The Calm After the Storm, part two

DIRCK HALSTEAD FOR TIME
A NEW BEGINNING
Gerald R. Ford takes the oath of office

(3 of 3)

DIANA WALKER FOR TIME

AN OCCASION OF NATIONAL MOURNING
Presidential farewell to Nixon

Nixon in Exile
After resigning from the presidency, Nixon lived for another two decades. The first few years in exile were excruciatingly difficult for him. Only his closest friends telephoned him, and he disappeared from the public debate except in the sensational stories regarding his alleged abuses of power. During this period, he and I often spoke on the telephone, and I visited him once in San Clemente. While I was still in office, when major events occurred, I would brief him; when I was under attack--which happened more and more frequently--he would call with supporting and insightful comments.

In February 1980, Nixon moved to New York and launched a spectacular career of reinventing himself as elder statesman. I hosted a small dinner to welcome him. For the first time, he sought to engage the Establishment. He would invite key representatives of the media and industry for an evening of discussion that usually turned into a briefing; he would send thoughtful little notes to authors of articles or books that caught his attention. Patiently and tenaciously, Nixon earned himself a position as a senior commentator whom, in the end, the incumbent Presidents found it to their benefit to consult.

Nixon began to deliver public speeches. I attended a few of them and marveled at how he used the occasion to overwhelm his audience. Pushing the lectern ostentatiously out of the way, he would deliver an hour-long speech forcefully and extemporaneously. Only the few Nixon cognoscenti understood just how much the sheer effort of it had cost him. They knew that if it was an important group, he would have written out the speech beforehand or at least made a full outline and probably rehearsed parts of it before a mirror. They were participating in an extraordinary feat of memory and self-discipline, not a spontaneous effusion.

I saw Nixon for the last time in January 1994 when I was one of the speakers in Yorba Linda at the launching of the Nixon Center, a new foreign policy think tank now located in Washington. Former key Cabinet members spoke briefly. Nixon concluded the event with a graceful speech to a large and friendly audience. At the lunch following, I toasted Nixon on behalf of his former Cabinet.

A few months later, in April 1994, Richard Nixon died.

We had lived together through periods of hope and of despair, through fleeting moments of triumph and long domestic travails. Nixon could be exasperating, maddening, even treacherous. But the overriding feeling evoked by his death was one of sorrow. Paradoxical as it sounds, Nixon's endless machinations were apt to be forgiven especially by those closest to him and therefore most likely to be damaged by his wiles because we were also familiar with the sweep of his aspiration and aware that his most tormenting battles were ultimately with himself.

Assaulted on all sides and torn within himself, Nixon had held to a concept of national honor, determined to prove that the greatest free nation had no right to abdicate. With a romantic and even lofty notion of the hero-statesman, he sought to point a way to overcome his nation's oscillation between overcommitment and withdrawal. Though in the end he fell short of fulfilling his highest aspirations, Nixon's goals were worthy even when the execution was occasionally flawed.

This is why his funeral on April 27, 1994, became a national occasion of mourning attended by all surviving Presidents, including Bill Clinton. And my eulogy came from the heart:

"When I learned the final news, by then so expected yet so hard to accept, I felt a deep loss and a profound void. In the words of Shakespeare: 'He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again'...

"...So let us now say goodbye to our gallant friend. He stood on pinnacles that dissolved into precipices. He achieved greatly and suffered deeply. But he never gave up. In his solitude, he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships and give new hope to mankind--a vision where dreams and possibilities conjoined.

"Richard Nixon ended a war, and he advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth. He was devoted to his family, he loved his country, and he considered service his honor. It was a privilege to have been allowed to help him."

From Years of Renewal by Henry Kissinger; (c)Henry Kissinger. To be published by Simon and Schuster, Inc.