Nixon works his passage back
William Shawcross
Washington When Richard Nixon asked Pat Ryan to marry him she refused. He hung around, driving her to her dates, waiting outside to take her home again. Eventually he wore her down. It was a lesson about persistence that he learned well; Nixon has been hanging around the American people ever since, always refusing to take No for an answer, and returning after each rebuff.
This time the return has seemed to take a little longer than usual, but actually he has been skilfully working his passage back ever since August 9 1974 when he was shipped off to San Clemente. There have been discreetly publicised outings with Walter Annenberg and Frank Sinatra, a ballyhooed trip to China, the David Frost extravaganza, foreign policy calls to and from Kissinger, Ford and even Carter, an appearance at Hubert Humphrey's obsequies in Washington, the huge volume of memoirs, and a splendidly successful public appearance in Kentucky. Who knows where it might end? So far it has been a beautiful performance, classic Nixon, and the only emotion one can feel is gratitude. Things are just not the same when he is resting.
There is in Washington today a great deal of criticism of President Carter. Most of it is nonsense, a symptom of the absurd way in which the press goes yapping in a pack in whatever direction the big dog columnists lead it. But one thing is certainly true. An honest and a decent politician, which Carter appears, cannot match Nixon's entertainment value. Certainly Carter could not write a book like The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (Sidgwick and Jackson, f12.50).
It is hard to know how important Nixon himself considers his memoirs as a stage on his road back to power. They are selling very well indeed in the States. And so they should. Nixon has always been excellent at autobiography; his first attempt, Six Crises, was unusually revealing of the man. This one is even better. It is packed with information which was classified until Nixon (like Ellsberg) decided to publish it, and makes a superb if somewhat heavy read. It also happens to confirm any prejudices that
even the most rabid `Nixon-hater' might harbour. You thought Nixon was compulsively dishonest, slimy, obsequious, vulgar, spiteful, brutal, shallow? His book shows that you were being charitable. Indeed it shows it all so clearly that it is hard to label him devious as well.
An enormous amount of the book is filled with lies and distortions. He is unable,for example, to recall the truth about his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Who can blame him? But often his own accounts of his exemplary conduct contain a give-away phrase. In the case of Eisenhower's heart attack he says, 'Assuming the best — that Eisenhower would be back on the job within a few weeks — it would be foolish for me to do anything that the press could in any way interpret as being self serving'. Quite so. He admits that despite his precautions, 'one or two members of the Cabinet seemed to feel that I was seeking publicity.' That's the trouble with poor Nixon; no one ever really understood him — everyone questioned his motives in a most unfair manner. He never knows why.
Today it is in foreign affairs that Carter is being compared most unfavourably with Nixon and his lieutenant Henry Kissinger. The columnist, Joseph Kraft, has even gone so far as to declare that but for the relative stability which the brilliance of Kissinger produced Carter would have wrecked the world by now. It is dangerous nonsense and the book establishes it. Nixon had hardly an interesting thought about foreign affairs, or any foreign country, in his life and Kissinger apparently had few more. Carter, poor man, has actually tried to change the principles on which American foreign policy is conducted, and to pursue more benign and tolerant ends.
A large section of the early, part of Nixon's book is devoted to a tedious tour of Asia as vice president. His observations are trivial. 'Sukarno was the main personification of a common problem in the newly created nation states of Asia and Africa . .like Nasser in Egypt and Nkrumah in Ghana, he could be very successful in tearing down the old system, but he could not concentrate his attention on building a viable new one to replace it.' In Burma Nixon confronted a demonstrator and 'I was later told that by backing the leader down I had made him lose face with the people. This experience bolstered my instinctive belief that the only way to deal with communists is to stand up to them'. In India he met a follower of Gandhi who apparently said to him, 'Younger men must be found to conduct the fight. Younger men like you.' Nixon says he noted in his diary that the man was 'infinitely wise'.
Vietnam he saw in 1968 as 'a short term problem' which would easily be solved if pressure was put on the Soviets to pressure, in turn, Hanoi. He and Kissinger tried to arrange this and their policy was a disastrous failure. It involved, by his own account, demonstrations of toughness and irrationality — like bombing Cambodia to impress the North Koreans — which only extended and lengthened the war, produced the deceptions which led to Watergate and eventually undermined the very policies to which Nixon was wedded.
Nixon relates all the shiftiness in which he and Kissinger engaged in the autumn of 1'972 when Thieu refused to sign the agreement they made with Hanoi. They blame the subsequent breakdown of negotiations entirely on Hanoi. Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, Kissinger said, 'They're just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits. They make the Russians look good, compared to the way the Russians make the Chinese look good when it comes to negotiation in a responsible and decent way'. Nixon's portrait of Kissinger is persuasive; they have a lot in common. Nixon's account of the destabilisation of Allende is confined to one page and is thoroughly dishonest. He says the United States merely supported the nonCommunist parties because an Italian businessman had warned him that between Allende and Castro Latin America would become a 'red sandwich'.
He says nothing of real interest about Watergate, except to show that everything he has said before was a lie. His general defence is that 'they' — all his enemies in the press, the Democrat Party, the eastern establishment — had done it first and worse than him. His principal conclusion, when the press began to investigate Watergate, was that 'Vietnam had found its successor'. In a sense this was true: Watergate was the Vietnamisation of American politics. But Nixon could not understand that; to him it was another liberal attack on him and the decent values he and his family claimed to represent.
Given the shortness of political memory, particularly in the United States, it seems inevitable that Nixon will continue to wheedle his way back into public affairs. Kissinger never left them and has, as shadow secretary of state, a ludicrous amount of influence on policy today. Nixon's book should be read carefully by all those who look back on the office of either man with nostalgia. It might be chastening.
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