Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are arguably the most consequential Republican presidents since the end of World War II.
Their accomplishments in foreign policy — Nixon's opening to China and Reagan's hard-line agenda dealing with the Soviet Union, which helped end it and the Cold War — shaped the world as it is today.
While much is written about them, little is known about how close the two Californians were, and how often the 37th president advised the 40th through private memoranda delivered through a back channel.
The "rest of the story" is now told by a third Californian: Ken Khachigian, who came into the Nixon White House almost fresh out of Columbia Law School and just in time for the president's historic resignation in 1974.
Following a stint in Nixon's "office in exile" in San Clemente, California, Khachigian ended up with former Gov. Reagan in his winning race for the presidency in 1980. He never left.
Khachigian became Reagan's self-described "word donkey" — helping prepare him for his lone debate with President Jimmy Carter a week before the voting, and then helping him sculpt just about every major speech in his presidency.
In his just-completed book, "Behind Closed Doors: In The Room With Reagan and Nixon," Khachigian tells much we didn't know about the two presidents he worked with and does so with warmth and insight. He also provides in-depth recollections based on a daily diary he kept, immediate transcriptions of important conversations in the White House, and — perhaps most importantly — the memos Nixon sent him containing advice to give candidate Reagan and later President Reagan.
Nixon was still controversial in 1980 and Carter and the Democrats could use any known contacts with Reagan to link him to Watergate and its premier figure. So the former president wrote much of his memoranda on what Reagan should or should not do to Khachigian, knowing he would deliver it to the Republican nominee.
Among other things, Nixon advised Reagan to stick to the economy and double-digit inflation to make his major case against Carter, and to take the high road in debate because he felt Carter was a "small man" and would play rough. He also shared his own lessons from his storied 1960 debates with John F. Kennedy, from which Reagan might learn.
Nixon spelled out in detail suggestions for President-elect Reagan's Cabinet, White House staff, and even the non-Cabinet "housekeeping" agency known as the General Services Administration. His strong pitch for Alexander Haig as secretary of state was followed by Reagan (although Haig was gone within a year, replaced by another Nixon favorite, George Shultz) and he urged Reagan to name William French Smith, a Los Angeles lawyer they both knew well, as attorney general.
"Your attorney general will be making the recommendations to you for all judicial appointments and particularly those to the Supreme Court," Nixon wrote Reagan directly. "Because he had a liberal attorney general, Ford appointed [Justice John Paul] Stevens who has lined up with the liberals on the court in virtually every significant case. With someone like Bill advising you, I'm confident you would not make that mistake."
Although Khachigian never formally joined the White House staff, he was brought in to work with the president on addresses from the inaugural speech in 1981, to several State of the Union messages, to Reagan's speech at the onetime Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
This would come on the heels of a visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany — highly controversial because it was eventually discovered that the cemetery to which West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited the U.S. president contained headstones of more than 40 of Hitler's murderous Waffen-SS fighters.
Defying widespread admonitions for him to visit another site — including those from first lady Nancy Reagan — the president would not break his promise to Kohl and went to Bitburg.
Crafted from Khachigian's draft and subsequent minor edits from Reagan himself, the president's subsequent speech at Bergen-Belsen invoked Holocaust victim Anne Frank as well as a German woman who got Americans and Germans to put down their arms in wartime and celebrate Christmas in her home before they returned to their respective fronts.
The speech stirred hearts throughout Germany and the world. Describing a call from the president in which he thanked Khachigian for his help on the speech, the author said Reagan told him, "Helmut couldn't have been more pleased. I think I could've been elected president of Germany!"
Drawing on rich details from his diaries and saved memoranda, Khachigian vividly recreates the internecine warfare in the Reagan White House between the moderate figures who were his chiefs of staff — Jim Baker, who had managed the campaign of Reagan's leading GOP nomination, opponent and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, and his three successors — and conservatives who understood, in the author's words, "the culture of Reagan and what he had been speaking about for 30 years."
From Nixon's strong admiration for Nancy Reagan ("she's the strongest of the bunch!") to a revealing private conversation between "Dick" and "Ron" (plus Khachigian) at the dedication of the Reagan Library in 1991, "Behind Closed Doors" is a rich repository of hitherto unknown but highly significant stories about two leaders who many of us thought we knew everything about but obviously didn't.
The reader may indeed conclude the book and wish they could somehow come back and do something about the toxic politics of today.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.