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are several reasons for studying minutiae in the lives of our presidents.
The superior reason for doing so is the enhancement of knowledge,
our understanding of elements of public life as they affect public
policy. Another reason is the gratification of curiosity active
and latent, human and maybe even a little inhuman. In this most
engrossing book on Nixon — President Nixon, Alone in the
White House — Richard Reeves delivers, as already noted
in this space, an account of a presidency from inception to abortion,
an account that might have been done by the dramatists of TV's West
Wing, except that everything that happens here actually happened.
It is the arrangement and selectivity by Reeves of the massive material
on Nixon that makes the book tingle with excitement as we read about
the most extraordinary man ever to have occupied the White House.
We learn that when Nixon was elected in 1968, President Johnson
put an Air Force One model plane at his disposal, the very first
use of which brought, as almost nothing else can to a president-elect,
a substantive preview of the embodiment of presidential life. Just
after take-off, thinking no one could see him — but through
curtains not-quite-drawn, someone did — Richard Nixon seized
his wife Pat around the waist and twirled about laughing and singing
in his exultation, the culmination of the tortuous road from nominee
for a congressional seat in California, to president-elect of the
United States.
Majestic emoluments in a democratic society explain the perseverance
of such as Richard Reeves, who as he gives us history by grand design,
shows also the skills of the dowser, coming up with incident after
incident which are trivia when examined discretely, but which add
to the grand and complicated portrait.
A bibliographic essay informs us that the complete tapes of Nixon
cover approximately 2,800 hours of conversation. Critically rewarding
to the Senate committee investigating grounds for impeaching the
president, but not otherwise worth it for the lay reader: "The
taped Nixon shows little evidence of his brilliance." What
do we make of it all? What was the impact of serial exposures? Reeves
does not tell us, but he lets us in on what they were. We knew that
Nixon admired the movie Patton, and now know that he viewed
it twelve times — but more often than that, he viewed the utterly
innocent Around the World in 80 Days. His prose we think
of as instrumental, stodgy and stumplike, but when he wrote individually
to John and Caroline Kennedy after their visit to the White House
with their mother in 1973, Jackie replied, "You wrote so charmingly
to each child, in the idiom of its age, pinpointing for each what
was most memorable about that special day." And with her own
grace, she closed, "There are no words to thank you, so please
forgive me for just saying thank you again."
Nixon was proud
of his capacity to memorize, but the exercise of that skill tripped
him up now and again. The State Department's brief, duly committed
to memory, was on the forthcoming visit of the prime minister of
Mauritania, an unfriendly desert state in West Africa, but the dazed
guest in the Oval Office was the prime minister of ever-so-friendly
Mauritius, a lagoon of sorts in the Indian Ocean. Only after well
into the president's hectoring of the policies of Mauritania, Kissinger
succeeded in slipping him a note — wrong prime minister,
wrong country.
"Excisions [from the CD-ROM of Nixon's tapes] previously made
for national security and privacy reasons are published for the
first time in this book," Reeves disclosed in his Notes. "These
segments show Nixon ruminating on replacing the mayor of Washington,
D.C., with a 'white Alabama coon-killer,' and celebrating the safe
landing of Apollo 13 by getting drunk and passing out in the middle
of the afternoon. But they also add to the understanding of policy."
Nixon contrived his own downfall, and his domestic policy was a
farrago of statism and capitalist cliché. Foreign policy
he did care about. He lost Vietnam, whose fate, along with Nixon's
own, was sealed by Watergate. His desperate deceptions, public and
subjective, closed in on him so that, finally, as this volume so
engrossingly shows, he could not move, except to abandon ship. His
resourcefulness no longer served him.
Only a few months earlier he had addressed the White House Correspondents
Association. "Nixon got a couple of laughs, the biggest one
at the beginning when he said, 'It is a privilege to be here . .
. I suppose I should say it is an executive privilege.' When he
got serious, he paid tribute to David Lawrence, the founder of U.S.
News & World Report, who had recently died. Nixon said,
'David Lawrence, who was a charter member of this club fifty-nine
years ago, said to me a couple of years ago: "There is only
one more difficult task than being President of this country when
we are waging war, and that is to be the President when we are waging
peace."'
"'What did you think of the Lawrence quote?' he asked Haldeman
later.
"'Appropriate,' was the answer.
"'I made it up,' Nixon said."
But he couldn't make up a way to stay on as president.
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