Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now welcome, Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
We're coming off a week that the world came back to New York after a two-year hiatus. I'm talking about the United Nations General Assembly, the body organized and headquartered here whose goal after two world wars in the first half of the 21st century was to avoid a third. Here's where President Harry Truman said to 10,000 invitees sitting on wooden folding chairs in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of New York City on October 24, 1949. He said, "We have come together today to lay the cornerstone of the permanent headquarters of the United Nations. These are the most important buildings in the world, for they are the center of man's hope for peace and a better life."
So last week brought me back 27 years to when I was working in the White House and President Bill Clinton met along the periphery of the General Assembly with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. On the agenda as the leaders of the two superpowers met was Taiwan, human rights, China's desire to join the World Trade Organization, and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Now, if President Joe Biden had held a bilateral meeting with his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping in New York last week, as might have been tradition, those very same issues might have been on the table. But alas, President Xi hasn't been to the United States since April 2017. That famous visit with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago where the Chinese leader feasted on a fat wedge of the club's famous chocolate cake. In fact, since the pandemic began in 2020, President Xi hasn't even stepped outside his own country except for one foray earlier this month to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where, among other foreign leaders, he held a tete-a-tete with President Vladimir Putin. As I was putting together my notes for the episode over the weekend, there were even wild rumors floating around the internet, since debunked, of a coup d'etat against Xi and Beijing by members of his own military.
So what a long, strange 50-year trip it's been between the United States and China since that week that changed the world back in February 1972 when President Richard Nixon, his wife Pat, and a large U.S. delegation stepped foot off of Air Force One to shake hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and began to normalize relations between the two countries that had effectively been frozen since Mao Zedong's rise to power after the end of World War II.
Nixon's gambit in that week-long trip can be seen as the spark that eventually saw a mammoth amount of trade between the two countries and 261 Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges with a combined market value of $1.3 trillion as of March 2022. Will those numbers begin to spiral down as a result of chilling relations and conflicting accounting standards between the U.S. and China? And will the military threat posed by China in the South China Sea and elsewhere move far beyond that which Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Secretary of State William Rogers saw when they declaimed in Beijing in 1972?
Today, we're going to talk with an architect of that trip and one of the few members of the traveling delegation still alive today to tell the story of how it happened, what went down on the ground when the U.S. President made his historic visit. Dwight Chapin was his personal aid to President Nixon and then Deputy Assistant to the President and acting Chief of Protocol during the trip. He's now out with his new book, The President's Man: The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aide, published by William Morrow. And he's our guest on Inside the ICE House coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
Connecting the opportunity is just part of the hustle.
Speaker 4:
Opportunity is using data to create a competitive advantage.
Speaker 5:
It's raising capital to help companies change the world.
Speaker 6:
It's making complicated financial concepts seem simple.
Speaker 7:
Opportunity is making the dream of home ownership a reality.
Speaker 8:
Writing new rules and redefining the game.
Speaker 9:
And driving the world forward to a greener energy future.
Speaker 10:
Opportunity is setting your goal.
Speaker 11:
And charting your course to get there.
Speaker 3:
Sometimes the only thing standing between you and opportunity is someone who can make the connection.
Speaker 12:
At ICE, we connect people to opportunity.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Dwight Chapin, got his start in presidential politics right down the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Former Vice President Richard Nixon, licking his wounds from losing to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election and Pat Brown in the 1962 governor's race, had an office at the law firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander right here at 20 Broad Street.
Mulling his future, Nixon and his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, carefully cultivated the former Vice President's political relationships in a row of filing cabinets and dispensed as many favors as they could for candidates in the 1966 midterms before Nixon might be able to mount a comeback against presumed opponent President Lyndon Johnson and make another run for the White House in 1968. Helping that process two or three nights a week was a volunteer, one of the young Mad Men at the offices of J. Walter Thompson here in New York City, one Dwight Chapin, late of Wichita, Kansas by way of USC and also by way of a sometimes paternal, sometimes brotherly, sometimes abusive relationship and mentorship with the head of J. Walter Thompson's West Coast office, one H.R. "Bob" Haldeman. Dwight Chapin, welcome to where it all began back here on Broad Street in the New York Stock Exchange.
Dwight Chapin:
Terrific. It's great to be with you.
Josh King:
So what are your memories of working in the neighborhood?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, I have great memories of taking the subway down after work at J. Walter Thompson and being shown the ropes by Mrs. Nixon and Rose Mary Woods, answering correspondence. At that time, of course, we had no email or means of communication other than snail mail. And Mr. Nixon being the consummate politician, insisted that every single piece of correspondence be answered in full. So Mrs. Nixon kind of taught me the ropes, and I launched my New York career in politics right there at 20 Broad Street.
Josh King:
Dwight, did the depiction by Vincent Kartheiser of Pete Campbell in the Connecticut-based commuting Mad Men of Sterling Cooper, which ran on AMC from 2007 to 2015, did it bring back any post-traumatic stress? What was it like to be working in advertising in New York City in the early 60s?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, it was highly competitive. The thing that you've got to recall is that marketing at that time was like investment banking or high tech is now. Marketing was the thing. And men and women coming out of the MBA programs were migrating here to New York City. It was a very, very hotbed of activity.
Josh King:
I watched a good part of Our Nixon over the weekend, the documentary made from home movies taken on Super 8 cameras in the hands of you, Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman. I took my own videos when I worked at the White House. Did you have a sense that you were a cinematographer of history when you were shooting or just having some fun with the camera?
Dwight Chapin:
No, I really didn't have that sense. We did work out an arrangement with the Navy film lab to have them develop all of our films, and in return for that the government would keep a copy and then we could also keep our own personal copy. It's really turned out to be quite a great idea because the film now exists at the Nixon Library and there are literally hundreds of feet of footage that comes from all different angles and so forth and helps like the tapes do. I mean, the Nixon presidency's probably the most documented presidency in the history of the nation.
Josh King:
Before we dive into the book, you mentioned near the end that a few years after leaving the White House, you and Bob Haldeman and Dick Howard, and then you and John Ehrlichman looked at starting business ventures in China. And given what I laid out in the introduction, how do you view relations between the U.S. and China today and perhaps moving forward both from a political standpoint and also a business standpoint?
Dwight Chapin:
That's a complicated question, Josh. I believe that one of the things that happened after the opening and as we progressed to normalization and put our ambassadorships in place and so forth was that the United States took and let commerce get into the lead role here versus the national interest. And it's a huge factor. And it's something that in my opinion needs to be readjusted. Where obviously both nations are here to stay and we're going to deal with one another, but it's the playing field. It is the understanding of what America is going to put in the primary position. And it can't be commerce. It has to be the national interest.
Josh King:
So let's spin back the clock. Let's go back to 1962. You launched your career in politics doing field work for Nixon in California. I'm curious what that entailed and how did you, like so many of my friends in the Clinton, Gore, Obama and Biden worlds, see the light that field sucks and advance work is where it's at?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, I didn't have a summer job in 1962, and my dad arranged for me to go down and interview at the Nixon offices. At that time, it was legal for corporations to give people two campaigns to work. And my dad's firm, the Garrett Corporation, had given a person to work in the Nixon campaign. And he arranged for me to go down. And when I went down to the offices on Wilshire Boulevard, I was introduced to Bob Haldeman, this young, crew cut executive that was the manager of the campaign. And he hired me to be in charge of Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, and the San Fernando Valley of LA County. And when I say hired me, I was recruited to go in and establish campaign headquarters in all these little communities.
At that time, we utilized housewives, I would say working women, but there weren't many working women, most women were housewives at that point, to run the precinct documents and get track of the whole grassroots organization. So I was in really at the very ground floor of what politics was all about. I was still going to USC. I dropped from 15 or 18 units down to four. My whole priority shifted to this campaign. And of course, the golden rainbow in it all was that I met all of these people that had been involved in the '60 effort against Jack Kennedy who had now migrated to California to help try to win this gubernatorial thing so that Nixon could keep his political career alive.
Josh King:
You brought up your dad. So let's just venture a little back further, Dwight. Your dad, an aeronautical engineer. Boeing got its start in Wichita, so aeronautics is a big thing in that town. You, like so many people in that era, were afflicted as you wrote in the book by undiagnosed dyslexia. And when you didn't measure up in grades or behavior, you'd find yourself at the business end of your dad's Sigma Chi slide rule from Purdue. What was life like at home?
Dwight Chapin:
Life at home was tough. By the time I got to college, I had actually learned to study. And what had happened was because I am very dyslexic, as you point out, as I moved into the college years, I would get my information orally and I could do much better with my grades. Once I realized I had to go to lectures and sit there and take notes, my grade point average improved dramatically, and I really never had another problem getting through college.
Josh King:
One of the ways out of Wichita, among others that you write about, thanks to Grandmother Chapin, was the philosophy of Norman Vincent Peele and The Power of Positive Thinking. Let's just hear a quick clip from Dr. Peele.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peele:
Now, what I want to talk to you about tonight is why positive thinkers get positive results. And they do too, that's for sure. One reason that the positive thinker gets positive results is he is not afraid of a problem. As a matter of fact, he finds problems exciting. He likes to take a tough, naughty problem and rip it apart and put it together again in the right manner.
Josh King:
So Dwight, Dr. Peele, Reverend Billy Graham, these guys had a powerful effect on you.
Dwight Chapin:
They did. You know, I've got to say, Josh, it sounds so corny, but attitude determines altitude. If you've got the right attitude, I mean you can go all kinds of places. And when you're dealing with people like Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton or any of the real successful politicians, attitude is what matters. The public senses when these people have a can-do type attitude or when they're trying to couple together a belief with policy or whatever it might be. And I was given that gift thanks to my Grandmother Chapin. I do believe that attitude is something that gives you altitude and helps to secure your place when you're working with these important men, whether that's Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon or whoever.
Josh King:
So Dwight, those of us who have been reared in advance work on the Democratic side were told 1960 war stories from people like Jerry Bruno and Jim King doing advance work for the Kennedy Brothers in '60 and '68. But our appreciation of the Republican application of the craft doesn't go a whole lot back farther than what Mike Deaver did for Ronald Reagan. Trace the lineage of advance work that goes back further to Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Nixon, the people of your generation.
Dwight Chapin:
I can really only trace the Nixon piece of it. But I will tell you this, that it was Billy Graham saying to Richard Nixon, this was for 1960, you should study how we put together these massive rallies, religious rallies that the Graham people would put on, their revivals, if you will. And Bob Haldeman went down to Montreat, North Carolina and spent a few days with the Graham people. And out of that, Bob developed an advance manual, which really ended up being the start of what we called the Nixon Advance Manual. And then it was modified and carried through various political campaign cycles all the way to '68.
Josh King:
I was so struck by the idea that as a person of my age who studied a little bit of the Nixon administration, the two people identified so often as being in charge, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and now my appreciation of you through your book, you're really advance guys.
Dwight Chapin:
I was. Well, actually I started out doing the correspondence, but I ended up in 1966 being an advance man and went to all of the advance schools. And then in '67 when Nixon invited me to become his personal aide, I started taking on all of the assignments that are associated with that. But I continued to go to all of the advance schools because the linkage between me managing the candidate and everything that was going on, it was critical that I understood what was going on with all of the advance people. And of course, the glue that held all of that together was Haldeman, who was an expert on it all. So Bob, he became chief of staff before he ever had the title, and he was the one that made sure that that cohesion was there between the advance operation and the management of the candidate.
Josh King:
Until Watergate, Dwight, the 1962 election was really the nadir of Nixon's political career. Here is the former Vice President after being defeated by Pat Brown 52% to 47% in the California gubernatorial election. Let's hear it.
President Richard Nixon:
People say it was another come down having run for president, almost made it to run for governor. The answer is I am proud to run for governor. I would like to have won. I believe Governor Brown has a heart, even though he believes I does not. I believe he is a good American, even though he feels I am not. I wish him well. And for once, gentlemen, I would appreciate if you would write what I am saying. For 16 years, you've had a lot of fun, you've had an opportunity to attack me, and I think I've given as good as I've taken. But as I leave you, just think how much you're going to be missing. You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. Thank you, gentlemen, and good day,
Josh King:
Dwight, you come back to that clip a couple times during the book. What does it tell us?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, first of all, I was standing about 16 feet from him when he said that. It was one of the most historical moments that I had ever attended up to that point. And in writing the book and thinking about all this, I think psychologically you were really seeing Nixon let his hair down. I mean, he did think it was all over. You know that Howard K. Smith, the renowned anchor for ABC, had a couple of nights after that event, had a show called The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon. In fact, one of the guests on the show was Alger Hiss, who had been a nemesis of Richard Nixon, Nixon having found Hiss as a Communist agent in the State Department.
So it was all over. That was it. It was curtains. Of course, it turned out not to be curtains, but at that point we all thought it was all over.
Josh King:
A through line of the entire book is your relationship with your bosses, Nixon one, and another one in particular, you write in the book, and I'm going to quote you here, "It was an extraordinary journey and it had been made possible by one man, Harry Robbins Haldeman. H.R. Haldeman was my mentor, my most demanding boss I ever had." Let's hear a clip when we hear his voice in Our Nixon.
Harry Robbins Haldeman:
I was very tough on people, feeling that I had to be, There's something about the presidency that I've been ridiculed from my picking up the Navy term of zero defects. But you do have to operate at as close to zero defect as you can. And I was not overly concerned with whether people like me as a result of it or not. I was only concerned with the result the President wanted got carried out.
Josh King:
So creative advertising man, Christian Scientist, a commanding authority, and privately, to you sometimes, a guy who really doubted himself.
Dwight Chapin:
All human beings at some point whether they admit it or not probably doubt themselves or have questions about certain aspects of what it is that they're doing. But I think the important thing, Josh, is that Bob Haldeman had one client. Keep in mind, he came out of the advertising business, which is made up of clients representing all kinds of points of view. This man, Bob Haldeman, represented one point of view and he had loyalty to one person and that was to Richard Nixon. And Bob had an operating dictum, that the definition of quality is to do the job right the first time. That puts a certain level of demand. And Bob expected that from all of us. We worked for a President of the United States. We were to perform at a A-plus level continually.
My issue with Bob became, as I look back on it, it was later in life, much later in life that I realized that I was, or found out that I was dyslexic. So part of my inability to perform at the level that Bob wanted on certain matters, particularly in terms of written communications, was directly related to my dyslexicism. But that said, one of my abilities was to interact with the other staff, with the President and so forth, on an oral level that was superior. My baggage was on the written communication side, not so much on the oral side.
Josh King:
Talk about the written communications and sometimes things that were attributed to you that shouldn't have been, Dwight. Talk about a politician in the political wilderness. I traveled some with Clinton in the 1980s before the 1992 campaign. You find yourself with Vice President Nixon in places like Waterville, Maine, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or behind a tiny desk in a walk-in closet in the Nixon's Fifth Avenue apartment. What did you come to appreciate about Richard Nixon in the years when it was just often just the two of you, those copious memos that he wrote that were often signed D.C. instead of R.N.?
Dwight Chapin:
I think that the real lesson is that, I'm talking Nixon now, Clinton may have been a little bit different, we would be going to the tiniest radio station in Wisconsin. And it would be 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning. He was going for the morning show traffic time. And we would arrive and in this station would be one single guy who was the engineer, the emcee of the show, and everything else. But Richard Nixon the whole way to that little radio station had sat in the back of the car with his briefcase on his lap and his yellow pad writing out everything he wanted to get accomplished at that radio show.
My point being, he worked incessantly. He prepared. It could have been the tiny, it was the tiniest radio station in the state probably, but you would think he was getting ready to go on Meet the Press or something. So with Mr. Nixon in these wilderness years, it was all about his learning curve, keeping it as he said to me at one time, "Keep your learning curve vertical." He practiced what he preached. And this was a man who was like a sponge absorbing all of this of what was going on, whether that be foreign policy, domestic policy, the politics in a given state, you name it. The guy was always working and learning.
Josh King:
Kept practicing, kept learning. And in some ways, Dwight, I think you'd probably agree, kept getting better than what he was before. There was this style that developed I think maybe with the help of Roger Ailes, who was the producer at The Mike Douglas Show, Al Scott, Len Garment, the President of CBS, Frank Shakespeare, that created what we would call the televised town hall. Nixon called it the man in the arena. Let's hear a clip of the kind of an event that would be from Detroit, Michigan.
President Richard Nixon:
Well, thank you very much, Bud Wilkinson. And I think that all of our television audience in view of this sports consciousness of this great city at the present home will be interested a little about you. Of course, everybody that hears Bud Wilkinson do the commentating on ABC Sports has heard of him and remembers his great Oklahoma team. But I'm glad that he's on my team and I'm on his team now, Bud Wilkinson.
Incidentally, it looks like we're in a winners city. I was thinking with the Tigers in the World Series and the Lions doing so well, I guess hope that a little of that winner business rubs off on me while I'm in Detroit. And then too we have some other celebrities in the audience that I would like to introduce before we go to our panel. We have the Governor of Michigan, Governor George Romney.
Josh King:
So Dwight, this is a man who isn't being kicked around anymore. He's taking to theater in the round like a football field doing some kicking of his own. How did this presentation really turn the tide in '68?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, first of all, you saw in the man in the arena concept, and it was one of the things that grabbed Roger Ailes imagination and he really brought it to life, was that we put Nixon in the center of this group with no notes, just a standup microphone.
Now, that may seem like in today's world not something special, but when you go back 50 years or 55 years, this was not how it was done. Everybody had notes or they're behind a podium or something. But Nixon demonstrated his ability to stand there in front of a microphone surrounded by either a group of reporters or a mixture of reporters and local citizens and to answer questions directly. And we did that on a regional basis. We went primary to primary. Then when the general campaign came along, we used it there also.
And then he coupled in the use of Bud Wilkinson, who was really a hero. I mean, he was like Saban is today in terms of the Alabama coach. I mean, Bud Wilkinson was the national football hero, college sports, and from Oklahoma. I mean, he had that kind of a Midwestern appeal. So it was the combination of the whole thing.
And I want to go back to what you said because it's so important to understand that in 1968 campaign, it was the Frank Shakespeares, the Al Scotts, the Roger Ailes, it was our team. We had a bench and we had real experts on that bench helping us plan every maneuver along the way. In 1960, the rub against Nixon was he was his own campaign manager. He didn't listen to others. He called the shots. In 1968, he delegated. He delegated the management of the tour to Haldeman. He delegated the management of the campaign to John Mitchell. He delegated the television stuff to Frank Shakespeare and to Roger Ailes. I mean, he was really smart about it and he used others.
Josh King:
Before and after he was elected in 1968, Dwight, Nixon seems, in the way you tell it in the book, to be a person who really wanted to confront his detractors head on. You write about an episode with protestors in Columbus, Ohio, another time in San Jose, California when he bounded on top of his limousine to flash the V for victory sign. But perhaps the most famous instance might have been this night at the Lincoln Memorial five days after Kent State. Here's Nixon in his own words dictating what happened May 1970.
President Richard Nixon:
I walked over to a group of them and walked up to them and shook hands. They were not unfriendly. As a matter of fact, they seemed somewhat overawed, and of course, quite surprised. I said, "I know you, probably most of you think I'm an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel. I recall that when I was just a little older than you how excited I was Chamberlain came home from Munich and made his famous statement about peace in our time. I had heard it on the radio. As a result, I thought at that time that Chamberlain was the greatest man alive. But when I read Churchill's all-out criticism of Chamberlain, I thought Churchill was a madman. In retrospect, I now realize I was wrong." The first rays of the sun began to climb up over the Washington Monument, and I said I had to go to, shook hands with those nearest to me, and walked down the steps.
Josh King:
It was four o'clock in the morning when he did that. Not a trip that was set up by the President's appointments secretary, was it? What does that tell us?
Dwight Chapin:
It tells us that he was really emotionally involved in what was going on and with these demonstrators coming into Washington and frustrated that he was having such problems communicating with them. And then most importantly maybe, it tells you about the inner Nixon. If you really read that piece in the book, he wanted those young people to continue to have faith in America. He did not want the war and what he was going through and the decisions that he was making to discourage young people from believing in our country. And it was a rough spot and he knew it. And he knew that they were coming at it from a different point of view than he was and that that was okay. He understood. From a leadership point of view, it's very hard to picture Nixon having that kind of a frame of mind, but that's where his head was.
Josh King:
You and Haldeman sort of got called in the middle of the night. What was the next morning like when either you saw the President or Haldeman saw the President and kind of got the download?
Dwight Chapin:
Yeah, I got called, I think it was around 4:30 in the morning. Bob says, "I'm going to pick you up in 10 minutes." And the White House car picked Bob up, picked me up. And we chased them to the Lincoln Memorial and missed them. And they were all on the way to the Hill. And we finally caught up with them in the chambers of the Senate where Nixon is having Manolo, his valet, who had been with him for years, going up and sitting in the chair of the Senate leader.
I mean, it was surreal. And then we went from there to the Mayflower Hotel where he had some breakfast. He used to go meet there with J. Edgar Hoover and they would have lunch or breakfast or something. And I remember that he said, "We're going to walk back to the White House." And I said this to Bob Taylor, who was by this time had caught up with us. He was the lead agent. And Bob says, "With all these demonstrators in town, he is not walking back to the White House." And we got him into the car and took him back by car.
Josh King:
So Dwight, you detail another key relationship that would provide a through line from the first election to the China trip to the '72 reelect and then Watergate, and that was Mr. Haldeman. While you were at The Pierre Hotel in New York, though, working on the transition, another key relationship begins, and that's when you are ordered to get in touch with this Harvard professor, a guy named Dr. Henry Kissinger. And you track him down through WACA while he's in a meeting with the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. This guy's brilliant, funny, charming. He's a ladies man, as you document, with Jill St. John. How would Henry Kissinger fit into this sort of crew-cut team of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Ron Ziegler, Pat Moynihan, Bryce Harlow? And how would Henry ultimately change your life?
Dwight Chapin:
I spent a few hours with Henry last week in California. We were out there for a dinner honoring Dr. Kissinger. And I happened to have the privilege of riding from his hotel over to the foundation with him. And he mentions in that car ride, he said, "Dwight, one of the things I think about is how I was welcomed in to the Nixon White House." He said, "Bob Haldeman supported me from day one and no one held against me my work for Nelson Rockefeller or being anything other than the new guy on the block. And I was made to feel very welcomed."
So he at 99 years old is still reflecting on the fact that he came in, we considered him a team member from the start. And of course, it goes without saying that he became this world's famous statesman. I joke about it. There were three or four times where Henry's sensitivities were such that he wanted to resign, and Bob Haldeman is the one that would talk him out of resigning. And I make the point in my book, Henry would've never become the statesman that he became had Haldeman not talked him into staying.
Josh King:
Beneath the bold names that we associate with Nixon's years in office, there are a myriad other names that came into consciousness as a result of the China trip or Watergate. People like Steve Bull. I got to know his wife Jeanne Bull a lot when she was at the State Department and I was at the White House. People like Alex Butterfield. And for Kissinger, his deputy Alexander Haag. How did it all gel or not during those first two years in office? I mean, in those home movies in Our Nixon, you all look like you're having the time of your lives. But was Haag the life of the party?
Dwight Chapin:
I would not put Haag at the life of the party. And there's unfoldments taking place regarding Al Haag and some questions as to the depth of his loyalty that are being investigated. I mean, it's too early to know exactly what all the truth is here and the historians are going to have to sort that out.
But there was a very high degree of comradery. I don't believe that we had the back biting and the kind of the disruption that we've seen in more recent administrations. First of all, Nixon wouldn't tolerate it. Haldeman wouldn't tolerate it. Obviously, we had disputes. I mean, we had a liberal like Patrick Moynihan, and we had a conservative like Arthur Burns who had run the Federal Reserve. So we had policy disagreements, but we didn't have really personality disagreements. The people were there to advance ideas. We had a liberal speech writer by the name of Ray Price and we had a conservative speech writer by the name of Patrick Buchanan. And they would batter over ideas and giving ideas to Nixon. But Nixon liked this kind of exchange. He liked his people kind of debating with one another so that he would get to a better conclusion of what it was that he wanted to do, a policy-type matter.
Josh King:
I remember my first office in the White House. It was, you've mentioned earlier, the OEOB, it was OEOB 184 in Clinton's time. The Old Executive Office Building was the home of the younger legions of the staff while the President spent much of his day in the Oval Office, the little study off of the Oval, and his little dining room in that suite. But in Nixon's day, OEOB 180 was really his home away from home, reserving the Oval for official meetings and events. How did he use that space for thinking time and how did that affect your job?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, it didn't affect my job. I mean, we fell into it. He started out using the Oval Office. He did use the little anteroom off of the Oval Office to go in and do some writing and so forth. At that time, Alex Butterfield had what has turned into the dining room area. Bob Haldeman had that at first and then Alex.
But then Nixon started liking going over to the Executive Office Building. It was a big office over there. He continued to do all of his official-type meetings in the Oval Office. But in the afternoons, once we got through the morning schedule, which was more of a public schedule, he would go over into the Executive Office Building and meet privately with people and so forth. It was, I don't know, less public, what it was about it, but more comfortable. He had a lot of his own artifacts that he had brought from previous years and so forth. So it didn't have the formality of the Oval Office.
Josh King:
Things that did affect you though, Dwight, were sort of you're reckoning with what the media was all about. There's a somewhat shocking story in your book that was news to me, reading about columnist Jack Anderson about to run a story about a homosexual ring in the White House that would involve you, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Larry Higby. And for reference, I just want to hear a little bit of a taped conversation between President Nixon and the FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover,
President Richard Nixon:
And I hope that you had your people get this one down because in the 23 years that I have known the director, that he has never served a party, he has always served this country. That sort of summed it up, didn't it?
J. Edgar Hoover:
It did. And I ordered today, a copy of your speech came over from the White House today.
President Richard Nixon:
Yeah.
J. Edgar Hoover:
And I ordered that it'd be printed in our national, in the law enforcement bulletin, which goes to about 1,500, 15,000 police departments in the country.
President Richard Nixon:
Oh, that's fine.
J. Edgar Hoover:
So it'llbe everywhere.
President Richard Nixon:
I wanted it to get out there. But it got a good play. And I was glad that we could give it a shot.
J. Edgar Hoover:
Well, I deeply appreciated what you did because it certainly was wonderful of you to do it.
President Richard Nixon:
Yeah, well, I wanted to.
Josh King:
J. Edgar Hoover himself made you put your hand on the Bible and swear it wasn't true. Was he looking for some kompromat to hold in the files in a safe under lock and key at his own home?
Dwight Chapin:
I don't think so. I think he, on that particular incident the name of the game was to get the staff cleared. It was a fraudulent charge that was put forward by Murray Chotiner. So it was an internal, Murray Chotiner being a political advisor of many years to Richard Nixon, who was at odds with both Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. And so it was an attempt within the administration to impugn us. And J. Edgar Hoover became part of the solution to that problem. The part that's very intriguing is no one knows where the depositions that we took are located. When Hoover died, his safe was emptied and nobody knows who emptied that safe.
Josh King:
After the break, Dwight Chapin, author of the President's Man: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon's Trusted Aide, and I are going to move from the West Wing and the OEOB of the White House to Air Force One and the tarmac in Beijing for that historic trip to China now 50 years in the rear view mirror. What that trip means in context and where our relationship with China might be heading, that's coming up right after this.
Speaker 17:
When you hear the word sustainability, you think too big. When you feel you have to do something, you think too complicated. Hold on. Think about your decisions. Get closer. Those that are big or small for you. Your decisions and other people's decisions. Those that have to be made every day. Step back a little. Think of the decisions that add up to many more. There are millions of decisions that change everything little by little for the better.
Now, think about who can help you make better decisions. And there we are. So that what you save, the planet saves too. To keep moving forward without leaving anyone behind. And now when you hear the word sustainability, you think opportunities. At BBVA, we're putting new solutions at your fingertips in order to build a greener and more inclusive future. BBVA, creating opportunities.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Dwight Chapin, author of the President's Man: The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aide, and I we're talking about his journey into presidential politics and his work in the Nixon White House. Now, as my friend, Secretary of State Tony Blinken might say, we're going to pivot to China for that historic trip 50 years ago in 1972.
So Dwight, you've got your job at the White House. A big part of that is working with John Ehrlichman on the President's sophisticated foreign trips like the world tour to welcome home the Apollo astronauts, or the first visit to Vatican City to greet Pope Paul VI. But to be honest, I mean, you're an operator, a logistics man. How conscious of you at this point of the things that Nixon has written in the past, like his 1967 article on foreign affairs in which he writes, "There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation"?
Dwight Chapin:
I was not familiar with that. I had read that article, it was Asia after Vietnam for Foreign Affairs Magazine. But I had read it back in '67. But I had no way of assimilating that because the foreign policy area was not my area of expertise to say the least. But it was brought to my attention shortly after the announcement of the trip to China. So it started making sense. And it made sense to me about the man himself. You have Richard Nixon in the wilderness years sitting there as a lawyer in New York City thinking about where the world's going, taking trips abroad, keeping his contacts with world leaders or opposition leaders in various countries.
So the fact that he was thinking of what was going to be happening with China all made sense once Henry was back from his secret trip and the announcement was made. To say that I was thinking about it before then, no, that's not true.
Josh King:
I mean, speaking of the secret trip, here's a recent clip of Dr. Kissinger remembering how ping-pong diplomacy opened up a new channel of cultural communication between the two countries.
Henry Kissinger:
A member of the American table tennis team sent a message to Premier Zhou Enlai asking for the American group to be invited to China. He had no governmental mission to do this. It was a private initiative. And the Chinese leaders took it up to invite the group for a historic visit to China. I was security advisor to President Nixon at the time.
Josh King:
So bring us to the Western White House in San Clemente, Kissinger's arrival via helicopter, and how gradually you pieced together what was going on.
Dwight Chapin:
That was a very historic day. He came back. The President went out in his golf cart, picked him up, took him off to breakfast. We knew something big was happening, but we just didn't know what. The next thing we knew was that Ziegler was in touch with the networks to reserve time that night. And we all got on the helicopter. Only three or four people knew what was going to be announced at Burbank Studios. I was not one of them. So I'm standing there in the studio when this happens, and that's when I hear that he's going to go to China. And of course, then the world exploded. I mean, this thing was huge news.
Josh King:
So you're standing in the Burbank studio, you have no idea what's on the President's talking points or what he's about to say. It's always a big ask when you ask the networks to clear time for the President of the United States to speak. And even a person very senior up in the West Wing has no idea what his boss is going to say. And then in terms of the advance depth chart in the West Wing, John Ehrlichman was probably ranked highest based on his experience, but he and Kissinger were kind of competitive guys. So Haldeman drafts you to take over as quarterback. Nixon wanted to accomplish the whole trip in a 10-seat Jetstar instead of 26,000. How did you go about all that work?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, it was amazing in the sense that this thing just kept evolving. So one of my first meetings with the President and Haldeman, and then Kissinger joined us after 20 or 30 minutes, was the President sitting there talking about the fact he was only going to take this Jetstar, he would take two or three members of the press, and this was going to be nothing but a business trip. So I mean, this thing started out on this very small-scale operation. And then within a week or two, it started getting a little bit bigger and so forth. And by the time we got to October, I mean, we were talking about fairly significant numbers. I think we were probably up in the 150, 200 range by that time. By the time we got to January on our planning, we were up to 390. I mean, this thing just kept expanding. Mrs. Nixon got included.
The problem that Ron Ziegler had in terms of the media requests was just overwhelming. And the thing that was so interesting about that, Josh, was that the management at the networks decided that they wanted to go on the trip because this thing was so unusual. Normally, the management never went. It was bureau chiefs and their reporters, nobody besides the bureau chief. And now we had executives bouncing the news guys off of the trip so that they could go. So Ziegler had a hell of a problem trying to get all this organized and limiting, getting the number of seats available assigned to the media.
Josh King:
In that sort of week to 10 days after Kissinger gets to San Clemente and you make the announcement at Burbank Airport and the word gets out because he's got a roadblock on all the networks that night, how did the notion of just a 10-seat business trip to Beijing go over with the State Department, with Secretary William Rogers and his Chief of Protocol Bus Mosbacher?
Dwight Chapin:
They never knew. I don't know that they knew that the thinking was that small. Bus Mosbacher was an issue from day one because basically I took on the responsibility as acting Chief of Protocol and Bus was moved out. He never even went on the trip.
The relationship with Rogers was incredibly sensitive, and we had to handle Secretary of State Rogers in a special way throughout the journey. And one of the reasons, you got to relate to this, Josh, one of the reasons that the policy implementations of the Nixon White House were brought into the White House, into the NSC, and run by Nixon and Kissinger was that Nixon knew if he was running these policy initiatives out of the State Department, as would be normal protocol, that they would've leaked and been undermined and would've never happened. I mean, it's awfully hard for people to understand that. It's an entirely different thing when a Republican is in office than when a Democrat is in office.
And I don't want to be disrespectful here. But I mean, you saw it with the leaking of the Trump phone call to the President of Mexico and somebody decides that they don't like that and they go out and they leak it. I mean, it's a hell of a way for a president to have to run his office. But that's what we were up against. And Nixon, as Vice President under Eisenhower, had seen eight years of how all this stuff worked. And he was going to be damned if he was going to have the State Department or the Pentagon undermining what his initiatives were going to be.
Josh King:
One of the ways in which you sort of secure yourself, the secrecy that you're going to need to plan the trip. There's you, Nell Yates, Ron Walker, Tim Elbourne, Bob Taylor, and Don Hughes. You open up this covert planning headquarters in the PEOC, and for those who don't know, that's the secret bomb shelter beneath the East Wing of the White House. How did your work get started and how did the needs of television and the media change the complexion of the trip?
Dwight Chapin:
I needed a place to work and to put all this together. That was the responsibility I had. And I had daily meetings with all of the individuals that you just mentioned so that it included the Military Aides Office, the Secret Service Office, our advance men, and so forth. And so that's why we established it down in the bomb shelter. We had a secure environment there. We had a conference room that worked out beautifully. And we just sat there and we started piecing this thing together. How are we going to do it?
The main example I would use was Tim Elbourne came up with the idea of us working with Boeing and establishing on a 747 a complete studio setup for the networks and for the radio people and so forth. And we would construct this and then fly it into Beijing. Well Kissinger, he warned us right up front. He says, "This is a Chinese face issue. They're not going to like this." But we took our plan, we put it in a notebook. It went with us on the October trip that I went with. There were nine of us on that trip and went with Dr. Kissinger.
And I presented it to Ambassador, he wasn't ambassador yet, but Han Soo, who was my counterpart. He later became the Ambassador to the United States. I gave the plan to him. I explained along with Tim Elbourne and the others in our party, we explained how all this would work. And that what they did is they took our plan. The way that it ended up, there was no 747, but they went out and built a building that looked just like a long airplane with all of the studios, with everything in it. And so they constructed a physical representation of what we had on that airplane.
And then we brought in, they wanted us to bring all of the equipment. We did bring in the equipment that went into these studios. But then the next issue became they wanted to buy all that equipment at the end of our journey. And of course, the State Department and us, I mean, we would not let them buy that because they wanted to pirate that equipment, copy it, and be ahead technologically by having acquired it all from us.
Josh King:
So Dwight, this isn't well known, but most presidential foreign trips start with this pre-advanced trip, this nine-person journey that you talked about, Dr. Kissinger. And for China, there were two pre-advances, and there often still are. One with you and Henry and another later on with you and General Hague. And Kissinger also did that earlier secret trip through Pakistan to lay the groundwork that culminated in St. Clemente and the trip to Burbank. But the diplomatic relations between the two countries were a little bit different from that first Kissinger trip and the second Hague trip, weren't they?
Dwight Chapin:
Yes. The first Kissinger trip I was not on. Winston Lord went with Henry, and it was a very, very tiny group of people. So it was our nine-party trip that started really kind of sketching this thing out. But it still was much different than any presidential trip that I had ever been involved in. I mean, we came up with ideas. We would ask the Chinese what they wanted to do as hosts. They would not give us direction. They liked keeping all of their options open. They were not used to dealing with people like us. We wanted specific direction and answers. And I was accountable to both Bob Haldeman and to the President. And I needed to go back and tell them how it was going to work. And they weren't about ready to tell me how it was going to work. So one of my major diplomatic missions was not necessarily the Chinese, it was handling Haldeman and the President. Henry helped me a lot by reinforcing the fact that we weren't being told yet. But I mean, it was just an entirely different world.
Josh King:
So when you're with Henry, you check into the state guest house in Beijing, and there's booklets with quotes from Chairman Mao with sayings like the people, the world should unite against fascist pigs. How versed are you at this point from the CIA and from Henry about the political undercurrents and the diplomatic skill of people like Premier Zhou Enlai? I mean, the premier is quite taken with your youth. Do you think he underestimated you?
Dwight Chapin:
I'm not about ready to say that Premier Zhou Enlai underestimated me. Let's take this in two parts. I mean, Henry pointed out immediately that this propaganda that was in our rooms was unacceptable, and he told our hosts that some mistake must have been made. He phrased it in such a way as to, of course you didn't mean to do this or somebody made a mistake by putting this propaganda there. We were told on the way over there not to let things throw us. We were told to be gracious. Not that we wouldn't have been gracious, but we were to surrender our normal Type A behaviors to make sure that we did not do anything that would cause a face issue, if you will, with the Chinese. We were told by Henry to maintain a posture that the President was in good shape for his reelection, that that was going to happen. We were told not to discuss in any way, shape, or form the Vietnam War and what was going on there. I have several of these kinds of rules that are in the President's Man, in the book.
We had what I would call a very soft approach in terms of how we handled it. My education for going over there, I had read everything that the State Department supplied. But at that time, the State Department's knowledge of the leaders and of all the individuals and what was really going on, it was not very complete. I mean, we were bringing back more information than they had. My movies that I took over there became very important documents to the CIA and to the State Department and so forth as we identified who these new players were. They're seeing some of these people for the first time. So we were kind of without really realizing the extent of it, we were bringing back a lot of knowledge.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about bringing back a lot of knowledge. You mentioned your counterpart Han Soo earlier who would become Ambassador to the United States and a long-time friend of yours. But at that moment, you don't know whether to trust him. And yet you're learning an amazing amount of things on this pre-advance. You're seeing the Forbidden City, you're visiting a petroleum installation, you're watching a demonstration of this unknown Chinese technique called acupuncture. Seen from today's lens, did you get any sense on that trip to China of its potential to become a dominant economic power?
Dwight Chapin:
No. It was so primitive and so far behind us. The only thing that I would say that did register with me was their concept of time. In America, we're used to thinking in terms of what the heck's going to happen by the end of the year or in the next quarter. And with the Chinese, you have more of this perspective of the long march of history. You did get the sense that whatever they were going to build or whatever it was going to take a while, that that was okay. I mean, that would be the closest I would come to having I think any premonition or any idea of what was going to be happening. There was no way that we knew at that time that they would move at the pace that they moved.
Josh King:
I mean, things aren't like today on a trip to China where Air Force One can take off from Andrews, refuel at Anchorage, and make it to Beijing on pretty much a straight line. On your trip, there's film of Nixon walking around the cabin in 26,000 in his blue blazer. You do overnights in Honolulu, in Guam to acclimate to the time difference. Here is the President speaking to a group of supporters in Guam.
President Richard Nixon:
Tomorrow I will take off from Guam for Shanghai and Peking, the first President of the United States ever to visit China. Guam, I know it is said, is where the American day begins. And I would hope that all of you here today would join me in this prayer, that with this trip to China, a new day may begin for the whole world. Thank you very much.
Josh King:
A new day may begin for the whole world. Dwight, what's the mood on the plane and at those tops? This really was Nixon's dream coming true as you write.
Dwight Chapin:
Nixon knew by this point that the whole world was going with us on that airplane. I mean, it wasn't just us and our party, it was the imagination of the world through the media. There was no ideological fraction here, Republican and Democrat or whatever. This trip, and that's why it was so historic, it captured the imagination not only of America but the world. And so the potential that it had and everything. I mean, Nixon has got this wind behind him in his sail that just took him in there for that week. And it was unbelievable. Not that we didn't have some rough waters during the week and things to be sorted out and what have you, but for the most part, that thing worked like a Swiss watch.
Josh King:
It's February 21, 1972, 50 years ago. Want to listen to just a part of President Nixon's toast to Premier Zhou Enlai.
President Richard Nixon:
At this very moment, through the wonder of telecommunications, more people are seeing and hearing what we say than on any other such occasion in the whole history of the world. Yet what we say here will not be long remembered. What we do here can change the world. As you said in your toast, the Chinese people are a great people. The American people are a great people. If our two people are enemies, the future of this world we share together is dark indeed. But if we can find common ground to work together, the chance for world peace is immeasurably increased.
Josh King:
So Dwight, ultimately 391 Americans made the trip, as you said. This is the order of the new China hands as Nixon called you all, about 381 more than would've fit into a Jetstar on a working visit. There's Dan Rather. There's Tom Brokaw. There's Barbara Walters. An impromptu visit with Chairman Mao gets on the books. A communique gets issued. As you mentioned, or alluded to some diplomatic snafus, like the old Chinese characters being used by the State Department on an invitation to an American-hosted banquet. But when it was all over, as you reflect back, what did the trip accomplish?
Dwight Chapin:
Well, I believe the trip accomplished a great deal. It made it possible for us to move to recognition of both nations and to start communicating. And I guess I'm inclined to point out that Nixon said 50 years ago on this occasion, he said, "In 50 years," which is right now, "we're going to be adversaries and we need to be able to talk to one another." So I think the gloom and doom that he said if we're enemies, we have to have that in mind, but it is this talking to one another that is important.
And then as far as our government is concerned and the policies that need to be put in place, it is us putting America's national interest first and explaining over and over again to the Chinese what we will and will not tolerate as a free society, whether it's copyright issues or trade issues or whatever. We in America, we're not trying to be holier than thou, but we are trying to conduct our affairs fairly, honestly, openly, and in a way that precludes us having to go to any kind of war footing. And they have to understand that and know that we mean it.
And so God willing, the leaders that are of a strategic mind and understand history and understand where we're going are going to put these kinds of policies in place that allow for this to happen.
Josh King:
A fascinating revelation to me made in the book was a spy ring run by senior members of our own government to infiltrate White House planning between Nixon and Kissinger for the trip. Two of the original members of the Plumbers unit, David Young, Bud Krogh, under the direction of John Ehrlichman, discovered that a military stenographer, yeoman Charles Radford, had copied documents from Henry Kissinger's briefcase in burn bags that were in your offices. Young didn't tell you about any of this until 2021, Dwight, I assume while you're researching the book. What were the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense Mel Laird trying to get from the President that they couldn't just ask for? Nixon had called it a federal offense of the highest order at the time, yet when he put together his memoirs, he spent less than one page writing about it.
Dwight Chapin:
This is worthy of a book itself, and I've been trying to convince David Young to do that. David is still with us on the planet and is the single most knowledgeable person other than Henry Kissinger. In that car ride I told you about with Henry, I asked him about this because I wanted to know what he thought. And he confirmed to me that Al Haig had been part of the planning on that spy ring with Admiral Zumwalt.
And in order to understand how that spy ring got established, you have to realize that Al Haig's loyalties were to the military more than to Kissinger or Nixon. And that it was Al Haig who realized what was going on and that the military did not know at the Pentagon what was happening. And so he concocted along with Admiral Zumwalt this putting the yeoman in place who fed the information back to the Joint Chiefs and all the way up to Mel Laird.
This to me is one of the single most important things in my book. It's complicated. It has all kinds of ramifications. And it was wrong. And Al was wrong. And it needs to be nailed and it needs to be understood so nothing like this happens again.
Josh King:
As we wrap up here, Dwight, your observations about Haig, that spy ring, and we're not even going to get into Watergate and John Dean, which you flesh out in sort of a very new angle on it than people think about in the 50 years since Watergate, we just don't have time, but we have to conclude this journey really on the tarmac in Beijing as you head back to Andrews and know that the story continues with a trip to Russia and then before you know it, you're enmeshed in Watergate and a couple years later you are on trial for the connection with Donald Segretti, which was not at all related to the break-in itself, and then eventually had to serve time at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. And the book has this incredible journey of yours post White House as well, which people ought to read. But just one final thought. I was in the Rose Garden of the White House with President Clinton on the evening of April 22, 1994. And just want to hear Peter Jennings and then a part of what President Clinton said that night.
Peter Jennings:
We've interrupted because President Clinton has now showed up at the White House and clearly wants to talk to the nation on this occasion. He's going to do so in the Rose Garden, which of course reminds us that Trisha, President Nixon's daughter, who's now 48 years old and married to Edward Cox, was married in the Rose Garden. And the fact that Trisha is now 48 and her sister Julie is 45 will remind many in our audience of the passage of time. But President Clinton wishes to speak to the nation.
President Clinton:
It is my sad duty to report to the people of the United States that Richard M. Nixon, who served as our 37th President, died this evening in New York City at 9:08 p.m. with his family at his side. Hillary and I send our deepest condolences to the entire Nixon family. We hope that Trisha and Edward Cox and their son Christopher, and Julie and David Eisenhower and their children, Jenny, Alex, and Melanie know that the best wishes of all their fellow Americans are with them during their moment of sorrow. It's impossible to be in this job without feeling a special bond with the people who have gone before. And I was deeply grateful to President Nixon for his wise counsel on so many occasions on many issues over the last year.
Josh King:
It's now been 28 years since the end of Richard Nixon's life. We're still adversaries with China, as you said, 50 years later. We're still debating Nixon. Will the book on China or the book on Nixon ever be closed?
Dwight Chapin:
Not for many years. Not for many years. I think that there's a renewal of interest. It's actually, it's continued since his death of people examining Richard Nixon and trying to understand him better. He was a man who was very misunderstood and has had to carry kind of this burden of Watergate that is disproportionate to what he contributed to this nation in terms of public service and the great things he did for the nation. And so I'm hopeful over time he's going to be much, much better understood.
Josh King:
Well, I think you begin that volume and that library with the President's Man: The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aide. Dwight Chapin, it was pleasure to read the book, pleasure to speak to you today. Thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Dwight Chapin:
Thank you, Josh.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Dwight Chapin, author of the President's Man: The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aid, out now from William Morrow.
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show was produced by Pete Ash with production assistance, engineering, and editing from Ken Abel and Ian Wolff. The Director of Programming and Production for Intercontinental Exchange and the NYSE is Maria Stanley. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
