Nofziger Unleashes His Poetic Inner Self

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 19, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

Insight: It's scary, isn't it? Because you can see Clinton imagining the kinds of sentences historians will be using to summarize the Clinton legacy.

LN: Obviously he's already made his legacy and something very extraordinary would have to happen for historians in the long term to write of him as a great man. I always think of poor Al Haig. He is a very able man, and yet I know that at the start of the third paragraph or so in his obits it's going to say he ran up to the press room [after the assassination attempt on Reagan's life] and declared, "I'm in charge here."

Insight: Richard Nixon, the other president you've worked with, has been described as a "deeply flawed man." What's your take on him?

LN: We're all flawed people, for God's sake! There's no question he handled Watergate badly. But I look back at the pressures he was under, especially during his first term when he was trying to end that war -- the riots in this city and the marches.

I sat there in the White House during the first two years of his term and over at the [Republican] National Committee during the third year of it and there were times when they parked buses, bumper to bumper, around the rear end of the White House to keep the schoolboy Lenins from coming over the fence.

There were times when they brought the National Guard and troops into the basement of the Old Executive Office Building because they had word that there was going to be an effort to storm the White House. I know the media said there was a "siege mentality" over there. Hell, there was a siege over there.

Insight: Nixon and Reagan were very different men.

LN: He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners. I've always said Reagan would have made a good hermit because he was very self-sufficient. Nixon, however, probably would have made a terrible hermit, even though he was a loner. He tried but he just was not comfortable around people.

I first knew Nixon when I was a reporter and he was vice president, but he always made it a point to speak to me, to go out of his way to be nice to me. I don't think he was cold at all. He was awkward with people, but that didn't make him a cold man.

Insight: You have been privileged to know presidents, to be close to a man who has done as much as Reagan did.

LN: Well you know, you're there purely by happenstance. There's no reason for me to have been there. I didn't go looking for the job with Reagan. I didn't go looking for the job with Nixon, either.

Insight: You're sure unusual in a town where staff so often claim that their president or senator or representative would be nothing without their help.

LN: I will tell you something: Reagan would have been elected governor if my mother had been running the campaign. He didn't need me. And I didn't elect Nixon, either. Nor did I ever give him any great advice. [Laughs.]