What Richard Nixon did next - 13 March 1992

Just about 15 yrs ago, Mr David Frost held a long television interview with former President Richard Nixon. It had been almost three years since he'd resigned the presidency in disgrace for lying throughout the more than two years of the Watergate scandal – lying to the Congress, to the press, to the people. Down the long and truthful perspective of those three years, Mr Nixon had had lots of time to brood and meditate and beg pardon, which he never did – his successor, President Ford, saved him from a court action by pardoning him anyway.

Mr Nixon never did say he'd done wrong. The crafty cover up of the Watergate break-in, the secret paying out of a million or more dollars to hush up the whole thing, the confidential audit of the CIA to stop the FBI looking into it. All this he lied about, but when he was caught and avoided certain impeachment by resigning – ever afterwards he never called it wrong doing. He admitted to mistakes, damn foolishness and he never could face the conclusive evidence that the Senate would have given him no more than a handful of votes when it came to sit as an impeachment court. He blusteringly explained that he'd quit because, I have no longer a political base in Congress – which was the understatement of the century.

So having watched him bare his soul, which he did astonishingly before Mr Frost, I talked about him the following weekend and said this: "It is not to me any longer a question of whether Mr Nixon was hounded by the press or whether to the end he was a victim of his own incorrigible chicanery. In other words, whether he was a dupe or a scoundrel, such testy questions of right and wrong were transcended the other evening in the face-to-face experience itself, the privilege of watching a tragic human being, a character of Shakespearean complexity and pathos, pitiable, in the end sympathetic and gone for good." Those last three words were fatal – "gone for good". Nothing could have been less true to the life and survival of the man in the 15 years that were to follow. It only proved again that reporters should leave prophecy to astrologers and crystal-ball gazers.

Mr Nixon, after going into a sort of retreat at his house in California for many months, perhaps as long as a year, I forget now, came to New York and he had, I believe, some trouble buying an apartment here on the fashionable Upper East Side. In some buildings whose condos are for sale, the tenants can have a say in who they take in, in spite of strict city and state laws about the discrimination implied in what used to be actually advertised as restricted buildings.

Even as late as the 1930s, when I came looking for an apartment, the bland word "restricted" meant one thing – no Jews. Well that even the possibility of that restriction in a city a third of whose population are Jews has long gone, but you still hear that proper tenants can have the money and the clout in various devious ways to find an applicant unsuitable. Certainly in 1975/6 or whenever it was, the stigma of Watergate and his abdication was still on him. He decided to buy a house across the Hudson in a far and leafy region of New Jersey and that's where he lives now.

Since then, he's settled to his autobiography and three or four books on America, its future, the future of Europe, Asia, what American policy ought to be. To put it more bluntly, he began about 10 years ago to write, act, travel and pontificate as if he was an elder statesman; not the elder statesman of the Republican Party, they and their two succeeding presidents did not want to be embarrassed by appearing with him in public. He attends no party conferences, he discreetly stays away from conventions, but what he adopted was the pose of an elder statesman of the republic beyond party, thinking only of America and its proper role.

Though I said just now he adopted a pose, which suggests it was an affectation he couldn't maintain. On the contrary, he has maintained it; he's proved himself to be exactly what he professed and increasingly in the past few years has been an impressive and original voice as a commentator on American foreign policy. Down the years, even his most seething enemies have granted that he achieved things during his presidency that could not belittled. First, he initiated the strategic arms limitation talks, but mainly was his bold decision – he, the legendary anti-communist – to break through the long freeze in the Pacific and establish normal relations with China.

Throughout the past decade or so, he's travelled far and wide. As Eisenhower's Vice President, he'd visited 56 countries. He has always requested and received as a right of office – his former office – audience interviews with all the leading statesmen and politicians of the day. I'm told that his demeanour at these personal encounters is at once so ingratiating but so courtly, so magisterial – he is after all 79 – that the impression of a third party could well be that it is Nixon who is granting the audience. And need I say that when, for instance, he quietly goes off to Russia, he sees Yeltsin and Gorbachev and probably their likely successors and possible enemies.

The other night an aide to President Bush was asked on a television programme if Mr Nixon would be invited to address the coming Republican convention, believe me there was a breathtaking pause. It has never – in all the 18 years since he left the White House – it has never been a possibility. Republicans, lots of them might praise him in private. It was well known that President Reagan frequently sought his advice in private, but the party felt that a public association with him would still look bad.

I do believe we could be on the verge of 180º turn, I don't mean that President Bush is about to send out an SOS message, "help, come home all is forgiven". On the contrary, Mr Bush has better reason than ever not to be merely wary of Mr Nixon but to be mad at him because suddenly this week, Mr Nixon has come out and thrust into the presidential campaign a complaint and a theme that amazingly have not been brought up by any of the candidates on either side. And, so far as I can read and run by any of our commentators, its this, what are you doing, what are you thinking, what are you proposing about American foreign policy, above all why are you losing one of the historic opportunities of this century by giving nothing but pathetic support, in quotes, to the democratic revolution in Russia?

This and much more is challengingly scornfully asked in a four-page memorandum that Mr Nixon has circulated among friends and many foreign affairs experts both here and in the course of the transatlantic mail abroad, it's a powerful and, if you're inclined to agree with its main points, a frightening document because it warns first the Bush presidency, never by name, that quote "if Yeltsin goes down, the prospects for the next 50 years could be grim". The Russian people would not turn back to communism, war could break out in the former Soviet Union as new despots, used force to restore the historical borders of Russia, Democratic forces would give way and dictators would be emboldened from China to Eastern Europe and from the Middle East to Korea.

But the fact that nobody before has so boldly thought through what Nixon calls the pathetically inadequate American response to the needs of a new Russia is enough to launch him all over again, not as just an interesting voice on the sidelines, but a third voice, a rousing policy alternative to President Bush and the Democrats' opposing candidate or candidates.

It's a little late for me to say that, like a lot of other people I'm sure, I'd wondered from time to time in the past month or so if either Mr Bush or the Democrats would ever return us to questions of foreign policy. Mr Nixon is right of course, he stirs our minds and chills our blood with the consequences of America's and the West's lackadaisical approach to a critical Russian revolution that is nowhere near one. As I said, his memorandum is only four pages long, but it's pungent enough to give off more fire and smoke than a fat booklet written in Congressional prose. First, he says the $400 million to help Russia and two other republics dismantle their nuclear weapons were voted by the Democrats in the last session not by the Bush administration. All it has done is to give the Russians credits for farm products and, quote, "hold a photo opportunity international conference of 57 foreign secretaries that was long on rhetoric but short on action".

We have sent 200 peace volunteers, which would be generous if they'd gone to Upper Volta; there's been an airlift of surplus Persian Gulf food. All this says Mr Nixon is pathetic, he proposes a crucial, he calls programme. One Western organisation to coordinate private and government projects, a vast increase in medical and humanitarian aid, a big core of Western managers to help with the transition, a rethinking, a rescheduling of the Soviet debt and interest payments, special access of Russian exports to the West stabilised the rouble. If Yeltsin's revolution fails, it will give the signal, he believes, for weapons of all sorts to pile up in Syria, Libya, Iraq, North Korea. The tide of freedom that has been sweeping over the world will begin to ebb and dictatorship will be the wave of the future.

Well, Mr Nixon is nothing if not apocalyptic, even so he has a record of having been right, as with China, when he seemed most melodramatic. You can be sure anyway that Mr Bush and Governor Clinton will suddenly discover a foreign policy and assure us that they'd merely misplaced it. If Mr Nixon has scared them sufficiently, they will one day come to admit that he has done the State and the West some service.

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