Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I was beavering away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles, when Henry Kissinger twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.

Kissinger, the last surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, was in Yorba Linda last fall for two reasons: to speak at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote a book he had published earlier in the year, at the improbable age of 99. The book, Leadership, contains an entire chapter in praise of Nixon, the man who had made Kissinger the 20th century’s only celebrity diplomat.

I was there to gather material for a Nixon book of my own. I had been nosing around in a cache of volumes from Nixon’s personal library. I was particularly interested in any marks he may have left in the books he’d owned. From what I could tell, no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind. To give an idea: One heavily underlined book in the collection is a lengthy biography of Tolstoy; another is a book on statesmanship by Charles de Gaulle; another is a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art. Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading.

Every morning a friendly factotum would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon Kissinger arrived, I had worked my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon left the White House. A significant portion of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News named Russ Braley, is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. In Braley’s telling, the Times’ treatment swung between the unfair and the uncomprehending, for reasons ranging from negligence to malice.

The book had found its ideal reader in Richard Nixon. The pages of his copy were cluttered with underlining from his thick ballpoint pen. It occurred to me, as I followed along, that Nixon was being brought up short by his reading: Much of the material in Bad News was apparently news to him.

[From the May 1982 issue: Kissinger and Nixon in the White House]

My reading was interrupted by a commotion outside the research room. I stuck my head out in time to see Kissinger and his entourage settling into the room across the hall. A group of donors and Nixonophiles had gathered to hear heroic tales of Nixon’s statecraft.

I dutifully returned to Braley. When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”

Page 551 from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by Russ Braley (Photograph by Joel Barhamand for The Atlantic)

Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.

The contrast between Nixon’s bitter hash marks about Kissinger from the 1980s and Kissinger’s present-day celebration of his old boss offered a lesson in the evolving calculation of self-interest. It also conjured the image of a solitary old man in semiretirement, learning things about a now-vanished world he’d once thought he presided over. It happened often in the reading room in Yorba Linda: With unexpected immediacy, the gray metal cart carried the past into the present, in small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.

The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people’s libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of “textual activity,” to use the scholar’s clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.

A book invites various kinds of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (whom Nixon admired, to judge by his extravagant underlining in the Durants’ The Age of Voltaire) scribbled commentary so incessantly that his marginalia have been published in volumes of their own. Voltaire liked to argue with a book. Nixon did not. He had a lively mind but not, when reading, a disputatious one; he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).

[From the April 1973 issue: The president and the press]

In his method, Nixon resembled the English writer Paul Johnson. I once asked Johnson how, given his prolific journalistic career—several columns and reviews a week in British and American publications—he managed to read all the books he cited in his own very long and very readable histories, which embraced such expansive subjects as Christianity, ancient Egypt, and the British empire. His reaction bordered on revulsion at my naivete. “Read them?!” he spat out. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” As it happens, Nixon was an avid reader of Johnson, whose books he often handed out to friends and staff at Christmastime.

John Adams, another busy producer of marginalia, liked to quote a Latin epigram: Studium sine calamo somnium. Adams translated this as: “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon acquired the pen-in-hand habit early, as his surviving college and high-school textbooks show, and he kept at it throughout his life. For Nixon, as for the rest of us, marking up books was also a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read. He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.

One of the most heavily represented authors in Nixon’s personal library is Churchill, whom Nixon revered not only as a statesman but also as a historian and an essayist. Nixon’s shelves sagged with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies: The World Crisis, Marlborough: His Life and Times, The Second World War, A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a series of sketches he wrote in the 1920s and ’30s sizing up roughly two dozen friends and colleagues, was clearly a favorite. When I retrieved Nixon’s copy from a box, I found it dog-eared throughout.

Nixon’s tastes ran heavily toward history, but he could be tempted away from the past to a book of present-day punditry, if the writer and point of view were agreeable. According to a report in Time magazine, when half a million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, Nixon holed up in his private quarters with a book called The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today. The book, slim and elegant, had been sent to Nixon by its author, the historian Daniel Boorstin.

Judging by his notations, Nixon was interested less in Boorstin’s turgid cultural analysis of “consumption communities” and more in his thesis that the ragged protesters gathering outside the White House fence constituted something new in American history: They were not radicals at all but nihilists. Nixon brought out the pen, and in Yorba Linda, a continent and decades away from his White House hideaway, I could still feel the insistent furrow of his underlining on the page. He marked several consecutive paragraphs in a section called “The New Barbarians,” in which Boorstin criticized protesters for their “indolence of mind” and “mindless, obsessive quest for power.”

People read books for lots of reasons: instruction, pleasure, uplift. This was Nixon reading for self-defense.

The book I most wanted to see in Yorba Linda was Nixon’s copy of Robert Blake’s biography Disraeli (1966). A re-creation of Nixon’s favorite room in the White House was one of the Nixon museum’s prime exhibits when it opened, in 1990, a few years before Nixon’s death. (It has since been redesigned.) Nixon himself chose Disraeli to rest on his desk for the public to see. The book was given to him during his first year in the White House, in 1969, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor, prominent Democrat, and future U.S. senator from New York. To the surprise of just about everybody, the year he took office, Nixon made Moynihan his chief domestic-policy counselor, a counterpart in those early days to Kissinger as head of the National Security Council. Despite Nixon’s enduring image as a black-eyed right-winger, his political ideology was always flexible, if not flatly self-contradictory.

[From the November 1974 issue: The friends of Richard Nixon]

Moynihan the liberal hoped to persuade Nixon the hybrid to take Benjamin Disraeli, the great prime minister of Victorian Britain, as his model. Disraeli was a Tory and an imperialist, and at the same time a social reformer of vision and courage. According to Moynihan, Nixon read the book within days of receiving it. Soon enough, the president was calling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” The precise meaning of the tag was clear to Nixon alone, but we can assume it underwent a great deal of improvisation and revision as his presidency wore on.

Disraeli’s appeal to Nixon went beyond his light-footed ideology. Speaking to his Cabinet at a dinner one evening in early 1972, Nixon called Disraeli a “magnificent” politician. Now, he went on, the “fashionable set today would immediately say, ‘Ah, politicians. Bad.’ ” As he saw it, the “fashionable set”—the epithet, suffused with reverse snobbery and class resentment, is pure Nixon—believed that politicians disdain idealism and think nothing of principle. “But,” Nixon said, “the pages of history are full of idealists who never accomplished anything.” It was “pragmatic men” like Disraeli “who had the ability to do things that other people only talked about.” Nixon, who had never shied away from calling himself a politician, wanted to see himself in Disraeli, or at least in Blake’s Disraeli—this “classic biography,” to which, he told his Cabinet, he often turned for inspiration on sleepless nights. And here the book was, Nixon’s own copy, at the top of my growing stack in Yorba Linda.

Disraeli is packed with observations about political tradecraft. They are penetrating, specific, and cold-blooded. The little dicta come from both the biographer and his subject. “He was a master at disguising retreat as advance,” Blake wrote approvingly. Nixon underlined that sentence, and then this one from Disraeli’s contemporary Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.”

A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?” But it was politics that always caught his eye, and activated his pen. Disraeli, Blake wrote, “suffered from a defect, endemic among politicians, the greatest reluctance to admit publicly that he had been in the wrong, even when the fault lay with his subordinates.” Another from Blake: Successful politicians “realize that a large part of political life in a parliamentary democracy consists not so much in doing things yourself as in imparting the right tone to things that others do for you or to things that are going to happen anyway.”

Should we take marked passages like these, with their ironic acceptance of the fudging and misdirection called for in the political arts, as a gesture toward self-criticism on Nixon’s part? Probably not: Nixon knew himself better than psycho-biographers give him credit for, but self-awareness is not self-criticism. In his chosen profession, he took the bad with the good, and his casual, creeping concessions to the seamier requirements of politics are what eventually did him in.

[From the October 2017 issue: How the Vietnam War broke the American presidency]

If you go looking for them, you can see reflections of Blake’s Disraeli throughout Nixon’s presidency, encapsulated in enduring phrases here and there. It was in Blake that Nixon came across Disraeli’s famous description of “exhausted volcanoes.” Disraeli coined it to disparage the feckless time-servers in William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet after they had been in office a few years. Nixon underscored not only “exhausted volcanoes” but the rest of the passage from Blake’s text: The phrase, Blake writes, “was no mere gibe … For the past year, the Government had been vexed by that combination of accidents, scandals and blunders which so often for no apparent reason seem to beset an energetic administration in its later stages.”

Nixon feared the same fate for his second term—a loss of energy and direction. The day after his landslide reelection, in 1972, he called together his Cabinet and senior staff. He told them of Disraeli’s warning about “exhausted volcanoes.” And then, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, serving as the lord high executioner, he demanded their resignations en masse.

Not everything in Blake’s Disraeli caught Nixon’s interest; certainly not everything was useful to him. As I paged through, I saw there were many longueurs, stretches of several dozen pages, sometimes more, where no filleting of any kind happened. And then—inevitably, suddenly—Nixon the reader is seized by passages of sometimes thunderous resonance, and the pen is again called into play.

“Disraeli,” Blake writes, “really was regarded as an outsider by the Victorian governing class.” One can almost see Nixon sit bolt upright and pick up his pen. This is the same ostracism that Nixon himself felt keenly throughout his personal and professional life, in fact and in imagination. The following page and a half, discussing the disdain of the “élite” for Disraeli, is bracketed nearly in its entirety. Some sentences are boxed. Some passages, like this one, are underlined as well as bracketed:

Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy … inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.

The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”

When reading about the elites, Nixon pressed the ballpoint deep into the page. We marginalia mavens, tracing our fingers across the lines today, can only guess, of course. But it may be that in 1969, sitting in the reading chair in his White House hideaway, he already sensed that this was not bound to end well.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Nixon Between the Lines.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When I first spoke with Alden Whitman, the chief obituary writer for The New York Times from 1964 to 1976, I was stunned to hear him say that he did not expect to live much longer. I didn’t reply, thinking that this 52-year-old man must be kidding—he was being melodramatic or had spent so much time writing about death that the subject was consuming him.

“I’m really not well,” he continued softly. “I’ve recently returned from eight weeks at Knickerbocker Hospital following a major heart attack, and I’m concerned that the next experience could be fatal.”

He was sitting on a sofa across from me in the living room of his apartment on the 12th floor of an old brick building on West 116th Street. We were surrounded by shelves packed with books, and there were even more books stacked below on the floor. He shared the apartment with his third wife, Joan, 16 years his junior. They had met seven years earlier, in 1958, at the Times, where she was an editor in the Style department.

I was interviewing Whitman for Esquire, my first profile in a series on reporters and editors, and part of my long-standing interest in writing about “nobodies.” The term media was not yet such a popular part of the lexicon as it would become later, sparked by Watergate. Editors generally assumed that there was not a great deal of general interest in, nor much of a market for, lengthy stories about journalistic endeavors and personalities. Indeed, journalists were not supposed to have personalities. Who they were, what they thought, how they felt was deemed irrelevant. They were coverers, copyists, and the scriveners of other people’s doings and deeds. Yet, knowing them as I did, I believed that they had personal and professional stories to tell that were as worthy of attention as the stories of the so-called news makers whose names and photographs appeared every day in the paper.

[Read: Click here if you want to be sad]

Before becoming the chief obituary writer, Whitman had been a copy editor for the newspaper. I never talked to him when I worked there in the mid-1950s, but the time I saw him in the cafeteria stuck in my memory. He was a short, stout man who’d walked in smoking a pipe and bearing a serious, if not dour, expression that contrasted with his sprightly attire. He was wearing a red polka-dot bow tie, a yellow pinstriped shirt, and a rakish double-vented tan hacking jacket. After selecting his food at the counter, he walked to an unoccupied corner table and began reading for the next half hour, carefully feeding himself with one hand while holding his newspaper with the other, positioning it within an inch or two of his nose and then squinting at it through his horn-rimmed glasses.

Despite what Whitman had just told me, he did not look like a dying man. He was much as I remembered him from the cafeteria—jaunty in a colorful bow tie, puffing a pipe, no signs of emaciation, weariness, or inattentiveness. He spoke in a strong and clearly modulated tone of voice, and his manner was as casual when discussing his ailments as it had been when he had greeted me earlier and asked if I’d like something to drink.

As I sat across from him, pen in hand, I could hardly believe what was happening. Here I was doing what he usually did, having an antemortem interview with a candidate presumably ready for a funeral. I had heard that Whitman had already written dozens of advance obituaries of noteworthy elderly people, who in some cases he had traveled great distances to meet in person and describe at close range before it was too late—Charlie Chaplin, for example, and Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Charles Lindbergh, Francisco Franco, and the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, who was known to have referred to Whitman as the Times ghoul.

Although he was an isolated member of the reportorial staff, the only one whose published writing did not carry bylines, Whitman nonetheless possessed considerable arbitrary power within the paper. It was primarily up to him to decide who was, and who was not, newsworthy enough to warrant an obituary. In Whitman’s world, the recently deceased was either a “somebody” or a “nobody.”

Growing up in a small town on the Jersey Shore in the late 1940s, I dreamed of someday working for a great newspaper. But I did not necessarily want to write news. News was ephemeral and it accentuated the negative. It was largely concerned with what went wrong yesterday rather than what went right. Much of it was, in Bob Dylan’s words, “good-for-nothing news.” Or it was “gotcha journalism,” in which reporters with tape recorders got public figures to make fools of themselves trying to answer tricky questions.

Nevertheless, news continues to be made every day based on the statements and activities of newsworthy people—politicians, bankers, business leaders, artists, entertainers, and athletes. Other people are ignored unless they’ve been involved in a crime or a scandal, or suffered an accidental or violent death. If they have lived lawfully and uneventfully, and died of natural causes, obituary editors do not assign reporters to write about them. They are not newsworthy. They are essentially nobodies. I wanted to specialize in writing about nobodies.

Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, liked my pitch for a series of articles on reporters, copy editors, and editors with whom I had worked in the newsroom at The New York Times. In 1965, he offered me a contract to write about my Times people, as well as other subjects of his choosing, while being guaranteed an annual salary of $15,000.

On the downside, however, I had to please Hayes occasionally by interviewing a movie star or other celebrity. When he proposed that I write about Frank Sinatra, I tried to talk him out of it. I reminded him that there had already been several recently published pieces about Sinatra, and I wondered what more could be said about him. I preferred to not write about celebrities because I knew from experience that few of them had much respect for writers, they were often late for interviews (if they showed up at all), and they regularly insisted that their press agents or attorneys sit in on interviews and review the articles prior to publication.

I would never agree to this kind of review, nor would any newspaper or magazine of which I was aware, including Esquire, but Hayes still desired a big piece about Sinatra in his magazine and wanted me to do it. He reasoned that it was only fair that I sometimes try to help him increase newsstand sales with celebrity covers since he was allowing me to publish stories about journalists whom few Esquire readers had ever heard of, like Alden Whitman. We eventually came to an agreement. I would write about Sinatra if he published my story on Whitman first.

From his start as chief obituary writer, Whitman expanded the scope of the assignment beyond the practices of his predecessors. The older Times staffers had produced advance obituaries largely based on information obtained from news clippings; or, if the subject was a very prominent individual, there might be magazine profiles or even biographies and autobiographies upon which to draw.

Whitman convinced the top editors to allow him to travel around the nation and abroad in order to conduct face-to-face interviews that provided closely observed details: For example, after meeting with Pablo Picasso at the artist’s studio in Paris, he wrote that Picasso “was a short, squat man with broad, muscular shoulders and arms. He was most proud of his small hands and feet and of his hairy chest. In old age his body was firm and compact; and his cannonball head, which was almost bald, gleamed like bronze.”

After compiling a list of people he hoped to interview, Whitman would write them flattering letters explaining that the Times wished to update its files on the lives of such distinguished individuals as themselves, seeking their biographical insights and reflections, and therefore a request was being made for a brief personal visit. Although there was no mention of advance obituary or death in these letters, nor was it explained that such interviews were slated for posthumous publication, the letter’s purpose was still fairly obvious to most recipients; and, indeed, after being granted an interview in Missouri with Harry Truman, Alden was greeted by the former president with: “I know why you’re here, and I want to help you all I can.”

Though there were some who turned down the interview request—for example, the writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson, the French minister of culture André Malraux, and Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery, the British World War II general— Whitman himself refused to interview many people who were not sufficiently notable. Who did, and who did not, meet the “notability” standard was largely his decision. The editors and reporters in the news department devoted their days to the coverage of the living, while it was his prerogative to deal as he wished with the dead and the almost dead.

He also made it clear—in a statement published in the monthly trade-news magazine Editor & Publisher—that he was not receptive to any solicitations from public-relations firms or from other influence peddlers, who might have clients desiring an antemortem interview with him. “This is strictly a business where we call you, don’t call us,” he said, adding, “The Times will place its own value on an obit, and I refuse to talk with anyone who calls up to suggest that so-and-so, still living, would make an interesting obit, and I can have an interview … I simply refuse to speak with anybody trying to guarantee immortality before he dies.”

In completing my own interview with Whitman for Esquire, one of my final questions concerned his own termination, especially because during our time together he had emphasized his failing health. As I wrote in the article:

“But what will happen to you, then, after you die, Mr. Whitman?” I asked.

“I have no soul that is going anywhere,” he said. “It is simply a matter of bodily extinction.”

“If you had died during your heart attack, what, in your opinion, would have been the first thing your wife would have done?”

“She would first have seen to it that my body was disposed of in the way I wanted,” he said. “To be cremated without fuss or fanfare.”

“And then what?”

“Then, after she’d gotten to that, she would have turned her attention to the children.”

“And then?”

“Then, I guess, she would have broken down and had a good cry.”

“Are you sure?”

Whitman paused.

“Yes, I would assume so,” he said finally, puffing on his pipe. “This is the formal outlet for grief under such circumstances.”

Three months after I had finished interviewing him, my article about Whitman appeared in the February 1966 issue of Esquire. Hayes, the editor, liked it and published it under the title “Mr. Bad News,” with the subtitle “Death, as it must to all men, comes to Alden Whitman every day. It’s a living.”

I began the piece by re-creating a scene that Joan had described during our lunch:

“Winston Churchill gave you your heart attack,” the wife of the obituary writer said, but the obituary writer, a short and rather shy man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and smoking a pipe, shook his head and replied, very softly, “No, it was not Winston Churchill.”

“Then T. S. Eliot gave you your heart attack,” she quickly added, lightly, for they were at a small dinner party in New York and the others seemed amused.

“No,” the obituary writer said, again softly, “it was not T. S. Eliot.”

If he was at all irritated by his wife’s line of questioning, her assertion that writing lengthy obituaries for the New York Times under deadline pressure might be speeding him to his own grave, he did not show it, did not raise his voice; but then he rarely does.

The article drew a favorable reaction from the magazine’s subscribers as well as from some top editors at the Times, and they soon reversed the paper’s anonymity rule for obit writing and began attaching Whitman’s byline to his work. As he continued to produce his well-written and informative memorials, he became a mini celebrity within the journalism profession and subsequently took a bow in front of millions of viewers while discussing his job with Johnny Carson on NBC’s The Tonight Show.

He not only continued to write obituaries for the next 10 years, but he also contributed book reviews and conducted interviews for the paper over lunches with many well-known novelists and poets; he usually showed up wearing a cape. He also had his photograph taken by Jill Krementz, who specialized in shooting literary figures and was the wife of the writer Kurt Vonnegut.

In 1976, he left the Times. Others would inherit his position, of course, although none would be so singularly identified with it. With his retirement, Joan quit her job in the Style department and the two of them moved to Southampton, Long Island, where she hired college students to read books and newspapers daily to her husband. She meanwhile worked as a freelance book editor, co-authored a few books on cooking, and helped edit big best-selling books written by a Times food critic.

[George Packer: I wish my friend could have read her own obituary]

Whitman died of a stroke in 1990. The Times published a 23-paragraph obituary accompanied by his picture and the headline “Alden Whitman Is Dead at 76; Made an Art of Times Obituaries.” It carried no byline.

This article has been adapted from Gay Talese’s book Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener.