The Nixon I Knew

President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were realists in their approach to foreign relations, realism meaning analysis of the power relations among major nations in the world and addressing them, and trying to deal with them according to the American national interest. The following episodes belong in the history of the Nixon administration.

I saw President Nixon on several occasions during 1971-1972, and also after he resigned because of the Watergate coverup. I had been a speechwriter for Nixon during the 1968 campaign, writing his law-and-order speech (officially titled “Order and Justice Under Law”), which he delivered in Philadelphia. In 1972 Nixon himself was not campaigning and I would write speeches for his surrogates — as it would turn out, Texas Gov. John Connally and Ann Armstrong, also of Texas.

At one point during 1972 I visited Nixon in San Clemente. His office and other offices were in temporary structures at some distance from La Casa Pacifica. Nixon said, “Brezhnev was here last week. The night before we met he got pretty drunk at the Casa and was badly hung over at 9:30 in the morning. After he had a cup of coffee I said to him, “Mr. Chairman, before we go further I want to tell you this. If there is a Russian tank attack across the West German plain it will go nuclear within 15 minutes.” (Note: Nixon was referring to battlefield nuclear weapons, actually howitzer shells kept in underground concrete bunkers.) Nixon went on, “Brezhnev replied, ‘I’m glad you told me that, Mr. President. I will tell them that back in Moscow.’”

Realists respect realism.

Later, after Nixon’s resignation, I visited him several times, at San Clemente, at his Manhattan Town House, at his place in Saddle River, New Jersey. Once, at his office in San Clemente we walked to the large window that looked out upon the Pacific ocean. Nixon said, “That’s not Charlie the Tuna out there. It’s Jaws.” Nixon had a Hobbesian view of international relations. On the whole pessimistic. Realistic. Like Hans Morgenthau (In Defense of the National Interest,1951), Nixon understood that in international relations there is no “sovereign” (i.e., world government) and so national interest is the guide to foreign policy.

Thus his historic trip to China (“Red China”), downgrading our relations with Taiwan, which reconfigured the balance of our relations with both China and Russia to our strategic advantage.

At his town house in Manhattan Nixon had many Chinese objects, vases, chairs, and so on, gifts from the Chinese, I suppose, including some very potent liquor, cases of which he had been given by Zhou En Lai. This stuff was contained in small round flasks, and must have begun evaporating as you poured it. No smoking please.

In 1985, Harrison Salisbury, foreign correspondent and author of many books, published The Long March,about Mao Zedong’s long march to his army’s redoubt in northern China from which he later emerged to win the civil war against the nationalists. In 1985 I was writing a syndicated column for King Features, and I interviewed Harrison Salisbury over luncheon at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Harrison told me that while in China he had visited Zhou En Lai in a hospital, where he was dying of cancer. At one point Zhou asked him whom he thought was the greatest American president of the twentieth century.

Harrison: Franklin Roosevelt?

Zhou: No. Nixon.

From his own perspective, of course. Nixon’s opening to China had strengthened China’s strategic position relative to the Soviet Union. Zhou was a realist.

In my view, Nixon could have been a near great president had it not been for his resentments and near paranoid belief that he had domestic enemies almost everywhere. Of course he did have enemies, but his reactions were such that they won and he lost.