Nixon as Grandfather

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

The empty helicopter pad is a forlorn reminder of power brutally rescinded. The scraggly-haired surfers shoulder their boards in the morning sun and scuff down the nearby path to their emerald waves, unmindful of Richard Nixon, who stirs beyond the fence in the skeletal complex that used to be the Western White House.

Though he does not now possess power, he still studies, thinks about it. Almost as if by instinct rather than command, his mind seizes on new information and assembles it into strategies and tactics for international and domestic leadership.

"The past is past," muses Nixon, seated as if forever behind a clean desk, the long, lonely horizon of the Pacific beyond him. "I'm not thinking of any political future. That is nonsense." Indeed, for the moment he is thinking about his 9-lb. 4-oz. granddaughter Jennie Eisenhower, born just three days earlier. He arranges by phone with her mother Julie for an evening visit. "We're elated," he says, and seems to be. "We're going to do our share of babysitting. I'll do almost anything but the 2 a.m. feeding. If I ever wake up I can't get back to sleep."

But the world beyond San Clemente and his family is still very central to Nixon's being. "I share the concern of many people in both parties and some national commentators regarding the deterioration of the American leadership position in the world," he says. But Nixon for the time being at least avoids direct public criticism of anyone in high office. He will begin to speak out more in the fall. He is planning a few speeches, and he has been invited by many foreign countries to come and visit.

He will go abroad soon, possessed as he still is at age 65 with the desire to savor faraway places. He will not go to the fragile Middle East, nor in his lectures will he ever "lob something in where sensitive matters are being negotiated. I do not intend to say or do anything to give President Carter a hard time."

He is now at work on his next book. It will be about the future, what old lessons tell him about the next 20 years, how America must and can retain its world leadership, maintain its economic strength. He will write about the role of the presidency, enlarging on his feeling that the institution is not going to be dramatically changed and that Presidents must take the office as it is and determine events with their personal skills. When he wrote the current book, RN, of which 300,000 copies are now in print, the former President dictated 1.5 million words about events of his political life and his thoughts about them. They were boiled down to about 500,000 words. From the mass of unused material, Nixon is now extracting, polishing and adding to make the new volume, which will be only about one-fifth the size of RN.

The new grandfather's face is collecting wrinkles. There is more gray at his temples. He has thickened a little at the waist. But there is energy in his eyes and his movements, a mental vigor that seems untouched by the savage season of Watergate. One concludes that Nixon looks his guest in the eye more directly, more confidently and with less of the familiar lid fluttering that sometimes marred his human encounters years ago in the White House.

He is helping Julie with her book on her mother, and David is at work on a biography of his grandfather. It is a world of words at San Clemente for the time being. Nixon relishes having the spare time at last for such things, and for just reading and thinking, contemplating events instead of reacting instantly to them. He has even worked out a Nixon rule of knowledge for Presidents. "Knowing a little about everything won't work. Knowing a great deal about important things is essential."

The country has weighed the tragedy of Richard Nixon. One sometimes wonders if there is not another dimension to that disaster that will some day get more attention--the loss of a man to the world, by his own doing, a man who understood the men, the ingredients, the glory, the brutality, the action and reaction of power as well as anyone else of our time.

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