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Call it coincidence, serendipity, or an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was simultaneously creepy and amusing. I was diligently working away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, located in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles. Suddenly, Henry Kissinger appeared before me in two forms of reality: first, within the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s handwritten notes in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the corporeal form of the man himself, who appeared in the hallway just outside my door.
Kissinger, the lone surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, visited Yorba Linda in the previous fall for two reasons: to deliver a speech at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote his own book, which he astonishingly published at the age of 99 earlier that year. His book, titled “Leadership,” included an entire chapter devoted to praising Nixon, the man who had elevated Kissinger to become the 20th century’s sole notable diplomat.
My purpose for being at the library was to gather research for my own Nixon book. I was particularly intrigued by any markings Nixon may have left within the books from his personal collection. Surprisingly, it seemed that no one had yet explored this extensive and diverse collection of over 2,000 books, filling approximately 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Together, these books offered insight into the vast range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an aspect of his highly active mind that often goes unrecognized. To provide a glimpse into the variety, one heavily underlined book in his collection was a comprehensive biography of Tolstoy, while another explored statesmanship through the writings of Charles de Gaulle. Nixon also delved into the historiography of Japanese art and showed great interest in “The Story of Civilization,” a multi-volume work by Will and Ariel Durant that depicted mid-century history in a more accessible manner. These volumes displayed evidence of thorough reading and rereading, with their marked pages.
Every morning, a friendly attendant would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon of Kissinger’s visit, I had made my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon’s departure from the White House. “Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times,” written by Russ Braley, a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News, presented a scathing critique of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. According to Braley, the Times’ treatment of Nixon ranged from unfair to uninformed, due to reasons varying from negligence to malice.
As I continued reading Braley’s book, a disturbance emerged outside the research room. I peered out just in time to witness Kissinger and his entourage settling into the adjacent room. A group of donors and Nixon enthusiasts had gathered to listen to captivating tales of Nixon’s diplomatic prowess.
I returned my attention to Braley’s book. When I reached the chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a clear pattern became apparent: the majority of Nixon’s markings revolved around the individual who was currently holding court across the hall, Kissinger himself. Nixon’s dissatisfaction with Kissinger was evident. Braley recounted that Kissinger had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to discuss his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Pentagon Papers were leaked. Nixon’s pen made its mark: an exclamation point! Despite this, Kissinger had still assigned Ellsberg an office in the White House complex for a month in 1969, mere steps away from the Oval Office. A slash mark! Braley further revealed that Kissinger would spend his evenings privately “ridiculing” Nixon with his liberal friends. This last betrayal incited Nixon’s full repertoire of marginalia: a slash running alongside the offending paragraph, a checkmark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under the phrase “liberal friends.”
Despite these tensions evident in Nixon’s marginalia, Kissinger’s present-day admiration of his former boss showcased an evolution in self-interest calculation. One could envision an aging, solitary man, retired but still learning new information about a bygone era he believed he had once controlled. This experience frequently occurred in the reading room at Yorba Linda, where the gray metal cart would unexpectedly transport glimpses of the past into the present—fragments of Nixon himself, tangible and surreal.
The task of uncovering a reader’s intentions through marginalia deviates from the conventional act of reading a book. It involves analyzing the reader rather than the writer. For several decades, scholars have been captivated by the annotations and notes left in the margins of books found in deceased individuals’ libraries. These marginal spaces represent promising grounds for “textual activity,” as scholars dub it—a realm to explore, analyze, and potentially discover new material for scholarly dissertations. Renowned figures whose libraries have undergone such scrutiny include Melville, Montaigne, Machiavelli, and Mark Twain.
A book invites various types of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (who seems to have been a favorite of Nixon, judging by his enthusiastic underlining in the Durants’ “The Age of Voltaire”) would often engage in heated arguments with the text, scribbling incessant commentary that has been published as a separate volume. However, Nixon did not possess a combative disposition when reading. His annotations mainly consisted of underlining sentences or using subverbal marks such as boxes, brackets, and circles. It appears that Nixon approached a book with a clear purpose in mind, actively searching for specific information and using his pen (rarely a pencil) to highlight and preserve those findings.
Nixon’s reading method resembled that of the English writer Paul Johnson. When I once asked Johnson how he managed to read all the books he cited in his extensive and engaging histories, considering his busy journalistic career—comprising multiple columns and reviews each week for British and American publications—he reacted with a hint of disgust at my naivete. “Read them?!” he exclaimed. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” Curiously enough, Nixon avidly read Johnson’s works and often distributed them as gifts to friends and staff during Christmastime.
Another notable figure known for his marginalia was John Adams, who often quoted a Latin epigram: “Studium sine calamo somnium.” Adams translated this as, “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon adopted the habit of holding a pen early on, evident in the surviving textbooks from his college and high school years. He continued this practice throughout his life. For Nixon, like many of us, marking up books served as a means of slowing down, enabling him to truly absorb and engage with the material. Although the reasons for selecting a particular notation over another remain elusive, much like the question of why he didn’t destroy the infamous Watergate tapes, each line, checkmark, and circle embodied Nixon’s methodical approach to reading and his desire to deeply internalize the knowledge he encountered.
One of the most prevalent authors in Nixon’s personal library was Churchill, whom Nixon greatly admired as both a statesman and a writer. Nixon’s bookshelves were lined with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies, including “The World Crisis,” “Marlborough: His Life and Times,” “The Second World War,” and “A History of the English Speaking Peoples.” Nixon appeared particularly fond of Churchill’s “Great Contemporaries,” a compilation of sketches that appraised approximately two dozen individuals who were Churchill’s friends and colleagues. As I…
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