Kati Marton (33 page)

THE EMOTIONAL COST
of giving her husband advice was too high, so Pat stopped giving it. “Her way of dealing with conflict,” Julie Nixon Eisenhower noted, “was to ignore it.” On those rare occasions when she spoke up, as when she suggested he appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, he paid her no heed. She hated emotional confrontation and prided herself on never forcing an issue with her husband. Her greatest contribution to his life, she said, was “I never nag him.” She let him make all the political decisions because that’s the way he wanted it. She believed in him. She believed he was a great man who would never get a fair shake from the media. Her role was to protect him. She was temperamentally ill-suited for the more difficult and more important role of the fully engaged partner. Nor was he capable of engaging in such a relationship.

Diane Sawyer blames the turbulent times of the Nixon presidency for the Nixons’ estrangement. “They got to the White House in the middle of the Vietnam War. Nixon was making Silent Majority speeches and bombing Cambodia and people were taking to the streets. He was getting up in the middle of the night to go out to talk to the protesters. Can you imagine being married to a man who is basically walking in and out of nuclear explosions, one after the other?”

Nineteen seventy-two should have been a triumphant year for the Nixons. He had just won the presidency by a greater margin than any Republican in history, nearly twenty million more votes than his opponent, George McGovern. It was his final election. At last he could appease his Quaker conscience by forging disarmament and peace treaties with Moscow and Beijing. Triumph was not Nixon’s preferred state, however; combat was. He could not savor with his wife the second-largest landslide in American history. The morning after his victory he slumped into a strange melancholy. As always, he chose the most secluded corner of the White House as his retreat, the Lincoln Sitting Room. “I was not as upbeat as I should have been …. I think the very
fact that the victory was so overwhelming made up for any failure on my part to react more enthusiastically than I did.”

During his first post-election Cabinet meeting, instead of thanking his team for their support, he asked for their resignations. A stunned Cabinet staggered out of a session they expected to be a celebration. “I did not take into account the chilling effect this action would have on the morale of people who had worked so hard during the election and who were naturally expecting a chance to savor the tremendous victory, instead of suddenly having to worry about keeping their jobs,” he wrote. An act this callous was surely a sign of a man who had lost his political survival skills, along with his humanity.

A single, overwhelming emotion washed over the first lady the morning after her husband’s final election: relief. “I’m going to relax in these last four years,” she told her staff. “I want to enjoy my family, spend more time with Tricia and Julie. I want to enjoy my grandchildren as they come along. I’m going to spend time with my friends, go out to lunch …. I’m going to shop.” Her plan, simply, was to reclaim her life. She was not even going to replace her departing chief of staff. Pat was going to peel off the plastic shell of public life and finally live the way she had always wanted.

On June 17, 1972, a “third-rate burglary” shattered those dreams. Watergate would be the signal event of the Nixon presidency and permanently alter the American political landscape. As always in times of crisis, Nixon became less communicative than ever with Pat, relying more and more on Haldeman and Rebozo for companionship. Increasingly, the Nixons used their daughters as the bridge between them, and were lost without them. Tricia and Julie loved both of their parents but saw their awkward, beleaguered father as the more vulnerable. Julie took on the role of trying to explain her father to the world, while Tricia, who suffered from migraine headaches, retreated from public view. When their daughters decided to spend Christmas in Europe with their own partners, Pat and Dick were bereft. “It is inevitable,” Nixon wrote in his diary, “that not only the President but the First Lady become more and more lonely individuals … who have to depend on fewer and fewer people who can give them a lift when they need it.” The Nixons could not
even bring themselves to open their presents on Christmas morning in Key Biscayne. “Later,” Dick said, when his wife suggested they comply with the ritual. But later never came, and they took their presents back to the White House unopened.

When Pat heard her husband had been taping his conversations with his aides, her immediate reaction was “Destroy those tapes.” They are like love letters, she said, private. It was advice that might have saved his presidency. But her husband did not consult her, and she had stopped offering him advice. For the country obsessed with Watergate, Pat knew that nothing she did would have much meaning. She dutifully answered her mail, for the volume was up to five hundred letters a night. In April, Nixon was forced to fire his two closest aides, Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman. Typically, he could not bear to face them, and asked his old friend Secretary of State William Rogers to do it. Rogers refused, so Nixon had to fire them himself. Following a television address informing the nation of the latest development in the unfolding scandal, the president’s family gathered to show support. Lifeless, his arms limp by his sides, Nixon mumbled, “I hope I don’t wake up in the morning.” His daughters hoped their mother had not heard.

The country was transfixed by the sordid details of CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect the President), of hush money, plumbers and bagmen with tentacles into the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and, finally, into the Oval Office itself. By March 1974, Attorney General John Mitchell and seven White House aides, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman and counsel John Dean, had been indicted on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The president was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

Pat and Dick did not discuss the scandal that was gradually engulfing them. “We never sat down as a family to talk about Watergate,” Julie recalled. Knowing only the bare outlines of the scandal, Pat urged Dick to fight on. That had always been her role.

Nixon’s spokesman, Ron Ziegler, advised that he go before Congress and admit everything he knew about Watergate. “Just tell it and tell us why it happened,” Ziegler urged, knowing that the American people are forgiving of their leaders’ mistakes, as long as they face them honestly. Nixon shook his head. “It won’t work,” he replied. “What has been
done has been done …. People’s basic character just doesn’t change. Some try to change—some try very hard—but generally it ends up either good or bad. It all depends on one’s strength of soul.” The president’s fatalism, his essential pessimism, his low self-esteem, as well as his grandiosity, are all contained in this brief, sad exchange.

Almost to the end, Pat carried on with her duties. Her final trip as first lady was to South America for the inauguration of the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela in March 1974. She received standing ovations in both countries for her courage in returning to the scene of violent anti-Nixon protests. On March 16, Pat’s sixty-second birthday, she flew to Nashville to join her husband for the opening of the Grand Old Opry. Seated at an upright piano onstage, the president surprised his wife by playing “Happy Birthday” for her with the audience joining in. Flushed with pleasure, Pat sprang from her seat at the back of the stage and, with arms outstretched, rushed toward her husband. Nixon turned away from her and signaled the master of ceremonies to proceed with the program. Those present never forgot the shocked expression on her face.

SPRING BROUGHT ITS USUAL STUNNING
flamboyance to Washington that year. It went unnoticed by those inside the White House. The president still had not discussed the approaching disaster with his wife. He had not solicited her opinion on what they should do to salvage the public life they had jointly crafted. As always, he admired her “dignity”—but from afar. Pat’s meals were brought to her upstairs in her bedroom, the trays returned barely touched. Her husband was aware of what he was putting her through. “God knows how she could have gone through what she does,” he wrote in his diary, “I simply don’t know.” But he did not reach out to her. He asked Rebozo to prepare the Nixon family for his resignation, while he shut himself in his favorite sanctuary. “That night I began the painful task of telling my family about the June 23 tape and preparing them for the impact it would have on my attempts to remain in office,” wrote Nixon. The three women were shattered by what the tapes revealed. The conversation of June 23, 1972, in which the president discussed the plan to use the CIA to head off the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, left no doubt about the presidential cover-up.

Tricia wrote in her diary, “Julie and I talked some more and I learned that Mama had not been told of Daddy’s tentative decision [to resign]. Mama was in her sitting room at her desk. It is strange how you try to spare those you love from worry. Strange because worry is contagious and is difficult to conceal other than with words. So in the end it is kinder to reveal what the person you are trying to spare already feels.” Pat was not spared.

Even as their lives were crumbling, the three women thought only about propping up the tortured man. Tricia wrote during the final week in the White House, “Now we must all be as stoical as is humanly possible and show him [our love] more than ever. We must not collapse in the face of this ordeal. We must not let him down.” There is no reproach from his wife or his daughters, no hint that it was he who had let them down.

On the eve of his resignation Nixon summoned the White House photographer to the upstairs solarium for a final family portrait. “Ollie,” an astonished Pat greeted the photographer, “we’re always glad to see you. But I don’t think we need pictures now.” The president signaled the photographer to proceed. “I tried to hide partially behind Mother,” Julie remembered, “because tears were in my eyes and I didn’t want them to be recorded in the photograph … it is very difficult to tell that I am crying. But my mother hates that picture and when it was being considered for inclusion in my father’s memoirs she told me why, ‘Our hearts were breaking and there we are smiling.’”

On August 8, 1974, Richard Milhous Nixon walked into the Oval Office for the final time. His family had wanted to be there when he made his announcement, but he told them he preferred to be alone. The man who had fought harder, and against greater odds, than almost any other to reach this office, announced, “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”

His wife’s ordeal was not yet over. A final indignity awaited her in the East Room where the Cabinet, members of the administration and the White House staff had gathered for a last good-bye. “Who authorized television?” Pat asked, for the room was ablaze with lights. “I did,” the president said. With his family standing behind him, Nixon stepped up to the podium and thanked his staff for “the sacrifice all of you have
made to serve in government ….” Then, in a voice thick with emotion, he spoke of his father and his mother, Hannah. “She will have no book written about her,” he said, his voice breaking, “but she was a saint.” Nixon closed by reading Theodore Roosevelt’s tribute to his first wife, Alice, at the time of her death. He said not a word about his wife, who stood just behind him fighting back the tears. It was as painful a spectacle as any he had ever staged.

Pat and Dick walked out of the East Room, across the red carpet flanked by the color guard at attention. Before boarding the
Marine One
helicopter, they smiled their terrible smiles at the wreckage below. One last time Nixon executed his jaunty over-the-head wave. Pat murmured, “It’s so sad, so sad.” And the Nixon presidency was over.

Pat was never rewarded for her loyalty, by her husband or by her country. Even her official White House portrait looks sad, a woman on the brink of tears. In San Clemente, California, she retreated from public view and stopped performing even for her husband. She declined to be her husband’s official hostess and spent her days cultivating her small garden. “I think she had lost heart,” Julie said. “It didn’t matter to her anymore what happened. I don’t think she felt things could ever be what they were.”

In 1976, Pat suffered a stroke from which she never fully recovered. Her friends say it was stress-related. Her bubble of denial about her husband’s treatment of her was burst by one of her own friends. Helen Smith had worked for her in the White House and was appalled at the depiction of Pat as a broken-down alcoholic in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book
The Final Days.
To counter that image, Smith wrote her own account, an entirely sympathetic portrait of a woman loved and respected by her staff but cruelly ignored by her husband. The article had a powerful effect on Pat. Given the source, she could not easily dismiss it. This public lifting of the veil on her marriage shattered her fragile emotional balance. She had lived a lifetime evading hard truths about her own choices; now there was no further escape. The article’s publication coincided with the decision of the New York State Bar Association to disbar her husband.