Nixon: "Never Look Back"

By Otto Friedrich

Ten years later, the only President ever to resign is still seeking a role

At 5 a.m. the sun is not even up yet. There is just the first yellowing grayness in the sky, beyond the oak trees at the edge of the garden. But for Richard Nixon it is no time to be sleeping. He gets up early, as he always has. Up, up to shower, to shave, to reach for a fresh shirt and a necktie, always a necktie. Then he pads down the stairs of his 15-room, $1 million stone-and-red-wood mansion to make his own breakfast: toast and coffee. His housekeeper is not awake yet, but the Secret Service men are, ready to accompany him on his two-mile walk around Saddle River, a wealthy enclave in northeastern New Jersey. There will be guards near Nixon for the rest of his life, but he professes not to worry about any lingering hostilities against him. "Never look back," he often says. "Remember Lot's wife. Never look back."

This is the way almost every day begins for Richard Nixon, now 71, the 37th President of the U.S. and the only one who demonstrably violated the law and resigned in disgrace. Since Nixon is a methodical man, his days pass in much the same way, and so, Thursday, Aug. 9, will probably be much like any other. But there must come a moment when Nixon remembers that this was the day, ten years ago, when he gave up the power and the glory that he had fought for all his life.

Ten years ago, that gray, haggard, jowly face appeared on the television screens of an avidly watching nation and announced the almost inevitable and yet unbelievable decision to resign. After two years of trying to escape the Watergate scandal--the bungled burglary at Democratic headquarters, and then the coverup, the lies, the hush money, the demands upon subordinates to "stonewall"--Nixon finally invoked the language of Theodore Roosevelt to describe himself as "the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs. . ." Next day, the official day of resignation, he was near tears as he bade his staff farewell. He talked about his mother, "a saint," and urged his followers to be charitable. "Others may hate you," he said, "but those who hate you don't win, unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."

Nixon seemed to have thoroughly destroyed himself when he flew off that morning into a self-imposed exile in Southern California. Though his resignation canceled the House Judiciary Committee's unanimous vote to impeach him, Nixon still faced a real danger of being indicted and imprisoned for obstruction of justice. A month after the resignation, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a blanket pardon for any crimes he may have committed in the White House, but the U.S. public was less forgiving. Polls consistently showed that two-thirds of all Americans thought Nixon should not have been pardoned and should never again hold any public office. Visitors to his compound at San Clemente during those first months reported that Nixon was morbidly depressed, devastated, possibly suicidal.

Today the man whom the Watergate grand jury branded forever as an "unindicted coconspirator" is rich, healthy and remarkably respectable. Apart from his $119,000 annual pensions and $300,000 in Government-paid expenses, his last TV interview cost CBS $500,000, and his last move from New York to New Jersey netted him a real-estate profit of more than $1.5 million. Though his wife Pat is in frail health after a second stroke last fall, Nixon is quite fit and chipper. Using a new Lanier word processor, he is tapping out his fifth post-White House book, No More Viet Nams. Though there was speculation that he might even play some role at this month's Republican Convention in Dallas, he declined to do so.

"Everywhere I go," says John Dean, the former White House counsel who first publicly tied Nixon to the Watergate coverup, "I hear people say that maybe Nixon wasn't all that bad. The passage of time is one reason. People have softened their views considerably." Another reason is that Nixon has spent the past ten years tirelessly and skillfully campaigning for rehabilitation, for public acknowledgment of what he considers his deserved status as elder statesman. Says Dean: "Richard Nixon is running for ex-President." That he should campaign with some success hardly surprises veteran Nixon-watchers like John Sears, a former White House deputy counsel. Says Sears: "Right now he's in a period of recovering, but what's so unusual? He's spent half his life recovering."

During Nixon's first years out of office, each move in the comeback was measured by micrometer: the first public appearance, the first foreign trip, the first political speech. Now all that is commonplace: Nixon has visited 18 foreign nations, conferred with 16 Chiefs of State, appeared frequently on TV and in the press.

Every day the Secret Service drives him 23 miles to his 13th-floor office near Wall Street, and from 7:30 on, he works the phones like a hungry stockbroker, making and receiving perhaps 40 calls by noon. He calls strategically placed colleagues in the Reagan Administration, though not the President. He calls old friends, like Florida Banker Bebe Rebozo, and even old foes, like former Senator George McGovern. Then he limousines to lunch and more politicking at some high-powered mid-Manhattan watering hole, often the "21" Club or Le Cirque, with such figures as Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig.

"Nixon has hundreds of contacts that he maintains, some of them daily, many of them weekly," says one of his former advisers. "He'll call and just want to talk politics or world affairs. At the time of last month's Israeli elections, he was calling up everybody to ask what they thought and to tell them what he thought. There's a lot of back and forth."

Whether this really amounts to much more than the humoring of an aging ex-President is debatable, but the evolution of national policies often does involve "a lot of back and forth," and even many of Nixon's critics acknowledge that he has valuable experience. People who have conferred with him say that he seems intellectually at ease with geopolitics in a way that Reagan never does and probably never will. Nixon, they say, makes his analyses appear to be based on experience and pragmatism, and thus part of a strategy that has a chance of success.

It is as architect of East-West detente that Nixon manages to maintain high visibility. Just last month he made a surprise appearance at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of his famous "kitchen debate" against Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev alongside the washing machine of a model American home on exhibit in Moscow. Said Nixon of Khrushchev: "He was a man of great warmth, and totally belligerent."

Ever concerned about his place in history, Nixon is trying to create a library to house his papers. With that in mind, he surfaced in San Clemente last May at Casa Pacifica, the former summer White House that he had once promised to donate to the nation. He sold it instead to some businessmen; the adjoining land is now being subdivided into lots. Nixon seized the occasion to welcome some 300 supporters with Mexican food and mariachi music, and then thanked his guests for their efforts in helping to support construction of a Nixon library on a windswept cliff two miles to the north. So far, only $7 million of the required $25 million has been raised.

That partial success, little more than onefourth, is perhaps a fairly accurate measure of how far Nixon has come in his struggle for rehabilitation. The American attention span is not long, but harsh feelings toward Nixon still persist. For every Nixon supporter who remembers the kitchen debate or the opening to China or the settlement in Viet Nam, there are others who recall his early campaigns attacking Democratic Administrations as full of "Communists and crooks." For everyone who thinks of Watergate as a politically exaggerated collection of minor misjudgments, there are many who regard it as a narrowly averted threat to American democracy.

The difference in perceptions among his supporters and detractors is epitomized by the disagreements over whether Nixon has sufficiently repented about his part in the Watergate scandal. When CBS's Diane Sawyer once pressed him hard about "the thing you're most sorry about," Nixon became almost speechless: "Well, the. . . the. . . well. . . well, the. . . if. . . if. . . well, it. . . I th. . . I've . . . I've covered it already."* Frank Gannon, who worked with Sawyer on the preparation of Nixon's best-selling Memoirs, asked him yet again, in the 90-minute CBS interview last April, whether he should apologize to the American people. Nixon apparently did the best he could: "There's no way that you could apologize that is more eloquent, more decisive, more finite, which would exceed resigning the presidency of the United States. That said it all."

There are analysts who believe it is time for more favorable judgments on Nixon's presidency as a whole. "Watergate obscured what Richard Nixon was really doing," says a former White House insider. "Nixon was in the forefront on affirmative action. He set up the Legal Services Corporation. He established the Environmental Protection Agency. There was a coherence to those years, and Nixon was a moderate because successful politics is moderation."

Leon Litwack, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian at the University of California at Berkeley, strongly disagrees: "If there is any nostalgia for Nixon, it's not based on any new historical findings but on the perception of Nixon as less dangerous and more intelligent than the current President. To forgive the enormity of Nixon's crimes would be a mistake. He waged war on American citizens."

Elliot Richardson, who was Nixon's Attorney General when he was forced out in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, sees his ex-boss as a President who succeeded in making the U.S. "adapt to the realities of change" but was "brought down by fatal flaws in his character." Says Richardson, who is now campaigning for a Senate seat in Massachusetts: "We all have the defects of our qualities. Nixon resented those more fortunate than he. He was insecure. But that was what propelled him to the presidency."

The argument over Nixon's place in history is an argument that nobody can win in the foreseeable future, so Nixon is probably destined to spend years as a kind of Ancient Mariner, plucking at the lapels of passers-by and trying to explain his strange story. But there are other, more pleasant sides to an ex-President's life. One of Nixon's reasons for moving from California to New York in 1980 was to be nearer his daughters. Tricia lives in Manhattan with her lawyer-husband Edward Cox; Julie in Berwyn, Pa., with her husband David Eisenhower, who is writing a book on his grandfather. Nixon delights in his four grandchildren, Jennie Eisenhower, 5, Alex Eisenhower, 3, Melanie Eisenhower, 6 weeks, and Christopher Cox, 5. When first asked what he wanted Jennie to call him, Nixon thought for a moment and then solemnly suggested that "R.N. would be nice"; he happily settled for her addressing him as "Ba." The older children frequently splash around with their grandfather in his Saddle River swimming pool.

For all that, the brand of unindicted co-conspirator can be neither erased nor forgotten. Nixon is still two years younger than the incumbent President and still insatiably full of ideas and strategies and ambitions. He is still an object of fascination to his foes as well as his friends. So the tenth anniversary of his departure from the Oval Office will not be a day like the others, even if nothing special happens. "I guess we will take note of it individually and in our own way," John Sears said somewhat reflectively last week. "It was, after all, the end of something." --By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Hays Corey/Washington and Adam Zagorin/New York

*As quoted in Robert Sam Anson's new book, Exile, The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon (Simon & Schuster).

With reporting by Hays Corey, Adam Zagorin