UNITED STATES OF AMERICA proclaims the blue and white livery of Air Force One, majestically swooping low over Peking’s airport and touching down on the runway. The President and First Lady appear at the doorway and wave, the presidential seal at their backs and an honor guard on the ground to welcome them. They descend, and the President reaches for Zhou En-lai’s hand. The two shake, and onlookers can feel the aura of a new  era of peace at hand.

The week in China goes by seamlessly, from the high-level meetings, to the dozens of dinners and banquets, to Mrs. Nixon’s cultural tours through the cities. Through the deceiving eye of television, a foreign trip by a President of the United States seems to go by effortlessly. But none of it happens spontaneously. Nothing is not off the cuff. Few take the time to realize the immense magnitude that goes into prepping for a presidential trip. Everything about presidential travel takes weeks, often months, to prepare and advance. And those preparations can have direct influences on the President’s policies: the policy of the United States.

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President Nixon organized his White House into three functional areas: The Office of the President, the National Security Council and the Domestic Council. Each President makes his own decisions on how he wants his White House to operate. There have been seven Presidents who have occupied the White House since President Nixon’s departure. However,...

Imagine the year is 1969 and it’s your lucky day when the telephone rings with a pollster from Gallup or Harris calling to get your opinion on just one critical question: How well informed on current events should the U.S. president be? Please choose one of the following: (1) Well informed. (2) As informed as the average American. (3) No opinion. It’s...

Harry Robbins Haldeman, known professionally as H.R. Haldeman and to his friends, co-workers, and his President as “Bob,” was the Chief of Staff at Richard Nixon’s White House from January 20, 1969, until his resignation on April 30, 1973. The concepts and structure Haldeman developed for the Chief of Staff’s office during those...

Newspaper readers have their favorite sections. Everyone sees the headlines, but readers scatter after that: some to the comics, others to sports and still others straight to the obituaries and the weather. RN’s news summaries, however, offered a section unlike any other publication. It was the stand-alone page at the back that listed each story...

Print media often referred to the Daily News Summary as the most exclusive newspaper in the world. It was a fair description because they were written to please just one person, RN himself.  They began during the 1968 primaries by Pat Buchanan, who chose articles “the old man would need to see.” He turned them over to a crew consisting of...

Few news summaries fell below 10 pages. In normal times, a short news summary ran perhaps 15, always single-spaced, and up to as many as 30 to 35 pages – in spite of constant efforts to keep them shorter. Even though some went long, we were reminded that the President actually read them and would use them as a day-to-day management tool, well...

I was a young man just a few months shy of my 30th birthday, the father of a 3-year-old girl, husband in a marriage struggling to stay intact, when a Staff Assistant to the President of the United States asked me if I would like to work at the White House preparing the President’s Daily News Summary, a document that by then had become an institution...

On the day he was inaugurated to his second term, President Nixon gave members of the White House staff a desk diary covering the four years of that term. Each day indicated how many days were remaining before his “Four More Years” came to a close. On the cover page he wrote, in part: Every moment of history is a fleeting time, precious and...