RICHARD M. NIXON
37th President, 1969–1974
Overall Rank: 28
Total Score: 486
Despite being the only president to resign from office, historians do not place Nixon in the bottom 25 percent of all presidents. He benefits from a very high rank in international relations (10th), along with several other rankings in the mid-twenties. However, historians rank him 37th in relations with Congress and second to last (42nd) in moral authority, ranking above only James Buchanan.
Party: Republican
b. January 9, 1913, Yorba Linda, California
d. April 22, 1994, New York City, New York
First Lady: Thelma “Pat” Catherine Ryan Nixon
Age entering office: 56
Historian: Evan Thomas
Journalist and historian Evan Thomas spent thirty-three years as a writer and editor at Time and Newsweek, including ten years as the Washington bureau chief. He has also spent time teaching writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton. He joined C-SPAN to discuss his book, Being Nixon: A Man Divided, on June 19, 2015, on Q & A.
I don’t think you can do a Richard Nixon [biography] without doing the personal [side]. You watch Nixon, and you wonder, what is driving this guy? What’s behind him? What’s it like to be Nixon? I called my book Being Nixon because I was really curious: What is it like to actually be Richard Nixon? He seems so possessed at times, haunted at times, troubled at times, enthusiastic at times, proud at times. His chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, called him “the weirdest man I ever met.” That’s from his loyal chief of staff. He was, for better or for worse, a weird man.
[I wanted to understand] how one of the most introverted politicians ever became one of the most successful politicians in the twentieth century. He was on five national tickets. He won the presidency twice, the last time by one of the largest landslides in history. His record is equaled only by FDR, and yet, he could barely make conversation. If he was here talking to you, there’s a chance that he wouldn’t be able to speak at all. Sometimes he would just spin his hands.…
He would just blurt things out. There’s a scene where he runs into Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at Martin Luther King [Jr.]’s funeral. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says to Mrs. Kennedy, “Mrs. Kennedy, this must bring back many memories.” Well, that’s just cringe-making. Nixon would do that kind of thing all the time. We all do this. I do this at cocktail parties. You just blurt things out because you’re uncomfortable. But Nixon would do this all the time. He was terrible at small talk. He liked to be alone. He was always writing on yellow pads, and people used to say his best friend was his yellow pad because he didn’t really have any best friends.
Nixon was in a Latin play when he was a high schooler. He was doing Dido and Aeneas. He was Aeneas, and he had to kiss Dido. He’d never kissed anybody before, so he lumbers over the stage to kiss her, and the high school students erupt in laughter, derision, mocking him. It was an early case of Nixon having to deal with real adversity. He was humiliated. The girl hated him for it, and yet, interestingly, afterwards he tries to make up with the girl, who becomes his girlfriend. He learns to deal with adversity, to be mocked and to be jeered, but come back and show people.
[That first girlfriend was Ola Florence Welch.] There are hundreds of oral histories about his high school and college years at Whittier College and at Cal State Fullerton,… because when he became president, they went around and interviewed all of the old friends. Ola gave a lot of interviews. She was quite touching about Nixon. She thought he was kind of an odd duck, but she also found him to be impressive, not your normal high school kid. And although she first wrote in her diary, “I hate Richard Nixon”—that was her first thought about him—she was his girlfriend for four years. He tried to marry her, and she finally dumped him. He was sad about that, but he found Pat [Ryan, married her in June 1940,] and was pretty happy.
His father, Francis, was a bully and his mom, Hannah, was a saint, he said. [She was] kind of a passive-aggressive saint. There’s some oral history that suggests that she was very withholding, and it was hard to win her love—and he desperately tried. His older brother was quite charming. Died of TB. And one of his younger brothers, who was a very sweet boy, also died. The mom said that Richard tried to be both of those boys, and he couldn’t be. It just was something he could never do. So, he was never comfortable; he was a very forlorn little boy. He was very clean. He always had a clean white shirt.… He walked barefoot but carried his shoes around in a bag. One of his cousins said he never wanted to be picked up and hugged. He was kind of a lonely, forlorn boy trying to please his parents in a way that I don’t think ever succeeded, even unto becoming president.
Nixon actually was accepted to Harvard out of high school because he was such a smart kid but couldn’t go because the money had all been used to take care of the older brother. And, in fact, his mom had gone out into the desert in Arizona and rented a place to take care of [his brother]. In those days, TB sufferers would go to dry places because this was pre-antibiotics. And so, Nixon loses his mother to go take care of his dying older brother as a teenager. I think that was tough for him.
He was a poor boy. His father made some money running a gas station, so it got better, and I guess relative to the other poor boys at Whittier College, he was probably OK. But Nixon used that poorness. He understood outsiders. He used his shyness to understand outsiders. When he was at Whittier College, there was a cool guys’ fraternity called The Franklins. Nixon started a fraternity for uncool guys, knowing that there were more uncool guys than there are cool guys. This is the beginning of the “Silent Majority,” [a term he would use as president]. Nixon was elected president of his class by getting all the outs to run against the ins. He was doing that thirty, forty years later as a politician. He understood what it was like to be on the outside. He empathized with those people. He shared their hopes and their resentments, and he knew how to exploit them.
[After serving in the navy in World War II, Richard Nixon returned to California and entered politics. He was elected in 1946 as representative for California’s twelfth congressional district. In 1950, he mounted a bruising campaign for the Senate against Democratic congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas and won.]
[Bebe Rebozo was one of Nixon’s lifelong friends. Senator] Nixon was down in the dumps in 1951 or so, depressed—he was subject to depression. George Smathers—who was this high-living senator, a friend of Jack Kennedy’s from Florida, a Democrat—to cheer him up, brought him down to Florida. [He planned to] have a guys’ weekend, drinking and girl chasing out on [Rebozo’s] boat. Nixon really was not good at either of those things, and at first Rebozo thought, “Who is this guy? He’s no fun.” But a kinship was established because Rebozo saw something real in Nixon, that there was a vulnerability and a sincerity there that the public never saw. But Rebozo did see it, and Rebozo understood that what Nixon needed was companionship without talking. And that was the basis of a friendship that went on for years and years.
[Nixon served as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president for eight years, from 1953 to 1961. Then, the 1960s were his]… wilderness years. Nixon had lost [his own presidential bid] in ’60. He runs in ’62 for [California] governor, loses, and holds his famous press conference, saying, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” People figure he’s finished, but he’s thinking about coming back right away. He said to… others that if he didn’t go back into public life, he would be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four. He’d read this book by Dr. [Arnold] Hutschnecker, his psychiatrist, called The Will to Live, and Hutschnecker suggests that people who are destined for greatness have got to be in public life or they’re going to die. And Nixon believed he was destined.
This is one of the positive things [about Richard Nixon]. We think of Nixon as being a pol and a bit of a hack, [yet] as a young congressman, Nixon, when everybody else is an isolationist—and remember he’s a Republican—he’s an internationalist. He realizes the United States has got to be out confronting communism, saving Europe. He was pro-Marshall Plan, even though his constituents back home thought foreign aid was an operational rat hole, that it was just wasting money. Nixon goes against his own constituency because he believes in American power for good, to save Europe in that case, and stand up against the communists. So, he always has this grand vision of himself as helping the United States fulfill its destiny as a great power, with Nixon front and center.
Nixon… actually admired Lyndon Johnson and felt a kinship. Both men were destroyed by Vietnam; both were politicians with a capital P, and both understood power with a capital P.… In 1968, when Nixon fiddled a little bit at the 1968 campaign and kept the North Vietnamese government from going to Paris, he arguably disrupted these peace negotiations [in order] to win the presidency. It’s a murky and not good chapter in Nixon’s history, and Johnson called Nixon a traitor for having done that. And yet, there’s still this kind of an affinity [between them]. You could see that he admires what a man LBJ was. He was a man, [and] poor Nixon wanted to be a man. He got himself in more trouble on those [White House] tapes by trying to appear macho—all that swearing and profanity. Nixon wasn’t even good at it. He was bad at it. It wasn’t natural to him. It was natural to LBJ. If you listen to LBJ swear on his tapes—he’s good at it. Nixon was trying to be something he wasn’t. He wasn’t an LBJ, crude, macho guy. Nixon was an intellect—a shy, intellectual, thoughtful man. But he couldn’t let himself be that. He had to be something that he wasn’t. I think that’s one of the reasons why he destroyed himself.
[Nixon won the White House on his second try in 1968. For his family it was] not that joyful the night of the election. Nixon, typically, was in one room [at a hotel], and the family was on a different floor. Nixon with his yellow pad, all alone. They heard that the votes were being held back in Chicago. Now, this brings back terrible memories because in 1960, Chicago mayor [Richard] Daley allegedly stole the election for Jack Kennedy, and they held back the votes in Chicago. Nixon always believed that election had been stolen from him. And so, in 1968, they hear that the Chicago votes are slow coming in, and it’s a razor’s edge race. Mrs. Nixon hears this, and her daughters can hear her vomiting in the bathroom; she was so upset about this. Finally, at about seven o’clock in the morning, they get Chicago to deliver their votes, and they find out they have won. Nixon is happy.… He goes home to his apartment on Fifth Avenue and puts Victory at Sea on the record player and opens up all the windows and conducts Victory at Sea as it blasts out the windows. All alone. No family there; it’s just Dick.
Since I was writing a book called Being Nixon, I needed to find people who were around him, physically close to him. They all were young men. [There was] Dwight Chapin, his body guy; Jack Brennan, his military aide; Ray Price, his speechwriter; [and] Larry Higby, who worked for H. R. Haldeman.… Years later, they were still a little defensive around the press, and they were a little defensive around me. I’m East Coast establishment—I worked for The Washington Post Company. But what the heck—a lot of years have passed, so they were pretty generous with me.… And they were sympathetic. Yes, Nixon was a weird guy, no doubt about it. But he was a considerate boss, a thoughtful boss. He tried to buck up his troops, and I think they wanted to get that side across.
… He was a good talent scout for young talent. Brent Scowcroft, later the famous national security adviser, was a young Nixon military aide. He talked to me, and he was very interesting. Henry Kissinger talked to me, of course, because he’s interested in his version of history, but also he’s a very thoughtful, perceptive critic of Nixon. Don Rumsfeld [later George W. Bush’s defense secretary] was a young aide who worked for Nixon, and he talked to me. George Shultz [Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state] was a young cabinet secretary. He talked to me. A lot of these names who became more famous later got their start with Richard Nixon because he had a good eye for talent. Somebody I didn’t talk to, but I wished I had, was Roger Ailes, [the now deceased founding] head of Fox News. Roger Ailes was a fairly obscure daytime TV producer when Richard Nixon discovered him in 1968 and put him as part of his media team.… Nixon plucked him out of the crowd and gave him this kind of responsibility. He did that kind of thing all the time. For all the craziness of Watergate, Nixon had a really talented staff.
The Georgetown set, today, doesn’t really exist, but back then,… it was really powerful. This was a group of CIA, State Department [officials], mostly going to Harvard and Yale, very charming, pleased with themselves.… This is a world I know because I worked for The Washington Post Company, and [its chairwoman] Katharine Graham was at the center of this world, as was Joe Alsop, the famous columnist.… I came in at the end of this world as the bureau chief of Newsweek, and so I used to go to Mrs. Graham’s for dinner and I saw this. They hated Nixon.… They made no bones about it. Mrs. Helms, who was the wife of the CIA director under Nixon, Richard Helms, said there was no mercy for Nixon at these dinner parties. No mercy. Henry Kissinger was often the honored guest. Kissinger, who could be shamelessly flattering of Nixon in the White House, would go out to dinner with the Georgetown set and make fun, gently, but make fun of his boss. Nixon knew this, and he rationalized it. He said, “Well, Henry has to do this. Henry needs this. He needs to be popular.” But it hurt him, and he would say, as Kissinger went off, “Well, there goes Henry to talk to those awful people in Georgetown.” And the Georgetown people, particularly the Washington Post, which was at the center of the Georgetown set, was out to get Nixon. And you know what? They got him.
[The Watergate scandal began with a plan for Nixon campaign operatives to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at Washington’s Watergate complex and wiretap their phones. On June 17, 1972, the “burglars” were discovered, and the scandal leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation ensued.]
… Nixon was hardly the first president to wiretap and bug. One of the things that afflicted Nixon was that he was envious of the Kennedys and Johnson. He thought the Kennedys were better at dirty tricks than he was, and he was trying to catch up to the Kennedys. He wasn’t totally wrong about that. I wrote a biography of Bobby Kennedy. The Kennedy machine was tough, and Bobby Kennedy [as attorney general] did more wiretapping than Richard Nixon ever did, including wiretapping Martin Luther King [Jr.]. So, it’s not like the presidency was innocent and along came evil Richard Nixon. Executive power was concentrated in the ’50s and ’60s in the White House. The rules about wiretapping and bugging were blurry at best. The FBI [under J. Edgar Hoover] was only too happy to be an instrument of the White House and spy on the president’s enemies.
There are endless ironies about Nixon, but one of [the] things that destroyed him was that the FBI got out of the business of working for the president, doing this kind of bugging. Hoover said, “We’re not doing this anymore.” Hoover, smart guy knowing about his legacy, could feel the lawsuits coming on in the Warren Supreme Court—this is a more liberal era in American government, and the rules are about to change. So, Hoover says the FBI’s not doing this. What does that mean? Nixon goes in-house. He creates the “plumbers,” [giving him] an in-house capability to spy. Unfortunately, the people his aides hired—Hunt and Liddy, names that resonate in history—were not that competent. They may have once been competent, but I’m not even sure of that. E. Howard Hunt’s reputation in the CIA was pretty bad. He was one of [Nixon’s] chief plumbers. G. Gordon Liddy was a very colorful figure and brave in some ways, but kind of a screw-up as far as I can tell. Those guys made a lot of mistakes. They were not competent in what they did, and they got caught. And Nixon got caught with them.
[H. R. Haldeman was one of many Nixon aides who got caught up in the Watergate scandal. On April 30, 1973,] he’s just fired Haldeman on national TV, and after [the broadcast, Nixon phones him].… He’s upset that nobody’s calling; in the old days, Haldeman would arrange to have people call. So, he says to Haldeman, “Bob, do you think you could get people to call me, like in the old days?” Haldeman goes, “I don’t think I can do that, Mr. President.” Nixon hears himself, and he says, “All right. I love you, Bob. I love you.” It’s poignant. It’s heartfelt. He actually does love the guy he just fired on national TV. His heart breaks [as you’re] listening to this; you can tell Nixon is going down. He’s going to be in office for another fifteen months, so it’s going to take a while, but he’s finished as of April 30, 1973, and you can hear it in his voice.
… There is, of course, a huge debate about how much Nixon drank. I can’t resolve it. He had a low capacity. [But] towards the end, even Julie, in her memoir, says in that last year [of Watergate] both her mother and her father drank more than they should have. I don’t think he was the crazy drunk that emerges in some of the literature. Although, I’ve got to say there’s a conversation between Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft where Kissinger casually says that they couldn’t put the president on the phone to the prime minister of Britain because he was “loaded.” That’s October 1973, and Nixon is in the throes of Watergate—it is really getting ugly. Scowcroft told me that he would go to Nixon with Kissinger’s cables, and, after a couple of drinks, sometimes Nixon would say, “Bomb ’em.” Scowcroft knew enough to ignore the order because Nixon really wasn’t capable of giving an order. I was a little shocked that Scowcroft told me that story.
[Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, as impeachment threats loomed—the only president ever to resign.] One of the many tragedies of Richard Nixon was that although he was very self-conscious, he was not very self-aware.… And he was afraid, in a way, of looking at himself in a realistic way. He would say, “I don’t carry grudges.” Hello? Richard Nixon was one of the great grudge-carriers of all time. He could be very un-self-reflective, and this hurt him because his lashing out at enemies is what destroyed him. If he’d only realized that about himself. As he leaves the White House, almost his last words are to the effect of, “Don’t hate your enemies, because if you do, that will destroy you.” It’s self-awareness, but it’s way too late. He’s about to get in the [Marine One] helicopter and fly away.
Poor Nixon. After he left office in disgrace, he almost died. He had phlebitis. He was passing out. The nurse was slapping him, “Richard, wake up, Richard.” He was near death.… Very much to his credit, he crawled back; he started playing golf with Jack Brennan. Not very good golf, but every day. He built himself back up. He talks to his friends; I guess he [still] had a few. Walter Annenberg invited him to his estate.… [There was] Bebe Rebozo, Bob Abplanalp, but not a lot of friends. Nixon was so broke that [his daughter and son-in-law] Tricia and Ed Cox had to give their bank account to him. It was a loan, but he was that broke.… There was literally a question of whether the Nixons were going to be able to pay for their groceries, he was so broke when he got out.
[Pat Nixon died in 1993, a year before the former president passed away.] Henry Kissinger told me a very affecting story that Nixon asked him to come for dinner at the [White House] residence with Mrs. Nixon. As they were walking over, Nixon said, “Would you tell Mrs. Nixon about some of my foreign policy accomplishments?” Then Nixon goes off to the bathroom because he’s too shy to do this himself. Kissinger dutifully starts in and starts telling Mrs. Nixon about Nixon’s foreign policy achievements, and Mrs. Nixon says, “Henry, you don’t have to.” She understood her husband and how awkward he was, even with his own wife. I actually think the marriage was much closer than we think. We’ve seen all these photographs of her looking pained and unhappy, and late in Watergate it was pretty bad. Nixon says in his memoir that he doesn’t tell his own wife that he’s resigning. He tells his secretary, Rosemary Woods, to tell Mrs. Nixon. So, you wonder how close they were in August 1974 [when Nixon resigned]. But before that, in the early years, there are very touching love letters between them. Nixon is like one of these guys that can’t believe his good luck that he married the prettiest girl. And she was the prettiest girl. If you look at the old photographs of her, she was gorgeous. She became gaunt later, but when she was twenty pounds heavier, she was a knockout.
Patricia helped him a lot in the early years. She stood by him, and when he felt weak or felt like quitting, she would say, “Richard, you can’t. You can’t, you just can’t quit.” She did that four or five times at key moments, the [1952] “Checkers” speech, and other times. So, it was a good marriage in some ways, but in the White House his natural aloneness and the terrible pressure he was under stressed it. Although, I’ve got to say, the marriage resumed after he left the White House, and when she dies in 1993, he is undone. The photographs are amazing. He is just bawling. He’s not just crying, he is convulsed with tears; he misses her so much.
Nixon was poignant. He has become, in the cartoon version, sort of a monster, and he did some monstrous things. You listen to [his White House] tapes, his anti-Semitism and all that. It is terrible. But Nixon was often somebody who wanted to be a better person. Late at night he would take those yellow pads, and he would write on them what he wanted to be. He would use words like “joyful” and “inspired” and “confident” and “serene.” These are adjectives that really didn’t describe Nixon. It’s not really who he was, but who he wanted to be. Those yellow pads are preserved in the Nixon library. When I started doing this book, I was really struck by that because it was so in contrast to this idea we have of Nixon, scheming and rubbing his hands and swearing and saying anti-Semitic things.… Both Nixons are true. There’s evidence for both, but you have to see the whole man to understand him—the good with the bad.
[Richard Nixon is] so endlessly fascinating. I didn’t really expect that when I started. He’s the great American novel. It’s not fiction; it’s nonfiction. But you cannot top his American story: this poor, shy kid who climbs to the very top, and then, overcoming all obstacles, defeated many times, gets to the top, and then destroys himself.