Free Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas

   CHAPTER 29   
“Richard! Wake Up!”
    “ I woke with a start,” Nixon recalled of his last morning in the White House. He had slept for four hours, more than usual. Shortly before 9:30 A.M. , he found his family waiting in the hallway of the Family Quarters. Pat was wearing a pale pink and white dress and dark glasses; she had barely slept in the previous two days, which she had spent packing up the family belongings. Only that morning had she begun to weep.
    The farewell ceremony with the White House staff was scheduled for 9:30 A.M . Steve Bull, Nixon’s personal aide, explained where everyone should stand in the East Room and mentioned that there would be three TV cameras. “At that news, Pat and Tricia became very upset,” Nixon recalled. “It was too much, they said, after all the agony television had caused us.” Nixon was firm. Television had saved him (the Checkers speech) and hurt him (the first Kennedy debate), but he knew that he had been one of the first politicians to exploit the power of television to reach over the “elites” to the masses. Nixon, in this moment, was thinking more about his place in history than about his family, who, he knew, would support him regardless. “That’s the way it has to be,” he said. “We owe it to our supporters. We owe it to the people.”
    Nixon was “fighting a floodtide of emotions” as he began to speak. The night before, working on his speech while his son-in-law Ed Cox retrieved his favorite books from their shelves, Nixon hadremarked that he was caught up in a “Greek tragedy,” one that had to “play out.” Nixon had been matter-of-fact, not maudlin, with Cox. 1 But standing before his staff and his followers, he did not hide his feelings. He talked, with an edge of populist resentment, about his father’s bad luck. He was sentimental about his mother (“a saint”) and then began reading from a tribute Theodore Roosevelt had written to his dead wife, Alice, which ended: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out of my life forever.” The audience was a little puzzled that Nixon chose to talk about Roosevelt’s wife and not his own wife standing behind him. In his memoirs, he explained that he couldn’t talk about his own family without breaking down. His point in his farewell remarks was that Roosevelt was only in his twenties when he thought the light had gone out of his life forever, but that he had rallied from despair. Speaking softly, with unpolished eloquence and from the heart, Nixon said of defeat:
It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain….
    Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. 2

Farewell.
    Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

To my daughters
    Louisa and Mary

Acknowledgments
    I n 1988, Nixon came to
Newsweek
magazine, where I worked, to talk to a group of editors and writers. After his talk, he came up to me and said, “Your grandfather was a great man.” I was taken aback—I had never met Nixon and I was one of thirty or forty people in the room. Not sure of what to say, I spluttered something about how he had been a good grandfather. My father’s father, Norman Thomas, had been the leader of the Socialist Party in America for many years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Nixon, in his careful, always-prepared way, must have looked at the attendance list and done some homework.
    I spent twenty-four years at
Newsweek
, the magazine then owned by the Washington Post