RICHARD NIXON: The Dark Comedian

At my first interview with Richard Nixon, in his New York office in the summer of 1985, I set my tape recorder on the table beside his armchair. He stared at the machine. “That’s one of those new tape recorders,” he said admiringly. “They’re so much better than the old tape recorders.”

“Oh yes, Mr. President. These new tape recorders don’t skip a minute.” I did not say that. I did not even think it, caught so thoroughly off guard in the fearful comedy of his presence.

Yet it occurred to me, driving toward what was now my third interview with Nixon, at his home in Saddle River, N.J. (I had been there once before at a dinner last spring), that in fact I had always thought of Nixon as a comic character, a dark and serious American comic character, like someone out of Twain. Comic in the Checkers speech. Comic in the “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” farewell following his defeat in the California gubernatorial election in 1962. In the clownish 5 o’clock shadow of the first Nixon-Kennedy television debate. In the “I am not a crook” protest. Lighting fires in the White House fireplace in the middle of summer. Kneeling with Henry Kissinger in prayer. Phone calls to Woody Hayes. Bebe Rebozo. Robert Abplanalp. Comic names, madcap circumstances. The man who exalted the “Enemies List,” vowing not to hate his haters, waving bravely from the chopper door, then flying back to California toward a town with a name that sounds like clemency.

But see: the Checkers speech effected not Nixon’s disgrace but his political rescue; and we did have Nixon to kick around some more; and if one reviews the tapes, it is easy to conclude that he actually won the TV debate with Jack Kennedy; and he was a crook. So there. With Nixon, every circumstance eventually turns out to be funnier than he is. The nation he has trod these 75 years, the framework for his antics, is itself a dark and serious comedy, simultaneously rejecting and accepting everything in its midst; a riot, a scream. Sometimes (rarely) Nixon laughs aloud. The gunshot laugh, the “Ha!” It is what Beckett designated as the risus purus: the laugh laughing at itself in the abysmal farce, in which every part is deadly ridiculous, every line as funny as a crutch.

“Why the hell did we bug the National Committee? They never know anything. If you’re going to bug anybody, you bug the McGovern headquarters!” ((Drummer does a rimshot.))

“Jackson will have his way with the platform, and the candidate will ignore the platform. That’s the way it happens.” ((Rimshot.))

“The media go on about the ‘undecided voter.’ Ha! Undecided voter. That’s bullshit. Believe me, people decide about politics early on. You take the average guy. You know? Sipping beer and eating his pretzels. He’s worrying about who he should vote for? While I’m on it, there’s another myth in politics: that the American people, in their wisdom, like to divide power. That’s why they vote for Republicans for President and Democrats for Congress. Because they want a balance of power. You think the average guy says, ‘Gee! I’m afraid of that one, so I’m going to restrain him’? Ha! That’s a political scientist talking. Know what I mean?” ((Double rimshot.))

The comedian understands the average guy. To a degree, the comedian may stand on the outside, which is where Nixon has always considered Nixon to be. But he stands outside the insiders, that’s all. Never outside the real, beer- and-pretzels Americans. “My mother was from Indiana. My father, from Ohio. I % always did well in the Midwest.” Right now, this moment, one is absolutely certain that many thousands of his countrymen would cheer him wildly from the roadsides if only they knew that it was he, Richard Nixon, seated in the back of that sedan, moving in silence every day between the Federal Plaza office building in Lower Manhattan and the large, not-quite-hidden Saddle River house.

On the way home sometimes, he tells his driver to take the route through Harlem. “I do it mainly because I want to remind myself of what it’s like. And I see those damn kids, those poor little black kids. Not to be sentimental about it, but I wonder how any of them ever make it.”

Then out of Harlem, over the George Washington Bridge, the car clapping rhythmically on the breaks in the segments of pavement and, whoosh, into the average guy’s New Jersey. FOR A FAMILY NIGHT OUT MAKE IT YOUR PLACE. THE GROUND ROUND. A restaurant billboard on the highway not far from Huffman Koos and Wild Bill’s Paramus Chrysler and the Happy Viking furniture store. Hohokus. Paramus. Mahwah. Figments of the American road show. Past the houses with the redwood decks and the fake, unclosable shutters. Houses of no color: not-green, not-yellow, not-white. The dead plunk of the coin at the EXACT CHANGE booth and onto the parkway, where high-tech factories called InSci and Timeplex crouch like bunkers near Saddle River.

Then quiet Saddle River. Lanes are named for animals. Few kids, no litter, except where crows pick at a flattened squirrel in the road. Something on every house is out of scale. The chimney is too big, or the window, or the gate. No high protective hedges here. Residents seem to want to be assured that everyone in sight has made it.

Is this where Richard Nixon belongs? No one doubts that he has made it. Phlebitis or no, he looks terrific these days: color in the cheeks, eyes alert, on top of things. About to publish his sixth book in ten years, 1999: Victory Without War, he has made Saddle River a Delphi for the nation’s politicians. They act, he broods. In the 14 years since his resignation- ouster, it is said that he has crafted a new base of power out of his expertise and cunning, a calculated rehabilitation. He laughs at the word rehabilitation as a cliche. As for the calculation, there must be a good deal of that, but Nixon could no more keep his natural ambition in check than could a beaver abstain from dam construction.

In his study (deep blue bookshelves, oriental rugs, Chinese vase, French desk), he props his feet on a large fluffy ottoman. The heels on his black loafers look new. The soles are white, clean as a whistle.

House beautiful: splashes of riches in pleasing, nondisruptive, conventional taste. Yet Nixon dissociates himself from the American upper class. He loathes that class, not for its money or education (he has both), but for something more painful. The loathing erupts like granite outcroppings in his conversation and in his new book. It emerges in contemptuous references to “America’s leadership class,” the “negativists in our great universities” and, most frequently, “the brightest and the best,” for some reason always applying the word order of the hymn and inverting David Halberstam’s book title, with ten times the scorn. With those “damn kids” in Harlem, he seems to feel a remote but genuine kinship — not to be sentimental about it. But at the mere thought of the Harrimans, the Bundys, the Kennedys, an excruciating anger enters his voice, reaching as deep into Richard Nixon as any feeling can reach, a fist in the entrails.

“Dukakis has to avoid being Mondale-ized. ((Rimshot.)) He can do it, and I’ll tell you why. You see, McGovern believed all that ((liberal)) stuff. Dukakis does not. He is simply reflecting the Massachusetts, the M.I.T., the Harvard, the Kennedy School line, and all those people, and so forth.”

What is the crime committed by all those people, and so forth? It is not as simple as their having looked down their nose at Richard Nixon. Those people do not understand Richard Nixon: “How I could be both a liberal internationalist and a conservative. You see my point?” A moment to be relished. “I remember when we went to China. Henry ((Kissinger)) says, ‘They ((liberals)) are dying because you did it.’ ” Followed by a canny aside: “Of course, Henry is sort of an expert at that. He plays that crowd pretty well.”

Even now, how that crowd gets under Nixon’s skin! Much of the reason is classic American: the man who all his life had to claw and struggle to the top, seething in the presence of, under the scrutiny of, those whose prominence and power came as easily as slipping on a coat. But there is something else here. The brightest and the best also had a kind of grace that Nixon never knew. A grace of attitude, manner, form, social badinage, perhaps created out of generations of privilege, perhaps not; the unprivileged are also often born with grace. Grace did not descend on Nixon. “I was never much of an athlete, but I follow sports, you know.” He of the contorted poses, the puckered face, the hunched-shoulder walk; he of the inability to lie and not get caught. Graceful people don’t get caught. “Everybody tapped phones, you know. It’s going on right now.”

The dark and serious comedy. The graceless, awkward, stiff, stumbling character trips about in a world occupied by natural athletes and virtuoso statesmen, though once he commanded that world. Preposterous contrasts are always good for a laugh. Alone onstage in Saddle River, the comedian raises himself to the company of heroes, soliloquizing that “it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up.” Look at history’s great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian does not; that is the purity of the comedy. But, whatever it may think, the audience does not laugh — at this or at anything he says (“That’s a new tape recorder”) — because under the still alive scorn, the still alive paranoia, lives the embodiment of resilience. Homo redivivus. Degraded, insistent, recovering Man.

To be knocked down and to have to get up, that’s the ticket. Never mind that it was he who arranged for most of his pratfalls; the getting up still elevates the comedian to something grand. Hard to believe. After all that one knows about Nixon, you would think it is impossible to feel admiration for him, much less affection, but then you realize that you are staring across the study at a man whom the citizens of your country elected to save it and to lead the world, not once but twice, nearly three times; who right now, today, senses enough about what America wants from its presidency to go on the stump and bring down the house. The remarkable display is not merely of will but of his mind. The swirling patterns of the world, the manipulating strategies his mind delights in. The Soviets, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nicaraguans, NATO; he adores the map. He would play with it still if he could. Temperamentally, he seems more the monarchist French diplomat than the Republican American, yet he understands his country in his bones, half cynically, half naively, much like Gatsby. The only thing that Nixon did not understand is Nixon. (Talk about funny!) Perhaps his resilience is a function of his intelligence: “I’m fighting getting old.” Perhaps he knows that in % the human comedy of politics, the last man onstage is the hero.

Which makes the audience part of the comedy. “Renewal,” he says at lunch. “Americans are crazy about renewal.” ((Rimshot.))

I mentioned that my second visit with Nixon occurred at a dinner last spring in Saddle River. The ground outside his house was soaked with rain, and no sooner had I entered the living room than I realized that I had tracked great clods of mud on the yellow-white carpet. Flustered, I called to the butler and asked him to do what he could with my destruction while I cleaned off my shoes in the bathroom. When I went back to the living room, scared to death, the carpet was spotless. Not a trace of a stain anywhere. The yellow glowed like sunshine. Several other guests were in the room now, chatting away raucously, as if nothing dirty had ever happened in their midst. The journalist simply stared at the place where the mud had been.

And then the President entered, smiling like a baby, and all rushed to welcome him into the room.