Free One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner Page B

got out that Ruth Farkas was not coming, because she and her husband had major-league problems with the IRS,” Ambassador Hart said. “And even Richard Nixon couldn’t fix that.” Nixon’s personal lawyer and political bagman, Herbert Kalmbach, fixed things for Farkas: after she pledged three hundred thousand dollars to his ’72 reelection campaign, the president appointed her ambassador to Luxembourg, a far more luxurious post. *
    The going price rose as the reelection neared. “Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must at least give $250,000,” the president instructed Haldeman in June 1971.
    This conduct had consequences. Kalmbach later pleaded guilty to selling ambassadorships for Nixon’s benefit. He had several million dollars in unspent campaign cash on deposit in 1969, and some of that money wound up in a secret reelection fund Nixon began building shortly after he first took office. The cash helped finance an undercover private eye who worked for the White House, Jack Caulfield, who began spying on Nixon’s political enemies in July 1969—days after Nixon commanded his aides to activate “dirty tricks” against the president’s political opponents, as Haldeman’s diary records. And three years later, some of the slush funds Kalmbach controlled would serve as hush money for the Watergate burglars.
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    Contributors who wanted something for their money often were received at the “Florida White House,” in Key Biscayne, or the “Western White House,” also known as LaCasa Pacifica, in San Clemente, California. Nixon escaped to these retreats frequently for long weekends and, increasingly, for weeks on end.
    The Key Biscayne compound contained five well-appointed waterfront bungalows. Nixon flew there fifty-nine times as president, spending 198 days and nights. He passed almost as much time at San Clemente. Both of Nixon’s hideaways were built with help from C. G. “Bebe” Rebozo, a Cuban American banker, and their mutual friend Bob Abplanalp, known as the spray valve king. Both men had been Nixon’s financiers for years. Nixon liked to bend an elbow with Rebozo whenever time permitted, relaxing his mind, sometimes past the realm of reason. When Nixon really wanted to unwind, he and his drinking buddy Bebe took a helicopter from Key Biscayne to Walker’s Cay, Abplanalp’s private island in the Bahamas. What went on in the cay stayed in the cay.
    San Clemente was far more formal, an elegant ten-room mansion built in the 1920s, on a twenty-eight-acre estate with flowering gardens and a seven-hole golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It stood forty miles south of the tiny town where Nixon was raised, but light-years away from its dusty poverty.
    Nixon would reside there for a month at a time. He liked to invite world leaders and Hollywood celebrities, laying charms on conservative stars such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Governor Ronald Reagan of California, though he regarded the governor as an amiable dimwit with no political future. Nixon summoned his senior military and diplomatic officers to San Clemente, where they delivered the latest grim reports on Vietnam. He frequently ordered White House aides to fly in from Washington on a moment’s notice to confer on the crisis of the day.
    He tried to relax in his retreats, but he remained a restless man. Aides who met with Nixon in California and Florida often found him seething in self-imposed isolation. While light sparkled on the water and warm winds stirred the air, Nixon drew the blinds against the sun in Key Biscayne, and set a fireplace blazing in an air-conditioned room sealed off from the Pacific breezes in San Clemente. He sat in the shadows, communing with the only man in whom he could confide: himself.
    “He had no hobbies,” said Alexander Butterfield, a senior Nixon aide, one of only four men who knew about the president’s secret taping system at the White House, installed in February 1971. “The