His job had ‘a price tag called Watergate’
GREENWICH — Riverside resident Dwight Chapin served as Richard Nixon’s deputy assistant in the White House after years of loyal service prior to the presidency, and his new book promises to show the man beyond the Watergate scandal.
In “The President’s Man: The Memoirs of Nixon’s Trusted Aide,” Chapin talks about his own experiences and a conviction that landed him in prison as a result of Watergate, but strenuously defends a man and a presidency that he says has not been given the full view of history.
“I had been involved in the renovation of the Nixon Presidential Library, and when I was doing that I realized how little people knew about Richard Nixon,” Chapin told Hearst Connecticut Media on Tuesday at his home.
“They either knew about Nixon through Watergate or through the opening of China. And there was so much more to the man. I thought about how I was one of the few guys still left around that knew him as well as I did and could put some meat around what he was all about.”
But he also had a more personal reason for writing the book, one that was hammered home by a visit to see family that lives in Kansas City.
He said his grandson asked him curiously if he had worked for a president and after Chapin said that he had, his grandson asked why he went to prison and if the president had gone to prison too.
“I told my wife on the plane ride home that I’ve got to take and write down what happened to me so that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, when the question comes along about what in the world happened to me and why did I have to go to prison, they’ll know the answer,” Chapin said.
Ultimately, Chapin said the book is about 15 percent about his own experiences and his family life and 85 percent of it is about his time with Nixon which began in 1962 when Nixon launched his unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in California and Chapin was a college student at the University of Southern California looking for a summer job.
As a field man on the campaign, Chapin got to know the Nixon family. And when Nixon moved to New York to work as a lawyer, Chapin moved too and volunteered to work after hours at the law firm answering mail, where be became close to Nixon’s wife, Pat.
Chapin settled into a life in Cos Cob with his wife and family and he believes it was Pat Nixon who recommended to the future president that he officially take him on as an aide in 1967. He began traveling with Nixon all over the country and followed him after Nixon’s successful presidential campaign in 1968 to the White House, where Chapin had a front row seat to history, good and bad.
Chapin stresses he was never an adviser to Nixon, just an aide who tried to be respectful of the privileges he had.
“I had a role,” Chapin said. “I knew my role and it was to make sure everything around him worked the way it was supposed to work . ... I didn’t spend my days talking about how special it was that I was here, but I knew that I was in a privileged position and I had a responsibility to perform that as best I could.”
Chapin said that’s ultimately what led to his conviction for making false material declarations before a grand jury about the administration’s dirty tricks operations. He served prison time from August 1975 to April 1976.
“It was heartbreaking,” Chapin said. “My family suffered, I suffered . ... As I look back on it all, I had all this great privilege and it was a wonderful experience. I just wish it hadn’t had a price tag called Watergate.”
The times he and Nixon spent together included the highest of the highs: Nixon’s two successful presidential campaigns, his six years in the White House and the famous diplomatic breakthroughs in China and Moscow, where Chapin was the advance man and was right at Nixon’s side.
But he was also there for the lowest of the lows.
“In my book we try to present Nixon — kind of warts and all — just like we tried to do with the library,” Chapin said. “There are significant good things about him, but also character traits that if he could change them, he should change them. But this idea that there is this line of demarcation and that Nixon is just evil is wrong.”
Chapin said there was a side to Nixon that few people got to see.
“He was a very warm and caring type of man,” Chapin said. “The Quaker influence from his mother and his whole family situation was more prevailing in his personality and his makeup and what he was about than hardly anyone could recognize.”
One story Chapin shared was on a White House trip to the Vatican to meet Pope Paul VI and Nixon found out who among the staff on Air Force One was Catholic so he could bring them along.
“We went to meet the Holy Father and he introduced the staff on Air Force One to him,” Chapin said.
“There was this one Filipino steward who was standing there, with the president of the United States introducing him to the pope, and the tears were just flowing down the side of his face. It was this poignant moment and that would never have happened if Richard Nixon had not decided he was going to do that.”