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The President had his heart set on showing us his birthplace in Yorba Linda. So we set off in an unmarked Lincoln to the unprepossessing house where Nixon was born. We were walking around the outside of the house when Nixon noticed that two cars had followed us, one containing Secret Service agents, the other the press pool.
All of this was standard procedure any time the President moved. But Nixon lost his composure as I had never seen him do before or after. He insisted that all follow-up cars leave immediately. He was President and he was ordering privacy for himself. The orders were delivered at the top of his voice, an event so unprecedented that the Secret Service broke every regulation in the book and departed, followed by the press pool. The mouths of many terrorists would have watered had they known that the President of the U.S. and his National Security Adviser, between them possessing almost all the national security secrets of the country worth having, were cruising around with only a single bodyguard who had to double as a chauffeur.
When we were alone again, Nixon became more relaxed than I have ever seen him. He and I sat in the rear of the car, Rebozo in front, as we headed toward Whittier. Nixon pointed out the gasoline station his family had sold just before oil was discovered there. He showed us the hotel where a discouraged Republican Party had canvassed volunteers to run for Congress against a presumably unbeatable Democrat. This Nixon was not the convoluted, guarded, driven politician I knew, but a gentler man, simpler in expression, warmer in demeanor.
And as he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental, how easily it could have been otherwise, a theme much more apparent to Nixon than to me. For the lesson I had been drawing from what I heard was that only a man of unusual discipline and resilience could have marched the path from candidate in a hopeless congressional race to the presidency of the U.S. Clearly, this was not the way it seemed to Nixon, who that afternoon in Whittier acted as if he belonged among his simple origins in a way he never did in any of the presidential settings.
I have always thought of this car ride as one clue to the Nixon enigma. "Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth," said Archimedes. Nixon sought to move the world but lacked a firm foothold. That, I suppose, is why he was always slightly out of focus. His very real gentleness, verging on sentimentality, risked sliding into mawkishness. And his cult of the tough guy was both exaggerated and made irrelevant because it had to be wrung from essentially resistant material. Nixon accomplished much but never was certain that he had earned it.