Nixon in China Read online

  Nixon has often been described as a realist, coldly calculating the best way to advance American interests in a dangerous and anarchic world. And indeed he could often sound like the great nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston, whose formulation remains the credo of realists: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.’ In 1970, in his report to Congress, Nixon explained that the first goal of his administration’s foreign policy was to support American interests. ‘The more that policy is based on a realistic assessment of our and others’ interests, the more effective our role in the world can be. We are not involved in the world because we have commitments; we have commitments because we are involved. Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.’ Great powers always looked out for their own national interests, he told his White House staff just after the announcement that he was to visit China, ‘or else they’re played for suckers by those powers that do.’11 Interests could coincide, and it was the wise statesman who could see this and be ready to negotiate.

  Nixon chose the portraits of the three presidents he most admired for the cabinet office in the White House. Dwight Eisenhower was a revered leader in war and peace, loved by Americans as Nixon never would be. Theodore Roosevelt was the fighter, the man who willed himself to be strong and brave. Nixon often quoted admiringly his image of the bloodstained and weary man in the arena, ‘who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly’. (Nixon used that in his resignation speech.) The one he identified with most, though, was the Democrat President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was not only brilliant intellectually but ‘a man of thought who could act’. Wilson, so Nixon saw it, had also worked for peace in the world. ‘For the first time, because the people of the world want peace, and the leaders of the world are afraid of war, the times are on the side of peace.’ Although the sentence comes from Nixon’s inaugural address, it could just as easily have been uttered by Wilson himself. For his desk in the White House, Nixon chose Wilson’s. Like others of Nixon’s gestures, it went slightly awry. The desk, it later turned out, had belonged to another Wilson altogether – Henry, a shoemaker who had risen to be Ulysses S. Grant’s Vice-President.12

  Nixon, unlike many of his more conservative Republican supporters, was not an isolationist. He maintained that the United States should have joined the League of Nations in the inter-war years and that it had done the right thing in joining the United Nations after the Second World War. He had supported the Marshall Plan in the 1940s to aid Western Europe; he was in favour of committing American troops to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and in the 1950s he was prepared to see the United States join alliances around the world in order to contain Communism. Indeed he worried that the experience of Vietnam and the preoccupation of the country’s elites with domestic problems would turn the United States inwards. He also believed that the United States was and ought to be a force for good in the world. As he told Kissinger, ‘nations must have great ideas or they cease to be great’. His big idea was to lead the United States to build permanent peace in the world. In his inaugural address, which he largely wrote himself (as he did all his major speeches), he called on his fellow Americans and on the world: ‘Let us take as our goal: Where peace is unknown, make it welcome; where peace is fragile, make it strong; where peace is temporary, make it permanent.’13

  Then and since, his critics have dismissed such rhetoric as Nixon’s cynical attempt to conceal his own moral vacuum. That is wrong. Nixon did many immoral things in his life but he longed to be good. In the notes which he wrote endlessly to himself on his favourite yellow legal pads, he exhorted himself to provide moral leadership, to be the national conscience of his country. If he often behaved like his father, who was a loud-mouthed and opinionated bully, he wished to be more like his saintly mother. A devout Quaker, she gave all her children a profoundly religious upbringing. For decades, Nixon carried in his wallet a note which she had given him in 1953 when he became vice-president. ‘I know that you will keep your relationship with your Maker as it should be, for after all, that as you must know is the most important thing in this life.’14

  Even historians who disapprove of psycho-history find themselves tempted irresistibly when it comes to Richard Nixon. It is partly that he inspired such strong feelings. It is partly the contradictions. The statesman of distinction who, as his tapes revealed, could talk with insight and understanding about the role of the United States in the world and then flail the next moment at his enemies, real or imagined, in crude, racist and scatological terms. (Thanks to those tapes, whose existence Nixon seems to have forgotten about from day to day, we know a lot about a deeply private and secretive man.) The man who wanted to be great, who told himself at the start of 1970, ‘Be worthy of 1 st man in nation and in world’, yet who was capable of such petty meanness and did so much to damage American public life. He was vicious and relentless in attacking others; in one of his first campaigns, he successfully painted Helen Gahagan Douglas as a Communist sympathizer, ‘pink right down to her underwear’. Yet he later told a British journalist, ‘I’m sorry about that episode. I was a very young man.’ When the regret was reported, though, he denied it furiously15

  He came from small-town America and liked to see himself as a Horatio Alger figure, triumphing against all odds. He talked about the simple values of his youth: hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety, decency. Yet his own finances and his acquisition of properties in Florida and California raised many eyebrows, especially when he spent government money on refurbishing them. He spoke, so he always said, to ordinary American men and women, yet he could also say, ‘You’ve got to be a little evil to understand those people out there. You have to have known the dark side of life to understand those people.’ He realized that middle Americans did not care about what he loved most – foreign policy. ‘They don’t know anything about what you’re doing on SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] and all these other things,’ he said more in amusement than anger, ‘they just want things to simmer down and be quiet, and to them we have not accomplished very much.’16

  He loathed the hippies of the 1960s with their drugs, their rejection of work and their sexual freedom. On the other hand, he was fascinated by the sexual peccadilloes of others. He ordered a round-the-clock watch on Senator Edward Kennedy in the hopes of catching him with, as Nixon put it, a ‘babe’. He made clumsy jokes about Kissinger’s reputedly extravagant sex life. He envied and even admired John F. Kennedy, but also railed against the East Coast establishment and the Georgetown intellectuals of Washington. His tastes remained resolutely middlebrow. He loved American musicals and wept unabashedly at Carousel. (He was particularly moved by the song ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.) One of his favourite movies was Around the World in 80 Days: ‘Watch – watch this!’ he would urge the audience in the White House screening room. ‘Here comes the elephant!’17

  According to an aide who knew him well, he deliberately played down his own intellectual side to portray himself as a good old boy. He told bad locker-room jokes. He talked incessantly about sports. That part was not an act; he loved sports, especially football. When he was at college, he turned out for the team, year after year, although he rarely got to play. At practices a skinny Nixon would face much bigger players, but the coach would not let up on him or them. ‘So I’d have to knock the little guy for a loop,’ remembered another player who had been responsible for blocking. ‘Oh, my gosh did he take it.’18

  Nixon always prided himself on his iron determination and his capacity for work. Like the ninety-seven-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas advertisement, he had shown those who once laughed at or underestimated him. ‘If you are reasonably intelligent,’ he told an old friend from his law school days, ‘and if your
anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.’ Kissinger, who came to know him well, said that Nixon always believed, though he was going to lose in the end. Once, as Nixon waited for a flight in Saigon, he told an American diplomat that it was sure to be late. ‘If anything bad can happen to me, it will.’ Tom Wicker, who wrote one of the more sympathetic biographies, watched him in the 1960 campaign: ‘painfully conscious of slights and failures, a man who has imposed upon himself a self-control so rigid as to be all but visible.’19

  The career he had chosen placed a terrific strain on him, and, from time to time, it showed. When he was tired and tense, even one drink would tip him over into slurred and rambling speeches. He often had trouble sleeping, and his colleagues grew accustomed to the middle-of-the-night phone calls. Unsubstantiated rumours circulated for years that Nixon had seen a psychoanalyst or that his doctor had treated him for impotence. One of his doctors, in New York, talked mysteriously in his old age about Nixon’s neurotic symptoms and how difficult it was to discuss them with a patient ‘so very inhibited’. It is hard to know how seriously to take such stories. It is certainly true, though, that many people found Nixon puzzling. ‘The strangest man I’d ever met,’ said one White House assistant. Kissinger, usually cautious in public, once told a reporter that he found Nixon ‘odd, artificial, and unpleasant’.20

  ‘I do not recall a moment’, said Herb Klein, his Director of Communications, ‘when I saw him completely lost in happiness.’ Nixon could never forget past humiliations and setbacks. As he told Chou En-lai when they finally met, ‘an election loss was really more painful than a physical wound in war.’ The latter wounded only the body, the former the spirit. On the other hand, adversity gave you ‘strength and character’. All he wanted, so he told Chou, ‘was a life in which I had just one more victory than defeat’.21 It was a curious and revealing way to talk to someone he scarcely knew.

  Nixon went through agonies even as vice-president and when he was running for the presidential nominations in 1960 and 1968, because Eisenhower, whom he admired so much, would never wholeheartedly support or endorse him. Although he prided himself on his selfcontrol, there would be moments of uncontrollable rage or self-pity. He broke down famously in public in 1962 at the end of his unsuccessful campaign for governor of California; in a rambling statement he blamed the press for his loss. ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference . . .’22

  It was not, of course. ‘Once you get into this great stream of history,’ he wrote in Six Crises, about what he considered the most significant incidents in his career ‘you can’t get out.’ Why would a man who was uncomfortable with strangers choose a life in politics? ‘It doesn’t come naturally to me to be a buddy-buddy boy,’ he told a journalist. ‘I can’t really let my hair down with anyone.’ What drove him on after so many setbacks: his narrow loss to Kennedy in 1960, his humiliating loss for the governorship of California and, of course, being driven from office by the Watergate scandal? Who or where was the real Nixon? Was it the man who barked orders at his aides to fire this son of a bitch and to get that opponent? The man who wrote, in the same 1970 New Year’s memorandum to himself, ‘Cool – Strong – Organized – Temperate – Exciting’? Or, the man whom an aide, a liberal Jewish lawyer from New York, remembered for his ‘intelligence, idealism and generosity’ and whom, for all the ranting about Jews on the tapes, the aide never believed to be anti-Semitic? Russell Baker, the writer, once came up with a striking image: of Nixon as a row of suits which came out of the closet in turn and which ran from the demagogic anti-Communist to the elder statesman.23

  When he was at college, Nixon loved acting. Many of the journalists who followed him over the years felt that he had never stopped. He could be brilliant, drawing crowds to their feet with his speeches. When he talked to his fellow statesmen, he was wise and dignified. But the acts were not always convincing. Eisenhower’s secretary thought that Nixon ‘sometimes seems like a man who is acting a nice man rather than being one’. In public appearances, he sweated too much, gestured stiffly, wrung his hands together until his knuckles went white. When he was president his staff tried to set up opportunities to show him being relaxed and spontaneous, as the Kennedys, who fascinated and infuriated Nixon, so easily were. Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, got him an Irish setter but it had to be cajoled with a trail of dog biscuits to come near him. A scene staged to display to the press a rugged Nixon strolling by the Pacific Ocean somehow did not come off with polished leather shoes and dress trousers. When visitors came to his office, he tried to set them at ease, but when he brought out a memento, a pin or a pen perhaps, he thrust it out awkwardly with one of his unfunny jokes. ‘He was a man totally lacking in personal grace,’ said a senior State Department official, ‘with no sense of the proper distance to keep in human relations.’ Yet when he gave out posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor (something he shrank from doing), he was direct and simple with the families.24

  He loved the idea of being president, although he found some of the reality such as cabinet meetings tedious. (He simply gave up holding them.) He loved being greeted abroad as a head of state. He loved living in the White House. He tried to enhance its already considerable pomp with new uniforms in white and gold for the White House police. (After press comment compared them to costumes in comic operas, the uniforms quietly disappeared; the elaborate hats popped up later at a rock concert.)25

  He knew how he wanted to be seen: the charm of a Kennedy; the leadership of a Churchill or a de Gaulle. ‘At his best in a crisis. Cool. Unflappable,’ were the qualities he wanted the press to see, so he told Kissinger. ‘Steely but subtle.’ He must be mysterious: ‘always like the iceberg, you see only the tip’. His staff had orders to stress how hard the man Nixon referred to as ‘N.’ or the ‘P.’ worked, how he needed only a few hours of sleep, how focused and energetic he was. This was true, but not always. Nixon was easily distracted. ‘P. is all of a sudden enamored with the use of the Dictaphone’, Haldeman wrote in his diary one day, ‘and is spewing out memos by the carload.’ Nixon fussed endlessly about the details for state banquets or the latest story in the press.26

  ‘All people think the P.’s doing an excellent job,’ he told Haldeman in 1972 just before the China trip, ‘but no one loves him, fears him, or hates him, and he needs to have all three.’ He had the last two, at least in some circles. He suspected, though, that even his own staff did not take his orders seriously when, like the Red Queen, he demanded that this person be fired at once and that office be closed down immediately. If sheer hard work and attention to image could have done it, Nixon would have had love too, but he knew well and sometimes despaired that he was not naturally charismatic.27

  He was generous to his staff, but he seems not to have known how to treat them as human beings. He never thought, for example, to ask Haldeman how many children he had. And although his chief of staff spent hours of every day with him, the President only ever invited him once with his wife to a purely social dinner with Mrs Nixon. But then Nixon had few purely social occasions or friends. Haldeman, who tried to anticipate everything, once tried to find a friend for him, someone he could confide in. Nixon was astonished. In any case, he already had the perfect friend in Bebe Rebozo, ‘a genial, discreet sponge’, who sat silently for hours while Nixon held forth.28 Otherwise it is difficult to know whom he was close to. His daughters certainly; perhaps his wife, Pat, although he rarely showed any interest in her after the first few years of their marriage. He had thousands of acquaintances but very few close friends.

  He often talked about his mother, widely held to be a saintly figure, who suffered the early deaths of two of her children. But she was a cold saint, doing her duty uncomplainingly but never showing her children open affection and warmth. Nixon told his sympathetic biographer Jonathan Aitke
n that his mother had never kissed him. When Aitken seemed surprised, Nixon grew angry. Aitken’s reaction, Nixon felt, was like something from ‘one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists’. Yet he wept in Billy Graham’s arms when she died. Henry Kissinger, who could be so cruel about Nixon, once said, ‘He would have been a great man had somebody loved him.’29

  The area where Nixon came closest to real greatness, in his own mind and those of his defenders, was foreign relations. As he took off from Washington that February day in 1972, he was flying not just towards China but towards, so he thought, a shift for the better in the United States’ position in the world. Perhaps even more important to him was the historic nature of his trip. He talked about it incessantly in the months before his departure. He was the first American president ever to visit China and he was going to a country which was a mystery to most of the world. ‘A trip to China’, he told journalists, ‘is like going to the moon.’30 He was determined that it would go well.