First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (22 page)

These lighter moments are overshadowed by the darker ones. The Nixons had a complicated marriage, and when asked, Connie Stuart says she never saw them argue: “Mrs. Nixon would never be seen arguing in public, are you kidding?” Pat was treated so shabbily at times by her husband that Nixon’s media adviser Roger Ailes wrote Haldeman a memo on May 4, 1970, advising the President to “talk to her and smile at her.” One event went particularly badly. “At one point,” Ailes wrote, “he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up.” In the margins of the long memo Haldeman wrote, “Good,” “Absolutely,” and “Right!” but for this particular suggestion he told Ailes flatly: “You tell him.” Pat’s press secretary, Helen Smith, says that Haldeman thought the President “would do well to dump her,” and rumors of an impending divorce after they left the White House were circulated by West Wing aides. Nixon’s private secretary, Rose Mary Woods, was close to Pat and would stick up for her during debates with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. But Pat was still often ignored. During a press conference with women reporters in honor of his wife’s birthday, the President was asked what woman he most admired. “Well, Mrs. Charles de Gaulle,” he said after a long, awkward silence. Yet Pat was getting more than five hundred letters a week, most of them supportive, at the height of Watergate. Pat had stood by him during the 1952 presidential election, when, as Eisenhower’s running mate, he was accused of accepting an unethical expense fund, charges he responded to with his famous Checkers speech. And she stood
by him after his 1960 defeat when he ran against John Kennedy for president, and she did not waver after his defeat in the 1962 California governor’s race.

Being pushed aside, coupled with increasingly busy schedules, damaged the Nixons’ relationship and created tension among their staffs. “Unfortunately,” Ehrlichman said, “the Nixon family usually left it up to the staff to fight out these jurisdictional battles, and that allowed unnecessary animosities to develop.” A triangle was formed. Pat would sit down with her husband in the residence over dinner and tell him, “Dick, there’s something wrong down there and we’ve got to fix it!” Then the President would turn to Haldeman and tell him, “Bob, there’s something wrong over there. Pat says there are some problems. Now we’ve got to fix them.” They went around and around in the triangle, the First Lady and Haldeman growing increasingly frustrated with each other. Connie Stuart was installed by Haldeman to be the First Lady’s press secretary and chief of staff so that the triangle could be a square: the First Lady to the President, the President to Haldeman, Haldeman to Stuart, Stuart to the First Lady. Haldeman wanted Stuart to give him warning before the First Lady went to the President with something.

Shortly after she started working for the First Lady in 1969, Stuart got a call from Haldeman telling her that the President wanted to see her. She found President Nixon eating his usual cottage cheese and pineapple for lunch in the small sitting room off the Oval Office. He asked her to sit down and for a half hour told her how important Pat was, and how she deserved good press. “Get your hands on everything you can to read about her, so that you get to know her as quickly as possible.” He told Stuart that she was an amazing woman who had accomplished a great deal in her life. Before Stuart left him, he added, “Make sure you
don’t become a lightning rod,” acknowledging the tension he knew was constantly consuming the East and West Wings of his White House.

Stuart was married to a West Wing staffer, and Haldeman considered her an ally in his ongoing war with the East Wing. “To him the East Wing was a problem and if I could keep the lid on it, I was his friend,” she said. “The real adversarial relationship in the White House is the men against the women.” Haldeman’s plan did not work. Stuart got a call one morning from Haldeman saying, “The President doesn’t like his lettuce.” “So?” she said. “Well, you’ve got to do something about the lettuce, it’s not fresh enough.” “Bob, what am I going to do about the lettuce?” “I don’t know how, but get it fresher.” That’s how it worked, she said: the President yelled at Haldeman and Haldeman yelled at her.

Feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem accompanied the Nixons on a ten-day campaign swing in hopes of getting an interview with the President for
New York
magazine. She was disappointed when she was given access to the First Lady only, but was surprised to discover that she “liked her [Pat] much better after this interview than before.” At first she was disappointed by Pat’s guarded answers, including her answer to what woman in history she most admired and would most want to resemble herself. Pat’s answer, “Mrs. Eisenhower,” was unconvincing to Steinem, and she pushed her to explain why she admired Mamie. Steinem says that after the two very different women sat through a long, awkward pause, “the dam broke.” In a slow and deliberate voice, Pat revealed her resentment of Steinem, the tone of her questions, and her entire generation. “I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. My parents died when I was a teenager, and I had to work my
way through college.” She talked about an older couple whom she drove in their Packard cross-country so that she could make extra money to put herself through school, and how she had to fix their car when it was overheating in the desert and when the brakes gave out in the mountains. “I worked in a bank while Dick was in the service. Oh, I could have sat for those months doing nothing like everybody else, but I worked in the bank and talked with people and learned about all their funny little customs. Now, I have friends in all the countries of the world. I haven’t just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do. Oh no, I’ve stayed interested in people. I’ve kept working.” Then she gestured toward her folder bursting with letters and said the minute she has a free moment she makes sure to answer every last one of them. “Nobody gets by without a personal note,” she continued. “I don’t have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I’ve never had it easy. I’m not like all you. . . .” Her voice trailed off and almost instantaneously she returned to her guarded self and acted as if nothing had happened. She patted Steinem’s arm and said, “I’ve really enjoyed our talk. Take care!” Steinem was stunned, but Pat’s brief flash of anger helped make her seem human.

When Pat ticked off the list of jobs she had held over the years, she left out her work as a technician in a hospital in upstate New York that treated patients with tuberculosis. Those were the most “haunting” six months of her life, she said. “They weren’t supposed to do it, but some of the young patients would sneak away to go bobsledding and I went with them.” When asked if she was afraid of catching the disease from them she said, “I never had the least fear of that. And it almost seemed that they believed they might contract good health from me.”

While in the White House, Pat received hundreds of letters
every week (sometimes more than a thousand a week) and prided herself on reading almost every one. She did not want anyone who took the time to write to her to receive a form letter with a signature from an auto pen. She sat at her desk in the residence for four to five hours every day answering letters, often after dinner. Her office would send a pile of letters in brown expandable accordion folders, sometimes as many as five or six a day, to the second-floor residence. Each of Pat’s signed letters was set aside to let the blue ink dry. When her head of correspondence arrived back at her office at eight thirty the next morning, the folders would be placed neatly on her desk. The only way that the women of the East Wing knew for sure that the President was resigning was when the folders stopped being returned. Pat did not open any letters during those painful final days.

First ladies get heart-wrenching requests, including letters from parents begging for help for their sick children. Several children were admitted to the National Institutes of Health because of Pat. One family wrote to the First Lady saying that their young daughter, who was very sick, needed heart surgery. An aide to the First Lady telephoned the American Heart Association and gave them the name and address of the little girl and told them that it was an emergency. Less than three months later Pat got a note from the little girl’s parents thanking her for saving their daughter’s life: “It may have been only a coincidence that shortly after your letter was received the problem was resolved in such an easy and a smooth succession of events. But we want to think that there was more to it than that.” Pat set aside especially touching or funny notes, including one titled “I am the wife of President Nixon,” written by a fifth grader from Elmont, New York. “Every time I make a speech I get a sore throat. When I go traveling with my husband we have to stand up for hours and my feet
are killing me. My back aches from sleeping in so many different hotels. When I’m in bed trying to rest I hear the body guards standing outside my door. I wish I could be an ordinary housewife and wear sneakers and blue jeans.” Pat wrote back saying how happy she was to be First Lady, but in a note to an aide she said: “I have kept her letter. She hits the spot!”

Pat considered answering mail part of her job as first lady, and she did not want anyone to challenge it. Once, Ehrlichman asked for a meeting with Pat and quickly discovered how much quiet power she wielded. They met in the late afternoon in the elegant Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the mansion, overlooking the South Lawn. “Perhaps you feel the need of someone to talk to—even to share problems with. There’s the mail, for example. I would be glad to try to ease that burden,” Ehrlichman said. At the mention of the mail Pat tensed up and knew exactly why he had come: to keep tabs on her and eventually control her correspondence. “I have an obligation to all the people who cared enough to write me,” she told him. “I might be slow and old-fashioned, but I believe everyone deserves a personal answer and a personal signature.” When he told her she would never have the time to answer every letter, she simply nodded once. The subject was closed.

Before he left, Ehrlichman told her that he was worried that she had grown too thin: “In the same way that you owe your correspondents your personal attention, you owe your family and friends the best care you can give yourself.” He said she should call his wife, whom she was friendly with, if she wanted to talk to someone. But the First Lady did not offer any reaction at all. Ehrlichman said he was readying himself for tears or for anger, but her cold stare shook him to the core. He had been sent to talk to her by the President and by Haldeman, and as he sneaked out
of the room, barely remembering to say goodbye, he realized he had absolutely nothing to report. This was a woman who was in complete control. It was a fierce battle between the East and West Wings because Mrs. Nixon was putting up a fight.

In interviews she often said she was never tired, and on the campaign trail she would sometimes make do with only a banana until dinner. But she never complained about being hungry. She had taken charge of her family’s household after her mother died when she was a young girl and could not afford to be tired or hungry. “I don’t get ill,” she told one reporter. “The girls [her daughters, Tricia and Julie] say that there’s no point in telling me if they don’t feel well. They’ll get no encouragement from me.” She once went so far as to say, “Even if I were dying, I wouldn’t let anyone know.”

Like most first ladies, she was more liberal than her husband and was pro-choice and supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In a rare moment of candor, she told a group of women reporters that she was pushing her husband to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court for the first time. “Don’t you worry,” she said, “I’m talking it up.” The President asked Attorney General John Mitchell to offer a list of qualified women and he seriously considered nominating a California Supreme Court associate, but decided against it. After weeks of consideration he announced his decision to appoint William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell to fill the two vacancies. When Nixon made the announcement Haldeman told him gushingly that he had “scored another ten-strike.”

“Well, probably so, except for my wife, but boy is she mad.” The silence at the dinner table that evening was broken by an angry Pat. She had gone out on a limb and spoken publicly, urging him to nominate a woman. Now letters flew in sympathizing with her about how her husband had “let her down.” “Women in 1971,”
she told him, “need the recognition that a female member of the Supreme Court would bring them.” The president sighed heavily and said, “We tried to do the best we could, Pat.”

B
ETTY
F
ORD, WHO
replaced Pat so suddenly after President Nixon’s resignation, was unusual because she publicly challenged her husband’s decisions and made statements that sent his male political advisers into a frenzy. Her 1975 interview on
60 Minutes
with Morley Safer shocked the nation. She said that all of her children had experimented with marijuana, and she said that if she were a teenager she would probably try marijuana herself. She also admitted to seeing a psychiatrist, and she revealed that she was pro-choice. When Safer asked how she would feel if the Fords’ eighteen-year-old daughter, Susan, confessed to having an affair, she said, “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I would think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all young girls.” There was an uproar as hate mail piled up in the First Lady’s correspondence office and angry callers jammed the White House telephone lines.