The Comeback Trail
Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon.
by Robert Sam Anson.
Simon & Schuster. 360 pp. $17.95.
Exile is an account of Richard Nixon’s life from his resignation of the Presidency on August 9, 1974 through his seventieth birthday on January 9, 1983. Based on interviews with dozens of first-hand sources—the subject himself did not consent to be interviewed but did nothing to obstruct the author’s efforts—the book consists in large measure of reported conversations between Nixon and his family, friends, and staff; Nixon and his lawyers; Nixon and his doctors; Nixon and other journalists; Nixon and his golfing partners; Nixon and his agent, publisher, and editors; Nixon and various government officials, both foreign and domestic; Nixon and his dinner-party guests; Nixon and chance passersby on the street. Exile, in short, is a narrative of events intertwined with a vast accumulation of gossip.
The tale Anson relates is one of yet another Nixon comeback—from public disgrace and ill-health to renewed vigor and respectability. It begins with Nixon’s departure from the White House for San Clemente, where he spent the first few months brooding over his fate and trying to adjust to private life. He was moody and morose. He had difficulty sleeping. He was worried about the future. He still faced the possibility of criminal prosecution—and even jail—over Watergate. Numerous civil suits were pending against him. His legal fees were running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he was in trouble with the IRS. His immediate prospects did not look bright.
The pardon granted him by President Gerald Ford eased some of Nixon’s worries, but it also sparked new denunciations of him by his tormentors in Congress and the press. His health quickly worsened. An attack of phlebitis—from which he had suffered, off and on, for ten years—put him in the hospital, and complications following surgery nearly killed him. The prognosis was so bleak that at one point Nixon spent six hours dictating what might have been his final thoughts on his life and career. His convalescence was difficult and painful. After six months out of office, he was in a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.
But if Nixon was down, as Anson puts it, he was by no means out, and slowly he began to climb back. To solve some of his financial problems, he decided to sell his recollections to television, ultimately making a deal with David Frost for $600,000 plus 20 percent of the profits. As his health improved, he began working seriously on his memoirs, a project that had previously proceeded by fits and starts. In his more expansive moods, he “predicted that the distaste for him would soon pass away,” and that in a couple of years “the record of his achievements would be apparent.” In the meantime, he worked on his golf and made plans to visit China.
The trip took place in early 1976, and although roundly denounced in the press, it was for Nixon an unqualified success. The admiring Chinese gave him a red-carpet welcome—in sharp contrast to the cool treatment earlier accorded to Gerald Ford—and Nixon spent nine hours conferring with the new acting premier. Since he was the first American even to have met Mao’s heir apparent, the Ford White House—which had wanted nothing to do with Nixon or his China trip—was compelled to request a briefing from him when he returned home.
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Having broken out of his isolation in San Clemente, Nixon began showing an interest in the forthcoming presidential campaign. And just as the Ford White House felt it needed Nixon the old China hand, it now felt it needed Nixon the consummate pol. His counsel came in reams, in the form of lengthy handwritten memos outlining in detail how to handle every aspect of the campaign. Much of his advice, however, went unheeded, a fact Anson implies might have hurt Ford in the election: “Richard Nixon had no comment on the outcome, then or later. He had made his predictions months before,” when he had drawn up a list of the states each candidate would take in November. “Without exception, they had been correct.”
While Nixon had now begun to play a behind-the-scenes role in politics, he was preparing to resume a role in public life as well. Following the David Frost interviews in 1977 and the publication of his best-selling memoirs in 1978, he began to accept speaking engagements, first from the town of Hyden, Kentucky; an American Legion Post in Biloxi, Mississippi; and the Oxford Union. On his way to England, he stopped in France, appearing on a Paris talk show to rave reviews. Back home, a Gallup Poll revealed that he was one of the ten men Americans admired most. In 1979, he was invited by the Carter White House to attend a state dinner for visiting Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. In 1980, ready to rejoin “the fast track,” he moved from California to New York.
“Within months,” says Anson, “dinner and a chat with the former President had become a must for political movers and shakers. . . .” While his next book, The Real War, climbed the best-seller lists, Nixon began working hard to insure the defeat of Jimmy Carter, speaking out publicly and serving, as he had with Gerald Ford, as an informal adviser to Ronald Reagan. After the election, he continued to offer advice to the new administration, his political influence reaching its peak with the appointment of Alexander Haig as Secretary of State (an appointment which, by Anson’s account, Nixon seems to have engineered). If Nixon could never again be at the center of power, he had nevertheless managed to carve out for himself the role of “elder statesman and occasional sage.”
Meanwhile, his public reputation was rapidly being restored. He was now flooded with requests for speeches—even Harvard asked him to speak—appearances at political fund-raisers, and interviews. The editors of the New York Times invited him to lunch to discuss foreign policy. The press generally had softened in its attitude toward him, to say the least. Hugh Sidey of Time, who had once written Nixon off “into the sloughs of history,” now proclaimed him “a strategic genius.” When he returned home from Anwar Sadat’s funeral and a tour of Arab capitals, the Washington Post spoke of his “redemption.” Even old political enemies had come to regard Nixon in a new light. Upon receiving a copy of Nixon’s book, Leaders, George McGovern sent him a thank-you note saying, “History will remember you as one of the great peacemakers of the 20th century.”
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By the early 1980’s, then, less than ten years after he was driven from office, Richard Nixon had gained the respect, and in some cases the esteem, of many who had once bitterly opposed him. Anson makes little effort to account for this miraculous recovery. He is content merely to chronicle the process of Nixon’s rehabilitation. His book, in fact, is part of that process. Though it shows us Nixon’s familiar unpleasant side—his vindictiveness, his awkwardness, etc.—it nevertheless portrays him as a sympathetic and admirable figure: shrewd and skillful, charming and generous, even, at times, heroic.
But while he elucidates Nixon’s remarkable personal qualities—his unbreakable character and his uncanny aptitude for public life—Anson overlooks the connection between Nixon’s resurgence and his political ideas. Those ideas can be summed up in a single word: détente.
In all of his writings since leaving the Presidency, and notwithstanding his often tough talk about the Soviet Union and the threat it poses to the free world, Nixon’s belief in detente has never wavered. Indeed, as Anson reports, he has criticized the Reagan administration for not implementing détente as fully as he himself would have done: for not offering the Soviets enough carrots, for not negotiating with them, for acting too tough. He has also criticized Reagan for pushing for too large an increase in defense spending and thereby sowing dissension in Congress. The Soviets would have been far more impressed, in Nixon’s view, by a smaller increase that commanded unified political support. “In a funny way,” Anson quotes him as saying, “you can almost say he [Reagan] is bad for defense.”
It is ideas like these that make Nixon so attractive nowadays to so many of his former antagonists. Today détente and its architect are held up—by Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, by John Lewis Gaddis in Foreign Affairs, among others—as the shining alternative to Ronald Reagan and his allegedly simplistic, ineffectual, and dangerous policy toward the Soviet Union. Those who thus elevate Nixon perforce misrepresent détente—which was supposed to contain Soviet expansionism but did not—as a sound, or even historically successful, strategy. In so doing, they are putting Richard Nixon to tactical use in their campaign for a painless accommodation to Soviet power and a retreat by the United States from its global responsibilities.
Because of Vietnam a number of these same people once considered Nixon a virtual war criminal; because of Watergate they once regarded him as the greatest threat to the survival of the Constitution since the Civil War. But these things apparently no longer matter now that it has been found useful to draft him into service. Richard Nixon will continue to be assured a place in the hearts of those who once viewed him with loathing and contempt as long as he gives expression to ideas that are today the staple of our political culture. And as long as our political culture remains in thrall to the idea behind détente—that the Soviet Union is a power less to be resisted than bribed, cajoled, and assuaged—Richard Nixon will continue to haunt us, though not in the way his enemies once foresaw.
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