RN at 99, PN at 100

in Featured The New Nixon by Jonathan Movroydis — January 10, 2012 at 6:38 am | 2 comments

Family, friends, and close aides celebrated President Nixon’s 99th birthday at the Nixon Library and around the country Monday. The ceremonies also inaugurated the centennial of First Lady Pat Nixon, who turns 100 this March.

The all-day events began at the memorial sites of President and Mrs. Nixon, where Admiral Mike Shatynski (U.S. Navy), represented President Obama for the laying of the White House Wreath. He was accompanied by Ed Nixon, the President’s younger brother, and Col. Jack Brennan, Marine aide to President Nixon; all extolled the 37th President’s far-reaching accomplishments and the courage he exhibited throughout his life in the political arena.

“On a global scale, Richard Nixon was a pioneer,” Adm. Shatynski said about the historic trip to the People’s Republic of China and the arms control treaties accorded with the Soviet Union. “He improved relations with these two countries which had a dramatic and positive effect on the international political stage.”

Ed Nixon, who will be traveling to the PRC in February to commemorate the trip’s 40th anniversary, said the monumental achievement couldn’t have been forged without the President’s understanding that diplomacy is about effectuating change through the people.

RN told the younger Nixon that “when you go [to China], meet the people not the leaders,” in effect rely on the grassroots to influence those who control the governing bodies.

Col. Brennan – who traveled with the President throughout the country and around the world – saw how RN, first-hand, concentrated on the people of the Soviet Union, while assuaging tensions at the height of the Cold War.

“It was a very poignant moment,” Brennan recalled before he recited a portion of President Nixon’s May 28, 1972 address to the Soviet People from the Kremlin. “He showed the softer side of America and how and why we wanted peace.”

“Yesterday, I laid a wreath at the cemetery which commemorates the brave people who died during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. At the cemetery, I saw the picture of a 12-year-old girl. She was a beautiful child. Her name was Tanya. The pages of her diary tell the terrible story of war,” President Nixon said in the television and radio address. “In the simple words of a child, she wrote of the deaths of the members of her family: Zhenya in December. Grannie in January. Leka then next. Then Uncle Vasya. Then Uncle Lyosha. Then Mama. And then the Savichevs. And then finally, these words, the last words in her diary: ‘All are dead. Only Tanya is left.’”

“I leave you with that,” Brennan concluded, “that is the real President Nixon.”

Following the ceremony, radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt broadcasted live from the East Room and spoke with family, friends and admirers of the President and First Lady. Ed Nixon and Col. Brennan appeared in studio. Guests phoning in included Julie and David Eisenhower, historian Richard Norton Smith, Nixon Foundation Chairman Ron Walker, former Nixon speechwriters Pat Buchanan and Ben Stein, former California Governor Pete Wilson, and Fox News personality and Nixon research assistant Monica Crowley. Listen to the entire broadcast at hughniverse.com.

Col. Jack Brennan, Marine Aide to the President from 1969 to 1974, gives remarks at the memorial sites of President and Mrs. Nixon on the occasion of the President’s 99th birthday and the beginning of the First Lady’s centennial celebration.