BEING NIXON

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BEING NIXON
A Man Divided

E VA N T H O M A S

d
RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK

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Copyright 2015 by Evan Thomas

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division
of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks
of Penguin Random House LLC.
[Permissions acknowledgments, if any, go here. Or delete this line.]
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Evan.
Being Nixon : the fears and hopes of an American president / Evan Thomas.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9536-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9537-4
1. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 19131994. 2.PresidentsUnited States
Biography. 3. United StatesPolitics and government19691974. I. Title.
E856.T48 2015
973.924092dc23
[B]
2015009669
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
www.atrandom.com
246897531
First Edition
Victoria Wong

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Introduction
THE FATALISTIC OPTIMIST

ichard Nixon loved the movies. His favorite, contrary to myth,

was not Patton, the 1970 biopic of the bellicose, war-loving
American general George S. Patton. It was Around the World in 80
Days, the whimsical, lighthearted 1956 film, based on a Jules Verne
novel, about a nineteenth-century British gentleman and his valet
who circumnavigate the world on a bet.1 Watch! Here comes the
elephant! Nixon would exclaim, bouncing in his chair at his favorite
scene. He sat for over five hundred movies at Camp David and in the
White House theater during his five and a half years as president, and
the eager moviegoer depicted by his daughter Julie bore no resemblance to the brooding Rex more commonly imagined. No matter
how terrible the first reel is, he always thinks it will get better, Julie
told William Safire when he was working as a presidential speechwriter. Give it a chance, hell say. Oh, we sat through some real
lemons. Bebe [Rebozo] would fall asleep, Mother and Tricia would
tiptoe out, but Daddy would stick with it. Wait, hed say. Waititll
get better. 2
Nixon wanted to be upbeat, to be an optimist. He often tried to,
as he put it, buck up his followers and his family. Late at night,
sitting alone in his Executive Office Building hideaway, or the Lincoln
Sitting Room in the White House, or his lodge at Camp David, he
would take out his yellow legal pad and begin making notes about
the leader and person he wished to be. He imagined, in the spirit of

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Commander-in-chief.
Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

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INTRODUCTION

xiii

his mothers Quaker faith, peace at the center; he would use words
like joyful, serenity, and inspirational.3
Those descriptive words fit him only occasionally. In his daily life,
he was more often fretful. He wished to be seen as cool and calm in
crisis, and he could be, but he was subject to episodes of venting and
lashing out. He was socially anxious and could be hopelessly, helplessly awkward. At his White House dinner for the artist Andrew
Wyeth, he welcomed Wyeths daughter-in-law Phyllis, who was in a
wheelchair, and exclaimed, Just last week I met with the Easter Seal
children!4 Nixon was famously clumsy. The president dropped so
many medals at awards ceremonies (or inadvertently stabbed the recipient), that Brent Scowcroft, at the time a White House military
aide, had the medals affixed with clip-on devices instead of pins.5
Nixons almost painful self-consciousness made him seem uncomfortable while doing the simplest human task. Gregg Petersmeyer, a
young White House aide, recalled watching the president at a cabinet
meeting. When a new person entered the room, Nixon could not bear
to turn his head to face him . Instead, his eyes darted sideways to get
a peek.6 He was being bashful, but he looked sneaky. Tenderhearted
and devoted to his wife and daughters, he could seem callous to them
in public.
Hope and fear waged a constant battle in Nixon. At the end of his
presidency, fear won out. Nixon was often driven by fearhe was, he
believed surrounded by enemies. At the same time, he understood the
hopes and fears of others, the insecurities of the people he memorably
named the Silent Majority. He was an introvert in an extroverts
business; incredibly, he was also one of the most successful politicians
in American history. Weak at human relations but cunning at power,
he made politics into a science and also an art; for him it had a cadence, precision, and beauty, wrote his daughter Julie.7 He ran on
five national tickets and won four times, the last (1972) in one of the
greatest presidential landslides ever. Only Franklin Roosevelt exceeded his electoral record. Though Ronald Reagan usually gets the
credit, it was Nixon who created the modern Republican Party, by

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xiv

IINTRODUCTION

breaking the New Deal coalition and siphoning off disaffected Democrats who sensed that the native Californian, born to the lower middle class, was more sensitive to their wants and needs than the liberal
elitists Nixon so enthusiastically scorned.
His accomplishments at home and abroad were great: opening up
China, achieving arms control with the Soviet Union, ending (if too
slowly) the Vietnam War, desegregating the Southern schools, increasing benefits for the elderly and the disabled, creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Indeed, some historians call him a
liberal.8 He was not, but he was a crafty activist who loved to outflank and confound his foes.
Did he achieve all this in spite ofor perhaps because ofhis
anxieties? Nixons inclination toward the dark side has long been a
clich. Less understood (possibly even by Nixon himself) is his heroic,
if ill-fated, struggle to be a robust, decent, good-hearted person. In
the battle against his darker impulses, he fought with a kind of desperate courage. At some level, I believe, he was aware of this struggle,
though he gave every indication of a man with little or no selfknowledge.
Nixon believed deeply in his country, and he largely realized his
ambition to be a statesman. Nonetheless, anyone listening to the
tapes of his White House conversations will cringenot, perhaps, at
the profanity (common among men of his World War II generation
under stress) but at the sheer hubris. Nixon and his lieutenants rarely,
if ever, stopped to wonder if they possibly were wrong and their opponents were right. Such arrogance was and is probably characteristic of the conversations of most presidentsthe Oval Office is a
cockpit of sycophancybut Nixons brittle pridefulness was so disturbing and at moments ugly that it makes you want to cry out. (Did
he really rail against Jews in government? Yes, he did.)9 Ultimately,
Nixons obsession with smiting his enemiescombined with an utter
inability to confront his friendswas fatal to his presidency.
Even so, his constant attempts to be a better man, generous and
big-spiritedand to control his fate, knowing, perhaps, that he was

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INTRODUCTION

xv

destined to failare poignant. Improbably, this anxious boy from a

pinched background believed that he was meant to do great things.
Shy and bookish, he wanted to wake up every morning and ask,
What will we accomplish today?
This is not a book intended to weigh the success and failure of
Nixon as a policy maker, and, although the Watergate scandal figures
inevitably and prominently, I do not attempt to solve its many mysteries. Rather, I have made an effort to understand what it was like to
actually be Nixon. Drawn from the memories of three dozen or so
men and women who worked for him as well as from the growing
flow of new and rich archival material, this book is a chronicle of a
fantastically contradictory and intriguing figure who set out to change
the world and, for better and for worse, did just that. The story is best
told from the beginning.

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