by Ann Beattie
If the Nixons came to my house in Maine, they would be overdressed. Thin people, they would be cold on the back porch and sweaters would have to be brought out, some quite ratty. Music they did not recognize would be playing on the boom box in the kitchen. (Music I do not recognize, either.) There would be a lot of food, but they wouldn’t be able to figure out the majority of the ingredients. There would be mismatched plates, and wine would be served in the wrong glasses. The ice bucket would be holding a plant, rather than ice. The view would be of a lovely field that is zoned commercial, with only two restrictions on its use as a business: no head shops; no auto dump. (Recently, we were lucky enough to turn aside plans for a proposed twenty-four-hour lighted storage facility with razor wire, but only on a technicality: the turn onto our street is so dangerous, the sight lines so deficient, that such a business would pose a liability.) The Nixons could take off their shoes, as we do, and when it was time for dinner, they could sit at our square picnic table, with its so-bad-it’s-hip sixties tablecloth (more sedate than Edward Cox’s underwear, but still pretty deranged). I would of course know to pour superior French wine for Mr. Nixon, though the rest of us could drink plonk.
My mother used to rock me to sleep. One of the songs was about paper dolls: “I’m gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own, a doll that other fellows cannot steal.” She had quite a repertoire of old songs. A nice voice, too. Once, she got so enthusiastic we rocked over backward. That same rocker—the one she’d sat in while pregnant, the one she’d later rocked me in—is still rocking on my back porch, badly in need of repair.
That might be a conversation starter. At least, with Mrs. Nixon.
Mrs. Nixon Is Taken on a Drive, 1972
“A Howard Johnson’s. We’ve eaten at Howard Johnson’s. They have good ice cream. It reminds me how much I loved ice cream when I was a girl.”
“In a cone?”
“Oh, yes. Strawberry.”
“I liked ice cream sundaes when I was a kid, without whipped cream. I never developed a taste for that.”
“And that’s the building? All of that, over there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There were some Cubans, and some other people?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s quite large, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The group of them got together and went there at night. And broke in.”
“That’s apparently what happened.”
“That person cut in front of us without signaling.”
“Passed on the right, too. That’s against the law.”
“I saw an accident on Constitution Avenue a few weeks ago. Someone hit another car from behind at a red light. I kept walking. I didn’t think they’d need a witness because with that sort of accident it’s obvious what happened.”
“That would have been a surprise: the President’s wife, just strolling along.”
“Camp David is a better place for it. Sometimes I just have to get some exercise, though.”
“I know. If I could be better about that, I’d take off the ten pounds I packed on last Christmas.”
“Everyone comments on how thin I am. I did weigh more when I was younger. It’s a very modern building, isn’t it? Is this where the restaurant is that they say is so good? We could come for dinner after an evening at the Kennedy Center. Or maybe we couldn’t now. What am I thinking.”
“You can’t give them any opportunity for a photo, because they don’t miss an opportunity.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Would you like me to turn around and drive past on the other side?”
“No. I’ve seen it.”
“There are some businesses there. There’s a barber. That sort of thing.”
“Yes, I’d think so, with so many people needing services.”
“So that was it. That’s all you wanted to see?”
“More than I wanted to see. At least, for this reason. I should probably know more about the city. I’m sure there are many new architectural sights all the time.”
“Look! Another one! Nobody’s using his turn signal tonight.”
“I used to love to drive, but driving here doesn’t seem appealing.”
“No, ma’am.”
“So the guard caught them. That’s when it all started.”
“As I understand it. Yes.”
Rashomon
He’ll never get any credit for anything he says on the subject anyway. I wanted him to just state frankly that he didn’t know, that no one knows, the full story of Watergate.
—Mrs. Nixon
Writers might sometimes think they are pretty competent discussing what they’ve researched, but generally, writers are the first to admit there might be more evidence or another perspective. Having the complete picture isn’t necessarily the objective. Finding out as much as you can might be a goal—no different with fiction or nonfiction. But writers tend toward skepticism, extrapolating information not just from words, but from what’s withheld, from body language, from facts that seem to exist in opposition to one another. What someone tells you will usually be her understanding of the truth. The next person tells you what he or she believes. A fact-checker might save you (every day there is less fact-checking, and more misinformation because of people’s reliance on the Internet). It’s difficult for fiction writers to reconceive dialogue because they’ve written it as they’ve heard it. You set a trap for yourself, of course, by seeming to control the external circumstances: you invent the room in which the characters have their exchange; the snowstorm—because you didn’t expect it, either—seems inevitable, but something else has determined the conversation. To some extent the writer is only recording.
In theory, you can move your characters out of the ski lodge and into the desert, but such revisions are so radical that I’d fear losing hold of the material and would rarely be tempted to make such radical shifts, though it is interesting that writers, themselves, move often or live in several places. (Hamptons envy: pictures from the party you weren’t invited to; houses you’ll never own.) Yearning is a necessary component to Americans’ conception of themselves. Something always has to be the faraway green light at the end of the dock. New York–based publications could not fill their pages without this assumption. Capitalism would stagger and fall.
When Mrs. Nixon wanted her husband to say that the Watergate mess could not be understood, she was tapping into the American spirit, counting on the complexity and validity of alternating opinions, rather than offering a rationale for the bizarre break-in.
Why couldn’t RN say, embarrassing as it might be, that he had no idea of the number of people involved in Watergate, and he had no way of questioning everyone? President Kennedy, used to poking fun at himself, could have passed it off as something that, yet again, he did not know enough about so that he had, of course, not acted promptly enough, then found some way to say this was because he was always outwitted by his charming wife, fluent in French and in the ways of the world. At least JFK knew how to appear abashed and to let the nation know that while they might be dazzled and charmed, he was (aw, shucks) just a hapless fellow: the guy who was always eclipsed by his wife and photogenic children. RN brought himself into everything and could admit no distance between his person and the presidency. He didn’t believe it existed. Surprisingly, this Quaker thought he’d been born for the stature he finally attained, whereas Kennedy could afford to joke.
What if he had said that he hadn’t kept a close enough watch, and that some people (he was certainly willing to sacrifice them) had acted badly, and that he apologized, and there would be no more of it? What if he had never made the fatal mistake of tape-recording his conversations in the White House, ostensibly for posterity, but more likely to be used as blackmail, and as a running ledger of who owed him? The White House had been bugged before, but RN was so incautious as to forget to deactivate a switch those times he would have benefited by something being off the record.
Paranoia can be contagious. In the Nixon White House, everyone was listening in on everyone else. The panting on the extension phones must have been palpable, as Kissinger’s people listened in on calls with Nixon, and his people’s people listened in on yet others. Everything was highly monitored: only Alexander Butterfield might truly have been naïve enough to assume that all the listening in was in the service of the President’s eventually writing his memoirs.
We have to wonder if Mrs. Nixon’s phone was also tapped. It’s difficult to believe it wasn’t, just as a precaution, just for the hell of it. Though she was ignored as much as possible by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, nothing could be lost listening in on her calls. When she died, her tombstone bore the epitaph “Even when people can’t speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.” Tapping her phone might have revealed just how much love.
The idea of love in one’s heart is intriguing, though. It was what the activists and protesters believed, what the sixties believed: that if you were the right kind of person, language wouldn’t define you—your karma would. You were either the right sort of person or the wrong sort. Mr. Nixon believed that what people said was one thing, but what he felt they believed was another. For example, whatever they said, they were suspect if they were Jews. If they’d been educated in an Ivy League school, ditto. Mr. Nixon did not come down firmly in favor of people being defined by their statements. After all, why would a man who never felt bound by the true value of words believe others? Of course, it would help if they had positive thoughts about Republicans and about his presidency, but that wouldn’t be enough. Really, nothing was ever enough. Mrs. Nixon, however, believed that people should have good hearts and do good deeds. She was sincere, helpful, aware that she was a figurehead whose imprimatur could help various good causes, various good people. Nothing suggests that she thought herself inherently special, with a quality that would draw people to her. She was accustomed to reaching out, whereas her husband was accustomed to finding a way to draw people close. If Mrs. Nixon was Little Red Riding Hood (admittedly, a bit long of tooth), then Mr. Nixon was the wolf, disguised as Grandma, asking all the necessary questions, ready to pounce.
The authors of The Final Days present Mr. Nixon’s mulling over of Watergate to an audience well within the fold: “Don’t you think it’s interesting, though, to run through this?” he asked. “Really, the goddamn record is not bad, is it?”
“Makes me feel very good,” Ziegler answered.
“To the President, that was overstating it a bit. ‘It’s not comfortable for me, because I was sitting there like a dumb turkey.’” (See: Agnew, Spiro; also, the presidential pardon of the Thanksgiving turkey.)
“Ziegler had an answer. ‘It’s a Rashomon theory,’ he offered.
“‘Hm?’ the President asked.”
Here, the writer has to pause to appreciate what’s about to follow. A likely interpretation of “Hm?” is that Richard Nixon had never heard of Rashomon. For one thing, it wasn’t American, and foreign = other = not to be trusted. It was tied in to contemporary culture in a way he was not and had no intention of being. But Kurosawa’s film had crept into our lexicon, as had the idea that there was no definitive story, but instead an amalgam of what people thought they saw and believed they’d heard, the way the frighteningly dismissive “whatever” has intruded into the language, giving carte blanche to signal boredom and indifference and to ask others to draw no conclusions at all.
“It’s a Rashomon theory,” Ziegler tried again. “Five men sit in a room, and what occurs in that room or what is said in that room means something different to each man, based upon his perceptions of the events that preceded it. And that is exactly what this is. Exactly what it [Watergate] is.
“The President grasped the point: Dean perceived that the President was involved in the cover-up based on his own, not Nixon’s, special knowledge of what had gone before. It seemed to the President to be a pretty good theory. Perhaps it would hold up.”
If Mrs. Nixon could have put a word in his vocabulary, it might have been Rashomon. It had a quality she understood: it’s a complex situation, I don’t know everything, no one knows everything. The movie had established itself as part of the culture: the part the President didn’t trust, though he still might appropriate it in his own defense. For a man who thought he knew exactly what had happened, and exactly what right and wrong were, it was a timely concept—one that could excuse him, if he could use it to generate enough uncertainty and confusion. Rashomon hadn’t already permeated his consciousness as a radical reappraisal of how to look at reality, but it was worth a try, the same way a superabsorbent dish towel might be used to mop up. Rashomon, one of those fancy concepts, probably out of the academy. Out of the movies, worse still. Not to dismiss movies altogether; he watched Patton over and over. (Now, there was a man who would have had nothing to do with Rashomon.) And true, he hired his staff from the academy. Kissinger came from Harvard, others from Yale, where probably unknown to Nixon, the pointy-heads—French pointy-heads!—were deconstructing the very idea of agreed-on truth. Rashomon with theory!
“Hm?” the President had said, having little idea of the way the concept had permeated the culture, defining it and reflecting it. He wasn’t out at the movies, opening himself up to some foreign notion that could be insidious. There was already a lot of confusion, protest marches that were nothing but confusion, and unbelievable as it was, some people wanted to sink even deeper. He liked to play the game of engaging a new notion every time the mirrored ball flashed, only to decide against it as it twirled away—or maybe his deciding otherwise made the ball rotate. Then the next shining notion would send a spark of light into your eye and clarify something else, for a spotlit second. If you were paranoid, though, you’d think the mirrored ball was there to entrap you: something glitzy and pretty and mesmerizing, but surfaces could be only so informative. You would want to be the person who controlled the ball, not the person who danced beneath it.
Some dialogue, found on the Internet, from Rashomon:
Commoner: Well, men are only men. That’s why they lie. They can’t tell the truth, even to themselves.
Priest: That may be true. Because men are weak, they lie to deceive themselves.
Commoner: Not another sermon! I don’t mind a lie if it’s interesting.
Having recently seen Rashomon again, I find that this dialogue was not in the movie.
David Eisenhower Has Some Ideas While Sitting by the Fire
Mr. Nixon liked a fire in the fireplace, even during summer, when he would have a fire lit and turn on the air-conditioning. He wanted a fire at Camp David, the White House, San Clemente—and also at Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower’s, those times the Nixons brought dinner from the White House kitchen. RN, himself, is said to have lit the fire. It may well be—but this is the man who, in frustration, tried to bite off a pill bottle’s tamper-proof lid. But let’s say that he lit it. They arrived at the Eisenhowers’, RN lit the fire, and they did not talk about Watergate because no fire would be consoling and comfy if that—forgive the pun—hot topic was brought up. “My father first lit the fire,” Julie Eisenhower writes. “While we sat in front of it, Mother would try to divert him by pointing out what was coming into bloom.” Mrs. Nixon must have noticed flowers on the ride over, or when looking out the Eisenhowers’ window. Since it was unlikely RN would refute her, or really even hear her, buds opening seemed like a safe subject. We all know what that’s like: trying to find something diverting to talk about, so as not to upset someone who is already unhappy.
David Eisenhower’s thoughts: My wife has decided the food needs reheating. It’s also her excuse to get her mother into the kitchen so she can find out how things are going. But Mrs. Nixon’s not responding the way Julie hoped; I can see the disappointment in Julie’s eyes. When do I not, lately? My mother-in-law likes to linger by the fire, letting Julie reheat the food. If she isn’t paying attention to what Julie wants, it usually means she
’s depressed. She feels comfortable here, that’s good, obviously good for them to get out of the White House. They’re so glad Julie and I still live nearby. I’d like to be in the kitchen, but I should stay with my in-laws—if nothing else, to fill what might otherwise be an awkward silence. There doesn’t seem to be much easy communication between them. Wonder what the kitchen’s sent over. I hope something good. Awful flap, that criticism of Heinz Bender—a great pastry chef, and some journalist got the recipe for Julie’s wedding cake way in advance, baked it, and said it was terrible. Might be funny, if it didn’t involve family. Not much seems funny these days, and also, the Coxes get to live in New York. Mrs. Nixon is saying something about flowers. Pay attention, David. Yes—given a garden plot, as a girl on the family farm; she’d grown flowers she loved to cut for bouquets. Daisies, in particular, because they lasted longest. I should remember that: a good future present. She’s always seemed grateful for small pleasures. Her mother died when she was thirteen, her father not long after. Her brothers were good to her, but she doesn’t seem to be in touch with them. Never mentions them. Mr. Nixon has just about finished that scotch. Mrs. Nixon, her ginger ale. The Secret Service and the chauffeur are waiting outside. What a job that must be, even if Julie thinks they overdo it from time to time. Well, in here it’s warm and might be very convivial if Watergate had remained only the name of an apartment building. If only, if only. How much time are you going to waste thinking about if only, David? Also, imagine if there’d been no Vietnam. Julie and I couldn’t even attend our college graduations because of the war protesters who showed up. The Nixons gave us a lovely dinner, but still. It would have been nice to have the option of going to graduation.
