NIXON: NO PLACE TO STAND

By Henry Kissinger

No modern President could have been less equipped by nature for political life. Painfully shy, Nixon dreaded meeting new people. Fearful of rejection, he constructed his relationships so that a rebuff, if it came, would seem to have originated with him. Fiercely proud, he could neither admit his dependence on approbation nor transcend it. Deeply insecure, he first acted as if fate had singled him out for rejection and then he contrived to make sure that his premonition came to pass. None of us really knew the inner man. More significant, each member of his entourage was acquainted with a slightly different Nixon subtly adjusted to the President's judgment of the aide.

The view that Nixon was the incarnation of evil is as wrong as the adulation of his more fervent admirers. What gave Nixon his driven quality was the titanic struggle among the various personalities within him. And there was never a permanent victor between his dark and sensitive sides. Now one, now another personality predominated, creating an impression of menace, of torment, of unpredictability and finally of enormous vulnerability.

This is why those of us who worked closely with Nixon developed a grudging respect and something akin to tender protectiveness for him. His aberrations grew out of a desperate conflict of discordant elements; thus he was in truth the first victim of his own unharmonious nature. We saw a Nixon who could be gentle and thoughtful; some of his most devious methods were mechanisms to avoid hurting people face to face. With all his tough-guy pretensions, he really wanted to be remembered for his idealism. He spoke often of his mother and her gentleness; he missed her dreadfully when she left him when he was quite young to take care of an older brother dying of tuberculosis.

His self-image of coolness in crisis was distorted by the dogged desperation with which he attacked his problems born out of the fatalism that in the end nothing ever worked as intended. His courage was all the more remarkable because it was not tied to a faith in ultimate success that distinguished leaders like De Gaulle or Churchill or Roosevelt.

I recoiled at some of Nixon's crudities. I resented being constantly manipulated. Yet I was deeply grateful for the opportunity he had given me to serve my country. Where outsiders saw a snarl, I saw the fear of rejection. What often appeared as deviousness was a means to preserve his options in the face of inner doubt about his own judgment. Few men so needed to be loved and were so shy about the grammar of love. Complexity was his defense, a sense of inadequacy his secret shame, until they became second nature and produced what he feared most.

During Nixon's final torment I often reflected on an event in the summer of 1970. On a Saturday afternoon the White House switchboard operator reached me at the hotel in Laguna Beach, Calif., that served as the press center. Would I like to drive with the President and Bebe Rebozo, his old friend, to Los Angeles? We could have dinner at Chasen's restaurant.

The President had his heart set on showing us his birthplace in Yorba Linda. So we set off in an unmarked Lincoln to the unprepossessing house where Nixon was born. We were walking around the outside of the house when Nixon noticed that two cars had followed us, one containing Secret Service agents, the other the press pool.

All of this was standard procedure any time the President moved. But Nixon lost his composure as I had never seen him do before or after. He insisted that all follow-up cars leave immediately. He was President and he was ordering privacy for himself. The orders were delivered at the top of his voice, an event so unprecedented that the Secret Service broke every regulation in the book and departed, followed by the press pool. The mouths of many terrorists would have watered had they known that the President of the U.S. and his National Security Adviser, between them possessing almost all the national security secrets of the country worth having, were cruising around with only a single bodyguard who had to double as a chauffeur.

When we were alone again, Nixon became more relaxed than I have ever seen him. He and I sat in the rear of the car, Rebozo in front, as we headed toward Whittier. Nixon pointed out the gasoline station his family had sold just before oil was discovered there. He showed us the hotel where a discouraged Republican Party had canvassed volunteers to run for Congress against a presumably unbeatable Democrat. This Nixon was not the convoluted, guarded, driven politician I knew, but a gentler man, simpler in expression, warmer in demeanor.

And as he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental, how easily it could have been otherwise, a theme much more apparent to Nixon than to me. For the lesson I had been drawing from what I heard was that only a man of unusual discipline and resilience could have marched the path from candidate in a hopeless congressional race to the presidency of the U.S. Clearly, this was not the way it seemed to Nixon, who that afternoon in Whittier acted as if he belonged among his simple origins in a way he never did in any of the presidential settings.

I have always thought of this car ride as one clue to the Nixon enigma. "Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth," said Archimedes. Nixon sought to move the world but lacked a firm foothold. That, I suppose, is why he was always slightly out of focus. His very real gentleness, verging on sentimentality, risked sliding into mawkishness. And his cult of the tough guy was both exaggerated and made irrelevant because it had to be wrung from essentially resistant material. Nixon accomplished much but never was certain that he had earned it.

As we headed for Los Angeles, Nixon decided that we should see where he had lived for two years, recovering his bearings after losing the 1960 presidential election. It soon emerged that Nixon had no precise idea of the location of that residence. He remembered it was in a big development in a canyon near the Beverly Hills Hotel. For well over an hour, we explored every canyon and the streets leading off them. Try as we might, we could not find the house. And soon the relaxed, almost affable, Nixon gave way to the agitated, nervous Nixon with whom I was familiar. He was at ease with his youth; he could recount his struggles; he could not find the locus of his achievements.

Nixon had set out to make himself over completely; to create a new personality as if alone among all of mankind he could overcome his destiny. But the gods exacted a fearful price for this presumption. Nixon paid, first, the price of congenital insecurity. And ultimately he learned what the Greeks had known: that the worst punishment can be having one's wishes fulfilled too completely. Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the "Establishment" as an equal.

He achieved all these objectives at the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later, partly because he had turned a dream into an obsession. On his way to success he had traveled on many roads, but he had found no place to stand, no haven, no solace, no inner peace. He never learned where his home was. -

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