Nixon's Beach House, Where the Western White House Stood

In April nineteen sixty-nine, three months after taking office, Richard Nixon purchased a twenty-acre oceanfront estate in San Clemente. He paid five hundred ten thousand dollars for it. He called it La Casa Pacifica, and he called San Clemente his Western White House, meaning that the full apparatus of the executive branch, the communications staff, the Secret Service, the national security advisors, the foreign leaders who needed to meet the president, would periodically relocate to this stretch of bluff above the Pacific while Washington waited.

The Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev visited San Clemente in June nineteen seventy-three, in conversations that produced preliminary arms control agreements. South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu had been here too, the specific discussions about the terms of American withdrawal from Southeast Asia taking place in a room with a view of the ocean. The history of the late stages of the Vietnam War runs partly through a gated community in San Clemente.

The Environmental Protection Agency was established in December nineteen seventy with Nixon's signature, part of a wave of environmental legislation in the early nineteen seventies that also included the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Whether the specific decisions that shaped the EPA were made at San Clemente or in Washington is not definitively documented, but the agency took shape during the years when San Clemente functioned as an alternate seat of government.

In August nineteen seventy-four, Nixon resigned. He came back to San Clemente. He walked the beach. The photographs from those days show a man in a suit alone on the sand, the Pacific behind him, no staff visible in the frame. He lived at La Casa Pacifica until nineteen eighty, then sold it. The estate is now in a private gated community. The beach below it is not accessible to the public.