RICHARD NIXON WAS A WORKAHOLIC and a loner who focused on his job relentlessly and pursued his goals ruthlessly. Eight years after his bitter loss to Kennedy, he was elected in a very close campaign against Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and quickly began isolating himself. Longtime associates, including aides who had served him during his vice presidency under Eisenhower, say this was a big change, because he was actually quite accessible, even friendly, in the No. 2 job. Yet he allowed his campaign staff to build a wall around him, and he continued the pattern in the White House.
If anything, this isolation intensified on Air Force One, where he would spend most of his time in his private cabin with the door closed, either alone or chatting with a handful of aides, especially White House Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. He allowed Haldeman and other advisers to screen not only his visitors but virtually all his phone calls on the plane; in the end, his contacts with the outside world were minimal.
He was reelected overwhelmingly in 1972 by giving Americans the kind of cultural conservatism and hardline but pragmatic foreign policy they wanted at the time. Even if the country didn’t like Nixon’s humorless, devious personality—his nickname was “Tricky Dick”—Americans preferred him to George McGovern, the liberal Democratic challenger whom Nixon managed to pigeonhole as a dangerous left-wing radical.
In the end, however, Nixon went too far when he covered up White House involvement in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel and endorsed a range of domestic spying, dirty tricks, and lying to Congress.
Just as important, his escalation of the Vietnam War fractured the country even more than it had been under Lyndon Johnson. Despised by a large segment of the electorate, Nixon made few attempts at healing despite his campaign promise to bring the country together. Instead, he played upon the country’s divisions over Vietnam, law and order, race, crime, and other issues, because it gave him and Republican conservatives a political edge. And no detail of his administration was seemingly too small to merit Nixon’s attention, resulting in a breathtaking focus on both the profound and the trivial.
He was capable of great decisiveness, and also great vacillation. As usual, these traits became vivid on Air Force One. On February 23, 1969, a month after his inauguration, he boarded the plane en route to Brussels for the start of his first foreign trip as president. An hour or so into the flight, Nixon suddenly ordered the bombing of Cambodian sanctuaries outside Vietnam. It had long angered him that North Vietnamese troops were staging attacks from these areas against American forces, and he was determined to stop them. Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, persuaded him to postpone his order for 48 hours so his advisers could consult with U.S., South Vietnamese, and other officials and develop a diplomatic plan for dealing with possible repercussions. Nixon agreed.
The next morning, Kissinger, Haldeman, and Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, returned to Air Force One to work out the bombing plan. It was the only place where they felt sure no one could eavesdrop on them electronically.
But as doubts about the plan rose among his senior advisers, including Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Nixon reconsidered. Ordering the bombing would only inflame the antiwar movement at home and abroad at the very beginning of Nixon’s regime. Nixon cancelled the attacks. He would order them, finally, several weeks later, but this initial episode showed how unsure of himself the new president could be.
Nixon’s many quirks were clearly visible on the plane. During the flight from Berlin to Rome on that first foreign visit, Nixon became peeved when William Safire, his speech writer, recalled the first trip he made with Nixon, then vice president, in 1958. Safire related how Nixon and Queen Elizabeth II had listened in historic St. Paul’s Church in London as a choir sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Nixon grew angry and interrupted the reverie. Ordering his aides not to mention the incident, he growled, “That’s a Kennedy song.” It was a manifestation of his resentment toward the man who had defeated him in 1960 and whose charisma he always envied.
As he did at the White House, he hatched many plots to outmaneuver his enemies, and he was obsessed with his news coverage. He believed the Eastern Establishment media, especially The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the three broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC, were out to get him, and he fumed to his senior aides, especially White House Chief of Staff Haldeman, about how unfair they were.
Ironically, shortly after he took office, Nixon ordered LBJ’s taping system aboard SAM 26000 removed from the aircraft. This primitive system had recorded all incoming and outgoing calls, just as Nixon was to do from the White House. It remains unexplained why Nixon removed the Air Force One system but upgraded the one in the White House, which was to provide damning evidence to the Watergate investigators during his second term.
Kissinger said later that Nixon suffered from “a lack of assurance even during his greatest accomplishments,” one of the character flaws that led to the paranoia-fed Watergate scandal. And Nixon’s vengeful mindset was evident even in his moments of triumph.
His pathbreaking trip to China, for example, started off well. In his departure ceremony on the South Lawn on February 17, 1972, he borrowed from the words of the first astronauts who had landed on the moon in describing what he hoped the trip would be remembered for: “We came in peace for all mankind.” It was an elegant way to begin, and everyone seemed to recognize the historic nature of the visit. The networks gave live coverage to Air Force One’s takeoff.
Yet Nixon was peeved. For one thing, he wasn’t happy that his effort to rename the presidential aircraft The Spirit of ’76 just before the trip was a flop; the media preferred Air Force One and would not accept the change. He began going over the manifest naming the 100 journalists traveling with him. “Are there any non-Jews here?” Nixon asked as he scanned the list. His aides (including Kissinger, who was himself Jewish) didn’t know whether he was kidding or displaying anti-Semitism, and didn’t know how to respond.
Nixon considered himself an expert on the media and was constantly fine-tuning his staff’s public-relations plans. For the China trip, he had insisted that the 100-person media contingent, pre-approved by the White House from a list of 2,000 applicants, contain a heavy concentration of television anchors, correspondents, camera personnel, and technicians. Nixon wanted the visit to be a TV spectacular, and he got his wish.
Yet throughout the outbound trip, reports Kissinger in his memoirs, “Nixon oscillated between anxiety that his otherwise competent staff was oblivious to the finer points of public relations and serious, indeed dedicated preparation for his sojourn in China. Having read every briefing book, he plied me with questions on the long hours of that plane ride.”
In an astounding departure, Nixon even strolled back to the press compartment on the Boeing 707 on the outbound leg—a first for him as president—and talked with the seven pool reporters and photographers on his plane. (As usual, a separate press charter had gone ahead to land before Air Force One and record the arrival.) Nixon awkwardly tried to make small talk, asking his antagonists if they knew how to use chopsticks.
As author Richard Reeves recounts, “One reporter showed him an elaborate China atlas with CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY embossed on the cover. ‘Do you think they’ll let us in with this?’ he asked.
“‘This will probably show how much we don’t know about China,’ answered the president.”
Nixon returned to his suite at the front of the plane and resumed studying the huge stacks of background briefing books. He memorized hundreds of “talking points” that he wanted to use in his talks with the Chinese leaders.
On the hop from Shanghai to Beijing, Nixon, sitting alone, looked out the window of Air Force One and, Reeves says, “thought the villages looked like pictures from the Middle Ages.” He felt that he was bridging not only ideological divides but historic ones, and considered this to be one of the most important missions of his presidency. He was right.
His trip was a triumph. Even if there were no huge breakthroughs on policy, it seemed a moment of historic conciliation. To this day, the term “Nixon goes to China” is shorthand for a political leader playing against type and doing what his critics never could have accomplished. Here was the seemingly implacable anti-Communist making overtures to Beijing. It was something a politician with a more lenient attitude toward the Red Menace could never have achieved; conservative leaders, such as Nixon himself, would have pilloried such a politician for naively taking risks with national security. Nobody thought Nixon would ever do that.
And even the seemingly small moments worked to Nixon’s advantage. On Nixon’s arrival in Beijing, a burly staffer blocked the aisle so aides could not walk off Air Force One at the same time as Nixon. Haldeman had given the order, and his goal was to keep everyone else out of the picture—particularly the publicity-hungry Kissinger—when Nixon shook hands with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai with Air Force One as a backdrop. This moment ended decades of enmity between Washington and Beijing, and was carried live on prime-time American TV—all to Nixon’s credit.
There were other memorable pictures that resonate to this day of his remarkable opening to China. The images, beamed all over the world, showed Nixon on the Great Wall; Nixon meeting with Mao Tse-tung; Nixon strolling in the Forbidden City.
Yet when he began his trip home, he fell into a funk. Nixon spent considerable time complaining to aides that his enemies in the media and in the Democratic party would criticize the trip as an election-year PR ploy, while ultra-conservatives would complain of a sellout. Surrounded by trusted aides who fed his every whim and fueled his bizarre theories, his insecure personality again came to the fore and he fretted that his enemies would twist the meaning of the trip to hurt him.
As Kissinger observed: “Triumph seemed to fill Nixon with a premonition of ephemerality. He was, as he never tired of repeating, at his best under pressure. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that he needed crises as a motivating force—and that success became not a goal but an obsession so that once achieved he would not know what to do with it.”
ON THE EVENING of Monday, June 19, 1972, en route to Washington after a long weekend in Key Biscayne, Florida, Nixon called Haldeman to the front of Air Force One and received what, in his diary, he called a surprise. “On the way back,” Nixon wrote, “I got the disturbing news from Bob Haldeman that the break-in of the Democratic National Committee involved someone on the payroll of the Committee to Re-Elect the President.” Nixon didn’t say whether he knew anything about the burglary in advance. But whether he did or not, his subsequent efforts to cover up the connections to his White House proved his downfall.
ON ELECTION DAY, November 7, 1972, Nixon carried 49 of the 50 states with 60.7 percent of the popular vote, one of the greatest presidential victories in U.S. history. And even though Republicans lost two seats in the Senate, they gained 12 seats in the House. Yet, the next morning, Nixon insisted that Haldeman demand the resignations of his Cabinet and senior staff so he could decide where to install new blood. The president struck his intimates as ungrateful and even angry.
Earlier that morning, November 8, he had reviewed his White House– prepared summary of the day’s news—which was dominated by glowing reports of his success. Instead of relishing his triumph, he again saw the downside. He wrote across the news summary: “The opposition line will be: 1. McG’s mistakes lost it and not his views and not RN’s strength. 2. The low vote proves no one liked either candidate, 3. RN let down his party.” He ordered Haldeman to take preemptive action against unnamed Republican officials who he predicted would blame the president for not helping them more. “Cut that off,” Nixon said. “Make sure that we start pissing on the party before they begin pissing on me. Blame bad candidates and sloppy organization.”
The flight to Key Biscayne on November 8 was supposed to be celebratory. But Nixon’s vindictive mood incubated on Air Force One. He told Haldeman he understood that 80 of the 89 members of the White House press corps had voted for McGovern (no one was sure where he got that number but no one challenged him on it). And he complained that it was McGovern’s campaign that had played dirty, not his.
He vented about the perceived slights, errors, and sins committed against him by Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and CBS News. “Freeze them,” he snapped, ordering his staff to keep the offenders out of the loop. As Haldeman reported in his diary, “He wants total discipline on the press, they’re to be used as enemies, not played for help.” As always, his first response against his perceived adversaries was to declare war. But this generally made matters worse in dealing with the media outlets that he singled out, because they had the last word. He also struck at his purely political adversaries. “He wants to be sure the IRS covers all major Democratic contributors and all backers of the new senators,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.
THROUGHOUT HIS PRESIDENCY, Nixon descended into fits of cursing and overall pique, contrary to his carefully cultivated public image of rectitude and calm. This was often exacerbated in the plane, surrounded as he was by obsequious aides and with no public schedule to force him to curb his private emotions. After a rough landing on one of his first flights as president, in 1969, he shouted, “That’s it! No more landing at airports.” His aides weren’t sure what he meant, so they never followed through.
His flight crew was overburdened. There were constant demands: for full meal service on one-hour flights to New York; for more and better trinkets, such as ashtrays and mugs that guests could take home as souvenirs; for upgraded menus and wine selections. At one point, Nixon aide Larry Higby wrote a lengthy memo to the military liaison office at the White House asking why the food service was not comparable to that at Trader Vic’s, a posh eatery that Nixon liked near the White House. One problem was that Nixon’s aides weren’t willing to pay the higher costs out of their own pockets or divert money from other budgets to finance their culinary adventures.
Such things didn’t mean much to Nixon personally. He was a Spartan eater, and he showed great discipline. For lunch, he almost always had a pineapple ring and cottage cheese, and he liked Salisbury steak with gravy for dinner. Yet the penchant for perks reflected a pervasive sense of entitlement among Nixon and his men.
“His staff was a buffer between him and everyone else,” recalls Jim Bull, retired chief of communications on Air Force One. “He didn’t even say good morning when he came on board… . He was so within himself when I flew with him on the airplane, it was kind of like there was a cloud over his head, like he was brooding.” On more than one occasion, Bull and other members of the crew would glimpse Nixon in his cabin when the door was ajar; he would be sitting alone with his hands on his forehead and his head bent toward his desktop, as if he were lost in thought.
While Haldeman filtered the president’s incoming communications, Nixon instituted a strangely formal process for making his outgoing phone calls. Instead of just picking up his phone and asking Bull to contact someone, Nixon would write a note, buzz for the chief steward, and hand it to him silently. It would contain the name of the person he wanted to talk to. Bull would then use the White House switchboard to track the person down.
NIXON FOUND SLEEPING on Air Force One uncomfortable, despite its amenities; on lengthy trips he would insist that the plane stop for the night so he could stay at a hotel, an ambassador’s residence, or a rich friend’s house. Ralph Albertazzie, his pilot, says Nixon never traveled overnight on the plane during his entire presidency.
Reflecting the law-and-order mood in the nation and his own austere tastes, he imposed a strong sense of protocol and a dour atmosphere. His only concession to informality was a garish red houndstooth sports jacket that he would slip on after removing his suit coat once he was airborne. He also had identical sports jackets, in gray, blue, and a mustard color, which he would alternate on different flights.
In his stateroom, he would occasionally prop his feet on a white pillow that he carefully placed on a table, still wearing his black wingtip shoes, his tie, and his jacket. Once in a while he would have a Ballantine’s Scotch or a martini, but his personality remained austere, belying his public claim that he wanted to inject a spirit of joy into his job.
Nixon often retreated into his own world. “He stayed pretty much in his cabin and the door was usually closed,” said Albertazzie. “I don’t recall that he ever came up into the cockpit to chat in the five and a half years I was his pilot.” Added former White House counsel John Dean: “Nixon typically didn’t come out of his cubbyhole.”
Nixon insisted that staff members leave him time to read, confer with his inner circle, and nap. But one of the things he valued most aboard Air Force One was the chance to think, and there is extensive evidence that he was one of the nation’s most introspective chief executives. He would often write memos and notes to himself and would accumulate what Haldeman called “an incredible stack of little white note sheets with an amazing array of trivia,” and he would badger his aides to follow up on his every concern.
Yet he could never figure out how to operate the lights and the reclining seats, even the radio, and was forever asking the crew to do it for him, interrupting his reveries. “He was the most unmechanical person I ever knew,” recalled retired Air Force general Brent Scowcroft, who was Nixon’s military assistant. “He wasn’t handy at doing anything. He couldn’t pin medals on people, and he used to trip over flecks of dust on the carpet.” Albertazzie says gently that he was “mechanically disinclined.”
The president’s memos to himself, whether handwritten on the white note sheets or a yellow legal pad, or recorded on a Dictaphone and transcribed later, showed not only his introspection but, more ominously, a conspiratorial mind at work. He wrote such notes at the White House, of course. But his musings on Air Force One, in the solitude of the presidential cabin at 35,000 feet as his mind played out the events he had just participated in or as he anticipated upcoming events and decisions, were especially revealing. What emerges is the picture of a man who at his best recognized the need for noble ideals but who seemed to profoundly misunderstand his inability to live up to them personally.
After a tumultuous reception in Gulfport, Mississippi, in September 1969, a buoyed Nixon flew back to Washington on Air Force One and wrote on his legal pad:
H [shorthand for Haldeman]: Tricia job
K [shorthand for Kissinger]: Hijacking plan for Cuba
Most powerful office
Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone
Need to be good to do good
Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspirational
Goals: Set example, inspire, instill pride
1. Personal image of Presidency—Strong, compassionate, competent, bold—Joy in job
2. Nation is better in spirit at end of term.
Three years later, at the end of that first term, he seemed just as obsessed with his legacy. “On October 10, 1972,” writes author Richard Reeves, “as he flew from his Florida home in Key Biscayne back to Washington, he worried, not for the first time, about how he would be remembered after all his elections were over, writing: ‘Presidents noted for—F.D.R.—Charm. Truman—Gutsy. Ike—smile, prestige. Kennedy—charm. LBJ—Vitality. RN—?’” He suggested to himself that his legacy might be: “The national conscience.” This, of course, looks quite deluded in view of the corruption that would soon be revealed in the Watergate scandal.
NIXON’S HYPOCRITICAL STREAK was strong. On the return trip from China, as Air Force One soared toward an overnight stop in Anchorage on February 28, 1972, he told Haldeman that he wanted to reward Kissinger for arranging the trip. “Then he told me to make a note of the fact that K has worked hard and I’m to call [Nixon friend and businessman Bebe] Rebozo and have him give Henry all of his phone numbers of girls that are not over thirty,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. And this from the apostle of family values!
Sometimes he would have a glass of Scotch; a 30-year-old Ballantine’s was his favorite, and he had the stewards keep a bottle or two on the aircraft. Occasionally he would share a martini with Rebozo in the presidential conference room, where they would put their feet up. Rebozo was one of his few close friends, and the men had a tradition of making martinis for each other and then evaluating each other’s bartending skills. Yet Nixon disdained aides who drank openly. Some of them would secretly defy their boss by pouring whisky into paper coffee cups or coffee mugs so no one was the wiser.
He also didn’t like people to curse, even though he often used foul language in the presence of his senior aides.
Pat Nixon had her own secret. She was a chain smoker, and the crew liberally stocked packs of cigarettes in the presidential quarters for the First Lady. Many times, she would sit alone in her cabin and puff on one cigarette after another, even though she was from the era in which “ladies” didn’t smoke at all. (Mrs. Nixon would die of lung cancer in June 1993, at age 81.)
The staff was preoccupied with status, even to the point of complaining when one aide was not served miniature candy bars that another aide received. Albertazzie described the overall atmosphere on the plane as “puritanically grim.” There was a TV in the conference room, for example, but few people watched it. They were too busy working and plotting.
STILL, THERE WERE HUMANIZING moments that showed Nixon was not a cardboard cutout. When the president flew to Poland, local authorities rolled out a red carpet and lined up some impressively dressed troops and a military band. Trouble was, as Air Force One landed, someone noticed that everything was placed on the right-hand side of the aircraft, when the president always exited on the left side. As the 707 taxied to a stop, the troops, the band, and the carpet were all rushed to the proper location, stirring derisive laughter among the Nixon aides and the president himself as they peered out the windows. What one Nixon aide called “an amazing screwup” became the ultimate Polish joke for the president and his men. Nixon got a big laugh out of it for weeks afterward.
Nixon also enjoyed looking up the skirts of secretaries and other young female passengers on his Marine One helicopter. He did it discreetly and never openly ogled the women, but he expressed a certain juvenile satisfaction in this forbidden pleasure.
Former White House counsel John Dean recalls flying from Florida to Washington with his wife, Mo, aboard Air Force One in 1972, shortly after Nixon’s reelection. At one point Nixon sauntered into the staff compartment and introduced himself to Mrs. Dean, who was thrilled. The president playfully cuffed Dean about the ears and tried to banter with the lovely young wife. “We’re going to keep your husband damn busy,” he told Mrs. Dean. When she said, “I hope not too busy,” the president replied, “You may wish you hadn’t married him.”
It turned out quite differently. It was Nixon who must have had the second thoughts after Dean’s testimony in the Watergate scandal helped bring the president down.
IN FACT, DEAN argues that it was on Air Force One that he saw the first link in “the chain of events that destroyed the Nixon presidency.” This was on January 14, 1971, well before the fateful burglary at the Watergate Hotel that set in motion the final series of lies and cover-ups. Nixon was en route to the University of Nebraska to deliver a speech far away from the protests that were spreading across other campuses. He sat in front of his IBM dictating machine, pushed the button, and began to speak.
“This for Haldeman,” Nixon said. “It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with [billionaire entrepreneur Howard] Hughes. Bebe [Rebozo] has some information on this although it is, of course, not solid. But there is no question that one of Hughes’s people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for ‘services rendered’ in the past. Perhaps [Chuck] Colson should check on this.”
After the message was typed and sent to Haldeman the next day in Washington, the senior aide suggested to the president that Dean, rather than Colson, be given the assignment as a test of his loyalty and ability. As a result, Dean was directed by Haldeman to investigate the relationship between Hughes and O’Brien, who was chairman of the Democratic National Committee with offices in the Watergate Hotel. Dean interpreted the assignment just as Nixon and Haldeman intended it. He was looking for scandal—some juicy episode with which to taint the opposition during that election year. This search was the motivating force behind the Watergate break-in.
WHEN THE NEW AIR FORCE ONE, bearing the tail number 27000, arrived at March Air Force Base near Palm Springs, California, in December 1972, the White House staff was abuzz with excitement. It was an updated Boeing 707, but reconfigured on express orders of the president from the way Kennedy had kept his 707, the famous SAM 26000. The cabins had a “new car smell,” scented with leather and plastic, an aide recalled, with fresh carpeting and expensive wall panels. Sheets had been placed over the seats so no one could leave a mark or spill a cup of coffee on the upholstery before the president flew on the plane. (He would not inspect it until it reached Washington.)
Actually, Nixon had considered ordering a 747 jumbo jet at the time. He loved the size and amenities of the plane, but was crestfallen to learn that it wasn’t practical because so few airports could accommodate the huge jets in the early 1970s. In the end, he went with his second choice of the refurbished 707.
Still, the plane was a big hit. For most of the first official flight, the staff behaved like kids with a room full of toys on Christmas morning. They played with the controls on the seats, tested the in-flight music system, and watched the new television monitors that picked up local stations as Air Force One cruised over them. Senior aides such as Haldeman quickly donned their brown cloth flight jackets, emblazoned with the words AIR FORCE ONE.
But there was a problem. Mrs. Nixon didn’t like the layout. It turned out that the presidential compartment was next to the staff compartment, which was adjacent to the guest cabin. This meant that the First Lady’s cabin was far removed from the president’s, and she had to go through the staff area to see her husband. Further, the Nixons would have to walk among the staff in order to reach their guests, and they were concerned that their retainers would interfere with their comings and goings. The plane was sent back to the factory for reconfiguration, at a cost of $2 million. Mrs. Nixon’s cabin was placed next to her husband’s suite.
Nixon rearranged the presidential quarters to give him even more privacy, creating four rooms end to end: a presidential office, decorated with the gold-and-blue presidential seal and containing two velour-covered swivel chairs across from a desk and a three-person sofa on the right wall that could be converted to a single bed; a sitting room with a couch that could be converted to another bed for the First Lady; a lavatory; and a conference room or lounge. There was a white telephone to the right of the desk, and a panel to the right of the presidential chair containing switches to control the room’s lighting, and another panel to operate the stereo system, although Nixon never quite figured out how to use either one. A corridor was built along the left side of the aircraft so aides would not trouble the president inside his suite when the doors to the hallway were closed.
ON FEBRUARY 8, 1973, as pressure was building on him because of the Watergate scandal and public unrest about the war in Vietnam, Nixon flew to his San Clemente estate for another of his increasingly common “working vacations.” On the flight, he told aides he had read stories that he might be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize but he wanted any nomination withdrawn. There would simply be too much embarrassment if he lost the prize; instead, he decided to take the public position that no leader should receive such honors just for doing his job, and making peace was his duty.
It was clear that he wanted to avoid more embarrassment at all costs and to wall himself off from his problems. He told Haldeman he wanted even more time alone in the coming months, now that the campaign was over. For the record, he wanted all trips to begin in Florida or California, where he had vacation homes, rather than Washington, so he could avoid the custom of inviting members of Congress to join him on Air Force One when he left the capital. The members pestered him too much with their demands and what he considered their petty concerns. He wanted no visitors whatsoever at Aspen Lodge at Camp David. He wanted to end state arrival ceremonies and embassy lunches—they were now too trivial for him—and he wanted no more Friday-afternoon meetings, so he could get away early each weekend for relaxation and reflection.
As his presidency wore on and his unpopularity grew, he followed LBJ’s pattern of traveling extensively abroad to escape hostile crowds at home. This meant that Air Force One was, more than ever, his refuge.
But even here he was not immune from the larger world. He learned this in dramatic fashion in June 1974, two months before he was forced to resign amid the Watergate scandal, when he visited the Middle East and the Soviet Union. En route from Saudi Arabia to Syria, an insulated, autocratic nation that no American president had visited before, a Syrian jet fighter—a Soviet-made MiG—suddenly appeared off Air Force One’s right wing, and another Syrian MiG zoomed in on the left wing. Air Force One pilot Ralph Albertazzie, not sure what was going on, suddenly popped the speed brakes, causing the MiGs to zoom ahead of the big jet. Albertazzie then put the 707 into a steep dive and took other evasive maneuvers. David Gergen, a Nixon adviser who was aboard, recalls being thrown roughly to the floor along with other passengers in his cabin and wondering if anyone would survive.
“Within minutes—or was it seconds?—word came to our pilots that there had been a huge mix-up on the ground,” Gergen says. “[Syrian ruler Hafez al-] Assad had dispatched his jets as a welcoming committee to escort us into Damascus but apparently failed to tell our advance party of his plans… . Air Force One leveled off and we proceeded smoothly to the red carpet down below, but I always look back on our journey as a lasting symbol of that summer of ’74. For the next several weeks, Richard Nixon twisted, turned, and tried to evade his pursuers until he crashed on August Ninth.”
In any case, Nixon never mentioned the incident to the pilot or crew, but confided to a friend later that he was stunned and scared.
• • •
WHEN HE ANNOUNCED on August 8, 1974, that he would resign from office rather than face impeachment and removal, Nixon was a bitter man who had retreated almost totally into a shell. His final flight on Air Force One to San Clemente, California, the next day, August 9, when he actually left office, was a bizarre wake.
There were 34 passengers aboard, but Nixon ordered that there be no press pool to harass or further embarrass him. More important, there was also no “football” or “black box,” containing the secret codes that would launch American nuclear retaliation in case of a surprise attack. When a president travels it is kept in a safe in the communications section of Air Force One, and whenever the president leaves the plane, a military aide is assigned to make sure it is never far from the commander in chief. This time, it stayed at the White House with Nixon’s successor, the 38th president, Gerald Ford.
Shortly after takeoff, Nixon asked Master Sergeant Lee Simmons, his personal steward, for a martini, which was unusual. He was a light drinker on Air Force One and rarely had alcohol at all in the morning. But on this day, he was, understandably, deviating from his routine.
When Ford took the oath of office in the East Room just after noon, Nixon’s plane was flying at 39,000 feet over a point 13 miles southwest of Jefferson City, Missouri. Albertazzie spoke to ground control.
“Kansas City,” he said. “This was Air Force One. Will you change our call sign to SAM [Special Air Mission] 27000?”
“Roger, SAM 27000,” came the reply. “Good luck to the president.”
Nixon was out of office.
He and Press Secretary Ron Ziegler sipped martinis in the president’s cabin, and ate a lunch of shrimp cocktail, prime rib, baked potato, green beans, salad, rolls, and cheesecake. Mrs. Nixon and daughter Tricia were alone in the First Lady’s compartment.
As the plane flew over the Midwest, Nixon got up from his seat, still wearing his blue suit and tie, and walked down its length, his face crinkled in a strained smile, thanking crew members and aides for their help over the years. Just remember, he told Simmons, that tomorrow is a new day. You can’t let things get you down. You can’t stay down, you have to pick yourself up and keep going. Life goes on.
At one point, he came upon a somber group in the conference room and got flustered. Rolling his hands in front of his chest, as he did when he was uncomfortable, he blurted out, “Is everybody enjoying the flight?” No one said a word as they looked at him in shock. Of course no one was enjoying the flight. He walked over to Albertazzie, who had left the cockpit to see how things were going, and said wistfully, “We traveled so many miles together.” Then he said he’d like the White House photographer to take a few pictures of them when they landed (which he did) and moved on.
When he got to the rear of the aircraft, Nixon saw that Secret Service agents were seated in the press section, since no journalists were allowed aboard. “Well,” Nixon said jovially. “It certainly smells better back here.” Everyone laughed nervously.
Then he returned to his private cabin, where he shut the door and remained alone for the rest of the flight.