[Transcript]

Hey, guys! Welcome back to Hello Down There! It’s Your Friend, History!

So… It’s been a while…

I had an excuse locked and loaded when I thought I was going to post this months ago, but at this point, I dunno, man. It is what it is. So I wrote this episode a year ago. I recorded it a year ago. I’m rerecording it now. Whatever. Hi.

So today’s episode is going to be a little bit different from the previously-posted and presumably long-forgotten episodes. My original plan for this series was to go through Nixon’s life in chronological order, highlighting the moments of interest to me and the moments of interest to me only. But as I started working on what was supposed to be this episode, I realized I’d gotten a little bit ahead of myself. So instead of moving on to discuss Nixon’s comeback after his repeated electoral humiliations, I actually want to take a step back and address a question I think anyone discussing history really does have an obligation to answer, and that is: why does this matter? You know, why should you care?

And there are a lot of really good answers I could give here. You can’t understand the present if you don’t understand the past, we must learn from history or we’re doomed to repeat it, whatever. But my answer to why does this matter, why should you care about these episodes in particular is as follows: Nixon was a whole freak. Just an unbelievable weirdo on a truly inspired level. So if there’s a dry moment in one of these episodes, just think of a young Nixon encouraging undergrads to dig up and eat animal carcasses. If I take you through a long description of Senate machinations or the selection of a Supreme Court Justice, as you’re trying to keep yourself from nodding off, remember: all of this was done by Richard Nixon, the man who was described by his closest aide as “the weirdest man ever to live in the White House.” And that’s a position for which he had stiff competition. Harry Truman, for example, thought the White House was haunted by president ghosts. And maybe it was. Nixon reportedly talked to the portraits on at least one occasion, so it seems pretty likely they knew something I don’t. But the point stands.

So today’s episode is dedicated to shedding light on the very crucial issue — dare I say the most crucial issue? — of Nixon’s fucked-up personality. Let’s dive in.

Nixon was intensely neurotic, as one would expect of a man who referred unprompted to his quote “fetish about disciplining [him]self.” He complained when he was provided with a soft chair for an interview, saying, “One has to be uncomfortable to do one’s best thinking. I don’t sleep before a big decision, yet I am at my best then.” He ate the same depressing lunch nearly every day, which included “a ring of canned pineapple, a scoop of cottage cheese… and a glass of skim milk.” As president, he exercised by running in place next to his desk or, when he wanted to spice things up, bowling alone at night.

Unfortunately for pretty much everyone, his “fetish” didn’t extend to exerting discipline over the more bizarre aspects of his personality. During his presidency, he was known for nitpicking constantly. He complained about thick steaks at official dinners, hard chairs in the cabinet room, and the, as he put it, “incredibly atrocious modern art” at U.S. Embassies. During a trip overseas, he devoted some of his time to a letter complaining about the bathrooms by the National Mall back in D.C. In 1973, he derailed Henry Kissinger’s swearing-in as Secretary of State by obsessing over how Kissinger “was the first secretary since WWII who did not part [his hair].”

Martin Luther King Jr described Nixon as, and I quote, “a very personable man” with “one of the most magnetic personalities that [he had] ever encountered.” Now, King said a lot of stuff about Nixon that sounds crazy to us in retrospect, like when he wrote to a reporter that quote, “It is altogether possible that [Nixon] has no basic racial prejudice.” But there was actually a point in Nixon’s career when he was considered to be pretty good on racial issues. I have not managed to find a moment when anyone thought he was charming. Besides, apparently, civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. So.

Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, worked with Nixon so closely and subordinated his needs to Nixon’s so completely that someone who knew him said, quote, “It’s almost as if Haldeman ceased to exist when Nixon took office.”

I’m actually obsessed with this relationship in a very like, I was on fanfiction.net when I was nine sort of way, but we’re not talking about that right now.

Haldeman’s deputy was Alexander Butterfield, the aide who would reveal the existence of the Nixon tapes at the worst possible moment of the Watergate scandal. Butterfield’s job was to be the Haldeman when Haldeman proper wasn’t around, which naturally required a good deal of training. Haldeman, like any good Nixon aide, was a total freak about the process.

He advised Butterfield to not only take notes on presidential conversations as he did, but to “act and react as [he] would,” down to using yellow legal pads — never white — and always sitting to Nixon’s left during meetings. Haldeman didn’t want to introduce Butterfield to Nixon until he could find the exact right moment, fearing Nixon’s reaction to meeting someone new. Until the introduction could be facilitated, he advised Butterfield that if the president entered a room, he should just get up and walk out as quickly and quietly as possible, saying that seeing him would “spook” Nixon. In the end, Butterfield reports, the introduction happened abruptly and at a moment of high stress, and Nixon’s reaction validated Haldeman’s nerves. So I’m actually just gonna read this to you from The Last of the President’s Men by Bob Woodward because there’s simply no way I can improve upon it.

“Ah, uh, hmm, ah, ahh,” the president mumbled, clearing his throat and gesturing toward Haldeman. “Urm, urm.” His right hand went up to his mouth, covering it briefly. He seemed about to speak, glanced at Butterfield, and motioned to Haldeman. … “Urm, urm,” he said. …. Nixon again uttered some low-pitched guttural sounds that were not words. Suddenly he began to move one foot back and forth, almost pawing the carpet. ….The president seemed as if he were trying mightily to say something. He was perspiring, and no words came out, only a kind of growl. It was nothing intelligible.

On another, even more exquisitely agonizing occasion, Nixon walked into a party being held for an ally, Paul Keyes, and wilted under the pressure of the guests’ attention. Here we go.

Nixon stepped back slowly and pointed at Keyes, who was wearing a solid green blazer. “Ah, ah, ah, …uh,” he muttered. Then Nixon pointed down at the carpet, a worn, faded maroon. He spoke in a deep but barely audible voice. “Green coat…red rug… Christmas colors.” He then wheeled around and strode out of the room to the Oval Office. That was it. Butterfield would remember those six words verbatim 45 years later — “Green coat…red rug…Christmas colors.” The buzzer in Haldeman’s office sounded almost immediately. Three long blasts.

Now, I would say I think about this once a week, easy.

Nixon actually did some of his best work at parties. Bob Haldeman’s wife wrote that when he ran into her at social events, he relied on the same joke over the many years of their acquaintance. As a devout Christian Scientist, she didn’t drink, but he would without fail greet her with a reference to her fictitious alcoholism, including:
◆ Well, how’s the drinking member of the family?
◆ Don’t go overboard on your toasting tonight.
◆ Got a handle on that drinking problem yet?
and
◆ Do you like Bob Hope, too? Just remember to stay sober tonight so you can enjoy his show.

Now as regular people, we can all recognize that this is both deeply inappropriate and just wildly unfunny! But Nixon, the president, could not.

Nixon’s awkwardness, of course, wasn’t limited to strangers. In the White House, when he and his family weren’t communicating through intermediaries, they would slip notes under doors or leave them on pillows. When he wanted to discuss an interior decorating issue with his wife, he issued a memo from “The President” to “Mrs. Nixon” that said, “With regard to RN’s room, what would be most desirable is an end table like the one on the right side of the bed. …. The table which is presently in the room does not allow enough room for him to get his knees under it.” One aide described a time when Nixon was greeting White House guests, going down the line one by one, until he found himself shaking hands with and introducing himself to his own wife. Another Nixon associate was known to joke that one of his responsibilities was “briefing Nixon on how to kiss his wife.”

Nixon, as every one of his associates would gleefully tell you — and did gleefully tell historians and journalists — was not a “guy’s guy.” He was awkward, strange, and prissy, and perhaps his awareness of his image had something to do with the intense vulgarity discovered on the White House tapes when they were released. One aide described him, bizarrely, as “profane, but in a nice sort of way.” Kissinger, with whom he was apparently much more reserved despite their intense frenemy bullshit, was surprised by the Nixon he heard on the tapes. I have no doubt that he was genuinely a vulgar little creep, but I do also wonder whether he was, to some extent, putting on a performance of how he imagined men would talk to each other. He and his closest friend, Bebe Rebozo, notoriously passed their time together in mutual silence and, if one witness is to be believed, handholding.

I actually don’t really beleive that last part is true. But I’m not the one who put it in a book; Anthony Summers put it in a book. I’m just repeating it uncritically for an audience of like, five people, so I don’t feel bad about that.

John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate traitor, had the uniquely horrifying experience of discovering that speculation about his sex life had been immortalized in the National Archives via the Nixon tapes. When I read his first book, published shortly after the Watergate scandal blew up in all of their faces, I mocked him a lot for the emphasis on how he was the young, long-haired, Porsche-driving sexpot of the Nixon White House, but having read a later book, in which he (or his assistants) reviewed every available Nixon tape and discovered how they talked about him when he wasn’t around, I’m like. Fine. Brag. Do whatever you need to do to make that less unbearable.

On one occasion, Haldeman said, “Dean has become harder in the job, because he is a guy, in spite of his playboy image, [who] is very deceptive. He is a playboy, he’s got a beautiful girl who lives with him, who’s not his wife. And he changes them every once in a while. …. And he loves rock music and discotheques. Hard stuff, hard.” To which Nixon responded, “You can see that he’s a good-looking guy. Christ, in Hollywood he’d be knocking ’em down.” Brief interjection: please look up a picture of John Dean. I could provide one, but I really think it’s more satisfying if you do the work yourself. Try searching “John Dean testimony.” Typing “young John Dean” almost exclusively pulls up screen caps from Supernatural.

Their descriptions of Dean only devolved as time went on. Nixon offered, “Dean is obviously the kind of guy that likes to screw anything, that’s really what he is.” Haldeman’s evaluation of him included, “He is a character. I think he takes out all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex. I guess he just solves all of his hang-ups that way. And then he can nail all the rest of this with real finesse.”

Nixon’s playboy obsession was far from new. He had developed a close friendship with John Kennedy, notorious horndog, during their time in Congress, but their relationship shattered when they faced off in the contentious 1960 presidential election. Though the friendship didn’t last, what others described as Nixon’s “Kennedy fixation” did; he maintained an obsessive hatred of the family for the rest of his life. Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, invited Nixon to the opening of the Kennedy Center. He not only refused to attend, but, in response to the positive commentary the Center received, complained of the “orgasm over this utter architectural monstrosity.”

Despite the apparently aggressive nature of his obsession, he did have occasion to help his old friend during Kennedy’s truncated presidential term. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, Nixon reportedly called other Republicans and asked them not to attack Kennedy over the debacle, resorting to begging and even threatening when people didn’t agree to what was by any metric a strange political directive. When asked to explain, he said that Kennedy was “crushed” and needed support.

During his presidency, Nixon toured the Executive Office Building and discovered that multiple offices displayed pictures of JFK. He ordered an aide to have them all taken down, describing their existence as an “infestation.” When the aide wasn’t prompt enough, he had Haldeman send a reminder. The memo included a request for a background check on one of the offenders, and a note that Nixon had asked about it every week for a month. After finally having the photographs removed, the aide detailed his efforts in a memo called “Sanitization of the EOB.”

Rose Kennedy, who had by then seen two of her sons assassinated, personally requested that Nixon give Teddy Kennedy Secret Service protection during a campaign. Nixon seized the opportunity to place a loyal agent on Kennedy’s detail as a spy. Haldeman said that the agent had approached him on two separate occasions and “absolutely, sincerely said, ‘With what you’ve done for me and what the president’s done for me, I just want you to know if you want someone killed, if you want anything, any way, any direction…”

So that’s cool.

To close this section, here’s a little tidbit that haunts me: during his first term, Nixon’s favorite car was reportedly the one Kennedy was shot in.

Perhaps the most major misstep of the Nixon presidency, even more damning than the sloppy crimes and sloppier coverups, was his choice to install an automatic taping system that caught not only his post-Watergate scheming, but a number of offensive and vulgar statements that weakened his political support. Many believe that if the tapes hadn’t been exposed, he would have weathered the Watergate scandal and served out his full second term, hobbled but ultimately secure. Secretly recording conversations was, by then, a presidential tradition. Nixon actually had Lyndon Johnson’s taping system dismantled at the beginning of his first term, but he took up the practice during his second term. The difference between Nixon and every other president with secret tapes is that they were all smart enough to install systems that could be turned off, and Nixon was not.

His system was voice-activated, meaning it automatically picked up all conversations within range. This truly baffling decision was made for the funniest possible reason: Nixon was simply too clumsy to manage a hidden switch. His aides made multiple attempts to develop a system that could be discreetly activated, but they all failed. He tried using a voice recorder, but he would accidentally erase memos immediately after recording them. They resorted to specially commissioning a machine with no buttons other than an on/off switch, but even that was too complicated for him. His incompetence left them with one option and one option only: an automatic system that would ultimately take down his presidency.

His clumsiness, of course, wasn’t limited to flipping switches on tape recorders. One aide recalled that he couldn’t manage to pin medals on soldiers during ceremonies. On his first attempt, he tore straight through the soldier’s jacket. They specially commissioned clip-on medals just for him, but he still dropped them constantly, meaning someone had to follow along behind him and pick them up. John Dean, the turncoat I mentioned earlier, described his note-taking strategy as a “long and awkward ritual.” He would reach one hand into the opposite pocket for a piece of paper, while at the same time reaching into his other pocket with his free hand for a pen, leaving his arms crossed over his body as he searched. After what was often a long struggle, he would finally emerge triumphant and laboriously scrawl a note on paper braced against his palm while holding the pen cap in his mouth. Of course, it has to be acknowledged that the Nixon White House was composed entirely of shady mean girls — while describing these tortured proceedings, Dean made a point of noting that Nixon would put on his glasses to do this, and that these glasses surprisingly made him less ugly, the opposite of what so many romcoms would have us believe. Every description of Nixon being deeply embarrassing could easily have been exaggerated by a supporter-turned-enemy acting out a revenge fantasy motivated by anything from petty personal slights to actual jail time.

But the descriptions of Nixon’s clumsiness are so universal and so consistent that it seems reasonable to assume they’re essentially true. So I will continue:

Nixon often relied on the offer of treats as a sort of social lubricant, a strategy that is no doubt familiar to any socially awkward person. After his embarrassing loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, he became a name partner in a prominent New York law firm. While there, his whole unfortunate deal was a constant source of entertainment for the other members of the firm. He would offer cigars to people who visited his office, putting on what witnesses described as “an inadvertent comedy routine.” He would produce a cigar, which would somehow end up bouncing off his cheek and falling to the floor. After retrieving it, which one has to imagine was a graceless, scrambling effort, he would cut off the wrong end while his visitors struggled not to laugh.

During the presidency, he was able to elevate his gift-giving strategy with better souvenirs: presidential tie clasps, golf balls, and M&Ms. One staffer liked to do an impersonation of his distribution strategy. Nixon would, as Haldeman described it, “abruptly turn away, take one out of the drawer and — without looking back — thrust it toward his surprised guest, like an NBA guard handing off a ball behind his back. Then he would turn to the man and tell his standard Nixon joke that never, in my memory, drew a laugh: ‘Give this to your wife or your secretary, whichever you prefer.’”

Which I actually do think is kind of funny. My apologies to women everywhere.

After four years of this approach, an aide reported that he still needed help opening the cardboard boxes the trinkets came in. The same man was once summoned by Nixon to open a bottle of antihistamines after an extended struggle. As he obliged, he noticed bitemarks on the cap.

Nixon even went to the trouble of fabricating an entirely new gender stereotype just to cover up his klutziness. One day, he declared that he wanted to ban the soup course at state dinners, saying it would be fine because “men don’t really like soup.” The real reason was that he had spilled soup all over himself the night before.

Of course, this is only a very small selection of the weirdness Nixon inadvertently put on display throughout his decades of public life. There are entire categories of personality flaws I wasn’t able to cover in this episode, but I hope I’ve given you some sense of what an absolute catastrophe Nixon was as a person. Next time, armed with this context, we’ll dive back into the events of his life.

Sources:
◦ The Last of the President’s Men by Bob Woodward
◦ Frost/Nixon by David Frost and Bob Zelnick
◦ Nixon: The Life by John Farrell
◦ The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers
◦ In the Shadow of the White House by Jo Haldeman
◦ Blind Ambition by John Dean
◦ The Nixon Defense by John Dean
◦ The Gatekeepers by Chris Whipple
◦ The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
◦ The Ends of Power by Bob Haldeman
◦ Ike & Dick by Jeffrey Frank
◦ Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills