The Endurance of Nixon
Reeves’s new book.

November 26, 2001 4:45 p.m.

here 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.