Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

Freeman recalled “one not uncharacteristic example of this at Mrs. Alice Longworth’s house one evening….Over drinks before dinner she asked me what I thought of the new President. I gave some sort of respectful reply. Alice then hushed up the whole company, saying in her wickedest voice, ‘How extraordinary! Listen. The Ambassador thinks well of Mr. Nixon! Such a common little man!’ and her guests all roared with laughter.”42 How wounded Nixon would have been! To know that his singular upper-crust ally—“Mrs. L.,” as he affectionately called her, his one faithful defender among the Washington cognoscenti—was taking such gleeful pleasure in sneering at him as a “common little man,” even if, as was likely, she was indulging in broad irony. Mrs. Longworth liked to play the provocateur and was no doubt taking malicious pleasure in shocking her British guest. Still, her betrayal would have confirmed Nixon’s suspicions, not just about Georgetown but more existentially about why he needed to keep his guard up. He would have stoically filed Mrs. L.’s slight away with other hurts in the place where he stored grudges and grievances—to be burned later as fuel. Nonetheless, Nixon was human, and he could not have helped but feel hurt when the whisperings of a supporter’s perfidy came back to him as malevolent gossip. (Nixon heard about some of Kissinger’s lèse-majesté from Haldeman, who had his own spies; other betrayals he probably intuited.) On some evenings, Nixon would joke with Hald...