Nixon and Mao Read Online Free PDF Page A

California; in a rambling statement he blamed the press for his loss: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” 46
    It was not, of course. “Once you get into this great stream of history,” he once said, “you can’t get out.” 47 Why would a man who was uncomfortable with strangers choose a life in politics? “It doesn’t come naturally to me to be a buddy-buddy boy,” he told a journalist. “I can’t really let my hair down with anyone.” 48 What spurred him on after so many setbacks—his narrow loss to Kennedy in 1960, his humiliating loss for the governorship of California, and, of course, being driven from office by the Watergate scandal? Who or where was the real Nixon? Was it the man who barked orders at his aides to fire this son of a bitch and to get that opponent? The man who wrote, in a 1970 New Year’s memorandum to himself, “Cool—Strong—Organized—Temperate—Exciting”? Or the man whom an aide, a liberal Jewish lawyer from New York, remembered for his “intelligence, idealism and generosity” and who never believed that, for all the ranting about Jews on the tapes, Nixon was anti-Semitic? The writer Russell Baker once came up with a striking image: of Nixon as a row of suits that came out of the closet in turn and that ran from the demagogic anti-Communist to the elder statesman. 49
    When he was at college, Nixon loved acting. Many of the journalists who followed him over the years felt that he had never stopped. He could be brilliant, drawing crowds to their feet with his speeches. When he talked to his fellow statesmen, he was wise and dignified. But the acts were not always convincing. Eisenhower’s secretary thought that Nixon “sometimes seems like a man who is acting a nice man rather than being one.” 50 In public appearances, he sweated too much, gestured stiffly, wrung his hands together until his knuckles went white. When he was president his staff tried to set up opportunities to show him being relaxed and spontaneous, as the Kennedys, who fascinated and infuriated Nixon, so easily were. Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, got him an Irish setter, but it had to be cajoled with a trail of dog biscuits to go near Nixon. A scene staged to show the press a rugged Nixon strolling by the Pacific Ocean somehow did not come off; he’d worn polished leather shoes and dress trousers. 51 When visitors came to his office he tried to set them at ease, but when he brought out a memento, a pin or a pen perhaps, he thrust it out awkwardly with one of his unfunny jokes. “He was a man totally lacking in personal grace,” said a senior State Department official, “with no sense of the proper distance to keep in human relations.” 52 Yet when he gave out posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor (something he shrank from doing), he was direct and simple with the families. 53
    He loved the idea of being president, although he found some of the reality, such as cabinet meetings, tedious. (He simply gave up holding them.) He loved being greeted abroad as a head of state. 54 He loved living in the White House. He tried to enhance its already considerable pomp with new uniforms in white and gold for the White House police. (After a press comment compared the new uniforms to those in comic operas, the uniforms quietly disappeared; the elaborate hats popped up later at a rock concert.) 55
    He knew how he wanted to be seen: with the charm of a Kennedy and the leadership of a Churchill or a de Gaulle. “At his best in a crisis. Cool. Unflappable” were the qualities he wanted the press to perceive, he told Kissinger. “Steely but subtle.” 56 He wished to be mysterious: “always like the iceberg, you see only the tip.” 57 His staff had orders to stress how hard the man Nixon referred to as “N.” or “the P.” worked, how he needed only a few hours of sleep, how focused and energetic he was. 58 This was true, but not always.