One Is the Loneliest Number

Richard M. Nixon is unique. He will be remembered as the first president who resigned--and did so in disgrace. He will be remembered, too, as the president who fled Washington and left behind an incredible array of documentary material, absolutely unrivaled by any comparable political figure. There is nothing like it. The tapes and the infinitely more important paper materials have prompted an outpouring of works on Nixon, the presidency and public policy. Nixon fought like a tiger to retain or suppress those materials in his lifetime. He wrote an endless array of memoirs to keep his name in the limelight and to pay the legal bills to underwrite his efforts. His followers always maintained that the records would exonerate Nixon of any wrongdoing and would establish his credentials as a great American president. Why, then, did he so resist opening them?

Nixon knew the materials belied the image he had so carefully cultivated through more than four decades on the public stage. His records and a steady parade of biographies, character analyses and specialized monographs have only diminished his reputation. Recently, Larry Berman’s “No Peace, No Honor” exposed the emptiness and double-dealing of his “peace with honor” deal in Vietnam, which allowed the North to retain its troops in the South, thus sealing the doom of our client, the government of South Vietnam. Allen Matusow’s “Nixon’s Economy” depicted a man with little understanding of the economy who, as usual, believed that political manipulation would cure long-term structural problems. John Dean, the former White House counsel who testified to Nixon’s abuses of power before the documents emerged, reveals in his splendid new book, “The Rehnquist Choice,” Nixon’s tortured process for selecting Supreme Court nominees, including the story of William Rehnquist’s emergence.

Now comes Richard Reeves, and he understands why Nixon so vigorously resisted the opening of his papers. Reeves and his assistants have examined thousands of pages of Nixon’s handwritten notes, memos and news summaries with his jottings on them along with his closest aides’ daily notes recording Nixon’s stream of complaints, all reeking of crankiness and paranoia. Reeves puts us in the Oval Office or the Lincoln sitting room or Nixon’s hideaway in the Executive Office Building, where we can “listen” to the president almost daily from his inauguration in 1969 until April 30, 1973, the date on which his top aides, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, resigned and Nixon lost his last line of defense. His presidency was dead. Nixon knew the truth was there, waiting to be discovered by prosecutors and investigators.

Nevertheless, Reeves’ decision to end his book in 1973 is unfortunate. The final 15 months of Nixon’s presidency are invaluable in measuring his behavior and character. During that period, Nixon was stripped to his essentials, having used all his resources in covering up first Watergate and then the cover-up itself and having spent all his energy on deceit, betrayal, drift and inertia. Reeves describes Nixon as a man “alone in the White House,” a reasonable inference from his evidence.

By all accounts, Nixon was that rare politician incapable of making small talk. When he learned of an impending visit by his Whittier College classmates, he told Haldeman to invite them to a White House evening affair or a church service rather than “a reception for them alone where I would have to get into too much conversation.” Robert Finch, supposedly a Nixon favorite and one in the line of “adopted” sons that replaced the ones he never had, admitted he never really knew Nixon. On occasion, Nixon could charm a reporter--”seduce” is a better word--as when he gave Theodore White “exclusive” access and virtually dictated the closing pages of White’s book on the 1972 campaign. White dutifully recorded, with his usual embellishments, Nixon’s visions of his own greatness and promise. Meanwhile, the president was all too painfully aware of his own criminal involvement in Watergate.

Nixon programmed himself, and he was programmed throughout his day with “talking papers,” whether meeting Mao Tse-tung or merely wishing a speech writer a happy birthday. Spontaneity in Nixon usually was confined to offhand, negative comments about others. Nixon loved to see himself as a tough guy. The ethnic slurs and the raw hostility he expressed about others seemed designed to impress those around him. Haldeman’s anti-Semitism was blatant and vicious; Nixon was determined to one-up him.

Reeves recognizes that Nixon’s isolation and detachment eventually “betrayed” him. “[H]e trusted almost no one,” Reeves writes. “He assumed the worst in people, and he brought out the worst in himself. He was too suspicious, his judgments were too harsh, too negative. He clung to the word and the idea of being ‘tough.’ He thought that was what had brought him to the edge of greatness. But that was what betrayed him. He could not open himself to other men and he could not open himself to greatness.” Nixon relished the warfare of competing interest groups and people: “He gloried,” Reeves writes, “in dividing the nation geographically, generationally, racially, religiously.” Few loved and practiced wedge issues more than Nixon. His 1968 slogan “Bring Us Together” was the antithesis of his politics and his presidency; instead, Nixon welcomed and nurtured the politics of resentment.

There is a sad quality to Nixon’s isolation and detachment. He regularly railed against outside perceptions that he was walled off and not in touch with a wide circle of people, responding to them with even further retreat. In a memo to himself, Nixon complained that his staff took too much of his time; his speech writers were inadequate and, since intellectuals and the media opposed him, he had to find other ways to reach the people. He concluded with exhortations for self-improvement: He had to stop recreation except for exercise, he needed more social events, spiritual life, an optimistic upbeat psychology, stimulating people he could talk to and “dignity, Kindness, drive, Youth, Priority, Spiritual quality.”

Nixon baffled his closest aides, his visitors and even his family. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman, perhaps reflecting Ike and his circle, remarked that Nixon seemed “like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.” She was on to something. Old Nixon? New Nixon? No, just one Nixon and, like all of us, one with a public and a private face. Both deserve our attention.

Reeves, however, offers little systematic presentation of policy or actions--that “public face”--to help us understand how Nixon’s contemporaries understood him. His admirers will inevitably be infuriated with the recitation of his foul thoughts and language, his banality, his lack of depth. We know that side of Nixon quite well; the papers have been public for nearly 15 years, the tapes somewhat less. We need to know more of President Nixon as president.

Reeves has offered us a Nixon with a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is lacking in consistent analysis of presidential policies. We are in the Oval Office with him, but we have little sense of a presidency in action. Reeves offers a haphazard, episodic rendition of Nixon kibitzing about the Soviets, the economy, his wife, the Kennedys, Kissinger and other assorted political figures--for none of whom, with the exception of John Connally, can Nixon mount much in the way of a good or kind word. In August 1971, for example, Nixon began a series of meetings with key officials regarding his plans for the economy, which included allowing the dollar to float and imposing wage-and-price controls. At the outset, Nixon sounded knowledgeable and in command of his administration’s plans. But then Reeves allows the subject to drift into limbo. He offers no consideration of the program’s implementation or its merits and shortcomings as it unfolded and faded. Reeves is bound by the sources he chose, but his self-imposed limitation is questionable, especially when we have so much more to enrich the subject. For the economic program, there is a wealth of data, within the administration and without, that traces its successes and failures. The Nixon presidency did, after all, extend beyond Richard Nixon’s Oval Office table talk.

In the long run, we must recognize and evaluate the origins, execution and consequences of Nixon’s policies and actions. The Cambodian invasion, for example, demands more rigorous analysis than to know he was drunk or in a rage, threatening to fire a host of aides. We cannot segregate Nixon’s personal and policy histories if we want to understand his presidency. Titillation is fine; but it is merely an appetizer.