Richard Nixon's Last Campaign

 Richard Nixon and I spent much of our adult political lives bound together, it often seemed to me if not to him. I had been a freshman in college in 1952, forty-two years ago when he made his first national race, and he died a few weeks after my sixtieth birthday. This enduring relationship did not bring us together, to coin a phrase. I had never been a great fan, and I was most assuredly not one of that tiny group of favored journalists who were close to him in the earlier part of his career, nor 0he of the select journalists summoned after his disgraced departure from Washington to come to dinner for one of his carefully orchestrated performances in Saddle River, New Jersey. These journalists were invited to what were more often than not stag dinners so they could sample firsthand his expertise on foreign affairs, and go back to their peers and tell them how good Nixon was in small groups, and how he seemed to have grown in his years since office.

 The two of us met only once. It was in 1964, when Neil Sheehan and I ran into him on Manhattan's East Side near where he was living and introduced ourselves to him, saying that we were both back from Vietnam. We must have implied that we wanted to talk to him about it because he fled from us as quickly as possible.

 We almost met a second time. This was in the fall of 1967 when I was at Harper's and Nixon was just back from Vietnam and gearing up for a 1968 run at the presidency and he invited a select group of writers and editors to his house to hear his views of Vietnam. Ray Price, one of his aides at the time, had called Willie Morris at Harper's and had invited him to come. Willie had said he couldn't but that I was the magazine's expert on Vietnam and perhaps I could come in his place. Ray promised to get back to Willie and called later to say that I was not quite right for the group, but perhaps I could come on another occasion. I never got an invitation. Still, I never made his enemies list either. I had written critically of his two Democratic predecessors, and once, after his fall from office, I went on local television during a book tour to be interviewed by, of all people, Martha Mitchell, who, having read The Best and The Brightest in preparation, complimented me on it and said that she had neve realized reporters had been so critical of the Kennedy years.

 I did not think of myself as a Nixon hater, although I probably qualified on a number of grounds, and I wished him well when he began his presidency. When Gerry Ford pardoned him I was glad, not so much because it would make life easier for Nixon but because it would make life easier for the country, the fabric of which, I felt, had been damaged enough (although in retrospect I think the pardon should have included some sort of promise on his part to be gone from the public scene permanently).

 Having watched him carefully over the years, I felt there were very few things about Richard Nixon that could surprise me. I was wrong. The success of his final campaign i the one that began the moment he was involuntarily driven from office, just ahead of impeachment in 1974, and that lasted for twenty years until his death in 1994 -- was a tour de force, the most successful race of his entire career. It was in essence a campaign to rehabilitate himself, to restore his good name, and to minimize Watergate, and he waged it doggedly and with singular skill, knowing all the while that the people he depended on for its success were the very people he considered to be his sworn enemies -- the men and women of the media. He waged it on two fronts, the first being those Saddle River dinners and his books and television appearances, the second being more covert: an attempt -- which still goes on -- to block access to thousands of tapes that are supposed to be in the public domain.

 Anyone watching and listening to the television coverage of his final days, from his death to his funeral, had to be impressed by the success of his effort. The coverage seemed to be not merely scripted, but indeed edited by Nixon himself -- I almost thought I might see his name on the final credits: Executive Producer, Richard M. Nixon.

 In the end, no one could doubt that this campaign was the greatest success of his career. If the print coverage of him was hardly robust, the degree to which the networks went in the tank was simply shameful. Those of us who always suspected that Nixon would have been a better campaign manager than candidate now had that view reinforced. The degree to which the networks were coopted by his preplanned script must have surprised even the networks' executives and the members of the Nixon family themselves, and might even give the network people some pause over how to cover any similar situation in the unlikely event that there is a similar situation.

 Nixon pulled off this last, most successful campaign against great odds, and although it is unlikely that future historians will be as forgetful of the more complex nature of his personality and the tragic impact of that personality on his political record as the leading television personalities were during the final ceremonies, one had to admire the true grit that went into this twenty-year-long campaign. Nixon was aided by a number of things. There was no real opponent: over all those final years he was campaigning primarily against himself, and against modern memory, which in a television age is marginal enough, and he was doing it in a country where most ordinary people were generally eager to forget so complex and sordid an event as Watergate.

 In addition, Nixon -- the most fiercely partisan politician of modern times -- was forced by the very nature of the final campaign to go the high road the entire time. Setting out to be the wise eider statesman, he did not dare become partisan. That would only mean the reincarnation of the divisive Nixon of the past, the very Nixon he was running against. The high road often took him overseas, and he was often seen in Moscow and Beijing. He was for good international relationships, rather than bad ones, and he was for better relations with the Communists, although, needless to say, one always had to be wary of the Communists. He believed in a strong defense, rather than a weak one, for the road to peace could only be taken by those who were strong.

 He used the immediate circumstances of his death exceptionally well. The death of a head of state and the subsequent state funeral are hardly the optimum time for journalists to dredge up old controversies; it is a time to mourn and to remember, and the doubts of even the best reporters who are called on to comment are, by the very nature of the event, muted. One tends to speak well of the dead anyway, and Nixon understood that. He understood as well that network television people rise to all ceremonial occasions, and if they do not cover American politics very well, they do cover ceremonies well, and among their favorite ceremonies are funerals. (Though the networks have barely bothered to cover the rise of modern industrial Japan, a story that does not lend itself to pictures, they flew to Tokyo to cover in great and loving detail the funeral of Emperor Hirohito, a man they had barely deigned to notice in life.)

 In addition, I am sure Nixon understood something else about network television: that at such moments there is an unconscious institutional instinct on the part of network journalists -- the higher they are, the more concerned they are, like politicians, about losing their own popularity -- to be concerned more than anything else about positioning themselves. One can assume, then, that the essential inner equation of ranking network journalists during these days was something like this: the more truth I tell, and the closer I come to the complexity of this man, the less welcome I will seem at his funeral (and in the living rooms of America), and the more I will seem to be violating the spirit of it, and the more the ordinary people of the country will resent me rather than the deceased.

 Mr. Nixon's final campaign struck me from the start as of a piece and a very shrewd one. At first, when Nixon began to shake the bonds of his singular disgrace, he returned as something else that television news likes: an aberration -- a disgraced former official trying to come back, gradually working to transform himself from exiled hermit and the man of disgrace to would-be elder statesman. That process made him a worthy figure for television: if he was not yet a wise elder, he was something better -- a figure not so much of politics but of an ongoing American soap opera. We all had an almost prurient interest in this man, so recently at center stage, then driven off into exile. And so, with his doggedness and his productivity, he was slowly and systematically legitimized.

 Television was the preferred conduit, its people being dramatically less disputatious than those of print, and generally more willing to accept a person at face value, its senior people far more willing to show flexibility on the interview's ground rules (what could and could not be asked) in order to gain access. Nixon, not surprisingly, tended to be quite controlling in setting the parameters of his televised appearances, and those of us with long memories will remember that some seventeen years ago, when he decided to talk about Watergate for the record for the first time, he was paid a great deal of money for doing it and the chosen vehicle for this moment was David Frost, whom only the most generous, such as Mr. Frost himself, would describe as a journalist.

 As the campaign continued, Nixon wrote a great many books, one of them, RN, quite revealing, and many of them, it seemed to me, quite repetitive. Books were important because, for one thing, he could choose the subject: statecraft (De Gaulte meets RN, Mao meets RN, RN reflects on the Churchill he knew).

 There is, I think, a strong sense in these books that RN's relationships with and intimate knowledge of the past greats of the world have been hyped considerably. An example of this may be found in the most recent book, Beyond Peace, where Nixon comments on the fact that it was Dwight Eisenhower who had personally told him of how the Russians had suffered terribly but had played an indispensable role in defeating Nazi Germany. I quite agree with that, but I must say that it did not take a personal intimate conversation with Ike to make me aware of the contribution of the Red Army. (One can almost imagine the White House conversation. Ike: "Dick, did I ever tell you about the role of the Red Army near the end of World War II?" Nixon: "No, but I bet they stood by and let us do all the heavy lifting." Ike: "No, as a matter of fact, Dick, for a bunch of Commies, they really surprised me. I would call their role indispensable.")

 Books were important for another reason: they got him on the television shows. It is not unfair to say that in most appearances he went up against slow-pitch softball. As his final campaign progressed, we learned that he had a very good sense of how and where to go to gain attention. He went to a great many funerals at home and around the world. He traveled often, and seemed late in life to have a fondness for visiting Communist dictatorships, where, ironicalIy, he tended to be treated as a greater celebrity than when he visited anything as pedestrian as a working democracy.

 The circumstances of his meeting representatives of the media world were always carefully monitored and controlled. Those who were screened through for the dinners at Saddle River tended to be either of an ideological predisposition that would allow Nixon some measure of confidence about what they might ask after dinner or too young to remember the Nixon who was so divisive a political figure.

 Not many of my generation who had watched this long psycho-struggle were likely to make the cut. For a time Nixon seemed to be in pursuit of my friend Ward Just, a distinguished Washington Post reporter who has since turned to writing exceptional novels, and many of Just's friends were amazed when he seemed to have made the Nixon A-list and a brief flirtation between the two took place. Since, like most of his contemporaries who did not make the list, Just was not a very ideological man but mildly liberal at heart, and a man who, having covered the Vietnam War, thought it abhorrent, the rest of us wondered what was happening, and whether Ward had tried to make a separate peace. He soon went to the top Nixon mailing list and became the recipient of speeches, memos, itineraries, and even received an autographed copy of Nixon's latest book, one not so much signed as initialed, RN, a reminder, of course, that he had been president. For a time we suspected that Ward had not only made the cut but would soone invited to dinner at Saddle River. And then catastrophe struck: Anthony Lewis of The New York Times wrote a column quoting from one of Just's novels a disparaging reference to the former president. And, with that, the process of seduction, such as it was, stopped. Just went immediately off the A-list.

 Bob Woodward, who watched the procession of reporters to Saddle River over the years (involuntarily from the outside, I might add), was particularly intrigued by what he came to believe was a very deliberate attempt by Nixon and the people around him to bring in young reporters, preferably those who were then covering the White House or the incumbent president in some form or another. Nixon's strategy was to contrast his own strengths with the weaknesses of the incumbent and to gain by comparison. When Reagan was president -- a likeable man of considerable personal ease, but a man hardly known for being able to string coherent sentences together when he spoke informally about policy -- there was an emphasis on Nixon's mastery of subject matter, the fact that he could open his mouth and out would come entire sentences, all of them lucid, and then paragraphs, all of them complete, and, it appeared, publishable at the moment of utterance. With Bush, far better informed and better at the small talk of thoffice than Reagan, Nixon seemed to seize on Bush's weakness, which was that he seemed to lack any larger vision, or grand design, and in the Bush years he emphasized his own larger view of the world.

 The campaign was nothing if not dogged. There were the endless trips overseas, the many books, the carefully edited selections from the books in magazines that had once been so critical of him, like Time, and the controlled, indeed sanitized appearances on various television talk shows. And with that, in the great vacuum of expertise which exists in this country of people who can talk intelligently about foreign policy and are actually allowed into a television studio, Nixon as the elder statesman of the world began to emerge.

 In those later years, his was surely a reasonably intelligent voice, and he generally added to, rather than subtracted from, the public debate. At the end, he was talking more intelligently about helping the post-Communist Russians than was the incumbent Republican, George Bush, and on the book jacket of his newest book there is a quite sane recommendation for normalizing relations with Cuba, along the lines of our relationship with China. But we ought to be clear about this: we are not talking about George Kennan here -- that is, an intellect of great clarity and originality who casts a shining light on the world, thereby helping us to understand what up to then had seemed beyond comprehension. We are talking about a rather conventional, quite intelligent man who, late in his life, was willing to see the world as it was and no longer took political profit from distorting that image as he had for so long. Indeed, one of the problems with his rise as a statesman was the gap between the portrait of t bipolar world he accepted and propagated as an eider statesman and the views of the violently partisan figure who had so bitterly attacked the Democrat officials who were the principal architects of that very same world.

 He was much hailed in those last few days for having had the courage to normalize relationships with China. But the truth was that the Washington-Beijing relationship could probably have been normalized as much as a decade earlier, perhaps as early as 1962, when serious signs of the split between the Chinese and the Russians first appeared. What paralyzed first the Kennedy and then the Johnson administration was the knowledge that if they moved in that direction they would be violently attacked by the core of the Republican party, led, of course, by Nixon. In that critical decade when true statesmanship was crucial and would have been profoundly helpful he remained the most partisan of figures. Perhaps this is the signature of a Nixon hater, but it does, I think, detract somewhat significantly from the historic importance of his trip to China that he was the only president of the United States who could go to China without being red-baited by Richard Nixon.

 The implications of that lost decade, and of his own early partisanship on the issues of China and Vietnam, are quite profound and were glossed over by the media at the end. They should have been far more carefully scrutinized. Lyndon Johnson made the fateful decision to send combat troops to Vietnam in 1965, not because he had any illusions about how easy a war it would be (he certainly had no idea of the degree of difficulty awaiting the American troops who went there, but he did know that it was going to be a great deal harder than a number of his advisers suggested), but because he had powerful memories of the 1950s and the crude Republican attacks on Truman and Acheson for allegedly losing China. When that happened, Johnson liked to say, Truman had lost the Congress, and he, Lyndon Johnson, was not going to be the president who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. The poison that had been gratuitously injected into the bloodstream in the '50s by the Republican right, including Nixon,ame back to haunt us in the '60s.

 Many commentators spoke of the fact that Nixon had ended the Vietnam War. Again, the record is more complicated. In truth, 1968 was a plebiscite against the war, and he could have ended the war much sooner with the same eventual result, and I suspect a much less divided nation, had he been a less divisive person. Instead, some 20,000 Americans and perhaps 200,000 Vietnamese died in the ensuing period when he was president and before the inevitable collapse of Saigon. We also lost a chance to bring out in an orderly way those Vietnamese who had been on our side, leaving us with that pathetic spectacle of trusted allies scrambling on the embassy roof, trying to grab on to skids of helicopters, and we in that period extended the war to Cambodia, with tragic consequences for that country.

 What stopped him from ending the war sooner was not the reality that existed on the ground there -- for it was always laughable that the ARVIN, a defeated army that had failed in the years before 1965 to defeat its enemy, could do what 500,000 Americans and the heaviest bombing in the history of mankind had failed to do. What stood between Nixon and a quicker end to the war was his own past, his own rhetoric and his own bias. The one thing the American people were entitled to in this period after so tragic an intervention and bitter an experience was some measure of truth of how and why we had failed, and what they got was a sham.

 By mentioning all this, I do not mean to suggest that I wanted the networks to make Nixon out to be a demon at the moment of his death. I also realize that there are certain moments of national tragedy which go beyond normal partisan politics, when the anchors and correspondents are more than reporters and are almost consciously agents of a process of healing. At moments like this -- the slaying of a young politician or the tragic explosion of a space shuttle -- they help remind the American people that the residual strengths of the country are far greater than the momentary darkness caused by the bullet of an assassin or the explosion of a space ship. But this was not one of those moments. Richard Nixon was not cut down in the flower of his youth. The nation was not torn apart by his death. The funeral as planned was not just the funeral of a man who had not been in office in twenty years and had left in disgrace. It was at the very least, and quite identifiably, part of a larger process to reste to him the aura of an unblemished presidency, and to erase the remembrance of so disfiguring a scandal, and therefore to no small degree a political event, and it should have been reported as such, with a certain cool reserve.

 The portrait given us over the final days of a wise elder statesman who had battled his way back from serious political problems rather than the tense angry man of significant skills -- the Nixon preserved on the tapes: insecure vindictive, raging at everyone and everything around him -- represented Nixon's final triumph over his arch enemy: the media.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe