RICHARD NIXON: 1913-1994 : EXCERPTS: ‘He Stood on Pinnacles That Dissolved Into Precipice’

The Rev. Billy Graham

The great king of ancient Israel, David, said on the death of Saul who had been a bitter enemy, “Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?”

Today we remember that, with the death of Richard Nixon, a great man has fallen.

We’ve heard that the world has lost a great citizen and America has lost a great statesman, and those of us that knew him have lost a personal friend.

You know, few events touch the heart of every American as profoundly as the death of a President. For the President is our leader, and every American feels he knows him in a very special way, because he hears his voice so often, sees him on television, reads about him in the press. And so we all mourn his loss and feel that our world is a bit lonelier without him.

But to you who were close to him, this grief is an added pain, because you wept when he wept and you laughed when he laughed. . . .

Since 1990, he had had a brilliant young cardiologist as his doctor by the name of Jeffrey Borer. And last Tuesday, the day after the President suffered his stroke, the doctor came by the New York hospital to examine him. He was partially paralyzed and could not speak, but he was still alert. And as the doctor talked, the President reached out and grabbed his arm with an unusual strength.

Then as the doctor turned to leave, something made him turn around and look back to the bed where Richard Nixon was laying. At just at that moment, the President waved and gave his trademark thumbs-up signal and smiled. That took determination, which he had and we’ve heard about already today. It was an example of fighting on and never giving up that Jeffrey Borer will never forget.

Now, President Nixon’s great voice, his warm, intelligent eyes, his generous smile are missed as we gather here again just 10 months after we were here when his beloved Pat went to heaven.

A few months ago, he was asked in a television interview, “How would you like to be remembered?” He thought a moment, and then he replied, “I’d like to be remembered as one who made a difference.” And he did make a difference in our world. . . .

No one could ever understand Richard Nixon unless they understood the family from which he came, the Quaker church that he attended, Whittier College where he studied, and the land and the people in this area where you are sitting today. . . .

But there is still another side to him that was his strong and growing faith in God. He never wore his religious faith on his sleeves, but was rather reticent to speak about it in public. He could have had more reasons than most for not attending church while he occupied the White House when there were so many demonstrations and threats going on, but he wanted to set an example, and he decided to have services most Sundays in the White House--a small congregation, a clergyman from various denominations.

And I remember before one of the first services that President Nixon had at the White House, Ruth and I and two of our friends were in the private quarters with him.

I’ll never forget the President sitting down on the spur of the moment at an old, battered Steinway that they had there, playing the old hymn, “He will hold me fast, for my Savior loves me so. He will hold me fast.” . . .

And so we say farewell to Richard Nixon today with hope in our hearts, for our hope is in the eternal promises of Almighty God. . . .

There is hope beyond the grave, because Jesus Christ has opened the door to heaven for us by his death and resurrection. Richard Nixon had that hope, and today that can be our hope as well.

And to the children and the grandchildren, I would say to you, you have that hope within your hearts. I had the privilege of knowing them when they were little girls, and I’ve seen them as they’ve come to know Christ and to know God in their lives.

And we look forward to seeing Dick and Pat some day in the future again.

Henry A. Kissinger

During the final week of Richard Nixon’s life, I often imagined how he would have reacted to the tide of concern, respect, admiration and affection evoked by his last great battle. His gruff pose of never paying attention to media comment would have been contradicted by a warm glow and the ever-so-subtle hint that another recital of the commentary would not be unwelcome.

And without quite saying so, he would have conveyed that it would mean a lot to him if Julie and Tricia, David and Ed were told of his friends’ pride in this culmination to an astonishing life.

When I learned the final news, by then so expected yet so hard to accept, I felt a profound void. In the words of Shakespeare: “He was man. Take him, for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

In the conduct of foreign policy, Richard Nixon was one of the seminal presidents. He came into office when the forces of history were moving America from a position of dominance to one of leadership. Dominance reflects strength; leadership must be earned. And Richard Nixon earned that leadership role for his country with courage, dedication and skill.

When Richard Nixon took his oath of office, 550,000 Americans were engaged in combat in a place as far away from the United States as it was possible to be. America had no contact with China, the world’s most populous nation, no negotiations with the Soviet Union, the other nuclear superpower. Most Muslim countries had broken diplomatic relations with the United States, and Middle East diplomacy was stalemated. All of this in the midst of the most anguishing domestic crisis since the Civil War.

When Richard Nixon left office, an agreement to end the war in Vietnam had been concluded, and the main lines of all subsequent policy were established--permanent dialogue with China; readiness without illusion to ease tension with the Soviet Union; a peace process in the Middle East; the beginning, via the European Security Conference, of establishing human rights as an international issue, weakening Soviet hold on Eastern Europe.

Richard Nixon’s foreign policy goals were long-range, and he pursued them without regard to domestic political consequences.

When he considered our nation’s interest at stake, he dared confrontations despite the imminence of elections and also in the midst of the worst crisis of his life. And he bore, if with some pain, the disapproval of longtime friends and allies over relaxing tensions with China and the Soviet Union.

He drew strength from a conviction he often expressed to me: “The price for doing things halfway is no less than for doing it completely, so we might as well do them properly.”

Thus Richard Nixon’s greatest accomplishment was as much moral as it was political: to lead from strength at a moment of apparent weakness, to husband a nation’s resilience and thus to lay the basis for victory in the Cold War. . . .

So let us now say goodby to our gallant friend. He stood on pinnacles that dissolved into precipice. He achieved greatly, and he suffered deeply, but he never gave up. In his solitude, he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships, and give new hope to mankind--a vision where dreams and possibilities conjoined.

Richard Nixon ended a war, and advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth. He was devoted to his family. He loved his country. And he considered service his honor.

It was a privilege to have been allowed to help him.

Sen. Bob Dole

I believe the second half of the 20th Century will be known as the age of Nixon.

Why was he the most durable public figure of our time? Not because he gave the most eloquent speeches, but because he provided the most effective leadership. Not because he won every battle, but because he always embodied the deepest feelings of the people he led.

One of his biographers said that Richard Nixon was “one of us.” And so he was.

He was a boy who heard the train whistle in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track. How American.

He was the grocer’s son who got ahead by working harder and longer than everyone else. How American.

He was a student who met expenses by doing research at the law library for 35 cents an hour while sharing a run-down farmhouse without water or electricity. How American.

He was the husband and father who said that the best memorial to his wife was her children. How American.

To tens of millions of his countrymen, Richard Nixon was an American hero, a hero who shared and honored their belief in working hard, worshiping God, loving their families and saluting the flag.

He called them the Silent Majority. Like them, they valued accomplishment more than ideology. They wanted their government to do the decent thing, but not to bankrupt them in the process. They wanted his protection in a dangerous world, but they also wanted creative statesmanship in achieving a genuine peace with honor.

These were the people from whom he had come and who have come to Yorba Linda these past few days by the tens of thousands, no longer silent in their grief.

The American people love a fighter, and in Dick Nixon they found a gallant one. In her marvelous biography of her mother, Julie recalls an occasion where Pat Nixon expressed amazement at her husband’s ability to persevere in the face of criticism--to which the President replied, “I just get up every morning to confound my enemies.”

It was what Richard Nixon did after he got up every morning that not just confounded his enemies, but turned them into admirers. . . .

Today our grief is shared by millions of people the world over, but it is also mingled with intense pride in a great patriot who never gave up and who never gave in. To know the secret of Richard Nixon’s relationship with the American people, you need only to listen to his own words.

“You must never be satisfied with success,” he told us, “and you should never be discouraged by failure. Failure can be sad, but the greatest sadness is not to try and fail, but to fail to try. In the end what matters is that you have always lived life to the hilt.”

Strong, brave, unafraid of controversy, unyielding in his convictions, living every day of his life to the hilt, the largest figure of our time whose influence will be timeless--that was Richard Nixon. How American. . . .

President Clinton

President Nixon opened his memoirs with a simple sentence: I was born in a house my father built. Today we can look back at this little house and still imagine a young boy sitting by the window of the attic he shared with his three brothers, looking out to a world he could then, himself, only imagine.

From those humble roots, as from so many humble beginnings in this country, grew the force of a driving dream, a dream that led to the remarkable journey that ends here today where it all began--beside the same tiny home mail-ordered from back East, near this towering oak tree which back then was a mere seedling.

President Nixon’s journey across the American landscape mirrored that of his entire nation in this remarkable century. His life was bound up with the striving of our whole people, with our crises and our triumphs.

When he became President, he took on challenges here at home on matters from cancer research to environmental protection, putting the power of the federal government where Republicans and Democrats had neglected to put it in the past, in foreign policy.

He came to the presidency at a time in our history when Americans were tempted to say we had had enough of the world. Instead, he knew we had to reach out to old friends and old enemies alike. He would not allow America to quit the world.

Remarkably, he wrote nine of his 10 books after he left the presidency, working his way back into the arena he so loved by writing and thinking and engaging us in his dialogue for the past year. Even in the final weeks of his life, he gave me his wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia. One thing in particular left a profound impression on me. Though this man was in his ninth decade, he had an incredibly sharp and vigorous and rigorous mind.

As a public man, he always seemed to believe the greatest sin was remaining passive in the face of challenges, and he never stopped living by that creed. He gave of himself with intelligence and energy and devotion to duty, and his entire country owes him a debt of gratitude for that service.

Oh, yes, he knew great controversy amid defeat as well as victory. He made mistakes, and they, like his accomplishments, are part of his life and record.

But the enduring lesson of Richard Nixon is that he never gave up being part of the action and passion of his times. He said many times that unless a person has a goal, a new mountain to climb, his spirit will die.

Well, based on our last phone conversation and the letter he wrote me just a month ago, I can say that his spirit was very much alive to the very end. . . .

Today is a day for his family, his friends and his nation to remember President Nixon’s life in totality. To them let us say: May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close. May we heed his call to maintain the will and the wisdom to build on America’s greatest gift, its freedom, to lead a world full of difficulty to the just and lasting peace he dreamed of.

As it is written in the words of a hymn I heard in my church last Sunday, “Grant that I may realize that the trifling of life creates differences, but that in the higher things, we are all one.”

In the twilight of his life, President Nixon knew that lesson well. It is, I feel certain, a faith he would want us all to keep. . . .

Gov. Pete Wilson

. . . I was one of the many young men and women in whom he (Nixon) inspired the same fierce loyalty that he gave to us. From the first, I was struck by the quality of his personal generosity.

When we met in 1962, he’d already debated Khrushchev and President Kennedy, he’d already run for President. He’d been a major political figure on the world stage. But still he had time to talk to and to help an eager young advance man who could offer him little but energy and enthusiasm.

Then, in the fall of 1965, when I was 32, he honored me by asking me to come to work with him on his potential bid for the presidency in 1968. But he’d heard from Bob Finch and Herb Klein that I was thinking about running for office myself. I told him it was true, and he grinned. He grinned and he said, in that deep, rich voice of his, “Is it a good district? Can you win?” And then he said, “Because if you can, then, Pete, you’ve got to try or you’ll never forgive yourself.”

I was just another young lawyer trying to find his way in the world, and he was a former vice president preparing a bid for the highest office in the land.

And yet, that day he was as concerned with my future as he was with his own. Time and again--not just with me, but with many others--he was always there, willing to share his insight and his experience, and no American in this century had more of either to share.

It’s hard to imagine a world without Richard Nixon. For half a century, he played a leading role in shaping the events that have shaped our lives. It’s not just that he served for three decades in high office, it’s not just that he garnered more votes than any candidate in American history. It was because his intellect, his insight and his indomitable will could not be ignored.

He moved on the world stage. He voiced bold ideas, and he left global footprints. But for all his world grasp and mastery of global strategy, it was right here in this small house, in this little town in Orange County, that Richard Nixon learned and never forgot the values that shaped him and helped him shape our world.

He learned the value of hard work. He learned that to make important change, you must take risks. And he learned the Quaker virtue that, if you were born with a good mind and good health, you were obliged to help others, to give back to your community.

But he had something more, much more. When most people think of Richard Nixon, they think of his towering intellect, the incisive quality of his mind.

I will always remember him for another quality. It’s the quality that great fighters have. They call it heart. Heart is what let Richard Nixon climb back into the ring time and again when almost anyone else would have thrown in the towel. It was his heart that taught us the great lesson of Richard Nixon’s life to never, ever give up. To him, it was no disgrace to fight and be beaten. The only disgrace was to quit. And he never did. . . .

Dick Nixon’s heart, shaped by the grit and mores of this small town, never left California, and now we return it to the soil that bred him.

He ended his own eulogy to Everett Dirksen with a favorite quotation from the poet Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

In Richard Nixon’s evening, his light burned bright with hope and wise prescriptions for America and for the world. Today, as we take him to rest, as we seek to measure the greatness of the man and his legacy, it is clear how truly splendid Richard Nixon’s day has been.