Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [260]
That, of course, was to underrate the spirit of realism that governed Nixon’s decisions, as I was shortly to discover.
CHAPTER 31
I like to think that I’m inured to famous people, having grown up in a family full of them. Still, no one is completely immune to a certain kind of celebrity—not even celebrities themselves. The only time I ever saw de Gaulle close up, I had to keep pinching myself to be convinced that it really was the general. I felt the kind of awe that one is supposed to experience at one’s first sight of the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal. All the same, he was just as I had expected him to be—immense, remote, austere.
Nixon was different. First of all, he had always fascinated me—as he did almost everybody—in a strange and inexplicable way. Far from being remote, like de Gaulle, whose memoirs I had published, Nixon was a familiar presence for so long that he seemed like a member of the family. Way back in the fifties, I remember, dinner parties were ruined by arguments when the subject of Nixon came up. Then, too, his triumphs and tragedies, his repeated rise and fall, his reputation for odd behavior, the contrast between his noble rhetoric and the public moments of mean-spiritedness, and, above all, his apparent view of himself as a kind of latter-day Prometheus, and the echo of failed greatness surrounding his political life always made him the most authentically Shakespearean of American presidents.
“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” he told the press bitterly after his defeat in the California gubernatorial election of 1962, but he was wrong: We always had Richard Nixon to kick around—even in exile and apparent disgrace (it was never perceived that way by Nixon), he remained part of our national consciousness, controversial even in forced retirement from the political scene.
I first met Nixon in the early 1980s at a luncheon at his town house in New York. The reason for my invitation was that I was Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s editor—encouraged by Irving Lazar, she had written a book on famous people she had known who had “made a difference”—and she felt that it would be appropriate to introduce me to her parents. Lazar had sent me off to meet Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, in Washington, where they had an apartment at the Watergate, by some strange coincidence. Julie and I had bonded immediately. It was one of those August days when the heat in Washington is unbearable, and the air-conditioning in the Watergate was strained, so that sitting in the Eisenhowers’ sunny living room was like being in a sauna with one’s clothes on. When David appeared, he was wearing a three-piece suit made of some kind of heavy tweed, rather like a Brillo pad, and sweat was pouring down his face. Fearing that he might collapse from heat prostration, I took the liberty of suggesting that he might want to take off his jacket and vest, or perhaps even change into a lighter suit. But that, Julie explained, was impossible. David’s grandfather, President Eisenhower, had left David all his clothes in his will, and David felt obliged to wear them, once they had been altered to fit him. Apparently, Ike had not owned any summer-weight suits, or perhaps they simply hadn’t reached David yet, but in the meantime he saw it as his duty to wear his grandfather’s clothes. Naturally, it would be something along the lines of lèse-majesté for him to remove the presidential jacket and vest and sit in his shirtsleeves, so he gamely continued to sweat in the sweltering heat, out of respect for Ike.
Nixon, who would surely have approved of his son-in-law’s behavior, was at the time in what amounted to exile in New York and beginning to build up his reputation as an elder statesman, foreign-policy guru, and political wise man in the long aftermath of his resignation. People reported sighting him from time to time at this restaurant