistant, was dumbfounded by the abruptness. By custom, White House staffers submitted resignations at the end of the first term. But Nixon’s somewhat opaque historical allusions (something about “embers which once shot sparks into the sky”), followed by Haldeman’s terse diktat, were worse then demoralizing. “It was demeaning,” Flanigan recalled. “Nixon wouldn’t have done that at an earlier stage of his career. I didn’t think he was a prideful man. I guess he had come to think that he was invincible,” Flanigan said, struggling, many years later, to explain to the author how a man so politically shrewd could have become so callous and aloof at precisely the moment he needed goodwill and allies to govern with a Democratic-controlled Congress. Searching for a meaningful saying, Flanigan adapted a famous quotation from Euripides (“Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad”). “Whom the gods wish to destroy,” said Flanigan, “they first make proud.”
¹³
In his memoirs, Nixon would regret calling for the resignations of the entire White House staff and cabinet. “I see this now as a mistake. I did not take into account the chilling effect this action would have on…morale.”
¹⁴

Nixon flew to Key Biscayne that evening for a brief rest, returned to Washington for only a day, and retreated to Camp David. He stayed there for the rest of the month. Staffers waited to be summoned to the mountaintop to learn their fates (the helicopter ride became known as the “Mount Sinai Shuttle”).
¹⁵
With Haldeman and Ehrlichman furiously making notes, Nixon began with a memorable rant—“Clean the bastards out!” “He’s got to go!”—and then spent days going back and forth rearranging the boxes and names on the organization chart.
¹⁶
He was going to remake the government top to
bottom, and he was determined to do it by Christmas. “No goddamn
Harvard
men, you understand!” he ordered Haldeman. “Under no condition.”
¹⁷
The president brandished a Pat Buchanan study of Ivy Leaguers in the Foreign Service to confirm what he expected—that while Ivy Leaguers made up less than 2 percent of college grads, they accounted for more than half the ambassadors. Ehrlichman’s notes captured Nixon’s scorn—how the Ivy Leaguers “play those frilly games, squash and crew.”
¹⁸

Then, having vented, Nixon proceeded to hire and promote Ivy Leaguers: Elliot Richardson of Harvard to replace Mel Laird at Defense and Caspar Weinberger, another Harvard man, to replace Richardson at Health, Education, and Welfare; Schlesinger, another Harvard man, to replace Helms at CIA; George Shultz, of Princeton, not only to run Treasury but also to oversee all economic matters in Nixon’s proposed new “super Cabinet,” designed to concentrate power in the White House and ride herd on the bureaucrats. “He’d pound on the desk and say, ‘We have too many Ivy Leaguers! No more Ivy Leaguers!’ So you’d give him three names and tell him the one you’re going to recommend was an Ivy Leaguer, and he’d approve it. You got used to it. It’s just the way he was,” recalled Fred Malek, his personnel chief (and a Harvard MBA).
¹⁹

For days, Haldeman and Ehrlichman made more and more lists and charts while anxious government servants rode the Mount Sinai Shuttle. Largely ignored in all the to-ing and fro-ing was the United States Congress. Aside from a brief meeting with House Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford and some tortured conversations with Senator Bob Dole, whom he was easing out as head of the Republican Party, Nixon avoided meetings with congressmen.
²⁰
To George H. W. Bush (another Ivy Leaguer getting a top job, as chairman of the Republican National Committee), Nixon dismissively said, “Our Senate lineup is depressing. Old farts or young farts.”
²¹

Peace in Vietnam
was proving maddeningly elusive. The Paris talks broke down. When Kissinger cabled Nixon with the news, the president
wrote in his diary, “The North Vietnamese surprised him by slapping him in the face with a wet fish.”
²²
The question arose: Who would tell the American people? Kissinger insisted that the president had to go on national TV. Nixon’s aides felt that Kissinger should be the one, via opening remarks at a press conference. “The president should explain success. The staff explains failures,” said Ehrlichman, who had been summoned to Camp David to help deal with the latest crisis.

As his aides read Kissinger’s cables, Nixon was swimming in his heated pool outside Aspen Lodge. Clouds of steam rose into the December night. Nixon emerged from the pool and donned a giant terry cloth robe. He was limping badly; he had cracked his toe on the side of the pool.
*
²
“That damn ‘Peace is at hand’!” the president muttered, drying his hair.
²⁴

Kissinger returned from Paris blaming the North Vietnamese. “Tawdry, filthy shits,” he stormed. “They make the Russians look good.”
²⁵
Kissinger was on the defensive. He had heard about Nixon’s plan to create a “new establishment,”
*
³
and he feared that he was too closely identified with the old one. “The depths of bitterness against the
Post
here is not to be described,” he had told Kay Graham by phone a week after election while arranging to attend a dinner party of the “Georgetown set” that would be held at a private home safely in the Maryland suburbs.
²⁷
Kissinger had further jeopardized his standing at the White House by giving an unguarded interview to an Italian journalist named Oriana Fallaci in which he compared himself to a “lone cowboy” riding into town to dispatch the villains. Sparring, boasting, and flirting with Fallaci, he seemed to take credit for all of Nixon’s foreign policy successes. As Walter Isaacson noted, for
a man who made fun of Nixon’s Walter Mitty tendencies and had never himself climbed on a horse, the picture of Kissinger as Lone Ranger was almost sweetly laughable. (“The president would have cast Henry, I suspect, as Tonto,” said Ehrlichman.)
²⁸

Kissinger pleaded with Haldeman that he had been “just joking” with the Italian journalist. “She shafted me.” Nixon was not amused. The president wanted to send a warning shot—to let Kissinger know that he should not try to take credit or to make Nixon the bad guy when he went to write his memoirs. Haldeman wrote in his diary that he was to “let Henry know that the EOB and Oval Office and Lincoln Sitting Room have been recorded for protection—so the P has a complete record of your conversations which, of course, you can carry when you write your book.”
²⁹
(Nixon quickly retracted the order.)

Kissinger’s Machiavellian aide Al Haig described Kissinger to the president as “completely paranoid.” Nixon told Haldeman that he thought Kissinger might be suicidal and instructed him to keep records on his mental state (and to remove all Nixon-Kissinger memos from Kissinger’s files, another order Haldeman ignored).
³⁰
In a moment of vexation, Nixon apparently considered easing out Kissinger, according to Haldeman’s diary and the recollection of Chuck Colson. Colson claimed that Nixon led him into a hallway at Aspen Lodge to whisper, “In the next Administration, Kissinger is gone. I don’t want him around.” (Colson later speculated that Nixon was whispering because the room was bugged.)
³¹

But Nixon and Kissinger needed each other. Nixon ordered Kissinger to break the news about the stalled peace talks at a press conference. Kissinger acquiesced—but made sure to mention Nixon’s name fourteen times.
³²
In mid-December, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to resume the bombing of Hanoi, this time with B-52s, massive strategic bombers that were deadly though not always accurate. Once and for all, they were hoping to bring the stubborn North Vietnamese to their knees. The press reaction to the “Christmas bombing” was intensely negative. James Reston of
The New York Times
called it “war by tantrum.”
³³
Kissinger “talked rather emotionally about the fact that
this was a very courageous decision,” Nixon wrote in his diary. Then the president was furious to learn, inevitably, that Kissinger was telling his friends in the liberal media that he had opposed the bombing. When Haldeman confronted Kissinger with the time and date he had talked to one reporter (to catch the leaks, Nixon had ordered Kissinger’s calls monitored), Kissinger responded, “Yes, but that was only on the telephone.”
³⁴