Diane Sawyer Speaks About Richard Nixon

February 25, 2010 by admin | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History 

As many of TNN’s readers know, Diane Sawyer, the veteran newswoman who now anchors ABC’s World News Tonight, spent the 1970s working in Richard Nixon’s White House, then, after his resignation from the Presidency, in San Clemente as his assistant for his Memoirs.

In her thirty years on network television, Ms. Sawyer’s occasionally been asked, on the air and in newspaper and magazine interviews, about her years with RN. But I don’t recall any interview that’s focused completely on her work for him – until now.

Today, Parade magazine published a somewhat short but still highly interesting Q-and-A in which Ms. Sawyer speaks about her impressions of RN, and especially how he viewed journalists. Here’s a representative quote:

“I think he thought that, institutionally, journalists – and I think you can argue with some cause – were not going to be on his side, for a number of reasons, not just political ones. He just didn’t have the easily accessed charm that journalists love so. If you read his diaries, he writes at one point about John Kennedy and what it must have been like to be John Kennedy and walk into a room and take it over. He was much more of an interior person who had to will himself in some ways to be a public person. I don’t think it was about my having gone to join the dark side or the enemy. I think it was more than anything I was someone he knew and understood who could bring him word back about this other craft was like.”

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