January 1969
The Southeast went to Wallace and Texas went to Humphrey. I won Ohio, Florida, Illinois, and then California. One by one the great names fell and it was decided. I was going to have it.
But when I took the oath, would I become someone different? How was it going to feel? What would I know that I hadn’t known before? Would I feel a new power? Eisenhower had known something, but Kennedy hadn’t, and Truman hadn’t. Probably not Johnson either, but he was far too cunning to guess at.
The time came. White-haired Chief Justice Earl Warren spoke the words into the cold morning air and I answered him, clearly and precisely.
“I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear…that I will faithfully execute the office…of president of the United States.”
This was it, I thought, right at the moment. I was saying it. I tried to feel every bit of it as it happened, to feel myself changing from civilian into the thirty-seventh president. To become, finally, something other than shitty Tricky Dick.
“And will to the best of my ability…preserve, protect, and defend…”
Nobody was ever going to fuck with me again. I was president! I tried to feel what Eisenhower felt, to take on that power. Eisenhower folded space, shrugged off bullets. Eisenhower was going to save the world. And now there was no Eisenhower. It would have to be me. This time it’s going to be different, I told myself. A brand-new Nixon.
“…the Constitution of the United States…”
It was almost over. It was ending. I was changing. Wasn’t I?
“…so help me God.”
I looked out at an entire planet staring back at me. I’d just become the most important person in the world, and not just to myself. There they all were. I wanted to rise into the air, the immanent Nixon, and stare fire from my eyes down at them. I waited for it to happen.
I walked off the stage as the exact same person I’d been when I walked onto it. Only a little bit surprised at how much I’d gotten my hopes up. At that, and at how, when the oath was concluded, the chief justice whispered a single word, so low that only I could hear: “Good-bye.”
Afterward, the inaugural parade, in which Pat and I rode down Pennsylvania Avenue while protesters threw rocks, sticks, garbage, and firecrackers at us. Called me a liar and a villain. I hear they held their own ceremony and inaugurated a pig in my place, proclaimed me an impostor. Pat was composed and angry; the Secret Service was polite, worried, and apologetic; all I could think was Of course I am. But how did they know?