Nixon Visits the Lincoln Memorial
The other night as I was watching a documentary about Richard Nixon entitled Nixon: A Presidency Revealed (from the History Channel) I was reminded of this bizarre episode from the life of Richard Milhous Nixon.
As the Vietnam war was raging on and protestors were blaming him for failing to end the war, Nixon wasn't sleeping well. According to the narrator of the documentary, he had been up for about 48 hours when, in the early morning hours of May 9, 1970, Nixon, with his White House valet in tow, decided to made an impromptu visit to the Lincoln Memorial. The secret service agents were told to bring the White House limo around and Lincoln was off to the Lincoln Memorial in order for him to engage in a rambling dialogue with student protestors who were maintaining a 24 hour protest vigil there.
The incident took place at a tumultuous time in the Nixon presidency, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia and the resulting explosion of outrage on college campuses, leading to the killing of four student protesters at Kent State University on May 4. Nixon's erratic behavior during the Lincoln Memorial visit had his closest aides wondering if the president was losing it. Nixon's Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman wrote in his diary hours after the Lincoln Memorial visit, "I am concerned about his condition," and note that Nixon's behavior that morning constituted "the weirdest day so far."
In November of last year the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum opened formerly restricted materials from five Watergate-related transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes, plus a series of presidential dictabelts. Five of the dictabelt recordings feature Nixon dictating a memo to Haldeman that offers his version of the Lincoln Memorial incident. Details of Haldeman memo had been disclosed before, but this was the first time that the public has heard Nixon recount the event in his own voice.
Nixon begins his memo by instructing that his recollections of the Lincoln Memorial trip be distributed "on a very limited basis" to close aides and "anyone else who may have raised questions." Details of the visit had already begun appearing in the press, describing an exhausted and overwhelmed president engaging students in nonsensical banter. Nixon was incensed at the suggestion that he was talking nonsense. He said in the recording: "Even when I'm tired, I do not talk about nonsensical things." Nixon said that the dialogue with the students was an attempt "to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander."
Nixon said that after finishing a press conference at 10 p.m. on May 8 during which he faced tough questions about his decision to invade Cambodia and the campus protests it provoked, he then fielded about 20 telephone calls "from VIPs," went to bed at 2:15 a.m. and "slept soundly" until shortly after 4 a.m.
Although he doesn't mention it on the tape, Nixon made an unsolicited call to NBC reporter Nancy Dickerson at about 1 a.m. When Dickerson answered the phone, awakened from a sound sleep, Nixon's first words were, "this is Dick." It took Dickerson a moment to realize who Dick was. In a brief, rambling conversation, Nixon complained about the way the previous night's press conference had gone and then asked Dickerson if she was attending White House church service that weekend. When Dickerson replied that she hadn't been invited, Nixon replied "oh, I can take care of that."
Author Anthony Summers writes in his book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon that Dickerson later commented to her husband, "that man has not been drinking, but I would feel better if he had been."
Nixon say in the tape that he woke up shortly after 4 a.m., went into the Lincoln sitting room, and began listening to a record of Eugene Ormandy conducting a Rachmaninoff piece. (Apparently many of the tapes of Nixon phone conversations feature classical music blaring in the background at rock volume.) The loud music awakened White House valet Manolo Sanchez, and as Nixon looked out the window at a small knot of people gathering outside on the National Mall, he asked his valet if he had had ever been to the Lincoln Memorial at night. When Sanchez replied no, Nixon impulsively told him, "Get your clothes on, we'll go down to the Lincoln Memorial!"
"I've never seen the Secret Service quite so petrified with apprehension," Nixon recounts, and indeed, the spur-of-the-moment decision to visit the Lincoln Memorial in the middle of the night was unprecedented, much less for a president under siege for his unpopular policies.
Nixon and his valet, along with senior White House doctor Walter Robert Tkach and a team of Secret Service agents piled into the presidential limousine and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. When they arrived there, Nixon and Sanchez walked up the steps to the chamber containing the imposing 19-foot high statute of the sitting Lincoln. Nixon pointed out to Sanchez the carved inscriptions of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and his Gettysburg Address. A handful of students had noticed Nixon and walked up to him. A few shook his hand. "They were not unfriendly," according to Nixon. "As a matter of fact, they seemed somewhat overawed and of course quite surprised. To get the conversation going, I asked how old they were, what they were studying, the usual questions." When several of the students said they attended Syracuse University, Nixon commented on how good the school's football team was.
Far from being favourably impressed, the students thought that Nixon's line of questioning was downright bizarre. One of the students later said in an interview": "I hope it was because he was tired but most of what he was saying was absurd. Here we had come from a university that's completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team."
Another student told the media, "He didn't look anyone in the eyes. He was mumbling. When people asked him to speak up he would boom one word and no more. As far as sentence structure, there was none."
Nixon's account, not surprisingly, paints a very different picture. When the discussion turned to Vietnam, Nixon says he told the students, "I hope that your hatred of the war, which I could well understand, would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country and everything that it stood for. I said that I know probably most of you think I'm an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel." Nixon says he then "tried to move the conversation into areas where I could draw them out," encouraging the students to see different parts of the United States and the world. "You must travel when you're young," he told them. "If you wait until you can afford it, you will be too old to enjoy it." Prague and Warsaw had beautiful architecture, Nixon said, but Europe is "really an older version of America. The place that I felt that they would particularly enjoy visiting would be Asia." Nixon added he hoped that during his administration, or at least in the students' lifetime, mainland China would be opened up.
Eventually, one of the students had enough of Nixon's rambling travelogue. "We're not interested in what Prague looks like," the student told Nixon. "We're interested in what kind of life we build in the United States." Nixon replied, "The whole purpose of my discussing Prague and other places was not to discuss the city, but the people."
Nixon says he told the students, "Ending the war and cleaning up the city streets and the air and the water was not going to solve the spiritual hunger which all of us have, which of course has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time."
By this time, the small crowd of students had swelled to about 30. One of them challenged Nixon, saying, "I hope you realize that we're willing to die for what we believe in." Nixon replied, "I certainly realize that. Many of us when we were your age were also willing to die for what we believe in and are willing to do so today. The point is, we are trying to build a world in which you will not have to die for what you believe in."
The talk turned briefly to fighting pollution and Nixon made this odd comment: "You must remember that something that is completely clean can also be completely sterile, without spirit."
The swelling crowd around Nixon and the sharpness of the debate made Nixon's already nervous Secret Service agents even more on edge. According to Nixon, "I realized the Secret Service was becoming more and more concerned as they saw the crowd begin to mount and probably feared that some of the more active leaders would get word of my visit and descend upon us." In an attempt to get Nixon to leave, Secret Service agents several times passed word that a telephone call was waiting for him in the car, but each time, Nixon says he told them, "Let it wait."
Soon, the first light of dawn was breaking across the sky, and Nixon, having exhausted both himself and his welcome, began walking back to the presidential limousine. A student Nixon describes as "a bearded fellow from Detroit" rushed up and asked if he could have his picture taken with the president. Nixon instructed the White House doctor to take the student's picture with the president. "He seemed to be quite delighted," Nixon says of that bearded fellow from Detroit. "It was in fact the broadest smile that I saw on the entire visit."
Nixon was promptly driven away in his limo. None of the students at the Lincoln Memorial remembered Nixon's behavior the he described it. Neither did any of his aides.
Following is a PBS news report which describes the incident and which contains an excerpt from some of the tapes:
As the Vietnam war was raging on and protestors were blaming him for failing to end the war, Nixon wasn't sleeping well. According to the narrator of the documentary, he had been up for about 48 hours when, in the early morning hours of May 9, 1970, Nixon, with his White House valet in tow, decided to made an impromptu visit to the Lincoln Memorial. The secret service agents were told to bring the White House limo around and Lincoln was off to the Lincoln Memorial in order for him to engage in a rambling dialogue with student protestors who were maintaining a 24 hour protest vigil there.
The incident took place at a tumultuous time in the Nixon presidency, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia and the resulting explosion of outrage on college campuses, leading to the killing of four student protesters at Kent State University on May 4. Nixon's erratic behavior during the Lincoln Memorial visit had his closest aides wondering if the president was losing it. Nixon's Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman wrote in his diary hours after the Lincoln Memorial visit, "I am concerned about his condition," and note that Nixon's behavior that morning constituted "the weirdest day so far."
In November of last year the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum opened formerly restricted materials from five Watergate-related transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes, plus a series of presidential dictabelts. Five of the dictabelt recordings feature Nixon dictating a memo to Haldeman that offers his version of the Lincoln Memorial incident. Details of Haldeman memo had been disclosed before, but this was the first time that the public has heard Nixon recount the event in his own voice.
Nixon begins his memo by instructing that his recollections of the Lincoln Memorial trip be distributed "on a very limited basis" to close aides and "anyone else who may have raised questions." Details of the visit had already begun appearing in the press, describing an exhausted and overwhelmed president engaging students in nonsensical banter. Nixon was incensed at the suggestion that he was talking nonsense. He said in the recording: "Even when I'm tired, I do not talk about nonsensical things." Nixon said that the dialogue with the students was an attempt "to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander."
Nixon said that after finishing a press conference at 10 p.m. on May 8 during which he faced tough questions about his decision to invade Cambodia and the campus protests it provoked, he then fielded about 20 telephone calls "from VIPs," went to bed at 2:15 a.m. and "slept soundly" until shortly after 4 a.m.
Although he doesn't mention it on the tape, Nixon made an unsolicited call to NBC reporter Nancy Dickerson at about 1 a.m. When Dickerson answered the phone, awakened from a sound sleep, Nixon's first words were, "this is Dick." It took Dickerson a moment to realize who Dick was. In a brief, rambling conversation, Nixon complained about the way the previous night's press conference had gone and then asked Dickerson if she was attending White House church service that weekend. When Dickerson replied that she hadn't been invited, Nixon replied "oh, I can take care of that."
Author Anthony Summers writes in his book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon that Dickerson later commented to her husband, "that man has not been drinking, but I would feel better if he had been."
Nixon say in the tape that he woke up shortly after 4 a.m., went into the Lincoln sitting room, and began listening to a record of Eugene Ormandy conducting a Rachmaninoff piece. (Apparently many of the tapes of Nixon phone conversations feature classical music blaring in the background at rock volume.) The loud music awakened White House valet Manolo Sanchez, and as Nixon looked out the window at a small knot of people gathering outside on the National Mall, he asked his valet if he had had ever been to the Lincoln Memorial at night. When Sanchez replied no, Nixon impulsively told him, "Get your clothes on, we'll go down to the Lincoln Memorial!"
"I've never seen the Secret Service quite so petrified with apprehension," Nixon recounts, and indeed, the spur-of-the-moment decision to visit the Lincoln Memorial in the middle of the night was unprecedented, much less for a president under siege for his unpopular policies.
Nixon and his valet, along with senior White House doctor Walter Robert Tkach and a team of Secret Service agents piled into the presidential limousine and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. When they arrived there, Nixon and Sanchez walked up the steps to the chamber containing the imposing 19-foot high statute of the sitting Lincoln. Nixon pointed out to Sanchez the carved inscriptions of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and his Gettysburg Address. A handful of students had noticed Nixon and walked up to him. A few shook his hand. "They were not unfriendly," according to Nixon. "As a matter of fact, they seemed somewhat overawed and of course quite surprised. To get the conversation going, I asked how old they were, what they were studying, the usual questions." When several of the students said they attended Syracuse University, Nixon commented on how good the school's football team was.
Far from being favourably impressed, the students thought that Nixon's line of questioning was downright bizarre. One of the students later said in an interview": "I hope it was because he was tired but most of what he was saying was absurd. Here we had come from a university that's completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team."
Another student told the media, "He didn't look anyone in the eyes. He was mumbling. When people asked him to speak up he would boom one word and no more. As far as sentence structure, there was none."
Nixon's account, not surprisingly, paints a very different picture. When the discussion turned to Vietnam, Nixon says he told the students, "I hope that your hatred of the war, which I could well understand, would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country and everything that it stood for. I said that I know probably most of you think I'm an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel." Nixon says he then "tried to move the conversation into areas where I could draw them out," encouraging the students to see different parts of the United States and the world. "You must travel when you're young," he told them. "If you wait until you can afford it, you will be too old to enjoy it." Prague and Warsaw had beautiful architecture, Nixon said, but Europe is "really an older version of America. The place that I felt that they would particularly enjoy visiting would be Asia." Nixon added he hoped that during his administration, or at least in the students' lifetime, mainland China would be opened up.
Eventually, one of the students had enough of Nixon's rambling travelogue. "We're not interested in what Prague looks like," the student told Nixon. "We're interested in what kind of life we build in the United States." Nixon replied, "The whole purpose of my discussing Prague and other places was not to discuss the city, but the people."
Nixon says he told the students, "Ending the war and cleaning up the city streets and the air and the water was not going to solve the spiritual hunger which all of us have, which of course has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time."
By this time, the small crowd of students had swelled to about 30. One of them challenged Nixon, saying, "I hope you realize that we're willing to die for what we believe in." Nixon replied, "I certainly realize that. Many of us when we were your age were also willing to die for what we believe in and are willing to do so today. The point is, we are trying to build a world in which you will not have to die for what you believe in."
The talk turned briefly to fighting pollution and Nixon made this odd comment: "You must remember that something that is completely clean can also be completely sterile, without spirit."
The swelling crowd around Nixon and the sharpness of the debate made Nixon's already nervous Secret Service agents even more on edge. According to Nixon, "I realized the Secret Service was becoming more and more concerned as they saw the crowd begin to mount and probably feared that some of the more active leaders would get word of my visit and descend upon us." In an attempt to get Nixon to leave, Secret Service agents several times passed word that a telephone call was waiting for him in the car, but each time, Nixon says he told them, "Let it wait."
Soon, the first light of dawn was breaking across the sky, and Nixon, having exhausted both himself and his welcome, began walking back to the presidential limousine. A student Nixon describes as "a bearded fellow from Detroit" rushed up and asked if he could have his picture taken with the president. Nixon instructed the White House doctor to take the student's picture with the president. "He seemed to be quite delighted," Nixon says of that bearded fellow from Detroit. "It was in fact the broadest smile that I saw on the entire visit."
Nixon was promptly driven away in his limo. None of the students at the Lincoln Memorial remembered Nixon's behavior the he described it. Neither did any of his aides.
Following is a PBS news report which describes the incident and which contains an excerpt from some of the tapes: