“The president had always despised small talk, but lately he would interrupt the conversation and ramble, usually about his past triumphs,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in their account of the final days of the Nixon administration. “Then suddenly, he would seem to be jolted to the present and would offer preposterous alternatives, make ridiculous suggestions.” As the walls closed around him and the pressure from allies and enemies alike became unbearable, Nixon grew “increasingly unstable, obsessed, exhausted.”
He didn’t sleep. He drank. He acted irrationally. His son-in-law and adviser, Ed Cox, said that Nixon was wandering the halls of the White House, “talking to pictures of former presidents — giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.” Woodward and Bernstein report that on one of his last days in the Oval Office, Nixon dropped to his knees in prayer, wailing in self-pity to Henry Kissinger:
Kissinger thought he had finished. But the president did not rise. He was weeping. And then, still sobbing, Nixon leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, “What have I done? What has happened?”
If Nixon had refused to leave office — if he had barricaded himself in the White House — there was a real chance he would use his power as president to do something rash, calamitous and irreversible. In fact, according to contemporaneous reporting in The New York Times, the secretary of defense, James R. Schlesinger, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff “kept unusually close control over lines of command, in the last days of the Nixon administration to insure that no unauthorized orders were given to military units by the White House.”
Nixon spiraled into self-destructive mania at the end of his term. President Donald Trump has reached those depths with three years left on the clock. For weeks, the president has been threatening a military takeover of Greenland, an autonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark. His reasons amount to little more than greed and vanity; he wants to be known to posterity for the territorial expansion of the United States.