President Nixon: Alone in the White House
By Richard Reeves Simon & Schuster, 702 pages, $53.50
The 37th president of the United States is well known to us all. He was the shy boy from the orange-grove town whose fierce ambition and sharp intellect took him to the very top of the greasy pole of American politics. He was the awkward man who never seemed quite at home, even in the White House he transformed into a private redoubt of seclusion. He was the statesman who carved brave thoughts into diplomatic history, but whose private rhetoric was combative, cruel and coarse.
Richard Nixon was the central character in one of the principal American tragedies of the past century, but he remains to us one of the central enigmas of American politics. How could a man so limited in his humanity come to occupy the most powerful position in the world? How could a man so bruised emerge in a political system that, before and since, has so richly rewarded the smooth and the polished? How could a man so marinated in stories about justice believe he could get away with one of the great injustices of the age?
American booksellers are full of half-answers and half-baked theories, the balm of a generation of readers whose obsession with this man of obsessions has not dimmed, though nearly three decades have passed since his departure from power. There is very little new to say about Nixon, much as there is little to say, more than four centuries later, about Shakespeare's King Lear. But Richard Reeves has at least framed the question in a fresh way.
In President Nixon, a kind of introverted companion to his presidential chronicle of an extrovert, the highly praised President Kennedy, Reeves offers a portrait of a man alone . . . alone at the top, alone in the White House, alone in the sweep of his vision but also, fatefully, alone in his misery.
He was unpleasant and hard to please in a profession of pleasant charlatans and crowd-pleasers. He was the avatar of family values, yet once felt he had to coach his daughters to tell interviewers he used to play birthday tunes for them on the piano. He spent New Year's Eve alone at Camp David (his valet whipped up some bacon and eggs for dinner). He trusted no one and was trusted by no one. His passion for secrecy was so great that he conspired in secret about how to keep secrets.
He bombed sovereign nations in secret, listened in on his rivals in secret, and dispatched his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, to Paris in secret for negotiations with the North Vietnamese and to Beijing in secret to set the stage for Nixon's ground-breaking trip to China. Once in China, he sneaked off to see Chairman Mao so that his own secretary of state, William Rogers, would not know where he was.
The tissue of lies was so thick that it could fill a volume, and it does. Some of them were big lies, some just stupid fibs, many quite trivial. By the time Apollo 15 lifted off for the moon, for example, most people had lost their fascination with lunar excursions and so hardly anyone would expect the president to be transfixed with the journey. He wasn't. No big deal. H. R. Haldeman, one of the president's principal advisers, noted in his diary: "The Apollo shot was this morning; the P slept through it, but we, of course, put out an announcement that he had watched it with great interest."
North Americans of a certain age have been in search of a key to Nixon's character and personality since he emerged on the Washington scene in 1947. There may be no better one than this, which argues, in short, that the man was one lonely guy and, unlike lonely guys in myth and mirth, didn't mind staying that way. For more than 600 pages, Reeves sketches a man who was, as he puts it, "a strange man of uncomfortable shyness, who functioned best alone with his thoughts and the yellow legal pads he favored, or in set pieces where he literally memorized every word he had to say."
This was, after all, a man who played every piano piece by memory . . . all in the key of G. After holding a state dinner for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, he complained about the function, saying, "We have to speed up these dinners. They take forever. So why don't we just leave out the soup course?" He often -- and at the time this was not the phrase of social significance that it would become in our time -- bowled alone.
But this was also a man who kept up appearances. When George Wallace, the redoubtable segregationist and populist, was shot in Maryland, Nixon turned up in his hospital room; the governor noticed that the president was wearing television make-up. Nixon repeatedly urged his lieutenants to portray him as a tower of strength. A Nixon directive to Haldeman: "The basic line here is the character; the lonely man in the White House. Tell Kissinger he's got to get across the lonely and heroic courage of the president."
That is how Nixon desperately wanted to be remembered. At his death there was a striking ambivalence -- disdain for his deceptions, awe at his achievements. But the balance has yet to tip in his favour, and historians and the public memory have yet to dwell on the heroic courage of the president.
They remember the lonely part, though. He was partly right: Richard Nixon was the lonely man in the White House. David M. Shribman is Washington bureau chief for The Boston Globe.