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In the final days, Nixon spent much time with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. On Wednesday, August 7, he said to Kissinger, "Just as there is no question but that I must go, there is no question but that you must stay." Then, Nixon adds, "At one point Kissinger blurted out, 'If they harass you after you leave office, I am going to resign as Secretary of State.' "
Soon after that, the much reported praying scene took place, and Nixon gives his recollection: "I told Kissinger that I realized that, like me, he was not one to wear his religion on his sleeve. On an impulse, I told him how every night, when I had finished working in the Lincoln sitting room, I would stop and kneel briefly and, following my mother's Quaker custom, pray silently for a few moments before going to bed. I asked him to pray with me now, and we knelt."
On Thursday, his last full day as President, Nixon gave some advice to Gerald Ford: "I said that the only man who would be absolutely indispensable to him was Henry Kissinger. If he were to leave after I resigned, I said, our foreign policy would soon be in disarray throughout the world."
As he prepared to write his resignation speech, Nixon said to his aide, General Alexander Haig: "Well, I screwed it up real good, real good, didn't I?" Nixon also told Haig that there would be no plea bargaining with the Watergate special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski: "I would not be coaxed out of office by any special deals, or cajoled into resigning in exchange for leniency. I was not leaving from fear, and I would take my chances. 'Some of the best writing in history has been done from prison,' I said. 'Think of Lenin and Gandhi.' "
The book covers other matters, of course, and according to some of the few people who have read it, often at tedious length. Memoirs starts with the sentence, "I was born in the house my father built," and devotes nearly a third of its pages to Nixon's years before he achieved the presidency in 1968. Roughly another third concentrates on foreign policy, while a final third covers the Watergate scandal. The best parts apparently deal with Nixon's historic overture to China, containing some highly personal assessments of Chairman Mao and Chou Enlai. Nixon, claims Editor Markell, who visited San Clemente half a dozen times to work with the author, "has a sharp talent for being able to recall the sense of a person." Walter Hunt, a Reader's Digest editor who has read the manuscript, agrees that Nixon brings foreign leaders "alive in a different way than others do."
Grosset & Dunlap has scheduled a first press run of 200,000 copies and claims that if all sell out, the company will make a profit of about $1 million. The book is priced at $19.95, and there are also special editions. One, at $50, includes Nixon's signature and a slipcase cover. For a select group of 2,500 Nixon loyalists, who have been solicited by mail, there is a $250 leather-bound autographed edition.