First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (35 page)

The day before the President announced his resignation, the Nixons’ daughter Julie, with tears in her eyes, told her mother that it was all over. Pat never gave up hope, not at any moment during those agonizing months leading up to her husband’s August 8, 1974, televised Oval Office address announcing his resignation effective noon the next day. When Julie approached her mother’s bedroom, still decorated as it had been when Lady Bird lived there, she found her mother standing in the doorway. “Daddy feels he has to resign,” Julie said. “But why?” Pat asked, disbelievingly. Three months before his resignation, the First Lady gave an interview and said that her husband “has never considered resigning and isn’t
now
.” As late as July 31 she was deciding what china she would order. (She called Curator Clem Conger and told him, “I won’t explain, Clem, but don’t go ahead with the porcelain. Call it off.”) Julie put her arms gently around her mother, afraid that a full embrace would cause them both to break down. The Nixons had weathered other storms together—they had been through eleven major campaigns—and Pat still believed that as a family they would survive this one. Before her husband announced his decision in 1972 to escalate bombing in North Vietnam, she hugged him and said, “Don’t worry about anything.” She almost always ended meetings with her East Wing staff with a cheerful “Onward and upward!” President Nixon said of his wife years later, “She was a fighter to the last, she was the last to give up.” She had publicly defended her husband throughout the Watergate investigation, telling reporters, “The truth sustains me because I have great faith in my husband.” Once, when asked by a reporter about her husband’s state of mind as Watergate raged on, she waved her arm with her fists clenched and said, “He is in great health, and I love him dearly and I have great faith.” Her social secretary, Lucy Winchester, calls Pat a “rock-ribbed woman.”

Most members of Pat’s East Wing staff were in their mid-twenties or early thirties, and they included Winchester, Director of Correspondence Gwen King, and Susan Porter Rose, who worked on correspondence and scheduling. The trauma of Watergate has bound these women together forever, and many of them still keep in touch. At the time, they were afraid to go out for lunch and encounter protesters in Lafayette Square, so they huddled together and ate in the White House. They were so worried about perception that eight months before the President’s resignation, as Watergate dragged on, the First Lady’s staffers agonized over a snowman. Before a White House party for the children of diplomats, several of these young women were asked to build a snowman on the South Lawn. Wearing heavy coats over their dresses and skirts, they made the snowman, with the help of groundskeepers who brought over shovels and water to help pack the fluffy snow. After much discussion, they decided that the snowman should be facing away from the White House so that people would not say that the President’s snowman had his back to the public. These women knew the pain and tremendous pressure that the First Lady was under, so anytime they received a heartfelt message or an encouraging telephone call, they would pass it along to her. One day the First Lady invited some staffers to go on the presidential yacht, the
Sequoia
. They went down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon, a welcome break from the bunker the White House had become.

The First Lady’s staff had found out about Watergate the same way that everyone else did—they read about it in the newspapers. On August 9, 1974, the day he resigned, the President gathered all of the White House staffers in the East Room to say goodbye. The women of the East Wing vowed they would not cry because the First Lady would not want them to. Walking together from
the East Wing to the East Room, they all kept their emotions in check, until they hit the Cross Hall, where the Marine Band was playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the musical
Carousel
. That undid them, and they walked into the East Room with tears welling up in their eyes. Gwen King remembers the First Lady, standing onstage, ever composed. “I think that I saw a tiny tear,” she said. “So I moved over behind somebody; the empathy was just too much for me.”

Up until her death, Pat maintained that no one knew the full story of Watergate. Pat’s chief of staff and press secretary, Connie Stuart, loves her former boss, and she compares her willful ignorance to that of a woman whose husband has been having a long affair. Pat knew intellectually that her husband had done something wrong, but she did not want to acknowledge it to herself. The President didn’t tell his family the whole truth because he didn’t want them to carry the burden that he was already carrying, Stuart said. “They’re not blind, they can read and they can hear. They’re not going to say, ‘Daddy, why did you do that?’” Pat became such a loyal defender that she cut out news articles about other presidents who were said to have bugged the White House, including President Franklin Roosevelt, and set them aside. Her close friend Helene Drown said that Pat saw Watergate as an effort by her husband’s critics to get their “last pound of flesh.”

The residence staff did not know the family was leaving until Pat called downstairs asking for packing boxes. Shortly before the President announced his resignation, Pat’s hairdresser, Rita de Santis, finished doing her hair and said happily, “See you tomorrow.” Pat hugged de Santis as her eyes filled with tears. She hated the famous photo taken of her family by White House photographer Ollie Atkins in the Solarium on August 7, two days before Nixon left office, because, she said, “Our hearts were breaking
and there we are smiling.” Nixon said he could tell his wife was upset that evening because when he walked into the Solarium he could see that she was suffering from a terrible pain in her neck—something that happened to her during times of stress. “This time I could see the throbbing. But when she saw me she put on a great act,” he recalled in an interview. “She threw her arms around me and she said, ‘We’re all very proud of you, Daddy.’” The night before Nixon announced his resignation, the First Lady could not sleep. The task of sorting through their furniture, photo albums, books, and clothing all fell on her shoulders.

On the morning of the President’s resignation, August 9, 1974, the Nixons were crowded into an elevator on their way to the East Room, where the President would make his emotional goodbye speech to his staff. Pat wore a pink-and-white dress and carried sunglasses with her in case she could not contain her sadness. Nixon’s aide Steve Bull began telling them where to stand and where the cameras were when Pat broke in plaintively, “Dick, you can’t have it televised.” No one had asked her opinion, and it was too late to change anything. The President never thanked Pat in his East Room speech, but her press secretary, Helen Smith, says that might be because “he knew that there is a limit to what Pat can endure—and still keep her head high.”

When the incoming President and First Lady, Gerald and Betty Ford, escorted the Nixons from the White House to the waiting helicopter, Pat and Betty clung to each other’s arms as they walked four abreast, flanked by two rows of military guards standing at attention. The most famous image from that day is President Nixon doing his trademark double V-for-victory sign as he stood on the steps of Marine One, but the way that Pat and Betty held on to each other on a day that would change the lives of both forever is just as fascinating. Betty Ford’s press secretary,
Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, said, “She [Betty] was very fond of her [Pat] and she felt very sorry for her, because she thought she was a very good person who had a very difficult marriage. She liked her as a person, in fact she liked her very much.” On the plane ride to California the Nixons, separated by a partition wall, each sitting alone in his or her own compartment, didn’t say a word to each other. And just like that, it was over. Barbara Bush remembers being there with her husband for Ford’s swearing in, and how jarring the transition was to witness. “After we waved goodbye to the Nixons the pictures on the wall were all of Jerry Ford’s family. We’re standing at the helicopter waving goodbye while they changed the pictures.”

Not long after the Nixons left Washington, Pat called her old friend Lucy Winchester and said, “I have a problem, I want to cook supper tonight. Dick wants me to fix my meat loaf recipe. The FBI still has my meat loaf recipe, do you remember it?” They couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity of it all. Winchester says the FBI took everything for a time, even one of the Nixon daughters’ wedding dresses.

On September 8, 1974, a month after Richard Nixon announced his resignation, President Ford granted the disgraced former president a “full, free and absolute” pardon. The Fords’ son Steve said that his mother worried about the reaction to the pardon, but his father was thinking of the long-term ramifications for the nation if Watergate dragged on. He said that his parents knew the pardon would cost them support, and possibly the next election. But Betty thought the risk was too high and warned her husband against it. Betty came to resent President Nixon for essentially ruining her husband’s chance of winning the White House in his own right. The pardon was the saddest day of Pat’s life because it marked her
husband’s acceptance of defeat. To her, he still had nothing to apologize for. Susan Porter Rose, who worked for Pat and for Betty, said there was no phone call between the two about the pardon. “No, absolutely not. It just wouldn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen with anybody. . . . Now, had somebody died, they would have called.”

Pat Nixon’s director of correspondence, Gwen King, went to stay with the Nixons in San Clemente and over dinner and a martini, King started telling the Nixons stories about the presidents she had worked for (she began working at the White House during the Eisenhower administration). Richard Nixon was especially curious about President Johnson, and in the middle of her story King stopped and asked him, “You’re not taping this, are you?” The room went quiet and she couldn’t believe what she had blurted out. A few seconds went by and Pat burst into laughter. The President laughed, too, and assured her that he was not recording their conversation.

In 1984 Pat declined Secret Service protection (she had had it up until then) because she considered it an unnecessary expense. President Nixon gave up his security detail a year later. Pat retreated into herself and read as many as five books a week. She took to gardening (“I couldn’t dig into the White House garden very much. It always had to be on display”) and wore through four pairs of heavy gardening gloves as she compulsively tended to their estate in San Clemente, which was situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She knew how much her husband loved roses, so she made sure to plant some outside the window of his study. Their lives may have been a shambles, but she could make the garden lush and beautiful simply by spending time taking care of it. No amount of time would restore her husband’s dignity. Pat reluctantly agreed to pose for her official White House portrait
by Henriette Wyeth Hurd, sister of the renowned artist Andrew Wyeth. Though she liked the painting, she said, “It makes me look too sad.”

S
OMETIMES, BEFORE GIVING
a speech, Betty Ford was so terrified that she would confess to her aides, “Oh my God, I think I’m going to throw up.” But when her husband, who was suffering from laryngitis, could not speak the morning after he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, it was Betty who read his concession speech and she did it with grace.

Her courage grew with each passing day that she was in the White House. One evening, she was about to be given a Bible by Rabbi Maurice Sage, president of the Jewish National Fund of America, at a black-tie gala at the New York Hilton, when Sage collapsed onstage. Betty said it was chaos as people rushed to help him and when she saw everyone crowding around Sage she went back to her seat to get out of the way. But as she sat there she felt uneasy. “I felt someone had to do something,” she wrote in her memoir. “I truly believed that if I could get up there and pray, and get all these people to pray with me, we might somehow save Dr. Sage’s life.” The First Lady took over the microphone as doctors in the audience of 3,200 and her Secret Service agents rushed to try to revive the fifty-nine-year-old leader. “We must all pray in our way,” she said, her voice trembling as Sage was being given oxygen. “It is up to God what will happen. We should all have faith.” She asked those present to bow their heads in prayer. “Dear Father in Heaven,” she recited to the stunned audience. “We ask thy blessing on this magnificent man. We know you can take care of him.”

When the crowd stood to applaud her, she motioned that they
should sit back down and she said the program should be ended as Sage’s life hung in the balance. Sage was pronounced dead at 11 p.m., shortly after arriving at the hospital. This woman, who used to hate public speaking, was able to command the attention of those in that ballroom and keep them calm. The experience of watching Sage die would stay with Betty forever; when she returned to the White House, she was haunted by it.

Betty was also plagued by fear after two assassination attempts were made on President Ford within the span of three weeks. Both attacks occurred in California and they were by the only two women who have ever tried to kill a president. In Sacramento, on September 5, 1975, a Charles Manson groupie named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot at Ford, but her gun never went off. Seventeen days later, outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, a forty-five-year-old middle-class housewife named Sara Jane Moore fired her gun and narrowly missed hitting the President.