RICHARD NIXON fought wars he could not win, feared his enemies at home would defeat him, and felt unconstrained by law when he sought to destroy them first. That belief led him to break his oath of office and violate the Constitution. He permanently damaged people’s respect for the presidency, a danger in a democracy.
And now his legacy is all around us.
Some presidents who succeeded Nixon never seemed to learn. Ronald Reagan ran covert wars overseas with clandestine funds. His top national security aides were indicted, then pardoned, by George H. W. Bush. Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury. George W. Bush’s abuses of power dwarfed Nixon’s—secret prisons, sanctioned torture, limitless eavesdropping, all supported by presidential fiat and secret statutes, aided and abetted by Vice President Dick Cheney. Barack Obama’s administration tormented more reporters and their sources under threat of subpoena or prison than Nixon’s ever did. In America, now more than ever, campaign cash from corporate magnates controls elections.
South Vietnam fell nine months after Nixon left office, as did Cambodia, which went on to suffer the torments of a tyrannical regime, and Laos, where many thousands of tribesmen who had fought alongside Americans for twenty years fled into exile. The last Americans to leave Saigon took neither peace nor honor with them. And still we go to war without knowing our enemies, or the contour of the battlefield, or the way out.
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Richard Nixon was unconditionally pardoned for the crimes of Watergate—an unpopular proclamation by President Ford—a month after he left the White House. Within six weeks, Nixon came close to dying.
His chronic phlebitis, doubtless compounded by depression, flared dangerously. He entered Long Beach Memorial Hospital near San Clemente on October 23, 1974. His physicians saw the danger. Nixon’s left leg was obstructed by blood clots; if one broke loose and invaded his lungs, he would almost surely suffer a potentially fatal embolism. Without surgery, his prognosis was grim. He was sixty-one years old.
Nixon collapsed after the operation. A vein ruptured. Bleeding internally, he fell unconscious, white as a sheet, in deep vascular shock. His heart stopped. “He just flat-lined,” said his White House aide Steve Bull, who was with him in the hospital. “Clinically … he was dead.” His nurse slapped his face, repeating: “Richard! Wake up, Richard!” When he came to consciousness the next day, his doctor told him: “We almost lost you last night.”
For the next two decades, Richard Nixon tried to turn his life into a parable of a man who suffered, died, and rose again.
Having taken every tape and every file he could find before he left the White House, he signed a $2 million contract for his memoirs, a 1,094-page book that he drafted with the help of the future television news anchor Diane Sawyer and his favorite speechwriter, Raymond Price. He signed a $600,000 deal with the British broadcaster David Frost for a series of interviews.
Nixon made a cunning remark near the end of his encounters with Frost. “What history says about this administration will depend on who writes history,” he said. “Winston Churchill once told one of his critics that history … would treat him well, and his critic said: ‘How do you know?’ And he said, ‘Because I intend to write it.’”
And Nixon did, first in his memoirs, then in eight volumes on statecraft and power. “As people look back on the Nixon administration,” he said in 1988, “they’re probably most likely to remember fifty years from now, one hundred years from now, that we made a difference on a very major issue. We changed the world.” He and he alone had transformed the global balance of power with “the China initiative, which only I could do.”
“History will treat me fairly,” he concluded. “Historians probably won’t.”
The tales of the tapes remained untold: Nixon and his wealthy supporters fought a twenty-year battle until his death in 1994 to keep them out of the hands of historians and citizens alike. It took twenty more years, up through 2014, before the last of the tapes were released and made available for the arduous task of transcription.
The tens of thousands of recently declassified documents from his years in office, on top of the tapes, are the real history of the Nixon administration. This book’s task is to tell it as it happened, in the words of the man himself—the man who said in his second inaugural address that we must answer to history, and to our conscience, for our work.
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Ray Price, who was with Nixon throughout his presidency and in his exile, gave an oral history interview in 2007 to Timothy Naftali, who transformed the Richard Nixon Presidential Library from a mausoleum into a living museum.
Talking about Nixon’s burdens in the Oval Office, Price said: “You have to, in some cases, sacrifice a lot of virtue. You may not have to sacrifice virgins, but you may have to sacrifice virtue sometimes. And that’s the only way you get things done in the real world. It is a real world, and a lot of the critics tend to forget that the world is real.… And people forget he actually was human. A lot of people may not believe this, but he was.”
“We don’t expect our presidents to be human,” Naftali said.
The two men laughed together.
“But almost all of them have been,” Price said.