The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

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  Marrying Pat marked the start of a gradual separation from the narrow world in which Nixon had grown up and a lifelong marathon of travel. Their first year together brought trips around the United States, to Canada, and then—on a United Fruit Company vessel—a cruise to Panama, Costa Rica, and Cuba.

  Cuba was then the kingdom of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, its capital, Havana, a gambling mecca run by American mobsters.5 Nixon took a liking to the place and, when he returned home, told his secretary he might move there to practice law. It was the genesis of a long fascination with the Latin world, one that would eventually draw him, as it would John F. Kennedy, into the quicksand of confrontation with Fidel Castro.

  Nixon had needed special permission from the draft board to travel outside the United States. War was sweeping across Europe, and during the Nixons’ cruise news had arrived that Hitler had invaded Russia. Six months later came Pearl Harbor, bringing America into World War II. For the next four years the war determined the course of Nixon’s life, as it did that of so many other Americans.

  His first wartime job was in the Office of Price Administration. It meant a move to Washington, D.C., but he soon tired of negotiating the complexities of tire rationing. In April 1942 he applied to join the U.S. Navy against the wishes of his mother, who knew that as a Quaker he could easily have avoided active service. After officer training and some dull months in Iowa, he sailed for the South Pacific.

  Nixon’s war record was honorable but unheroic. He worked as a ground operations officer processing supplies and men, moving from island to island as the Japanese fell back. In his first political campaign Nixon would pose in naval uniform and speak of his time “in the foxholes.” He reminisced about his experiences “when the bombs were falling,” while taking care not to embellish too much. The best research suggests that Lieutenant Nixon, known to his unit as Nick, was rarely in danger.6

  Nick’s Snack Shack, the beer and hamburger stand he ran at the airstrip on Green Island, was later remembered by veterans as a catering miracle. “Some of the stuff,” one of Nixon’s men said, “was, shall we say, liberated . . . but Nick could swap anything. If you ever saw Henry Fonda in Mr. Roberts, you have a pretty good idea of what Nick was like.”

  Nixon, navy comrades noted, could curse a blue streak. Some discovered to their cost that he played a mean game of poker, which he had been playing since his days at Duke. “Nixon was as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen,” said fellow officer James Udall. “Sometimes the stakes were pretty big, but Nick had daring and a flair for knowing what to do. . . . I once saw him bluff a lieutenant commander out of fifteen hundred dollars with a pair of deuces.” According to one intimate, Nixon returned from the war some ten thousand dollars richer—the equivalent of ninety-five thousand dollars at 2000 rates.7

  He also found time for poker in his political career, even in the White House. In retirement Nixon regaled guests with stories of the “big pots” he had won while president. In the fifties, when vice president, he played regularly with a group of senators and representatives. Tip O’Neill, later Speaker of the House, was unimpressed. “Nixon thought of himself as a good poker player,” O’Neill recalled, “but he talked too much and didn’t follow the cards. Moreover, he used to take advantage of the fact that he was the highest-ranking person at the game by asking the other players how many cards they had drawn. . . . Every time he lost a few bucks, which was often enough, he’d holler and complain. . . .”

  Every single day during his service in the Pacific, according to their daughter Julie, Richard Nixon wrote to his wife. Every day she wrote him as well. These were happy contacts, full of affection and yearning. Nixon begged his wife to say, “I love you,” in each letter: “I always look for that first. . . .” Pat sent a letter smeared with lipstick. “Sweet,” she wrote shortly before he came home, “you’ll always have to love me lots and never let me change my feelings for you. . . .”

  Down the political decades to come, the world would be invited to believe the Nixons had a happy marriage, a union for the American century—“Pollyanna going steady with Horatio Alger,” as Time magazine described it thirty years later. Yet while outsiders can never assess the love of others with absolute certainty, a mass of evidence indicates theirs was no idyll.

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  They tried to love each other, but the gulf remained, a kind of black hole that sucked into it the good feelings that might have made Nixon a more human, more stable President.

  —Margaret Truman in 1995, on the marriage of Richard and Pat Nixon

  There were fault lines in the relationship from the start. On the eve of Nixon’s wedding, when he had to fill out the marriage license, he had realized he had never learned his wife’s real name; “Pat” had never told him she had been born Thelma Catherine. There was, as he later discovered, much else that Nixon did not know about his wife-to-be. “Pat never told me,” he recalled with astonishment in old age, “about what she had done, where she had been, what she had been through . . . she had never told me about some of her family problems, the tragedy of her mother who died . . . or her father who died when she was sixteen.”* In their two-and-a-half-year courtship, after all the walks on the beach together, all the drives in his car, all the spaghetti dinners, he had learned virtually nothing of the background of the woman he was marrying.

  He was, too, still fettered by the inhibitions his mother had instilled in him. Six years into their relationship, anticipating his return from the war, Nixon found it necessary to write: “Hundreds of times I have pictured our first meeting again. . . . I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good! Will you mind such a public demonstration?” Pat did not mind, and at the airport she rushed to hug him, a greeting she would offer again and again in the years that followed. Mostly, Nixon would avoid her embrace.

  Evlyn Dorn, his longtime secretary, saw her boss reach out to touch his wife only once—and then merely to steady her as they stood in the back of a car. “He had a way of ignoring her,” she said. “I never saw him touch Pat’s hand,” recalled Tom Dixon, a broadcaster who acted as an aide during elections in the late forties. “I have never seen quite so cold an arrangement.”

  Public affection was not forbidden to Quakers, who upon meeting often kissed on each cheek, French-style. Yet in 1952, when Pat reached up to kiss her husband as he accepted the nomination for the vice presidency, Nixon turned away. His public rejections clearly hurt her.

  “Both were shy,” their daughter Julie wrote, by way of explaining her parents’ apparent coldness. “Both would find it difficult to break through their reserve and discuss their deepest feelings.” She attributed it to memories of their hot-tempered fathers and marital strife in their childhoods. The Nixons avoided scenes, she said, “at the cost at times of candor.” As a loyal daughter Julie did not discuss the long-term cost.

  There were occasional scenes, when Pat had finally been pushed too far, and outsiders glimpsed the extent of her unhappiness. Once, during the vice presidency, a priest was greeted at the door by a Pat Nixon who was clearly furious, temporarily estranged from her husband; another story from the same period claimed that Nixon came home one evening to find his clothes scattered across the lawn, where Pat had thrown them. Once, when a reporter suggested during an interview that she had a good life, Pat raised her eyebrows and simply replied: “I just don’t tell all.”

  As this unfolding story will show, there are reports that Richard Nixon on occasion even abused his wife physically.

  It was the political life she had to live, whether she liked it or not, that Pat resented most. “She didn’t want politics, ever,” said Earl Mazo, a family friend as well as a Nixon biographer. “Her friends were never political friends. She hated the idea of ever facing another campaign. Every time Nixon entered one, she was in despair.” In 1960, at the start of the race against John F. Kennedy, she said: “I’ve given up everythin
g I ever loved. The people who lose out are the children,” she continued on the verge of tears. “Any of the glamour or reward in it comes to the grown-ups. It’s the children who really suffer.”

  Usually, though, Pat carefully hid such feelings. “She is,” social secretary Lucy Winchester said after the collapse of the presidency, “the proverbial Iron Butterfly.” “Pat is a far stronger man than Dick,” thought Dr. Paul Smith, Nixon’s former teacher at Whittier College. “She’s much the stronger of the two, a real Hercules. I don’t know of anyone who has so disciplined herself to endure a life she does not like.”

  In an attempt at humor Nixon once told female members of the White House press corps that were she always to accompany him on trips, Pat would just be “excess baggage.” Some women journalists had been thinking along just those lines, and for quite a long time. “They never seemed to talk to each other on the plane, nor do I think they sat together,” said Gloria Steinem, who followed the Nixon campaign in 1968. “There was never, ever, ever, ever, any sign of affection whatsoever,” recalled Kandy Stroud, who specialized in covering Pat for Women’s Wear Daily. “I rode in the limousine with them, the first time I was alone with them together. He did all the talking, she did none. She just sat there . . . like a staff member . . . the entire ride and he didn’t refer to her, or defer to her.”

  John Ehrlichman, who worked for Nixon through four campaigns as well as in the White House, thought the couple seemed remote from each other even in private. “They had essentially separate lives,” he said. “He resented her interference, and they had conflicts. She might criticize the schedule as unworkable, and she was often right. But when Pat made a suggestion, Nixon would brush it off. . . .”

  “You get a little insight when you work, as I did, on their estate plan,” said White House counsel John Dean. “He excluded Pat from knowledge of what he was going to do. He didn’t want her involved in those decisions, and I was instructed not to speak with her about it at all. When the papers were completed, she was summoned to the Oval Office like an aide virtually, and told to sign on the dotted line. . . . He didn’t seem to trust her.”

  “He was so cold it could be funny,” said Kissinger aide William Watts. “When the shah of Iran was in Washington, I watched Nixon going around the room shaking hands with a group of women. And as he came to each one, he would say, ‘Hello, I’m Richard Nixon.’ And he came to another one, and I heard him say again, ‘I’m Richard Nixon’—and it was his own wife. She just replied, ‘Yes, dear, I know. I’m Pat. . . .’ ”

  Hugh Sidey, who covered the presidency for Time for more than twenty years, reached a harsh conclusion. “She kind of followed along with him, and he used her in campaigns,” he said, “but once he got in the White House that was the end of it. . . . Between Nixon and his wife I don’t think there was any kind of human bond. There had to be something, but I don’t understand it.”

  They did have one element in common, albeit a negative one. Nixon of course forever complained about the rich eastern elite, and his wife shared that attitude. “The moneyed class,” Pat had written to a relative while working in the Los Angeles department store at the age of twenty-three, “come in and ask us to do their shopping. . . . They sit in luxurious chairs while we go all over the store and gather things for them. . . . I drape the lovely velvet robes etc., around me, grin at the fat, rich customers and pff! they buy. . . .”

  “Richard and Pat Nixon were bonded as two outsiders,” said Gloria Steinem, reflecting on the interview during which—in a rare achievement—she found chinks in the iron butterfly’s armor. “They were together in their resentment of glamorous people who’d had it easy. . . . She just let go about this to me, like a long accusation, saying, ‘I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven’t just sat back and thought of myself or what I wanted to do. . . . I’m not like all you . . . all those people who had it easy.’

  “I could see,” Steinem said, “that Pat thought of me as an adversary, someone who’d led a very privileged life. I tried to explain that it wasn’t so: My father made an insecure living, and after my parents divorced, my mother and I lived in a factory neighborhood in a house that had been condemned by the health department. . . . But Pat Nixon just didn’t want to listen.”

  When she talked with Steinem about her husband, Pat did not just trot out the usual campaign platitudes. “I got the distinct feeling,” Steinem recalled, that she didn’t respect him very much. . . .”

  To suffer for so long, constantly hiding her feelings, took a massive toll on Pat Nixon. Robert Pierpoint, a CBS White House correspondent through six presidencies, had known her back in Whittier when she was a high school teacher and he a student. Then, he remembered, she had been vivacious, enthusiastic, even sexy. When he met Pat little more than a decade later, on one of Nixon’s vice presidential trips, he was shocked. “I could scarcely believe she was the same woman,” he said. “I was immediately struck by her tension, nervousness, and drawn appearance . . . she seemed so totally remote.”

  A few years later a British reporter interviewed her at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in London. “Mrs. Pat Nixon, face to face, is like a Republican Coppélia. She chatters, answers questions, smiles and smiles, all with a doll’s terrifying poise. There is too little comprehension. Like a doll, she would be smiling when the world broke. Only her eyes, dark and strained, signal that inside the black suit and pearls there is a human being. . . . One grey hair, one hint of fear, one golden teacup overturned on the Persian carpet, and one could have loved her.”

  Pat Nixon claimed she used neither cigarettes nor alcohol. In fact, she smoked almost all her adult life and was to die of lung cancer. By the time her husband was president, she was chain-smoking the moment she stepped out of the public eye. “She smoked incessantly aboard Air Force One,” said chief pilot Ralph Albertazzie. “That was one of the little secrets she shared with the crew. Sometimes, after a flight, the stewards counted the butts. . . .”

  Drink was a sensitive subject too. “I once saw a tray of sherry aperitifs being passed around,” said veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas. “She reached out for a glass, saw the newspaperwomen looking at her, and pulled her hand back.” According to a former Secret Service agent who spoke out in 1993, “Pat Nixon had a problem. . . . I think at one point she was almost an alcoholic. She had to have counseling, arranged through her friends. . . . It was during the second term.”1

  Late in the second term, according to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Pat was “more and more reclusive, and drinking heavily.” They told of staff members finding her in the White House kitchen in the early afternoon, trying in vain to hide a tumbler of bourbon on the rocks. Her daughter Julie and former aides hastened to deny the story.

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  As for Nixon, marriage did not resolve his problems with the opposite sex. “When I worked for him, he was still shy and afraid of women,” said Alexander Haig, his last White House chief of staff. “He wouldn’t sit alone in a room with Imelda Marcos, I remember, or with Indira Gandhi—or even Golda Meir!”

  Two years later, as president, Nixon ordered the acclaimed Philip Roth novel Portnoy’s Complaint, with its masturbation theme, removed from the White House library. The reporters’ perception of Nixon’s sexuality was summed up in a spoof question a Newsweek man put to the White House press secretary. “What,” Karl Fleming asked, “does Nixon do on the occasion of his semiannual erection? The consensus is that he smuggles it to Tijuana. . . .” The press secretary did not smile.

  As if to compensate, CBS’s Dan Rather noted, Nixon was prone to locker room talk and obscenities, usually at inappropriate moments. In the fifties he was asked to meet and thank the flight attendants on his campaign aircraft. “Mr. Vice President,” said columnist Art Buchwald, “these are our stewardesses. They’ve been so nice to us. I’d like to introduce them.” Nixon replied: “Stewardesses? I thought they were B-girls.” He
moved on, oblivious of the fact that the women were looking nonplussed. (“B-girl,” in those days was the term used to describe slinkily dressed bar hostesses, many of whom were, by common knowledge, whores.)

  Campaign aide John Sears recalled a nocturnal episode before the 1968 election and a welcome flash of more subtle humor. “He often didn’t sleep well and would venture out into the hallway in his blue bathrobe to pace back and forth. It was quite late when he encountered a member of his staff going back to his room with a young lady. Without breaking stride, Nixon said, “Mike, we don’t have to get those votes one at a time, you know.”

  As president Nixon told a gathering of male staffers that he would help them conceal extramarital affairs. “If you ever have to say you are working late, I’ll cover for you.”

  In 1972, during a working session on Air Force One, Nixon gave Haldeman an odd instruction. Henry Kissinger was working too hard, he said. Haldeman was to call a friend and “have him give Henry all of his phone numbers of girls that are not over thirty.” The following year, as Kissinger began a briefing for congressional leaders on the Yom Kippur War, Nixon interrupted. “Ah . . . we had trouble finding Henry,” he said. “He was in bed with a broad.” As the secretary of state tried to continue, the president giggled and rolled his head around. “Henry,” he insisted, “which girl were you with? It’s terrible when you have a girl and the Secret Service has to break in on you.”

  As he left a Miami restaurant with Kissinger one night, tipsy on martinis, Nixon accosted an attractive woman, a total stranger. “She looks like she’s built for you, Henry,” he said with a leer, then told the woman she could have a job at the White House.

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