The Calm After the Storm

  • DAVID HUME KENNERLY -- THE WHITE HOUSE

    APRIL 1975: AS VIETNAM WAS FALLING
    He understood global business better than American politics

    It is difficult to write about Richard Nixon, who combined brilliance, patriotism and courage with self-destructive flaws as in a Greek tragedy. The hatred he evoked in his political opponents was extraordinary even by the turbulent standards of American democracy. I served as his principal adviser on foreign policy for 5 1/2 years and often saw him several times a day. Yet to some extent I still remain mystified by the personality of the perhaps most complex President of the 20th century.

    One of the questions posterity will surely ask is what it was about Nixon that caused passions to run quite so deep. Was it because almost everything one could say about Richard Nixon was both true and yet somehow wrong? He was politically astute and highly intelligent yet prone to self-destructive acts; exceptionally analytical yet done in by yielding to ill-considered impulse; deeply patriotic yet wont to hazard his achievements on tawdry practices; possessed of a considerable capacity to feel guilt coupled with an instinct to gravitate toward actions guaranteed to evoke feelings of guilt; an outstanding judge of people except of those whose actions could affect his own interests; successful in the gregarious profession of politics although introverted, almost reclusive.

    Nobody who dealt with Nixon regularly ever doubted that here was a man capable of imposing his will on circumstances. But he could not handle face-to-face disagreements and would go to extraordinary lengths to achieve his aims by indirection. Nixon aspired to greatness and came close to it, at least in the conduct of foreign policy. Yet he ruined his presidency by acts as unnecessary as they were unworthy.

    It would take a poet of Shakespearean dimension to do justice to the extraordinary, maddening, visionary and debilitating personality of Richard Nixon--at once thoughtful and quirky, compassionate and insensitive; sometimes fiercely loyal, at other times leaving old associates in his wake as casualties. Yet ultimately Nixon's obvious and unending struggle with himself proved so unsettling, even threatening, because deep down one could never be certain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within oneself.

    Inevitably our personal relationship exhibited the ambivalences Nixon inspired in his entire entourage. Nixon, who treated acquaintances with a wary aloofness and even close associates as foils, provided few emotional footholds. His oblique, indirect method of government and his tendency to foment conflicts among his subordinates could be nerve-racking. Occasionally I would relieve the tension with exasperated comments. For his part, Nixon resented the publicity I attracted, starting with the secret trip to China on which he sent me in 1971. Presidents do not take kindly to assistants who compete with them for public attention--especially when some of Nixon's closest advisers were arguing that I was upstaging him deliberately. While the word deliberately was inaccurate, it is certainly true that I did not exactly resist the media's favors.

    Nevertheless, and despite some mutual misgivings, Nixon and I worked extremely well together. Face-to-face, he always treated me with conspicuous courtesy. Though we were not emotionally close, I was touched by his vulnerability and often moved by his inner torments, as in the period just prior to his resignation (when I might well have been as close to Nixon as anyone, except his immediate family, ever got).

    Nixon's single most important quality was the ability to make bold decisions. That attribute was all the more remarkable because he was not by nature daring and by no means a happy warrior. On the contrary, he made his major decisions with a joylessness verging on despair, as if he was doomed by some malign destiny to have so much anguish brought to naught despite meticulous reflection and notepads crammed with options.

    One of the paradoxes of the Nixon presidency is that the evidence on the tapes pictures him as impulsive, even reckless. But the Nixon with whom I worked on foreign policy reached his major decisions only after almost maddening deliberation. He might act intuitively, but he did not do so impulsively. Every significant foreign policy decision was preceded by weeks of solitary reflection and apparent indecision. Sequestered in his hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building with the curtains drawn, Nixon would work out on a pad of yellow sheets permutations of the options I generally had submitted to him. And since, in any major decision, the pros and cons are closely balanced and unanimity among advisers is rare, he would muse endlessly about how to overrule fractious subordinates. But once he had overcome his premonitions of catastrophe and found someone (usually Bob Haldeman or John Mitchell) to bring the bad news to the overruled associates, Nixon would almost invariably take a big leap.

    Afterward Nixon would retire to Camp David for a few days, to recover from the ordeal but also to make it that much more difficult for opponents of the decision to reach him. It was hardly the decision-making process recommended in public-administration textbooks, and it was emotionally exhausting for all the participants--including, especially, Nixon. But Presidents could do worse than to place on their desks the dictum Nixon would invoke on such occasions: "You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely."

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