First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (21 page)

N
O MODERN FIRST LADY
had a more fraught relationship with her husband’s advisers than Pat Nixon. It was so bad that when Betty Ford became first lady she said, “They’re not going to lead me around like they did Pat.” H. R. “Bob” Haldeman was Nixon’s chief of staff and tried to have complete control over every part of the White House, including the First Lady’s office and the residence staff. Haldeman and the President’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman, took it upon themselves to reorganize the office of the First Lady and combined the posts of staff director and press secretary. The President himself even insisted on overseeing the delicate seating arrangements at state dinners, usually in the purview of the First Lady’s office, and he wanted to weigh in on the musical entertainment and what was being served.

When Pat’s director of correspondence, Gwen King, found Haldeman and Ehrlichman looking in cubbyholes and peering over people’s desks in her East Wing office, she was worried. Not long after that she got a memo telling her that she would be reporting to someone in the West Wing, instead of the East Wing. When she told the First Lady, Pat was furious. The very next morning King got a call from the First Lady, who said, “Business as usual.” She had won this battle—King would be reporting to Pat’s chief of staff—but she would lose many more.

To the First Lady’s face Haldeman was unfailingly courteous, but behind closed doors he referred to her derisively. Joni Stevens, who worked for special counsel and political strategist Harry Dent in the Nixon White House, remembered another staffer
gesturing to Haldeman and asking, “Do you know who that is?” “No, I don’t,” Stevens replied. “That’s God. Or at least he thinks he is.” Haldeman’s control was so complete that Stevens was once asked to report to the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House at 4:30 a.m. to type a top-secret report, based on results of a particular primary election, that was going to be sent to the President. A uniformed division Secret Service agent stood guard at the door while she typed, and absolutely no one other than Stevens and a handful of advisers was allowed in the room. She never found out why that seemingly innocent primary election was so important.

On January 8, 1970, Haldeman wrote in his diary, “P [President Nixon] called me back up with Bebe [Bebe Rebozo, Nixon’s best friend] about problem of personal household staff, lousy food of wrong kind, etc. Wants me to solve it.” Even though it was the First Lady’s job to approve the menus each week, the President was having his chief of staff, and not his wife, tell the White House chef what to do. When given the chance Pat knew exactly what to tell the chef: “No lamb. Dick doesn’t like lamb, he had too much lamb in the Pacific [during the war] and he does not want lamb.” But the President’s requests were even more specific: no French or California white, “only Moselle or Rhine, Johannesburg, only Bordeaux red or
very
good light French Burgundy,” Haldeman told the chef. White House Doorman Preston Bruce remembered when Haldeman announced that no one would be allowed to stand in the hall outside the State Dining Room during state dinners—not even the Secret Service. It had been a perk of the job for the butlers to listen to the toasts from the hallway. Haldeman’s office also sent out a memo reminding the residence staff not to ask for a photo or autograph of the President or his family. If they did, they would be fired immediately. “We
all felt this was a cheap little shot,” said Bruce. “We knew better than to approach the President with such requests.”

The Nixons’ social secretary, Lucy Winchester, said that she could always count on Haldeman to critique social events put on by the East Wing, and that once, when she fought back and told him that he did not know what he was talking about, he looked at her in “utter fury.” “You and Mrs. Nixon say ‘West Wing’ in the same voice you would say ‘left wing,’” he said, red in the face. “You don’t even think I know which knife to lick first.” Occasionally, he’d ask Winchester to fire residence staffers, but she always refused. At just five feet, one and a half inches she would straighten up and get very tall and tell him, “Listen here, you don’t know anything so let me tell you about this man and what you need to know and what you haven’t bothered to find out.” Haldeman threatened to fire her when she mentioned inviting the Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell, and Lady Bird’s press secretary, Liz Carpenter, to the Navy Mess, which is usually reserved for the White House staff. “We spent too much time and effort trying to get those people out of the White House!” Haldeman bellowed. (Winchester wanted to show them what redecorating they had done, even though she was growing concerned that the White House was becoming ridiculously threadbare. She carried a pair of small scissors in a little beaded evening bag that she had for state dinners and would run around and cut the “whiskers” off furniture where the fabric had worn through.) Pat Nixon felt the West Wing pressure. “My mother was frequently exasperated by the indifference she encountered in Haldeman and some of his aides,” Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote in her biography of her mother. “But she had spent so many years around power that she took with a grain of salt how it changed people.”

Pat was aware of Haldeman’s growing influence, and she
hated his constant videotaping of formal White House events. She wanted to maintain some sense of privacy and was frustrated at every turn. Pat was upset when she discovered that Haldeman had unilaterally approved Johnny Cash’s request to record a concert at the White House and call it
Johnny Cash at the White House
. She vetoed the idea, viewing it as disrespectful because it echoed his famous recording at Folsom Prison. Yet, by that point in 1970, the White House did feel like a prison to her. Haldeman helped redesign Air Force One so that the large staff section was directly behind the President’s office and before the First Lady’s sitting room. The family had liked to gather in the presidential lounge that had been next to the presidential suite. With the redesign, every time a family member wanted to go to the lounge, she or he would have to walk through the staff compartment, where Haldeman would inevitably be sitting keeping tabs on who was visiting the President and for how long. Pat let her displeasure be known after the first flight from Andrews Air Force Base to “La Casa Pacifica,” the Nixons’ beachfront mansion in San Clemente, California, where they went to escape the pressures of Washington. Eventually the plane was returned to its original design, with a suite of rooms for the President and his family at the front of the plane, at a cost of approximately $750,000.

The President’s advisers never understood Pat Nixon’s public power. She became the first wife of a president to lead a United Nations delegation overseas when she went to Liberian President William R. Tolbert Jr.’s inauguration in 1972; her trip was a huge media success, but no one in the President’s office congratulated her. Nixon’s aide Charles Colson wrote a memo to the President that said, “As you know we have tried for three years to project ‘color’ about you, to portray the human side of the President. . . . Mrs. Nixon has now broken through where we have failed.” But
somehow that message was never conveyed to her and she felt undervalued. She was able to put people at ease in a way her husband never could. Once, a group of women from the Appalachian Mountains came to visit the White House and presented the First Lady with a cherry-tree quilt they had made for her. Some of them were weeping openly because they were so nervous and intimidated by the imposing surroundings. Pat entered the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House, where they were gathered, and walked around the room, giving each guest a hug.

Chinese leaders wanted Pat to join her husband on his groundbreaking 1972 trip to China, the first visit ever by a sitting president to mainland China. But the men in the West Wing did not see the point. “He [Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai] wants Mrs. Nixon, he wants her on the trip,” National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger told the President. “If she goes, she goes solely as a prop,” Haldeman said, oblivious to the powerful image of an American First Lady visiting Chinese schools, factories, and hospitals and interacting with the Chinese people in a way the President could not. A hug between the First Lady and a Chinese child splashed across front pages could do as much to help diplomatic relations as high-level back-channel talks between diplomats. After it was settled that she would accompany her husband, Pat was told that she could take one person with her. “Mrs. Nixon said she wouldn’t go if she couldn’t take her hairdresser,” an aide recalled, laughing. Indeed, her hairstylist, Rita de Santis from the Elizabeth Arden Salon in Washington, was her traveling companion on the historic trip. They had fun together and even developed their own hand signals to communicate in their hotel suites, knowing the Chinese had them bugged. When later asked how the President could not see the political pluses
of taking his wife, Pat’s chief of staff and press secretary, Connie Stuart, replied, “You can’t be president of the United States unless you think you’re the most important person in the world. You are more important than your wife. Period. I’m not so sure that the President was even happy that she came along, it was one more encumbrance, it meant more Secret Service, it meant another car.” Pat, though, was happy Zhou Enlai pushed for her to go. She enjoyed being a part of history.

Zhou took a liking to the First Lady and at one banquet they discussed her visit to the Beijing Zoo, where she saw the giant pandas. When she reached for a container of Panda cigarettes, which had a drawing of two pandas on it, she turned to him and said, “Aren’t they cute?”

Zhou replied, “I’ll give you some.”

“Cigarettes?” she asked him, confused.

“No, pandas.” Two giant pandas were soon sent to the Washington National Zoo and became a sensation.

On the plane ride back from China, the First Lady told reporters, “People are the same the world over. I think they’re [the Chinese] good people. It all depends on the leadership.” Her image as “Plastic Pat” was partly a by-product of being cast aside by the President’s West Wing, led by a small cadre of men, including the President, who never understood her power.

Pat Nixon was the ultimate political wife, with decades of training, and that may have been her problem. Rosalynn Carter’s press secretary, Mary Hoyt, said she had heard that Pat Nixon’s press secretary called her “the principal.” “I always thought that was a little bit chilly.”
New York Times
reporter Tom Wicker noted her ability to sit through speeches she had heard dozens of times as her husband was running for Congress, the Senate, and the presidency “with an only slightly glazed expression of awe
and admiration.” Polly Dranov, who covered Pat Nixon for the Newhouse News Service, remembers how relaxed and chatty she could be with the female reporters who were covering her, and how that changed on a dime. “She had mic fright and camera fright. As soon as those lights went on, she froze.” Once, traveling with a chatty group of female reporters, Pat stopped talking as soon as one of them turned on a tape recorder. “She was very, very observant,” East Wing staffer Joni Stevens says, “and she always made you feel like you were the only person in the room.” That was the friendly Irish Pat Ryan sneaking through, with no West Wing staffers around to stop her. During a trip to Africa,
Time
reporter Bonnie Angelo says that she saw “Pat Nixon” return to the fun-loving woman she was and emerge as “Pat Ryan.” “Pat Nixon was left somewhere flying over the middle of the Atlantic,” she said. “I thought she was a special person and was being misused.”

Pat was pretty, slim, and graceful, and she often came across like a delicate china doll. Her social secretary, Lucy Winchester, remembered that, like all first ladies, she had a side to her that very few people ever saw. Winchester always tried to make her boss laugh and would bring tabloid newspapers into the White House and send them up in a folder to Mrs. Nixon. Pat would devour them and send them back with a note, “Burn before reading!” She instructed Winchester to get rid of any trace of them so that the press would not find out about her guilty pleasure. Once Pat told Winchester, “I shared them with Dick and he thought they were hilarious!” Another time Winchester, who loved to play practical jokes, used a blow-up doll to surprise members of the Daughters of the American Revolution who were touring the White House. She knocked on the First Lady’s door before the group arrived, knowing that she would be ready on time with
every hair in place. When Pat answered, she saw the twinkle in Winchester’s eye and the strange doll and said, “What have you done
this
time?!”

“Let’s put her in the Queens’ bathtub!” Winchester suggested. “We were sobbing with laughter, she was holding one end and I was holding the other, marching her down the hall and there was a startled policeman there at the end of the hall and we put her in the bathtub,” Winchester said, laughing at the memory of this carefully controlled woman who claimed that she liked to iron her husband’s clothes to relieve stress, and who always wore sensible shoes and kept her skirt length at least two inches below the knee, lugging this doll down the hallway of the White House. They were howling with laughter until suddenly Pat froze and said, “They’re going to think it’s me!” And that made them laugh even harder.

Pat and her social secretary could tease each other in a way that only close friends can. After several state dinners, Pat asked Winchester, a Kentucky native, “Lucy, is this too much for you, a farm girl? Meeting all the kings of the world?”

“Oh, Mrs. Nixon, you were a farm girl so you understand this: feeding kings and feeding cattle are pretty much the same thing. Feed them what they like, don’t make loud noises or sudden gestures, and clean up afterwards.”

Winchester’s young daughter, also named Lucy, was given some toads and frogs as pets. “You know what frogs eat, don’t you?” the First Lady asked Winchester, not seeming a bit horrified. She always kept a flyswatter nearby on the shelf of her sitting room closet. (“She had a deadly sure swing,” her daughter Julie said.) For several weeks, until Winchester took the frogs and toads back to live with her mother in Kentucky, the First Lady sent down a red-tagged envelope in interoffice mail that was full
of dead flies that she had swatted for Winchester’s daughter. “The White House is full of cluster flies, as old houses are,” Winchester said. The First Lady included a note: “Lucy, dear, I hope these help solve your feeding problem.”