Nixon's Memoirs: "I Was Selfish"

A few admissions about what he thought was just a public relations problem

"A book both extraordinary and historic. The personal memoir of a life of conflict, an extraordinary life lived in the arena, a public life that ended with the greatest fall in modern political history. The whole story."

One man's view of tumultuous events, of course, cannot constitute "the whole story," especially when the man sits at the troubled center of much of the action and judges himself. Yet that publisher's puff for a book, designated "14374-7 General Nonfiction" in the Grosset & Dunlap catalogue and titled The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, is generally accurate. Richard M. Nixon's personal recollections of his roller-coaster career are a valuable contribution to the history of his times. Only on some highly specific points, including his familiar version of Watergate events, will critics wonder if his book lives up to its classification as nonfiction.

Working for nearly three years over yellow legal pads at his San Clemente estate, Nixon produced 1.5 million words. Even more surprising, he then went willingly, if painfully, through an editing process that slashed those hard-wrought words to fewer than 500,000 -a throw-away of presidential verbiage that must make historians blink. Still, the final product is a book of 1,184 pages. And though Nixon had research help from his staff, as well as from writers who prepared drafts of some sections, the result, says Editor in Chief Robert Markell of Grosset & Dunlap, "is very much the former President's book and his words. It is his message not only to us here and now, but down through the ages."

Warner Communications Inc., which will publish the paperback edition, paid him more than $2 million. Warner then sold the hard-cover rights to Grosset & Dunlap and the newspaper syndication rights to the Times Syndication Sales Corp., owned by the New York Times Co. Sixty periodicals -30 newspapers in the U.S. and 30 magazines and newspapers abroad -this week began reprinting excerpts. U.S. newspapers were limited to running 15,000 words, foreign papers 25,000 -a mere 3% to 5% of Memoirs.

As the first excerpts appeared this week, it was clear that the book does not contain any smashing revelations. It is neither chatty nor ponderous. It will satisfy neither readers looking for personal gossip nor scholars seeking profound insights into the forces shaping global politics. Yet it does move easily in short sentences and simple narrative style to convey Nixon's interpretations of history in an unambiguous fashion, full of specific, if incidental, detail.

The syndication editors chose to begin the first of seven installments with Nixon's account of first reading about the Watergate burglary in the Miami Herald on Sunday, June 18, 1972, as he relaxed at his vacation home in nearby Key Biscayne. Nixon's memory is keen: "I could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen." But as he takes the reader once again down what he calls "the road that eventually led to the end of my presidency," Nixon's story is the same defensive, superficial and unconvincing account that he has told so often in the past. He says that at first he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as "some sort of prank" conducted by "Cubans in surgical gloves." He again professes bewilderment at learning that officials of his 1972 re-election committee and former White House Gumshoes Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were centrally involved. By June 20, he began to worry that "the investigations and depositions, if they went too far, would hand the Democrats a major campaign issue."

It was then that he became enmeshed in the coverup, working through his aide H.R. Haldeman and manipulating CIA Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters. Nixon writes: "I told Haldeman to say that I believed this thing would open up the whole Bay of Pigs matter -and they should call the FBI in and say that for the sake of the country they should go no further into this case. When Haldeman came back from his meeting with Richard Helms and Walters, he said that Helms got the picture and would be happy to be helpful. As far as I was concerned, this was the end of our worries about Watergate."

Later Nixon sensed that "a cloud of suspicion still hung over the White House. Yet I felt sure that it was just a public relations problem that only needed a public relations solution."

Nixon does concede some culpability for the illegal acts of his aides and, ultimately, for the end to his presidency. In one telling passage, he refers to his discussions of granting presidential clemency to the Watergate burglars, and to his relations with his aides Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson, and Jeb Magruder, operational head of Nixon's 1972 re-election committee. Writes Nixon: "I told myself that I had not been involved in the things that gave them potential criminal vulnerability. But there were things that I had known. I had talked with Colson about clemency; I too had suspected Jeb Magruder was not telling the truth, but I had done nothing about my suspicions; and I had been aware that attorneys' fees and family support funds were going to the defendants. The difference between us was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had become trapped by their circumstantial involvement; so far, I was not.

"I was faced with having to fire my friends for things that I myself was a part of. I was selfish enough about my own survival to want them to leave; but I was not so ruthless as to be able to confront easily the idea of hurting people I cared about so deeply. I worried about the impact on them if they were forced to leave; but I worried more about the impact on me if they didn't."

The former President concedes too that he had misjudged the impact of charges leveled against him by his counsel, John Dean, whom he fired in the spring of 1973. The most serious was Dean's persuasive claim that Nixon had approved hush-money payments to the Watergate burglars in a White House meeting that March 21. "I went off on a tangent by concentrating all our attention and resources on trying to refute Dean. But it no longer made any difference that not all of Dean's testimony was accurate. It only mattered if any of his testimony was accurate. And Dean's account of the March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own." With obvious regret, Nixon sums up: "I did not see it then, but in the end it would make less difference that I was not as involved as Dean had alleged than that I was not as uninvolved as I had claimed."

Though Nixon makes no such dramatic admission of error as he had in his televised interviews with David Frost ("I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life"), he does admit that all his public speeches about his Watergate role as he fought to stay in office "were not explanations of how a President of the United States could so incompetently allow himself to get in such a situation. That was what people really wanted to know."

What finally forced Nixon to quit was the hard evidence that only six days after the Watergate burglary, he was already deeply involved in the coverup. This became clear when he was forced to release the White House tape of a meeting that he had with Haldeman on June 23, 1972. The "smoking gun" revelation came out in the fateful summer of 1974, and Nixon writes of the events of Friday, August 2: "I decided instead of resigning on Monday night, I would release the June 23 tape and see the reaction to it. If it was as bad as I expected then we could resume the countdown toward resignation. If by some miracle the reaction was not so bad and there was any chance that I could actually govern during a six months' trial in the Senate, then we could examine the forlorn option one more time. In a subconscious way I knew that resignation was inevitable. But more than once over the next days I would yield to my desire to fight, and I would bridle as the inexorable end drew near." During those days, he writes, "an odd rhyme struck me. It's fight or flight by Monday night!"

On the crucial Monday night, he recalls, "We had passed through the first blast of the firestorm, but it was still raging. I knew that it would be following me for the rest of my life."

He also knew that he had to resign. Instead of breaking the news himself, he called in his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and had her tell his family. When his sons-in-law, Edward Cox and David Eisenhower, argued the case for delaying his decision at least for a few days, Nixon recalls, "I said that this was just like a Greek tragedy: you could not end it in the middle of the second act or the crowd would throw chairs at the stage. In other words, the tragedy had to be seen through until the end as fate would have it."

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.

The Times syndicate will not reveal how much it expects to earn from the newspaper reprint rights, but it went to remarkable lengths to protect the security of its investment. Stung by the Washington Post's premature publication of Haldeman's book, The Ends of Power, the Times had lost some $500,000 in payments that newspapers refused to make after the Post destroyed the news value of their Haldeman excerpts. This time the precautions were as stringent, said one editor, as "wartime security for military maps and weapons."

The manuscript was sent from Grosset & Dunlap to the Times in true cloak-and-dagger style. The Times first telephoned the publisher with the description of its courier, who was dispatched to pick up parts of the manuscript on three separate trips. When the courier reached Grosset & Dunlap, he was given half of a letter. Then he traveled from New York to the still undisclosed city where the books were printed. When he reached the printing plant, the courier gave his half of the letter to a printing-company official who held the other half. Only when the two halves matched was the courier given the third of the manuscript that was ready for him.

When Nixon made late editing changes, his longtime aide Frank Gannon carried them first from San Clemente to the printing plant by airplane, then to the Times office in New York. "He would usually show up dead tired, in jeans and sports shirt, after up to 30 hours without sleep," recalls a Times editor. There was especially tight security on the deliveries of the syndicated excerpts to foreign newspapers. The excerpts were shipped in bulk to such points as Paris and Tokyo, then personally taken to the client papers by Times couriers. A flap arose when one shipment destined for Taiwan was temporarily lost; it had been mistakenly unloaded in Tokyo.

The precautions apparently worked, as the newspaper serialization began without a damaging leak. Whether the fascination of readers would prove as intense as the editors hoped remained in doubt. For Nixon, the personal financial value of his work was already assured. The bigger and yet to be answered question was whether Richard Nixon's message would be accepted favorably "down through the ages." qed

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