Book Review: Nixon's Memoirs

Highlights from 37

I’ve had the first volume of Richard Nixon’s memoirs on my shelf since high school. I got them because of a childhood inside joke, and only recently got around to reading them. The volume ends with Nixon’s first term, though there are portentous intimations, occasionally, of what came after.

I’ll start with rolling narrative observations, then a grab bag of details that I found fun, then my favorite excerpt to close out.

Big Picture Stuff

Before reading his memoirs, my basic cartoon of Nixon was “guy who always felt on the outs no matter how much power/prestige he accumulated.” His famous press meltdown and debate performance, the Watergate scandal, and his tendency to appeal to a “silent majority” all supported this thesis. But in fact, seen through his own eyes, Nixon was frequently an insider. I was right about his sensitivity to criticism, but he seems to have been similarly sensitive, touchingly, to praise. His memoirs are full of remembering kind words people he respected had for him, in speech and in writing, and it’s clear that he not only was beloved by (many of) his fellow Republicans, but that he himself understood this.

Speaking of people Nixon respected, I got a new appreciation for Eisenhower and how large he loomed during the middle of the 20th century. I’d known very little about him as a president, but it seems like he was enormously popular, never really losing his special glow. In fact, a large chunk of Nixon’s memoir concerns his vice presidency, during which he represents himself as Eisenhower’s grim enforcer. The one (partial) critique Nixon levies against his old boss is that Eisenhower would never say no to anything, and thus Nixon was often stuck being the bad guy. Amusingly, Nixon partly puts this critique in someone else’s mouth; he just so happens to be talking to one of Eisenhower’s subordinates in the army, who observes that reporting to Eisenhower meant having to break a lot of bad news on his behalf.

In fact, a lot of Nixon’s career (at least as he describes it) seems path dependent on this trait of Eisenhower’s. Eisenhower was a “unifier” president, much like Obama in my lifetime, appealing directly to the center and avoiding partisan politics. But his administration - that is, what he actually wanted to do - was pretty conservative! Nixon, thus, was the fall guy, the hatchet man, the representative of Eisenhower’s more divisive policies when Eisenhower himself wished to remain above the fray. It’s a testament to either Nixon’s character or his skill as a writer that he never seems bitter about this state of affairs, and that his praise of Eisenhower and celebration of their relationship seems sincere. It probably really is sincere; Nixon’s daughter ultimately married Eisenhower’s grandson.

They say the past is a foreign country, and Nixon’s heyday of the 60s and 70s really does seem very different from today. A mandatory draft, huge protests, regular domestic terrorism, and, of course, the perpetual shadow of the Cold War. So much of Nixon’s era revolved around tensions between capitalism and communism, and in that context the threat of nuclear war. It’s a little weird; today, about 20% of humanity lives under communism, and about 80% under capitalism, but I don’t really get the sense that either economic style fears that the other will suddenly and irrevocably overwhelm them. From a recent visit to Texas, I suppose radio ads may beg to differ, but on the whole it’s hard to imagine anyone getting so worked up over purely ideological questions these days, except maybe infighting leftists.

Also, holy shit did a lot happen during Nixon’s presidency. He didn’t even have the full eight years, and he presided over the end of the gold standard, the creation of the EPA, opening relations with China, and the first ever moon landing. All this during the Vietnam war and a narrowly avoided second Cuban missile crisis, which, unlike the first, was kept under wraps. I’ve only read one presidential memoir, so maybe every term is like this. But I doubt it; Nixon’s years do feel extra consequential.

On the other end of the world-shaking spectrum, Nixon’s family life was pretty touching. Hand-written letters were clearly very important to him; he wrote them for various family members at milestones. He clearly prized the letters he wrote to his daughters when they got married, and treasured letters he got from others in both personal and professional capacities. He reads like a thoughtful father more generally, and an adoring husband. It’s his memoir, so it’d be a little pathetic if he came off badly there, but I do find myself believing.

Fun Details

• When Nixon moved into the White House for his first term, Lyndon Johnson had installed a complicated (and very powerful) shower. Nixon tried it once and, overwhelmed, replaced it with an ordinary one.

• Since I think of McCarthyism as chilling and structural, I’d assumed Joe McCarthy was the US equivalent of an apparatchik spook: elegant, ideological, and menacing. In fact, he was a bruiser, going so far as getting in a literal fistfight with a journalist, and Nixon pulled them apart! Ironically, McCarthy himself was eventually censured for his pattern of improper conduct.

• Eisenhower coached Nixon before at least one important speech, telling him to make sure to smile. Then he was jubilant and complimentary about his Vice President’s smile. Funny to imagine that happening today; “you should smile more” is so poisoned in gender discourse that any instance of it seems fraught, but one man saying it to another in the halls of power feels extra silly.

• Before Nixon’s famously untelegenic performance in his first presidential debate with Kennedy, campaigning while sick lost him a ton of weight. To gain it back, he drank a “four-a-day-regimen of rich milkshakes” afterward.

The End

I’ll transcribe just one block quote, which I found particularly beautiful (and relatable, as a person who won an elementary school award for “perseverance”). After Nixon, then Vice President, lost to Kennedy:

My Secret Service protection had ended at noon, but I had my official car and chauffeur until midnight. John Wardlaw had been my driver for almost eight years, and I asked him if he would mind coming back after dinner for one last ride through the city.

The streets were snarled with traffic, made worse by the snow and ice. Hundreds of cars and rented limousines were lined up outside the hotels, waiting to pick up men in tails and women in long gowns on their way to the inaugural balls. No one noticed us as we drove past the White House and headed through the streets toward Capitol Hill.

I asked John to park in the space reserved for the Vice President’s car, and I got out and walked up the broad stone stairs. A surprised guard let me in, and I walked past the entrance to the Senate Chamber and down the long corridor to the Rotunda, the dome of the Capitol rising above it. The only sound was the echo of my heels on the bare stone floor.

I opened a door and went onto the balcony that looks out across the west grounds of the Capitol. I had stood there many times before. It is one of the most magnificent vistas in the world, and it never seemed more beautiful than at this moment. The mall was covered with fresh snow. The Washington Monument stood out stark and clear against the luminous gray sky, and in the distance I could see the Lincoln Memorial. I stood looking at the scene for at least five minutes. I thought about the great experiences of the last fourteen years. Now all that was over, and I would be leaving Washington, which had been my home since I arrived as a young congressman in 1947.

As I turned to go inside, I suddenly stopped short, struck by the thought that this was not the end—that someday I would be back here. I walked as fast as I could back to the car.

In one sense, that reflection was Nixon’s last chance to look back on an unblemished political career; the end of his tenure as President was very different.

Still, he never gave up the ghost. To give him the last word, a fact I didn’t learn from his memoir: Richard Nixon’s final book, which he wrote the year he died, was titled Beyond Peace.