DAY 5: 'Our long national nightmare is over'

This is the last in a five-day series chronicling Richard Nixon's last week as president in 1974, exactly 50 years ago. As a young correspondent for Newsweek, National Journal’s Tom DeFrank was at the White House from Aug. 5, when damning transcripts of taped Nixon conversations were released by Supreme Court order, until Aug. 9, when Nixon resigned and Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president. [CLICK HERE TO READ UNLOCKED VERSIONS OF PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, AND PART 4]

Now officially a lame duck, President Nixon managed little sleep on his final night in the executive mansion. He was up until 1:47 a.m., phoning old friends and taking calls from sorrowful well-wishers, many of whom knew that he’d privately betrayed their trust by his lies. He was working the phones and dealing with staff again four hours later.

As Nixon remained in the family quarters, large color photographs documenting his triumphs came down from West Wing walls even though he was still president.

His prime-time farewell had been delivered in a firm, steady voice, absent malice and devoid of emotion. Not so the next morning, when Nixon assembled more than 400 friends and staffers in the East Room at 9:30 for an adieu so wrenching that even some arch-enemies later admitted a pang of sympathy for a humiliated fellow human struggling to keep from unraveling.

As many wept openly and he himself almost broke down more than once, Nixon was rambling, disjointed, tortured, awkward, maudlin—and in his own way, powerful, majestic, even heroic.

He paid tribute to his parents—first his father, a streetcar motorman, then owner of “the poorest lemon ranch in California … he sold it before they found oil on it,” yet still a “great man, because he did his job” despite many travails.

Then he said, almost breaking down, “my mother was a saint.”

How Nixon got through it, I’ll never know. Somehow he did, at times rising to an eloquence that often eluded him: “Greatness comes … when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”

Thanking his staff at the end, he spoke a line for the ages: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

It was the last story I’ve covered where even reporters were in tears.

Viewing a replay from his vice presidential office, Ford was struck by the disconnect between Nixon’s noble words and ignoble behavior. “If he’d followed his own advice,” Ford noted in his memoir, “this moment might never have come.”

Those 25 minutes may have been Nixon’s most memorable in public life. It almost seemed un-American to recall that this was the same paranoid president who kept an “enemies list” of political opponents, railed in private against Blacks and Jews, vowed to unleash the IRS on his political adversaries, and tried to assure America that “I am not a crook” as evidence of his criminal misconduct piled up.

A roar from the building signaled his farewell had ended. On the South Lawn, Manolo Sanchez, Nixon’s faithful valet, a Cuban immigrant, was waiting to accompany the boss to California. “I decide is my duty to go with this man because I know he’s kinda sad,” a bewildered Sanchez told me. “I don’t believe this thing happen.”

Three minutes after his East Room goodbye, Nixon and his family joined Jerry and Betty Ford. They walked down a long red carpet between a military honor guard. The wives embraced; their husbands shook hands. “Dick, I’m sorry about this. You did a good job,” Ford said. “Good luck, Jerry,” the 37th president replied. “Goodbye, Mr. President,” Ford said. “Goodbye, Mr. President,” Nixon added.

He walked up the four steps of a Sikorsky VH-3A helicopter, turning for a magisterial wave. Then, almost as an afterthought, he snapped off that signature gesture his liberal adversaries hated most: the double-V-for-victory salute.

From his cabin, Nixon stared at the red carpet being rolled up, another metaphor of sudden decline. Army One slowly lifted, banked to starboard, then turned left for the nine-minute hop to Andrews Air Force Base.

He flew to California on The Spirit of ‘76, which he’d rechristened from Air Force One in honor of America's 1976 bicentennial celebration, over which he’d expected to preside. By the time he landed at a Marine Corps air station in California, the plane’s call sign had been downgraded to SAM (Special Air Mission) 27000.

The 2,028 days of the Nixon presidency were over.

Walking back to the press room to brief other reporters, I witnessed a riveting image: the chief of Nixon’s Secret Service detail, Dick Keiser, staring at the vanishing helicopter, tears streaming down both cheeks.

A few years later, Keiser and I got to know each other, and over lunch one day I said I’d been wondering about something that had happened well before we’d met.

“I know what you’re going to ask me,” he replied. “The day Nixon left.

“I totally lost it,” he said. “I couldn’t help it. We’re all trained to react without emotion, to take a bullet for a guy no matter what we think of him personally. But after all he’d been through, you just couldn’t help feel bad for him.

“You’re willing to literally spend your life protecting someone, and all of a sudden [you’re] watching them suffer the greatest hurt of their life and you can't do anything about it. I was helpless. It was very emotional for me.”

Three minutes past noon, on the same dais where Nixon had said goodbye two hours earlier, Jerry Ford was sworn in as the 38th president by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Technically, he was already POTUS; Nixon’s one-sentence resignation letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was logged in at 11:35 a.m.

By design, it was a plain-vanilla ceremony. Ford decreed the moment too solemn for celebration—none of the usual “Ruffles and Flourishes,” “Hail to the Chief,” or 21-gun salutes. It lasted a mere seven-and-a-half minutes, “just a little straight talk among friends,” he called it.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Ford said. “Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

When he asked the country to pray for Nixon, Ford’s voice quavered and his eyes misted. “May our former president, who brought peace to millions, find it for himself,” he said.

He closed by reprising what he’d pledged in his first moments as vice president: “to do the very best I can for America. ... God helping me, I will not let you down.”

Ford graciously set aside prime seats for many of Nixon’s senior aides. I still remember Al Haig wordlessly patting a grim-faced Rose Mary Woods on the arm, trying to assure Nixon’s most dedicated, loyal-to-a-fault personal assistant that time would heal her grief. Woods wasn’t buying it; stoic in her rage and grief, she stared straight ahead at the podium where her beloved boss had still been leader of the free world just that morning.

History has concluded that “our long national nightmare” is the signature sound bite from that speech. But standing on the rear sideline in that magnificent room, its three majestic chandeliers aglow, a simpler line popped into my head, one that then-Vice President Ford had uttered for months on end as he and six journalists hurtled around the country on Air Force Two—a lumbering, twin-engined Convair 580 propjet so slow we renamed it “Slingshot Airlines.”

“Remember: I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

In an era before political spin became a cynical art form, Ford in his understated style was both lowering expectations for himself and signaling that the man an old Michigan pal called “Plain Old Jerry” wasn’t going to run an imperial presidency.

For the next seven hours, Ford raced through a staggering schedule of appointments to stamp his authority over a government inherited without the customary 10-week transition period. He had more than two dozen meetings with old and new White House aides, economic advisers, and congressional leaders. A third of his schedule was devoted to meetings with more than 50 ambassadors, individually and in small groups. It was critical, he believed, to assure global friend and foe on Day One that American foreign policy hadn’t changed even though its architect was now a private citizen.

He kept his predecessor’s Oval Office desk—the same desk, ironically, where Nixon installed hidden microphones to record the conversations that doomed him.

By 7:30, Ford finally motorcaded home to 514 Crown View Drive, his modest split-level residence in suburban Alexandria, Virginia. He and his family commuted for the first 10 days of his presidency.

Almost immediately, a sense of relief began to settle across a fractured nation. The political divisions and emotional angst suddenly felt less fevered. At least for the moment, hope seemed to have trumped despair.

Leaving the White House after five turbulent days, I happened upon another unexpected twist that lingers a half-century later.

Until President Clinton shut down a two-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, thousands of vehicles drove past the executive mansion each day. As Nixon’s presidency had teetered, some protesters who routinely gathered on the north side of the avenue had hoisted banners urging motorists, “Honk If You Think He’s Guilty.”

For weeks on end, hours each day, even into the darkness, presidential visitors and staffers were serenaded by a crescendo of motorists voting with their horns. It drove the dwindling band of Nixon true believers crazy.

Now, with one president abruptly gone and his successor vowing to “bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than any foreign wars,” the horns at long last had fallen silent.