In his last act as president 50 years ago this week, Nixon finally showed his vulnerable side

With less than three hours left in his presidency, Richard M. Nixon took the stage of the White House East Room to deliver his farewell speech 50 years ago Friday and tearfully showed a vulnerable side that few had seen him show in public before.

“I think it was the first time that people really saw Richard Nixon, the man,” said Stephen Bull, who served as Nixon’s staff assistant at the time.

The night before, on Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon had gone on TV and announced to the nation that he would be resigning as president in the wake of the Watergate scandal, effective noon the next day. He couldn’t sleep, and when he looked at his watch, it said 4 a.m. So he walked into the kitchen to get a glass of milk and was startled to see a White House steward making coffee, Nixon recalled in his book, “In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal.”

The president asked him what he was doing there so early.

“It isn’t early, Mr. President. It’s almost six o’clock,” the steward replied.

“My watch had stopped. After three years the battery had run down,” Nixon wrote - an apt metaphor for his presidency.

As he worked on the farewell address he would deliver to his Cabinet and staff that Friday morning, there was a knock on the door. It was his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, presenting him with a one-sentence letter, addressed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The letter read: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”

Nixon’s mind flashed back to one of his first days in the Oval Office in 1953, as vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was about to sign some letters and documents.

“He looked up at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘Dammit, Dick, I wish my name weren’t so long!’” Nixon recalled in his memoir. “Mercifully, my name is short. I signed the letter.”

Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Nixon, 61, walked into the East Room for his farewell address, accompanied by wife Pat Nixon; older daughter Tricia Nixon Cox and her husband, Edward Cox; and younger daughter Julie Eisenhower and her husband, David Eisenhower (the grandson of President Eisenhower).

A band played “Hail to the Chief,” and hundreds of White House staffers and Cabinet members greeted Nixon with a three-minute standing ovation. The smiling president clasped his wife’s hand, pointed to someone in the crowd, clenched his fists a couple of times, and held two thumbs up before beginning his remarks.

Nixon was a famously reserved leader, “an introvert in the extroverted calling of the politician,” as New York Times columnist Tom Wicker once observed. But in his farewell speech, he let his emotions out.

“I recall speaking from the heart,” Nixon said in a 1983 interview with former White House aide Frank Gannon. “Tricia later, in her diary, which she let me see, wrote that for the first time she was glad people were able to see Daddy as he really was.”

Shoulders hunched and eyes moist with tears, Nixon leavened his sad remarks with gallows humor. He made light of his debt to the Internal Revenue Service after it disallowed a $576,000 deduction for donating his vice-presidential papers to the National Archives.

“I only wish that I were a wealthy man,” he said. “At the present time I’ve got to find a way to pay my taxes.” He chuckled as the audience laughed along with him.

He recalled that his father was what people would call a “a little man, common man. … He was a streetcar motorman first and then he was a farmer and then he had a lemon ranch - it was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it.” The crowd laughed again.

“And then he was a grocer,” Nixon continued. “But he was a great man, because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt regardless of what happens.”

His mother, Nixon said, “was a saint.”

At one point in the speech, Nixon put on a pair of glasses to read a Theodore Roosevelt quote he said he had found “as I was reading my last night in the White House.” It was a diary passage about losing his young wife and mother on the same day. Nixon fought back tears after reading it.

“That was T.R. in his 20s,” he said. “He thought the light had gone from his life forever, but he went on. And he not only became president, but as an ex‐president, he served his country always in the arena, tempestuous, strong, sometimes wrong, sometimes right. But he was a man. And as I leave, let me say, that’s an example I think all of us should remember.”

A couple of minutes later, he delivered perhaps the most famous line of his speech, a recognition that his obsession with vanquishing his perceived enemies had brought him to this nadir:

“Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

In The Washington Post the next day, Sally Quinn wrote that hardened reporters in the press room found themselves with mixed emotions.

“I felt so angry at him for making me cry,” one unnamed reporter said. “He did it to himself. We didn’t do it.”

Years later, daughter Julie Eisenhower told Barbara Walters of ABC News that her father’s speech “was very difficult because he was really letting down his guard for one of the few times in public - his voice cracking with emotion as he spoke about his parents and speaking about [how] a man is not defeated until he gives up.”

“The critics panned my remarks, not surprisingly, as being too emotional,” Nixon recalled in his memoir. “They overlooked the fact that it was an emotional moment.”

After the speech, Nixon and his wife walked to the White House lawn with Vice President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty Ford. Just before Nixon boarded the waiting helicopter, he waved and flashed his “V” gesture, for victory. The helicopter took him to Andrews Air Force Base for the ride home on Air Force One, which lost that designation at noon near Jefferson City, Mo., when Ford was sworn in as the new president.

Bull, the staff assistant, said Nixon’s aides should have made more of an effort to help Nixon show his human side during his presidency. He flew back to California with Nixon and shared that feedback with the now ex-president.

“I said to him, ‘I think the staff did you a great disservice,’” recounted Bull, now 82. “‘We always presented you as being one-dimensional, almost an automaton who is concerned only with the business at hand. And we never showed that you had emotions - humor, happiness, depression, anger - all of the human emotions.’”

Bull added, “The American people didn’t see that side of him, which I think ultimately worked against him in the public perception.”