Being Nixon

Metadata

He was an introvert in an extrovert’s business; incredibly, he was also one of the most successful politicians in American history. — 113

Nixon’s dramatic debut was a crisis, but for Richard Nixon, crisis was already normal—to be expected; endured; even, as time went on, welcomed. Defeat was what one overcame; rejection was to be reversed, if not avenged. — 178

Nixon was smarter, more intellectual, more open to ideas than almost any president who had come before him, including the ones who had gone to Harvard. — 211

“Can you imagine,” asked Henry Kissinger, “what this man would have been like if somebody had loved him?”26 — 285

Angelus Temple—L.A.’s first megachurch—to accept Salvation. — 322

thirteen-year-old Nixon, avid consumer of newspapers, it was an early lesson in the murkiness and malleability of truth. — 329

There is the insecure Nixon who never got over the social slights of his youth; then there is the resilient Nixon who rose above the snobs and shaped his own persona. Both are the real Nixon: He used anxiety to create strength, but a brittle strength. — 337

“We were officially dedicated,” Nixon recalled, “to what we called the Four B’s: Beans, Brawn, Brain, and Bowels. — 349

All his life, Nixon was drawn to the sunshine. He was fair-skinned and burned easily, but he liked to walk the beach for hours at a time or to stare out at the sunset. — 578

One must always be keyed up for battle but he must not be jittery. He is jittery only when he worries about the natural symptoms of stress. He is keyed up when he recognizes those symptoms for what they are—the physical evidences that the mind, emotions, and body are ready for action. — 1006

He recalled a quote from Lincoln that “God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them. — 1462

“It has been my experience that, more often than not, ‘taking a break’ is actually an escape from the tough, grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance….Sleepless nights, to the extent the body can take them, can stimulate creative mental activity.” He added, revealingly, “For me, it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at — 1480

To Richard You have gone far and we are proud of you always—I know that you will keep your relationship with your maker as it should be for after all that, as you must know, is the most important thing in this life. With love, Mother. — 1587

he liked to point out that when Frederick the Great wanted to punish a German province, he appointed a professor as governor. — 2661

The Will to Live, by Arnold Hutschnecker, — 2785

“He was to me that rare species, the uncommon man,” Haldeman told Jonathan Aitken. — 2864

Kissinger would come to understand that Nixon was often elliptical in his speech. “I learned that to Nixon words were like billiard balls; what mattered was not the initial impact but the carom,” he wrote. — 3474

By “people person,” Rumsfeld meant that Nixon was “interested in horse flesh.” He was a great talent scout for up-and-coming politicians and statesmen. “He spotted them, mentored them, — 3487

Klemens von Metternich, — 3496

Another nineteenth-century statesman whom Kissinger admired was Prince Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck’s genius, Kissinger saw from close study, was the ability to deal with contending forces “by manipulating their antagonisms. — 3518

Nixon liked Dr. Peale’s sermons, which discouraged self-examination of one’s flaws and weaknesses as a trap set by trendy psychiatrists. — 3542

“Decentralization is not an excuse for inaction but a key to action,” he scrawled on a memo from Moynihan.21 — 3800

Nixon was never going to reconcile the man he wished to be with the man he feared he was. — 4524

“I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.” — 6635