Flying into Exile: Nixon’s Arc of Political Redemption

When President Richard Nixon resigned from the Office of the Presidency on August 9, 1974, he immediately departed for the Western White House, Nixon’s home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Clemente, California. Accompanying him into exile was Nixon’s skeleton staff, which included former press secretary Ron Zeigler, Zeigler’s assistant and future ABC news star Diane Sawyer, Nixon presidential advisor Frank Gannon, and former White House Director of Communications Ken W. Clawson.

Perhaps no one covered the Nixon White House like the New Republic’s John Osborne, hailed by Nixon experts as one of the most consequential White House reporters of his day. His unpublished interview notes from fall 1974 with major officials from the Nixon administration — including the San Clemente staff — provide insight into modern political rehabilitation. Even at his physical, emotional, and political nadir, Nixon’s time in exile demonstrates the power of presidential orbits and how the gravity of the office, even in disgrace, can create a culture of loyalty and serve as a springboard to political renewal.

Flight into Exile

Despite the shock of the situation, Sawyer remembered an atmosphere of solidarity on the plane, “part of a great experience that only we could ever have,” Sawyer told Osborne. Knowing that chief of staff Al Haig would be issuing the formal resignation of the president to Henry Kissinger at precisely 11:35 a.m., Sawyer recalled how they slipped into a sort of collective psychosis as they all kept repeating to each other that morning, “He is still the President of the United States, HE IS STILL THE PRESIDENT.’”

Nixon even shuffled back to them about a half hour before the official resignation to lighten the mood, telling jokes, expressing his gratitude, and letting each of them know how much they meant to him.

Sawyer’s comments revealed the depth of the staff’s loyalty to the president, telling Osborne that Nixon had always been “misunderstood, maligned, wrongly accused.” He was always “fighting back.…it’s what he was doing in San Clemente and what he will be doing again.” Nixon was a “man who still has a lot to offer his country and the world.”  Osborne wrote skeptically that Sawyer seemed “as if she believed it.”

The San Clemente Scene

The digs at San Clemente post-resignation were not sumptuous. Offices were empty, the compound bare. Outside of the occasional table and chair, most patio furniture had been removed. Staffers made their own meals consisting of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hot dogs, and tuna fish salad. “A few cheese sticks and a nearly empty jelly jar indicate that someone had been using the kitchen,” Osborne wrote in the New Republic. The presidential helipad functioned as part tennis and volleyball court. Where before one might find a fleet of 20 cars, now you only saw three or four.

Articles in the media reported on Nixon’s faltering mood, largely hewing to the “lonely and depressed” narrative, as one headline from a Washington Post article described him; according Osborne’s interviews, this view proved correct. During the first week of exile, Clawson told Osborne he went to bed every night wondering if they “might find [Nixon] on the bottom of the swimming pool the next morning.”

Even in disgraced exile, Nixon had supporters. Between San Clemente and the White House, more than half a million letters of support poured into Nixon’s offices. In them, one hears echoes of more recent scandals. “It is a tragedy that a man who was elected by a landslide could be removed from office by a group of small men from Washington.…Communism has certainly taken over the Democrats, and some of the Republicans,” wrote Ohioan Charles W. Wendelken. “Surely, you of all people know that the Watergate Caper was a Sunday School Picnic, in comparison to what other Presidents got away with,” Floridian Russ Williams wrote. Labeling Nixon’s political opponents, “Demoncrats” Ruth Kerr expressed her continuing loyalty. “To me and millions of others, you are the One – we love, admire, and adore.”

Despite physical and mental health challenges, Nixon began his work of political rehabilitation. Ziegler and Gannon monitored the news media for reports summarizing the political environment, sought out law firms for representation in court and to reactivate the Nixon Foundation, and attempted to secure additional funds from the government for San Clemente’s operation. Perhaps most importantly, they kept tabs on the Ford administration and a possible presidential pardon.

By early September, discussions within the White House regarding his pardon began. Attorney Benton Becker, clandestinely representing the Ford administration, flew to San Clemente to negotiate the pardon. According to Becker, the negotiations were harsh for Nixon, who “anguished through the sessions” in “freakish grotesqueness,” a sign of his impending hospitalization for phlebitis that would begin on September 26 and last nearly two weeks. The September 6, 1974, draft of Ford’s pardon with annotations by Ziegler provides a small example of the exchanges described by Becket, notably Nixon’s request to strike one line from the pardon’s conclusion so as to expand the pardon’s aperture, “to avoid Nit Pickers say[ing] this is [a] pardon for action of [the] judiciary.” In other words, by deleting the passage, Nixon hoped to prevent future legal challenges that might narrow the pardon’s ambit.

While most of Nixon’s staff in exile departed after a few months, both Gannon and Sawyer stayed for four years, helping Nixon pen his memoirs. Osborne interviewed Sawyer in June of 1978, six months after the memoir’s publication. She had found the experience “marvelous … a tremendous education,” but had also concluded that Nixon never grasped one of the fundamental tensions of his presidency: “Morality and politics are unrelated.” Yet, she noted, he regularly drew on morality to justify political action and would even direct memos to Kissinger warning against taking immoral stands and encouraging Kissinger to “do the right thing regardless of consequences…” Nixon could or would not acknowledge this contradiction.

Regardless, Nixon’s memoirs would be followed by over half a dozen more books before his death in 1994. In the intervening years, he corresponded with Republican and Democratic politicians, commented publicly on foreign policy, and held private parties attended by diplomats, foreign dignitaries, industrialists, and intellectuals where he held court and networked.

Throughout he courted the media, behind the scenes and in front of the camera. In 1977, Nixon participated in the now-famous Frost-Nixon interview, with Gannon and Sawyer in tow — his first step toward public rehabilitation. In 1984, Gannon earned $500,000 for his 90-minute interview of Nixon, featured in part on the show 60 Minutes. Later the same year, Nixon received a standing ovation at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference. During the 1980s and early 1990s, even his tendency to monologue proved valuable in the burgeoning cable news universe where such discursive commentary filled time and sounded profound.

By the time of his passing in 1994, Nixon’s legacy had undergone revision, and he was seen as foreign policy wiseman and even served as an unofficial Russia advisor to President Bill Clinton. After his passing, historians like Joan Hoff and others separated his administration’s accomplishments from its disgrace. At his funeral, Clinton lamented that Nixon was only remembered for scandal. “[L]et us say, may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”

Osborne had thought Sawyer unhinged for thinking Nixon had any political future at all in October 1974, yet in the end, Nixon’s exile set the stage for his reemergence in American life.