Making A Presidential Martini

Nixon gave me the recipe... Now you can have it too...

“I like a good martini.

Two at the very most.

Three—I’m under the table.

Four—I’m under my host.”

-Dorothy Parker

I’ve never been much of a drinker. Red wine makes me sleepy and brown liquors give me a terrible headache—but thanks to Richard Nixon, I became a fan of the perfect martini.

The origins of the martini are disputed. The name may derive from the Italian Martini brand of vermouth. Others suggest it evolved from a cocktail called the Martinez served in the early 1860s at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, which locals frequented before taking an evening ferry to the nearby town of Martinez, California.

I acquired my taste for a dry vodka martini at the Saddle River, New Jersey home of former President Richard Nixon. During the 1980 presidential campaign, while serving as the Northeast Regional Political Director for Governor Ronald Reagan’s campaign, one of my duties was to make a pilgrimage to Nixon’s modest home in the New York suburbs of New Jersey, to give him a weekly briefing on the status of the campaign.

The old man had a voracious appetite for political intelligence, as well as gossip. In our briefings, the man who had served as our 37^th President, was reserved, buttoned down, and all business. Every session included rapid-fire questions about polling, debate preparation, election day operations, and the like.

I initially found that President Nixon was very forward looking. While it was easy to get him to talk about rising talent in the Republican Party or who he viewed among the current-day Democrats as a threat, it was virtually impossible to get him to talk about the past. “Always look forward; never look back,” he would famously say.

After our “business” was finished, he would invariably ask me if I “wanted a Silver Bullet?”—which is what he called the perfect martini. Although he regularly preferred gin and initially scoffed at my choice of vodka, after I explained that I had gotten stinking drunk on gin and tonic in my teens and couldn’t even abide the smell of it, he agreed to mix us both one of his legendary martinis using vodka. Famous for his legendary memory, he would never again ask me my preference of vodka over gin but would automatically mix a couple of ice-cold vodka martinis after our “briefing session” was over.

The fact is, Dick Nixon made a mean martini and was quite proud of his martini mixing skills, and he was quite precise about his recipe. The whole thing had a ritual to it. First, he explained, you must chill a couple of martini glasses in the freezer. Then, you had to follow the precise steps enumerated below. Above all, his “Silver Bullet” required an extremely vigorous shake of a sterling silver or aluminum cocktail shaker. “If there are not tiny chards of ice floating on the surface of the martini after you pour it—well, then, that means you’ve fucked it up!” he would growl.

Undoubtedly Nixon honed his mixology skills tending bar at “Nick’s Hamburger Stand,” an impromptu canteen put together by the enterprising Navy lieutenant for war-weary service members passing through Nixon’s post in the South Pacific in World War II.

Dick served up booze and burgers. Nixon served at Guadalcanal and later at Green Island as officer in charge of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command, supervising C-47 cargo operations. Lieutenant Commander Nixon was legendary for his ability to acquire “hooch” for the boys.

Generally speaking, Nixon was not introspective. He hated to talk about the past, always looking forward instead. It was hard to get him to talk about Ike, McCarthy, JFK, LBJ, and the deep secrets he held close for so many decades. But after two drinks the old man became absolutely loquacious and would reveal astonishing things, cloaked in Nixonian intrigue, of course.

It was after his second martini that when I asked the former President, “Who really killed John F. Kennedy?” that he told me that, “The Warren Commission was the biggest goddam hoax in American history” and when I pressed him further said, “Let me put it this way; Lindon and I both wanted to be President—but I wasn’t willing to kill for it.” That statement was the impetus for my New York Times Best Selling Book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.

“More than one of these and you want to beat your wife,” Nixon reportedly told his then-26-year-old assistant John P. Sears. When I told the former President how great his martini was, he admitted that he had borrowed the recipe from no less a legend than British Prime Minister and wartime leader Winston Churchill.

Little did I know that years later, Nixon and I would share more than our stout republicanism; we would both be the recipient of full and unconditional presidential pardons.

On the day of my arraignment on the entirely fabricated charges filed against me by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his failed attempt to pressure me to testify falsely against President Donald Trump, I recorded a video for the Daily Caller, revealing Nixon’s martini recipe.

Silver Bullet Recipe

Ingredients

·      One (1) bottle of small to medium sized green olives with pimento

·      Dry Vermouth of choice

·      Fine Russian vodka (or Tanqueray gin, as Nixon preferred)

Assembly

·      Drain the brine from the bottle of olives, leaving olives intact

·      Refill olive bottle with water; shake vigorously; drain water completely

·      Refill olive bottle with dry Vermouth; refrigerate the bottle

·      Chill a traditional martini glass

·      Fill a cocktail shaker with ice, preferably a vintage Tiffany hammered silver art deco shaker

·      Fill the shaker with vodka (or gin, according to preference) until the ice is covered

·      Shake VERY vigorously—if there are not tiny shards of ice floating on the surface of the Silver Bullet, you have not shaken the mixture vigorously enough

·      Pour the mixture into the chilled martini glass

·      Add one Vermouth-drenched olive from the jar

·      Return the Vermouth olive jar to the refrigerator for use with your next Silver Bullet

---