Kati Marton (31 page)

The sentimental appeal worked. Eisenhower realized he had to keep Nixon on the ticket. “You’re my boy!” he told him. But Pat felt humiliated. “Aren’t we entitled to have at least a little privacy?” she meekly asked, knowing her objections counted for less and less. She and her husband continued to value above all else harmony in their marriage—at almost any price. So Pat kept quiet and Dick did what he had promised her he would not do. He thought only of himself. Pat’s needs, her sensitivities, were plowed under her husband’s single goal of vindication. Each perceived injury, and the Checkers incident was but one in a growing list, only fueled that need. For years after the Checkers speech, Nixon celebrated the anniversary as the day of his political resurrection. As for his wife, “She lost all heart for politics after that speech,” he admitted. He wasn’t oblivious to her pain, he just chose to ignore it. “She was the one person of whom my father never asked, ‘Do you remember?’” his daughter Julie recalled.

Fame and success did not seem to affect Nixon’s self-absorption or his insecurity. He did not think Eisenhower had shown him sufficient support in his ordeal. He had heard that, when asked about Nixon’s contributions to the administration, Ike replied, “Give me a week and I’ll think of one.” Success only made him more determined and even more remote. Being vice president was an ego-crushing experience for a man as famished for power and affirmation as Nixon. He needed to be president.

The Nixons had virtually ceased direct communication with each other by 1958, when he was preparing his run for the presidency. Dick found a companion less demanding than even his wife. His name was Bebe Rebozo, a quiet, divorced real estate man who never disagreed with him, never challenged him, interacted with him only at Nixon’s initiative. Rebozo was the closest Nixon could come to being alone while in the company of someone else. He often retreated to Rebozo’s Key Biscayne, Florida, sanctuary when he wanted to escape from both Washington and his wife. Bebe is like a sponge, Pat said, he just listens to Dick and never disagrees with him. Dick loves that.

When Pat’s old friend and fellow Whittier Union High School teacher Helene Drown spent a week with the Nixons, she was struck by the breakdown in communications between them. She sent Dick a memo, urging him to talk to his wife. “Have a talk about the future—what are the roads [available],” continued public life or returning to the practice of law. Drown’s note is unexceptional. What is noteworthy is that it took a visitor to point out to the couple that they needed to talk to each other.

All the while, Pat had also become famous and much admired. She seemed the fulfillment of the ideal wife of the fifties, as depicted in situation comedies and advertisements. Perfectly groomed, smiling, loyal, she seemed uncomplicated and satisfied that her kitchen floor was shiny and her husband’s pants pressed. Occasionally, the mask slipped. “We don’t have as many good times as we used to,” she admitted to one reporter. On a 1959 trip to Moscow, Pat turned to the wife of Ambassador Lewellyn Thompson, asked for a cigarette and said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a politician’s wife. I’d only voted once in my life—and that was for Roosevelt.”

To protect herself and her daughters, Pat canceled their subscription to the
Washington Post.
She did not want their daughters to see Herblock’s famous front-page cartoons depicting her husband with his perpetual five o’clock shadow as a sleazy Red-baiter. In public she was the tireless campaigner and goodwill ambassador who never put a foot wrong. “You probably have never seen a more exhausted woman than Pat Nixon,” Washington columnist Betty Beale wrote. “When she and the Vice President showed up at the Women’s National Press
Club … the evening they returned from South America … Pat stood on a platform beside her husband as he spoke, with her arms hanging limp beside her, her face so numb with fatigue it couldn’t smile …. She seemed to move like an automaton ….” Did her husband even notice?

Pat almost never complained. Secret Service agent Rex Scouten was astonished at her self-discipline during an eighteen-country Asian tour in the 1950s. “The weather, the food—Mrs. Nixon was such a picky eater—but she bore up under everything without ever complaining …. I remember an endless ballet in Cambodia, even I couldn’t stay awake. But she did. She was made of steel.”

Her husband knew she hated his chosen profession. As to why he stayed in it despite continued promises to get out, Nixon blamed
destiny.
“Once you get into this great stream of history you can’t get out. You can drown. Or you can be pulled ashore by the tide. But it is awfully hard to get out when you are in the middle of the stream—if it is intended that you stay there.” Of course, he had no intention of leaving the stream. But Pat’s sad, drawn face was a daily reminder of his betrayal. He wasn’t home much, but when he was, he closed the door behind him and played the sound track of
Victory at Sea.
The music’s martial sound drowned out all else.

In the 1960 presidential race, Pat campaigned as hard as he did. Her husband insisted she be there for public appearances, silent and perfect. She rarely expressed an opinion. Her standard line, “I don’t give my husband advice because he doesn’t need it,” made reporters wince and fueled her reputation as being “unreal.” Few people ever saw her and her husband touch. Mostly he seemed oblivious to her presence. On her own, she was different. Photographs reveal a woman spontaneously affectionate with her daughters, with children in hospitals, even with reporters and officials. The contrast between Pat’s natural warmth and Dick’s awkwardness was stark. Once, searching desperately for small talk with reporters in a restaurant, Nixon commented on the pretty flowers on the table. “But, Dick,” his wife said, “they’re plastic.” Those present said Nixon’s face darkened and he made no further attempt at small talk. No wonder Pat retreated behind the silent smile.

She hated reminders of the past and pleaded with others not to look back. Those who saw her after many years’ absence were struck by the
change. CBS White House correspondent Robert Pierpoint had been a student at Whittier Union High School when Pat was a teacher. He remembered the lively Miss Ryan. “She had changed drastically. She was extremely uptight, difficult to talk to, very nervous and not at all the happy, outgoing personality I remembered from high school days.” Pierpoint was astonished at Pat’s reluctance to talk about their shared past, “She became stiff and wooden and acted as though she didn’t want to talk to me or hear of the other students and teachers.”

Losing the presidency to John Kennedy was devastating to the Nixons. The Kennedys were everything Nixon most resented: rich, charming, Harvard-educated, socially connected, at ease in the world. Nixon was convinced they mocked him behind his back. Jack, the “lightweight playboy,” beat Nixon in the only game Nixon cared about. For Pat, the defeat sealed her determination to get out of politics. “Nineteen fifty-nine disillusioned her beyond redemption,” her younger daughter wrote. Nixon believed that voting irregularities in Cook County cost him Illinois. Though Nixon did not contest the results, Kennedy’s popular vote total was only 118,574 more than his. In the electoral college, the results were 303–219. “[Pat] saw a stolen election and could not understand why so many were indifferent.” The Nixons headed back to California, Pat determined to build a new life, Dick full of rage.

For a brief period now, she was happy. She led the life she had always yearned for, tending her garden and looking after her daughters. Her husband, meanwhile, plotted his return from exile. When the polls indicated that incumbent governor Pat Brown was vulnerable, he saw his chance for a comeback. This time Pat did not mince words. “If you run …I’m not going to be out campaigning with you as I have in the past.” Her husband left the family council, gloomily mumbling, “Well, that’s life ….” Pained at the sight of her deflated father, Tricia turned to her mother and said, “If it means so much to Daddy, maybe we should change our votes, Mother.” Pat sighed. “You run upstairs and tell your father.” In his
Memoirs,
Nixon describes his conversation with his wife that night. “I thought about it some more,” Pat told him, “and I am more convinced then ever that if you run it will be a terrible mistake.” But he knew she would come around. All he had to do was wait it out. “If you weigh everything and still decide to run,” she finally said, “I will support
your decision. I’ll be there campaigning with you just as I always have.” The next day he plunged back into the only life that mattered for him.

“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” the bitter Nixon declared to the media following his loss to Brown, “because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Julie Nixon never forgot the humiliation. “We were waiting tearfully for my father in the hallway at the front door when he arrived. Mother spoke first. She said brokenly, ‘Oh, Dick.’ He was so overcome with emotion that he brushed past and went outside to the backyard. That afternoon was the first and the only time my parents gave way to their emotions simultaneously and it bewildered Tricia and me. Mother lay on her bed, the room darkened by closed shutters, and cried in front of us for the first time we could remember. Tricia and I sat on the floor by the bed and cried also.”

Ordinary mortals, even ordinary politicians, would have taken that searing defeat on the heels of the bruising presidential loss as a sign that it was time for a career change. The sight of his broken wife, his weeping children, would have been enough to convince even the most driven politician that the sacrifice was too high. But Nixon’s demons would not rest, no matter what the human cost. Transplanting his family to New York, he saw them briefly thrive again. Pat was content to be the wife of a corporate lawyer. But by 1967 the restless Nixon was set to reenter political life, determined to make another run at the presidency. His wife and nearly grown daughters would just have to go along with his decision, as they always had.

Not only did he expect them to support him, Nixon required that they campaign full-time. The times may have changed—the Age of Aquarius supplanting the Age of Conformity—but Pat Nixon had not. Her proud assertion, “I may be dying but I would never say anything about it,” sounded off-key in the new climate. For much of the country, Father no longer knew best. Dick Nixon was equally out of touch with the mood shift. His own opinion of himself was so low, he was so hungry for the public’s admiration, that he could not cede any of the limelight, not even to his wife. It wasn’t as if he was oblivious to her attributes. “Whatever you think of me,” he often told audiences, “I’m sure you’ll agree that Pat would make a fine first lady ….” Feminist writer Gloria
Steinem touched a nerve with Mrs. Nixon. When Steinem tried to draw out Pat to say just who she really was, she replied in a torrent, “I never had time to think about … 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 … I never had it easy.” This was not the happy, fulfilled woman of a thousand campaign appearances. This was a neglected wife who was at the end of her rope.

VIOLENCE AND DISSENT DESTROYED
the chances of LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, in the 1968 presidential race. Nixon won by almost as narrow a margin as the one by which he lost to JFK in 1960. Still, the presidency conferred its blessings and its privileges on the Nixons. However circumscribed a role Nixon wished for his wife, the country has expectations of any first lady. For a while, Pat allowed herself to savor her hard-won reward. But though she was now the wife of the president, he was still Dick Nixon, still the most polarizing politician of his day. As first lady she would be her cautious self. “She knew,” her husband asserted, “you could not have two voices coming out of the White House.”

The White House brings most couples closer. It had the opposite effect on the Nixons. For Richard Nixon, the White House was a place where he could finally indulge his love of solitude. Nixon gloried in his self-imposed isolation. Sheltered by a retinue of aides and the trappings of the office, it was easier than ever to ignore Pat. Finding the Oval Office too exposed, he often retreated to a secret hideaway next door in the Executive Office Building. After dinner he would escape to the Lincoln Sitting Room, a small room with a fireplace and huge windows, and play his martial music—alone. “A major public figure is a lonely man,” Nixon told Stewart Alsop. “You can’t enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships …. You can’t confide absolutely in anyone. You can’t talk too much about your personal plans, your personal feelings.”

Henry Kissinger said he never heard Nixon directly address a word to his wife. Nor did they ever go alone to Camp David. His real “wife” was a tall former advertising man with a buzz cut, H. R. Haldeman. He
was the one Nixon relied on to keep the world at bay, including his wife. Haldeman, like Rebozo, made no emotional claims on Nixon, required no intimacy. He, unlike Pat, did not remind Nixon of three decades of broken promises. Haldeman did not criticize. Haldeman called him Mr. President, which, no doubt to her husband’s regret, Pat could not.