One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (46 page)

Nixon collapsed after the operation. A vein ruptured. Bleeding internally, he fell unconscious, white as a sheet, in deep vascular shock. His heart stopped. “He just flat-lined,” said his White House aide Steve Bull, who was with him in the hospital. “Clinically … he was dead.” His nurse slapped his face, repeating: “Richard! Wake up, Richard!” When he came to consciousness the next day, his doctor told him: “We almost lost you last night.”

For the next two decades, Richard Nixon tried to turn his life into a parable of a man who suffered, died, and rose again.

Having taken every tape and every file he could find before he left the White House, he signed a $2 million contract for his memoirs, a 1,094-page book that he drafted with the help of the future television news anchor Diane Sawyer and his favorite speechwriter, Raymond Price. He signed a $600,000 deal with the British broadcaster David Frost for a series of interviews.

Nixon made a cunning remark near the end of his encounters with Frost. “What history says about this administration will depend on who writes history,” he said. “Winston Churchill once told one of his critics that history … would treat him well, and his critic said: ‘How do you know?’ And he said, ‘Because I intend to write it.’”

And Nixon did, first in his memoirs, then in eight volumes on statecraft and power. “As people look back on the Nixon administration,” he said in 1988, “they’re probably most likely to remember fifty years from now, one hundred years from now, that we made a difference on a very major issue. We changed the world.” He and he alone had transformed the global balance of power with “the China initiative, which only I could do.”

“History will treat me fairly,” he concluded. “Historians probably won’t.”

The tales of the tapes remained untold: Nixon and his wealthy supporters fought a twenty-year battle until his death in 1994 to keep them out of the hands of historians and citizens alike. It took twenty more years, up through 2014, before the last of the tapes were released and made available for the arduous task of transcription.

The tens of thousands of recently declassified documents from his years in office, on top of the tapes, are the real history of the Nixon administration. This book’s task is to tell it as it happened, in the words of the man himself—the man who said in his second inaugural address that we must answer to history, and to our conscience, for our work.

*   *   *

Ray Price, who was with Nixon throughout his presidency and in his exile, gave an oral history interview in 2007 to Timothy Naftali, who transformed the Richard Nixon Presidential Library from a mausoleum into a living museum.

Talking about Nixon’s burdens in the Oval Office, Price said: “You have to, in some cases, sacrifice a lot of virtue. You may not have to sacrifice virgins, but you may have to sacrifice virtue sometimes. And that’s the only way you get things done in the real world. It is a real world, and a lot of the critics tend to forget that the world is real.… And people forget he actually was human. A lot of people may not believe this, but he was.”

“We don’t expect our presidents to be human,” Naftali said.

The two men laughed together.

“But almost all of them have been,” Price said.

Judgments

President Richard M. Nixon
: Named as an unindicted coconspirator by the Watergate grand jury; unconditionally pardoned by President Ford.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew
: Pleaded no contest to evaded taxes on bribes he took while in office; three-year sentence suspended.

Attorney General John N. Mitchell
: Convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and perjury; served nineteen months in prison.

White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman
: Convicted of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice; served eighteen months in prison.

White House assistant to the president for domestic affairs John D. Ehrlichman
: Convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice, conspiracy to violate civil rights, and perjury; served eighteen months in prison.

White House counsel John W. Dean III
: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate cover-up; served four months.

White House special counsel Charles W. Colson
: Pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice; served seven months.

White House deputy assistant to the president Dwight L. Chapin
: Pleaded guilty to lying to the Watergate grand jury; served eight months.

White House aide to Ehrlichman and liaison to federal law enforcement Egil Krogh Jr.
: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate civil rights in his role overseeing the Plumbers; served four and a half months; license to practice law restored by the state of Washington.

Nixon attorney and financier Herbert W. Kalmbach
: Pleaded guilty in connection with the sale of ambassadorships to wealthy campaign contributors; served six months; license to practice law restored by the state of California.

CREEP deputy director Jeb Stuart Magruder
: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, fraud, and wiretapping; served seven months.

CREEP finance director and former commerce secretary Maurice Stans
: Pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor violations of campaign finance laws; fined $5,000.

CREEP adviser and presidential aide Frederick C. LaRue
: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice; served five and a half months.

Watergate burglary overseer E. Howard Hunt
: Convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping; served thirty-three months.

Watergate burglars Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis
: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping; their sentences ranged from twelve to fifteen months.

Watergate wiretapper James W. McCord Jr.
: Convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping; broke the case with his letter to Judge Sirica; served four months.

Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy
: Convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping; served fifty-two months, the longest sentence of all.

Acknowledgments

One Man Against the World
exists thanks in great part to three people: Stephen Rubin, the courageous president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company; Gillian Blake, Holt’s extraordinary editor in chief, who gave every word meaning; and my brilliant literary agent, Kathy Robbins, who has stood by me for twenty years.

At the Robbins Office, David Halpern contributed mightily. At Holt, thanks to Chris O’Connell, Meryl Sussman Levavi, Jenna Dolan, Eleanor Embry, and Caroline Zancan.

The collected works of Richard Nixon include 2,636 hours of taped White House conversations open to the public. The struggle to wrestle them from Nixon—and the continuing effort to transcribe them—has been an epic battle. The last 340 hours of tapes were released on August 21, 2013, nearly forty years to the day after their existence was revealed at the Senate Watergate Hearings. The talented Cynthia Colonna helped me immeasurably in transcribing hundreds of crucial Nixon tapes.

All Nixon historians stand on the shoulders of Stanley Kutler, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1994, Kutler sued the National Archives and the Nixon estate to force the release of the White House tapes. He won. He worked tirelessly for more than twenty years to bring the truth of the Nixon administration out of the past and into the light of day. Stanley died in April 2015. I wish he could have read this book.

Harry Robbins Haldeman produced handwritten and dictated diaries that describe in minute detail the mind of Richard Milhous Nixon. Haldeman’s candor can be checked meticulously against contemporaneous documents and records. Haldeman almost always got it right—and his reflections have a mordant sense of humor. Without his diaries (online and in the public domain at the Nixon Library’s website), replete with passages declassified as recently as November 2014, no accurate account of Richard Nixon’s presidency would be possible.

The memoirs of members of the Nixon administration are often self-serving, and sometimes demonstrably false. An exception is John W. Dean III’s
The Nixon Defense
, published in August 2014. Dean—who, like Iago in Shakespeare’s
Othello
, plotted to destroy his master—may not be the most reliable narrator of the Nixon tragedy, but his book is essential. With the help of forty-two Nixon Presidential Library archivists and six personal assistants, Dean transcribed a multitude of previously unpublished tapes. His book is a straightforward script of the conversations and confrontations that preceded Nixon’s downfall.

Timothy Naftali led the Nixon Presidential Library for four crucial years until November 2011. He is an unsung hero of American history. I am grateful to him, his successors, and every staff member of the Nixon Library, who will serve generations of Americans throughout the twenty-first century.

The editors, historians, and archivists of
The Foreign Relations of the United States
series produce the official diplomatic history of America, published continuously since the Civil War. Their work is unique and invaluable. Laboring tirelessly—often against strong opposition from the CIA—they have printed fifty-six thick volumes of declassified documents on the foreign policies of the Nixon administration, all available online. Since 2007, these have incorporated the transcripts of hundreds of hours of conversations among Nixon, Kissinger, and their top military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials.

My mother, Professor Dora B. Weiner, is a distinguished historian. She taught me how to read and write. I am forever grateful to her.

I love my wife, Kate Doyle, who works with all her heart and soul in the name of human rights, and our daughters, Emma Doyle and Ruby Doyle, who know that American democracy is a work in progress—and that work may take a long time. We are all in it for the long haul. I dedicate this book, and my life, to them.

Notes

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

Abbreviations

Author’s Note

“I gave them a sword”: Nixon interview with David Frost, broadcast May 19, 1977, broadcast on American public television stations, online at
http://www.wgbh.org/programs/FrostNixon-The-Original-Watergate-Interviews-489/episodes/FrostNixon-The-Original-Watergate-Interviews-7381
.

“a cancer within”: John W. Dean to Nixon, March 21, 1973, NWHT, White House.

1: “A great, bad man”

“
the
world leader”: Jan. 2, 1971, entry in H. R. Haldeman,
Haldeman Diaries
, online at
http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/haldeman-diaries/haldeman-diaries.php
.

“an indefinable spirit”: Richard M. Nixon, State of the Union address, Jan. 22, 1970, Public Papers of Richard Nixon.

“Nixon has a genius”: Martin Luther King Jr. letter to Earl Mazo, cited in Clayburn Carson et al., eds.,
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 481.

“We are still dealing with governments” and “Those Chinese are out to whip me”: May 27, 1971, NWHT, Oval Office.