First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (25 page)

Nixon had promised Pat that he would not run again after he lost his 1962 comeback campaign for governor of California, famously blasting the press with this parting message: “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Pat was relieved. Her happiest years were after that 1962 defeat, when the family moved to New York and retreated to private life and Nixon worked as a lawyer. Jackie’s reply to a condolence note that the Nixons had sent her after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 must have made Pat question whether her husband should ever return to politics. “We never value life enough when we have it,” Jackie wrote. “I know how you must feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you the question comes up again—and you must commit all your and your family’s hopes and efforts again. . . . If it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family.”

Pat was not eager to enter the fray again in 1968. By the time
they actually got to the White House in January 1969, the Vietnam War was raging and the feminist movement was in full force. As the wife of President Eisenhower’s vice president, Pat had been trained at the knee of Mamie Eisenhower, the quintessential 1950s political wife, and she would have been an excellent first lady in the 1950s and early 1960s. “Life and history have not been fair to Pat Nixon. Period,” Connie Stuart says. On the eve of Richard Nixon’s first inauguration, Pat was asked if she had wanted her husband to get into politics. “No,” she said. “I did not. Politics was not what I would have chosen for him because, after all, you don’t see as much of your husband as you would like and it’s a hard life.”

Jackie wrote to Pat again after Nixon’s victory. The handwritten card was delivered by messenger from Jackie’s 5,300-square-foot New York apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue to the Nixons’ apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue (the most famous First Lady and the incoming First Lady lived just twenty-three blocks away from each other). In the letter Jackie congratulated Pat but added ominously, “You are such a close family that I know you will be able to be happy in spite of the pressures and the absence of privacy.” Firmly believing their time had passed and wishing that her husband had given up politics, the exhausted Pat ate dinner alone before the inaugural balls while her family had a decadent steak meal served on china in the Family Dining Room. “I don’t want any dinner,” she said. “You’ve got to eat something, Pat,” her husband told her. She relented and asked for a bowl of cottage cheese in her room (which sent the kitchen staff into a frenzy when they discovered that they did not have any cottage cheese on hand and someone had to race out to a local supermarket). Pat was in no mood to celebrate.

But she took her job seriously. She traveled more than one
hundred thousand miles as First Lady, visiting more foreign countries (seventy-eight) than any before her. Her foreign travels included the Nixons’ historic visit to China in 1972 and a trip to Peru in 1970, when she led a major humanitarian effort, bringing tons of donated food, clothing, and medical supplies to tens of thousands of people devastated by an earthquake. She became the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to travel to a combat zone when she visited wounded American soldiers in South Vietnam in 1969. She flew from the Saigon airport to the Presidential Palace in a helicopter that made dramatic nearly vertical takeoffs and landings to avoid sniper fire. Her Secret Service agents were armed with machine guns and shoulder belts loaded with cartridges. During a visit to an orphanage with 774 children, fighter jets and circling helicopters nearly drowned out her conversations with the children.

The protests over the war in the fall of 1969 were so large that the President called in hundreds of army troops to Washington to defend the White House. There were days when the window shades had to be drawn and the bomb shelter under the East Wing was used as an official command center where communications were kept open with the military in case National Guard troops were needed. The Nixons’ social secretary, Lucy Winchester, had unknowingly scheduled the annual Senate Ladies Luncheon at the height of Vietnam War protests in May 1971. Streets around the White House were clogged as two hundred thousand demonstrators flooded the city. Winchester says that when she was leaving work protesters would leap on her car and spit on her windshield.

“Are you sure you want to do this? We can cancel this,” she told the First Lady.

“Absolutely not,” Pat replied—she had chaired the group when her husband was vice president. “The senators have no idea
what we put up with all day long, every day. They are so sheltered. If their wives have to come to town, they will see what we are up against and they will tell their husbands.” She told Winchester to spend the night before in a guest room on the third floor and not to forget her party dress. “I will not have you be held up in the morning by all those bad actors. The luncheon goes on.”

Though she never publicly crumbled, Watergate took a terrible toll on Pat Nixon’s health as she lost more and more sleep and felt that she needed to put on a brave face. She also lost weight and rumors of her drinking began to circulate, though her loyal aides beat them back, saying that she enjoyed an occasional highball and a cigarette at the end of a long day. “Watergate is the only crisis that ever got me down,” Pat told her daughter Julie. “It is just constant. And I know I will never live to see the vindication.” In a letter from the Eisenhowers’ home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Mamie wrote, “Pat Dear—This is not an engraved invitation but I would love to have you come up here when the President goes away—you could rest, walk, read, and gossip with me—know please everything would be on the QT.” She signed the note “Love, Mamie E” and never once mentioned Watergate, but the implication that she knew Pat needed a place to escape is clear.

Pat strongly objected to her husband’s decision to release transcripts of secretly recorded tapes of conversations relating to Watergate. She said they should be destroyed (preferably burned), and she was hurt that her husband never asked for her opinion before they were released. The tapes, she told her close friend Helene Drown, should be treated like “private love letters” meant for “one person alone.” She was fiercely loyal to her husband, whom she had stood by for nearly thirty years of political life.

House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes, a Republican, told a group of reporters at a breakfast session that the President should
consider resigning in order to avoid impeachment. “If Nixon comes to conclude that he can no longer be effective as president, he will do something about it,” Rhodes said. “If he should resign, I would accept it.” In fact, resignation, he said, “would probably be beneficial” to the party.

Rhodes came face-to-face with Pat Nixon in a receiving line at a party on Capitol Hill that evening.

“How are you, Mrs. Nixon?” he asked her.

As a photographer asked them to smile for a picture she said, through pursed lips, “Oh, yes. Let’s smile as if we liked each other.”

“Mrs. Nixon,” Rhodes replied, “it isn’t the way you heard it.”

“Yeah,” she said coolly, “that’s what they all say.”

In the spring and summer of 1974, before her husband’s resignation, she spent most of her time in her pale yellow bedroom on the second floor of the residence, a prisoner of the White House. She still answered as many letters as she could, looking out onto a magnificent view of the National Mall. She also read books about friendship and love, and around 11 a.m. she would order a coffee and chef’s salad or soup to be served at 1 p.m. Often the coffee would be the only thing she touched on the tray. Things got so tense that the butlers rushed to serve the Nixons dinner because once they sat down there was a deafening silence in the Family Dining Room that made five minutes seem like an hour. But there were times when the President tried in vain to lighten the mood. He suddenly looked at his wife one morning, focusing on her for the first time that day, and said, “My, that’s a pretty suit you have on, Pat, you really look nice. I like that.” She replied, a little sharply, “Oh, Dick, I’ve had this suit for years. You’ve seen this before. You know this isn’t new.”

On Valentine’s Day in 1974, six months before the President’s
resignation, the Nixons had a rare dinner out at Trader Vic’s, not far from the White House. UPI reporter Helen Thomas and CBS reporter Lesley Stahl found out that they would be there and got a table nearby. The Nixons brought along the President’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo, and when they got up to leave Thomas and Stahl pushed to get ahead of them and ask them questions. The two reporters thought they would be getting a scoop, but as soon as the Nixons stepped outside, microphones and cameras were shoved in their faces by reporters who had been staking out the restaurant. Stahl and Thomas found themselves pushed aside as everyone clamored to ask the President about Watergate. When Thomas glanced to her left she saw that someone else had also been left behind: Pat Nixon. “How are you?” Thomas asked her. “Helen,” the First Lady said, her eyes filling with tears, “can you believe that with all the troubles Dick has had, all the pressures he’s been under, he would do this for me?” Thomas was speechless—she thought the President owed his loyal wife much more than just a dinner date.

In early August President Nixon told his family of his decision to resign and they pushed him to reconsider. But even they recognized the deep hole he was in when the so-called smoking gun transcript was released revealing a June 23, 1972, meeting between the President and Haldeman proving his culpability in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. “This was the final blow, the final nail in the coffin,” Nixon told former aide Frank Gannon in a 1983 video. “Although you don’t need another nail if you’re already in the coffin—which we were.” On August 7, a congressional delegation led by Republican Senator Barry Goldwater told the President that he would not survive an impeachment vote. That night, Nixon decided he finally had to resign. Pat began packing and worked through most of the night; there was no use trying to sleep anyway. She would stand by him through it all. “With
us sometimes,” the President reflected, “you don’t have to say it publicly, or even privately. Things unspoken say it more strongly.”

They left the White House on August 9, 1974, and spent months in self-imposed exile at their home in San Clemente, California. When the former President was in the hospital because of a blood clot in his lung, Pat brought him McDonald’s hamburgers and the two huddled together and watched reruns of
Bonanza
, a TV show they had never had time to watch before. So much had changed in their lives. The helicopter landing pad at their home was turned into a makeshift volleyball court and weeds started to take over the small golf course on their property. They were used to being completely surrounded by aides who acted as buffers between them, and it was the first time since their first political campaign in 1946 that they were truly alone with each other. Julie says that she and her sister, Tricia, saw “that they both survived because when my father felt defeated, Mother upheld him, and when she was spiritless, he rallied to comfort her. We never saw them give in to despair at the same time.” Nixon would encourage his wife to eat more at dinner—“try the delicious squash from the garden”—and she’d leave a gardenia on his pillow at night.

B
ETTY
F
ORD HAD
dealt with debilitating pain from a pinched nerve after tripping over a stool in the family’s den in their Alexandria, Virginia, home. She was also racked by arthritis. Her addiction to painkillers began in 1964 when she was prescribed medication for her neck, and those prescriptions multiplied when her doctor gave her pills for everything: for pain, for anxiety, to help her sleep. She was taking as many as twenty pills a day and often mixing them with alcohol, a potentially deadly combination that she began to depend on when she was raising her four
children in their suburban home. It was a dependence that her husband did not want to admit to himself.

It was clear to some of the women in the East Wing that the First Lady had a serious problem. One of her East Wing staffers, along with a navy nurse who traveled with Betty, approached the White House physician, Dr. William Lukash, and told him they were concerned about the seven or eight bottles of pills, including pain medicine, that the First Lady traveled with. “We believe Mrs. Ford is taking too much medication,” they said. He stared back at them: “Which medical school did you go to?”

Like so many women of her generation, Betty struggled to be the perfect housewife. She felt the heavy responsibility of raising children alone in the suburbs and keeping up appearances for her husband, his work colleagues, and their friends. But behind the scenes, Susan Ford recalled witnessing her mother buckle under the weight of it all and break down in the Fords’ bedroom. Susan was eight years old and her congressman father was on the presidential yacht, the
Sequoia
, with President Johnson. She found her mother alone and sobbing. She ran to get their nanny, Clara, who called Ford and told him he needed to come home. Clara told the children, “Your mother is very sick, and she had to go to a psychiatrist.” Susan Ford remembered not being able to process that at her young age. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to go. I was scared that mother might fall apart in front of my friends.”