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The dark and serious comedy. The graceless, awkward, stiff, stumbling character trips about in a world occupied by natural athletes and virtuoso statesmen, though once he commanded that world. Preposterous contrasts are always good for a laugh. Alone onstage in Saddle River, the comedian raises himself to the company of heroes, soliloquizing that "it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up." Look at history's great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian does not; that is the purity of the comedy. But, whatever it may think, the audience does not laugh -- at this or at anything he says ("That's a new tape recorder") -- because under the still alive scorn, the still alive paranoia, lives the embodiment of resilience. Homo redivivus. Degraded, insistent, recovering Man.
To be knocked down and to have to get up, that's the ticket. Never mind that it was he who arranged for most of his pratfalls; the getting up still elevates the comedian to something grand. Hard to believe. After all that one knows about Nixon, you would think it is impossible to feel admiration for him, much less affection, but then you realize that you are staring across the study at a man whom the citizens of your country elected to save it and to lead the world, not once but twice, nearly three times; who right now, today, senses enough about what America wants from its presidency to go on the stump and bring down the house. The remarkable display is not merely of will but of his mind. The swirling patterns of the world, the manipulating strategies his mind delights in. The Soviets, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nicaraguans, NATO; he adores the map. He would play with it still if he could. Temperamentally, he seems more the monarchist French diplomat than the Republican American, yet he understands his country in his bones, half cynically, half naively, much like Gatsby. The only thing that Nixon did not understand is Nixon. (Talk about funny!) Perhaps his resilience is a function of his intelligence: "I'm fighting getting old." Perhaps he knows that in % the human comedy of politics, the last man onstage is the hero.
Which makes the audience part of the comedy. "Renewal," he says at lunch. "Americans are crazy about renewal." ((Rimshot.))
I mentioned that my second visit with Nixon occurred at a dinner last spring in Saddle River. The ground outside his house was soaked with rain, and no sooner had I entered the living room than I realized that I had tracked great clods of mud on the yellow-white carpet. Flustered, I called to the butler and asked him to do what he could with my destruction while I cleaned off my shoes in the bathroom. When I went back to the living room, scared to death, the carpet was spotless. Not a trace of a stain anywhere. The yellow glowed like sunshine. Several other guests were in the room now, chatting away raucously, as if nothing dirty had ever happened in their midst. The journalist simply stared at the place where the mud had been.
And then the President entered, smiling like a baby, and all rushed to welcome him into the room.