Had I not known, I wouldn’t have guessed. The voice was wary, but not instantly recognizable. I did know, though. So I strained to hear it, an echo of one of the most famous names and voices in history.
"Mr. Nixon?" I asked when the Lynnwood man picked up his phone.
"Yes," he answered.
I had tried before to talk with Ed Nixon, the 71-year-old brother of former President Richard Nixon. I called in 1999, during President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. I wanted to ask what it had been like for his brother to be so embattled. No wonder he declined.
Last week, I asked only for his memories of his brother.
Ed Nixon was articulate, cordial and absolutely right when he said, "there’s a lot there" — far more than I can write here. There’s so much that he would someday like to publish his journals.
For Presidents Day today, he shared recollections both personal and global.
Twice he visited the White House. He and his wife, Gay, retired from teaching math at Lynnwood High School and spent two nights there when they attended a state dinner for French President Georges Pompidou.
Their daughters, Beth and Amy, were junior bridesmaids at Tricia Nixon’s Rose Garden wedding in 1971. Ed Nixon has a funny memory of that June day, which began with rain.
"I sat next to Alice Roosevelt Longworth," the irreverent first child of President Theodore Roosevelt. "She was quite a character. The seats were a little damp, and she made a point that someone could have wiped off the chairs.
"I said, ‘Well, it will dry,’ " he said, chuckling. It was a place of note, as Longworth’s much-quoted maxim was, "If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
Seventeen years the president’s junior, Ed Nixon saw his brother "like a second father."
"There were five boys. He was number two, I was number five," he said.
When his famous brother was in Congress, Ed Nixon was at Duke University. He’d drive from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., to see his brother.
"He was always curious about what the students were thinking. That was typical of him," said Ed Nixon, who studied geology. "I remember his curiosity about field trips we took at Duke."
His brother was curious about everything, Ed Nixon said. "He was a student of history and geography and geopolitics and the relations between nations, from way back. My mother told stories about that."
President Bush will visit China this week, but it was Richard Nixon, 30 years ago Feb. 21, who ended a quarter-century of antagonism and opened the door to Chinese-U.S. relations with his historic trip to Beijing.
"It was a pioneering, bold move," Ed Nixon said of the breakthrough encounter with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. The former president retraced his steps in China in 1982, and Ed later followed in those footsteps. He has made 30 trips to China, seeking business and cultural opportunities working through the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs.
"When they see somebody by the name of Nixon, they open out the red carpet," Nixon said.
A world traveler, Ed Nixon loves the Northwest. He was brought here by the Navy years ago, and served as an ROTC instructor at the University of Washington in the early 1960s, before campuses exploded over the Vietnam War during his brother’s presidency.
He doesn’t dwell on the Watergate scandal, stemming from a break-in at the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 campaign. Faced with the likelihood of impeachment, President Nixon announced Aug. 8, 1974, that he would resign to begin "that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America."
Ed Nixon said if there’s a lesson in the scandals of his brother’s administration and that of President Clinton, who delivered Richard Nixon’s eulogy, it is "for people interested in obtaining high office to be on guard and do it right."
"It is a fishbowl, it has to be. The operations can be private and secret to a point," he said, offering as an example Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China in 1971 that paved the way for the Nixon trip.
Ed Nixon hopes history’s long lens will focus on global triumphs, not political scandal.
"History is not a place for emotion, it’s a place for facts, all sides of the facts," he said.
Nixon’s resignation is fact, one his brother sees not as a disgrace but as a heroic act.
"The president is in the highest office in the land, in the world perhaps. In deference to the office, when he resigned from that office, he resigned in honor."
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