EXIT NIXON

Amidst a riotous swirl of banners and balloons Miami's cavernous Convention Hall, Richard Nixon strode to the microphones on Aug. 8, 1968, and, confident of victory in November, accepted the Republican nomination for President. It was the culmination, he said, of "an impossible dream" he had had all his life. Four years later, Nixon was renominated for what looked like--and proved to be--a push over of a campaign for a second term. On yet another Aug. 8, last week, Nixon announced his resignation, midway through his term, ruined by his own deeds. The impossible dream had been transformed into a nightmare and his fall from power was almost poetic in its stark, measured recessional.

The decision to resign had probably been reached on Tuesday, Aug. 6, and firmed up on Wednesday. During his undecided hours he appeared gray and wretched. Once the decision was made, as has happened before when he finally resolved a crisis, Nixon seemed a different man. He seemed al most "serene," one aide said.

Nixon rose early Thursday, going by himself to the Lincoln Sitting Room to ponder and plan his day. He met later with his chief of staff, General Alexander Haig, and at 11 a.m. he called in his successor, Gerald Ford, for a private talk that lasted an hour and ten minutes. "The President asked the Vice President to come over this morning for a private meeting," Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren announced to newsmen shortly before the two sat down together. "And that is all the information I have at this moment." It was information enough, however, to alert reporters that resignation, expected since Monday's devastating admission of obstructing justice, was imminent.

If further confirmation were needed, it was visible a little later on the haggard, emotion-wracked face of the usually deadpan Ron Ziegler, who, with Haig, was Nixon's closest adviser in the dying days of his Administration. "Tonight at 9 o'clock, Eastern Daylight Time," Ziegler said, struggling to hold back tears, "the President of the U.S. will address the nation on radio and television from his Oval Office."

No Precedents

Without a glance at the 150 reporters who jammed the White House briefing room, Ziegler turned on his heel and walked out. Nixon himself sat down in the Executive Office Building and, working from a draft prepared by Speechwriter Ray Price, he composed his final nationwide address, which would be the 37th speech from the White House by the 37th President.

Even as he wrote, he was frequently interrupted by the more prosaic functions of his office as the federal bureaucracy continued to move ahead with its own ponderous momentum. A $13.6 billion agricultural and environmental bill was vetoed as inflationary; legislation was signed providing cost-of-living Social Security increases; three people were nominated to be federal judges; and a new member was named to the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission.

Nixon dined early with his family, who until the night before had steadfastly opposed his quitting; now there was a feeling of glum acceptance that could really not be relieved by attempts at cheerfulness. At 7:30 p.m. Nixon left the White House for a meeting with five congressional leaders in the Executive Office Building next door. For perhaps the first time in his presidency, he asked his Secret Service men not to follow him on this the last night he would occupy the historic house and its grounds. The Secret Service men complied, but to ensure his protection nonetheless, they locked all doors to the White House for 23 minutes, leaving some 100 reporters and 200 staff members temporarily incarcerated inside, wondering what was going on.

At his meeting with congressional leaders, Nixon announced what all of them already knew--that he was resigning. "I'm sure none of you will be surprised at what I'm going to say tonight," he told them. "We can't put the country through this [impeachment]. If I had my way, I'd fight it through to the end. [But] there's much higher considerations than that." He then told them of his plans to leave for California the next day and remarked, "I don't know when I'll come back to Washington--if ever." After that he seemed at a loss for words and wondered aloud if his suit fit properly for the TV address. "It looks like I've lost weight," he complained. Finally, deciding that the suit did in fact fit properly, he made his farewells: "I'll say goodbye to you, my good and dear friends." The congressional leaders could only say, in their turn, that they were sorry. "It was kind of pitiful," one of them said afterward.

Thirty minutes later, Nixon walked slowly back to the White House for a meeting in the Cabinet Room with 46 members of Congress whom he considered his friends--among them Senators Barry Goldwater and John Stennis and Representatives George Mahon (Texas), Les Arends (Illinois) and Joe Waggonner (Louisiana). There were tears on both sides, and as he looked across the polished Cabinet table, Nixon said: "Well, this is the last meeting that I'll share in this Cabinet Room . . . I just hope you don't feel that I let you down." No one told him that he had, and as his eyes welled with tears, he disappeared through a side door.

His usual cool restraint had returned when he faced the television cameras half an hour later in the Oval Office. At Nixon's request, the crew of technicians was kept to a bare minimum; no aides, friends or family members were in the room to share his disgrace. There were no precedents at all in American history--and no exact precedents in world history, the resignation of West Germany's Chancellor Willy Brandt being perhaps the closest recent parallel--for the sort of speech that Nixon, a head of state departing under a cloud, was about to make.

The 16-minute speech (see box) was delivered with remarkable restraint, given the circumstances, and without a trace of demagoguery or self-pity. There were no attacks on his old enemies, no visible bitterness. There was also no concession of anything more serious than "mistakes" in his handling of Watergate, and no hint of remorse except one line regretting "any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision." His statement that he leaving because his "political base in the Congress" had eroded sounded as if he had been defeated in some policy issue under a parliamentary system, and the speech could have been a valedictory at the end of a long and generally successful term of office.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the first to come into the room after the speech, shaking hands with his boss and accompanying him along the West Wing Colonnade to the living quarters. Nixon then rejoined his family, who had been watching the address on television. Across the street in Lafayette park, a group of youths had been loudly chanting "Jail to the Chief." Julie Nixon Eisenhower, her husband David and Pat Nixon appeared at the window, one after the other, apparently to see what was going on. When they realized that they were being watched from below by reporters, the shades were abruptly drawn. The family had ignored all messages and phone calls, even from close friends, during most of the week, and once again they were isolated in their special grief.

If Nixon's resignation speech was dignified, it was also almost complacent and inadequate as his final official address to the people who had called him their President for 5 1/2 years. His extemporaneous farewell to the members of his own Administration Friday morning, however, was merely awkward and embarrassing, a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of self-pity and self-torment (for excerpts from this extraordinary talk, see box page 68). Gone was the dry-eyed restraint night in its place was a tearful emotionalism.

Good Plumbers

For 19 rambling minutes Nixon talked of his mother, "a saint," and his "old man," who had never amounted to much in the eyes of the world, but who was a great person nonetheless. No job is too humble, Nixon said, and the world needs good farmers, good businessmen, good plumbers, good carpenters. There was an uneasy stir in the room when he mentioned plumbers--the word for the intelligence team assigned to plug information leaks and handle illegal operations like the Watergate break-in--but Nixon seemed not to notice.

As he had the night before, he quoted Teddy Roosevelt, whose famous bulldog courage seemed to be much on his mind in his last hours, describing how the young T.R. thought his life was over after the death of his first wife. Instead, Nixon pointed out, it was only beginning, because Roosevelt, despite his sorrow, was too much of a man to quit. "The greatness comes not when things go always good for you," Nixon said pointedly, "but the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks and some disappointments, when sadness comes." Like much else in the speech, the point of his analogy was not clear when he first made it and in the end was not really appropriate, as none other than Alice Roosevelt Longworth, T.R.'s daughter, quickly noted. Her father, she said, had been a young man when his beloved Alice died, with his work ahead of him; Nixon, 61, has his own work behind him.

He emphatically claimed that "no man or no woman [in this Administration] ever profited at the public expense or the public till." A good many questions may still be asked on this score--on that very day, John Connally, his former Secretary of the Treasury, arraigned in Washington's federal court on charges of bribery and other crimes--but in any case it was largely beside the point. It has long been obvious that the real and profound corruption of the Nixon Administration consisted of the abuse of power and the violation of the Constitution rather than mere greed.

His face perspiring, his eyes red-rimmed, Nixon scarcely looked at his audience most of the time, his eyes focused down and to the side. In one stunningly incongruous and belated insight, considering that it came from a man who was brought down by his own congenital suspicion and mistrust, Nixon told his colleagues: "Always remember others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them--and then you destroy yourself."

Nixon immediately walked with his family through the applause in the East Room, out to the south lawn and into Army One, the olive-drab helicopter that the Army provides the President, which was waiting to ferry them to Andrews Air Force Base. There Air Force One, the silver-and-blue 707 that had taken him to his triumphant tours of China and the Soviet Union, was in turn waiting for the 4-hr. 44-min. flight to California. Betty and Gerald Ford walked with the Nixons down the red carpet that had been laid from the Executive Mansion out to the lawn, and the couples exchanged kisses and handshakes at the helicopter door; Nixon touched Ford's elbow, as if in final encouragement. Though Ford was not to take the oath of office for another two hours, the famous black box, the repository for the nation's military codes--an ugly talisman that signifies the transfer of power in the nuclear age--was left behind with a military aide. It was the first time it had been away from Nixon since Jan. 20, 1969, the day he had taken charge of it from Lyndon Johnson.

Air Force One was 13 miles southwest of Jefferson City, Mo.--Middle America by geographical as well as political definition--when Richard Nixon became an ex-President and a private citizen. It was the 2,027th day of his presidency--896 days short of a full two terms. Tricia Nixon Cox and her husband Edward listened to President Ford's first speech on a radio in the plane, but Nixon and Pat did not leave their separate compartments to hear it.

At El Toro Marine Base in California, a crowd of 5,000 was waiting, and Nixon's first words were "We're home!" He promised to work for peace, the legacy for which he wants to be remembered, and "for opportunity and understanding among the people here in America." Then, climbing into another waiting helicopter, Nixon sped with his family the 40 miles to San Clemente and Casa Pacifica. There, shielded from public view by the Bougainvillaea shrubs and a cement wall that had been installed for him, Richard Nixon began his exile.

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