Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

Nixon correctly, but futilely, complained to his family and his aides about a double standard.

Baffled by Watergate—what superpower would indulge the luxury of destroying its leader over petty nonsense like bugging the opposition?—the Soviets made clear that they were prepared to ignore it.

The president’s first reaction was that Butterfield’s revelation would make him a laughingstock. Indeed, one headline read, “Nixon Bugs Himself.”34 Haig was worried where the tapes would lead. He recalled telling the president, “Mr. President, I’ve been in a good many meetings with you, and we both know how the conversation goes. You set up straw men; you play devil’s advocate; you say things you don’t mean. Others do the same. There is gossip and profanity. Imagine publishing every word Lyndon Johnson ever said in the Oval Office. No president could survive it.”

On October 6, the Nixon administration was caught completely off guard by an Arab attack—Syrians from the north, Egyptians from the south—against Israel. Just the day before, the CIA had reported to the president that war was unlikely. Nixon was unsurprised by the incompetence of the CIA, his old hobbyhorse, but he was “stunned” by the failure of Israeli intelligence.

As so often in the past, Nixon felt isolated, unable to trust his closest advisers. He was getting foot-dragging excuses from the Pentagon, and he continued to wonder about Kissinger’s divided or ambivalent loyalties—to him, to his liberal friends, to the Jewish state.10 Nixon himself was constantly weighing competing interests—access to cheap Arab oil, the Jewish vote at election time, worries about provoking a conflict with the Soviet Union over primacy in the Middle East. Along with Kissinger, he had a tendency to delude himself with the presumption that America could cold-bloodedly calibrate the fate of other peoples as part of some grand global “geostrategy.”11 And yet, in a critical moment in the history of Israel, Nixon—who could so casually utter ethnic slurs—decisively and forcefully came to the rescue of the people of Israel. When Kissinger told him that the Pentagon had authorized three C-5A transports to fly to Israel—any more would “cause problems” with the Arabs and Soviets—Nixon was exasperated. “We’re going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for 300,” he told Kissinger.12 The president called Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and told him that he was aware of the gravity of his decision and that he would accept the responsibility if the Arabs cut off oil to America.

If the Pentagon could not arrange private charter flights, it should use military aircraft. “Do it, now,” the president ordered. Informed by Kissinger that Pentagon officials were arguing over the type of aircraft to be used, Nixon exploded: “Goddamn it, use every one we have. Tell them to send everything that can fly.”13 The next morning, anxious residents in Tel Aviv were awakened to a loud droning in the sky. One after another, giant American air force transports rumbled overhead as they descended to nearby airports and airfields. Cars stopped in the streets and people began to shout “God bless America!” Relieved and grateful, Golda Meir, Israel’s hard-bitten prime minister, wept.14 —

On the same day that Israel asked to be saved by the United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 5 to 2 that President Nixon had to turn over the tapes of nine White House conversations subpoenaed by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. Nixon had been dreading the court’s decision, in part because of the prospect that the judges would shred his constitutional defense of executive privilege and in part because he feared the unleashed zeal of Archibald Cox. “Firing him,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “seemed the only way to rid the administration of the partisan viper we had planted in ...

The president’s chief of staff underestimated the deep bonds between the two Yankee lawyers.

Matched against such self-conscious pillars of rectitude, Nixon was bound to look like a small and mean tyrant. Saturday, October 20, 1973, unfolded with Shakespearean—that is to say, convincingly contrived—drama. At a press conference early that afternoon, Cox rejected the “Stennis Compromise” and said that he would go to the Supreme Court to force the president to turn over the tapes. In Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, presidential chronicler Theodore White (Harvard ’38) rendered the scene in the ballroom at the National Press Club: “Gangling, gentle and firm, combining the qualities of old Mr. Chips and Joan of Arc, the Special Prosecutor opened at his best—and then proceeded to get better.” Sheepishly, perhaps a bit disingenuously, Cox apologized for disturbing reporters on a beautiful fall day. “I am certainly not out to get the President of the United States,” said Cox, as the cameras zoomed in. “I am even worried, to put it in colloquial terms, that I am getting too big for my britches.” But he felt honor-bound, he explained, “to stick by what I thought was right.” Cox went on to state that under the law only the attorney general—not the president—could fire him.

He said that he was sorry Richardson had put his own concern above the nation’s interest at a time when the Russians were watching for signs of irresolution in the Middle East.

recalled, “I realized that he was reassuring me, letting me know that he still had confidence in me. Deeply touched by his simple kindness in what must have been one of the most difficult hours of his life, I felt a surge of admiration and sympathy for this complex, unpredictable, and indomitable man.” But Haig also wondered if Nixon could survive the firestorm.24

“He was an activist president who wanted to do a lot of things nobody had ever tried, and by a floating coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, we got some of it passed,” Timmons recalled. “We were able to cut deals, to compromise, and we built a lot of courthouses and bridges [trading pork barrel projects for votes]. But the tapes killed him. He was not the Nixon they knew or they thought they knew.”

As an OMB official from the beginning of Nixon’s first term, O’Neill, who would go on to serve as George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, had been impressed by the “Brandeis Briefs” demanded by Nixon from all his advisers—fact-based arguments the president sent back covered with incisive comments. By 1974, “I’m not sure Nixon even read my recommendations,” O’Neill recalled. “I guess he was huddled down in a bunker, wishing he were dead.”11

Three Presidents destroyed. Kennedy by an assassin’s hand, Johnson by the hand of his enemies, Nixon by his own hand. I should think my string has run out.”48

At one point, Nixon padded down the hallway to find the bottle of cognac they had cracked when Kissinger reported the breakthrough to China. They raised a glass, two rivals and comrades in dramatic times. Kissinger began to weep. Nixon broke down, too.

Like the image of Nixon talking to portraits, the truth, whatever it was, has long since blurred into myth.50

Nixon was firm. Television had saved him (the Checkers speech) and hurt him (the first Kennedy debate), but he knew that he had been one of the first politicians to exploit the power of television to reach over the “elites” to the masses.

then it passed. Nixon refused to be introspective, at least for long. Too much self-reflection was, he believed, a sign of weakness; he was unable to see that lack of self-awareness was his weakness.

“What starts the process, really, are the laughs and snubs and slights you get when you are a kid. Sometimes, it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn you can change those attitudes by excellence, by personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”