By Cecilia Keehan

Syndicated columnist Richard Reeves discussed his book, “President Nixon, Alone in the White House,” Nov. 5 at the Morning Forum of Los Altos.

Reeves found accounts of Nixon’s dialogues with him in records from his presidency sealed by the F.B.I. and unopened until recently.

Bob Dole told Reeves that what he found amazing about Nixon was not what he did as president, but just the fact that he was president, because Nixon was an extreme introvert who could not stand being with people.

Reeves said that the president had a photographic memory and that whatever he said was memorized. To avoid contact with others, the president always used the tunnels in the White House. He spent as much time as possible at Camp David to attain the solitude he craved.

Reeves related a story about the first state dinner Nixon hosted, which was for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The president was seated next to the prime minister at the dinner. Reeves said it was a long and uncomfortable evening for the president and the following day he complained to Bob Haldeman that these dinners had to be made shorter. His solution was to cut the soup course. Manolo Sanchez, the president’s valet, revealed that the president had spilled soup down his vest, causing the ban on soup at future dinners.

Reeves revealed that Nixon thanked and then dismissed all his staff at the end of his first term and told them if they wanted to return, they had to reapply for their jobs. There was a clause they had to sign that said they would not try to see or talk to the president.

Reeves found examples of notes the president wrote to himself. He spent hours writing on legal pads on self-improvement, including suggestions for himself such as “be cool,” “joy in life,” “need for spiritual help,” “make every day count.”

Nixon tried to create the White House as a version of himself, Reeves said. He governed by surprise. In the greatest democracy in the world, he made deals in secret. Reeves has written that Nixon operated behind screens of secrets and layer upon layer of lies, big and small. He made decisions without the advice or interference of Congress, the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the press or the people.

The United States’ opening to China in 1972 came as a total surprise to the country, as did his taking the dollar off the gold standard in 1971. These initiatives were created on his yellow pads or in secret meetings, Reeves said.

This governing by surprise was done with extraordinary effectiveness, the writer said.

The White House tapped the phones of Congress, and the president in turn was being tapped by the Signal Corps. A yeoman was assigned to stay late to empty White House wastebaskets and to take the papers to the Pentagon for review.

In Nixon’s White House, Reeves said, there were huge bags of cash. There were then no campaign finance laws to prohibit movement of cash, and the president could move money around at will. Helen Hunt, the wife of Howard Hunt, one of the people caught in the Watergate burglary, died in a plane crash and was found to be carrying hundreds of $100 bills in her purse. This contributed to the unraveling of what was going on in Watergate. It was no aberration. According to the speaker, it had begun on day one of the Nixon administration.

Because Reeves had lost his way en route to last week’s speaking engagement, he joked that he would speak about one president and a half — so near the end of his time, he switched to the present president. Referring to the recent killings of alleged Al-Qaida operatives in Yemen, Reeves commented, “We are back in the assassination business.” He said it was insanity to go into Iraq. “We are an open society; the others are not.”

Reeves believes the United States must retaliate in very strong ways, and though we have to fight, we must fight as a superpower. He said that we, being Americans, don’t want to be colonialists. He admitted he doesn’t like this president because he is an ignorant man with no sense of history. Reagan, by contrast, was smart enough to know that a new superpower has to dominate by example. It may take five to 50 years to bring about an Arab democracy. We can show them, but we can’t stay. We are not the Romans.