NIXON LIBRARY : THE VOICES : From Annenberg to Ziegler, Views of Nixon--Then and Now

It is nearly 16 years since Richard M. Nixon became the first President in history to resign from the White House under threat of impeachment.

His name and his long political career have left an indelible mark on American society, and those who have crossed paths with Nixon have sharply divergent views on the man.

Some see him as a scoundrel who wrapped himself in the flag, a ruthless politician who fanned anti-communist hysteria, all as a means to obtain power.

Others see him as a true American hero who rose from modest beginnings to “walk with giants”--someone who will be remembered as a diplomat and statesman along with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.

Still others see him as a tragic figure brought down by a fatal flaw.

In these interviews, we ask people who were there to remember the man and assess his legacy.

As Republican counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Watergate proceedings, Fred Dalton Thompson watched from a ringside seat as the drama that would topple the presidency began to unfold in 1973.

As the scandal unraveled, Nixon failed to gauge the depth of the problem, said Thompson, an attorney with offices in Washington and Tennessee who has become a successful character actor with meaty parts in films such as “The Hunt for Red October,” “Days of Thunder” and “Die Hard II.”

“Every step of the way, he misjudges . . . he just keeps getting deeper and deeper into it,” Thompson recalled.

“Nixon always had a style--he seemed to be uneasy, he was not a natural politician. His personal mannerisms just rubbed people the wrong way,” he said. “He was his worst enemy in many respects. . . . He gave (his opponents) the hammer to hit him with (in Watergate), and they did it with a vengeance.”

Assessing Nixon’s presidency, Thompson called him “kind of a good administrator, a middle-of-the-road President who presided over relative prosperity.”

But Nixon’s legacy as President will be clouded until he gets Watergate behind him, Thompson said. And that won’t happen as long as the ex-President continues to minimize the scandal and his role in it.

“I’d feel a lot better if he did not refer to everything he did as ‘mistakes,’ ” the lawyer said. “There’s a difference between mistakes and acknowledging whether or not you violated the law. I’d also feel better (about Nixon and his presidency) if he didn’t blame it on subordinates.

“Since when did subordinates ever run Richard Nixon’s White House?”

Yet Watergate, Thompson believes, was not so momentous a threat to the nation’s very foundation as many have said. “What you had was an age-old story of people with power who failed to meet the test . . . who abused power for high-minded reasons.”

He was Nixon’s most eloquent defender on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings. But it was Fullerton Rep. Charles E. Wiggins who ultimately advised the President to resign when White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig told him about the so-called “smoking gun” tape, which was about to be released.

“I told him I thought that whole episode would be so grossly misunderstood that (Nixon’s) impeachment was a very likely event,” said Wiggins, now 63 and a judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Reno.

“I recommended . . . that the President strongly consider resigning. . . . It was the only thing I know about to this day that could link the President to Watergate.”

On the tape, he recalled, Nixon in an “almost offhand kind of way” agreed with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that the CIA should be ordered to tell the FBI to halt its Watergate investigation. That order was canceled when the FBI director protested to the White House. But the contents of the tape had initially been withheld from the House committee.

“I really don’t think that was a basis to impeach our President,” Wiggins said. But in those politically charged days of the early 1970s, “we didn’t need much. There were thousands of people out to get Richard Nixon.”

In Wiggins’ view, the stain of Watergate has cost this country the wise counsel of one of its few remaining senior statesmen.

“Watergate has prevented him from being a world spokesman and leader that he is. They (Nixon and other U.S. Presidents) have had to meet in dark alleys and behind corners,” he said. “It is so unjustified. He is really a fine person, a fine American. It’s unfortunate that he got involved in trying to protect his friends who evidently did have a role in (Watergate). Mostly, he was trying to protect the presidency.”

Daniel Ellsberg, the whiz kid scholar and war planner who became a leading critic of American involvement in Vietnam, is vehement: Richard Nixon, he says, is a “mass murderer” who pursued an unwinnable war.

Ellsberg said he leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret file documenting the war’s pursuit through 1968 that he gave to the media in 1971, for one reason: “To impress on the people that every other President had lied (about Vietnam) and that he (Nixon) might too.”

It was the effort to squelch Ellsberg and his persistent criticism of the Nixon Administration that spawned many of the illegal activities now known as Watergate. The burglary of his psychiatrist’s office led to the conviction of Howard Hunt and his team of “plumbers” and revelations about other clandestine activities planned or countenanced by the White House.

The 58-year-old anti-war activist compares Nixon and Henry Kissinger to Mafia bosses for what he called “their willingness to use unlimited violence to protect their own careers and reputations, which they confuse with the national interest.”

Even as Nixon was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, he escalated the bombing of North Vietnam and then Cambodia, thereby “prolonging the war by six years . . . in a Capt. Ahab effort to win,” Ellsberg charges.

And in that time, Nixon was responsible for dropping 4 1/2 million tons of bombs in Southeast Asia, more than twice as much firepower as was used in World War II in both Europe and Asia, Ellsberg said.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard who now lives outside Berkeley, Ellsberg questioned Nixon’s achievements and expertise in world affairs.

“I think Nixon is enormously overrated as a foreign policy thinker and doer. He’s given credit for the opening to China, but that is more indicative of the cowardice of his predecessors,” Ellsberg said.

Nixon’s real motive in approaching China, he added, was to prevent that nation from reacting to renewed U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

“His reputation in history is far better than he deserves.”

When he thinks of Richard Nixon, Donald H. Segretti, who went to prison for his role in sabotaging Democratic candidates in the 1972 presidential campaign, said he sees an otherwise able President with a “dark side to his personality.”

“He was all for the win, and he did not care how you did that,” said Segretti, 48, now a successful lawyer in Newport Beach. “I don’t want to paint Nixon as all black . . . he made some important contributions as President. . . . Unfortunately, I got caught up in the dark aspects of his politics.”

Segretti said it was his friendship with Nixon aides Dwight Chapin and Gordon Strachan dating back to their days at the University of Southern California that led to his being hired straight out of the Army to handle campaign “dirty tricks,” which he saw at the time as relatively benign.

Segretti served four months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy and distributing illegal campaign literature. Because those charges were misdemeanors, he said, he was able to open a law practice in Orange County in the late 1970s, and he has put Watergate behind him.

“I closed the book on that chapter a long time ago.”

As for Richard Nixon, Segretti said he harbors no bitterness. On the other hand, he doesn’t plan to rush right out to the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace.

“I have reservations about all these libraries. It seems like a huge waste of resources. My feeling is that they should all be together in one place, maybe with a wing for each President. . . . That would seem to make more sense.”

Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who defeated Nixon in the 1962 gubernatorial race, also speaks of a “dark side” to an otherwise brilliant man and savvy politician.

It came out during a meeting at the old Senator Hotel in Sacramento in 1950 when Nixon, then a congressman, was running for the U.S. Senate against liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan-Douglas.

“He said, ‘I’ll stay out of your race if you stay out of mine,’ ” recalled Brown, who was running for attorney general.

“I thought to myself, it was something I just couldn’t do. I was a Democrat and had to be loyal to my party. So I told him, ‘I’m going to run my campaign, you run yours.’ ”

Both men won and went their respective political ways until they went head-to-head in the 1962 governor’s race.

Brown has vivid memories of one televised debate with Nixon that echoed his previous poor performance in the visual medium.

“I can’t forget the faces of the people present when it was over. They all thought Nixon had won it,” said the 85-year-old Brown, who still has an active law practice in Los Angeles. “But on TV, I came through as a good human being, and he came through as a mean guy.”

Brown beat Nixon, who had started out as the early favorite, by 300,000 votes.

“He’s a tough fighter,” Brown said. “He wants to win, and he won’t always play the game by the rules.”

Black Panther party founder Bobby Seale, whose image as being gagged and shackled in a Chicago courtroom in 1969 was etched into public consciousness during the infamous “Chicago 7” (Seale was the eighth defendant) trial, says his view of the former President is unchanged.

“Richard Nixon to us in our time . . . was the head of what we called the racist, fascist pig power structure,” said Seale, who was prosecuted by Nixon’s Justice Department along with seven others for the riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “That’s exactly what he was--still is. . . .

“Richard Nixon represented to us really what he turned out to be--a corrupt politician.”

A self-described political revolutionary, the 53-year-old writer and lecturer lives in Philadelphia. He also does volunteer community outreach for Temple University’s African-American Studies department.

Seale was convicted of 16 counts of contempt of court for his repeated outbursts in federal court when Judge Julius Hoffman refused to delay his trial because his lawyer was ill. The conviction and his four-year sentence were overturned on appeal.

The father of three, he is completing a film script about his life. His latest book, “Barbecuing With Bobby,” was published in 1988.

Historians and people who today praise Nixon’s contributions as President in domestic and foreign affairs are being misled, Seale said.

“I don’t think he is rehabilitated. I think people are being duped.”

Had Watergate not brought an end to Nixon’s presidency, former South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky believes that his country might never have been taken by the North Vietnamese in 1975.

“Without Watergate he would still have been President, and maybe the situation in my country would have been different,” said Ky, a flamboyant former air force pilot who describes his work as “public relations for the cause of a free Vietnam” and divides his time between Bangkok and his daughter’s Fountain Valley home.

“I believe when the communists launched their final offensive, (Nixon) would have done something about it.”

Ky, now 61, said he first met Nixon in Saigon in 1965, when then U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge suggested that he give a reception for the visiting politician-without-portfolio. It would be the first of many meetings stretching over three decades, including visits to Nixon’s San Clemente home after he resigned under threat of impeachment.

“We sat out there and talked about the past and recalled all the memories,” he said. “We would look down his yard at the flowers and the ocean.”

Although Ky has not seen Nixon since the early 1980s, he described the former President as a resilient, intelligent politician. “The spirit is still there--he is still Mr. Nixon, very smart, very clever.”

And while he quarrels with Nixon for failing to order a continuation of massive bombing of North Vietnam--an attack that he said was within a few weeks of crushing the enemy’s resolve--Ky believes that Nixon was a good and strong President, one who is held in far higher regard internationally than at home.

“Outside the United States, people appreciate him as a . . . very great politician and a great leader.”

“The real understanding of the man will come into sharper focus in another 25 years,” predicted publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg, 82, former ambassador to Great Britain and a member of the board that runs the Nixon library.

“Once you throw out the viciousness of the liberals, the realities of the qualities of the man will come through. . . . He (Nixon) is a tremendously able human being.”

Newsman Daniel Schorr, whose reports on CBS television earned him a spot on Nixon’s fabled “enemies list” along with Gregory Peck, Joe Namath and the president of Harvard University, remembers the President as “one of the more politically talented Americans of this century who aspired to--and reached--great heights.”

Yet this complicated man, who Schorr said never seemed to enjoy his successes, “was brought down mainly by his own apparent urge for self-destruction.”

In retrospect, when Nixon “was being President and not conspiring against somebody, he was a pretty good President,” said Schorr, now a senior news analyst for National Public Radio.

Schorr said it was his report on the “CBS Evening News” calling the President’s proposal to solve parochial school funding “bunk” and politically motivated that led Nixon in 1971 to order the FBI to “get something on this guy.”

He credited Nixon’s food stamp program as “perhaps the most creative effort in any Administration I’d seen before or, I may say, since” to abolish hunger in America.

The President’s forward-thinking domestic policies and the strides achieved in foreign policy seemed to be overshadowed by his character, Schorr said.

“I remember having covered election headquarters on the night of his reelection in 1972. . . . When the landslide votes were coming in and being tallied, he showed up . . . looking like the gloomiest man there,” Schorr recalled.

“It always struck me that he couldn’t really enjoy triumph and at (such) moments . . . he always seemed to be contriving his next crisis. Somehow, he seemed to function best in crisis.”

“It always struck me that he couldn’t really enjoy triumph and at (such) moments . . . he always seemed to be contriving his next crisis. Somehow, he seemed to function best in crisis.

Almost from the day Nixon left the White House on Aug. 9, 1974, Schorr said, the politician who seems to thrive on adversity has devoted his considerable energies and intelligence to “rehabilitating himself. . . .”

“He’s done a great job of running for ex-President. And I think he has almost made it.”

Historian Stanley Kutler, who spent five years on his just published book, “The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon,” said Watergate will remain the indelible stamp of Nixon’s presidency for generations to come.

“What makes Richard Nixon unique is Watergate,” said Kutler, a professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Centuries from now, American history textbooks will say, ‘Richard Nixon, the first American President to resign from office in a scandal. . . .’ ”

Borrowing from “Macbeth,” Kutler predicted: “History will ebb and flow in its treatment of specific events of Nixon’s presidency, but Watergate is ‘the spot that will not out.’ ”

Former President Jimmy Carter, whose 1976 victory was widely viewed as a public backlash to the Watergate scandal, gives a more favorable assessment:

“Watergate never will be forgotten, but I think since President Nixon left the White House, he has done a very good job in explaining to the American people and the world his notable achievements I would say primarily in foreign policy, but not exclusively in foreign affairs,” Carter said.

“For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, the council of environmental quality . . . (which were) passed by a Democratic Congress but signed into law by President Nixon. And he gave it full support,” said Carter, who now volunteers his time helping to build housing for the homeless around the world.

“So I think history is going to treat President Nixon well, with the exception of the Watergate tragedy. . . . I think what he did as President was a notable contribution.”

To Kenneth L. Khachigian, a speech writer in the Nixon White House who helped the ex-President write his memoirs, Richard M. Nixon belongs in the pantheon of great world statesmen of the 20th Century.

“He really did walk the Earth when there were giants on it--De Gaulle, Churchill, Chou En-lai, the giants of the postwar era who rebuilt the world from the destruction of (World War II),” said the San Clemente attorney and political strategist. “(Nixon) stands astride that era and the modern era of Jack Kennedy and nuclear strategic matters . . . (his career) is really a fascinating insight into the 20th Century.”

There’s a certain charm and appropriateness to Yorba Linda, birthplace of the 37th President of the United States, as the repose for Nixon’s lifetime collection of papers and memorabilia, he said.

“It is still the American story, the grocer’s son rising to the top. There was a symmetry to it that was nice,” Khachigian said.

Nixon’s legacy may depend on the beholder, but Khachigian said the man is prepared to “let history make the decisions.”

“He’ll be remembered for how he resigned from office . . . and for having been a part of the rebuilding of Europe,” he predicted. “For being a spirited veteran of the political wars . . . for having really redefined the geography of geopolitics in the ‘70s (and) laying the groundwork for what’s happening (in Eastern Bloc nations) today.”

Ronald Ziegler, White House press secretary under Nixon, believes that the Watergate scandal will be remembered as just one part of an otherwise estimable presidency.

Ziegler said he finds that people have “a significant degree of respect for Richard Nixon because of his ability to survive this tragedy and not destroy himself . . . (that) he had the strength to survive and the intellectual scope.”

“I think people admire that in a man and they learn lessons from that.”

The foiled burglary of Lawrence F. O’Brien’s office in the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, unleashed the chain of events culminating in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

More disturbing than the political skulduggery, said the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was Nixon’s and his subordinates’ ordering the Internal Revenue Service to audit O’Brien and other political opponents in search of incriminating information.

“It was beyond my comprehension that any person in the Oval Office would go to these extremes to use agencies of our government for the express purpose of trying to destroy citizens,” said O’Brien, 72, who was National Basketball Assn. commissioner from 1975 to 1984 and is now semi-retired and living in New York City.

“If Watergate had not been discovered, who knows what might have been the end result of this activity?”

At the time, O’Brien said, he thought the repeated IRS queries and audits were odd.

“Frankly, I thought that I was caught in the computer. It’s the old story--I had nothing to hide, but I was aggravated at the constant (questions).”

While he has no animosity toward Nixon, O’Brien is bitter over what he sees as widespread public apathy and disaffection toward government spawned by the Watergate scandal.

“Apathy turned to downright cynicism, and Richard Nixon is directly responsible for much of that cynicism,” O’Brien said.

It has been 16 years since Nixon resigned, but he still draws laughs for comedian Rich Little, who made a career imitating the former President’s heavy lids, jiggling jowls, hunched shoulders and penchant for denials.

“If he’d come clean and just totally put his cards on the table (about Watergate) . . . ,” said the 50-year-old comic, who then slid effortlessly into Nixon voice. “It wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t even there. I did not do anything wrong--and I promise I’ll never do it again.”

It’s that image, of a man who doesn’t admit responsibility for anything, that has kept the character alive, Little said.

“Before Watergate, I used to get criticized, usually by little old ladies . . . (who) thought I was a little tough on (Nixon). I would say, ‘I didn’t write the news.’ But the mood changed after Watergate. Now, people just applaud and love it. . . .”

Little didn’t begin his shtick until Nixon became President in 1968. “I didn’t pay too much attention to him as vice president--neither did Eisenhower,” he quipped. But how can you lose, he asks.

“Nixon is so great visually . . . think about it. He has no neck, and he wore the same blue suit for over 30 years and never took the hanger out of it. I’ve done sketches of him at the beach, swimming in the blue suit.”

Even children born after Nixon left the center stage laugh at Little’s impersonation.

“When my daughter was 8 years old, she woke me up and said somebody had stolen part of my act and was doing it on TV,” he recalled. “Well, I looked and there was Nixon giving a speech.

“I said, ‘No, no, no. That’s the real Nixon. That’s the guy I’m doing.’ ” Daughter Bria, now 12, looked at her father and replied, “It’s pretty good, Dad, but I think you’re better.”

H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, the White House chief of staff and longtime political campaign associate of Nixon, predicts that the former President eventually will be seen as a “truly great President.”

“When I think of Richard Nixon I think of the words incredible intelligence , diligence , perspective . He has the most complete grasp of global geopolitics of anybody I think living today and anybody living in our time.

“He has an amazing sense of how all the pieces fit together,” said Haldeman, a former advertising executive whose life had been intertwined with Nixon’s political fortunes since 1956.

Haldeman was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and three counts of perjury in connection with the Watergate scandal. In his book, “The Ends of Power,” he blames Nixon for most everything, from ordering the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to the cover-up of illegal activities. Since his release after 18 months in federal prison, he has blunted the earlier barbs with praise for Nixon’s political and diplomatic acumen.

Today, the 63-year-old entrepreneur now living in Santa Barbara, calls Nixon “the author of detente,” a policy he contends led to the historic rejection of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

“Nixon’s overriding goal in life, and as President, was to establish a lasting structure for peace in the world,” said Haldeman. His launching of detente with the Soviet Union and his visits to China were “two watershed events that set in motion a chain of events . . . that I believe is the linchpin to the whole process of change going on in the communist world today.”

When all is said and done, Watergate will not dominate Nixon’s legacy, he said.

“I think historians will look at the Nixon era’s accomplishments and failures in a much broader . . . much less emotional perspective. History will ultimately record him as a truly great President.”

Athalie Clarke, widow of James Irvine and mother to Orange County heiress Joan Irvine Smith, has been an admirer and staunch supporter of Richard Nixon since his early congressional campaigns in the late 1940s.

“He wrote his (presidential) acceptance speech at our home in Cameo Shores,” said Clarke, now 87, of the Newport Beach home she shared with her second husband, Judge Thurmond Clarke.

“I think today he is our greatest living statesman, probably the greatest in the world. . . . I’d like to see him named secretary of state,” she said, chuckling.

“One day, he’ll go down in history as one of our top Presidents, right behind Washington and Lincoln. . . . One of the highlights of my life has been to hear this man discuss foreign policy and international affairs.”

Clarke, who said she loaned her Virginia farmhouse to Nixon and his family shortly after he resigned the presidency, does not believe that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in, the campaign tricks or the cover-up.

“If you analyze it, he knew he had the election won, so why would you bug the Democratic headquarters? It’s just so ridiculous, it doesn’t make any sense,” Clarke said.

Staff writers Dave Lesher and Catherine Gewertz contributed to this story.