Richard Barnett worked in the White House for the final four years of the Nixon administration, ultimately serving as the presidential communications officer responsible for Camp David, Key Biscayne and San Clemente, where the first family vacationed and lived. Thirty-five years later, Elon senior Amy Reitnouer shares her grandfather’s stories in a documentary screened May 8 in the School of Communications.
“Lessons from the Nixon White House” examines the presidency of Richard Nixon from the view of a U.S. Army officer assigned to the communications office during the early 1970s. It was an eye-opening experience for a student who as a child never fully grasped what her grandfather saw with his own eyes.
“He’s always told me these grandiose stories of meeting Henry Kissinger and hanging out with the players of the Nixon White House,” said Reitnouer, a communications major with a focus on cinema. “When I was little they didn’t seem real. I didn’t realize the historical weight they carried. As I grew older I got more interested in history, and it hit me what, exactly, he had done.”
Barnett worked as an officer in the White House Communications Agency, a military assignment from 1970-1974 that was part of a 30-year U.S. Army career which ended in his retirement as a lieutenant colonel. As a member of the presidential communications staff, he did not interact daily with Nixon, but he often supervised staff and coordinated communication needs when the commander-in-chief was away from Washington.
Barnett and the personnel who reported to him would arrange lighting and podiums for news conferences, coordinate radio communication needs in foreign nations, including the Soviet Union, even handle telephone switchboards that traveled with the president on Air Force One. And Barnett would introduce Nixon at events and help backstage to prepare him for appearances.
“It was a surreal environment, and you begin to wonder, ‘How in the heck did I get here?’” Barnett said, who said he feels sympathetic for Nixon, a president he admired despite his flaws. “I hope people will judge Nixon as a good man who kind of lost his way. Watergate should never have happened. It didn’t have to happen.”
Reitnour recorded 20 hours of interviews with her grandfather, then combed through 10,000 photos and other documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to confirm stories from three decades earlier. She worked with Ray Johnson, a professor of communications, to produce her documentary.
The completed project is a 25-minute film that examines the Nixon White House without too heavy an emphasis on the scandal that led to the president’s resignation in 1974. The film looks at many of the characters associated with Nixon, including Chief of Staff H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and advisers John Ehrlichman and Charles “Chuck” Colson.
Barnett believes it was the White House atmosphere created by Haldeman that played a strong factor in the Watergate scandal. Had Haldman not treated the office as a monarchy, Barnett explains, conditions would not have led to the cover-up that would force Nixon to resign in 1974.
“He has a lot of respect for the president but he’s a very keen observer. He never comes out and says so-and-so was a bad person or so-and-so is guilty,” Reitnouer said of her grandfather. “He just shares his observations about what happened, things that were noticed and have been processed over the past 30 years.”
As for Nixon?
“In my opinion, he was a good man,” Barnett said. “He was always working. He never seemed to be able to relax … and he seemed to be obsessed with Lincoln.”
A question-and-answer session with Reitnouer and Barnett followed the film. For more information about the project, contact Amy Reitnouer at areitnouer@elon.edu.
