Fanfare for an Uncommon Man

By HUGH SIDEY/YORBA LINDA

Only two of the founders were left now, thought Jerry Ford: himself and John Allen, the old Congressman from Oakland, California, off someplace in Idaho now. Richard Nixon had been among the three surviving founders of the Chowder and Marching Society, formed in 1949 by 15 fractious young Republicans of the House to oppose monthly bonuses for war veterans, which they considered too costly. Chowder and Marching welded exuberant friendships and accidentally founded a power matrix that helped produce three Presidents and shape an American half-century.

So much history, thought Ford as he listened to the eulogies on that clouded and chilly California afternoon last week when Nixon was buried beside his wife Pat at the Nixon library and birthplace in Yorba Linda. Ford was Nixon's closest political colleague. "I treasured his friendship," Ford said later. "When I took the oath of office in the well of the House in 1949, the very first person who came up to shake my hand was Dick Nixon."

Ford looked stricken. In fact, all five Presidents gathered below Nixon's casket were dramatically reminded that even the toughest actors are ultimately swept from the great stage. And with them such rich memories of the old campaigns. "I asked him to come to Grand Rapids to make a Lincoln Day speech, and he stayed at my parents' home," said Ford. "He slept in a four-poster bed with sideboards. Later, when he became President, my mother hung up a sign on the bed, THE PRESIDENT SLEPT HERE."

The covey of Presidents who shivered through the Nixon rites owed their days of glory in varying degrees to Richard Nixon, either for his help or his failure. Ronald Reagan, a Democrat until the early 1960s, recalls how his growing disenchantment with the party inspired him to go talk with Nixon. "I'd grown up a Democrat, but I told Nixon I've got to be a Republican," Reagan said. "But Nixon asked me to campaign for him as a Democrat, and I did until right at the end. Then I switched."

By this time Reagan had got the political bug, and he watched Nixon and listened to him. After Nixon's Watergate humiliation, it was Reagan who made certain Nixon was on the delegation, which also included Ford and Carter, sent to the funeral of Egypt's Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Only 10 months ago, Reagan sat beside Nixon at the funeral for Pat. "I know how he felt about his family," said Reagan. "I always admired him for that, and I saw at Pat's funeral the terrible grief he felt. I thought so very much of him."

George Bush, a decade younger, nevertheless was caught up in the Chowder and Marching retinue during his days as a member of Congress. "Nixon was on this swing through the country back in 1966 when he went out and raised money for a lot of newly running candidates," Bush recalled. "I was one of them. Nixon came down to Houston and helped. I was kind of awestruck. He had done so many things, and he was getting ready to run for President again. I was the new boy on the political block, and I was very appreciative for what he did."

Bush relished the scent of power when Nixon asked the younger man to campaign for him in 1968. But it gave him pause when Nixon took off on the "Ivy Leaguers," Bush being a Yalie. "It was a hang-up with him," Bush said, "but he was on to something. He was talking about those elitists of the foreign policy establishment thinking they had a corner on all knowledge and wisdom on foreign policy. He was right."

Something else was on Bush's mind as he sat last week in that front row of Presidents and their wives. In the hours of despair after Bush lost the election in 1992, one of the first letters he received was from Richard Nixon. Few could know so well those depths. "It was just a very sweet letter," remembered Bush. "Very sensitive -- very sensitive and very meaningful for me. And in his role as a former President, Nixon has been very good; never a conflict of interest."

Jimmy Carter, who without the Nixon apocalypse and pardon by Ford probably never would have been President, came quietly to the rain-soaked green below Nixon's coffin. His presence was his testimony, going beyond old denunciations and bitter assessments. Carter carries the memory of going on that presidential mission to Sadat's funeral and at first feeling uncomfortable about being on the same plane as Nixon. But they surveyed each other warily in the confines of the fuselage, then self-consciously greeted and sat down and talked genially about foreign policy. In a moment they had become sort-of friends, mellowing members of the Past Presidents club, now diminished by one.

When Bill Clinton's time came to speak at the funeral, he turned and glanced back at the tiny Nixon birth home, glossed and manicured far beyond its original luster. Then Clinton quoted the opening line of Nixon's memoirs: "I was born in a house my father built."

Clinton continued, "From those humble roots, as from so many humble beginnings in this country, grew the force of a driving dream." In his words there was an echo from his own background. Clinton and Nixon found friendship in the last year because of their shared interest in the future of Russia. But - there is also something about that high, lonely and rutted road of the presidency that evokes a mystic camaraderie among the small band of survivors. Clinton at the end quoted a hymn: "Grant that I may realize that the trifling of life creates differences, but that in the higher things we are all one." Was it the wind, or was there a catch in the voice of the 47-year-old President?