XPost: alt.history

On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 13:36:07 -0700 (PDT), Jeffrey Rubard <jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com> wrote:


Saturday, January 20, 1973?|?Inauguration Day

It had been “one helluva show.” The Grieg piano concerto, in
particular, had been a revelation. Van Cliburn was superb: no one
could match his virtuosity. Of course, most of the Republican high
rollers who feasted on colonial roast duckling and plantation
pineapple in their tuxedos and long dresses—“clowns,” in Richard Nixon’s estimation—“did not know what the hell was going on.” But the president had thoroughly enjoyed both the music and the political
symbolism of the evening.

His arrival at the Kennedy Center had been heralded with “ruffles and flourishes” from sixteen military trumpeters in full Ruritanian
regalia. The orchestras at each of the three inaugural concerts had
blared out “Hail to the Chief” as he entered the presidential box, as
per an “action memo” from his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Best of all, he had succeeded in “sticking it to Washington” by
excluding the dreary, politically correct National Symphony Orchestra
from the festivities. Instead, he had brought the outspokenly
conservative Eugene Ormandy down from Philadelphia to conduct the
rousing finale to a wonderful event.

The clanging church bells and simulated cannons of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were still reverberating in Nixon’s ears as he said good
night to the evening’s guest of honor, Mamie Eisenhower, at the front
door of the White House. He took the mirror-paneled elevator to the
residence on the second floor and then headed left through a
succession of grand hallways lined with books and paintings to his
private den in the far corner of the mansion. This was the Lincoln
Sitting Room, the smallest room in the White House and his personal
favorite. The cozy Victorian parlor was the place where he did his
best thinking and writing, scribbling his ideas onto yellow legal pads
to the booming strains of Victory at Sea. He settled into his plush
Louis XV–style armchair, a birthday present from his wife Pat, resting
his feet on the matching ottoman. A black-and-white print of the
Lincoln family hung on the wall above his head, next to the window,
which provided a perfect picture frame for the floodlit Washington
Monument.

Snug in his sanctuary, Nixon gazed into a crackling fire set by his
personal valet, Manuel “Manolo” Sanchez. He was still dressed in the
tuxedo he had worn to the Kennedy Center, offset by black bow tie and
gleaming presidential cuff links. His hair, dark brown with splotches
of gray, was carefully brushed back, a sartorial choice that
emphasized his receding hairline and protruding widow’s peak. His
already thick jowls had filled out even more during his first four
years in office. Combined with his darting eyes, they gave him a
tortured look, as if he were perpetually brooding over past slights
and disappointments. The upturned, slightly twisted nose, on the other
hand, suggested a bumbling American everyman, like Walter Matthau in a
goofy Hollywood comedy. Assembled together, it was a face that was
neither handsome nor ugly, distinguished nor plebeian. But it was
certainly memorable.

It was already past midnight, but the thirty-seventh president of the
United States had no desire to sleep. In less than twelve hours, at
noon, he would be appearing on the steps of the Capitol to deliver his
second inaugural address. He was still tinkering obsessively with the
text. “As I stand in this place so hallowed by history, I think of
others who have stood here before me,” read one of his last-minute
tweaks. Another note reflected his determination to scale back the
Great Society that his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had
devoted so much energy to constructing: “our goal for government—to
take less from people so that people can do more for themselves.”

Nixon read through the speech once more, fountain pen in hand, marking
the passages he wished to emphasize in dark blue ink. He underlined
some phrases and scratched in a few additions, until the text
resembled a heavily annotated sheet of music. He had issued strict
instructions that the speech not go “a word over 1200 words.” As with
so many of his peremptory commands, the order had gone unfulfilled,
largely due to his own contradictory impulses. He had planned to
emulate Abraham Lincoln—who had used just 701 words for his second
inaugural address, one of the most memorable in American history—but
there was too much he wanted to say. In the end, he had settled for a
speech of 1,800 words, still reasonably short by modern-day
presidential standards. He calculated that it would take sixteen
minutes to deliver, including applause.


As he prepared to take the oath of office for the second time, the son
of the struggling Quaker grocer had many reasons to celebrate, despite
his perpetually restless nature. He had been reelected by the largest
margin of popular votes of any president in the nearly
two-hundred-year history of the Republic. He had won the grudging
respect of the foreign policy crowd—that despised band of elitist
snobs—for the geostrategic brilliance of his opening to China. Most gratifying of all, he was on the cusp of concluding a peace agreement
with the Communist government of North Vietnam, heralding an end to a
war that had cost the lives of fifty-eight thousand Americans and
countless Vietnamese. Four years previously, in his first inaugural
address, he had described the “title of peacemaker” as “the greatest honor history can bestow.” The road to peace had been long and bloody,
but the prize was finally within his grasp. The initialing of the
peace accords was set for January 23, just three days away, in Paris.

Of course, the Nixon haters were still out in force. They had seized
on the bizarre scandal spawned by the attempted bugging of Democratic
Party headquarters in the Watergate office building back in June
1972—“a third-rate burglary attempt,” the White House spokesman Ron Ziegler had termed it—to cast a shadow over his smashing reelection
victory. There had been sensational stories in the press alleging a
link between the White House and the hapless band of Cubans caught in
the act of breaking in to the Watergate. But the trail seemed to be
petering out. The burglars were refusing to provide the names of the
mysterious higher-ups who had set the plot in motion. Important
witnesses had developed amnesia. Even The Washington Post, which had
covered the scandal most aggressively from the beginning, was running
out of leads to pursue. A special inaugural section of the newspaper
titled “The Nixon Years” did not contain a single mention of the
dreaded word “Watergate.”

Unable to sleep, and excited by the prospect of four more years in the
White House, Nixon was eager to share the moment with “the son I never had.” He lifted the receiver of the telephone on the polished mahogany
coffee table beside him and was instantly connected to an operator.

“Mr. Colson, please.”

The political operative known around Washington for his boast that “I
would walk over my own grandmother” to ensure Nixon’s reelection came
on the line less than a minute later, at 1:04 a.m.

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.” Despite the late hour, Chuck Colson managed
to sound chipper and eager to please. He had evidently been waiting
for the call.

“Well, how’d you like the evening?”

Nixon cut off his aide before he could answer the question. He wanted
Colson to know that he had practiced the Grieg piano piece as a
sophomore in high school, back in California, at a time when he had
been “quite advanced in music.” He had never heard it performed
better. In the hands of a less skillful conductor, the orchestra could
easily have overwhelmed the piano. But Ormandy was superb. He was a
fantastic musician and a fantastic man. Word had reached the president
that the Hungarian-born maestro had told dissident members of his orchestra—“goddamn left-wingers”—to go to hell when they asked to be excused from the concert as a protest against the Vietnam War.

“Marvelous, that’s marvelous,” enthused Colson.

Formally, Colson had the title of special counsel, but this concealed
his true function in the White House, which was to serve as Nixon’s
chief political adviser and confidant. The self-described “hatchet
man” was accustomed to such late-night calls, which he considered a
form of “handholding.” One of his responsibilities was to help Nixon
deal with his chronic insomnia and talk himself to sleep. A few months
earlier, he had received a 1:00 a.m. call from Camp David, the
president’s weekend retreat. Nixon had just returned from Moscow. It
was obvious he had been drinking, in addition to taking sleeping pills
to fight jet lag. He slurred his words so badly that he was
practically incomprehensible. In the middle of the telephone
conversation, he passed out. Worried that the president might have
injured himself or could even be dead, Colson tried desperately to get
back through to Camp David. He could not make a call on his own phone,
because the party on the other end—Nixon—had not hung up. Rushing out
into the night, he woke up a neighbor and managed to reach Manolo
Sanchez, who went to investigate. After a few minutes, the valet
reported back: the commander in chief was snoring peacefully.

This time, Colson had no difficulty understanding his boss. Both men
viewed the inaugural festivities as an opportunity to promote a new conservative majority in the country that had cleaved off great chunks
of the old Democratic coalition. They had already made inroads into
the Democratic power base in the Old South by appealing to white
voters alarmed by the gains of the civil rights movement. Colson had
now set his sights on the labor unions, allied traditionally with the Democrats. He wanted to bring pro-Nixon union leaders to the front of
the presidential reviewing stand on Pennsylvania Avenue one by one so
they could stand alongside the president as he took the salute at the
parade. It would be a visible demonstration of a seismic shift in
American politics. Soon, the Democrats would be left with just the
blacks, the poor, the intellectuals, and a “lavender shirt mob”
composed of “homos and queers.”

Nixon could see the value of giving the defectors their moment in
front of the television cameras. Those two and a half hours on the
reviewing stand could be mined for “a hell of a lot of gold.” But he
was worried about being caught chatting with a supporter when he
should be saluting the flags carried aloft by the marching bands.

“You see, I’ve got to stop every two minutes to put my hand on my
heart as the flag goes by,” he reminded Colson, his deep baritone
voice tinged with irritation. He wanted to make sure that actual
conversation was kept to a minimum. Wives must definitely be excluded.

Colson reassured him. “We won’t do too much of it, but I think a
little bit of it would be a nice touch?.?.?.??I believe that the New
Majority is there, Mr. President. I really do.”

The conversation turned to Nixon’s controversial decision to launch a
massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam over Christmas. For
eleven tension-filled days, waves of American B-52s supported by
thousands of tactical aircraft had pounded North Vietnamese ports and
airfields and power plants, as well as air defenses around Hanoi. The
North Vietnamese had earlier agreed to release all American prisoners
of war and permit the anti-Communist South Vietnamese leader, Nguyen
Van Thieu, to remain at least temporarily in office. They refused to
make further substantive concessions but did allow some token
modifications to the peace agreement that were sufficient for Nixon to
claim he had achieved his goal of negotiating a “peace with honor.”
His toughness had been vindicated. The huge sacrifices of the last
four years, including a further twenty-one thousand American lives,
had been justified. That, at least, was how Nixon saw it.

It had not been easy. Even his national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger, had wavered toward the end beneath a firestorm of criticism
of the bombing from Congress and the media. Had Nixon given in to the
critics, “the goddamn war” would have continued for months if not
years, and thousands more Americans would have been killed. There was
one outstanding problem: that “son of a bitch Thieu” was threatening
to boycott the signing ceremony in Paris because he mistrusted
Communist promises of an end to hostilities. But Nixon believed that
his South Vietnamese ally would cave when threatened with a cutoff in
American aid. Thieu was not about to “commit suicide.”

“We go ahead and make our deal,” he told Colson. “We sink Thieu and everybody says, ‘Thank God [Nixon] was a tough son of a bitch on both sides.’ The hell with them.”

“That’s right,” Colson chimed in. “We accomplished our objectives.”

Once “peace with honor” was achieved, Nixon continued, it would be Colson’s job to stick it to the antiwar people, both on Capitol Hill
and in the country. “We just pour it right to ’em.”

It was the kind of assignment the hatchet man relished. A bespectacled
former marine captain with a mischievous grin, Colson shared the
president’s disdain for the “East Coast elite,” even though he was himself the product of a top New England prep school. He liked to
boast that he had turned down a full scholarship to Harvard, choosing
instead to attend slightly less prestigious Brown University, where he
became a champion debater and leader of the Young Republicans. He was
proud of his reputation for political ruthlessness, summed up by the
Teddy Roosevelt quotation he kept in the den of his house: “When
you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” The president knew he could rely on Colson to carry out his orders without question—unlike some other aides, who would prevaricate when asked to
do something that seemed impractical or illegal. He had put Colson in
charge of “dirty tricks,” such as tracking down photographs of Edward Kennedy dancing with starlets or harassing the leakers of secret
government documents. He praised his forty-two-year-old assistant for
having “the balls of a brass monkey.” For Nixon, Colson was “Mr. Can-Do.”

Although the hour was late, Nixon wanted to give his most appreciative
audience a preview of his inaugural address. He flicked through the
large-font, double-spaced copy he had been marking up and began
reading his favorite portions aloud.

“The stuff on the world is good. I mean, it’s very strong,” the
president enthused. “The time has passed when America will make every
other nation’s conflict our own or make other nations’ future our responsibility or presume to tell the people of other nations how to
manage their own affairs?.?.?.??Get the point?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Abroad and at home, the time has come to turn away from the
condescending policies of paternalism, of Washington knows best.”

“Oh, great.”
Excerpted from King Richard by Michael Dobbs. Copyright © 2021 by
Michael Dobbs. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.

(Reformatted for legibility)

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