Another Life (75 page)

At first, nothing caught my eye. Most of the rooms had a certain formal, unlived-in quality, rather like an expensive hotel suite or, more to the point, the White House. The unlived-in feeling apparently extended to Nixon: He didn’t seem familiar with the layout of the house himself. At one point, he opened a closet door, apparently thinking that it was the door to his study, then slammed it shut hastily, with a muttered oath. Like people lost in a museum, we circled aimlessly, it seemed to me, for some time, searching for a particular piece of art he wanted to show his guests, until he finally said, “Here it is!”—as if somebody had moved it, which was unlikely, since it was fastened elaborately to the wall, with a plaque underneath. As it happened, the piece was undoubtedly worth finding—a magnificent silk tapestry of a cat playing, a gift from Mao to Nixon. The Chinese seemed to me more interested in the plaque, on which Mao’s name appeared, than in the tapestry itself.

Nixon did not seem particularly interested in his collection. Perhaps he had shown it to visitors too many times before: the screen from the Japanese government, the Philippine folk art from President Marcos, the endless ceremonial gifts that are among the perks of being a head of state. With considerably more animation, Nixon flung open the door of his study—lucky on the second try—and ushered us in. “This,” he said solemnly in the third person, “is where Nixon works.”

The Chinese assumed a reverential expression—one they had perfected, presumably, for the display of any of Mao’s artifacts. All the same, it was difficult to imagine any work being done in this unused room: It had something of the quality of a stage set furnished with expensive new props. No doubt Nixon was a clean-desk man, but this particular desk, shoved uncomfortably into a corner, showed no sign at all of use. There was not a paper in sight, and the desktop, like everything else in the room, was polished, spotless, and apparently brand-new. The desk chair showed no signs that Nixon had ever sat in it. “This is the desk at which Nixon wrote all his books,” Nixon said. He patted its shiny leather top affectionately, as if it were a horse.

I looked around the room, searching for a single sign of Nixon’s occupancy, for a single personal possession. There was none to be seen. We stood uncomfortably around the empty desk, and then Nixon told Han Xu that he wanted him to have a souvenir of this visit—something that would convey some part of the American spirit. There was a man
in the forties and fifties, he said, whom Nixon had always respected as a true patriot—a prophet without honor in his own country, a man who had made great sacrifices for the truth and had been martyred for his pains but had lived long enough to play an important part in Nixon’s own career. That man wrote a book, Nixon continued, one of the most important books of the twentieth century, a book that every American ought to read, and not just Americans, either, for his message was universal.

We stood around Nixon, spellbound by his emotion, for he was speaking, it was apparent, from the heart, and his eyes, normally piercing, were humid. I racked my brain trying to think who this great American might be. Eisenhower seemed all wrong, and anyway I knew that the Nixons harbored a certain resentment toward Ike and Mamie, who seldom, if ever, invited them to a private dinner, just the four of them, during the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency. John Foster Dulles crossed my mind, but it seemed unlikely that his views on China would commend themselves to Han Xu. Then it came to me. Of course! Nixon was talking about J. Edgar Hoover. Probably nobody had been a more loyal Nixon booster than Hoover, from the very beginning of the young congressman’s career, and Nixon, during his presidency, had once paid Hoover the supreme compliment of accepting an invitation to dinner in Hoover’s house, with the smoked mirrors, the overstuffed easy chairs in which Hoover and Clyde Tolson used to sit companionably in the evenings watching television game shows while eating their dinners off TV trays. “Remind me never to do this again,” Nixon was reported to have whispered to John Ehrlichman as they made an early departure from Hoover’s dinner party. Yet there was no doubt that Nixon owed Hoover a lot.

But I was wrong. Nixon bent down and opened the bottom drawer of his big desk and withdrew a copy of Whittaker Chambers’s
Witness
. I was fascinated to see that the drawer was full of hardcover copies of Chambers’s book. Had Nixon bought up the entire stock? I wondered. Briefly, Nixon summed up Chambers’s life for the politely bewildered Chinese. Had they heard about the Pumpkin Papers, about Alger Hiss, about the discovery of the typewriter on which Hiss committed treason? Succinctly, from long experience, Nixon filled the Chinese in on the Hiss case and Chambers’s part in it, explaining to the three Communist bureaucrats the undoing of the Communist conspiracy in the United States and the way the liberal media persecuted all those who
had tried to bring the truth to light, Nixon himself not excepted. Names emerged from the dim past: Helen Gahagan Douglas, Mrs. Hiss, Joe McCarthy—a whole chunk of American history, which now seemed as remote as the Long March probably seemed to the Chinese, and during which, as could hardly have escaped their notice, their own country had been billed as one of the principal villains. The Chinese nodded amiably—no doubt they were accustomed to hearing far more unlikely glosses on the past from their leaders, and at far greater length. Besides, they were not diplomats for nothing. Han Xu showed every sign of agreement with this view of history, and after Nixon autographed a copy of
Witness
for him he clutched it to his bosom as if it were the Holy Grail. Would he take it home? I wondered. Would scholars in China dissect Chambers’s narrative carefully, looking for clues to understanding the United States, or to understanding Nixon? Would they puzzle over the Pumpkin Papers and write dissertations on the microfilm that marked the beginning of Richard Nixon’s rise to power?

We returned to the fireplace, where the atmosphere, fueled with stingers, was getting boisterous. Nixon, I could tell, had had enough of the Chinese by now, and they seemed to have tired of him, too. They had what they had come for—a friendly signal from Nixon, a veiled assurance that he would not call off his visit—and a signed copy of
Witness
besides. I took my leave with them.

Nixon walked outside with us, to shake hands. He saw the Chinese into their waiting limo, then said good night to me. He looked across the blacktop at my Porsche, studied it carefully, and said, “What the hell is
that?
” He then went back indoors.

I left feeling like Dorothy leaving Oz. As I drove home, around me in the night was suburban New Jersey and behind me was a kind of magic world where the past was still alive, where the Wizard was still wise and all-seeing, and where Whittaker Chambers was still an American hero. It was a testimony to Nixon’s power that he could make
his
world of exile seem more real than the world around him—that he could create, somehow, the illusion that he was still president, that Watergate had never happened, that the bombing of Cambodia or the shooting of the Kent State students hadn’t really mattered.

At that time, the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace had not yet opened, but I should have been able to predict what it would be like, even then, right down to the mail-order catalog offering a T-shirt showing a nervously smiling Nixon shaking hands with a befuddled and stoned-looking
Elvis Presley. In fact, Nixon was his own monument, a kind of living, breathing Mount Rushmore—the one American president of this century about whom it is absolutely impossible to be indifferent.

I
DOUBT
whether any publisher has ever grown rich from books written by presidents. We did a good deal better with Nixon than we had done with Jimmy Carter, however, whose speeches I had published in a volume called
A Government as Good as Its People
. Patrick Anderson, a friend of Larry McMurtry’s, then speech writing for “the Governor,” as those who were close to Carter called him even in the White House, persuaded me to come down to Washington to discuss a book of Carter’s speeches. When I got there, I was mildly surprised to note that everybody had a glass bowl full of peanuts on his or her desk, including Anderson. Our discussion about the speeches was so quick that it was over before it started, which I didn’t mind a bit. What I
did
mind, as I told Anderson later, was that I never received a set of presidential cuff links.

In the Nixon era it was impossible to get anywhere
near
the president without being presented with a pair of cuff links enameled with the presidential seal, and I had admired them on many people’s cuffs, including those of Henry Kissinger. Indeed, in Nixon’s time, a whole drawer of the president’s desk was reserved for such small mementos, and he passed them out to everybody who entered the Oval Office, as did his aides. Once, when a group of rabbis came by to ask for more support for Israel and were presented, each of them, with a box of cuff links, the last rabbi to leave the room, overcome by curiosity, opened his box and peeked inside, just before reaching the door. He stopped, turned around, and said to Nixon, “Mr. President, I hope your promises about Israel mean more than this present. My box is empty.”
^*

When Anderson asked me how I had enjoyed my visit to the White House, I told him that I was disappointed not to have received the traditional cuff links. Anderson replied, with some embarrassment, that the
president and Mrs. Carter felt that kind of gift giving had been overdone in previous administrations—in short, it was tacky.

I thought that very strange. The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter?

Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (“
A Goverment as Good as it’s People
”). I had it framed and treasured it for many years, until somebody stole it off my wall, together with an angry letter from Lyndon Johnson about a book I had published that was critical of him.

I was therefore not as excited as Dick Snyder expected me to be when I heard that he was going after Ronald Reagan’s memoirs. As it turned out, the book was to usher in the era of huge advances for ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies that was to make Harry Evans famous at Random House and eventually help to bring his career there—as well as the era—to an end. Oddly enough, we at S&S learned our lesson sooner than anybody else, since even dedicated Republicans who had contributed hundred of thousands of dollars to the president’s campaign chests could not be persuaded to buy the signed edition of the speeches or the autobiography, and the general public, which had twice voted Reagan into office, completely ignored his books. In short, it was a disaster, which we attributed at the time to the fact that too much time had elapsed between his departure from office and the publication of the books. It can be explained more simply by the possibility that while the public had a good deal of affection for the president, they had no curiosity to know more about him and were smart enough to guess that they wouldn’t find out anything new from his book anyway.

U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT
was the last president in American history who actually sat down on his front porch with a pad of paper and wrote his own book—under difficult circumstances, too, since he was writing
against the clock, dying of throat cancer and in great pain. Since then, however, books by presidents have been largely ghostwritten, sometimes completely, as in the cases of Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, sometimes with the more or less active participation of the president in the process. Nixon did a good deal of his writing himself but was aided by a staff of people who did research for him and drafted whole sections of manuscript that Nixon then rewrote and revised. This is a perfectly respectable approach to writing a memoir—Winston Churchill employed a large staff of people to feed him research and first drafts, but there is no question that the final draft sounded like Churchill, much as Nixon’s final drafts sounded a lot like Nixon (minus the profanity). Johnson’s prose, in contrast, had the unmistakable flatness of a ghosted product, and no president was ever more removed from his book than was Reagan.

The Reagan book had, as they say, a “history,” which partly explained how it came into our hands. In June 1977, Bill Adler, a book packager and agent who specialized in celebrity authors and who was briefly testing the limits of conflict of interest by working at S&S as an editor at the same time, had signed up Reagan to do a book on politics in Hollywood in the 1950s—the blacklisting and the witch-hunt in the movie business in the McCarthy years as seen from the side of one of the chief witch-hunters, so to speak. Adler’s enthusiasm was not contagious. Most of the staff of S&S thought of Reagan as a West Coast right-wing extremist, and dreaded having to publish the book. This, as it turned out, need have concerned no one, since it was never written. The advance was modest, but so long as S&S refused to accept the money back, Reagan owed S&S a book, which he cheerfully acknowledged. At one point, in 1987, Irving Lazar, who as an old friend and neighbor of the Reagans considered himself entitled to be the president’s agent, wrote to Nancy Reagan offering to sell the president’s memoirs to S&S, despite the fact that to all intents we already owned them, and had his knuckles firmly rapped by her—she not only said no, she told him to refrain from even discussing the possibility with S&S or anyone else.

Thus Dick Snyder was in the position of having an option on the president’s memoirs, as Reagan’s second term drew to an end, and made a deal that satisfied everybody. Reagan was to receive, after he left office, what was certainly the largest advance ever paid to an author to
date, and S&S was to get what Dick would call in his press release announcing the deal, “the book of the century.”