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.

Even RN’s handshake with Zhou has a backstory. In order to make a good impression on his Chinese hosts, and to make amends for John Foster Dulles’ 1954 snub, refusing to shake Zhou’s hand in Geneva, President Nixon instructed National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers to make sure only he and Mrs. Nixon emerged from Air Force One until the two shook hands. A Secret Service agent blocked the aisle just in case.

The Nixon White House literally changed the Presidency, in that it became a fully schedulable post, able to be moved around the world in an organizational, timely fashion.

None of the careful planning that goes on could be possible without the White House Advance Office, established during the Nixon Administration. Its first Director was Ronald H. Walker, a one-time Nixon campaign volunteer who had helped to organize candidate Nixon’s ’68 campaign travels. The Director of the Office of Presidential Advance is in charge of his large staff, and oversees and approves all aspects of advance, including airport arrivals and what the composition of the motorcades. consist of.

Walker was the author of the first White House Advance Manual, which alone set a precedence that all White House’s have followed. At 397 pages, the Nixon Manual took six months to write, carefully outlining the necessary steps involved in order to move the President.

“This manual, as old as it is, is still the manual that Presidents use today,” Ron affirmed. It has been refined as technology has advanced, of course, but it is still the prime example.

And we at the Nixon Foundation are proud that Ron is our President, and will soon assume his appointed position as Chairman of our Board.

Supplementing the advance work and the immense amount of time spent on preparing presidential trips, is how the President is scheduled, how that impacts how the West Wing is run, and how his staff works to maximize his time and minimize his effort where it’s unneeded.

Proper scheduling is vital and can have far-reaching results; David Parker, President of the American Gas Association who served in the Nixon White House, recalled the importance: “What does a President want to do with his years in office? What is his concept of governing? We made up a four-year schedule, anticipating all the major events of Nixon’s [first] term. With that, we could plan an overarching program of achievements. Without it, every day would simply fill up with activities.”

To accomplish this, Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman implemented a new structure of operations in the West Wing.

“The structure that Bob Haldeman ran was similar to that of a well run corporation,” recalled former Special Assistant Steve Bull. Picture an organizational chart like that of an upside-down funnel: “The President was the Chairman of the Board, Bob Haldeman was in effect the Chief Operating Officer, his key corporate vice presidents, if you’ll accept that term, were Henry Kissinger from international affairs, John Ehlichman, his vice president of domestic affairs, Rose Woods, the vice president of personal affairs, Herb Klein as vice president of media affairs, and later, Chuck Colson who became the de facto vice president of political affairs. These were the principal people with whom the President worked. These were the key people with whom and through whom he dealt.”

Thus only the most important dealings went to the President himself, while those under him handled all others. At all times, the sole focus was on the President. All other staffers, said Haldeman, needed to have a “passion for anonymity.”

In addition to making sure the President was well scheduled, things were done this way, Bull recalled, to ensure that low-level staffers “not try to barge in and sell pet projects, abuse phone opportunities, exploit personal relationships, or promote themselves or things of limited importance.”

The result was a tightly organized, precise system. By all accounts, it was very effective in terms of managing the President’s time.

Also very important was the way that President Nixon himself changed the West Wing in terms of governing. Prior to RN, decisions on pertinent issues were made by a specific member of the President’s Cabinet, and then sent to the President. RN changed things around a bit; decisions were now to be made by the President, and executed by the Cabinet.

Dealing with mail and correspondence from the American public, and, often times people outside of America, was very important to the President. The thousands of invitations the President receives to speaking events or memorials, receptions or conferences need to be sorted, decided on, and “staffed out,” or sent to the appropriate White House agency so that they get onto the President’s schedule.

One of those invitations was to visit China – from Mao Tse-tung himself.

The shock wave came instantly, even to members of the White House staff: “Oh my God, I’m going to CHINA,” Ron Walker uttered in disbelief. Heading up the advance team, he reminded them that in China, “we have no embassy” and advancing this trip will be “unlike anything we’ve ever attempted to do.” What followed was one of the most important visits by a President anywhere.

The real work comes in the planning. All of the careful plans – often timed down to the second – are made to allow the actual trip to go smoothly.

Many variables need to be decided on: the trip’s duration, whether overnight stays are involved, etc. Anywhere from 13 to 15 White House agencies contribute to the plans, including communications, press, speechwriting, political affairs, social, medical, and public liaison offices plus the White House Military Office and the Secret Service – perhaps also the vice president’s staff or the first lady’s office.

“For those of you who have been part of a presidential visit, you know what you are in for,” declared Bush 43 Advance Director Todd Beyer, “For those of you who haven’t, you’re in for quite a ride.”

Indeed!

For international trips, a contingency of over 600 advance, staff members, and representatives from the press, as well as over 200 Secret Service agents, fly to the location weeks ahead of time just to prepare for the President’s arrival. RN’s trip to China needed six months of preparation, including three advance trips.

Among the first dozen Americans in China in more than 20 years, and without an embassy on the ground, Walker’s team had to double their workload. They made all the arrangements and prepped for everything all by themselves.

The advance team scouts out possible event sites and begins a checklist of necessary, though often unbelievable, arrangements that must be hammered out. Toiletry items that Americans take for granted needed to be shipped in bulk to China, including toothpaste, Kleenex, deodorant, shaving cream, and – most importantly – toilet paper itself. Walker and his staff spent the entire month leading up the trip preparing manifests, flight and travel schedules, personal requests, lists of the members of the press, and countless others.A checklist for a Bush 43 trip was a lengthy 26 pages, containing 485 items – all approved by the White House itself.

The Military Office plans arrangements for Air Force One, the Presidential helicopters, the famed limousines (“beasts” as the Secret Service calls them). The Secret Service establishes the motorcade routes, vetoing those judged to be too vulnerable. Even a supply of the President’s blood is on hand, courtesy of the Medical Unit.

When preparing for a presidential trip, White House schedulers must ask themselves: What policy theme does the President want to publicize? Whether its aid for the elderly in rural Montana or the threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, the bottom line is that trips are designed to fit the President’s priorities.

Site venues are nailed down, and the event planning begins. In these venues, meant for rallies and speeches and the like, the planners need to communicate “more than just the fact the President was doing something,” noted Larry Higby, Assistant to Bob Haldeman; the events needed to communicate “an aspect of his policy, what he was trying to get done in the world, and why it was important.”

To accomplish this, planners consider everything from size of the stage to how the President would look against the backdrop as he’s speaking at the podium. They snap photos and, nowadays, quickly email them back to the White House. Who will sit on the dais? How many chairs need to be set up? Balloon drops? Get local civic organizations and highs school students involved – this allows the POTUS to reach out to young people and the young people to potentially become supporters. Local volunteers are also an integral part of the planning and smooth execution.

Dwight Chapin, Special Assistant and Appointments Secretary to President Nixon, recalled the perfect scenario – placing the President against a backdrop of the White House as often as possible, simply because “no one else can.” To best communicate his message, then, his staff would regularly invite people to the White House; “labor leaders, Catholic leaders, Lithuanian groups, you name it – they would come to the White House, go back out, and the President would save the time and energy of having to go out; it was incredibly effective” in terms of both managing his time and showing Americans how he was working for them.

Said Larry Higby, “What you had was a melding of speech and picture into a totally different way of communicating with the American public.”

Everything must be done with close attention to detail perfectly, for attention paid to international Presidential events can directly impact public opinion on notable issues and influence U.S. policy itself, not to mention friendly relations with the host nation on overseas travels.

And then the President arrives. Game Day. Everything that had happened prior to, was all done to ensure that the President’s trip would go off without a hitch, and make it appear as if nothing had been planned at all.

The overarching rule of Presidential scheduling and advance came from RN himself: “I always want to be in the saddle, and I don’t want to be saddled.” Using this logic, perhaps Dave Parker summed things up best: “Everything we did related to what he was trying to achieve.”

RN’s travel was the subject of the second Nixon Legacy Forum, The Effective Use of the President’s Time, featuring Ron Walker.

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, the structure of the modern White House and its operations remain virtually unchanged since it was established during the Nixon years.

The architect of the management structure and virtually all the procedures implemented during the Nixon administration was Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Haldeman’s organizational and management skills have been acknowledged by many of his Chief of Staff successors. They recognize Haldeman made a historic contribution to the office of the Presidency with the organizational structure and management procedures he introduced in the White House.

The most precious asset any President has is his time. Time is a diminishing asset and it must be used judiciously. Presidents and their respective staffs determine how their management style impacts their priorities—the daily schedule, communicating with the nation, travel and getting the daily office work of the presidency completed.

President Nixon entered office with more government experience than any modern President. From his vast experience through service first in the House of Representatives and then the Senate, followed by eight years as President Eisenhower’s Vice President, all supported by his keen political and intellectual instincts, President Nixon knew how he wanted his White House to work and how he wanted to use his time. That said, as documents will underscore, President Nixon continually experimented with and changed his work pattern and that of his staff. He was always seeking the optimum way to operate. The challenges of his administration changed from year to year, if not month-to-month, and he adapted to those changes by personally deciding how his time would be used. He always made these changes and adjustments in consultation with Haldeman who was accountable for implementation and follow-up.

A significant management feature of The Office of the President is that the President’s schedule management systems were flexible. The team Haldeman assembled easily adapted to the President’s changing priorities and need to refocus. The only constant in the Nixon White House was change. This is to some extent true of all White Houses because the word routine does not define how White House business is conducted in today’s world.

The organizational and management systems were instilled in the Nixon White House along with a business management approach, which might best be defined as “no nonsense”. Solid business practices and decorum were expected of all. The requirement was professionalism, teamwork, and the subordination of personal agendas to that of the President and his goals. In the Nixon White House this meant loyalty and unity, characteristics of behavior and attitude that Bob Haldeman exhibited through his professional and personal conduct, and which served as an example to be emulated by all members not only of the White House staff but of appointees in the Departments and Agencies who were expected to follow Haldeman’s example. In so doing they best served the President and, in turn, the nation.

(1) Well informed.

(2) As informed as the average American.

(3) No opinion.

It’s reasonable to speculate that nearly 100% of those surveyed would choose a “well informed” president. Surely an “average” level of awareness would not be good enough for the presidency, and having no opinion defies credulity – if not outright scary.

To be well informed, would they have had Richard Nixon to set aside 90 minutes every night to watch three networks’ news broadcasts? Or would just one network be enough? Which networks would be excluded? What about the weekly commentary on PBS?

To be well informed, would the public have wanted RN read just one or two newspapers? If just two, which major American cities would not be represented in the president’s newspaper stack? Would it be okay to exclude the newspapers from every city except, say, New York and Washington, D.C.? Which editorial perspective would be unnecessary? On the other hand, if the public deemed all of them “important,” how would the public react to a photo in their local newspaper of their president trying to work his way through a stack of 50-plus newspapers next to a bank of three television sets running the news broadcasts of Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and Howard K. Smith?

The problem crystallizes quickly: the need to be well informed every day clashes with not having the time necessary to tackle the problem – one newspaper, one television news broadcast at time. And so the Daily News Summary was created to solve that dilemma for RN. It originated as a one-page look at the news just in time for the snowy New Hampshire primary of 1968. Former aide Patrick J. Buchanan edited the news summaries, which continued in the White House years under the editorship of the late Lyndon K. Allin. The Daily News Summary expanded well beyond the original brief document, with a resource of approximately 70 daily newspapers, 35 magazines and periodicals, plus each day’s network television news broadcasts. All of that was supplemented by special editions for major reviews of newspaper editorials.

Balancing our respect for the President’s time with his need to be well informed was a constant struggle.

Although Haldeman, an executive with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, had followed Nixon’s career since the days of the Alger Hiss case in the late 1940s, his involvement in it did not begin until he was hired as an advance man during the Vice-President’s 1956 campaign. He proved to be effective at this work, and four years later was hired as chief of the advance team for Nixon’s first presidential campaign.

After Nixon’s narrow defeat by John F. Kennedy and his return to California, Haldeman continued to undertake various tasks for him, and in 1962 was asked to be manager of Nixon’s campaign for governor of California. After a hard-fought race, Nixon sustained his second and last electoral defeat. But Haldeman had proven capable and resourceful in this work, and so in 1968, after six more years in the advertising business, he was brought on board Nixon’s second presidential campaign as chief of staff.

In this capacity, Haldeman devised a campaign strategy radically different from Nixon’s approach to previous races. The former Vice-President had always believed in hands-on campaigning, speaking directly to as many crowds as possible; Haldeman recommended an approach focused on television commercials and limited, carefully managed personal appearances, preferably before small groups, from which footage for the commercials could be drawn. The result was that Nixon’s image was transformed overnight from the anti-Communist crusader (a persona that had proven a popular target for liberal commentators) to that of a “cool,” low-key, pragmatic thinker. This caused pundits to speak of a “new Nixon,” and helped facilitate the candidate’s victory over Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.

When Haldeman came into the White House in January 1969, he continued to work on developing the image of the President presented to the world; part of his job involved analyzing the results of public-opinion polls to a degree unprecedented in previous presidencies (although in a somewhat less sophisticated way than the enormously detailed approach later pioneered by Pat Caddell in the Carter White House).

But Haldeman’s primary work was to change the nature of the Chief of Staff’s office. Prior to his arrival, the Chief of Staff mainly focused on supervising the work of White House personnel and handling the appointment schedule of the President, and was, generally, not a very significant figure in the government’s executive branch overall. The major exception to this was Sherman Adams, who, as President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, functioned as the Oval Office’s gatekeeper; apart from the Cabinet members and some national security staffers, anyone wishing to see the President had to go through him. He also had some involvement in Eisenhower’s contacts with Congress.

Haldeman took the role of Presidential gatekeeper much further. From the start of the Nixon Administration until he left, all requests to see the President had to go through his office, and, almost invariably, only he and Steve Bull, who informed Nixon of his appointments, could enter the Oval Office at will. This was not an approach popular with many officeholders and bureaucrats who had been accustomed to talking to previous Presidents directly about meetings, but this was the way President Nixon wanted to work; he was extremely conscious of the need of the Chief Executive to focus on the work at hand without distractions, and it was Haldeman’s job to make such work possible.

Haldeman’s other major task was to process the President’s directives to the Executive Branch. This was usually accomplished in the form of memos, which Haldeman would send out to White House staffers and others with crisp descriptions of what the President wanted and, usually, just when he wanted it done. In a short time the large “H” with which the Chief of Staff signed these memos became, in some quarters, a much-feared initial. Haldeman also made it a point, when asking for memos and documents from others, to have them presented in a format that would make it possible for himself (or the President, if these required his attention) to make a quick decision about approving or disapproving their recommendations.

Haldeman’s role as gatekeeper, and his absolute discretion, meant that Nixon was also granted a kind of safety valve that has not been available to subsequent Presidents. For example, if Nixon was feeling upset over something a reporter or columnist had written (as was frequently the case), and felt like ordering that person to be barred from traveling with the press corps on Air Force One, he could express that desire to Haldeman during their morning meetings, and Haldeman would duly note it on the legal pad that he always used to keep comprehensive notes on his and Nixon’s conversations. Then Haldeman would simply ignore what the President had ordered, and, after a while, Nixon would calm down and forget about the idea. This enabled the President to let off steam and move on with his job.

Unlike Sherman Adams, Haldeman played little direct role in policymaking apart from evaluating how the President’s policies were being received; his own views leaned toward the conservative side, but he regarded it as his task to ensure that what the President decided to do was made clear and comprehensible to those charged with implementing these decisions.

Haldeman also was involved with planning the President’s trips outside the White House, and oversaw the advance work of Dwight Chapin and Ron Walker, especially in the trips to China that laid the groundwork for Nixon’s historic visit to that nation in 1972.

The last ten months of Haldeman’s tenure at the White House were increasingly dominated by the Watergate scandal; he had little involvement in the events that led up to the break-in at the Watergate complex in June 1972, but afterwards was involved to a considerable degree in the decisions about how to handle the fallout from it, which mushroomed into the scandal that finally forced him from the White House and led to his conviction in 1975 on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

But the circumstances that led to the end of Haldeman’s career in public service should not be allowed to overshadow the important role he played in helping to make possible some of the greatest achievements of the Nixon Administration, both in domestic affairs and in the international arena.

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 broadcast by the television networks and the amount of time allocated — to the minute and second. That time log served both as an “index” of stories as well as a measure of the importance the networks attached to each story. It was important for the White House to know what the networks thought was important because that was a key to public perception. The time log also compensated for a difference between print journalism and broadcast. Newspaper readers immediately see the importance assigned to a story by placement, headlines, and column inches. By contrast, the currency for broadcasters is time and story order. Time allocated to stories was also an indirect indicator of potential bias, though hardly conclusive by itself. Future researchers might find a number of uses for those time sheets. At a minimum they are quick reference to the stories of each day.

A complaint sometimes heard from journalists about news summaries was how the truncated style made them difficult to read, i.e., extensive use of abbreviations and a conscious decision to never tell the president what he already knew (e.g., “RN gave a speech on the economy today … “) or to repeat each newspaper or broadcaster’s introduction to each story. What was included was whatever was unique to each broadcast or print publication, i.e., how each characterized RN’s speech, from both anchors and reporters. Reactions from major political stakeholders were always included. The format and writing style would treat a hypothetical RN speech on the economy like this:

RN speech on the economy led
nets and front pages of most dailies.
ABC anchor Smith led into Jarriel’s
report from the WH by calling it
“a bold move.” NBC’s Chancellor called it
“a plan sure to invite criticism from Democrats”
as he went to Brokaw at the WH. At CBS,
Cronkite said it could be “an exercise in
futility,” an opinion promptly shared by Rather
in a standup from the North Lawn.

A primary goal was to make sure we got the quotes and attributions right.

Another characteristic new readers noticed was how senior administration officials were identified only by initials. The President was always RN, of course, Haldeman was HRH, Ehrlichman was JDE, Buchanan was PJB and Henry Kissinger was HAK. The most prominent person in the White House who was never initialized was the First Lady. Other significant White House personnel were usually referred by last name.

Building a House

News summaries were constructed like a new house, from the ground up. The foundation and “framing” were made up of AP and UPI wire copy put on an oversized work table, sorted by topic. In the late afternoon, editor Mort Allin took the stacks and sorted them into a sequence that he expected the television networks would follow (he was usually right). He stapled AP and UPI wire copy to sheets of yellow legal size paper, while striking out repetitive lines and words. Arrows indicated where the network summaries would be inserted. To confirm accuracy, the White House Communications Agency replayed requested reports over one of two closed-circuit television channels. As writers finished network summaries, Allin’s black pen (sometimes helped by scissors) integrated all the copy. The end result was a scary stack of marked up wire copy and TV summaries, patched together with staples, scotch tape and lots of marker pen arrows to lead the typists to the right place. From an artistic perspective, it was ugly. When someone once told Allin that artist Jackson Pollock would be right at home, Allin continued to work as he said, “I hear he’s a revered artist.”

A squad of typists worked late into the night and miraculously converted all of it into sensible typewritten copy. A game score might be added at the last minute to serve RN’s strong interest in sports. Once corrections were made, RN’s copy was placed in a blue binder sometime after midnight and delivered to a security guard in the West Wing.

The 1972 Reelection – then Watergate

Around sunset on election night Marine One landed on the South Lawn. RN had arrived a few hours before polls would close in the East. I was part of a group of staffers who formed a greeting line at the entrance to the Diplomatic Reception Room. To say we were excited would be an understatement. We were about to witness a landslide reelection. As RN came under the canopy I said, “We’ve got it, sir.” With a measured smile he said, “We’ll see.” I’m sure there was a trace of doubt in his voice.

But it was a landslide. RN captured more than 47 million votes to George McGovern’s 29.1 million, a difference of nearly 18 million. Morale soared and all hands were ready to pursue second term goals.

That was 38 years ago. Then Watergate became more prominent, sometimes dominant in the news; it seemed to have no end. When researchers read news summaries from that time they will find that we faithfully recorded all the Watergate news and harsh editorial criticisms aimed at RN, including special reviews of headlines and editorials from newspapers across the U.S. As I watched and listened to colleagues, staff morale seemed to erode in slow motion. The purpose and energy I found at the White House in January 1972 was dissipating against a backdrop of investigations, firings and resignations.

One morning in 1973 I learned that Pat Buchanan didn’t get along well with machinery. He came into the office carrying a sheet of paper, turned upside down. He quietly handed it to me and asked if I would copy it for him. “Don’t read it, just bring it back to me,” he added. I have wondered from time to time if I would not have read it if he’d never told me not to read it. But the truth is I couldn’t determine if the copy was readable if I didn’t look at it. So I looked. It was a memo to Ehrlichman that was so short that I grasped the 3 or 4 lines in one glance. Buchanan wrote that he wouldn’t join a group to plan a Watergate strategy. “I believe this would be a waste of my time,” he wrote. I was amazed. “Wow,” I said aloud. It was “wow” because not many people could get away with a blunt “no” to Ehrlichman – and keep their job. Buchanan kept his job, but doesn’t recall it as a memo to Ehrlichman, but Haldeman.

Presumably the memo is in Buchanan’s papers scheduled to arrived in Yorba Linda this year.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned in April 1973. Archibald Cox was appointed a special prosecutor in May. And the Senate created a select committee on May 17 to investigate Watergate, the committee chaired by the colorful (and late) Sen. Sam Ervin (D.NC.). I made very few diary entries in those days, but that day was also my 30th birthday. My only entry was, “How long will this go on?”

Summers in Washington are hot and humid. The intensity of the Watergate stories grew during the summers of ’73 and ’74, often making those summers as miserable indoors as out. The mounting tension and emergence of Watergate as the dominant news week after week took a toll. One morning in May our secretary and I were alone when she suddenly slumped down into her chair and quietly wept. I put the AP wire down and sat next to her.

“Why are they doing this to him?” she asked. “When will this ever stop?”

I had no good answer. She pulled herself together and struggled through the day. A few minutes later I walked into Buchanan’s office with pretty much the same question.

“Is there no end to this, Pat?” He was as frustrated as anyone else. “What would you have me do?” he asked rhetorically. No one had answers.

The Last Days

The Senate Watergate Committee issued its final report in June 1974. The House Judiciary Committee voted three Articles of Impeachment in July and RN announced his resignation in a television broadcast on the night of August 8, 1974. Mort Allin, arguably one of the most dedicated and loyal members of RN’s staff, strode out of our offices and into the West Wing where he tracked down a gaggle of reporters (Peter Lisagor among them) clustered in a rear area of the press briefing room. Allin flipped a #2 pencil end-over-end at them, yelling, “Okay you bastards you finally got what you wanted. I hope you’re happy.” Allin returned to the office, grabbed a few things, then drove through the night to his family home in Wisconsin. He never returned to work at the White House, but had a great career at USIA including diplomatic posts in Lagos, Nigeria and Moscow.

With Allin gone, there would be no news summary the next morning, so I made the 20 minute walk to my Q St. apartment, fell into bed exhausted and numb from the trauma of witnessing the fall of a president. But there would be little sleep. At 2:00 a.m. the phone rang with the unmistakable voice of Diane Sawyer [now ABC News anchor], then an assistant to Press Secretary Ron Ziegler. Could I return to the office and prepare “just one more news summary for the President to take on the flight to San Clemente?” she asked. Of course I could. It’s amazing where energy comes from when asked to do something for the president. It was like magic, but I was definitely puzzled that RN would even want a news summary, given all that he had been endured. Perhaps it was just Sawyer who wanted to have a touch of normalcy for RN. I reminded her that the news summary was now a one-man office, but I would do as much as I could. The task was complicated because the networks dropped normal broadcast schedules for live news coverage virtually all day. There would be no obvious starting point. I’ve long forgotten what went into that last summary. I believe my review was limited to ABC and NBC (no CBS). I had to stop by 7:00 a.m. to allow time for the typists to prepare it and get it to the West Wing.

Later that morning, I sat in a chair in the East Room where the staff assembled to hear RN’s farewell. The emotional distress was palpable. I think I saw a tear or two on RN’s face; we all cried inside. It’s a memory I cannot forget. I was too exhausted to go the South Lawn to see RN and family board Marine 1 for the last time. I should have made myself do it.

A unexpected touch of irony came that morning from The Washington Post, one of two papers RN always read for himself. The irony was that the paper’s main account of the resignation was not written by Woodward or Bernstein, but by Carroll Kilpatrick with this lead:

“After two years of bitter public debate over the Watergate scandals, President Nixon bowed to pressures from the public and leaders of his party to become the first President in American history to resign.” Caroll Kilpatrick in the Washington Post, Aug. 9, 1974

The readership in 1969 began with just a handful of senior staff, but had nearly 100 “customers” when I arrived in early January of 1972. Distribution had expanded to include the Cabinet and various agencies in the executive branch. Because the president read it, we had a pretty large captive audience for our readership.

The senior staff used news summaries to stay informed, but perhaps more importantly hoped to stay a half step ahead of the president. The staff quickly learned that RN used the news summaries as a management tool. RN’s annotations in the margins generated memoranda directed to officials throughout the executive branch, memoranda that were monitored by the Staff Secretary to ensure RN got answers.

Captive audience or not, the White House staff regarded the news summaries as a great resource and time saver.  Ben Stein, then a lawyer-speechwriter, recalled his view of the news summaries in an email last week:

“The Daily News Summaries were an amazing feat. News and opinion were collected from a wide variety of print and broadcast sources nationwide. They were presented in many pages of typescript, the reading of which made a young speechwriter or any other White house or administration official incredibly well informed. I particularly recall the dry wit with which some of the stories were presented. There was a real human intelligence and sense of humor involved even in the darkest days. To think that these were done in a  matter of hours is testament to extreme brilliance, devotion, and mordant wit.  They were astonishingly great works of journalism and art.”

From a member of Henry Kissinger’s NSC staff, Kathy Troia (now McFarland), came these reflections:

“The NSC staff was more focused on reading the classified cables and the DOD early bird news summaries.  For us the earthquakes were when something that should have stayed in the classified channel ended up in the news summaries. At that point, no summaries would do – we needed to look through the entire article word by word for clues.”

The Washington press corps, however, had suspicions about RN’s exposure to news, skepticism that seemed to peak during the long months of Watergate investigations in 1973 and 1974.  Was the president getting the ‘unvarnished’ truth? wondered UPI’s Helen Thomas, a question often echoed by pundits such as the late Peter Lisagor, PBS commentator and columnist for the Chicago Sun Times. It was a curious phenomenon inasmuch as  Buchanan and Allin had allowed numerous White House reporters to come into the news summary offices to see how they were prepared, as well as make their own selection of summaries to review, page-by-page.  Among those who came through during my time (1972 – ’74)  were Aldo Beckman of the Chicago Tribune, Courtney Sheldon of the Christian Science Monitor, Dom Bonafede of the National Journal and perhaps a dozen others. Even syndicated columnist Jack Anderson took several editions of news summaries for detailed review.  And Pulitzer Prize winner Theodore White came through in 1972, pausing briefly to look at my stack of papers and ask, “Do you actually read all those?” White was doing his homework for what would be the last book in his series on four presidential elections that began with 1960 and ended with “The Making of the President 1972.”

When the trip to China concluded, each member of the news summary received a unique memento that hangs my wall to this day. It was a photograph of a television screen at the moment Chou En Lai greeted RN on the tarmac in Beijing. It perfectly symbolizes how the news summary staff saw much of RN’s presidency during those years.

RN wasn’t finished, however.  Barely two months later he ordered the U.S. Navy to mine North Vietnam’s Haiphong harbor on May 8th, then went to Moscow for a summit 14 days later. The days immediately after the harbor was mined, however, the scheduled summit in Moscow was all but pronounced dead by some of the prominent talking heads of the day. “Surely the Soviets will not stand for this,” CBS’ Eric Sevareid intoned, which White House reporter Dan Rather supported with his view that “this certainly puts any summit in doubt.”

Of course history records that the Moscow summit did indeed take place and resulted in a historic strategic nuclear arms limitation agreement, commonly known as SALT I. I confess I later took advantage of how the two summits of 1972 unfolded. The national press association dropped its usual single-speaker format after the Moscow summit to gather a dozen or so members of the press who had gone to Moscow. Dan Rather was among them. It was only by chance (honestly) that I was an invited guest to have lunch there on that day.  And I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I saw that Dan Rather was there to answers questions. The custom at that time was for members and guests to write out a brief question to be read by the moderator to the guest speaker. I took my chances, wrote out my question, and added it to the stack that found it’s way to the front table.  I had marked my question for Rather was read by the moderator. By chance, question was picked.

“For Dan Rather,” the moderator began, “ ‘why, after President Nixon trapped Soviet ships in Haiphong Harbor when he ordered it mined on May 8, didn’t the Russians cancel this summit?’ “

“I must admit,” Rather replied, “I really don’t know.”  I knew what the answer had to be, but I wasn’t sure Rather could actually bring himself to utter those words. The experience brought a smile on my face that lasted until the end of the year.

All of 1972 was filled with a sense of purpose, mission and high morale.  As the campaign season approached, there was an early clue that people around the Oval Office were feeling good. The upbeat mood was signaled when chief of staff H.R. Haldeman approved the entire news summary staff as part of the White House staff contingent to the Republican National Convention in Miami. Although we continued to publish a news summary every day, there was a little time in the mornings to explore. A memorable moment happened when I walked into a virtually empty convention hall – except for a lone figure near the stage. I slowly walked in that direction, but it wasn’t until I was a few feet away that I could identify the man quietly seated on a steel chair. It was Jimmy Stewart. I introduced myself and asked if there was anything I could do for him. “No, I’m fine,” he said calmly in that special voice everyone knows.  “I’m just waiting for some technicians to get here for a ‘mike check’.”  A real gentleman, a guy next door, a real pro. I couldn’t bring myself to take advantage of this chance encounter with a true giant of the entertainment industry. I thought that those moments of quiet just might be among the few he’ll get.

Miami ended with RN’s expected renomination – and our quick return to Washington. But we took some lasting memories. Some of the senior staff, for example,  had been invited for cocktails aboard W. Clement Stone’s yacht. Not unusual, except for the part gift guests received: an oversized bronze coin embossed with Stone’s image. As fun as that must have been, I think the Jimmy Stewart memory is the better of the two.

Back at the White House we knew there would be a lot of work ahead, but the press would quiet down a little while RN took some “down time” either in Key Biscayne or San Clemente.  That meant the White House itself was a little more relaxed and offered chances to take friends though the West Wing and places where guided tours simply don’t go – including a long look at the Oval itself.



“If you make a mistake because of something I say, I’ll apologize and we’ll move on. If the President makes a mistake because of something we put in his news summary, what will we do?” His eyes made clear there was no good answer to that question. We weren’t going to make a mistake.

Getting all the broadcast network reporters’ stories right was made possible because of the elaborate video taping and two closed circuit channels run by the Army’s White House Signal Corps office. We made heavy use of their instant replay ability for the nightly newscasts from ABC, NBC, CBS networks as well as the weekly shows, including PBS.

But China was different. It was a full day and 13 hours ahead of Washington. When we began to see our network news broadcasts at 5:30 p.m., it was the next day at 4:30 a.m. in Beijing and, presumably, the President was within an hour or so of rising from a night’s sleep.

The more critical element, however, was the sheer technical capacity of communications equipment to handle a steady stream of information from the U.S. to Air Force One to make sure the Old Man had the information he needed. We shared an electronic pipeline with others, so we pared the news summaries down into 3 or 4 page documents to avoid choking the system. We focused on the stories coming out of China or originating here about the trip. The process of dispatching short summaries continued day and night until the presidential party departed China.

Nixon’s grasp of U.S. news broadcasts while standing on Chinese soil didn’t go unnoticed. While in Beijing the President attended a performance of Chinese gymnasts. We watched in Washington, of course, and duly reported in the next mini-news summary that NBC commentator Joe Garagiola had described the performance as “truly outstanding,” along with a few other words of high praise. Nixon mentioned that to a Chinese escort the next day while touring the Great Wall. Standing nearby, paying close attention, was our venerable Barbara Walters, then an NBC regular.

“Mr. President,” Walters implored, ”how do you know what Joe Garagiola said last night – he’s in New York!?”

Nixon didn’t answer. But the temptation I felt to bargain later for a free lunch from Walters in exchange for the answer was enormous.



That happened in January 1972. And that was the year that our 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, choreographed a historical paradigm shift in global power relationships that put unique levers of influence in the hands of the U.S. at the hub of the global steering wheel with his trips to the Peoples Republic of China and the USSR.

The Staff Assistant who hired me was Lyndon K. Allin, known in the White House with affection and respect as “Mort”.  Allin was a a former Wisconsin high school teacher who had directed the 1968 election campaign’s youth operations and was hired to be editor of the News Summary by Pat Buchanan.

Like Allin I also went to the White House from Wisconsin, but well versed only in the struggle of a state Republican party trying to get traction in the left and far-left politics peculiar to Milwaukee and Dane counties, especially in the capital city of Madison. But well versed in Wisconsin isn’t a strong argument for national savvy.  All politics may be local, but what I learned in Wisconsin was meager preparation for Washington. The capital was another universe with its own cast of characters, its own history. The learning curve would be steep.

My first assignment was to get through as many newspapers each day as I could to find articles and editorials that would add value to the President’s news summary. Allin, a consummate teacher, drove home the gold standard to satisfy: Does the President of the United States need to known this? Does it add value?  The challenge of becoming familiar with the byline columnists and editorial history of so many newspapers (most not seen in my quaint Wisconsin universe) was formidable. We had at least 75 dailies to get through, papers that covered an extraordinary editorial spectrum (Manchester Union Leader -vs- The San Francisco Chronicle), as well as geographical. There was strong Latin, leisure industry and senior citizen reporting from the Miami Herald, cultural conservatism from The Arizona Republic, midwest liberalism in the Minneapolis Tribune or Chicago Sun Times; and urban sentiments from major cities like Baltimore, Detroit; and the influences of our traditional Old South from Atlanta and New Orleans or Richmond.  And we incorporated agricultural reporting from Des Moines and Lincoln, Nebraska. Oil and cattle were covered by our Houston and Dallas papers. Of course Los Angeles and Seattle were included, and others one might not expect, papers from St. Paul and Indianapolis. With a smile on his face, Mort once scolded me not to waste time reading our home town newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, “except in your spare time.” There was no spare time, needless to say.

For those who value finer points in history, the news summary staff took up three offices in the Old Executive Building, rooms 125, 127 and 129. Directly across the hall were some of the luminaries of the time, Bill Safire, Pat Buchanan, Dave Gergen – even one-time ABC reporter John Scali – and countless others.

And there was an extraordinary pool of talent down every hallway. It was the only place I ever worked where there were Ph.D’s around every corner and secretaries with masters degrees.  It was all a part of the mix to the background noise as the AP and UPI wire service printers clattered six feet from my desk. Staffers walked in and out, people like Ben Stein, Noel Koch, Ken Khachigian, to see if stories they had worked on had yet rolled on the wire services.

Seeing the differences between what the President said or did to what the press printed and broadcast was an education in its own right.

The mechanical process of putting a news summary together was both art and science, engineered by its editor, Mort Allin. With his remarkable memory to remember dates and page numbers where articles had appeared, above the fold or below, Mort Allin was arguably the most ideal person for that job. He could recall if NBC’s Tom Brokaw had used the same language as Bob Pierpoint on CBS and could recall most of what was said by the late Admiral Elmo Zumwalt in his infamous Playboy magazine interview [Yes, we had every issue because, again, we could not let the President be caught off guard - even by the Navy’s top admiral.]

Soon after my contributions to the news summaries began, the usual format and routine underwent an abrupt change for the historic trip to China.

On the cover page he wrote, in part:

Every moment of history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. The Presidential term which begins today consists of 1461 days – no more and no less. Each can be a day of strengthening and renewal for America; each can add depth and dimension to the American experience.

The 1461 days which lie ahead are but a short interval in the flowing stream of history. Let us live them to the hilt, working each day to achieve these goals.

This fairly modest gift richly captures the importance President Nixon placed on using his time – and the time given his administration – to achieve the great purposes to which he devoted his presidency.

There is no single, succinct definition of what constitutes the best use of a president’s time. As head of state, chief executive of the federal government, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and head of his political party, a president wears many hats – often simultaneously. Each president must find a way to juggle the demands these different roles place upon him so that he can focus on those matters that only the president can handle.

When President Nixon took office in January 1969 he established a staff structure that remains largely intact today, seven presidencies later. While each president has tinkered with it, none has entirely replaced it. And those that have strayed too far from its central tenet – that a president’s time is his most valuable resource – have seen their decision-making and their effectiveness diminished.

In the Nixon White House, large, lengthy meetings involving the president were held to a minimum. Requests to see the president were vetted through his chief of staff, who rigorously guarded the president’s time. Policy proposals needing a presidential decision were frequently presented in writing. Presidential travel was meticulously planned to make the most of every minute on the road. Most important, the president’s schedule included “open time” for him to think through issues and strategies.

President Nixon valued and guarded that open time. It gave him the opportunity to reason things through, to consider the various consequences of a decision, and to construct an effective strategy for advancing his vision. As John Mitchell told Time magazine, “[The President] is a man who does his homework, and that becomes quite time-consuming.” Of course, President Nixon only had the time to “do his homework” because his staff was so effective at managing the other demands on his schedule.

This structure, of course, had its detractors. Cabinet officers grumbled that the cabinet didn’t meet enough and complained that they lacked unfettered access to the Oval Office. Members of Congress and White House staff members would have liked more “face time” with the president to advocate for a policy or just to collect that valued Washington currency: the ability to say, “When I was meeting with the president the other day….” The media claimed that the president was being isolated behind a “Berlin Wall” constructed by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger.

Much of the criticism centered on the canard that President Nixon didn’t much like being around people. His critics saw his preference for written memos over face-to-face meetings, for example, as proof of his supposedly misanthropic nature. A fairer reading of the practice, especially taken in the context of his respect for the limited time given any president to accomplish his great goals, leads one to a different conclusion.

If done right, a carefully thought out, well-written memo is almost always a better way to present a proposal. The author of a memo is forced to construct the most cogent, concise presentation for the president’s consideration. That, in turn, provides the president with the information he needs in an efficient format – and if it doesn’t, he will ask for more (or will find someone else who can do it right the first time).

When I was working in President Nixon’s Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey office in the spring of 1990 writing the exhibit text for the Nixon Library, we followed this procedure. As I was preparing to begin writing an exhibit, he would dictate a memo to me (of usually just a page or two) outlining his goals for the exhibit and suggesting tone, content, and direction.

I used that memo as a starting point and would write a draft for his consideration. It would come back marked up in varying degrees. I would incorporate the changes and send back a revised draft. That would continue until he was satisfied with the final product.

This process saved us an enormous amount of time and effort, which was important because we were on a tight schedule. But it also was important because it forced the President to consider what he wanted in an exhibit and because it gave me what I needed to meet his expectations. It only worked, however, because he was willing to take the time to think things through.

My experience is, of course, in no way analogous with the experiences of those who worked in the Nixon White House. On their easiest days they faced pressures, complexities, and challenges of exponentially greater magnitude than anything I tackled during my most difficult. But that’s what made the Nixon White House’s process for managing the president’s time so much more important. It allowed the President to focus on the big picture – and the big picture is ultimately what being president is all about.

For his 13th birthday, Richard Nixon’s grandmother Milhous gave him a framed picture of Lincoln, which she inscribed with a stanza from Longfellow’s Psalm of Life. The inscription read:

Lives of great men oft remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave behind us/Footsteps on the sands of time.

The future president hung that picture over his bed, and years later still regarded it among his fondest possession.

Over the course of his long career, President Nixon left many footsteps on the sands of time. His ability to do so was made possible, in no small part, because he knew how to use the time given him most efficiently and effectively.