High life
Dining with Dicky
Taki
As ex-Presidents of the United States go, the only one I'd cross the ocean in order to dine with is that darling of the liberals, Richard Milhous Nixon. The first time I met him was at Jonathan Aitken' house, where he addressed a Tory philoso- phy group I head whenever I'm out of prison. We hit it off well, so well in fact that he wrote to me while I was in Pentonville. There is something extrernelY touching (and rare) about an ex-President writing to one who is banged up. After all, politicians are known to be a bit like art dealers and Charles Benson, never there when you need them. So, when my friend Bob Tyrrell rang and told me I was included in an off the record dinner with Nixon I left Annabel's and flew to New York, destination New Jersey, via stops at Southampton and Watermill, Long Island, for a weekend tennis tournament in which
no one competing had a good word to say about Tiriac or McEnroe.
The Nixon house is in Saddle River, a very green and beautiful part of New Jersey, one hour from New York City. The house has a Japanese garden of about five acres, a swimming pool that looks like a lotus pond, a tennis court (for the children) and is furnished and covered with the kind a chintzes that Arabs might find vulgar but we English fought the second world war in order to preserve. It is a sprawling 11. °use, on one storey, as Mrs Nixon is not in the best of health and cannot climb stairs. The colours are soft browns and Yellows, with modern and old mixed up, everything orderly yet cosy. The famous man waited just inside the glass door and came out to greet us as we drove up.
one wasn't prejudiced against Richard Nixon — which few people are not thanks to the two greatest novelists since Tolstoy (Woodward has since gone on to greater triumphs, with a hatchet job on the dead Belushi, while Bernstein concentrated on Margaret Jay) — it would be easy to see why the press distrust him. He simply is not good at all at small-talk. And as everyone knows, it's charm, small-talk and badinage With the reporters, a la JFK, that the 'IS',..inerican media consider important. Keagan is a natural at it, Nixon is not, never was. What he is is brilliant. There is no other word for him. He knows it all, has seen it all, has met everyone, has had his 611ger on the button longer than anyone. I only wish Reagan, Carter and Ford had abducted him, stuck him in a large wing of the State Department, fired nine tenths of the decision makers, let him run our foreign policy and this would be a far oetter world to live in.
As the meeting was off the record I Cannot write about the important things, like Star Wars, and our chances in having an. all-out nuclear exchange. Of course Richard Nixon must know that anything said in the presence of eight journalists has as much of a chance of remaining off the record as, say, Harold Pinter is likely to choose places like Vietnam, Afghanistan. Poland, Bulgaria, Cuba and Nicaragua before he chooses to go to Turkey and l3roclaim that writers over there are being Picked on. (Not to mention the Soviet Union, eh Harold?) We first talked for about 45 minutes, then went into the yellow Chinese room for drinks and canapes, then into dinner. That consisted of excellent filet-mignon, vege- tables, cheese and a very good chocolate ousse. The wine was Chateau Latour '66, a good year for wines, a bad one for Politics', according to our host. From there we went into his study where the mood became more relaxed. He even told us a feW anecdotes about the great men of his time.
Curiously enough, Nixon is a dove in domestic politics. He admires Reagan and sPeaks to him often but is more of a Centrist than RR. But when it comes to the Soviet Union he is more of a hawk than the
cowboy. (His analysis of the hostage crisis and his opinion on what should have been done was brilliant.) He calls the Soviets nuclear coercers, not fools, nor stupid, just greedy. He thinks that when the Soviets decide to take out the Chinese nuclear capability, it will bring the western alliance to a terrible dilemma. He knows more about the Soviet Union than all of the CIA put together. I guess that's why people who don't like to see a strong America still hate and fear him. People like those who want Reagan to resign simply because he's now a semicolon. I only hope they hold their breath till he does.
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