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As he had the night before, he quoted Teddy Roosevelt, whose famous bulldog courage seemed to be much on his mind in his last hours, describing how the young T.R. thought his life was over after the death of his first wife. Instead, Nixon pointed out, it was only beginning, because Roosevelt, despite his sorrow, was too much of a man to quit. "The greatness comes not when things go always good for you," Nixon said pointedly, "but the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks and some disappointments, when sadness comes." Like much else in the speech, the point of his analogy was not clear when he first made it and in the end was not really appropriate, as none other than Alice Roosevelt Longworth, T.R.'s daughter, quickly noted. Her father, she said, had been a young man when his beloved Alice died, with his work ahead of him; Nixon, 61, has his own work behind him.
He emphatically claimed that "no man or no woman [in this Administration] ever profited at the public expense or the public till." A good many questions may still be asked on this score—on that very day, John Connally, his former Secretary of the Treasury, arraigned in Washington's federal court on charges of bribery and other crimes—but in any case it was largely beside the point. It has long been obvious that the real and profound corruption of the Nixon Administration consisted of the abuse of power and the violation of the Constitution rather than mere greed.
His face perspiring, his eyes red-rimmed, Nixon scarcely looked at his audience most of the time, his eyes focused down and to the side. In one stunningly incongruous and belated insight, considering that it came from a man who was brought down by his own congenital suspicion and mistrust, Nixon told his colleagues: "Always remember others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them—and then you destroy yourself."
Nixon immediately walked with his family through the applause in the East Room, out to the south lawn and into Army One, the olive-drab helicopter that the Army provides the President, which was waiting to ferry them to Andrews Air Force Base. There Air Force One, the silver-and-blue 707 that had taken him to his triumphant tours of China and the Soviet Union, was in turn waiting for the 4-hr. 44-min. flight to California. Betty and Gerald Ford walked with the Nixons down the red carpet that had been laid from the Executive Mansion out to the lawn, and the couples exchanged kisses and handshakes at the helicopter door; Nixon touched Ford's elbow, as if in final encouragement. Though Ford was not to take the oath of office for another two hours, the famous black box, the repository for the nation's military codes—an ugly talisman that signifies the transfer of power in the nuclear age—was left behind with a military aide. It was the first time it had been away from Nixon since Jan. 20, 1969, the day he had taken charge of it from Lyndon Johnson.