Kati Marton (32 page)

The staff served dinner quickly when the First Couple was dining alone. The silence hung like a curtain between them. The Nixons shared few activities, or even the same space much of the time. “I’ll have to have a room of my own,” Pat told Chief Usher J. B. West. “Nobody could sleep with Dick. He wakes up during the night, switches on the light, speaks into his tape recorder or takes notes—it’s impossible.”

The tone of the Executive Mansion is set by the relationship between the president and the first lady. A Cold War soon raged between the East and West Wings of the Nixon White House. Much as Nixon would show contempt for the constitutional limits on the office of the chief executive, he tried to subvert the traditional role of first lady. Power would flow from only one source: Richard Nixon. The president’s men did not need explicit instructions on reining in the first lady’s role. Nixon communicated with the first lady largely through memoranda exchanged between his aides. Nixon’s chief of staff tried to run the East Wing as well as his own, and treated the first lady’s domain with undisguised contempt. The communications to the first lady’s office were remarkable for their condescending tone, and sometimes for their astonishing rudeness. When Pat’s office recommended inviting the celebrated Russian-born pianist Artur Rubinstein for a White House gala, Haldeman answered with a single-word memo: “No!”

In an effort to control the first lady’s role, Haldeman put the wife of Charles Stuart, one of his lieutenants, in charge of the East Wing. The move backfired. Constance Stuart was appalled by the demeaning treatment of the first lady. “She was one of the most experienced individuals to come into the White House,” she said of the first lady she was meant to “keep under control.” “[Mrs. Nixon] had long ago learned how to have a good public, political face. She could keep a stiff upper lip and a stiff lower chin in the face of the most difficult circumstances …a very warm, outgoing, funny, delightful woman.”

“Funny and delightful” was not the image Nixon, whose ideal was Charles de Gaulle, sought for his presidency. “I would like to know who was responsible for selecting the entertainment, who checked the backgrounds of the entertainers, how this incident happened,” began a typically accusatory November 5, 1971, Haldeman memo, one of a blizzard that crossed the White House’s east-west divide, “and what are we doing to make sure that similar incidents don’t occur in the future?” The “incident” was the presence of a longhaired guitarist as part of the entertainment at the state dinner honoring Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. Haldeman was enraged by a mildly humorous description of the evening by
Washington Post
reporter Sally Quinn. Mrs. Stuart fired back.

Though Nixon tried to impose an image of frozen perfection on his wife, others penetrated her shield. Diane Sawyer, then an aide in the president’s press office, recalled,

Though the Nixons’ marriage had become a charade, the country still expected the president and the first lady to behave like a warm, loving couple. Increasingly the Nixons failed to convey that image. In the media age, the public has developed keen antennae for judging a presidential marriage. That perception has much to do with how the media covers the first lady. Nixon, obsessed by the attention the Kennedy women received in the media, could not understand why the press did not consider his dutiful wife a “good story.” “Here’s the point that I wish you would make in terms of building up Mrs. Nixon’s activities,” Nixon instructed Haldeman. “She’s done a helluva job …. But did you ever have any biographies on Mrs. Nixon, who goes to Peru and all those goddamn things around the country?” Nixon seemed oblivious to the fact that his treatment of his wife might impact on the country’s perception of her. Ironically, he assigned Haldeman to improve Pat’s image. “There’s a strong feeling,” Haldeman wrote Connie Stuart, “that we have dropped the ball in getting across the story on the First Family in a warm and effective way. For example, there’s an awfully good story in the fact that Mrs. Nixon is the most underestimated first lady. She thought of the lighting of the White House, the Thanksgiving Dinner [for the elderly] idea, the use of the boats for underprivileged children …. There is so much of this in the material that we now have that hasn’t gotten over.”

The women reporters who covered Pat Nixon admired her doggedness but felt sorry for her. “Nixon seemed to forget about her in big moments,” Donnie Radcliffe of the
Washington Post
recalled. “He didn’t want her to upstage or embarrass him. She was so controlled there wasn’t the excitement associated with covering the first lady. Perhaps she had been burned in the past …. At any rate, she didn’t have the flare or maybe the showmanship.” But Pat once had both. When she traveled on
her own, to Africa or to Russia, reporters glimpsed the warmth and the playful side of Plastic Pat. “She looked happier than I’d ever seen her,” Barrie Dunsmore, the ABC correspondent who covered Mrs. Nixon’s solo Africa tour, noted. “She didn’t have her usual gaunt look. She seemed comfortable dancing and putting on the tribal headdress. The limelight was on her and she was treated with tremendous dignity everywhere she went.”

Pat did not share her husband’s visceral suspicion of all reporters. When away from him, she treated them as colleagues and even friends. On a Moscow trip, Associated Press reporter Saul Pett was about to be hauled off by Soviet security when she came to his rescue. She claimed Pett as a member of her party, even offered the reporter a lick of her ice-cream cone in front of the agent. Pett later wrote her, “I just wanted to express my gratitude to you for being so nice to me during phase I and phase II of the biggest, noisiest floating crap game in town. You’ve been a heckuva good sport and the ice cream was especially good.”

Beneath the prim June Cleaver facade was a sharp eye. “She knew Brezhnev was having girlfriends in,” Sawyer recalled. “She knew how unsteady he was.” Her husband, for whom all social interaction was exhausting, was puzzled why she returned from her travels more rested than when she left. “The amazing thing,” Nixon wrote in his diary after her 1972 Africa tour, “is that Pat came back looking just as fresh as a daisy despite an enormously difficult, taxing schedule. She had press conferences in each country, had conversations with Presidents, and carried it all off with unbelievable skill.” Yet when the first lady accompanied her husband, he reduced her to an ornament. Planning his historic 1972 trip to China, the president assigned a very clear role to his wife. “If she goes,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, “then the P[resident] doesn’t have to go out into the people. If not, he will have to. If she goes, she goes solely as a prop.”

She was Nixon’s most underused asset. “I used to see her in the White House,” her aide Patricia Mattson recalled, “with three, four hundred people coming through and she would stand there in the Green or Blue or Red Room and greet every single one: shake their hands, look into their eyes and they would come away feeling they had met the first
lady of the United States.” She spent hours each day answering her mail, refusing to let her staff use an auto pen on her behalf. “This is a woman who didn’t expect anybody to do anything for her,” Mattson noted. “She worked every single night. You always got the file back the next morning. Often it was a very used envelope, not to waste the government’s money. She saw it as a job and a responsibility …. But we also saw a different Pat Nixon than the rest of the world did. She had the most wonderful sense of humor. She always had fun with the Secret Service agents, always teasing them about one thing or another. Their girlfriends, their ties ….”

Pat entertained more people, gave more White House tours and did more and better interior decorating than most of her predecessors or successors. “She told me exactly how she wanted to change every room, and all of it was in her head,” White House curator Clement Conger said. “She didn’t carry a notebook. And every change that she suggested was the right one. She had a marvelous eye for line, color and design.” Room by room, Pat restored all the major public rooms to their nineteenth-century elegance, raising money for the project herself. While she was first lady, the White House acquired 65 valuable paintings, 156 pieces of period furniture, 19 chandeliers and 22 rugs. But her husband did not wish her to take credit for even this most traditional of the first lady’s many roles. As usual, Haldeman was the messenger. “A recommendation has been made,” he wrote Pat, “that Clement Conger appear on ‘The Dinah Shore Show,’ a daily television show on NBC aimed primarily at women. He would discuss his work here, with basic emphasis on the guidance and encouragement he has received from you …. The interview would be conducted at the program’s normal studio in Hollywood and he would take along photographs which demonstrate some of the changes made.” The contrast between Jackie Kennedy’s highly personal and enormously successful tour of her White House restoration and Nixon’s scenario for a studio conversation with the curator spoke volumes about two presidential styles.

This time, Pat fired back. “Mrs. Nixon and I have discussed your memo,” Connie Stuart replied to Haldeman, “that Clem Conger appear on ‘The Dinah Shore Show’ to discuss the redecorating work Mrs. Nixon has done in the White House …. Once it [the entire White House] has been opened we hope to interest one of the networks in
doing a television special on the completed White House with Mrs. Nixon as the focal point.”

Only when one of his aides reminded Nixon that his wife could enhance his image did he temporarily react. “I think it is important for the President to show a little more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he moves through the crowd,” Roger Ailes wrote. “At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her. Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public. The more attention she gets the happier they are.”

The stories of Nixon ignoring his wife in public are legion. The one told most frequently involves the Nixons’ flight to San Antonio in separate planes. Pat, waiting on the tarmac, approached her husband with open arms. Senator John Tower reached her first and gave her a kiss. Her husband offered a stiff handshake. Did Pat remember the letter her husband had written her from the navy, “Whether it’s the lobby of Grand Central or the Saint Francis bar, I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good! Will you mind such a public demonstration?”

Pat and Dick were together mostly when protocol required it. They stood side by side bidding their guests good night after state dinners, and then went their separate ways, he to his study, she to her bedroom. Their daughter Julie was startled to find her mother in the upstairs residence after one such dinner, “… still dressed in her evening gown. She was swaying to the faint sound of music coming from the Grand Foyer where some of the guests were still enjoying the dancing. On tiptoes she moved gracefully across the gleaming parquet floor ….” Whatever thoughts, regrets, lost dreams floated with Pat Nixon across that polished floor, she kept to herself.

Everything was left unspoken between them. “When you’ve been married as long as we have,” Nixon told Frank Gannon, “you don’t have to put things into words.” It is unlikely Nixon ever told his wife something he wrote in his memoirs: “I knew that the road had been hardest of all for Pat. For almost twenty years of public life she had been wife, mother and fulltime campaigner …. She had done it all, not because she loved the attention or reveled in the publicity—she didn’t. She had done it because she believed in me. And she had done it magnificently. Now
she was loved by millions and no woman ever deserved it more. My deepest hope was that she felt that it had all been worth it.” Most revealing in this passage is Nixon’s uncertainty as to the answer.