A friend sent over a link to the video of Richard Nixon playing piano on the Jack Parr show.

I remembered the quest I went on long ago to get copies of piano music composed by Richard Nixon. Having read that the president composed music I thought his theme song for the Orthogonians club at Whittier College would make an interesting and weird addition to my recital program of mostly short pieces.

For my New York premiere (if that’s what you want to call it) I played a program including 26 pieces by composers for every letter of the alphabet. It was a harmless gimmick meant to include music by everyone from Beethoven to my friends downtown to music by people famous for things other than composing music. Leo Tolstoy, Nietszche, even Hitler crossed my radar at one point (the latter for only the briefest most moribund blip).

I wrote many letters to Richard Nixon requesting copies of or any information that would lead me to copies of the piano music he had written, so that he could be my “N” composer.

He ignored me, but in the selfish obsession of my quest it eluded me that he was a human being (not to mention former president) who might find these repeated requests puzzling or suspicious. Like many Americans, I imagined RIchard Nixon as a public abstraction, a wailing wall for open domain backwash.

I was eventually informed on the phone by a librarian at Whittier College that Richard Nixon had been asked directly if he would approve release of a copy of the music for the song he wrote for the Orthogonians. Richard Nixon said no. I sobered up from the selfish quest, realizing that not only did Richard Nixon likely think me a lunatic, but that there are certain classes of people on this earth with whom you just do not fuck around.

Years later I learned something interesting. At the exact same time my one-sided, bottom-feeding correspondence wailed silently in the wilderness, a certain Monica Crowley had also initiated a correspondence with Richard Nixon. In her correspondence she challenged Nixon on his record, confronted him on China and current politics, and to her own surprise soon found herself face to face with the man. She became a rare member of Richard Nixon’s late-life inner circle, and she went on to write books about her experiences with him. The last I heard her chirpy voice (which I sometimes interpret as cynical and even mocking) filled the airwaves of WABC 770 AM radio.

I thought Monica Crowley would find my story interesting. I imagined she would think it a strange footnote to her own feelings of ambiguity as to what part of Richard Nixon she tapped into at that time, and how she among so many others touched a nerve allowing her in to his world. I contemplated sending her a letter with my story, but decided otherwise, and the lot of us is most certainly better off for it.

Around 1999 or 2000 a friend sent me a VHS copy of this video showing Richard Nixon playing piano on the Jack Parr show. I had no easy way to digitize the video at the time (and video on the web was not as common as today), so I let it languish until the video was lost. Too bad, I could have been first on the Internet with this bizarre cultural relic.