RICHARD NIXON: 1913-1994 : The Western White House in San Clemente Was the Setting for Some of Nixon’s Diplomatic and Political Successes; Then Watergate Drove a Humiliated President From Office, and La Casa Pacifica Became a Fortress and a . . . : House of Sorrows

It was the summer of 1973, when the eyes of the nation were glued to the Watergate hearings on television.

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And yet, thousands of miles away on the West Coast, Richard Nixon and his family were honoring a rare guest at La Casa Pacifica.

Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev had come to the seaside estate for a stay of several days, bringing with him to South County some of the world’s most powerful Communists. But in this case, none of the neighbors minded.

Brezhnev came to the Western White House in July, the same month former Nixon aide Alexander P. Butterfield revealed that the President had secretly recorded all of his Oval Office meetings and phone conversations. Hence, the bombshell of the Watergate tapes.

But in the oceanfront tower of La Casa Pacifica, where former President Franklin D. Roosevelt had once played poker, Nixon and Brezhnev engaged in a high-stakes game of diplomatic chess deep into the night. What resulted was the first of a series of agreements aimed at averting nuclear war.

More than any other aspect of La Casa Pacifica, or “peaceful house,” it was the tower, friends say, that came to symbolize the 37th President’s greatest successes and deepest sorrows.

It was there that he retreated for quiet contemplation and then later for refuge, as shelter from the storm that drove him from office as an unindicted co-conspirator in August, 1974. And it was from there, in days before and after Watergate, that he forged his strongest bonds with the people of Orange County as political soul brother and oceanside neighbor.

For Nixon, “it was a great escape in two different ways,” said family friend Pat Hitt of Corona del Mar, a Nixon appointee to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. “Before his resignation, it was a getaway where he could have privacy but still be completely in touch. But after his resignation, it was purely a refuge, and for that matter, a place of healing.”

During the time he lived in the sprawling estate--between 1969 and 1980, when he returned to the East Coast--Nixon welcomed to the 24-acre enclave Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato. “First Foreign Leader Ever in San Clemente,” the city’s newspaper proclaimed. Sato would not be the last.

Nixon later welcomed Soviet dignitaries Anatoly Dobrynin and Andrei Gromyko, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and former President Lyndon Johnson, who celebrated his 61st birthday at La Casa Pacifica.

Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Red Skelton, Cesar Romero and the Rev. Billy Graham also dropped in for overnight stays. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger moved in next door, to an estate once owned by the publisher of Surfing magazine. Nixon aides H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman moved nearby.

And so, for a while, San Clemente became the focal point of the ultimate power lunch. La Casa Pacifica quietly emerged as not only the high-profile social arena in Southern California but also the setting for some of the most important foreign-policy decisions of the Cold War era.

It was in Nixon’s so-called final days, in particular, friends say, that the Western White House came to symbolize much that was positive and compelling about his presidency, while Washington came to depict the stigma of Watergate and his ultimate undoing.

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But for the final five years of his time in San Clemente, La Casa Pacifica became a fortress, where sadness was the resident emotion.

“Oh, he was bitter,” Hitt said. “Being a human being, he had to be. But he didn’t express it, at least not publicly. He didn’t go around saying, ‘Poor me.’ But I know he was bleeding inside. He had to be--he really was had. Certainly, everyone close to him was bitter.”

Nixon and his wife, Patricia Ryan Nixon, or Nixon by himself, were often seen walking along the beach, looking at the sand as the sea gulls circled overhead.

“It was quite a therapeutic surrounding for them,” said Dorothy Fuller, president of the San Clemente Historical Society and author of an unpublished manuscript on La Casa Pacifica titled “The Western White House Foursome.”

“It’s just so beautiful and peaceful and medicinal,” Fuller said. “It would be a great place for a sanitarium.”

Until then, however, La Casa Pacifica was a far different place for Nixon. It was there that he met with special envoy Huang Chen in what led to a meltdown of hostilities between the United States and China.

As author David Halberstam, whose books “The Powers That Be” and “The Fifties” contain numerous references to Nixon, said last week in an interview: “There were positive things--his intelligence, the opening up of China. . . . But he had to have been the only President ever who could go to China without being red-baited by Richard Nixon.”

It was at La Casa Pacifica that Nixon welcomed the Skylab astronauts and a reunion of former Vietnam POWs. And it was there that Tom Hayden brought a mob of protesters angry over the Vietnam War.

It was there that former Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev was photographed ogling actress Jill St. John in a reception line, and where Brezhnev later slept in a decorative bedroom normally occupied by one of Nixon’s daughters, Tricia. Rather than stay in a luxurious compound reserved for visitors at Camp Pendleton, Brezhnev opted for Tricia’s frilly bedroom, where he was surrounded by fragile wicker furniture and blue- and lavender-flowered wallpaper.

It was at La Casa Pacifica that journalists persuaded Nixon to be photographed while walking on the beach, and he cooperated--by strolling along the shore while wearing a coat, tie and wing-tipped shoes. Not to mention a stiff smile.

Nixon had chosen San Clemente as the site of his Western White House for its isolation. He especially liked the location, bordered by a rocky beach on the west, Interstate 5 on the east, a Coast Guard navigation station on the south and private, gated communities on the north, with Camp Pendleton and the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant lying beyond.

But his ties to the region had predated the Western White House, so named by his staff because of the high-level strategy sessions that marked his early years in office.

He and his wife had begun their courtship here, and according to a biography written by their daughter, Julie, Pat had agreed to marry him while sitting in a parked Oldsmobile on a Dana Point bluff that afforded a romantic view of San Clemente’s beaches.

So, in 1969, those who knew him were hardly surprised when Nixon bought his new home and its surrounding acreage for $340,000. He purchased the property from 90-year-old Victoria Cotton, whose husband, Hamilton Cotton, had built it in 1926.

Cotton was an oil tycoon and one-time national finance chairman of the Democratic Party. He gained national attention for having entertained Franklin Roosevelt in all-night poker games by first using pulleys to hoist the disabled President up to the gazebo tower overlooking the coastal tracks.

The same tower later served as the focal point of the Nixon-Brezhnev summit, and for endless conferences among Nixon, Kissinger, Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

After Nixon’s arrival, the city renamed Via del Fronte, the street leading to the Cotton estate, Avenida del Presidente (the President’s avenue), and the Nixons christened the house La Casa Pacifica. They attended Community Presbyterian Church here and patronized the local taco stands and El Adobe restaurant in San Juan Capistrano.

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They also played host to dinner parties that many in attendance won’t soon forget. Hitt remembers the Christmas party after Nixon became the first President in U.S. history to resign from office.

“There were only five or six of us,” she said. Longtime Nixon friend “Charles (Bebe) Rebozo, Tricia, Pat, John Wayne and myself. After dinner, we went in the living room, and (Nixon) surprised everyone by pulling out a John Wayne movie. John said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s one of my worst ever,’ and everyone just roared. Along about then, we all needed that.”

But Hitt said it was “never in the cards” that the Nixons would remain in San Clemente. Pat Nixon resented the glare of attention that she was able to escape in New York City, “where she could be completely anonymous,” Hitt said.

After the resignation, the former First Lady found shopping at Fashion Island in Newport Beach an excruciating exercise, Hitt said. She was even spat on at a South County supermarket and began to venture out in public only after donning a jet-black wig and heavy makeup.

Nixon himself complained of La Casa Pacifica being “eerily detached” from the world, especially after Watergate, during a period he later called “The Wilderness.” So, in 1980, he sold the estate to a three-member partnership of Gavin Herbert, Donald M. Koll and George Argyros.

Koll, a prominent developer, and Argyros, former owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball team, acquired the surrounding lands. Herbert, a longtime Nixon friend and former chairman of Allergan Pharmaceuticals of Irvine, took possession of the house and 5.9 acres of land, which, according to county records, were valued at $2.3 million in 1992.

The owner of famed nursery Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, the relentlessly private Herbert has maintained the grounds as one of the most elegant, well-manicured showplaces in Southern California. A few reminders of the Nixon era still linger, such as the flagpole by the front door and a bulletproof glass wind screen around the pool.

But most of all, it is Nixon’s spirit that remains. And like the place where Nixon knew the highest highs and the lowest lows, he divides opinions just as fiercely as La Casa Pacifica played host to a range of emotion.

“He created an excitement here that will never be duplicated,” Hitt said. “But I remember him more for who he was. He was formal on the outside, but on the inside, he was warm, caring, giving and very understanding.”

Halberstam has a different view, saying that to view the late Nixon with only rose-colored glasses would be a tragic error in perception.

“He was quite excessive,” Halberstam said. “He was a real figure of the Cold War. He was created by it, and he exploited it. He was quite willing to do some of the ugliest stuff on it. The key was always that rage and insecurity within.

“More than any politician, he marked for better or for worse my generation’s life span. Sadly, there is a lot of darkness there, and a lot of the darkness of this country is connected to him. The problem was never the intelligence. It was always the anger--and that overpowering sense of psychological vulnerability.”