Free Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas Page A

Company, Nixon’s nemesis. By many measures, I am a creature of the East Coast media establishment. Old Nixon hands might have been suspicious of me, and I’m sure some were, but they were helpful in my research nonetheless. I told them that I wanted to get past the cartoon version of Nixon, and they trusted me enough to try to explain a highly complicated, deeply flawed, but capable and fascinating figure.
    I want to thank, first, Robert Odle, a Washington lawyer and pro bono counsel to the Nixon Foundation, who opened many doors for me. Rob and I didn’t always agree about Nixon, but he was always thoughtful in his arguments and gracious with me. I owe a debt to the many former Nixon aides and cabinet members who spoke with me:Marjorie Acker, Robert Bostock, Lucy Winchester Breathitt, Jack Brennan, Steve Bull, Jack Carley, Henry Cashen, Dwight Chapin, John Dean, Chris DeMuth, Fred Fielding, Peter Flanigan, Frank Gannon, William Gavin, David Gergen, Richard Hauser, Larry Higby, Lee Huebner, Ken Khachigian, Henry Kissinger, Egil Krogh, Melvin Laird, John Lehman, Fred Malek, Paul O’Neill, Gregg Petersmeyer, Ray Price, Jonathan Rose, Donald Rumsfeld, Don Santarelli, Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz, Stuart Spencer, Connie Stuart, William Timmons, Ron Walker, Charles Wardell, and John Whitaker.
    In particular, I want to thank Doug Hallett, who was an aide to Chuck Colson, and Jack Carley for their insights into Nixon. Frank Gannon, who helped Nixon with his memoirs and spent many hours with the man, was an invaluable resource to me.
    Edward Nixon, Nixon’s younger brother, was gracious and informative when my wife, Oscie, and I visited him at his home outside of Seattle. For reasons I understand, other members of Nixon’s immediate family chose not to speak with me, although I did receive guidance from a source close to the family who wishes to remain anonymous.
    Oscie and I had a very pleasant and interesting lunch with Jo Haldeman, Bob Haldeman’s widow, who permitted me to read her unpublished memoir. Haldeman’s full, unedited diary, available at the Nixon Library, was a crucial source. So, too, were his handwritten notes of his meetings with Nixon, also at the Library. The Nixon-Haldeman memo file is the best source on what Nixon was thinking and agitating about, particularly on personnel and media issues. For his more spontaneous reactions, his marginalia on the president’s daily news summary are revealing. Some of Nixon’s late-night musings on his yellow pads are available at the Library, as are a large cache of his school papers and much of his correspondence. His ten-thousand-page diary remains closed, though he quotes extensively from it in his memoirs. John Ehrlichman’s handwritten notes of his meetings with Nixon, at the Hoover Library at Stanford, are less complete than Haldeman’s but are also significant. My thanks toPeter Ehrlichman for talking to me about his father. Thanks, too, to Susan Eisenhower, who lived with the Nixons at the White House in the volatile spring of 1970 and gave me an interesting, empathetic insight.
    The White House tapes capture less than two and a half years of his presidency, but they are a mother lode. Since there are three thousand hours available, I needed experienced guides. The one scholar who has listened to all, or almost all, of the tapes is Luke Nichter at Texas A&M. Luke and his coauthor of
The Nixon Tapes
, Doug Brinkley, were very helpful to me. I also used John Dean’s
The Nixon Defense
and Stanley Kutler’s
Abuse of Power
—massive and crucial works on the hard-to-decipher tapes. At the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Ken Hughes has made important contributions to deciphering the mysteries of the tapes, and I am grateful to him for sitting down with me to talk through the 1968 October Surprise.
    Oscie and I spent several weeks listening to tapes at the Nixon Library, mostly digital versions of the National Archives originals. I often visited Luke