Chagrined Cowboy

Ever since the secret trip to China, my own relationship with Nixon had grown complicated. Until then I had been an essentially anonymous White House assistant. But now his associates were unhappy, and not without reason, that some journalists were giving me perhaps excessive credit for the more appealing aspects of our foreign policy while blaming Nixon for the unpopular moves.

No Chief Executive would take kindly to an appointee who is cast by the media as the source of all constructive actions. This was compounded by Nixon's conviction that he faced a lifelong conspiracy of the old Establishment to destroy him. He grew increasingly convinced that I was needlessly trafficking with his enemies in the "Georgetown set" and at the same time was using my public relations skills to furbish my image and not his. Starting with the India-Pakistan crisis in 1971, the White House public relations machinery avoided few opportunities to cut me down to size.

These tendencies were given impetus by an interview I granted to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4,1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.

I paid the price for my naivete. The quotes ascribed to me, statements of marginal taste gathered together in what she presented as a conversation, were the most self-serving utterances of my entire public career. What drove Nixon up the wall was a quotation Fallaci put in my mo.uth: "Americans like the cowboy . . . who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else . . . This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique." I do not believe that I said this in that context or that it was about myself. Ms. Fallaci has consistently refused to make the tapes available to other journalists. And yet she was on to something. The "peace is at hand" press conference had had an electric effect. Coming on top of a year of successful negotiations, it was for me a moment of unusual pride not leavened by humility. Fallaci caught that mood, even if she took liberties with my pronouncements. She wrote history in the Roman style; she sought psychological, not factual, truth.

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