The Fall of Richard Nixon
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When the president arrived Deng immediately said, “I understand you had an important meeting with our leader, Chairman Mao, last night.” The President missed his cue, responding instead as a kind of giddy tourist: “Yes, and Betty had a wonderful time at the ballet and Susan loved the Great Wall (although about halfway up the long walk Susan confided to me, ‘I could really use a Big Mac about now’).” It was clear that the setup for a serious conversation in the Deng meeting had gone off the rails.
The next day I was pool reporter for a second meeting with Deng, who this time was in a jolly mood, teasing us for writing about his tobacco habit. When the president arrived Deng said convivially, “I hope you had a good rest, Mr. President.” To which President Ford replied, “Yes, and I had an excellent meeting with your chairman two nights ago.”
Oh, well.
The China trip was personally memorable for a new friendship. Garry Trudeau, the Yale graduate who gave the world the satirical comic strip Doonesbury, was along and we quickly became friends. His perceptive sense of humor was always on call. When we were at the Great Wall he turned and asked, “I don’t know, Tom. You’re the Huns, sweeping out of the north, would you let this stop you?” I laughed—and then saw the exchange in one of his strips later. “Hey, I was just road testing,” he explained. “When you laughed I knew it would work—I can’t waste this stuff on an audience of one.”
Back home we stayed in touch, and Garry met Jane Pauley at our home. That friendship born on the China Wall has endured. Now we’re all grandparents—Jane and Garry, Tom and Meredith. And I still laugh at his peerless touch as a satirist.
* * *
—
President Ford continued to struggle with inflation, the energy crisis, and the perception he had not really earned the office. What carried him through, I believe, was his down-home style, his honesty, and his very attractive family of two rambunctious boys and his high-school-senior-daughter, Susan.
And especially his wife, Betty, who had been living the constricted life of a stay-at-home mom while her husband was on the GOP dinner circuit. Now she was suddenly the First Lady and almost immediately was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her candor about her condition and willingness to speak out about the need for women to have ready access to screening earned her new admirers instantly, which led to television appearances and her outspoken views on a wide range of women’s rights issues.
Mrs. Ford went even further, talking about a pill and alcohol addiction that had developed while she was a suburban wife and mother. Just as the women’s consciousness movement was beginning to lift off, the nation had a new champion, a First Lady who was candid about issues that had heretofore been swept under White House carpeting. So in many ways the Ford family introduced a new, modern era to the White House, partisan politics aside. After the Watergate scandal America was looking for a renewal of homegrown values and conduct. The Ford family delivered.
For his part, President Ford was a tireless campaigner, crisscrossing the country, preparing for the upcoming 1976 presidential election. There were strong winds blowing out of the west: California governor Ronald Reagan was organizing a challenge for the GOP nomination.
On September 5, 1975, President Ford was in Sacramento, California, as part of a west coast campaign tour, and he began the morning working a rope line of admirers on the state capitol grounds. I was a few feet behind him when suddenly Secret Service agents grabbed the president. Someone yelled, “Gun!” as another agent, Larry Buendorf, reached out and got his hand on a .45-caliber pistol aimed right at the president by a young woman in a long red dress.
As the agents hustled the president away, another agent handcuffed the young woman, who kept shouting, “It didn’t go off!” I told my colleague Russ Ward to go with the presidential party; I wanted to follow the suspect to confirm what I was sure was true. I recognized her. She was Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of the notorious Charles Manson, who was serving a life sentence with other members of his cult for the brutal murders in the Los Angeles hills in 1969 of the actress Sharon Tate and four others. Fromme had not been involved in the murders, but she had kept vigil outside the courthouse where Manson was on trial.
As a lone Secret Service agent guarded the now handcuffed Squeaky, I kept yelling at her, “Aren’t you Squeaky Fromme?,” confident that she was but wanting to be sure. She didn’t respond but kept yelling, “It didn’t go off!” as the stoic Secret Service agent maintained his grip on the manacles.
Racing to catch up with the official party, I arrived just in time to hear press secretary Ron Nessen say the suspect had been identified as one Lynette Fromme, address unknown. To which I added, “As in Squeaky Fromme, a member of the Manson cult.” Ron started to laugh and the other reporters looked at me, puzzled, until they all realized it was true.
In a bizarre twist, another California woman, Sara Jane Moore, also tried to assassinate President Ford seventeen days later in San Francisco as he emerged from a hotel on Union Square. Her first shot missed and the second one went astray thanks to the quick action of Oliver Sipple, a former Marine who knocked her arm down.
Moore, it turns out, had developed a bizarre antiestablishment political philosophy with no real connection to President Ford except that he was an authority figure and a convenient target. Fromme and Moore served lengthy prison sentences but were eventually paroled after thirty-four and thirty-two years, respectively.
Before the 1976 presidential election, I moved on from Washington to host the Today show in New York, but I maintained my role in NBC’s political coverage. In New York I accepted an invitation to a Hofstra University retrospective on Watergate. Standing backstage I was suddenly embraced from behind in a bear hug and heard a familiar voice say, “You know how many times I’ve watched you on television and thought, ‘I could have sent him to prison!’ ”
It was Bob Haldeman.
I laughed and said, “Bob, I’ve never talked about your offer, and I don’t want to start now!”
He laughed as well and said, “Don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.”
Meanwhile, Richard Nixon was reintroducing himself as a public figure, holding private dinners for journalists, coming to NBC occasionally for discussions on global affairs, even appearing on Meet the Press, where he acknowledged that he’d occasionally been too hard on the press.
He restored his finances with his multimillion-dollar television deal with David Frost, in which he said of his political opponents, “I gave them a sword,” still reluctant to acknowledge his personal behavior as a reason for his impeachment. In contentious exchanges with Frost, Nixon persistently refused to admit that he had committed criminal acts, describing his actions as political containment, until Frost cited Nixon’s taped conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman on how to get the money to pay off the burglars, his conversations with John Dean on how to avoid perjury charges.
As Frost continued to bore in with factual definitions of criminal behavior, Nixon began to wither on camera, finally saying of the hush money arranged by the White House, “It’s possible—it’s a mistake that I didn’t stop it.” He conceded, “I made so many bad judgments…mistakes of the heart rather than the head. But let me say a man in the top job…he’s gotta have a heart but his head must always rule his heart.” That rationale may have been comforting to Nixon admirers, but placed alongside his language and attitude as caught on Oval Office recordings, it was a transparent appeal for sympathy when the facts provided an entirely different conclusion.
Once the Frost interviews were completed and Nixon was financially secure again, he began to reemerge as a public figure. Admirers financed a handsome Nixon library next to his childhood home in Yorba Linda. For the 1990 dedication of the Nixon Presidential Library, I invited my mother, a lifelong Democrat and keen student of public affairs, to come with me. When I asked if she wanted to meet Nixon, she sai
d, “You know, I would.”
She had never voted for him but they shared some common American experiences. Their families had gone through very difficult times in the 1930s. Mother’s South Dakota farm family lost everything in the Great Depression; even though she graduated from high school with honors at sixteen, the cost of college—one hundred dollars a year—had been out of the question.
Nonetheless, she was a student of American literature, history, and politics, a disciple of presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Mother and my dad, nicknamed “Red” for his flaming red hair, were what I called Dirt Road Democrats, chasing construction jobs across the Midwest, where Red was in high demand for his great skills operating earth-moving equipment.
After I introduced Mother to Nixon, they quickly fell into a cordial exchange about South Dakota. Mother was aware that Pat Nixon had started life in the Black Hills of our home state, where Pat’s father had been a miner in a large gold mine.
I had never seen Nixon as relaxed around a stranger as he was around my mother, and Mother was plainly enjoying the moment. As we walked away I teased, “I trust this doesn’t mean you’re changing your party registration.” She laughed and said, “No, but I had a good time.”
* * *
—
Back in New York, a few months before I turned fifty, NBC secretly arranged for camera crews to get reactions to my milestone birthday.
One of the crew members came to my office wide-eyed, saying, “You’re not going to believe this!” Another person inserted a videotape into the TV setup across from my desk, and there on the screen was Richard Milhous Nixon, in a blue suit, an American flag in his lapel, saying into the camera, “I want to wish Tom Brokaw a happy birthday. I’ve always thought Tom was a man of very good judgment.”
A short pause, a quick smile, and then: “He never showed better judgment than when he turned down my offer to be my press secretary!”
That was my last contact with Richard Nixon, and a welcome surprise. Finally we found something on which we could agree.
President Nixon moved back to California for a while and then returned to the East Coast and resumed an active life of writing and entertaining journalists. But even now, we’re left to wonder—which of the many Richard Nixons should we believe?
So I come to the end of this odyssey with the same question that is asked at the entrance to his library: “Who was Richard Nixon?”
He had so many identities.
Brilliant but insecure. Physically awkward but able to manage the choreography of a very public figure for more than half a century. A global visionary with myopia about his own shortcomings.
The man and the president continue to generate strong expressions of admiration and contempt. He was neither the first occupant of the Oval Office with complex personal qualities nor the last.
There does seem to be now more praise and awareness for Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the War on Cancer, Title IX (which expanded women’s rights), lowering the voting age to eighteen, and eliminating the draft, in addition to his diplomatic masterstroke in China and arms control treaties with the USSR in his first term. That roll call of accomplishment makes his participation, language on the tapes, and deceit in the long Watergate scandal all the more perplexing and unforgivable.
The power and responsibilities are so great and even the ordinary decisions so consequential, with constant examination by the press, as well as domestic and foreign adversaries, that all presidents leave office with some scars. How the long view of history will judge him remains unanswered, as does that provocative question: Who was Richard Nixon?
To Meredith, always
The White House press corps was much smaller, mostly white and male and dominated by print representatives. There were personal ideological differences within the ranks, but at the end of the day the indisputable facts of the president’s policies and behavior were the central themes.
In the course of this book I mention several of my colleagues. I want to also acknowledge those who were not singled out but nonetheless were consistently professional and personally cordial in our common pursuit of the facts in a historic drama of unparalleled consequences.
Frank Cormier and Gaylord Shaw of the Associated Press; Norm Kempster of United Press International; Aldo Beckman of the Chicago Tribune; Marty Schram of Long Island Newsday; John Herbers and Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times; occasional visits by R.W. “Johnny” Apple of The New York Times; Rudy Abramson of the Los Angeles Times; Larry O’Rourke of The Philadelphia Bulletin; Marty Nolan of The Boston Globe; Jim Deakin of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
There were other occasional visitors, but this was the core group not mentioned in my text.
This is my eighth book with Kate Medina, the legendary Random House editor in the corner office. Our relationship long ago became one of not just writer-editor but of family, as we worked together on The Greatest Generation, and books about my formative years in South Dakota, the unexpected personal encounter with cancer, and four other subjects relevant to our time.
Kate and her colleague Jon Meacham wisely thought that now is the time to revisit the final year of President Nixon through my experience as a White House correspondent. Though I was at first reluctant, I warmed to the subject as Kate and Jon persuaded me that the current political climate is a reminder that history provides context for large issues and small. So, Kate, here we go again.
As always I am dependent on a strong, perceptive assist from research experts, and no one is better than Ruby Shamir, a student of modern American politics who has written widely on the subject. She brought to Watergate and Richard Nixon a historian’s discipline and a generational curiosity about the man and the time. I unfailingly welcomed her scholarship.
Once again I relied on my friend Frank Gannon for insights on the man and the time of the fall of Richard Nixon. His brilliant work on the Nixon Library, especially the provocative essay greeting visitors—“You Decide: Who Was Richard Nixon ?”—was a perfect ignition for where I hoped to go.
I am grateful to the entire team at Random House, including Kate’s right hand, Erica Gonzalez, who helped shepherd this project and wrangle all of its pieces into a coherent whole. I’m grateful for the assistance of Louisa McCullough. Thanks to the leadership of Random House for giving my books a place in their library: Gina Centrello, president and publisher of Random House; Bill Takes, executive vice president; and Avideh Bashirrad, vice president and deputy publisher. Thanks to Evan Camfield for his copyediting genius; Carole Lowenstein, who has done the interior design of all of my Random House books; Benjamin Dreyer, coordinator extraordinaire, who also has brought his expertise to all of my Random House books; Greg Kubie, my publicist for the book; Ayelet Gruenspecht, the marketer on the book; and Anna Bauer, Joe Perez, and Paolo Pepe who did the cover design.
Finally, a big shout out to the home team led by Meredith and including our family business manager, Geri Jansen; house manager, Goldine Nicholas; and my NBC executive assistant, Mary Casalino.
1Bettmann/Getty Images/ General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
2Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
3The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Byron Schumaker/WHPO-8548-06A-36
4AP Images/John Duricka
5The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Oliver Atkins/WHPO-3144-04A
6AP Images
7The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Oliver Atkins/WHPO-5500-02
8AP Images
9AP Images/John Duricka
10Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images
11The Richard Nixon President
ial Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Byron Schumaker/WHPO-E1729-02A
12Bettmann/Getty Images
13AFP Files/AFP/Getty Images
14Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo
15AP Images
16Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo
17H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Alamy Stock Photo
18AP Images/John Rous
19AP Images
20Dirck Halstead/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
21AP Images
22AP Images
23The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Jack Kightlinger/WHPO-9512-03A
24AP Images/Michel Lipchitz
25AP Images
26AP Images
27The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Jack Kightlinger/WHPO-E2678-14
28AP Images
29Bettmann/Getty Images
30The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Oliver Atkins/WHPO-E2938-22
31AP Images
32The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/The White House Photo Office Collection/Oliver Atkins/WHPO-E3359-05A
33David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
34CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images
35Bettmann/Getty Images
BY TOM BROKAW
The Greatest Generation
The Greatest Generation Speaks
An Album of Memories
A Long Way from Home
Boom!
The Time of Our Lives
A Lucky Life Interrupted
The Fall of Richard Nixon