First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (15 page)

The Nixons would soon learn to find their escape at Camp David, the rural presidential retreat in Maryland sixty-two miles north of Washington, where they took long walks and enjoyed a sense of privacy. The barbed-wire and high-voltage electric fences made it so secure that Secret Service agents did not have to trail them quite so closely, which was a relief. Pat often declined trips to their Winter White House compound in Key Biscayne, Florida, because Secret Service officers would get into the water whenever they did and the Nixons felt that their voices had to be kept low so that no agents could listen in on their conversations. Pat would sometimes ask agents to carry scuba gear when they walked along the beach with the family so that they would not look so obvious.

Of course the White House is a magical place that offers surreal experiences almost daily for the families who live there. Tricia remembers watching as Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. “I remember being in the West Sitting Hall with my mother and sister and if you know what that’s like you can look out of the window and see the Oval Office, so we actually watched the TV but we also watched the Oval Office so we could see my father speaking to the astronauts on the moon both in the Oval Office and on TV.”

Both Tricia and Julie were married and spending the holiday at their homes with their husbands during the Christmas of 1972, when President Nixon started the biggest bombing campaign against North Vietnam, dropping more than 20,000 tons of explosives. This decision weighed heavily on the President, and because it was the first Christmas without either of their daughters it was a painful time for him and for the First Lady. Secret Service agents surrounded their Key Biscayne home as security threats grew. When Pat suggested they open presents on Christmas
morning to lighten the mood, the President grumbled gloomily, “Later.” The presents were sent back to Washington untouched.

The Watergate investigation dragged on for more than two years, and by the winter and spring of 1974, it was totally eclipsing the presidency. The Nixons sought refuge with their daughters. At least twice a week the President and the First Lady visited Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, at their white-brick house on Armat Drive in Bethesda, Maryland, about a half hour outside Washington. The Nixons brought dinner prepared by the White House chefs and the family settled into a familiar routine of pre-dinner drinks on the suburban house’s glassed-in porch. Before dinner, the President would light the fire and Pat would try to cheer him up by pointing out what flowers were in bloom, doing anything she could to avoid the suffocating tension in the room. At the height of the Watergate investigation, the President talked wistfully about the early days when he and Pat first started dating. For the President’s son-in-law David the routine was especially painful because as a student at George Washington University Law School he overheard his professors and other students who knew people on the Senate Watergate Committee talking about the incriminating evidence against his father-in-law. He was often silent during these dinners, not knowing what to say.

Pat was a devoted mother and wife, and the West Wing staff cut off her newspapers in a patronizing effort to shield her from the painful headlines. It was heart-wrenching for her to see her daughters face angry protesters who blamed their father for mishandling the war in Vietnam and for bombing Cambodia, and how Julie, in particular, stood up for her father during the two years of bitter debate surrounding the Watergate break-in. The Nixon daughters occasionally confided in the residence staffers, the butlers, maids, and doormen who they felt were the only
people who did not judge them. “You see beyond politics, you see beyond the story, you see the true person,” Tricia said. In the elevator with Doorman Preston Bruce, Julie would ask him, with tears in her eyes, “How can they say such awful things about my father?” “Never mind,” he told her. “Ignore all that. You know politics. It’ll all come out right in the end.” As the scandal raged on Julie confronted her father for being despondent and not realizing how much her mother was trying to do to help him. “It’s hard for her, too,” she told him. In a biography she wrote about her mother, Julie admitted feeling a pang of guilt as she remembered how she vented her frustrations to Pat about criticism of her father. “She had so many concerns and adjustments of her own, and to see her daughter under stress was surely the greatest strain of all.”

Because her sister, Tricia, was private and her mother too beleaguered, it was Julie who came to her father’s defense so often in the press, and it was Julie whom her parents leaned on most heavily. At times her mother seemed to want to reverse their roles. Julie had long helped her mother escape the confines of the White House by taking long walks with her on Roosevelt Island, a small, densely wooded island in the Potomac River about a ten-minute drive from the White House. After dinner they sometimes took walks together in downtown Washington near the executive mansion, in a neighborhood that was largely deserted at night at that time because people thought it was too dangerous. Pat wore a scarf to cover her blond hair during their long walks.

Julie’s valiant attempts to help calm her mother did not end after her parents left Washington. A few weeks before her father was set to testify before a special grand jury on Watergate in June 1975, Julie called her mother. “Why don’t you come out here [to visit us in California]?” Pat asked her. Julie told her that David was studying for his second-year law school exams and she needed to
stay in Washington to be with him. “You have only one person to take care of there but two broken people here,” Pat said.

Pat was devastated by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book
The Final Days
, which described the Nixons’ marriage as loveless and alleged that she was a heavy drinker. She tried to get a copy of it but her husband was adamant that she not read it. Finally, she borrowed a copy from one of his secretaries and that same day she suffered a stroke. The President blamed the book for her stroke but, in truth, the decades of being a political spouse and the humiliation of watching her husband resign were stressful enough. David Eisenhower said in a 1973 interview, “She [Pat] is a shoulder to everyone—but whose shoulder does she lean on?” In the White House, Pat hardly ever canceled events, but she became more and more anxious as Watergate dragged on. Before Nixon’s resignation, Pat’s anxiety increased. In the elevator on her way to meet visitors she asked Doorman Preston Bruce, “Bruce, do you think these people will be friendly?” He tried to put her at ease: “They seem
very
friendly, Mrs. Nixon.”

In the spring of 1970, at the height of the antiwar protests, when the President sent American troops into Cambodia and four students at Ohio’s Kent State University were killed by members of the Ohio National Guard, the President agonized over whether to go to Julie’s graduation from Smith College. She did not want him to go and was willing to miss it herself if it meant the ceremony would be turned into a giant protest against her father. The White House knew that antiwar activists Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, and others were organizing anti-Nixon demonstrations around the event. Julie wrote a note to Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman at the end of April, asking her father not to come. “I truly think the day will be a disaster if he comes,” she wrote. “The temper up here is ugly.” She mentioned a rally with thousands of
people chanting “Fuck Julie and David Eisenhower.” The head of Julie’s Secret Service detail warned her against attending her own graduation and David against attending his. Antiwar organizers said they could bring upwards of two hundred thousand people to campus if President Nixon showed up. The President decided not to attend. On June 6, the Nixons had a private family party at Camp David and President Nixon was in an unusually upbeat mood, toasting his daughter, but Pat was quiet. She knew the small dinner could not make up for Julie having to miss her college graduation because of the public life her husband had chosen, a life that she grudgingly accepted.

It wasn’t only the Vietnam War that weighed heavily on her husband. During Watergate, Pat watched helplessly as he became more and more despondent. Nixon could be found late at night wandering the halls of the White House and talking to portraits of the presidents before him. His family was concerned that he might commit suicide. “You fellows, in your business,” the President said to his chief of staff, the four-star General Alexander Haig, “you have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer.” After one speech in which he defended his handling of Watergate, Pat, Tricia, David, and the President’s private secretary Rose Mary Woods answered phones while he retreated to the Lincoln Sitting Room, his favorite hiding place in the mansion. There he sat by the fire and cranked up the air-conditioning. “I hope I don’t wake up in the morning,” he mumbled.

But Julie refused to give in. At the top of her calendar for October 26, 1973, she wrote: “Fight, fight, fight.” On May 11, 1974, she stood in her father’s place during a press conference, desperate to defend him. “He is stronger now than he ever has been in his determination to see this through.” A reporter said that he was
not sure what she was doing there in place of her father, “since in our system we do not hold the sins of the fathers against the following generations.” Julie replied, “I have seen what my father has gone through, and I am so proud of him that I would never be afraid to come out here. . . . I am not trying to answer questions for him. I am just trying to pray for enough courage to meet his courage.” Julie’s husband, David, worried that she was getting too involved. As hard as it was to watch, Pat wanted her daughter to support the family. Pat confronted David: “Why aren’t you giving Julie support?”

Before President Nixon resigned in August 1974, he went to Camp David and asked his family not to come with him. But the next morning, when he walked into the living room of Aspen Lodge, the President’s cabin on the sprawling retreat, he was surprised to see Tricia sitting there. She and David and Julie had been up almost all night and had decided that one of them had to go and offer the President support. Tricia had arrived at Camp David with a Secret Service escort early that foggy morning to tell him how much she and the family loved him, and to encourage him to answer the public cry that his advisers, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, had to go. (Even the residence staff disliked the duo, Butler Herman Thompson said: “There was something about Haldeman and Ehrlichman that you could look at them and you knew that they would never have respect for a person like you.”) The President asked Tricia to stay all day and keep him company, but she knew she had to leave him alone to make the decision.

Pat’s daughters were entirely consumed by Watergate. Just days before their father announced his resignation Julie wrote him a note: “Dear Daddy, I love you. Whatever you do I will support. I am very proud of you. Please wait a week or even ten days before
you make this decision. Go through the fire just a little bit longer. You are so strong!”

T
HE
W
HITE
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OUSE
is a wonderland for children: Sasha and Malia Obama invite friends over and have sleepovers on air mattresses in the third-floor Solarium; Chelsea Clinton sunbathed on the window ledge of her bedroom until members of the press told the chief usher and he demanded that she come down; the Johnson daughters used the Solarium as a teenage hideaway complete with a soda fountain; all the children eventually discover the secret stairway that connects the second and third floors. The Ford children wore jeans and put their feet up on furniture until their mother admonished them, “Don’t put your feet up there! That’s Jefferson’s table.” Betty insisted on manners once they got to the White House. She wanted her family to step up to the level of the White House, not to bring the White House standards down. She spoke as honestly about the trials of motherhood as Lady Bird had. “God bless nursery schools,” she wrote in her memoir. “I must say it was a joy to have half a day without two little boys running around pulling out all the pots and pans.” Because of her husband’s travel as a congressman, Betty had been left to raise their four children—including three rowdy boys—alone, sometimes for more than half the year. Ford’s long absences were inexcusable, said Bonnie Angelo, a reporter who covered the Fords for
Time
magazine. “She was really boxed in and she was not a spirit that was intended to be boxed in,” Angelo said of Betty. In the last year that Ford was House minority leader, he attended some two hundred political events and was away from home 258 days. “I couldn’t say, ‘Wait till your father comes home,’” Betty recalled. “Their father wasn’t going to come home for maybe a week.” It
was Betty who took the kids to the dentist, to doctor’s visits, to football practice. Ford aide Robert Hartmann eventually caved to pressure from Betty to curtail her husband’s schedule when he became vice president. “We have to look at this differently now,” Hartmann told the schedulers. The sheer exhaustion of the daily routine weighed heavily on Betty, and later she would say in an interview with
Good Housekeeping
that she hoped men would begin to share the workload in greater numbers with their wives. Like many political wives of the era, she was “more often political widow than political wife,” said journalist Cokie Roberts. And like many stay-at-home mothers, Betty went through periods of loneliness and bitterness.