Kicking Dick around (again)
Charles Foley
Los Angeles Richard Nixon, accused of making many false statements in his time, was never more in error than in his bitter 'farewell to politics' in 1962, following his failure to become governor of California, when he advised the press that he would no longer be their football. Here we are in 1976, and they are kicking Dick around as hard as ever.
In the past six months alone, two major books have appeared describing in horrendous detail his political and moral disintegration, a leading columnist has sued him for 822 million, a national newspaper has accused him of a sexual affair with a Red spy, a film spoof of unusual vulgarity has appeared depicting the Final Days, further peculiarities in the White House accounts have been uncovered, and—among much else—his wife has suffered a stroke, reportedly while reading one account of her years as First Lady.
The former president himself is little in evidence. Occasionally, he visits the Shorecliffs Golf Club at San Clemente, under the eyes of his secret service guards. His presence in the bar turns few heads. Tourists still make the pilgrimage to his place of exile, La Casa Pacifica, the Nixon estate above the ocean, but all they find is a guarded gate with a TV camera peering at them from atop a pole. The rambling Spanish-style house is not visible from the road.
Most of Mr Nixon's time is spent writing —'the toughest thing rve ever done', he tells visitors such as Mr Paul Presley, a longtime admirer who runs the 'San Clemente Inn', and who has there established the 'Little Bit of History' museum. Tens of thousands of the faithful have examined this small collection of Nixonian memorabilia since it opened nine months ago.
The memoirs now being composed, we are told by Mr Nixon's publisher Howard Kaminsky, of Warner Books, are 'strong and vivid—quite fantastic'. One hopes so, for Mr Kaminsky's sake: his firm is said to be paying 82.4 million for the rights. The ex-president is writing 400,000 words, which his editors will reduce to 200,000. It's the American Way of Literature. When Mr Kaminsky visits the sanctuary at San Clemente, his host reads aloud to him: last time, a month ago, he heard fifty pages at a sitting.
Of the competing memoirs concerning the Nixon years, the one which must have hurt most appeared in September: Leon Jaworski's The Right and the Power: The Prosecution of Watergate. After all, Woodward and Bernstein are only humble folk, like you and me: their information for all those teary, bleary scenes in The Final Days was secondor third-hand, even, at times, a little fudged, some charge, despite its horridly authentic ring. But here was the special Watergate prosecutor, a man privy to many secrets and one of Mr Nixon's peers in the legal profession, blasting away at him: 'greedy', 'sordid', 'like two cheap ward-heelers talking in the rear room of a neighbourhood dive' (of a taped conversation between the President and his chief counsel, Charles Colson).
Mr Jaworski's explanation for Nixon's failure to destroy the tapes: 'He hoped to realise a fortune from them.' Jaworski as good as says Nixon was responsible for tampering with the tapes, and he tells of being offered—by way of a bribe—a seat on the Supreme Court.
'I suppressed a smile,' Mr Jaworski records. He is giving all royalties earned by the book to charity.
Mr Nixon was clearly correct about the tapes: they are worth a fortune, which is why his heaviest legal expense to date accruing from Watergate has been his battle to win them back. More than 8200,000 has gone already in legal fees on a series of challenges to the Act of Congress whereby the Nixon presidential documents were declared 'US property'. The tapes relevant to Watergate were, of course, only a fraction of the whole. Still in a White House vault are 920 recordings and many of the forty-two million documents—enough to fill three railway freight trucks--accumulated during his five and a half years' presidency. The former president must be haunted by fears of further unpleasant revelations about his language and behaviour in office, both before and after Watergate.
One way this might occur would be through a subpoena in any of the numerous law suits now pending against Mr Nixon. The most threatening of these is perhaps columnist Jack Anderson's 822 'million damage suit accusing the ex-chief executive and nineteen subordinates of conducting a five-year campaign to destroy his credibility and thwart his First Amendment rights as a newsman.
Mr Anderson, who is well known for his exposés of Washington corruption (his column is carried by several hundred American newspapers), has made use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain official documents concerning the harassment, investigation and surveillance he alleges were carried out against him and his staff by the White House. Not only the 'plumbers' but the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and the Internal Revenue Service, according to Mr Anderson, were drummed into service in an effort to discredit or disgrace him. The documents, he says, outline a plot to drug him and wreck a TV appearance; a CIA operation called 'Mudhen' employing twenty agents around the clock to watch Anderson's staff and learn his sources; and at least a dozen White House, FBI and Defence Department investigations aimed at obstructing him professionally, sometimes by the dissemination of false and derogatory information.
'I hope it's going to be a classic case among press freedom trials,' says Anderson. 'I believe it will show that the Nixon administration went much further than most people think to silence dissent.'
The last thing the exile of San Clemente wants is to be involved in more litigation, but so enraged was he by the latest press assault on his virtue that Mr Nixon agreed to 'co-operate fully' with the Chinese woman whose name was 'romantically linked' with his. She is suing the National Enquirer for libel because of a story entitled 'Richard Nixon Dated Hong Kong Hotel Hostess Marianna Liu While the FBI Was Investigating Her as a Suspected Spy'. The ex-president has offered to give evidence cal behalf of the forty-five-year-old Mrs Liu (whom he admits knowing briefly in 1966 and 1967) to help her win a 85 million suit. The libel is contained in a suggestion that Nixon improperly helped her obtain US citizenship.
And so it goes. In his forthcoming memoirs, as a thirteen-page outline now being read (but not given) to potential publishers abroad indicates, Mr Nixon will continue to protest his innocence in the Watergate matter. He is the victim, still, of slander, of partisan politics, of a vicious and prejudiced press. But history will be his judge: and history is queer stuff. Look how his good friend Chairman Mao ('a man of immense courage,' said Nixon, on learning of his death, 'a totally dedicated, unique leader in a generation of great revolutionary leaders') was once universally excoriated. If the western world can so totally reverse itself once, it can do so again. Although that, of course, may take some time.
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