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The Personal Nixon
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17032 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1990 |
3,678 Words |
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Russ Braley
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No American's life, public and private, has been so closely examined as Richard Nixon's. The New York Times Index of 1973 required ninety pages of double-column fine print to list that year's stories on Watergate, enough news reports in one publication to make thirty books of 100,000 words each on only one aspect of the President. In 1974 the Index did it again, eighty-nine pages devoted to Watergate. Nixon has written two previous memoirs, Six Crises in 1962 and the monumental RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon in 1978. What can be left to say in a third memoir?
Surprisingly, quite a lot. In the Arena updates Nixon's unprecedented second return to public esteem after two sentences to oblivion (1962-68 and 1976-1986), keeps pace with a fast-moving world, and records some blunt remarks that he could not make during his years in the wilderness.
At seventy-seven and final tiring - he canceled a speech in April - Nixon is in fashion again. The bankruptcy of Soviet Communism, the continuing misery in Vietnam and Cambodia fifteen years after the victories of the North Vietnamese military, and the dangerous stalemate in the Middle East all vindicate the efforts Nixon had under way when he was so rudely interrupted in 1974.
When Nixon wrote RN - a classic story that will be read so long as there are books - during his years of disgrace in San Clemente, California, he worked under crushing constraints. The ripple of charges related to the Watergate break-in had grown into a tidal wave that could not be refuted in RN's mere 1,117 pages. As he wrote, his wife, Pat, suffered a stroke and recovered use of her left arm only through dogged exercise. Twenty-six men who worked for him - none criminals - were being sentenced to prison on charges related to the Watergate cover-up or campaign irregularities. The Watergate special prosecutor's investigators and the IRS were hounding his close friends Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp without cause.
Nixon had few remaining allies in the United States and could expect no tolerance from the news media. Of the U.S. television networks, only one showed interest in interviewing him for a brief show at fire-sale compensation. No network would carry the sensational interviews Nixon did with David Frost, a Briton who put together a chain of independent television stations to show them.
When he wrote RN, Nixon had too much on his plate to say much about how he felt. Any hint of pain would have called down more derision from a hostile press.
In the Arena allows him to get some things off his chest: "I was utterly defenseless…I do not think there was any allegation about me, no matter how horrendous or base, that would not have been believed if it was aired or published." Nixon says that accepting a pardon from President Ford was the most painful humiliation. His attorney, Jack Miller, pointed out that if he did not accept it, looming attorney fees and scores of lawsuits would bankrupt him and keep him in court for the rest of his life. Income from the Frost interviews went to pay lawyers.
They didn't believe him
The news media suggested that Nixon was faking illness when his physician asked that he be excused
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