Why Nixon Hated Georgetown
By EVAN THOMAS
June 04, 2015
The paranoid president never fit in with the powerful D.C. social crowd. And they never let him forget it.
Nixon soon learned that Kissinger was making fun of him at Georgetown dinner parties. He tried to be philosophical about it, telling his aides that Kissinger was insecure and needed to build himself up by preening for the swells, even if that meant running down the president. Nixon would tease Kissinger. “Oh, there goes Henry to the leak to the Washington Post,” the president would say when his national security adviser left a meeting, or, “There goes Henry to dine with his Georgetown friends.”
But Kissinger’s perfidy rankled, especially when it appeared in the liberal press—the Times and Post, Time and Newsweek—that Kissinger was a dove who was trying to rein in the hawkish Nixon on Vietnam (the truth was far more complicated). Nixon instructed his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to keep a log of Kissinger’s phone calls. In one instance, after Kissinger denied talking to a certain reporter, Haldeman confronted him with the record of a phone call. “But that was just on the telephone!” protested Kissinger. (Evidently, he had not actually talked to the reporter in person.) Nixon would have been furious, albeit unsurprised, if he knew some of what Kissinger was actually saying on those calls. On the transcript of one call—recorded by Kissinger, who had his own taping system—Kissinger talked to Mrs. Graham about sneaking away from Pat Nixon’s birthday party to her private dinner. Mrs. Graham joked that they would both be “beheaded” if caught.
Nixon’s anger simmered as he heard more reports of Kissinger hobnobbing with the media élite and appearing to grab the credit for the foreign policy achievements of the Nixon administration. He was furious when he heard that Time wanted to make Kissinger, not Nixon, its Man of the Year after the opening to China in 1972, especially since going to China had been Nixon’s idea, not Kissinger’s. He ordered that both Hugh Sidey of Time and John Osborne of the New Republic be banished from the White House. “Both have spoken in the most vicious derogatory terms of RN in the place where you really find out what people think—the Georgetown cocktail parties,” Nixon dictated. “The evidence on this is absolutely conclusive. You do not need to ask me where I got it.”
Nixon was particularly angry at the Washington Post. At first, Nixon’s anti-Post decrees were petty and to some degree forgivable. He banned the Post’s society reporter, Judith Martin, from attending his daughter Tricia’s wedding. (Martin had compared Tricia to a “vanilla ice cream cone.”) Mrs. Graham protested, but at some level she understood; she privately confessed that she wouldn’t want Martin to cover her own daughter’s wedding.
But then, as Nixon increasingly listened to his self-described “hatchet man” Chuck Colson, the punitive steps became harsher. Colson, a tough-guy populist who once joked that he would run over his grandmother to get Richard Nixon re-elected, called Mrs. Graham “vicious.” Kissinger, who could act as something of a double agent, told Nixon that Mrs. Graham had said of Nixon, “I hate him” and that she had vowed to stop his re-election. Kissinger, meanwhile, was telling Mrs. Graham that the animus towards the Post at the White House was “unbelievable.”
Colson and Nixon’s friend Florida real estate mogul Bebe Rebozo began to maneuver behind the scenes to spur citizen challenges to the Washington Post’s TV broadcast licenses. At the Post, the editors understood that not just their access, but also their livelihoods were threatened. In an interview years later, the Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, was explicit about the cause and effect: “Our stock price nosedived as the word got out that the Post was going to lose its TV station income. It was a scary time, and it had an absolutely critical impact on us internally. From that time on we knew that Nixon hated us and we reciprocated. Without that, the Post would never have behaved so confidently in its reporting of Watergate.”
Of course, Nixon’s bitter relations with the Georgetown Set did not cause Watergate. Nixon’s enemies lists were wide ranging and included all manner of despised bureaucrats; his rants were aimed at various ethnic groups as well as the “liberal elitists” who dined at Mrs. Graham’s. But as I read Haldeman’s diaries and notes of his running conversation with the president and listened to the White House tapes, I was struck by the frequency with which Nixon returned to his feelings of aggrievement at the hands of the people who went to cocktail parties in Georgetown.
Nixon liked to say that he did not hold grudges. The evidence strongly suggests the contrary: that the desire for revenge fueled Nixon. But he was resilient, and he could make himself get along with his enemies, even as he privately denounced them. In 1986, he made peace with Mrs. Graham. The two old adversaries were photographed sharing a laugh, and Newsweek (owned by the Graham family) ran a cover story with a smiling Nixon under the cheeky headline, “He’s Back!”
Over at the Washington Post, executive editor Ben Bradlee expressed a certain fondness, or at least nostalgia, for Nixon. In the late 1980s, when I was the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, I attended a lunch of the Board of Directors of the Washington Post Company, and Bradlee was there. He got to talking about Nixon. Suddenly he exclaimed, “I miss him! I miss him!” Georgetown society—the sort of parties thrown by Kay Graham, Joe Alsop and Bradlee and his wife Sally Quinn—is just a memory now. But in its day, it’s fair to say that Georgetown dined on Richard Nixon—and then spat him out.
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