Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [267]
But I was wrong. Nixon bent down and opened the bottom drawer of his big desk and withdrew a copy of Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. I was fascinated to see that the drawer was full of hardcover copies of Chambers’s book. Had Nixon bought up the entire stock? I wondered. Briefly, Nixon summed up Chambers’s life for the politely bewildered Chinese. Had they heard about the Pumpkin Papers, about Alger Hiss, about the discovery of the typewriter on which Hiss committed treason? Succinctly, from long experience, Nixon filled the Chinese in on the Hiss case and Chambers’s part in it, explaining to the three Communist bureaucrats the undoing of the Communist conspiracy in the United States and the way the liberal media persecuted all those who had tried to bring the truth to light, Nixon himself not excepted. Names emerged from the dim past: Helen Gahagan Douglas, Mrs. Hiss, Joe McCarthy—a whole chunk of American history, which now seemed as remote as the Long March probably seemed to the Chinese, and during which, as could hardly have escaped their notice, their own country had been billed as one of the principal villains. The Chinese nodded amiably—no doubt they were accustomed to hearing far more unlikely glosses on the past from their leaders, and at far greater length. Besides, they were not diplomats for nothing. Han Xu showed every sign of agreement with this view of history, and after Nixon autographed a copy of Witness for him he clutched it to his bosom as if it were the Holy Grail. Would he take it home? I wondered. Would scholars in China dissect Chambers’s narrative carefully, looking for clues to understanding the United States, or to understanding Nixon? Would they puzzle over the Pumpkin Papers and write dissertations on the microfilm that marked the beginning of Richard Nixon’s rise to power?
We returned to the fireplace, where the atmosphere, fueled with stingers, was getting boisterous. Nixon, I could tell, had had enough of the Chinese by now, and they seemed to have tired of him, too. They had what they had come for—a friendly signal from Nixon, a veiled assurance that he would not call off his visit—and a signed copy of Witness besides. I took my leave with them.
Nixon walked outside with us, to shake hands. He saw the Chinese into their waiting limo, then said good night to me. He looked across the blacktop at my Porsche, studied it carefully, and said, “What the hell is that?” He then went back indoors.
I left feeling like Dorothy leaving Oz. As I drove home, around me in the night was suburban New Jersey and behind me was a kind of magic world where the past was still alive, where the Wizard was still wise and all-seeing, and where Whittaker Chambers was still an American hero. It was a testimony to Nixon’s power that he could make his world of exile seem more real than the world around him—that he could create, somehow, the illusion that he was still president, that Watergate had never happened, that the bombing of Cambodia or the shooting of the Kent State students hadn’t really mattered.
At that time, the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace had not yet opened, but I should have been able to predict what it would be like, even then, right down to the mail-order catalog offering a T-shirt showing a nervously smiling Nixon shaking hands with a befuddled and stoned-looking Elvis Presley. In fact, Nixon was his own monument, a kind of living, breathing Mount Rushmore—the