The Arrogance of Power (47 page)

Nixon noted without demurring that the Frenchman had no use for the parliamentary system, that he thought “Members of parliament can paralyze action, they cannot initiate it.”
⁷
“Authority,” he quoted de Gaulle as arguing, “derives from prestige . . . there can be no prestige without mystery.”

No book in Nixon's library reportedly was more well thumbed or more densely annotated than de Gaulle's 1960 memoir,
The Edge of the Sword.
He underscored passages like: “Powerful personalities . . . frequently lack that surface charm that wins popularity. . . .” Also, “Great men of action . . . have without exception possessed to a very high degree the faculty of withdrawing into themselves.”

As early as 1960, the year he met de Gaulle, CBS's Nancy Dickerson watched the Nixons board an airplane “as if they were traveling royalty on an imperial state visit.” She believed Nixon had even then “studied de Gaulle and was already trying to emulate him.” Robert Finch thought the same, as did Bob Haldeman.

“He feels he should be more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious, i.e. de Gaulle . . .” the chief of staff would note after a session with Nixon after arriving in the White House. And soon after de Gaulle died: “We discussed the general P.R. question . . . especially since the death of de Gaulle we have a real opportunity to build the P as
the
world leader. . . .”

On a state visit to Paris Nixon publicly extolled his mentor as “a giant among men.” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who agreed that Nixon tried to imitate de Gaulle, suggested dryly in a 1997 interview that therein lay the difference: Nixon was “a shrewd, calculating figure, but no giant. He would have liked to have been more giant than he was. He was not an imposing figure like de Gaulle.”

_____

To establish himself as a master world statesman, Nixon began an extensive program of travel. In 1963, during what was supposed to be a family vacation, he saw, in addition to de Gaulle, Spain's Franco, President Nasser of Egypt, Italy's defense minister, the British foreign secretary, and West Germany's Adenauer.

Touring East Berlin behind its newly erected wall, he filed a news report on the excursion in breathless tabloid tones. “As we were walking along the street searching for a taxi, a shadowy figure walked up to us and said, ‘Do you have a cigarette?' . . . The man looked around and said, ‘Our only hope is with the Americans.' ”

Nixon's guide in the Eastern sector, BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler, recalled how Nixon leaped out of the car on Stalin Allee to hand out visiting cards inscribed “Vice President of the United States of America,” a post he had not held for nearly two years. To the bemused Wheeler, Nixon seemed “weird . . . Totally mad.”

Two years later, while in Finland, he decided on a whim to make the twenty-hour train journey to Moscow. A Canadian journalist, David Levy, came upon him there dining at the Sovietskaya Hotel, “seated at a long table groaning with jellied sturgeon and Georgian wines.” Learning that Levy knew the private address of Nikita Khrushchev, ousted and “unpersoned” six months earlier, Nixon asked to be taken at once to see the man he had once famously confronted.

When the
babushka
at the door of Khrushchev's apartment building proved uncooperative, Nixon made do with leaving a scrawled note. On the following day he engaged in a dialogue—fatuous, according to Jules Witcover, a usually evenhanded biographer—with an official at Moscow University. He also “accosted a policeman with stupid questions.”
⁸
American reporters present thought his behavior ludicrous but reported it all anyway. Nixon achieved what he wanted: publicity back home.

He continued his circuit of the world for five years, taking in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia—especially Asia, where the United States was becoming mired in the Vietnam War. He covered 225,000 miles and on one of ten flights to Japan contracted phlebitis, the inflammation of a vein in his leg that—as president and afterward—would come close to killing him.

Nixon was to claim later he had been “running the whole operation on a shoestring, traveling sometimes on coach flights with only one person with me and sometimes none at all. . . . As far as privacy was concerned I just took the inside seat and put whoever was riding with me on the outside, opened my briefcase and became deliberately oblivious. . . .”

This was a misrepresentation. The companion on many of the flights was his best friend, Bebe Rebozo, and much of the travel was paid for by
Reader's Digest
or Pepsi, which he represented as VIP attorney at bottle plant openings. Neither company was a mean patron, and Pepsi certainly got a return on its investment. In Rome, Nixon addressed the press while conspicuously sipping the soft drink. During a television appearance a waiter reached past Nixon to turn a Pepsi bottle so that the label faced the camera.

Globe-trotting for Pepsi, however, was hardly the Gaullist grandeur to which Nixon aspired. “Nobody paid any attention to him,” said
Life
's Hugh Sidey. “Some of my bureau chiefs said he would come into town—a former
vice president—and ask to see the head of state, whether he was in Kuala Lumpur, Algiers, or some faraway place. In many cases they wouldn't see him. He was a has-been; they didn't like him very much.

“He didn't care. . . . When he got to the White House, he knew virtually every leader of every country in the world because someplace along the line he'd ended up as a reject with the guy. . . . Six or twelve years later this fellow would be elected president or prime minister, and he'd be Nixon's pal. . . . It paid off in the end.”

Behind Nixon's desk in his New York office stood a second desk, holding serried ranks of signed photographs of the high and the mighty. The monarchs had pride of place: the queen of England, the kings of Belgium and Thailand, the emperor of Ethiopia, the shah of Iran. There were poses of Nixon at Eisenhower's side and—somewhat unexpectedly—a portrait inscribed with
“bonnes pensées”
from Albert Schweitzer in his West African leper colony. A book about the Quakers was left lying where visitors could not miss seeing it.

“This,” an aide reflected later, “was Nixon's carefully set stage for winning over the skeptical.”

_____

Sheer hard work, more than his attempts at window dressing, is what ultimately brought Nixon real rewards. During one forty-eight-hour period in the fall of 1966 the man who was not a candidate appeared before the Supreme Court in his legal capacity, flew to San Francisco to give television interviews, drove north to Oakland to address a political meeting, south to Palo Alto for a planning meeting, then—after three hours' sleep—there was more television, a fund-raising breakfast, an airplane flight, a press conference, a rally for a fellow Republican, another flight, another press conference, more TV, another flight and another rally, yet another airplane hop, and then—after another short night—the long haul back to the East Coast.

Nixon had sallied forth to breathe fire into the Republican faithful in the midterm elections, to bring the party back from the ignominy of 1964, and he delivered a smashing victory. On election day, with most of the results in, he celebrated with colleagues at El Morocco, the New York nightclub. “I never heard him sound happier,” said Herb Klein, whom he called that night. “It was clear that he knew he now had a launching pad for another try at the presidency.”

Nixon had been refusing even to discuss the possibility of running in 1968. He remained noncommittal even after the big win and a Thanksgiving break with Rebozo, and after political intimates said they wanted to organize a Nixon for President committee. The following year, as other contenders—George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and a former actor by the name of Ronald Reagan—entered the lists, Nixon watched and waited. In nearly two hundred years no man defeated in a run for the U.S. presidency and denied renomination on the following attempt had ever been nominated again, let alone elected.

In September 1967 Nixon's mother Hannah died. She had languished in a rest home, giving no sign that she recognized visitors, since suffering a stroke four years earlier. According to Nixon, his last conversation with her had taken place in the hospital in 1962, after she had been through a serious operation and he had been defeated by Pat Brown. Then, he recalled, he had leaned over her bed to urge: “Mother, don't give up.” She responded, he claimed, by pulling herself up and telling him: “Richard, don't
you
give up. Don't let anyone tell you you are through.” Her advice was almost identical to what, as Nixon told it, his dying father had told him in 1956: “Dick, you keep fighting.”

Three months after Hannah's death, according to Nixon, he sat down in front of a fire and made notes on whether or not to run for president. His first line supposedly read: “I have decided personally against becoming a candidate.” Then, after a listing of reasons not to run, he wrote: “I don't give a damn.”
⁹

That Christmas, Nixon said, he consulted the family and gave “great weight” to what they thought. Nineteen-year-old Julie told him, “You have to do it, for the country,” and twenty-one-year-old Tricia said, “If you don't run, Daddy, you really will have nothing to live for.” “Daddy,” Julie has recalled, citing her contemporary diary, “was very depressed. I had never known him to be depressed before. . . .”

We cannot know what Pat really thought. She later told an interviewer of the “horror” she had been through in the past, that she felt she could not go through it again. According to Julie, though, life as a New York matron was beginning to pall somewhat for her mother. She sometimes grew restless, she confided to a friend. On a stroll along Madison Avenue, Julie remembered, she and her father agreed that “Mother needed something to do.”

Pat's resolve to avoid politics had already been broken in 1966, when, as “Miss Ryan,” she had quietly worked a campaign telephone. Was she, Pat asked her daughters that year, “a failure to Daddy”? A few months later, though, she was telling Julie “flatly, almost tonelessly” that she could not face another presidential race.

Nixon had recently discussed his marriage with his younger brother Ed. “There's never been anybody but Pat,” he had said, “never needs to be.” In fact, Nixon the proper family man had recently been letting his standards slip a little.

_____

During the 1964 convention, while drinking with a group of Republicans in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel, Nixon had become, in John Ehrlichman's words, “loudly celebratory.” At the end of the evening, when most of the others had drifted away, he made “clumsy passes” at a campaign staffer in her twenties. “He was drinking hard, and he lost it,” Ehrlichman recalled. “She was very
embarrassed; we were all embarrassed.” The young woman finally escaped Nixon's advances and left.
¹⁰

Arnholt Smith, who had known Nixon from childhood, recalled an episode during another party in California. “I was looking for my wife and—jeez!—I couldn't find her. Apparently Dick had maneuvered her into the john, and they were drinking highballs. I finally found out where they were and had to jerk her out. He was high as a kite, and he said, ‘We're not doing anything, we're not doing anything!' . . . When he got to drinking, Nixon was really something.

“Pat,” said Smith, “was a wonderful woman, but very straitlaced. She was Queen Victoria. I think he sought a change from that. . . . He sometimes wandered.”

During this period Nixon took an interest in a Chinese woman in her early thirties, a relationship that remained hidden from the public until 1976, when the
New York Times
revealed that the FBI had investigated a reported “affair” between Nixon and Marianna Liu, a former hostess at the Hong Kong Hilton. The
National Enquirer
gleefully assigned a team of reporters to dig further and later ran two lengthy stories.

The situation had begun to surface with a security flap in 1967. “One of my contacts in another U.S. agency,” former FBI Hong Kong representative Dan Grove told the author, “came to see me one morning and said one of his sources, Marianna Liu, was seeing Nixon. He thought I should be aware of this. . . . He said he knew Nixon had had a top secret briefing on the People's Republic of China, and that made his contact with Liu a risk.”
¹¹

According to Liu's attorney, FBI records confirm that her contacts with Nixon triggered an alarm and that Nixon himself came under surveillance in Hong Kong, to the point of being photographed through his bedroom window with infrared cameras. Grove believed the work was carried out by the British—Hong Kong was then a British colony—at the request of the CIA.

Early press accounts suggested the pair had first met in the late fifties, when Nixon was vice president and Liu was visiting Washington with a group from Hong Kong. They certainly met repeatedly between 1964 and 1967, when Nixon was making annual trips to Hong Kong. Liu told the
New York Times
she thought she saw him on all but one of the visits. In 1967, when she was hospitalized, Nixon sent flowers.

Later, when he was president, Liu not only moved to the United States but lived initially in Nixon's hometown, Whittier. Her sponsors for residence included a businessman with whom Nixon had stayed in Hong Kong and a Nixon-era immigration official. By one report, Liu saw Nixon twice at the White House.