Nixon in the Den (2015) Movie Script
TAPE RECORDING: 'I'll never forget that they
were all so worried about the Manson case.
'I knew exactly what we were doing on Manson.
You've got to win some things in the press.
'These guys don't understand, they
have no understanding of politics...'
He was one of America's most successful
presidents on the international stage.
Lauded as a world statesman
who thawed the Cold War.
He was re-elected in one of the
biggest landslides in American history,
capturing 49 out of 50 states.
Yet Richard Nixon was also the
only president to resign from office,
forced out of the White
House in abject disgrace.
People have got to know whether
or not their President's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
40 years on, Nixon remains
a towering, ruined figure.
Who was the real Nixon -
the visionary statesman
or the sordid crook?
I believe that's a
false distinction.
Nixon was both Jekyll AND Hyde,
a bizarre mixture of near-greatness
and incorrigible pettiness
that left an enduring
mark on history
and makes him such
an intriguing figure.
This is the story of a man who
remained a perpetual outsider,
even though he rose to
the very peak of power,
as President of
the United States.
With the help of rare, behind-the-scenes
footage, this film explores Nixon's tragedy,
how the traits of personality that propelled
him to the top also destroyed his presidency.
'After you return, they're going to
ask, what about this son of a bitch...'
In office, the ruthless, burning
ambition that had forever driven him
disintegrated into paranoia,
about enemies real and imagined.
'Mr President? I have Dr
Kissinger calling you now. Fine, fine.'
The tapes he made of his conversations would
expose him, almost naked, to posterity.
'...got any other
choice, goddammit.'
Nixon's presidency,
more than any other,
shows us how the demands of the
most powerful, most public job in the world
can strip bare the
character of a human being.
'Do the very best
that you can, that's all.
'OK, bye, Henry. Bye.'
Here is an intimate portrait
of a most un-intimate leader.
Nixon in secret, in his
"den", his hideaway office.
A president, alone
with his visions
and his demons.
On the night of 30th July, 1974,
Richard Nixon could not sleep.
Mired in scandal, his
presidency was in terminal crisis.
In the early hours of the
morning, he took out his notepad
and methodically listed the
reasons why he should resign,
for the good of his Republican
Party, and his country.
Yet Nixon kept returning to his gut
instinct, that he had never been a quitter.
And resignation would be
taken as a confession of guilt.
As dawn came up, Nixon had
been scribbling for three hours.
Finally, he turned over his sheaf
of papers and wrote on the back.
"End...
"career...as...
"a fighter."
Richard Nixon had
always been a fighter.
To understand how this man became
the most embattled president in history,
we need to go back to the
struggles of his early life -
the struggles that shaped him.
His father, Frank, a
small-town grocer in California,
was a violent bully.
His mother, Hannah, was a
devoted Quaker and homemaker.
Yet the young Richard
drew no real warmth from her.
There were few hugs or kisses.
Much of Hannah's energy was
expended on his sickly brothers,
Arthur and Harold,
who died of tuberculosis.
Richard grew up insecure,
withdrawn and emotionally bottled up.
Yet these trials of youth
spurred a fierce ambition.
At school, Nixon was an A-student
and strove for fame on the football field.
But popularity eluded him.
Dick seemed tense and solitary,
always desperate for fulfilment,
never able to enjoy his success.
Some presidents exult
in the trappings of power.
Lyndon Johnson, Nixon's predecessor, started life
as a schoolteacher in dirt-poor eastern Texas.
And he loved to flaunt
his status as president.
On one occasion, he walked across the
White House lawn to the wrong helicopter.
And an aide rushed forward.
"Mr President, Mr President!
That's your helicopter, sir, over there."
Johnson turned round,
"Son,
"all of them are
my helicopters."
Unlike Johnson, when
Nixon became President,
he didn't set up court in the grand
Oval Office of the White House.
Images like these were mainly
for show on TV and in the press.
Nixon liked to work in a far
less ostentatious hideaway,
in the old Executive Office Building, a
few hundred yards from the White House.
Here, his typical pose
was sitting in an easy chair
with his feet on an ottoman, reading official papers,
or obsessively scribbling on his yellow notepad.
The den was
Nixon's natural milieu.
Socially awkward, he shunned
cocktail parties and business breakfasts.
The den also shielded him
from debate and discussion.
Nixon liked to take
decisions in private,
after reviewing
memos and documents,
rather than through the cut and
thrust of face-to-face argument.
This was a president who
wanted to rule the world
on paper.
But a detached, loner president, who
secluded himself so much from bureaucrats
and politicians,
press and public,
was particularly reliant on a few
key intermediaries to do his will.
His right-hand men were
domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman,
and Chief of Staff,
Bob Haldeman,
known unaffectionately
as "the Prussians".
In foreign affairs, Nixon's main
interest, the man who mattered
was the National Security
Adviser, Henry Kissinger.
Up close, Kissinger caught
something of the essence of his boss.
He didn't enjoy people.
What I never understood
was why he went into politics.
Isolation had become almost a spiritual
necessity to this withdrawn, tormented man.
Nixon himself admitted, "I'm an
introvert in an extrovert profession."
Not enjoying human company is
a bit of a handicap for a politician.
But Nixon had always compensated
for his lack of personal skills
by a formidable
capacity for hard work.
Hard work had been Nixon's way out of
his impoverished small-town background.
From his modest local college
in Whittier, southern California,
top grades won him a
scholarship at Duke University,
one of the best law
schools in the country.
This should have been a huge boost to his
self-confidence, but Nixon never let up.
His grim determination earned
him the nickname "Gloomy Gus".
One fellow student recalled...
"A very studious individual,
almost fearfully so.
"I can see him in the law library hunched
over a book, seldom even looking up.
"He never smiled.
"Even on Saturday nights
he was in the library, studying."
But there was a loftier side to
Nixon's workaholic personality.
He devoured history books
and was deeply moved
by the lives of world leaders,
such as Woodrow Wilson
and Winston Churchill.
One of his cherished possessions
was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln,
a present on his 13th
birthday from his grandma,
under which she had inscribed
lines from the poet Longfellow.
"Lives of great men all remind
us We can make our lives sublime.
"And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."
Nixon was determined to leave
HIS footprints on the sands of time.
He saw himself as almost
a philosopher president,
envisioning the grand strategy
while his minions sorted out the details.
And in 1969, he came to office
with a genuinely grand aim -
to thaw the Cold War
and reshape world politics.
Since the Second World War, the superpower
stand-off between democratic West and communist East
created the constant
threat of all-out nuclear war.
Tensions peaked in 1962,
in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
which left Americans with
a new sense of vulnerability
and the whole world teetering
on the brink of Armageddon.
Nixon developed a plan
to end the global stand-off.
To do this required detente - a
relaxation of tension with Russia.
But, more than that,
Nixon believed it essential
to forge a new relationship
with communist China.
Since the communist takeover in 1949, the United
States had refused to recognise "Red" China.
In the 1960s, the xenophobic
frenzy of Mao's Cultural Revolution
gave further reason
to shun the Asian giant.
But although a right-wing Republican,
Nixon swam against the tide.
He believed that an opening
to China was now vital.
"We simply cannot afford to leave China
forever outside the family of nations,
"there to nurture its fantasies, cherish
its hates and threaten its neighbours."
Nixon's goal was to pull China
back into the international community,
because, he argued, "The world
cannot be safe until China changes."
The boldness of Nixon's scheme
shouldn't be underestimated.
China was a total pariah.
The equivalent today would be a Western
leader calling for direct talks with Al-Qaeda.
Nixon would act on this idea during his very
first 24 hours in the White House, scribbling...
"Chinese Communists.
"Short range, no change.
"Long range, we do not want
800 million living in angry isolation.
"We want contact."
Here was the
visionary side of Nixon,
an American outsider reaching
out to the world's outsiders.
And what makes his
initiative even more striking
is that, so far, Nixon had forged his whole
political identity as a vehement anti-communist.
New evidence of communist activities
in government circles is promised
by the House Committee
On Un-American activities.
Microfilm reportedly found in
a pumpkin on a Maryland farm
is examined by Investigator
Stripling and Congressman Nixon.
Capitalising, as a young politician,
on the Cold War panic of the 1940s,
he relentlessly depicted his
opponents as crypto-communists.
Running for the Senate in
1950, he smeared his rival,
Helen Gahagan Douglas, as
"pink, right down to her underwear".
When in a political fight, Nixon
showed little sense of restraint.
He simply went for the jugular.
Nixon had learnt the value of
dirty tactics. He won by a landslide.
But Douglas's
parting barb stuck.
She coined the
nickname "Tricky Dicky".
Seething resentment drove
Nixon's political ruthlessness.
His impoverished youth had left him with a
deep grudge against America's privileged elite.
"What starts the process, really, are laughs
and slights and snubs when you are a kid.
"But if you are reasonably intelligent, and if
your anger is deep enough, and strong enough,
"you learn that you can change those attitudes
by excellence, personal gut performance,
"while those who have everything
are sitting on their fat butts."
Nixon's loathing was reserved particularly
for the East Coast establishment.
NIXON: The diffusion within the United States
of subversive and un-American propaganda...
In fact, he made his political
name in the hearings that fingered
top State Department diplomat,
Alger Hiss, as a probable Soviet agent.
Nixon's hatred of elite
figures came from the gut.
Hiss told Nixon, grandly,
"I graduated from Harvard.
"I heard your school was...
"Whittier?"
Snubs like that made
Nixon determined to nail Hiss.
Nixon was the outsider, determined
to manoeuvre his way to the top.
He deliberately portrayed himself
as the champion of Middle America.
And his mix of commie-bashing and populist
politics catapulted him into the vice-presidency,
where he made a name
for himself in foreign policy.
..all over the Soviet
Union. That's a fair bargain.
LAUGHTER
After eight years playing
understudy to Eisenhower,
he ran for the presidency
himself in 1960.
His opponent was a daddy's boy
from Harvard, John F Kennedy,
whose rich, womanising father was determined
to install his son in the White House.
Nixon's relentless hard work on
the campaign trail counted for little
in the beauty contest of the
first real television election,
where each forced smile and
awkward pose was played out on screen.
Let's look at the record.
Is the United States
standing still...?
Although Nixon
scored on the issues,
the contrast between
Kennedy's urbane good looks
and his tense, sweaty, face
was a killer in their first debate.
Nixon lost the election.
The Eastern establishment had brought
his irresistible rise to a shuddering halt.
He then stood for the Governorship of California,
was defeated again and conceded with a bitter speech
aimed at the liberal media that
he believed had shafted him.
As I leave you, I
want you to know,
just think how much
you're going to be missing.
You don't have Nixon
to kick around any more.
Because, gentlemen, this
is my last press conference.
Nothing could have
been further from the truth.
Nixon was simply regrouping for a
new assault on the inner circle of power.
The underdog was still
determined to come out on top.
The comeback was a typical mix of underhand
manoeuvres, ruthlessness and hard work.
At home, he won vital political allies campaigning
for Republican candidates for Congress.
Abroad, trips to Europe and Asia
helped polish his
credentials in foreign affairs.
And as America became polarised
between right and left in the "angry '60s",
Nixon positioned himself as
spokesman for what he called
the "silent majority of
law-abiding Americans".
So he was ideally placed
to exploit the country's
deepening crisis in Vietnam.
Launched by President Kennedy, and fired up into
a costly full-scale conflict by Lyndon Johnson,
the Vietnam War had
gone disastrously wrong.
Americans were dying
at the rate of 200 a week.
Meanwhile, at home, Johnson's
ruling Democratic Party was imploding.
Its Chicago convention degenerated
into a week of city-wide rioting.
With his political
opponents on their knees,
Nixon seized his opportunity.
When the strongest nation in the world can be
tied down for four years in war in Vietnam,
without the end in sight,
when a nation with the greatest tradition of rule
of law is torn apart by unprecedented lawlessness,
it's time for new leadership in
the United States of America.
APPLAUSE
'Wherever in the world he goes,
'doors open. People listen.
'Things happen.
'Who is this man?
'Of course - Richard Nixon.'
Running for the Presidency
once again in 1968,
Nixon projected a new image -
a dignified statesman,
the unifier of his country.
'Who's the one man we need in
these troubled, dangerous times?
'Nixon's the one.'
No doubt this was the kind of
leader that Nixon aspired to be.
But, behind the scenes, the
reality was rather different.
Ever the anxious
political outsider,
Nixon instructed his
staff to treat the campaign
as what he called "all-out war".
In this war, no
blow was too low.
Publicly, Nixon talked
peace in Vietnam.
But behind the scenes, he
arm-twisted South Vietnam
to withdraw from President
Johnson's peace talks.
To win the election,
he was prepared to undermine
his opponents' bid to end the war.
This time, his
Machiavellian tactics worked.
Nixon won.
The outsider became
the ultimate insider.
Now Nixon had the chance to
craft world peace on his own terms,
leaving indelible footprints
on the sands of time.
The greatest honour history can
bestow is the title of peacemaker.
This honour now beckons America.
The chance to help
lead the world at last
out of the valley of turmoil...
As President, Nixon's grand strategy was a
new set of relations with Russia and China.
But first, he had
to resolve Vietnam.
He was determined not to let HIS presidency,
like Johnson's, be crippled by the war.
So Nixon and his National Security Adviser,
Henry Kissinger, plotted America's exit strategy.
The President's
double act with Kissinger
became one of the most extraordinary
political relationships of the 20th century.
It would fuel Nixon's
rise, but also his fall.
On the surface, Nixon and
Kissinger seemed an unlikely pair.
The reclusive, workaholic
son of a California grocer,
and the sparkling
Jewish intellectual,
a childhood refugee
from Hitler's Europe.
Kissinger was an effervescent
and gossipy socialite,
the prize exhibit at
Washington dinner parties.
He cultivated his
image as a ladies' man,
ostentatiously dating movie stars
such as Liv Ullman and Jill St John.
But, as with Nixon, things were
not always what they seemed.
One girlfriend commented wryly,
"I don't think Henry was interested
in sex. He didn't have time for it.
"Power, for him, may
have been the aphrodisiac,
"but it was also the climax."
Close observers noted that super-smooth
Kissinger's nails were bitten down to the quick.
He and Nixon were, in
fact, essentially similar.
Ambitious loners, obsessed about
image and their place in history.
And each was by
nature deeply suspicious.
I believe very strongly that the
position of a White House assistant
is inconsistent with making public
statements on substantive issues.
Natural conspirators, Nixon
and Kissinger were sure that
secrecy was the key to negotiating
an end to the Vietnam War.
To avoid the leaks
and press comment
that could smother their diplomacy
before it had time to flourish.
So Kissinger created a confidential
back channel to the Kremlin
and engineered secret
talks with the Vietnamese.
While Kissinger
talked, Nixon acted
with the same ruthlessness
that had won him the presidency.
Now he could do so with the
full might of America's power.
He aimed to bludgeon the
communists to the negotiating table,
by round-the-clock bombing of
Vietcong sanctuaries in Cambodia.
He wanted to shake Hanoi, let them
know he didn't play by normal rules.
He told his chief of staff...
"I call it the
madman theory, Bob.
"I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached
the point where I might do anything to stop the war.
"We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's
sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism.
"'We can't restrain him when he's angry,
and he has his hand on the nuclear button.'
"And Ho Chi Minh will be in Paris
in two days, begging for peace."
But the quick fix didn't work.
Madman tactics failed to end
the war, as Nixon had hoped.
In fact, his saturation bombing
provoked a backlash at home,
fuelling mounting public
protest and press criticism.
But Nixon, convinced that he was
right, became ever more entrenched.
He liked to claim that he wasn't
bothered about his media image,
unlike his narcissistic
predecessor, Lyndon Johnson,
who had TVs in almost
every room of the White House.
But in fact, Nixon insisted
on a daily news summary,
often running to 50 pages,
on which he would scribble
comments frenziedly.
Over the years, he'd accumulated a list of
friendly editors, reporters and commentators.
He'd also built up
an "enemies" list.
Even minor criticism was
enough to ensure inclusion.
He would scrawl
angrily to his aides,
"Note. Newsweek
is loaded against us.
"Cut it out like we
cut The Times."
Nixon saw enemies on
every side, encircling him.
But I think he almost
needed to be hated.
That way he knew he was right.
There was a kind of self-righteous
masochism here, as well as paranoia.
As the Vietnam War dragged on,
Nixon's paranoia about his
enemies at home intensified.
Not just the student left, but the liberal
Democratic establishment and mainstream press.
Raging about newspaper
exposes of government policy,
he even created a breaking and entering team
to catch the perpetrators and plug the leaks.
They were known as the Plumbers.
Nixon's den, which he'd
conceived of as a command post,
was beginning to
feel like a bunker.
The President was
exhausted and drinking heavily.
In May 1970, four
students were shot dead
on the campus of Kent State
University in Ohio, protesting for peace.
The following weekend, thousands of anti-war
demonstrators converged on Washington.
Nixon felt besieged.
Unable to sleep, he put on a record
of Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto.
Yet, over the music,
all he could hear
were the protesters
gathering on the Mall.
Nixon suddenly flipped.
Desperate to break out of the
den, he summoned his driver.
They drove down to the Lincoln
Memorial where, in the early light,
he confronted some
of the protesters.
They were utterly astonished
to encounter the President
and to hear rambling recollections
about his own idealism at their age.
He talked of Neville Chamberlain coming back
from Munich proclaiming "peace for our time".
"I said I thought at that time that
Chamberlain was the greatest man alive,
"and when I read Churchill's all-out criticism
of Chamberlain, I thought Churchill was a madman.
"In retrospect, I now realise
Chamberlain was a good man,
"but that Churchill
was a wiser man."
May 1970 was
Nixon at his worst -
lurching drunkenly between
defiance and self-pity.
A foretaste of things to come.
But this man was a fighter.
Out of the wilderness, like
Churchill, he crafted a triumph,
finally accomplishing
his grand design.
Military might alone was clearly
not going to end the war in Vietnam.
So Nixon resorted to
cold, calculating diplomacy.
Better relations with Russia and
China were his long-term goal.
But now he also seized on this as a
way to put the screws on North Vietnam,
by persuading Moscow and Beijing
to cut off weapons and supplies.
His tactic was to make us of the growing rift
between North Vietnam's two communist patrons.
The Soviets were obsessed by China's growing
military strength and soaring population,
already triple that of Russia's.
Russian fears about
the Chinese threat
were captured in
one Moscow joke,
which imagined a phone conversation between
Nixon and the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.
I hear you have new super-computer
with massive predictive power?
That's right. Yes, indeed.
So, Mr President, please
ask your super-computer
to predict names of Soviet
Politburo in year 2000.
A long silence ensues.
Finally Brezhnev
crows down the phone...
So, Mr President,
your super-computer
not so super after all.
Oh, no, Mr General Secretary,
the, uh, names came up all right.
It's just that...
I can't read Chinese.
How best to exploit the split
between the two communist giants
appealed to the grand
strategist in Nixon.
If Washington thawed relations
with Beijing, he reckoned,
that would alarm Moscow
and make it cosy up to America.
And the price he would exact for
these new, improved relationships
would be an end to both Moscow
and Beijing's support for North Vietnam.
Nixon saw all this as a
kind of global chess game,
which, move by move, would get
him the peace settlement he wanted,
and needed, to gain
re-election in 1972.
He told Kissinger...
"We're doing the China thing to screw
the Russians and help us in Vietnam.
"And maybe down the road to
have some relations with China."
Nixon saw Kissinger as his most powerful piece,
his queen if you like, in this game of chess.
After covert
contacts via Pakistan,
in July 1971, Kissinger flew
in secrecy over the Himalayas
and into the Forbidden
City of Beijing.
Nixon could only
wait impatiently,
but on 11th July, he received
the message he wanted.
Kissinger had secured
China's agreement in principle
that the President
would visit Beijing.
For Nixon, this would put pressure on North Vietnam
and advance his great goal of global detente.
Nixon was beside
himself with delight.
He scribbled a message of
congratulation to Kissinger.
"When you return, I
plan to give you a day off
"in compensation for your
superb service to the nation."
Reading this nowadays,
you'd think it was a joke.
But Nixon didn't do irony...
just hard work.
Premier Chou En-Lai, on behalf of the
government of the People's Republic of China,
has extended an invitation to
President Nixon to visit China
at an appropriate
date before May 1972.
President Nixon has accepted
the invitation with pleasure.
The opening to China was a
stunning public relations coup,
which took the world by storm.
The problem for Nixon was that
Kissinger gained much of the credit,
turning him almost overnight
into a international celebrity,
depicted as the shrewd helmsman who was piloting
Nixon on a dramatic voyage into the unknown.
Nixon needed Kissinger
as the backroom deal-maker.
But he hated letting his
adviser into the limelight.
Nixon's pioneering visit to China
eventually took place in February 1972,
carefully scheduled for
prime-time TV back home.
Just to be sure that
Kissinger did not muscle in
on the photo-opportunity
of Nixon's grand arrival,
burly secret-service aides blocked the aisle of
Air Force One as the President, and his wife,
walked down the
steps and into history.
The visit was a triumph
of public relations
and it could only have been
achieved by a notorious right winger
who couldn't be criticised
for being soft on communism.
Just as Nixon had hoped, his China visit
loosened the Cold War deadlock with Moscow.
The Soviets' great fear was
being isolated if their old enemy,
America, and their new foe,
China, started becoming friendly.
So Moscow hurriedly invited
Kissinger to discussions in the Kremlin.
Nixon wanted concessions on Vietnam
before he would meet with Brezhnev.
But Kissinger regarded a summit
between the two leaders as the priority
and forged ahead on his own.
Back in the den, Nixon fumed impotently that
Henry was simply "breastfeeding" the Soviets.
Tell him no discussions of the summit before
they settle Vietnam, and that is an order!
Kissinger got equally angry.
If the President does not trust me,
there is not much that can be done.
The struggle for the limelight
was becoming a struggle for power.
On Kissinger's return,
according to the diary of Nixon's
Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman...
"The President was all primed to really whack
Henry, but backed off when he actually got there."
This was typical Nixon.
Although a tough
talker in private,
he loathed face-to-face
confrontation.
But the appeasement was costly.
Kissinger had set up a summit in
Moscow, essentially on his terms.
The messenger was
becoming the master.
In May 1972, Nixon
touched down in Moscow.
He had prepared for the summit by watching
the James Bond classic, From Russia With Love.
And he was welcomed, if not
with love, at least with champagne.
Unlike Beijing, there was
substance here as well as symbolism.
He signed a series of agreements with
the Soviets, above all, on arms control.
So, in three dramatic
months in 1972,
Nixon had overturned a
quarter-century of Cold War history,
becoming the first US president to
visit the two capitals of communism.
Just 10 years after the Cuban Missile
Crisis, when nuclear war seemed inevitable,
Nixon's policy of detente,
relaxing superpower tension,
offered hope for an
end to the Vietnam War
and the prospect of a
new, more peaceful world.
The global chess game paid off.
In 1972, Nixon won
a landslide victory,
being re-elected with
60% of the popular vote.
But his obsessive suspicion
was now corroding his judgement.
More and more, the President's
wary eye turned on his right-hand man.
Nixon was still angry that Kissinger was getting
the credit for the diplomatic triumphs of 1972.
What's more, his adviser, it seemed,
was openly trumpeting his success.
"I've always acted alone.
"Americans admire
that enormously.
"Americans admire the cowboy entering
a village or city all alone on his horse.
"This romantic, surprising character suits me,
because being alone has always been part of my style.
"A Wild West tale, if you like."
The tubby, bespectacled Kissinger
as a Lone Ranger-style Wild West hero
sounded preposterous to most
people. But Nixon took it very seriously.
He liked to think of himself as the Lone
Ranger figure, with Kissinger playing Tonto.
Two quick puffs.
That's your sign, Tonto.
I don't stand on protocol, if
you just call me Excellency...
LAUGHTER
Clearly his National Security Adviser
saw their roles as being reversed.
'Mr President, I have Dr
Kissinger calling you now.
'Fine. Thank you.
'Hi, Henry! Mr President. Are
you in New York or Washington?
'No, I'm here. Oh, fine, fine.'
Nixon, who resented sharing any of the glory,
had even started taping his meetings and calls.
He wanted material for his memoirs
so as to shape the verdict of history,
but he was also determined to
protect himself against Kissinger,
who often leaked distorted accounts
of their conversations to the press.
In due course, the tapes would
prove Nixon's fatal mistake.
Part of what irked Nixon was that
Kissinger's jet-setting diplomacy
had still not delivered
peace in Vietnam.
In December 1972,
with the election won,
Nixon reverted to hardball once
again to finally clinch the deal.
He unleashed 12 days
of savage bombing,
forcing the North Vietnamese into some final
concessions, and an agreement was signed.
North Vietnam acknowledged
South Vietnam's right to exist...
at least for the moment.
Nixon had extricated America from
the mess and got the boys home.
The President, it seemed,
was starting his second
term with a clean slate
and could look ahead to expanding his China
strategy and building on superpower detente.
There was just one
minor difficulty for Nixon...
the trial in a Washington court
of some rather unusual burglars.
The Washington Post didn't usually
put local burglaries on its front page,
but this one, at the Watergate apartment
complex on the Potomac River in June 1972,
was not run-of-the-mill.
Five men, one of whom said he is a former
employee of the Central Intelligence Agency,
were arrested at
2.30am yesterday
in what authorities described as
an elaborate plot to bug the offices
of the Democratic
National Committee here.
The White House denied all knowledge
and insisted that the break-in was
the work of a few
out-of-control political mavericks.
Nixon himself claimed...
What really hurts in matters
of this sort is not the fact
that they occur, because overzealous people
in campaigns do things that are wrong.
What really hurts is if
you try to cover it up.
Wise words.
If only Nixon had heeded them.
Watergate wasn't a marginal event
on the fringe of the Nixon presidency.
It was a product of the
hardball, paranoid politics
that had got Tricky Dicky to the
top but would now bring him down.
Nixon probably didn't know
about Watergate in advance,
but he had sanctioned break-ins
and wire-taps of opponents
through his notorious Plumbers.
He had fostered the climate of
illegality that led to Watergate.
Nixon's siege mentality assumed
that they were all out to get him -
the Democrats, the press,
the liberal establishment.
Earlier in his presidency,
he'd made a comment to
Kissinger and some aides
that was
frighteningly revealing.
"One day, we will get them.
"We'll get them on the
ground, where we want them.
"And we'll stick our heels in,
step on them hard and twist, right?"
"Henry knows what I mean.
"Get them on the
floor and step on them,
"crush them, show no mercy."
Following the Watergate arrests, Nixon
was right at the centre of a cover-up,
which he delegated to the White
House law officer, John Dean.
In June 1972, on the pretext of national
security, Nixon told aides to order the FBI...
But after the election, in 1973,
Congress appointed a special Senate
committee to inquire into Watergate.
The burglars who broke into the headquarters of
the Democratic National Committee at Watergate
were in effect breaking into the home
of every citizen of the United States.
The burglars and their immediate
bosses were prosecuted.
The press followed
up every lead,
delighted to get
back at the President.
The hatred was mutual.
The pressure was
really getting to Nixon.
His hands were shaking,
his breath smelt of liquor.
The den was becoming a bunker.
It was like May
1970 all over again.
But this time, there
was no way back.
His presidency and his
personality began to fall apart.
Nixon told Haldeman...
"You know, Bob, there's something I've
never told anybody before, not even you.
"Every night since
I've been President,
"I've knelt down on my knees beside my bed and
prayed to God for guidance and help in this job.
"Last night, I knelt down and this time I
prayed that I wouldn't wake up in the morning.
"I just couldn't face going on."
Nixon was prone to
melodrama and self-pity.
But even so, these words
probably came from the heart.
The most powerful
man in the world,
custodian of the nuclear codes
that could exterminate millions,
could not stop the wheels
of justice and democracy
gradually grinding him down.
Yet the scandal dragged on for
another 15 months because Nixon,
a fighter all his life,
would not give up.
It is my constitutional
responsibility
to defend the integrity of this
great office against false charges.
Ironically, though, he
sealed his own fate,
because this most
secretive of presidents
had documented his own
crimes through his tapes.
Throughout 1973, Nixon
kept battling on two fronts.
Still aching to leave his own
footprints on the sands of time,
he invited Brezhnev
to Washington,
hoping to keep up the momentum of
his great diplomatic project, detente.
But he was also fending off efforts by
the Senate enquiry to subpoena his tapes.
Watergate was now not only
sapping his energy and health,
but also undermining
his political credibility.
After re-election, he had
hoped to dispense with Kissinger,
jealous of his cult status.
Instead, the discredited president found he
needed his respected National Security Adviser
as never before, even appointing
him Secretary of State as well.
From now on, it was
almost a co-presidency.
No more so than
in late October 1973
at the height of the
Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War.
The crisis escalated into a major
face-off between the superpowers.
US forces were put on Def Con III - the highest
level of defence readiness short of imminent attack.
Yet the decision was taken not
by the President, but by Kissinger.
Nixon was asleep, and Kissinger
took the decision not to wake him.
Chief of Staff Al Haig asked if
Kissinger had talked to the president.
"No, I haven't,"
Kissinger replied.
"He'd just start
charging around.
"I don't think we should
bother the President."
Whether Nixon was
exhausted or drunk is unclear.
To save himself, the
President had had to sacrifice
most of the key aides who had
been at his side since the beginning.
Haldeman and Ehrlichman
had been forced out.
And he was losing all authority, constantly
harried in press conferences about the tapes,
the cover-up, and even
his personal finances.
People have got to know whether
or not their President's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
Now the Lone Ranger
really was alone.
Forced to release the
self-incriminatory tapes
and facing imminent impeachment,
Nixon finally resigned
in August 1974.
He told staff in a tearful,
rambling farewell...
Never be petty...
..always remember,
others may hate you,
but those who hate you don't
win unless you hate them...
..and then you destroy yourself.
The ultimate irony was that hate had become
the adrenalin of the Nixon Presidency.
The ambition and ruthlessness that had driven Nixon
to the top had spiralled into a consuming rage
and mistrust of others that
had indeed destroyed him.
The presidency of the United
States is an unforgiving role.
Nixon wasn't the first president, nor will he be the
last, to end his tenure compromised and discredited.
The relentless pressures of office
drill down to the vulnerable heart
of the incumbent, and expose it
to the media's remorseless gaze.
Since Nixon, the political
strip show has continued.
Carter - honourable,
but hapless.
Reagan - amiable, but out of it.
Clinton - a presidency unzipped.
Bush Junior - a
presidency in terror.
But Nixon stands as
an exceptional case.
Watergate wasn't a
strange aberration.
It was symptomatic of the back
channel, backstabbing methods
by which Nixon's whole
presidency operated.
Methods that generated his international
triumphs as much as his domestic scandals.
Here was a presidency
of the paranoid.
And, ultimately, it was this very paranoia that sank
him, in the form of his obsessively recorded tapes.
'Henry, I just wanted
to be sure that...
'with regard to that Laos and
Cambodia strike, that both...'
FADES OUCongenitally unable
to relax with success,
Nixon had never allowed
himself to enjoy his presidency.
As Elliott Richardson, one of his Cabinet,
told Nixon early in the second term...
"Mr President, I believe
your real problem is
"that you have somehow been
unable to realise that you have won.
"Not only won, but been
re-elected by a tremendous margin.
"You are the President of all
the people of the United States.
"There is no 'they' out there,
nobody trying to destroy you."
Richardson was part of that East Coast
elite from which Nixon always felt excluded.
He was also a D-Day veteran,
tested in the furnace of battle,
and evidently at
ease with himself.
Nixon was never satisfied
with his achievements.
He'd never come
to terms with himself,
with his unstable mixture of ability
and ambition, shyness and suspicion.
His problem lay
deep, deep within.
As the poet John Milton
wrote, in Paradise Lost...
"The mind is its own place, and
in itself can make a heaven of hell,
"a hell of heaven."
Nixon made his own
heaven and his own hell.
Just before lifting off
from the White House lawn,
Richard Nixon turned to give a
farewell wave, arms outstretched
in that fake-spontaneous
public style of his.
It looked like a
final act of bravado.
Nixon the defiant fighter, giving
a last, deluded V for victory.
But behind this humiliating exit,
one senses something darker.
The mantle of martyrdom.
In Nixon's self-pitying,
self-righteous mind,
was this his moment
of crucifixion?
were all so worried about the Manson case.
'I knew exactly what we were doing on Manson.
You've got to win some things in the press.
'These guys don't understand, they
have no understanding of politics...'
He was one of America's most successful
presidents on the international stage.
Lauded as a world statesman
who thawed the Cold War.
He was re-elected in one of the
biggest landslides in American history,
capturing 49 out of 50 states.
Yet Richard Nixon was also the
only president to resign from office,
forced out of the White
House in abject disgrace.
People have got to know whether
or not their President's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
40 years on, Nixon remains
a towering, ruined figure.
Who was the real Nixon -
the visionary statesman
or the sordid crook?
I believe that's a
false distinction.
Nixon was both Jekyll AND Hyde,
a bizarre mixture of near-greatness
and incorrigible pettiness
that left an enduring
mark on history
and makes him such
an intriguing figure.
This is the story of a man who
remained a perpetual outsider,
even though he rose to
the very peak of power,
as President of
the United States.
With the help of rare, behind-the-scenes
footage, this film explores Nixon's tragedy,
how the traits of personality that propelled
him to the top also destroyed his presidency.
'After you return, they're going to
ask, what about this son of a bitch...'
In office, the ruthless, burning
ambition that had forever driven him
disintegrated into paranoia,
about enemies real and imagined.
'Mr President? I have Dr
Kissinger calling you now. Fine, fine.'
The tapes he made of his conversations would
expose him, almost naked, to posterity.
'...got any other
choice, goddammit.'
Nixon's presidency,
more than any other,
shows us how the demands of the
most powerful, most public job in the world
can strip bare the
character of a human being.
'Do the very best
that you can, that's all.
'OK, bye, Henry. Bye.'
Here is an intimate portrait
of a most un-intimate leader.
Nixon in secret, in his
"den", his hideaway office.
A president, alone
with his visions
and his demons.
On the night of 30th July, 1974,
Richard Nixon could not sleep.
Mired in scandal, his
presidency was in terminal crisis.
In the early hours of the
morning, he took out his notepad
and methodically listed the
reasons why he should resign,
for the good of his Republican
Party, and his country.
Yet Nixon kept returning to his gut
instinct, that he had never been a quitter.
And resignation would be
taken as a confession of guilt.
As dawn came up, Nixon had
been scribbling for three hours.
Finally, he turned over his sheaf
of papers and wrote on the back.
"End...
"career...as...
"a fighter."
Richard Nixon had
always been a fighter.
To understand how this man became
the most embattled president in history,
we need to go back to the
struggles of his early life -
the struggles that shaped him.
His father, Frank, a
small-town grocer in California,
was a violent bully.
His mother, Hannah, was a
devoted Quaker and homemaker.
Yet the young Richard
drew no real warmth from her.
There were few hugs or kisses.
Much of Hannah's energy was
expended on his sickly brothers,
Arthur and Harold,
who died of tuberculosis.
Richard grew up insecure,
withdrawn and emotionally bottled up.
Yet these trials of youth
spurred a fierce ambition.
At school, Nixon was an A-student
and strove for fame on the football field.
But popularity eluded him.
Dick seemed tense and solitary,
always desperate for fulfilment,
never able to enjoy his success.
Some presidents exult
in the trappings of power.
Lyndon Johnson, Nixon's predecessor, started life
as a schoolteacher in dirt-poor eastern Texas.
And he loved to flaunt
his status as president.
On one occasion, he walked across the
White House lawn to the wrong helicopter.
And an aide rushed forward.
"Mr President, Mr President!
That's your helicopter, sir, over there."
Johnson turned round,
"Son,
"all of them are
my helicopters."
Unlike Johnson, when
Nixon became President,
he didn't set up court in the grand
Oval Office of the White House.
Images like these were mainly
for show on TV and in the press.
Nixon liked to work in a far
less ostentatious hideaway,
in the old Executive Office Building, a
few hundred yards from the White House.
Here, his typical pose
was sitting in an easy chair
with his feet on an ottoman, reading official papers,
or obsessively scribbling on his yellow notepad.
The den was
Nixon's natural milieu.
Socially awkward, he shunned
cocktail parties and business breakfasts.
The den also shielded him
from debate and discussion.
Nixon liked to take
decisions in private,
after reviewing
memos and documents,
rather than through the cut and
thrust of face-to-face argument.
This was a president who
wanted to rule the world
on paper.
But a detached, loner president, who
secluded himself so much from bureaucrats
and politicians,
press and public,
was particularly reliant on a few
key intermediaries to do his will.
His right-hand men were
domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman,
and Chief of Staff,
Bob Haldeman,
known unaffectionately
as "the Prussians".
In foreign affairs, Nixon's main
interest, the man who mattered
was the National Security
Adviser, Henry Kissinger.
Up close, Kissinger caught
something of the essence of his boss.
He didn't enjoy people.
What I never understood
was why he went into politics.
Isolation had become almost a spiritual
necessity to this withdrawn, tormented man.
Nixon himself admitted, "I'm an
introvert in an extrovert profession."
Not enjoying human company is
a bit of a handicap for a politician.
But Nixon had always compensated
for his lack of personal skills
by a formidable
capacity for hard work.
Hard work had been Nixon's way out of
his impoverished small-town background.
From his modest local college
in Whittier, southern California,
top grades won him a
scholarship at Duke University,
one of the best law
schools in the country.
This should have been a huge boost to his
self-confidence, but Nixon never let up.
His grim determination earned
him the nickname "Gloomy Gus".
One fellow student recalled...
"A very studious individual,
almost fearfully so.
"I can see him in the law library hunched
over a book, seldom even looking up.
"He never smiled.
"Even on Saturday nights
he was in the library, studying."
But there was a loftier side to
Nixon's workaholic personality.
He devoured history books
and was deeply moved
by the lives of world leaders,
such as Woodrow Wilson
and Winston Churchill.
One of his cherished possessions
was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln,
a present on his 13th
birthday from his grandma,
under which she had inscribed
lines from the poet Longfellow.
"Lives of great men all remind
us We can make our lives sublime.
"And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."
Nixon was determined to leave
HIS footprints on the sands of time.
He saw himself as almost
a philosopher president,
envisioning the grand strategy
while his minions sorted out the details.
And in 1969, he came to office
with a genuinely grand aim -
to thaw the Cold War
and reshape world politics.
Since the Second World War, the superpower
stand-off between democratic West and communist East
created the constant
threat of all-out nuclear war.
Tensions peaked in 1962,
in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
which left Americans with
a new sense of vulnerability
and the whole world teetering
on the brink of Armageddon.
Nixon developed a plan
to end the global stand-off.
To do this required detente - a
relaxation of tension with Russia.
But, more than that,
Nixon believed it essential
to forge a new relationship
with communist China.
Since the communist takeover in 1949, the United
States had refused to recognise "Red" China.
In the 1960s, the xenophobic
frenzy of Mao's Cultural Revolution
gave further reason
to shun the Asian giant.
But although a right-wing Republican,
Nixon swam against the tide.
He believed that an opening
to China was now vital.
"We simply cannot afford to leave China
forever outside the family of nations,
"there to nurture its fantasies, cherish
its hates and threaten its neighbours."
Nixon's goal was to pull China
back into the international community,
because, he argued, "The world
cannot be safe until China changes."
The boldness of Nixon's scheme
shouldn't be underestimated.
China was a total pariah.
The equivalent today would be a Western
leader calling for direct talks with Al-Qaeda.
Nixon would act on this idea during his very
first 24 hours in the White House, scribbling...
"Chinese Communists.
"Short range, no change.
"Long range, we do not want
800 million living in angry isolation.
"We want contact."
Here was the
visionary side of Nixon,
an American outsider reaching
out to the world's outsiders.
And what makes his
initiative even more striking
is that, so far, Nixon had forged his whole
political identity as a vehement anti-communist.
New evidence of communist activities
in government circles is promised
by the House Committee
On Un-American activities.
Microfilm reportedly found in
a pumpkin on a Maryland farm
is examined by Investigator
Stripling and Congressman Nixon.
Capitalising, as a young politician,
on the Cold War panic of the 1940s,
he relentlessly depicted his
opponents as crypto-communists.
Running for the Senate in
1950, he smeared his rival,
Helen Gahagan Douglas, as
"pink, right down to her underwear".
When in a political fight, Nixon
showed little sense of restraint.
He simply went for the jugular.
Nixon had learnt the value of
dirty tactics. He won by a landslide.
But Douglas's
parting barb stuck.
She coined the
nickname "Tricky Dicky".
Seething resentment drove
Nixon's political ruthlessness.
His impoverished youth had left him with a
deep grudge against America's privileged elite.
"What starts the process, really, are laughs
and slights and snubs when you are a kid.
"But if you are reasonably intelligent, and if
your anger is deep enough, and strong enough,
"you learn that you can change those attitudes
by excellence, personal gut performance,
"while those who have everything
are sitting on their fat butts."
Nixon's loathing was reserved particularly
for the East Coast establishment.
NIXON: The diffusion within the United States
of subversive and un-American propaganda...
In fact, he made his political
name in the hearings that fingered
top State Department diplomat,
Alger Hiss, as a probable Soviet agent.
Nixon's hatred of elite
figures came from the gut.
Hiss told Nixon, grandly,
"I graduated from Harvard.
"I heard your school was...
"Whittier?"
Snubs like that made
Nixon determined to nail Hiss.
Nixon was the outsider, determined
to manoeuvre his way to the top.
He deliberately portrayed himself
as the champion of Middle America.
And his mix of commie-bashing and populist
politics catapulted him into the vice-presidency,
where he made a name
for himself in foreign policy.
..all over the Soviet
Union. That's a fair bargain.
LAUGHTER
After eight years playing
understudy to Eisenhower,
he ran for the presidency
himself in 1960.
His opponent was a daddy's boy
from Harvard, John F Kennedy,
whose rich, womanising father was determined
to install his son in the White House.
Nixon's relentless hard work on
the campaign trail counted for little
in the beauty contest of the
first real television election,
where each forced smile and
awkward pose was played out on screen.
Let's look at the record.
Is the United States
standing still...?
Although Nixon
scored on the issues,
the contrast between
Kennedy's urbane good looks
and his tense, sweaty, face
was a killer in their first debate.
Nixon lost the election.
The Eastern establishment had brought
his irresistible rise to a shuddering halt.
He then stood for the Governorship of California,
was defeated again and conceded with a bitter speech
aimed at the liberal media that
he believed had shafted him.
As I leave you, I
want you to know,
just think how much
you're going to be missing.
You don't have Nixon
to kick around any more.
Because, gentlemen, this
is my last press conference.
Nothing could have
been further from the truth.
Nixon was simply regrouping for a
new assault on the inner circle of power.
The underdog was still
determined to come out on top.
The comeback was a typical mix of underhand
manoeuvres, ruthlessness and hard work.
At home, he won vital political allies campaigning
for Republican candidates for Congress.
Abroad, trips to Europe and Asia
helped polish his
credentials in foreign affairs.
And as America became polarised
between right and left in the "angry '60s",
Nixon positioned himself as
spokesman for what he called
the "silent majority of
law-abiding Americans".
So he was ideally placed
to exploit the country's
deepening crisis in Vietnam.
Launched by President Kennedy, and fired up into
a costly full-scale conflict by Lyndon Johnson,
the Vietnam War had
gone disastrously wrong.
Americans were dying
at the rate of 200 a week.
Meanwhile, at home, Johnson's
ruling Democratic Party was imploding.
Its Chicago convention degenerated
into a week of city-wide rioting.
With his political
opponents on their knees,
Nixon seized his opportunity.
When the strongest nation in the world can be
tied down for four years in war in Vietnam,
without the end in sight,
when a nation with the greatest tradition of rule
of law is torn apart by unprecedented lawlessness,
it's time for new leadership in
the United States of America.
APPLAUSE
'Wherever in the world he goes,
'doors open. People listen.
'Things happen.
'Who is this man?
'Of course - Richard Nixon.'
Running for the Presidency
once again in 1968,
Nixon projected a new image -
a dignified statesman,
the unifier of his country.
'Who's the one man we need in
these troubled, dangerous times?
'Nixon's the one.'
No doubt this was the kind of
leader that Nixon aspired to be.
But, behind the scenes, the
reality was rather different.
Ever the anxious
political outsider,
Nixon instructed his
staff to treat the campaign
as what he called "all-out war".
In this war, no
blow was too low.
Publicly, Nixon talked
peace in Vietnam.
But behind the scenes, he
arm-twisted South Vietnam
to withdraw from President
Johnson's peace talks.
To win the election,
he was prepared to undermine
his opponents' bid to end the war.
This time, his
Machiavellian tactics worked.
Nixon won.
The outsider became
the ultimate insider.
Now Nixon had the chance to
craft world peace on his own terms,
leaving indelible footprints
on the sands of time.
The greatest honour history can
bestow is the title of peacemaker.
This honour now beckons America.
The chance to help
lead the world at last
out of the valley of turmoil...
As President, Nixon's grand strategy was a
new set of relations with Russia and China.
But first, he had
to resolve Vietnam.
He was determined not to let HIS presidency,
like Johnson's, be crippled by the war.
So Nixon and his National Security Adviser,
Henry Kissinger, plotted America's exit strategy.
The President's
double act with Kissinger
became one of the most extraordinary
political relationships of the 20th century.
It would fuel Nixon's
rise, but also his fall.
On the surface, Nixon and
Kissinger seemed an unlikely pair.
The reclusive, workaholic
son of a California grocer,
and the sparkling
Jewish intellectual,
a childhood refugee
from Hitler's Europe.
Kissinger was an effervescent
and gossipy socialite,
the prize exhibit at
Washington dinner parties.
He cultivated his
image as a ladies' man,
ostentatiously dating movie stars
such as Liv Ullman and Jill St John.
But, as with Nixon, things were
not always what they seemed.
One girlfriend commented wryly,
"I don't think Henry was interested
in sex. He didn't have time for it.
"Power, for him, may
have been the aphrodisiac,
"but it was also the climax."
Close observers noted that super-smooth
Kissinger's nails were bitten down to the quick.
He and Nixon were, in
fact, essentially similar.
Ambitious loners, obsessed about
image and their place in history.
And each was by
nature deeply suspicious.
I believe very strongly that the
position of a White House assistant
is inconsistent with making public
statements on substantive issues.
Natural conspirators, Nixon
and Kissinger were sure that
secrecy was the key to negotiating
an end to the Vietnam War.
To avoid the leaks
and press comment
that could smother their diplomacy
before it had time to flourish.
So Kissinger created a confidential
back channel to the Kremlin
and engineered secret
talks with the Vietnamese.
While Kissinger
talked, Nixon acted
with the same ruthlessness
that had won him the presidency.
Now he could do so with the
full might of America's power.
He aimed to bludgeon the
communists to the negotiating table,
by round-the-clock bombing of
Vietcong sanctuaries in Cambodia.
He wanted to shake Hanoi, let them
know he didn't play by normal rules.
He told his chief of staff...
"I call it the
madman theory, Bob.
"I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached
the point where I might do anything to stop the war.
"We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's
sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism.
"'We can't restrain him when he's angry,
and he has his hand on the nuclear button.'
"And Ho Chi Minh will be in Paris
in two days, begging for peace."
But the quick fix didn't work.
Madman tactics failed to end
the war, as Nixon had hoped.
In fact, his saturation bombing
provoked a backlash at home,
fuelling mounting public
protest and press criticism.
But Nixon, convinced that he was
right, became ever more entrenched.
He liked to claim that he wasn't
bothered about his media image,
unlike his narcissistic
predecessor, Lyndon Johnson,
who had TVs in almost
every room of the White House.
But in fact, Nixon insisted
on a daily news summary,
often running to 50 pages,
on which he would scribble
comments frenziedly.
Over the years, he'd accumulated a list of
friendly editors, reporters and commentators.
He'd also built up
an "enemies" list.
Even minor criticism was
enough to ensure inclusion.
He would scrawl
angrily to his aides,
"Note. Newsweek
is loaded against us.
"Cut it out like we
cut The Times."
Nixon saw enemies on
every side, encircling him.
But I think he almost
needed to be hated.
That way he knew he was right.
There was a kind of self-righteous
masochism here, as well as paranoia.
As the Vietnam War dragged on,
Nixon's paranoia about his
enemies at home intensified.
Not just the student left, but the liberal
Democratic establishment and mainstream press.
Raging about newspaper
exposes of government policy,
he even created a breaking and entering team
to catch the perpetrators and plug the leaks.
They were known as the Plumbers.
Nixon's den, which he'd
conceived of as a command post,
was beginning to
feel like a bunker.
The President was
exhausted and drinking heavily.
In May 1970, four
students were shot dead
on the campus of Kent State
University in Ohio, protesting for peace.
The following weekend, thousands of anti-war
demonstrators converged on Washington.
Nixon felt besieged.
Unable to sleep, he put on a record
of Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto.
Yet, over the music,
all he could hear
were the protesters
gathering on the Mall.
Nixon suddenly flipped.
Desperate to break out of the
den, he summoned his driver.
They drove down to the Lincoln
Memorial where, in the early light,
he confronted some
of the protesters.
They were utterly astonished
to encounter the President
and to hear rambling recollections
about his own idealism at their age.
He talked of Neville Chamberlain coming back
from Munich proclaiming "peace for our time".
"I said I thought at that time that
Chamberlain was the greatest man alive,
"and when I read Churchill's all-out criticism
of Chamberlain, I thought Churchill was a madman.
"In retrospect, I now realise
Chamberlain was a good man,
"but that Churchill
was a wiser man."
May 1970 was
Nixon at his worst -
lurching drunkenly between
defiance and self-pity.
A foretaste of things to come.
But this man was a fighter.
Out of the wilderness, like
Churchill, he crafted a triumph,
finally accomplishing
his grand design.
Military might alone was clearly
not going to end the war in Vietnam.
So Nixon resorted to
cold, calculating diplomacy.
Better relations with Russia and
China were his long-term goal.
But now he also seized on this as a
way to put the screws on North Vietnam,
by persuading Moscow and Beijing
to cut off weapons and supplies.
His tactic was to make us of the growing rift
between North Vietnam's two communist patrons.
The Soviets were obsessed by China's growing
military strength and soaring population,
already triple that of Russia's.
Russian fears about
the Chinese threat
were captured in
one Moscow joke,
which imagined a phone conversation between
Nixon and the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.
I hear you have new super-computer
with massive predictive power?
That's right. Yes, indeed.
So, Mr President, please
ask your super-computer
to predict names of Soviet
Politburo in year 2000.
A long silence ensues.
Finally Brezhnev
crows down the phone...
So, Mr President,
your super-computer
not so super after all.
Oh, no, Mr General Secretary,
the, uh, names came up all right.
It's just that...
I can't read Chinese.
How best to exploit the split
between the two communist giants
appealed to the grand
strategist in Nixon.
If Washington thawed relations
with Beijing, he reckoned,
that would alarm Moscow
and make it cosy up to America.
And the price he would exact for
these new, improved relationships
would be an end to both Moscow
and Beijing's support for North Vietnam.
Nixon saw all this as a
kind of global chess game,
which, move by move, would get
him the peace settlement he wanted,
and needed, to gain
re-election in 1972.
He told Kissinger...
"We're doing the China thing to screw
the Russians and help us in Vietnam.
"And maybe down the road to
have some relations with China."
Nixon saw Kissinger as his most powerful piece,
his queen if you like, in this game of chess.
After covert
contacts via Pakistan,
in July 1971, Kissinger flew
in secrecy over the Himalayas
and into the Forbidden
City of Beijing.
Nixon could only
wait impatiently,
but on 11th July, he received
the message he wanted.
Kissinger had secured
China's agreement in principle
that the President
would visit Beijing.
For Nixon, this would put pressure on North Vietnam
and advance his great goal of global detente.
Nixon was beside
himself with delight.
He scribbled a message of
congratulation to Kissinger.
"When you return, I
plan to give you a day off
"in compensation for your
superb service to the nation."
Reading this nowadays,
you'd think it was a joke.
But Nixon didn't do irony...
just hard work.
Premier Chou En-Lai, on behalf of the
government of the People's Republic of China,
has extended an invitation to
President Nixon to visit China
at an appropriate
date before May 1972.
President Nixon has accepted
the invitation with pleasure.
The opening to China was a
stunning public relations coup,
which took the world by storm.
The problem for Nixon was that
Kissinger gained much of the credit,
turning him almost overnight
into a international celebrity,
depicted as the shrewd helmsman who was piloting
Nixon on a dramatic voyage into the unknown.
Nixon needed Kissinger
as the backroom deal-maker.
But he hated letting his
adviser into the limelight.
Nixon's pioneering visit to China
eventually took place in February 1972,
carefully scheduled for
prime-time TV back home.
Just to be sure that
Kissinger did not muscle in
on the photo-opportunity
of Nixon's grand arrival,
burly secret-service aides blocked the aisle of
Air Force One as the President, and his wife,
walked down the
steps and into history.
The visit was a triumph
of public relations
and it could only have been
achieved by a notorious right winger
who couldn't be criticised
for being soft on communism.
Just as Nixon had hoped, his China visit
loosened the Cold War deadlock with Moscow.
The Soviets' great fear was
being isolated if their old enemy,
America, and their new foe,
China, started becoming friendly.
So Moscow hurriedly invited
Kissinger to discussions in the Kremlin.
Nixon wanted concessions on Vietnam
before he would meet with Brezhnev.
But Kissinger regarded a summit
between the two leaders as the priority
and forged ahead on his own.
Back in the den, Nixon fumed impotently that
Henry was simply "breastfeeding" the Soviets.
Tell him no discussions of the summit before
they settle Vietnam, and that is an order!
Kissinger got equally angry.
If the President does not trust me,
there is not much that can be done.
The struggle for the limelight
was becoming a struggle for power.
On Kissinger's return,
according to the diary of Nixon's
Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman...
"The President was all primed to really whack
Henry, but backed off when he actually got there."
This was typical Nixon.
Although a tough
talker in private,
he loathed face-to-face
confrontation.
But the appeasement was costly.
Kissinger had set up a summit in
Moscow, essentially on his terms.
The messenger was
becoming the master.
In May 1972, Nixon
touched down in Moscow.
He had prepared for the summit by watching
the James Bond classic, From Russia With Love.
And he was welcomed, if not
with love, at least with champagne.
Unlike Beijing, there was
substance here as well as symbolism.
He signed a series of agreements with
the Soviets, above all, on arms control.
So, in three dramatic
months in 1972,
Nixon had overturned a
quarter-century of Cold War history,
becoming the first US president to
visit the two capitals of communism.
Just 10 years after the Cuban Missile
Crisis, when nuclear war seemed inevitable,
Nixon's policy of detente,
relaxing superpower tension,
offered hope for an
end to the Vietnam War
and the prospect of a
new, more peaceful world.
The global chess game paid off.
In 1972, Nixon won
a landslide victory,
being re-elected with
60% of the popular vote.
But his obsessive suspicion
was now corroding his judgement.
More and more, the President's
wary eye turned on his right-hand man.
Nixon was still angry that Kissinger was getting
the credit for the diplomatic triumphs of 1972.
What's more, his adviser, it seemed,
was openly trumpeting his success.
"I've always acted alone.
"Americans admire
that enormously.
"Americans admire the cowboy entering
a village or city all alone on his horse.
"This romantic, surprising character suits me,
because being alone has always been part of my style.
"A Wild West tale, if you like."
The tubby, bespectacled Kissinger
as a Lone Ranger-style Wild West hero
sounded preposterous to most
people. But Nixon took it very seriously.
He liked to think of himself as the Lone
Ranger figure, with Kissinger playing Tonto.
Two quick puffs.
That's your sign, Tonto.
I don't stand on protocol, if
you just call me Excellency...
LAUGHTER
Clearly his National Security Adviser
saw their roles as being reversed.
'Mr President, I have Dr
Kissinger calling you now.
'Fine. Thank you.
'Hi, Henry! Mr President. Are
you in New York or Washington?
'No, I'm here. Oh, fine, fine.'
Nixon, who resented sharing any of the glory,
had even started taping his meetings and calls.
He wanted material for his memoirs
so as to shape the verdict of history,
but he was also determined to
protect himself against Kissinger,
who often leaked distorted accounts
of their conversations to the press.
In due course, the tapes would
prove Nixon's fatal mistake.
Part of what irked Nixon was that
Kissinger's jet-setting diplomacy
had still not delivered
peace in Vietnam.
In December 1972,
with the election won,
Nixon reverted to hardball once
again to finally clinch the deal.
He unleashed 12 days
of savage bombing,
forcing the North Vietnamese into some final
concessions, and an agreement was signed.
North Vietnam acknowledged
South Vietnam's right to exist...
at least for the moment.
Nixon had extricated America from
the mess and got the boys home.
The President, it seemed,
was starting his second
term with a clean slate
and could look ahead to expanding his China
strategy and building on superpower detente.
There was just one
minor difficulty for Nixon...
the trial in a Washington court
of some rather unusual burglars.
The Washington Post didn't usually
put local burglaries on its front page,
but this one, at the Watergate apartment
complex on the Potomac River in June 1972,
was not run-of-the-mill.
Five men, one of whom said he is a former
employee of the Central Intelligence Agency,
were arrested at
2.30am yesterday
in what authorities described as
an elaborate plot to bug the offices
of the Democratic
National Committee here.
The White House denied all knowledge
and insisted that the break-in was
the work of a few
out-of-control political mavericks.
Nixon himself claimed...
What really hurts in matters
of this sort is not the fact
that they occur, because overzealous people
in campaigns do things that are wrong.
What really hurts is if
you try to cover it up.
Wise words.
If only Nixon had heeded them.
Watergate wasn't a marginal event
on the fringe of the Nixon presidency.
It was a product of the
hardball, paranoid politics
that had got Tricky Dicky to the
top but would now bring him down.
Nixon probably didn't know
about Watergate in advance,
but he had sanctioned break-ins
and wire-taps of opponents
through his notorious Plumbers.
He had fostered the climate of
illegality that led to Watergate.
Nixon's siege mentality assumed
that they were all out to get him -
the Democrats, the press,
the liberal establishment.
Earlier in his presidency,
he'd made a comment to
Kissinger and some aides
that was
frighteningly revealing.
"One day, we will get them.
"We'll get them on the
ground, where we want them.
"And we'll stick our heels in,
step on them hard and twist, right?"
"Henry knows what I mean.
"Get them on the
floor and step on them,
"crush them, show no mercy."
Following the Watergate arrests, Nixon
was right at the centre of a cover-up,
which he delegated to the White
House law officer, John Dean.
In June 1972, on the pretext of national
security, Nixon told aides to order the FBI...
But after the election, in 1973,
Congress appointed a special Senate
committee to inquire into Watergate.
The burglars who broke into the headquarters of
the Democratic National Committee at Watergate
were in effect breaking into the home
of every citizen of the United States.
The burglars and their immediate
bosses were prosecuted.
The press followed
up every lead,
delighted to get
back at the President.
The hatred was mutual.
The pressure was
really getting to Nixon.
His hands were shaking,
his breath smelt of liquor.
The den was becoming a bunker.
It was like May
1970 all over again.
But this time, there
was no way back.
His presidency and his
personality began to fall apart.
Nixon told Haldeman...
"You know, Bob, there's something I've
never told anybody before, not even you.
"Every night since
I've been President,
"I've knelt down on my knees beside my bed and
prayed to God for guidance and help in this job.
"Last night, I knelt down and this time I
prayed that I wouldn't wake up in the morning.
"I just couldn't face going on."
Nixon was prone to
melodrama and self-pity.
But even so, these words
probably came from the heart.
The most powerful
man in the world,
custodian of the nuclear codes
that could exterminate millions,
could not stop the wheels
of justice and democracy
gradually grinding him down.
Yet the scandal dragged on for
another 15 months because Nixon,
a fighter all his life,
would not give up.
It is my constitutional
responsibility
to defend the integrity of this
great office against false charges.
Ironically, though, he
sealed his own fate,
because this most
secretive of presidents
had documented his own
crimes through his tapes.
Throughout 1973, Nixon
kept battling on two fronts.
Still aching to leave his own
footprints on the sands of time,
he invited Brezhnev
to Washington,
hoping to keep up the momentum of
his great diplomatic project, detente.
But he was also fending off efforts by
the Senate enquiry to subpoena his tapes.
Watergate was now not only
sapping his energy and health,
but also undermining
his political credibility.
After re-election, he had
hoped to dispense with Kissinger,
jealous of his cult status.
Instead, the discredited president found he
needed his respected National Security Adviser
as never before, even appointing
him Secretary of State as well.
From now on, it was
almost a co-presidency.
No more so than
in late October 1973
at the height of the
Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War.
The crisis escalated into a major
face-off between the superpowers.
US forces were put on Def Con III - the highest
level of defence readiness short of imminent attack.
Yet the decision was taken not
by the President, but by Kissinger.
Nixon was asleep, and Kissinger
took the decision not to wake him.
Chief of Staff Al Haig asked if
Kissinger had talked to the president.
"No, I haven't,"
Kissinger replied.
"He'd just start
charging around.
"I don't think we should
bother the President."
Whether Nixon was
exhausted or drunk is unclear.
To save himself, the
President had had to sacrifice
most of the key aides who had
been at his side since the beginning.
Haldeman and Ehrlichman
had been forced out.
And he was losing all authority, constantly
harried in press conferences about the tapes,
the cover-up, and even
his personal finances.
People have got to know whether
or not their President's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
Now the Lone Ranger
really was alone.
Forced to release the
self-incriminatory tapes
and facing imminent impeachment,
Nixon finally resigned
in August 1974.
He told staff in a tearful,
rambling farewell...
Never be petty...
..always remember,
others may hate you,
but those who hate you don't
win unless you hate them...
..and then you destroy yourself.
The ultimate irony was that hate had become
the adrenalin of the Nixon Presidency.
The ambition and ruthlessness that had driven Nixon
to the top had spiralled into a consuming rage
and mistrust of others that
had indeed destroyed him.
The presidency of the United
States is an unforgiving role.
Nixon wasn't the first president, nor will he be the
last, to end his tenure compromised and discredited.
The relentless pressures of office
drill down to the vulnerable heart
of the incumbent, and expose it
to the media's remorseless gaze.
Since Nixon, the political
strip show has continued.
Carter - honourable,
but hapless.
Reagan - amiable, but out of it.
Clinton - a presidency unzipped.
Bush Junior - a
presidency in terror.
But Nixon stands as
an exceptional case.
Watergate wasn't a
strange aberration.
It was symptomatic of the back
channel, backstabbing methods
by which Nixon's whole
presidency operated.
Methods that generated his international
triumphs as much as his domestic scandals.
Here was a presidency
of the paranoid.
And, ultimately, it was this very paranoia that sank
him, in the form of his obsessively recorded tapes.
'Henry, I just wanted
to be sure that...
'with regard to that Laos and
Cambodia strike, that both...'
FADES OUCongenitally unable
to relax with success,
Nixon had never allowed
himself to enjoy his presidency.
As Elliott Richardson, one of his Cabinet,
told Nixon early in the second term...
"Mr President, I believe
your real problem is
"that you have somehow been
unable to realise that you have won.
"Not only won, but been
re-elected by a tremendous margin.
"You are the President of all
the people of the United States.
"There is no 'they' out there,
nobody trying to destroy you."
Richardson was part of that East Coast
elite from which Nixon always felt excluded.
He was also a D-Day veteran,
tested in the furnace of battle,
and evidently at
ease with himself.
Nixon was never satisfied
with his achievements.
He'd never come
to terms with himself,
with his unstable mixture of ability
and ambition, shyness and suspicion.
His problem lay
deep, deep within.
As the poet John Milton
wrote, in Paradise Lost...
"The mind is its own place, and
in itself can make a heaven of hell,
"a hell of heaven."
Nixon made his own
heaven and his own hell.
Just before lifting off
from the White House lawn,
Richard Nixon turned to give a
farewell wave, arms outstretched
in that fake-spontaneous
public style of his.
It looked like a
final act of bravado.
Nixon the defiant fighter, giving
a last, deluded V for victory.
But behind this humiliating exit,
one senses something darker.
The mantle of martyrdom.
In Nixon's self-pitying,
self-righteous mind,
was this his moment
of crucifixion?