      |
|
|
 |
|
« Back to Richard Nixon: When Politics Gets Personal main page   Transcript for: Richard Nixon: When Politics Gets PersonalTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG #945 “Richard Nixon: When Politics Gets Personal” BW: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. In all of American history, only one president has been effectively thrown out of office, Richard Nixon. Simply put, his opponents believe that he trashed the Constitution. His defenders say that charge is much overstated and point to his policy accomplishments. Was Richard Nixon the twisted loner who would stop at nothing or the cerebral strategist who sensationally changed the global chessboard – or both? To find out more about President Nixon, Think Tank is joined by Richard Reeves, former chief political correspondent for the New York Times and author of a new book, President Nixon: Alone in the White House. And Leonard Garment, former Counsel to President Nixon and author of Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon’s White House, Watergate and Beyond. The topic before the house: “Richard Nixon, When Politics Gets Personal.” This week on Think Tank. BW: Richard Nixon’s meteoric rise to power started in 1946 when, in California at age thirty-three, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He gained national attention investigating alleged Communist spies. In 1950, Nixon won a bitter election in the U.S. Senate and in 1952, after just six years in politics, Richard Nixon landed in the White House as Vice President to the administration of the war hero President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1968, Nixon captured the presidency on his own. Four years later, he was re-elected with a huge majority. Richard Nixon served during a troubled time in America; protests against the war in Vietnam rocked the nation, racial turbulence had turned violent, inflation climbed. In the midst of the turmoil, Nixon crafted bold policies that left a lasting mark on America and the world. Some think for the better, some think otherwise. He engaged communist China, brokered detente with the Soviet Union and pulled American combat troops out of South Vietnam. On his watch, the Environmental Protection Agency was launched, school desegregation and Affirmative Action moved ahead. But critics and defenders alike agree that Richard Nixon was a strange man with self-destructive qualities. Under the impact of what has been called the horrors of Watergate, he and his White House imploded. On August 9th, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign from office. BW: Gentlemen, Richard Reeves and Leonard Garment, thank you for joining us on Think Tank. Richard Reeves, your book is new, it’s selling very well. What is your basic take on Nixon? Richard Reeves: My take on Nixon was that he was wired strangely and was deeply introverted in a business that attracts extroverts. That in a business where many politicians, the ones I’ve known, Clinton and Kennedy being good examples, were men who couldn’t stand to be alone, who had to be at the center of action all the time. Suddenly along comes this guy who doesn’t like to be with people and who is an extraordinarily effective president, particularly at moving his own agenda forward, by surprise. So that this is the man who worked alone and suddenly comes on television, “I’m going to China and the world is never going to be the same again.” There had been no public debate or argument, people, press, Congress about that. Comes on television and says, “I’m now going to change the world’s economic system. I’m taking the U.S. off the gold standard. I’m implementing……” BW: And through all this…. Richard Reeves: It was a way, it was a DeGaulle way to govern, I thought. BW: Was it legal? Richard Reeves: It was legal. It was brilliant, because he avoided that debate and he was able to…. BW: Because you know, in Clinton’s second term, that’s what he went to. He went to executive orders. Richard Reeves: But this went beyond executive orders. You can’t have an executive order that changes the power balance of the world or changes the world economy. I mean when Nixon came out after a kind of what he would call a symbolic meeting at Camp David and went on television and said that Brenton Woods is over, we’re having a new economic system in the world, he really was one of the great creators of what we now call ‘globalization.’ No one knew uh, that was happening. It wasn’t just issuing an executive order; it was a political maneuver that left both friends and opponents neutralized in place. BW: Leonard, what do you think of that? Leonard Garment: I think the isolation, the paradox of a man of separateness, isolation, being introverted, Nixon doing all these big things – they’re really part of the whole. I mean he just couldn’t get things done by trusting the development of his policy to anybody. I mean it’s the kind of thing that requires the action of one individual. Richard Reeves: But that is somewhat different than the Constitutional system in which he operated. When Ben said did he break the law on that, I don’t think he broke the law on that. Leonard Garment: Well… Richard Reeves: But he certainly essentially changed the Constitution, and the balance of power between executive and the legislative. Leonard Garment: Well, that’s what he set out to do. Richard Garment: And the people himself. He set out to do that, he set out to do it because he felt that real changes were needed. Uh, it was wartime. I mean there, let’s forget the euphemism of….. BW: We are talking about the Vietnam War. Leonard Garment: Yeah, the Vietnam War. I mean it was a very bloody, frustrating engagement. The decision that Richard Nixon made--I think was NSDD-Two…. BW: National – what does that stand for? Leonard Garment: Whether to stick the course in Vietnam or whether to get out, was the crucial event in his presidency, in my view, because everything else flowed from that. I think of Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken. If he had gotten out, I don’t know what would have happened. BW: Well he did get out. Leonard Garment: He got out but it took… BW: Four years. Leonard Garment: Those four years were years where bombs were bursting not only in the air over Vietnam but were bursting in Wisconsin. They also have the weathermen. You have places blowing up. And in President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Dick Reeves’ book, you see Nixon talking about nihilism, the terrorism at home. BW: Well, listen you said the magic word. I mean here we are in the United States of America faced with terrorism, Leonard Garment: An extension of that. BW: And you told me when we chatted earlier that Nixon was truly fearful of what was happening on the streets in America and the terrorism, the weathermen, and that kind of thing. Leonard Garment: And he wanted help from the FBI, he wanted to find out what the sources of the American terrorism were-- light compared with today. And the FBI would not give it to him. J. Edgar Hoover said, “I’m,” you know, “I’m not going to do this for the President.” That led to the creation of his own little spy group called ‘the plumbers.’ And the plumbers catching up that excess of Nixon about politics, and we wound up in Watergate. BW: But it was at the end of the presidency. Richard Reeves: Right… BW: Hold on. (several talking) Hang on one second. Leonard? Leonard Garment: Yes? BW: Was Richard Nixon nuts? Leonard Garment: Oh no. BW: Was he a world class liar? Leonard Garment: Well he competed with a lot of other presidents. I mean nobody can run the presidency in this turbulent democratic world that we have in the United States without deception, lying, mendacity, tricks and games. And I think Dick Reeves is gonna agree with me on this, because you have somebody that’s getting up there and telling the truth, he’s out of office in no time. BW: Do you agree with that? Richard Reeves: I think he was a world class liar… BW: But what about the other? Richard Reeves: …and that it did him in. That there came a point where no one, in the end, knew what the truth was. BW: Do you think he was nuts? Richard Reeves: I think he was differently wired. I think that the business of reading social clues and things like that, he was clueless as to it, that he was oddly mannered neurologically. BW: As you point out…more pejoratively than you just stated it if I must say…that this guy was some sort of a weird loner and just sat there sort of drawing triangles and figuring out things. I remember seeing him once… he was making a point at some meeting and he said, “Let me [pointing at person he was speaking to] tell you [pointing at himself] something.” (laughs) Richard Reeves: And actually Leonard was a great influence on my thinking on some of this. The fact that his behavior was learned and often memorized, that he looked at other people to see how they acted in this strange business of extroverts, and here’s the one guy who wants to be alone with his pads and with his thoughts, and he had to figure out what these guys do, what’s different about them from me. And obviously he did it brilliantly. He became one of the great triumphs of will and of intelligence, that a fellow like that could become President….. BW: Dick, I have rehearsed for this program. I have a list of questions here. We did the set up piece; it’s coming off a teleprompter. What is wrong with somebody who has to make a public statement rehearsing? Richard Reeves: Nothing, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. But I have news for you, you’re not going to be President. Well, you couldn’t be President. BW: (laughs) I wouldn’t even vote for me, what do you think about that? Richard Reeves: Right. Well I wouldn’t vote for me either. We’re writers, that’s why we’re writers. Nixon maybe should have been a writer. When I dealt with him in his later years, he was a much more comfortable man than the man I remembered from the White House. I mean maybe he should have been a college professor or a teacher or a writer. BW: You have this….. Richard Reeves: I’d just like to add one thing. I mean Bob Dole said, you know, the most amazing thing about the Nixon presidency is not what happened during it, but that Nixon became President. Leonard Garment: Well that’s what makes the Nixon story so interesting. I mean this man with great dreams and great nightmares, who was demonic and yet noble. I mean all of that is why the Nixon story goes on. Richard Reeves: That’s why… BW: And books keep being written. Richard Reeves: It’s why people read Shakespeare… Leonard Garment: And the Bible (laughter). Richard Reeves: …actors want to play Hamlet and writers want to….. BW: That story, there’s a story of Leonard Garment: ..extraordinary man. Revival, resuscitation….. BW: There another facet to this very peculiar…. Leonard Garment: Stop using the word ‘peculiar.’ I mean, I don’t think we should discuss Nixon as being neurologically this or psychiatrically that. He told lies. Many presidents do. But I think the business of saying that he was neurologically wired, I guess he was clumsy. BW: Well I didn’t say neuro – he said that. Richard Reeves: I actually did. Leonard Garment: Okay, I take issue with that. BW: But when I said ‘peculiar,’ let me…. Richard Reeves: Without qualification, I might add. Leonard Garment: I think it’s unimportant. I think it’s unimportant. BW: We’re going to come to that. When I said, ‘peculiar,’ here you were saying, “Well the real Nixon maybe ought to have been this guy in the smoking jacket with a pipe…and a writer.” Leonard Garment: Going to be another writer, along with several thousand others, doing very little. BW: Yeah, but how many writers lived…he lived until Nineteen Ninety-three or something…I mean, through that period of time and even while he was in office, used this anti-Semitic, racial, ugly gutter language that you reproduce again and again and again. And yet, at the same time, as a matter of free will, appointed probably more Jews to high public office than any Republican. Certainly, I mean, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Burns, Chairman of the Fed, Bill Saffire, Herb Stein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and…. Leonard Garment: ..Dick Nathan, Arnold Webber, and little me. BW: …and Leonard Garment, and all of these Jews to one degree or another, after this terrible language came out – and it’s bad language – have, as Leonard does, more or less continue to defend him. Richard Reeves: Well, I mean, we’re defending our own lives in a way. That I don’t, I’m a son of a Republican politician and though I’ve reprinted the words that Nixon used about Jews, I don’t think that his spoken anti-Semitism was unusual in this country in the forties and the fifties among Protestants on the way up. I think, I personally, I mean Len may have a better view of this, that what I saw Nixon saying is that there’s a tribe out there of accomplished people with a great deal of money and they’re against me. They vote against me and they finance the other side and they—Jews, or sometimes he would say New York--they are my enemy, and thank goodness I could peel a few of the smart ones off on to my side. BW: Right. (several talking) Richard Reeves: That’s actually a tribal mind. Leonard Garment: I think Dick has it just right. Nixon hated people who were his enemies, who insulted him, I mean Philip Roth—Philip Wrath--who just treated him as dirt. And others who had despised him. And it was largely liberals, largely democrats and in significant numbers, Jews. So that drew his rage. But he also was a man who had friends among… I mean, his interest was in achieving something, getting things done. BW: How would Nixon have dealt with the terror situation in America now, with what’s going on? Richard Reeves: My answer would be that if he actually had to deal with it, he would overreact and hit too quickly, would show very little restraint. However, my core belief about that is that this wouldn’t have happened on Nixon’s watch. That when we had Cold War presidents, whose total focus, for all practical purpose of foreign policy… I mean Nixon said, “I didn’t come here to build outhouses in Peoria.” And he meant that. Kennedy said roughly the same thing; they were watching this stuff. We’ve come through a period of electing governors from southwestern states who have never been outside the country. And for ten years as this thing built, no one was watching. And it’s impossible for me to believe that a Richard Nixon in the White House would sit there for six years and not understand those people are out there and they’re coming and they’re coming for us. And would not understand that the Saudis have been exporting their problems, their domestic problems, for years, whether it was to Afghanistan or to Bosnia or to Kashmir and now here. So my answer is this would not have happened if Richard Nixon or another deeply experienced foreign policy president had been in the White House rather than governors from the prairies. BW: What….what was the idea of the madman theory? Leonard Garment: Well that developed fairly early in the game. (all talking) I know at least, I mean that was with Nixon and Kissinger to convey to the world that he was unpredictable, that he could do something really quite savage and destructive. I have a personal small anecdote I write about that occurs to me, just when I just started working, I was a lawyer, I didn’t know anything about the White House or foreign policy. Henry Kissinger knew that I was going to Moscow to chair the group for the Moscow Film Festival. He said to me, “When you get there, don’t learn anything about U.S./Soviet relations. Don’t, you don’t know anything, you – and you shouldn’t learn anything. You go over there and you find an opportunity, you will find an opportunity, because you are Nixon’s law partner, they’re going to try to get some stuff out of you. Your mission, in your own ineffable, strange way – like it’s a jazz musician – improvise this story that Nixon is kind of crazy, that he is very unpredictable, he’s liable to do something just savagely destructive.” And sure enough, the opportunity came, they invited me…Arbotov and the Institute for U.S. Policy and the Soviet Union KGB gang…invited me to a meeting, asked me questions about U.S. policy. I had been appointed the head of some policy group, so they thought that I knew a lot. And I started to ramble on about the Richard Nixon that I knew as a law clerk. And I said, you know, “This man, he’s, you know, he’s very smart, very intelligent, very sober-minded, but he could go berserk.” There’s a mad side to him. And they took it. They took all those notes. BW: Did he purposely promote that in other instances to throw his geopolitical adversaries off balance? Richard Reeves: Well I, yes, I think it was a standard leadership technique. I’ve worked for a lot of people – editors are generally like that. I mean (laughter) “this guy is so great, you cross this guy and he is gonna come after you.” Nixon may have been crazy in some ways but that wasn’t one of them. BW: Were Nixon and Kissinger friends? Leonard Garment: No. BW: Or was this a…? Richard Reeves: We’re in total agreement on that. Leonard Garment: No, no, no. They were like… I shouldn’t say this – you’ll edit it out. They were like Leopold and Loeb (laughter). They were accomplices (laughter) – You won’t edit it out. You’d keep it in. Richard Reeves: Right. Leonard Garment: No, I mean they were…. BW: We’ll put a little thing on the bottom of the screen to describe who Leopold and Loeb were. (* Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were defended by Clarence Darrow in an infamous 1924 thrill killing case. They were convicted.) Leonard Garment: I protest. No, they were central to each other’s plans. Richard Reeves: . I think in some ways, the most important things that I was able to mine in doing the book is, one, how much of a hired hand Henry Kissinger actually was, since his own books present it quite differently. And two, that whatever was wrong with Nixon, he was rarely hysteric and Kissinger was capable of staying hysterical for weeks at a time. BW: Tell me just before we end about the Duke Ellington evening, because I read your book and heard you talk about it and it’s two very different renditions of what was going on. Leonard Garment: Well, this was early in the Nixon presidency when the flowers were in bloom and the honeymoon was still on in April of 1969. And, of course, Nixon made a very large contribution to the Arts and Humanities and quadrupled the program. It went from eight million to…. BW: He funded the Great Society. I mean all of us LBJ people know that. You know, LBJ passed the laws and Nixon gave them the money. (several talking) Leonard Garment: There are lots of questions there. I didn’t write about that, so to speak. I mean part of it was keeping the lid on, you know, rendering unto the domestic polity, what had to be done too while he was dealing with foreign policy, all of that. But it was Duke Ellington’s seventieth birthday coming up on April 29th, 1969, and I forwarded the suggestion that this would be a great night for a party. BW: You as a former jazz musician. Leonard Garment: I was a former jazz musician… Nixon said, “That’s a great idea. We’ll do an evening for Duke Ellington.” And he really did it. I mean it was the happiest night… I think it was the happiest night in Nixon’s whole presidency because here was this place, black tie party, Presidential Medal of Honor, Duke Ellington bestowing all kisses on Nixon. BW: Four kisses. Leonard Garment: It was Ellington’s style, you know, two on each cheek. Jerry Mulligan and an all-star band playing all of Ellington’s numbers, special arrangements. Everybody there, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman. And they all loved Nixon that night. BW: But you made the point that Nixon thought jazz was Guy Lombardo. Richard Reeves: I’m not sure, you know. Leonard Garment: That was irony. Richard Reeves: Len may be right about it. I’ve thought a lot about that quote, which is from Haldeman’s diaries… BW: Right. Richard Reeves: …saying, “yeah, we’ll get all the jazz greats like Guy Lombardo.” Leonard Garment That’s a joke, I mean…. Richard Reeves: It is conceivable to me that Len is right and that that was meant as a joke and that it was Haldeman… BW: Haldeman’s obtuseness… Richard Reeves: …who was too blocked to understand that it was. I don’t know that but….he’s been very persuasive on this over…… Leonard Garment: I had lunch with Edward Teller and Richard Nixon before he became president and Edward Teller, you know, a great atomic scientist, and when we walked out after lunch, Teller, the Hungarian genius, had all this, there was this dander all over his shoulders and as we walked up the street, I said to Nixon, “What is that?” And Nixon said, “It’s strontium ninety.” (laughter) Somebody who could say that was ironic when he said, “Guy Lombardo.” BW: In preparing for this program, I read a very interesting transcript of an interview that Nixon had with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN and Nixon made the point that at least fifty years have to pass until history will get a real take on a president. A really interesting point. Len first, Richard second, we’ve got to be a little brief. How is history going to see him in the year… Leonard Garment: Well, I think you’ll see him…. BW: … in 2025? Leonard Garment: I think we will see him with considerably greater intelligence. And I say this not just because we’re here but because I truly feel that Richard Reeves’ book is a contribution to a larger picture of what the Nixon presidency was about. I really urge people, after they finish reading my book, to read Richard’s book. BW: And all of my books. Yeah, go ahead. Leonard Garment: No, it tells that story and it tells it in a way that people later on when a lot of the kind of the silly things that, you know, like Nixon had a bathing cap because he was concerned, the barber told him, the chlorine was going to affect his hair – I mean who cares about all that stuff? I think they’ll say that it was a very significant presidency, one of the most important presidents of this century. BW: And positive? That’s significant, I mean, it can be significant and negative. Leonard Garment: Of course, these were organic things that were done, through that incredible, indefatigable, obsessive concentration by Nixon on getting the job done. Richard Reeves: I think that they’re going to say he was a gifted man who changed the world, not only geopolitically, militarily, but also economically. But that he failed as a democratic, with a small D, politician because in the end, he didn’t trust democracy or the people. And because of that, he brought out the worst in them. So it will end up historically, I think, a wash is my guess. BW: Leonard Garment, thank you very much. Richard Reeves, thank you very much and thank you. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
  Web development by Bean Creative. |