Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 9, 1990 TAG: 9003091976
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
"It's good to be back here where my political career started 43 years ago," he told a phalanx of reporters and television cameras crammed into a corner of the lobby of the Longworth House Office Building. "I know that I'm getting older. And the press seems to be getting younger."
So are the lawmakers, some of whom had not been born when Nixon took office as a freshman House member from California in 1947. Most of them were not in office in 1974, when he resigned his presidency after the House Judiciary Committee voted for his impeachment. Republican members said that Nixon had not set foot in the House of Representatives Capitol Hill office complex since the days of his administration.
Judging from Thursday's reception, the wait may have been worth it. The Republicans, meeting with the former president in the baronial chambers of the House Ways and Means Committee, gave him a crystal bowl and - according to those present - listened with rapt attention as the architect of detente launched into an hour-long seminar in realpolitik. Attendance at the session was limited to Republican House members and invited guests.
The spirit of forgiveness was almost palpable. "They keep referring to that darned, two-bit break-in," House Minority Leader Robert Michel, R-Ill., groused later, referring to the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices at Washington's Watergate complex. "But for the loyalty to a few subordinates, the president, he could have said `you're fired.' That very well could have ended it."
Nixon himself was clearly buoyed by the reception. Stoop-shouldered and hard of hearing, his trademark jowls approaching the dimensions penned by editorial cartoonists of two decades past, he looked every bit his 77 years. But, in a meeting with the press after the closed session, he fielded questions with the quiet confidence and agility of a pro at the peak of his career.
In the closed meeting, Nixon characterized developments in Eastern Europe as "a change of the head and not of the heart."
Before the press, he dismissed a proposal advanced by House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., the House majority leader, to extend U.S. economic aid to the Soviet Union as "a bad idea because, first, because [Soviet President Mikhail S.] Gorbachev has not indicated he wants it."
Nixon was also quick to defend the Bush administration's policy toward China since its brutal repression last June of the fledgling pro-democracy movement.
"If the United States does not play a role in China, who does that leave among the major powers? It leaves the Soviet Union and Japan," he asserted. "Anyone who thinks Japan is going to export democracy to China must be smoking pot."
Several times, Nixon tried to break free from the press and head off to the Senate side of the Capitol, where 15 Republican senators up for re-election were awaiting his counsel. Before he was able to do so, however, the questions turned to the subject of Ronald Reagan, who recently testified on videotape that he had forgotten many of the details of the Iran-Contra affair on which judgment of his culpability rests. Could Reagan's memory really have so lapsed?
"Oh, certainly," said Nixon, then lapsing into the vocabulary once used to discuss an earlier scandal. "President Reagan was not trying to dissemble. He was not trying to cover up."
by CNB