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Contents
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EARLY YEARS 1913-1946
CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR 1947-1952
VICE PRESIDENT 1953-1960
PRIVATE CITIZEN 1961-1967
1968 CAMPAIGN AND ELECTION
THE PRESIDENCY 1969-1974
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
PHOTOGRAPHS
INDEX
FOR
PAT, TRICIA, AND JULIE
Sources and Acknowledgments
This is a memoir—a book of memories. Since memory is fallible and inevitably selective, I have tried whenever possible to check my recollections against the available records and to supplement them with contemporary sources. Some of these sources—memos, correspondence, public papers—are self-evident. A few of them need further elaboration.
Throughout my public career I have had the habit of making extensive handwritten notes about my ideas, conversations, activities, and speeches. These notes, most of them made on yellow legal pads, total more than 20,000 pages extending from my outlines for the debates in the 1946 campaign to the outlines of my resignation speech in 1974. They range from offhand observations to extremely detailed passages of dialogue.
Between 1954 and 1957, while I was Vice President, I made diary-type dictations covering 112 different meetings, conversations, or events. I cannot remember why I started or why I stopped making them, and they cover such a wide variety of subjects and personalities that there does not seem to have been any single purpose behind them. These diaries, which were dictated on Edison Voicewriter platters, were transcribed in 1961 when I wrote Six Crises, but I did not use them directly in that book and they are quoted here for the first time.
By historical necessity some of the events in the pre-presidential years that were treated in Six Crises are also dealt with in this book. The reader will find, however, that while the facts concerning the events have not changed, the passage of time has enabled me to analyze them with greater perspective, and the new context has made it necessary for me to treat them in a substantially different and more condensed manner than they were treated in that earlier account.
During the presidency, from November 1971 until April 1973 and again in June and July 1974, I kept an almost daily dictated diary. In this book these passages are introduced by the heading Diary. With the exception of a few that were subpoenaed by the Watergate Special Prosecutor, none of these diary cassettes was transcribed until the summer of 1976 in San Clemente. While I have excerpted the passages from them that appear in this book, no word has been changed without adding brackets to indicate the change. These dictated diaries do not have the orderliness of a written diary—often I would dictate on a subject one day and then expand on the same subject a day or two later. Because of this, in some cases, I have combined entries that deal with the same subjects but were dictated on different days. Diary entries dealing with Watergate, however, are always from the same dictating session on the same day.
For the Watergate period I have used some of the tape transcripts that are already public or that were used by the Special Prosecutor in different investigations and trials. In an effort to reconstruct as completely as possible what I knew and what I did in the crucial period immediately following the Watergate break-in, I asked Mrs. Marjorie Acker, a member of my staff since the vice presidential years, to type transcripts as well of the tapes of every conversation I had with H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson for the month after my return to Washington following the break-in, June 20–July 20, 1972. I asked her to do the same for my conversations with Haldeman in May 1973, when we were discussing what we remembered of the events of June 23, 1972, when I authorized the meeting in which the CIA was asked to limit the FBI’s investigation of Watergate.
There were many unintelligible passages on these new tapes. Even so, I believe that they have enabled me to give the most complete account of those days that has ever been given.
In this book I recount many conversations, some of them as direct quotes. Those dealing with Watergate are largely based on the language recorded on the White House tapes. Others are based on my handwritten notes or my dictated diaries. There are also extensive memoranda of conversations—“memcons”—covering most talks with foreign leaders, and I have been able to use these to confirm and supplement my notes and recollections. Conversations in which I did not take part are obviously dependent upon reports from the participants or on secondary sources. In a few cases, I have had to depend solely upon my memory of a conversation in re-creating it, but I have tried to limit this to exchanges in which the vividness of the words lodged them unforgettably in my mind.
This book could not have been written or published without the help of dozens of people, and I am deeply grateful to all of them.
The wonderful volunteer women who work every day taking care of the mail that comes into La Casa Pacifica spent many hours on the laborious but important proofreading of three drafts of the manuscript.
Cathy Price, Marnie Pavlick, Nora Kelly, Cindy Serrano-Mesa, and Meredith Johnson worked late hours and many weekends in order to type the manuscript and then proof galleys against original documents. Judy Johnson helped with a variety of typing and research tasks; Meredith Khachigian helped to proof the manuscript against the originals of my diary. When all the papers of my administration were impounded, Howard W. Smith, a private citizen, kindly sent us his complete set of the daily press office news releases and special briefing transcripts.
Robert Huberty and Mark Jacobsen, of the University of California, Irvine, did much of the detailed library research and newspaper checking.
In a work of this size the copy editors perform an enormous and vital task. I want to thank David C. Frost and Nancy Brooks of Grosset & Dunlap for their patience, diligence, and professional expertise. Others who assisted in various tasks were Jack Brennan, Bernard Shir-Cliff, Larry Gadd, Diana Price, and Robert and Cara Ackerman. The index was compiled by Robert Daugherty, and the photographs were assembled with the help of Ann Grier. I also appreciate the interest and encouragement I have received from my publishers: Harold Roth and Bob Markel of Grosset & Dunlap and Bill Sarnoff and Howard Kaminsky of Warner Books.
I am grateful to the dozens of former staff members and friends who took part in the events chronicled in this book and who gave hours of time to me and my staff as we worked to reconstruct those events fairly and accurately. I am also grateful to those who read different parts of the manuscript and gave valuable advice and assistance: General Brent Scowcroft, who concentrated on the sections dealing with international affairs and foreign policy; Ray Price, who gave editorial assistance and advice, particularly on the domestic policy sections of the presidency; and Herb Stein, who provided editorial assistance on the section dealing with the economy.
Rose Mary Woods was able to spend several months in San Clemente sharing her memories of the twenty-three years during which she served as my personal secretary and applying painstaking attention to detail in reading and checking the manuscript. Marje Acker also came out to help with these tasks. Loie Gaunt, who first joined my staff when I was in the Senate, has served tirelessly as a limitless source of information and help throughout the past three years.
Finally, there are the three people who have worked with me on this project from the beginning. My deep gratitude goes to Ke
n Khachigian and Diane Sawyer for their research and for pulling together much of the source material. And to Frank Gannon, my chief editorial assistant who organized the research and directed the project, my special appreciation.
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La Casa Pacifica
March 1978
EARLY YEARS
1913–1946
I was born in a house my father built. My birth on the night of January 9, 1913, coincided with a record-breaking cold snap in our town of Yorba Linda, California. Yorba Linda was a farming community of 200 people about thirty miles from Los Angeles, surrounded by avocado and citrus groves and barley, alfalfa, and bean fields.
For a child the setting was idyllic. In the spring the air was heavy with the rich scent of orange blossoms. And there was much to excite a child’s imagination: glimpses of the Pacific Ocean to the west, the San Bernardino Mountains to the north, a “haunted house” in the nearby foothills to be viewed with awe and approached with caution—and a railroad line that ran about a mile from our house.
In the daytime I could see the smoke from the steam engines. Sometimes at night I was awakened by the whistle of a train, and then I dreamed of the far-off places I wanted to visit someday. My brothers and I played railroad games, taking the parts of engineers and conductors. I remember the thrill of talking to Everett Barnum, the Santa Fe Railroad engineer who lived in our town. All through grade school my ambition was to become a railroad engineer.
My first conscious memory is of running. I was three years old, and my mother was driving us in a horse-drawn buggy, holding my baby brother Don on her lap while a neighbor girl held me. The horse turned the corner leading to our house at high speed, and I tumbled onto the ground. I must have been in shock, but I managed to get up and run after the buggy while my mother tried to make the horse stop. The only aftereffect of this accident was that years later, when the vogue of parting hair on the left side came along, I still had to comb mine straight back to hide a scar caused by the fall.
Our life in Yorba Linda was hard but happy. My father worked at whatever jobs he could find. Thanks to a vegetable garden and some of our own fruit trees, we had plenty to eat despite our low income. We also had a cow that provided milk from which my mother made our butter and cheese.
I started first grade in Yorba Linda’s schoolhouse when I was six. My mother had already taught me to read at home, and this head start enabled me to skip the second grade.
After homework and chores, I often sat by the fireplace or at the kitchen table immersed in a book or magazine. We took the Los Angeles Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Aunt Olive, my mother’s youngest sister, and her husband, Oscar Marshburn, lived in nearby Whittier and subscribed to the National Geographic. Nearly every time I visited them I borrowed a copy. It was my favorite magazine.
In 1922 my father sold our house and lemon grove in Yorba Linda, and we moved to Whittier. He did roustabout work in the oil fields, but although it paid well, this physical labor offered no challenge to a man of his ambition, intelligence, and lively imagination. Early on, my father could see that even though there were still very few automobiles and only one paved road in the area, the horseless carriage was an idea whose time was about to come. He borrowed $5,000 to buy some land on the main road connecting the growing towns of Whittier and La Habra. He cleared the lot, put in a tank and a pump, and opened the first service station in the eight-mile stretch between the two towns.
The enterprise was an almost instant success, and he soon opened a general store and market. He added a small counter for my mother’s home-baked pies and cakes. One of her specialties was angel food cake. She insisted that it was at its best only when she beat fresh outdoor air into the batter before putting it into the oven. I remember her standing outside the kitchen door in the chilly predawn air, beating the batter with a big wooden spoon.
The grocery business expanded rapidly, and had it not been for the illnesses that struck our family, we would have been modestly well off by the standards of those times.
The Nixon Market was a “mom and pop” operation; the whole family worked in the store. In addition to waiting on the customers and keeping the accounts, inventory had to be taken, orders placed, and the shelves kept stocked. The store had to be cleaned and swept each night and sprayed for flies each day.
When I was older, I took over the fresh fruit and vegetable buying. Each morning I got up at four in order to be at the Seventh Street market in Los Angeles by five o’clock. I chose the best fruits and vegetables, bargained with the farmers and wholesalers for a good price, and then drove back to East Whittier to wash, sort, and arrange the produce in the store and be off to school by eight. It was not an easy life, but it was a good one, centered around a loving family and a small, tight-knit, Quaker community. For those who were willing to work hard, California in the 1920s seemed a place and time of almost unlimited opportunity.
The principle that opposites attract aptly describes my father and my mother. In the most important ways they were very much alike. Both were deeply religious. They were completely devoted to one another, and no sacrifice was too great for them to make for their children. But two more temperamentally different people could hardly be imagined.
My father, Francis Anthony Nixon, was known throughout his life as Frank. He was born on a farm in Ohio on December 3, 1878. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eight, and her long illness left the family almost penniless. After her death the family moved to a small barren plot of land in eastern Ohio, where my father had to walk several miles each day to the nearest school. A newcomer, small in stature and dressed in ragged clothes, he was taunted by his schoolmates. He responded with a quick tongue and a ready pair of fists, and he soon became known as a natural fighter.
The family fortunes did not improve, and after he had finished the sixth grade he quit school and went to work. It was a necessary decision, but one he regretted all his life. Over the next few years he held many jobs, acquiring new skills with each. He drove an ox team hauling logs to a sawmill, worked as a carpenter, managed a potato farm, sheared sheep in Colorado, and installed early hand-crank telephones.
Throughout his life my father tried to better himself through work. He moved to Columbus, Ohio, and became a streetcar motorman. The insides of those early trolleys were heated by pot-bellied stoves, but the vestibules where the motormen stood were open. During the winter of 1906 his feet became frostbitten. Complaints to the company went unheeded, so he organized a protest by the motormen and conductors. They managed to get a bill passed in the state legislature requiring that the vestibules be enclosed and heated.
Nonetheless, the battle had left him frustrated and discouraged, and he decided to move to Southern California, where at least frostbite would not be a problem. In 1907 he got a job as a motorman on the Pacific Electric streetcar line that ran between Los Angeles and Whittier. In 1908 he met Hannah Milhous at a Valentine’s Day party, and despite the reservations of her family because she had not finished college and because her suitor was not a Quaker, they were married four months later.
My father had an Irish quickness both to anger and to mirth. It was his temper that impressed me most as a small child. He had tempestuous arguments with my brothers Harold and Don, and their shouting could be heard all through the neighborhood. He was a strict and stern disciplinarian, and I tried to follow my mother’s example of not crossing him when he was in a bad mood. Perhaps my own aversion to personal confrontations dates back to these early recollections.
He often argued vehemently on almost any subject with the customers he waited on in the store. His outbursts were not personal; they were just his way of putting life into a discussion. Unfortunately some of our customers did not appreciate this, and it was a standing family joke that my mother or one of us boys would rush to wait on some of our more sensitive customers before he could get to them.
Whatever talent I have as a debater must have been acquired fr
om my father, from his love of argument and disputation. When I was on the debating team in college, he would often drive me to the debates and sit in the back of the room listening intently. On the way home he would dissect and analyze each of the arguments.
My father had a deep belief in the “little man” in America. He opposed the vested interests and the political machines that exercised so much control over American life at the beginning of the century. Because he thought that the Standard Oil trust was a blight on the American landscape, he chose to be supplied by the less well known Richfield Oil Company when he opened his service station in Whittier. As the Nixon Market grew, he became a vociferous opponent of chain stores. He feared that through their volume buying they would crush the independent operator and the family grocery store.
In those days before television and when radio was still in its infancy, conversation within the family and among friends was a major source of recreation. Lively discussions of political issues were always a feature of our family gatherings. My father started out as a hard-line Ohio Republican. In 1924, however, he became disenchanted with the stand-pat Republicanism of Harding and Coolidge. A populist strain entered his thinking, and that year he deserted his party to vote for the great Wisconsin Progressive Senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette. He even became an ardent supporter of the Townsend Plan, which proposed paying $200 a month to everyone over sixty who would spend the money and agree to retire, a program which was too liberal even for the New Deal. He supported Hoover in 1932 because Hoover was a “dry” and FDR a “wet” on prohibition. He never told me how he voted in 1936, but I always suspected that in the midst of the Depression he voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than Alf Landon, whom he once described as a “stand-patter.”
The dignity of labor was the keystone of my father’s philosophy of life. He said that taking too seriously the biblical invitation to lean on the Lord encouraged laziness, and his favorite biblical passage was, “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” During the long period when my brother Harold had tuberculosis—the years of the Great Depression—my father refused to let him go to the county tuberculosis hospital, one of the best in the country, on the ground that going there would be taking charity.
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