Nixon's Secret (82 page)

Dole then reminded us of a few very eloquent words Nixon once spoke: “You must never be satisfied with success. And you should never be discouraged by failure. Failure can be sad. But the greatest sadness is not to try and fail, but to fail to try. In the end, what matters is that you have always lived life to the hilt.” Dole proclaimed that Nixon was strong, brave, and unafraid of controversy, unyielding in his conviction—and that he lived every day of his life to the hilt. In his closing remarks, Dole said, “The man who was born in the house his father built would become the world’s greatest architect of peace, the largest figure of our time whose influence will be timeless. That was Richard Nixon. How American. May God bless Richard Nixon, and may God bless the United States.”

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave some details about how Nixon shaped foreign affairs. He said, “He came into office when the forces of history were moving America from a position of dominance to one of leadership. Dominance reflects strength; leadership must be earned. And Richard Nixon earned that leadership role for his country with courage, dedications, and skill. The price for doing things halfway is no less than for doing it completely, so we might as well do them properly.”

It was, however, the eulogy of President Clinton that Nixon would have enjoyed the most because it signified Nixon’s success in his final rehabilitation. Clinton remembered Nixon as being a spirited politician. Clinton said, “He never gave up being part of the action. He said many times that unless a person has a goal, a new mountain to climb, his spirit will die. Well, based on our last phone conversations and the letter he wrote me just a month ago, I can say that his spirit was very much alive until the very end. On behalf of all four former presidents who are here; President Ford, President Carter, President Reagan, President Bush, and behalf of a grateful nation we bid farewell to Richard Milhous Nixon. May the day of judging President Nixon on anything but his entire life come to a close.”

Henry Kissinger’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, summed it up better than most. He said that his experience with Nixon impressed him as “a very complex man in everything he did, and there was a light side to him, there was a brilliance side to him, and there was a brooding side. And I think sometimes when he had the advisors appeal to his good side, he was able to do very good things.”
11

  Nixons’ death brought accolades from strange quarters.

Bill Clinton added, “He suffered defeats that would have ended most political careers, yet he won stunning victories that many of the worlds most popular leaders have failed to attain.”
12
Rev. Billy Graham: “He was one of the most misunderstood men, and I think he was one of the greatest men of the century.”
13
Boris Yelstin (Russian Leader): “One of the greatest politicians in the world.”
14
John Sears: “The picture I have of him is a mosaic, an image formed from a series of vignettes often so unexpected they can never be forgotten.”
15
Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose: “Nixon was the most successful American politician of the twentieth century.”
16

White House speech writer Ben Stein, whose father Herbert Stein was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, recently said, “Let’s look at him with fresh eyes. Unlike LBJ, he did not get us into a large, unnecessary war on false pretenses. Unlike JFK, he did not bring call girls and courtesans into the White House or try to kill foreign leaders. Unlike FDR, he did not lead us into a war for which we were unprepared.

He helped with a cover-up of a mysterious burglary that no one understands to this day. That was his grievous sin, and grievously did he answer for it. But to me, Richard Nixon will always be visionary, friend, and peacemaker.”

Carl Bernstein: “Nixon defined the postwar era for America, and he defined the television era for America.”
17
President Jimmy Carter: “His historic visits to China and the Soviet Union paved the way to the normalization of relations between our countries.”
18
Former President Ronald Reagan: “There is no question that the legacy of this complicated and fascinating man will continue to guide the forces of democracy forever.”
19
Even his 1972 opponent George McGovern said, “Not too many people could psychologically withstand being thrown out of the White House. It takes an enormous amount of self-discipline that I had to recognize as remarkable.”
20
Not all remembrances of Nixon were favorable. Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote shortly after Nixon’s death: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.”
21
Thompson, a lifelong hater of Nixon, amid the bile, also recognized Nixon’s special brand of resilience. “As long as Nixon was politically alive—and he was, all the way to the end—we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road,” wrote Thompson. “There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.”
22

I summed up my one special memory of Nixon for
Newsweek:
“Working for Richard Nixon was like working for the mafia. You never really left and you never knew when you might be called on to perform a political chore.”
23
Nixon achieved his goals of a more peaceful world and a lessening of tensions with America’s enemies. He built a government at once more compassionate and progressive than anyone would have imagined.

Driven from office by his terrible secrets; his approval of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, the Bay of Pigs, his reliance, along with virtually every national politician of the 1950s and 1960s, on mafia funding, the bribes he had taken from the Teamsters, his contretemps with the CIA, his knowledge of what really happened in Dallas and who was involved secured him a pardon in order to avoid prison and launch his greatest public comeback.

In 1986 the filmmaker Oliver Stone was producing his much-heralded film on Richard Nixon. After conferring with Nixon associates Garment and Ziegler, Oliver Stone made John Sears one of his chief consultants on the project; recognition that Sears’s unique perspective on the Nixon psyche was vital.

Nixon friends feared the film would be a hatchet job. Instead, it is one of the most compelling films in the Stone
ouevre
presenting a surprisingly balanced portrait of the president. Actor Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Nixon was distinctly sympathetic. Stone even had Nixon standing up to a fictional conspiracy of rich men who had helped put him in office. Sears had shaped the movie as much as he had shaped the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein.

The release of the film was accompanied by a book comprised of the screenplay and some essays, one of them by Sears. “Nixon,” Sears wrote,“was the loner produced by a nation of loners. That was the reason the country could not forgive Nixon for his illegal acts, even though others had done the same. We are a land of loners and our only protection is the law. Did I want him to escape at the time?” Sears asked rhetorically. “Yes. Did I think he would? No.”

But was Nixon, on balance, worth it for the country? “I would submit,” Sears wrote, “that if the world survives for a million years, perhaps its finest hour may be that in the last half of the twentieth century, when the power to blow up the world rested in the hands of a few men in two very unsophisticated and suspicious countries, we didn’t do it, and one American, Richard Nixon, moved the Cold War away from permanent confrontation toward victory. How can any wrong that he did compare with that?”

Richard Nixon won his final campaign.

NOTES

1
.     Barry Goldwater,
Goldwater
, p. 282.

2
.     Jonathan Aitken,
Nixon: A Life
, p. 529.

3
.     Malcolm MacDougall,
We Almost Made It
, p. 169.

4
.     Ashley Powers, “Nixon’s Legacy Still Divides City,”
LA Times
,
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/22/local/me-nixonwall22
.

5
.     Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery
, pp. 527–528.

6
.     “CBS Evening News,” April 27, 1994, interview with Rita Braver.

7
.     
http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/02/25/hillary-fired-lies-unethical-behavior-congressional-job-former-boss
.

8
.     Jerry Zeifman, “Crocodile Tears in Connecticut,”
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/hillarys-crocodile-tears-in-connecticut
.

9
.     
http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/thelife/postpresidency.php
.

10
.   
http://www.nixonlibrary.gov
.

11
.   CNN
Crossfire
transcript #1080, April 27, 1994.

12
.   April 4, 1994.

13
.   
The Washington Post
, April 22, 1994.

14
.   
The New York Times,
April 23, 1994.

15
.   
Los Angeles Times,
April 24, 1994.

16
.   
CBS This Morning,
April 25, 1994.

17
.   
The Washington Post,
April 25, 1994.

18
.   
The Washington Post,
April 23, 1994.

19
.   
Dallas Morning News,
April 23, 1994.

20
.   
U.S. News
, May 2, 1994.

21
.   Hunter Thompson, “He Was a Crook,”
Rolling Stone,
June 16, 1994.

22
.   Ibid.

23
.   Roger Stone, “Remembering Nixon,”
Newsweek
, April 22, 1994.

APPENDIX 1

28 November 1967

FROM: RAY PRICE

SUBJ: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GENERAL STRATEGY FROM NOW THROUGH WISCONSIN

We enter with these factors in the equation:

1)    RN is the front-runner, maintaining or increasing strength in the polls with relatively little activity.

2)    We can’t be sure how solid this support is (e.g., the New Hampshire attitude that he’s a good man but probably can’t win, thus their votes are really being cast away—or cast for LBJ).

3)    Romney is certain to conduct a high-intensity campaign, with a lot of street cornering and probably a lot of TV. This has apparently been effective in Michigan; whether it’s transferable to a 1968 Presidential campaign is another question.

4)    Rockefeller and Reagan continue to exercise their attractions from the sidelines. Rockefeller’s strength derives principally from RN’s can’t-win image. He’s riding high, not particularly because people like him, but because they’ve been told (which is something other than thinking) that he can win and that he thus is the only realistic alternative to LBJ. At this stage of the game, poll results don’t particularly show what voters think about a candidate; they reflect in large measure what they’ve been told. They haven’t begun thinking that intensively. Reagan’s strength derives from personal charisma, glamor, but primarily the ideological fervor of the Right and the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him “in his place”—or at least to echo their own anger and frustration.

RN is the overwhelming favorite of the delegate types; if we can lick the can’t-win thing we’ve got it made. This is the one possible obstacle between RN and the nomination. Thus the whole thrust of our effort should be aimed at erasing this image. How? To answer this, we have to analyze the image.

Basically, it divides into two parts:

a)   He lost his last two elections.

b)   He somehow “feels” like a loser.

We can’t alter the facts of (a), and probably our capacity to get people to look at those facts realistically is limited. We can make any number of powerful arguments about the way in which those results should be interpreted: in 1960, one of the closest races in history against one of the most charismatic of American political figures, the effect of the Catholic issue, vote-stealing, defending the Eisenhower record, etc.; and in 1962, the bitter split in the California Republican party, the fact that he wasn’t credible as a mere governor (too big for the job, and he showed it), etc. But politics is only minimally a rational science, and no matter how compelling these arguments—even if we can get people to sit down and listen to them—they’ll only be effective if we can get the people to make the emotional leap, or what theologians call “the leap of faith.” If we can make them feel that he’s got the aura of a winner, they’ll rationalize away the past defeats by themselves; if we can’t make them feel that, no matter what the rational explanations, they’ll pull down the mental blind marked with those simple words, “he lost.”

The natural human use of reason is to support prejudices, not to arrive at opinions.

Then how do we attack (b)—the notion that he “feels” like a loser?

First, we bear in mind that to a lot of people he feels like a winner. It’s the others we have to worry about. And we might oversimplify by dividing these into two basic groups: 1) those who themselves feel there’s “something about him I don’t like,” or “something about him that spells loser”; and 2) those who themselves react altogether positively, but consider him a loser-type because of the way others react to him. The line between these two groups, of course, isn’t sharp; and again we have to bear in mind that most people’s reactions to most public figures are a mixture of positives and negatives. But for purposes of analysis, we can proceed from this division.