PRESS: The Nixon Finale
Powers, Thomas
THE NIXON FINALE THOMAS POWERS here's the way to prove it, the whole sordid business would open up like a septic boil. But she won't talk. She is afraid without knowing quite what she fears. She...
...There is a gotterd Smmerung spirit about his determination to fight it out if even a single senator will serve as ally...
...Or maybe it was, *What has gone wrong...
...I cannot think of any other account of a political crisis from the inside which is as factually well-documented or as humanly dense...
...thesis on the sourcing of the book, and no doubt some day someone will, but there is better evidence of its accuracy than close argument...
...Bitterly or sardonically or in amazed, sick disbelief, perhaps, but not uproariously...
...Somehow Bernstein and Woodward won the trust of men who knew Nixon, and they have not betrayed them...
...None of them has...
...It's interesting, and even illuminating (if you will accept the light as light), but it's not exactly fun to read...
...Not everyone talked, of course, but enough of them did to make the book something of a composite memoir...
...in his defenders...
...It seems to me that the book sometimes gets the facts right but the nuance wrong...
...This is not to say that everything in the book was a free gift...
...As the end approaches Nixon is sometimes frightening...
...The first critic on the scene was William Safire, with an all but apoplectic column in which he concocted a "Woodstein" quote to the effect that, "We had to make a lot of it up, but there's two million bucks in it...
...Bernstein and Woodward have not found it...
...At least that's the way I felt I don't know how Hoffman-Bernstein felt...
...When he refers to Nixon as "our meatball President" or says Nixon wants "a nuclear war every week," I'm not sure he ought to be taken as meaning just that, and only that...
...He drinks heavily and holds it badly...
...I do not insist that in every instance without exception the authors have gotten things exactly right • the very words as they were spoken but I do say an awful lot of it would have to be wildly wrong for it to make much difference to the book as a whole...
...In print they're bitter enough, but things I have heard in ordinary conversation are truly breathtaking...
...The best way to get a sense of the pain they feel is to listen to their attacks on the book...
...The chief aim of this ecumenical, tax-exempt organization "is to feed hungry children...
...Not just people who do like Nixon, but even a lot of those who don't, as well...
...But of course they do make him cry uncle...
...He can speak freely -and then of flowers, birds, the weather, as well as the events of the day only to a tape recorder or dictaphone...
...Part of their anger is compassion for Nixon...
...This is obviously not the place to reargue Vietnam, detente, the rapprochement with China, the Sinai agreements and so on, but when those arguments resume they will center on a recognizable human being, rather than the old cartoons of his friends and enemies...
...while ignoring a more legitimate charge...
...If it is painful to me, who thought Nixon should have been forced from office and was glad it happened, then how must it feel for his friends, allies and supporters to relive his defeat and humiliation in such merciless detail...
...It doesn't sound right...
...Some scenes obviously had to be reconstructed with great care from many accounts, not all of them forthcoming...
...They even make him cry, and it is not pleasant to watch...
...People don't like this book...
...Nixon might issue similar denials...
...They did not have to fight for scraps...
...How did this happen...
...He may have mimed Nixon just as they say, and he may have laughed, but the nature of his relationship with Nixon rules out the possibility of his having laughed "uproariously...
...Contributions should go to The Chol-Chol Foundation for Human Development, 4936 Loughboro Road, N.W., Washington, D.C...
...Kissinger, Edward Cox, David Eisenhower and others have issued disclaimers of varying intensity and Woodward and Bernstein have been roundly attacked for presuming to read people's thoughts, for going easy on their informants, for taking fourth-hand accounts at face value, for treating backstairs gossip as a legitimate affair of state, and in general for twisting, distorting, slanting and otherwise getting things plain wrong...
...In The Final Days something of Nixon's whole character begins to emerge, not only his fierce persistence in the lie which undid him, but the strength which brought him to the White House, and which helped him to do things, once there, that no one had expected...
...If the rest of the Watergate story had unfolded in the same way I doubt they would have made it all the way to the end, and if their reporting for The Final Days had been of that sort, the book would never have been written...
...Because Nixon's lawyers insisted he had been telling the truth, it took only a proven lie to undo him in the end...
...Whether or not, in theory, they could have known what Nixon said strikes me as less significant than the fact no one has offered an alternate account, or flatly denied theirs...
...They appeal for funds to build schools, increase food production by technical assistance and alleviate extreme poverty...
...I doubt that Bernstein or Woodward got them wrong in their notes, but it's certainly possible that their informant had garbled them slightly, or more likely in this case (since it seems that the account came from someone who heard it from Kissinger) the Bernstein-Woodward informant was passing on accurately what had been inaccurately related to him...
...There is is no other book like this about American politics, because no other reporters have gotten so close to their subject...
...It is the overwhelming impression on almost every page of people talking...
...Patrick Buchanan, for example, is described as one of Nixon's oldest and most loyal supporters...
...No doubt Woodward and Bernstein disagree...
...From the first page, with Nixon's lawyers on their way to Miami in November, 1973, to persuade the President to resign, it is clear that this time Bernstein and Woodward's informants wanted to talk...
...But in the next moment he sounds like a tearful schoolboy...
...They trust and like him...
...The Final Days is the product of prepared minds, familiar with the evidence, and of sources who knew what happened and wanted the world to know...
...Must you force his last allies to betray him by describing his final agony...
...Kissinger, for one, is certainly in a position to deny without qualification that he saw Nixon the night before his resignation, or that he tried to reassure the President his genuine achievements would not be forgotten, or that Nixon suggested they pray, or that they did pray, or that Nixon cried...
...I take their vaguer disclaimers of misemphasis as a confirmation of the central facts...
...She is timid, she is retiring, she wants someone else to talk, she wants Hoffman to get up and leave...
...20016...
...I do not think many readers will take actual pleasure in watching Nixon surrender point after point until there is nothing left and he almost wistfully hopes for death, or assassination, and even perhaps (it is hard to pin down) half-considers his own suicide...
...The true quarrel that Satire and so many others have with The Final Days does not concern its accuracy so much (although accuracy is always a safe, and even high-minded target) as its taste...
...I believe what they are telling me in a factual sense that he said and did what they claim he said and did: but I don't think they understand the man, or the nature of his relationship to Nixon...
...From beginning to end it is the story of an isolated man who refused to confide even especially...
...Someone emphasized the President's words to Woodward and Bernstein...
...To put my doubts simply, I don't think you can take what Kissinger says at face value...
...Julie will accept things from Buchanan she will refuse to hear from anyone else, and Buchanan is hardly untouched by the destruction of a man he admires for a wrong so needless...
...So far, so good...
...When he was done, they say, he "laughed uproariously...
...Must you even tell the world that in the end his family turned against him too...
...What he did was to light another cigarette, summon a little smile, and try to put the question another way...
...The early Watergate stories were all but lost in night and fog...
...After six months of it I suspect Woodward and Bernstein must have been ready for a three-week sleep cure in Zurich...
...But then Woodward and Bernstein describe an incident in which Buchanan mimes the President erasing the 181/2 minutes of incriminating tape...
...In the end I think the bitterness and doubts will fade, and The Final Days will be recognized for the astonishingly rounded portrait it is...
...AN APPEAL The Chol-Chol Foundation of Washington, D.C., "is seeking to mobilize people...
...I am making such a point of this because The Find Days has been most harshly criticized for what seems to me its strongest point, its authority as an informed history...
...I think it is safe to say that Nixon is a deeply flawed man, but until now it has not always been safe to say that there was strength and loyalty in him as well...
...Later Safire wrote a second column on the theory of reliability in quoting...
...But the book as a whole clearly comes from willing informants...
...One could write a Ph.D...
...In some profound way Nixon trusted Kissinger and I think Kissinger must have been touched by this trust, and must have returned it, and yet Woodward and Bernstein describe their relationship as all pique and ruffled feathers and spite and backbiting...
...so that all men together may strive for a better world...
...His friends are being ruined, and in general, the closer the friend, the greater his ruin...
...With one or two exceptions (which 111 go into in a minute), the book is all of a piece, with a constant theme and point of view supported by the densest sort of circumstantial detail...
...in The Final Days it is at least ten in the morning, if it is not quite high noon...
...There are lots of Kissinger stories-but he himself remains contradictory and elusive...
...My point is not to straighten them out, but to show that the book has been little challenged where it is most open to argument, while at the same time loonily criticized for what is least in doubt...
...No President ever hid himself so well...
...Perhaps he said, "How- could this have happened...
...His supporters defended without liking him, and his enemies saw only his flaws...
...the people involved wanted them to know...
...He has not slept with his wife since the early 1960s...
...What has happened...
...There's something wrong there...
...It's no big deal, but all the same I think Bernstein and Woodward got it wrong...
...By all accounts he is a mercurial man, but there must be some point at which the contradictions of his character meet...
...It was less a history, he seemed to be saying of the book, than an exhumation...
...It was interesting enough, but it's hard to see that it could do much more than raise some question whether Nixon said "What have I done...
...while beating his fist on the office carpet, or only something generally like it...
...But in any event I am satisfied that Woodward and Bernstein put the words in quotes because they honestly think that's what Nixon said...
...they were all but inundated with information, not just who said what to whom, under what circumstances, but with people's moods, thoughts, fears, resentments and loyalties...
...Larry Eagleburger might deny mat he listened into Nixon's phone call to Kissinger later that night, or that Nixon sounded drunk, or that he heard Nixon ask Kissinger not to tell anyone "that I cried and that I was not strong...
...But behind that compassion is a different sort of agitation, not anger at lies, but distress at the truth...
...Safire seemed to think better of this lame joke almost as soon as it was out but I suspect it accurately represents his true feeling, that there is something ghoulish in examining a political career so undeniably dead...
...It would be hard to exaggerate the sea change between the first Watergate stories in the summer of 1972, when it took so much work to establish the most basic facts, and The Final Days...
...The isolation of the man is stunning...
...He is hard-headed and honest, quick to see why the June 23 tape was going to be fatal and angry it had been withheld for so long, but at the same time he is almost a member of the Nixon family...
...They can beat him, but they can't make him cry uncle...
...There is something so weak, small and fearful about her you want to get up and shout and grab her by the shirt collar and whip her with imprecations until she cracks open and tells what she knows...
...For some reason critics of The Find Days have centered on its methodology just how did they find that out, anyway...
...If Woodward and Bernstein have gotten a quote or an atmospheric detail or a nuance of motive wrong here and there -and it would be amazing only if they had not it cannot alter the truth of this larger event which unfolded over a period of two years...
...In much the same way I think they have missed Kissinger...
...Nothing in the book is directly attributed but in most cases it is fairly clear where things come from...
...Can't you leave the man alone, they seem to be asking...
...Woodward and Bernstein didn't make up all those details of circumstances and mood...
...Fighting for scraps of information that way, from people who have it and hold onto it for reasons of instinct alone, is enough to wreck your equilibrium...
Vol. 103 • May 1976 • No. 10
