Drum Rolls and Lightning

By Hugh Sidey

For the past year Richard Nixon has led a singular exile, a man beyond his own shores, dwelling in the realm of world power, which he loves. He is not a Philip Nolan because he still resides firmly on U.S. turf, even goes to baseball games. Yet there is a tiny whiffy of The Man Without a Country around the nation's most prominent political scalawag. After five years a sizable segment of America still holds Nixon beyond forgiveness. It may always be thus. He may be ordering his life to acknowledge that.

Soon he will go to China for his second visit since leaving Washington. He will journey to France, Germany and Britain. Then he will move to New York, a city he wryly describes as the most private place in America because "nobody likes anybody else there."

There is no self-pity. His mind is hard yet, filled with the dangers and failings he perceives in the human condition, his own not excluded. He plays it as it lays. Curiously, his broad view contains a core of coherent national optimism that deepens irony. Hope and guidance from San Clemente, of all things.

He has put it in a book about the world, power and the presidency, which will be published in April. By all accounts it is a drama filled with timpani rolls of peril, but with lightning flashes revealing the way back to preeminence.

"Scare the pants off you," Nixon says, feet up on his desk, spectacles on, leafing through his raw prose. "Dicey time ahead for the United States ... the next two decades will be a time of maximum crisis ... 1985 is the year we face inferiority. Not just No. 2, but way back No. 2."

"Loss without war" is his warning. The Soviet leaders are not madmen, he notes, but they believe it means a good deal to be No. 1. So, too, may the Chinese, who could turn away from the U.S. if they see us continuing to slip. "They think we have the power now... but they question our will." So do others in the Nixon scenario. Germany and Japan must deal with a winner. The Saudis too.

Spirit, economic might, technical excellence are going for the free world, Nixon insists. "The world is going to move toward freedom ... We should mobilize our economic strength. If there is a real contest, there just isn't any question about the outcome. The U.S. and the West can be as strong as they need to be... An arms race for the Soviet Union is no win."

Nixon relishes Pope John Paul II's trip to Poland. "Stalin asked how many divisions the Pope had," Nixon chortles. "The answer is one hell of a lot of divisions." Nixon catalogues the Soviet flaws: their economy is a "basket case," Eastern Europe is not so firm, the cost of Cuba is growing. The Soviets have that one damnable advantage of singleminded, purposeful, directed leadership.

Nixon's writing will offer ideas about strong leadership, rules of international positioning, in which he believes. "We are now in a war called peace ... The time is right for leadership from the United States. That means not only from the President (people expect too much from the President) but from opinion leaders, corporate heads and others ... We need a revival of will." A President should be a man viewed as capable of acting "rashly," Nixon contends. He should be a man who is feared. "The next President's qualifications should be tested against foreign policy. If he fails there, we all fail."

Dealing in this world takes a man who believes in the right principles, Nixon says, but a man who also has "street smarts" and "can play every trick ... We want him skillful, shrewd and as tough in the clutch as the other guy. The presidents of the top 50 or so corporations in the United States might be more intelligent, smoother, better poker players, have better manners, but there are no more than two or three of them I would want in a room with a healthy Brezhnev. But I do know some labor leaders I would put in there."

From his Pacific heights Nixon detects a change among intellectuals abroad and here. "They are beginning to take a second look at the world around them, a more realistic look." If they can join with the leaders of American society, then, he believes, we may be headed out of an era "lost in uncertainty" and "paralyzed by propriety." That way, says the exile, this "dicey time" could turn into an era of opportunity.

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