The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  The psychotherapist also made a number of trips to see Nixon in his Washington office. During one lunch he astonished the senator by declaring that he considered both Joe McCarthy and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles mentally disturbed. “Dr. Hutschnecker . . .” Nixon wrote in a 1959 note to Rose Woods, “I want to have him come down . . . check with me as to whether I want it before we go on vacation.” The following year, during the campaign against John F. Kennedy, there was another summons.

  In early 1961, within weeks of the Republican handover of the White House, Nixon was back at the doctor’s office. The following year he consulted Hutschnecker before his disastrous bid for the governorship of California, having ignored the doctor’s advice not to run. A journalist who happened to live next door to the building that housed Hutschnecker’s Park Avenue offices, Harriet Van Horne, recalled seeing Nixon’s “grim visage” passing beneath the canopy. “I once asked a building employee,” Horne recalled, “ ‘Does Mr. Nixon visit friends at 829?’ ‘Naw,’ came the reply. ‘He comes to see the shrink.’ ”

  During the presidency, however, Nixon’s aides saw to it that the link to Hutschnecker was virtually severed, though he would make two visits to the White House, the first to discuss violent crime and the second after the U.S. incursion into Cambodia in 1970. The doctor had long hoped that Nixon would swiftly get the United States out of Vietnam, and a friend quoted him as saying, “Pavlovian technique had been helping him brainwash Nixon into becoming a better person.” He believed he could “remake the man into a dove” on Southeast Asia. But the second trip was to misfire. As reported in context later, Nixon would end the meeting in frustration after a few minutes. There were a number of other meetings outside the White House, though, but only when Nixon felt he could avoid detection—not only by the press but, the doctor implied, by his own aides.

  Later, after the resignation, the doctor would visit Nixon at San Clemente. By then he seemed, Hutschnecker thought, “like a confessant.” They met for the last time in 1993, when Nixon asked the doctor to accompany him to Pat’s funeral. He was seated, at Nixon’s request, in the area allotted to the family. The doctor did not attend the former president’s own funeral the following year because, as he put it, there was no one left for him to help.

  A few cautious comments aside, Dr. Hutschnecker did not speak publicly about his patient over the years. He avoided putting Nixon’s name on prescriptions, kept his name out of the appointment book, and apparently did not ask for payment. Although he is said to have been less guarded in private—snippets of his dinner party asides leaked out on occasion—the doctor was careful to shield Nixon as medical ethics required.

  In 1995, however, he gave the first of three lengthy interviews for this book. Toward the end of the former president’s life, Hutschnecker said, he had written authorizing him to write about their relationship, assuming Hutschnecker would survive him. It must have seemed a reasonable gamble that he would not, for the doctor was nearly ninety at the time. Yet Nixon did die first, and Hutschnecker wrote the draft of a manuscript about his experiences with his patient, though he kept it at home unpublished. He had felt constrained, he said, to “leave out a lot.”

  Astonishingly sprightly at ninety-seven and living testimony to his own advice on how to achieve longevity, Dr. Hutschnecker received his interviewer at his home in sylvan northern Connecticut. He answered questions in a study cluttered with the bric-a-brac of a long professional life, including a photograph of Richard Nixon—inscribed in 1977 “in appreciation of friendship”—and a Nixon gift of ivory elephants. Later, on the veranda, over tea laced with Irish whiskey, he talked on in his heavily German-accented English about the politician to whom he had had such exclusive access.

  Restricting himself to what he felt ethically acceptable, Dr. Hutschnecker said little of Nixon’s first visit, in 1951. His patient’s initial complaint, he said, had been of feeling “a little nervous, irritable, and not sleeping so good. I gave him a mild sedative and told him to come back in two weeks.”

  Nixon, however, did not travel from Washington to New York merely to obtain a prescription for insomnia. In a brief response to a question posed by Newsweek, Hutschnecker once let slip that “Nixon wondered if there was an emotional cause” for what was bothering him physically. Nixon, for his part, said years later that he always believed there was a direct relation between physical and mental health.

  One aspect of Nixon’s problem, the doctor revealed years later, was depression. Pat Nixon spoke of her husband’s having been “more depressed than she ever remembered” early in the election year of 1956. The eminent New York Times journalist Harrison Salisbury recalled a meeting in early 1960, the year of the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, with a businessman who had served with Nixon in the war, who, like other acquaintances in the service, knew him as Nick. “Say,” the businessman asked Salisbury, “is Nick still seeing that shrink of his in New York?” He then explained to a surprised Salisbury that Nixon “had severe ups and downs, and it was not easy to pull him up when he fell into depression”—as he had, the businessmen said, at the time of the conversation with Salisbury.2 Len Garment, a Nixon colleague from the mid-sixties—himself no stranger to the malady—said Nixon suffered from “powerful depression.”

  Hutschnecker told the author that his patient had at first been reluctant to talk about himself but gradually became more open. As the doctor put it, he prided himself on being able to “lure patients into therapy.” He eventually built up enough trust that—some four years into their relationship—Nixon “said he could really tell me everything. It was safe.” The doctor never did get Nixon to accept a full course of psychotherapy, but they seem to have found some sort of mutually acceptable middle ground.

  As early as the end of the second session, Hutschnecker said, he was certain his patient’s sharp intellect and outward self-confidence masked “deep-seated inhibitions.” He thought “Nixon was an enigma, not just to me but to himself. And I . . . had to try to understand what motivated his superdrive, and—paradoxically—his inhibitions.”

  As other information suggests, Hutschnecker believed that Frank Nixon had been a “brutal and cruel” man who had beaten his sons and “brutalized” his wife. While the doctor viewed this as an enormously important factor in Nixon’s makeup, the heart of the problem, he believed, was Hannah herself. “Clinically,” Hutschnecker said, “it started with the mother. Nixon’s mother was so religious he was trapped in many ways. I wouldn’t say that he was really religious but he was totally devoted to his mother—like a robot if you want. Even to the last, you know, he was kneeling down to pray every day. He was completely smothered. His mother was really his downfall.”

  While Nixon’s father died in 1956, Hannah lived on until 1967, passing away just a year before her son was elected president. In 1960, during his losing fight against Kennedy, she had still been very active. Hutschnecker thought Nixon’s performance in the televised debates then—as well as earlier, in his self-revealing 1952 TV speech answering charges about illicit funds—was affected by the notion that his mother could see him. “I was convinced,” he said, “of the connection between being in front of the camera and being in front of his mother. . . . Multiply the singular face of a critical mother watching the flaws, to the flaws seen by millions, then one can better comprehend the telegenic awkwardness of Nixon. . . . I believe that the image of the saintly but stern face of his mother defeated him more than any other factor. . . . He wanted his mother to believe him perfect. That was his problem.”

  Looking back, Hutschnecker suspected Nixon had “guilt feelings” for having pursued politics in the vindictive style of his father rather than on the “saintly” path of his mother. Nixon’s fervent wish, the doctor felt, was that someday he would be able to say to Hannah, “Mother, I have made peace. Now I am worthy of you.”

  In the course of discussing Nixon’s relationship with his mother, the author raised the possibility that he had suffered at some po
int from sexual impotence. According to James Bassett, who from 1952 became unusually close to Nixon as a press aide—and drinking companion—this was the case.

  Hutschnecker denied having treated Nixon for impotence. He said, however, that his patient would “become fourteen years old, red-faced, and stammer” when matters of sex were raised. The doctor did speak a little about Pat Nixon. He had learned from her directly “how much she detested politics. She wanted a simple life . . . wanted to be a housewife. But he couldn’t. He liked to be in the thick of things.” On the one hand, Hutschnecker regarded Pat as “a wonderful lady . . . loyal . . .” who gave her husband limitless support and encouragement. On the other, he said Nixon viewed her as “his sun”—to a degree that was not entirely healthy. “He was devoted,” said the doctor, “but that was like the relationship with his mother . . . one-sided. He became very dependent on her.”

  Pressed again on the alleged impotence problem, Hutschnecker hesitated. “Every boy,” he said, falling back on a psychiatric staple, “has the imprint of his mother as an ideal. And unless he drowns out that ideal woman, he cannot do sex.” Asked if he was applying that principle to Nixon’s relationship with Pat, Hutschnecker responded, “I cannot say it,” but he then added, “If someone was like a mother and was a saint, you don’t have sex. That far I can go.” He would say no more on the subject.

  In The Will to Live, the book that first encouraged Nixon to consult him, Dr. Hustchnecker suggested that the late twentieth century should be named the Age of Ambivalence. In psychiatry, he wrote, “ambivalence” is a term meaning “the simultaneous existence within us of opposite emotions towards the same object or person.” For Hutschnecker, it explained the darkest, most destructive side of man. Were modern man to understand this, he maintained, he would no longer have an excuse for “emotional immaturity.”

  The ambivalence concept, said the doctor, dealt at one blow with the constant references to the notion that there was an “old Nixon,” and “a new Nixon.” For Hutschnecker, it explained “the contrasting behavior of an almost puritan Nixon with the Nixon of uninhibited language and angry outbursts. It is a direct reflection of the opposing parental personalities. . . . We all judge what we see, but what could not be seen was the Quaker boy who had a ‘saintly’ mother and an angry father, filled with the unknown hungers and conflicts of his inner self that would become his remarkable ‘sense of mission.’ ”

  Somewhat less charitable is the view Hutschnecker shared with dinner companions one loquacious night in 1965, according to the lobbyist Robert Winter-Berger, who was present. “Nixon is happiest,” the doctor said then, “either when he has no responsibility or when he has it all. When he has no responsibility, he can’t be criticized for anything and he can relax and be a little boy. When he has all the responsibility, he feels he has the right to exercise it as he alone sees fit, and he can’t bear to be criticized for anything at all. That’s when he says or does shortsighted things, and I get a call.”3

  So it was that, although Nixon shied away from therapy, he continued to use the doctor as a kind of medical life preserver, to be consulted at times of crisis.

  _____

  Hutschnecker’s 1955 decision to narrow his practice to psychotherapy alone alarmed Nixon. He was well aware that should the press start probing, the fragile pretense that he was consulting the doctor purely for physical complaints was unlikely to hold up. “It is safer for a politician to go to a whorehouse than to see a psychiatrist,” Hutschnecker himself once said mournfully. To protect himself, Nixon went out of his way to decry psychiatry in public and in private. “People go through that psychological bit nowadays,” he told a writer in 1966. “They think they should always be reevaluating themselves. . . . That sort of juvenile self-analysis is something I’ve never done.”

  Roger Ailes, a television producer hired to make seemingly spontaneous Nixon interview programs for the 1968 campaign, remembered calling a Nixon aide to tell him the makeup of the panel for one of the shows. All was going well, Ailes reported—they had a black man, a newsman, and other professional people—until Ailes said he had booked “a Jewish doctor from Philadelphia, a psychiatrist.” The aide, Len Garment, immediately rejected the idea. “Jesus Christ!” Ailes told a companion when he hung up. “You’re not going to believe this, but Nixon hates psychiatrists. He’s got this thing apparently. They make him very nervous. You should have heard Len on the phone! . . . Did you hear him? If I’ve ever heard a guy’s voice turn white, that was it. He said he didn’t want to go into it. But apparently Nixon won’t even let one in the same room.” Ailes dropped the psychiatrist and went out to look for a cabdriver to appear on the show in his place.

  Three years earlier, in a late-night conversation with Garment, Nixon had said that he “would do anything to stay in public life—‘except see a shrink.’ ” To Garment this “was a sure sign, in Nixon-speak, that despite himself, he had indeed seen a shrink.” Garment learned only later about Dr. Hutschnecker.

  Nixon remained concerned about the “shrink” taint even after the resignation. According to the doctor, Nixon was concerned to conceal the nature of their meeting at San Clemente. “Just say,” Nixon advised him conspiratorially, “that you came to visit an old friend.”

  Exposure of their relationship, Nixon impressed on Hutschnecker, would lead to people’s believing he “must be cuckoo” or “nuts.” The irony of course is that even without knowledge of the relationship, precisely this thought did cross the minds of a good number of people. The comments that follow, many of them by men who could hardly be considered Nixon’s enemies, constitute a stunning chorus of misgiving, surely not comparable with assessments of the mental state of any other president in American history.

  George Christopher, a former mayor of San Francisco and senior Californian Republican, recalled that “Nixon would be depressed long before the 1962 election—kind of moody and withdrawn. There was nothing to hate about the guy at such times. He was just in a terrible state of mind, in which I think another man might have done away with himself.”

  Kenneth O’Donnell, John Kennedy’s close confidant, was more blunt. “JFK,” he said, “never trusted his mental stability.” A key supporter, San Diego Union publisher James Copley, was troubled when he saw Nixon debating Kennedy on television. “Dick’s expression was very studious,” he wrote to a colleague, “but to the point where it looked almost like he was mad or disturbed.”

  Journalists also perceived the instability. Eric Sevareid, writing in 1960, referred to Nixon’s “black spells of depression. These moods may last for an hour, or even days, when he feels ‘circumstances’ are against him.” “At times,” wrote Walter Cronkite, “he actually seemed unbalanced. I was a guest at a state dinner on one occasion when I noticed his eyes fix on the molding at the edge of the ceiling. Then they began following the molding across that side of the room, then across the adjoining side, even to the side behind him, and back along the next wall to the starting place. One would assume that he was following an intrusive beastie in its circumnavigation of the room, but I could see nothing there. . . .”

  Robert Greene, senior editor of Newsday, spoke of “Hamlet-type moments,” adding, “There was some kind of quality, or lack of quality, in Nixon in terms of his mental stability, that would have him go off into these off-drift things where nobody existed around him. . . .” Newsweek’s John Lindsay regarded Nixon as a “walking box of short circuits.”

  During the Watergate crisis the concern reached a crescendo. “He was acting so strangely,” thought John Herbers of the New York Times, “acting obviously so deeply troubled and so weird in his actions, that it just brought on speculation.” Henry Hubbard, of Newsweek, said that at one point most of the White House press corps believed the president had gone “off his rocker.” As reported in detail later, Tip O’Neill—the House majority leader—and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox privately had the same concern.

  One of the men who lived closer to Nixo
n than anyone except his immediate family, a White House Secret Service agent, found him “very depressed.” Deep Throat, the anonymous source quoted by the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein, reportedly told Woodward Nixon had been “having fits of dangerous depression.”

  “What the men in the White House were involved in was the management of an unstable personality,” concluded Theodore White. “Here was the leader of the free world in an almost shattered condition,” Attorney General Richard Kleindienst recalled of the meeting at which his resignation was decided. “His sobs and distraught manner were, to me, profound and genuine. . . . Richard Nixon was President of my country and he was imperiled. If he was imperiled, my country was endangered.”

  Kleindienst’s successor, Elliot Richardson, was said by Vice President Spiro Agnew to have believed Nixon was “losing control, emotionally and mentally.” William Saxbe, who followed Richardson as attorney general, thought Nixon’s actions were not those of a “reasonable man.”

  Alexander Butterfield, cabinet secretary and senior factotum, was struck early by Nixon’s obsession with detail that seemed utterly out of proportion. It did not seem reasonable that on a trip to Yugoslavia Nixon took time to dictate a letter about “the lousy restroom facilities we had around the Mall.” Butterfield characterized it as “abnormal” behavior, in “the strangest man I’d ever met . . . a strange, strange fellow.”

  Even Haldeman, the keeper of the gate, later agreed that Nixon was “the strangest man he ever met.” As for John Ehrlichman, he told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973, “From close observation, I can testify that the President is not paranoid, weird, psychotic on the subject of demonstrators, or hypersensitive to criticism.” Three years later, asked if he would still make the same assessment, he replied curtly, “No, I would not,” adding, “There was another side,” he said of the man he served loyally for so long, “Like the flat, dark side of the moon.”