Being Nixon: A Man Divided (34 page)

He also looked to cheer up his beleaguered family. They had been badly shaken by the March on Washington after the Kent State shootings. Returning from Camp David on May 9, a few hours after Nixon’s early morning adventures, the First Lady, Tricia, Julie, and David had been smuggled into the White House in unmarked cars. They found the Residence tomblike, with the shades drawn, echoing with the eerie, high-pitched whine of distant sound equipment and muffled chanting. Back at Smith and Amherst, Julie and David learned, the protesters had picked up a new chant: “Fuck Julie, Fuck David.”
²⁰

The president decided to hold a mock graduation ceremony for his daughter and her husband in the White House. He impulsively borrowed a set of Notre Dame academic robes from George Shultz, who had just given the commencement speech in South Bend, and dressed up Bebe Rebozo as the official commencement speaker. Rebozo gave a funny speech written by Pat Buchanan. Everyone ate chocolate cake and tried to be jolly. But Julie noticed that her mother was “quieter than usual….She did not seem to be a part of the party.”
²¹

The First Lady was still having trouble finding a comfortable or meaningful role. The staff came between her and her husband. The president, in his “RN” mode, sometimes delegated to Haldeman or Ehrlichman orders or requests for his wife and daughters. (Tricia reacted with a frosty disdain; Ehrlichman later wrote, “I told her father that I had sized her up as a very tough and troubled cookie.”)
²²

The press was rough on the First Lady. She played the role of traditional, dutiful wife at a time when women, or at least the kind of women who worked in the media, were trying on feminism. Her face, guarded and closed and a little sad, kept alive the “Plastic Pat” label and made some reporters wonder if she was depressed.
²³

She may have indeed been depressed during that first year; at least
some of the men in the West Wing thought so.
²⁴
But others closer to the Nixons saw how warm she could be, especially with visitors who were frightened or intimidated to be in the White House.
²⁵
Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter and David’s sister, lived on the third floor of the White House in the spring and summer of 1970. She remembered the elevator door opening and finding Mrs. Nixon with her arms open, ready to embrace her and make her feel comfortable. (Susan also found the president to be surprisingly easy company, mostly because he seemed to be genuinely interested in the views of an eighteen-year-old on foreign policy.
²⁶
Nixon’s struggle to make small talk worked to make him engage in serious conversation.)

Nixon had trouble showing his affection for Pat in public, and he was often off by himself, but he left her little notes of endearment on her bed. People who spent time around the Nixons had no doubt that he was in love with her. “She
loved
him,” said Connie Stuart, the First Lady’s chief of staff. Nixon was awkward, distant, and yet solicitous and tender with his wife. Stuart recalls watching them, knee to knee, on Marine One, the president’s helicopter. Nixon leaned forward and said, “You look very nice today. Is that a new outfit?” She answered, “Oh Dick, this is an old suit. You’ve seen it a dozen times.” Nixon sat back, chagrined. “He didn’t know what to say. But she wasn’t angry. She knew he was trying.” Their devotion was “real but not demonstrative.” When a White House photographer caught the First Couple holding hands, Stuart quickly gave the photo to the press without first checking with the First Lady, who, she knew, would say no to public displays of affection.
²⁷

Mrs. Nixon bridled at Haldeman’s tight rein, Stuart recalled: “We’d get memos saying, ‘The President wants,’ and she would say, ‘Well, maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.’ ” (Stuart, the wife of one of Haldeman’s advance men, Charles Stuart, was initially imposed on the First Lady but grew close to her.)
²⁸
Mrs. Nixon had been her husband’s adviser, and Haldeman had shut her out and also her daughters. Nixon abetted the arrangement. “Pat would complain to the
President, who would complain to Haldeman, who would complain to me to tell Mrs. Nixon not to complain,” said Stuart.
*
¹

The physical setting of the Residence “did not encourage togetherness,” said Stuart. “There were a series of rooms off a grand hallway, with no real living room. The Lincoln sitting room was way down the hall from the family living quarters. [The Nixons] often ate off trays in the hallway. They were prisoners of the second floor.” The First Lady sometimes escaped with the president to Camp David or Key Biscayne, but “she didn’t like Key Biscayne,” said Stuart. “It was very modest. There was nothing for her to do. So he would go by himself. It was a Dick and Bebe show.”

The war cast a constant shadow. “You can’t imagine how it felt,” said Lucy Winchester, the White House social secretary. “Protesters would scream things and the press would eat it up.” The president was “pre-occupied. We were at war and he took it hard.” Pat had one longtime close friend, Helene Drown, who would often visit her. Mrs. Drown was vivacious but perhaps too opinionated around President Nixon. “Mrs. Nixon loved Helene Drown because she made her laugh,” Connie Stuart recalled. “But the President didn’t like having Helene around. Helene would tell the president what to do, how to deal with the press or who to have to a White House dinner. Nixon would avoid her. The word was passed through Bob [Haldeman]: No more Helene.”

Looking back from the perspective of several decades, Stuart said, “It was a tragedy, the whole damn thing.” The stress of war, the officious staff, and their own innate reticence conspired to create distance between two people who loved each other. “There was no screaming or hollering,” recalled Stuart, “but there were some cold, stony silences.”

Pat was stoical. “Her favorite phrase was ‘onward and upward,’ ” said Stuart. “She got angry but didn’t sulk.” When Nixon ran for president in 1968, Pat told the
Los Angeles Times
, “We never have fights. We just move away from each other.”
³⁰
Actually, the First Lady did tangle with the president from time to time. Nixon was, for his time, unusually farsighted about hiring women. He had instructed his personnel aide Fred Malek to make an effort to find qualified women (along with minorities, Catholics, and non-Harvard grads).
³¹
When two Supreme Court seats opened up in September 1971, Pat told reporters, “I think it would be great to get a woman on the Court. And if Congress doesn’t approve her, they better see me.” She announced that she was working on her husband to make it happen.
³²
“Just to play an awful long shot,” as he put it to his aides, Nixon did consider a woman, Mildred Lillie, a state court of appeals judge from California. But when the male-dominated American Bar Association balked, he picked two men (Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist) instead. Pat rebuked her husband. “Boy is she mad!” Nixon told Haldeman.
³³

Nixon wanted to please Pat. Frank Gannon, who helped Nixon write his memoirs, compared Nixon to a “high school nerd who could never quite believe he had won the prettiest, coolest girl.”
³⁴
Nixon tried, however clumsily, to impress her. Henry Kissinger recalled to the author an evening when the president invited him to dine with the First Couple in the Residence. On the way over, Nixon awkwardly suggested that the national security adviser tell the First Lady a little bit about the president’s accomplishments in foreign policy. Nixon absented himself to go to the bathroom, and Kissinger dutifully started in reciting Nixon’s achievements. “Oh Henry,” Pat sighed, wearily but sweetly. “You don’t have to.”
³⁵

Nixon was more
worried about John Mitchell’s marriage than his own. In May of 1970, Nixon became so concerned about the wild behavior of Martha Mitchell—and its impact on the attorney general—that he considered dismissing his closest adviser.

Waving a cocktail, spouting off in her Southern sorority girl drawl, Martha had become a great favorite of the press. Speaking her own mind in TV interviews and inebriated late-night phone calls to reporters, she even seemed to reveal her husband’s true thoughts. “As my husband has said many times, some of the liberals in this country, he’d like to take them and exchange them for Russian Communists,” she told the
CBS Morning News
.
³⁶
Mitchell pretended to be amused by his wife’s outbursts, but he was having difficulty maintaining what Haldeman called his “usual imperturbable stance.”
³⁷
Martha passed out into her soup bowl at one dinner party and threw her shoe at her husband at another.
³⁸
During one of their marital spats, she tossed the attorney general’s pants out the window, requiring his FBI detail to retrieve them from the street.
³⁹

Mitchell seemed to withdraw, like a turtle into his shell, observed Ehrlichman.
⁴⁰
Never voluble, he was distracted, increasingly silent. Mitchell was stretched thin. He was not only doing the job of attorney general (“Mr. Law and Order”), he was summoned to all important national security meetings. He served on the “40 Committee” that approved covert actions and the equally crucial, if less formal, “Henry Handling Committee” that tried to keep Henry Kissinger from throttling Secretary of State Rogers.

Egged on by Ehrlichman, who saw Mitchell as a rival for power, Nixon began to lose faith in Mitchell, at least as a manager. The ex–Wall Street bond lawyer was not wise to the territorial ways of Washington, and Nixon correctly blamed his attorney general for botching the Haynsworth and Carswell Supreme Court nominations.
^41
,
*
²
Nixon held Martha partly responsible. When, after a few drinks, Martha
Mitchell called reporters and suggested that Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas should be “crucified” for voting against Carswell, Nixon told Haldeman, “We have to turn off Martha.”
⁴²

She was starting to place her midnight calls to the president as well as to reporters. Various aides tried to fend her off. One of them, White House military assistant William Gulley, recalled a 4:30
A.M
. conversation with Mrs. Mitchell, long breathy silences punctuated with, “Don’t you go back to sleep you little son-of-a-bitch. Remember that my husband is the fucking Attorney General of the United States of America.”
⁴³
On April 15, Haldeman’s notes show, Nixon fretted over how to muzzle Martha. “Bebe take on frontally?” Haldeman jotted on his notepad. “P. take M[itchell] on directly?”

But for Nixon to directly confront Mitchell was “unthinkable,” notes Mitchell’s biographer, James Rosen.
⁴⁴
Nixon avoided confrontation at all costs, particularly with anyone he regarded as an authority figure. Mitchell was a good deal quieter than Frank Nixon, but he was no less forceful a figure to Richard Nixon. Nixon did not summon Mitchell to the Oval Office; instead, he cast about for an emissary. “Someone has to talk to John,” Nixon said to Haldeman. A month later, on May 18, the president blurted to Haldeman, “Mitchell goes—if Martha doesn’t.”
⁴⁵

But Mitchell did not go. Nixon needed him too much. He had counted on Mitchell to be his strong and wise man, his consigliere. Some aides thought that the president would look to Mitchell at meetings to see if he was going on too long. If Mitchell seemed to be puffing strenuously on his pipe, that was the signal for Nixon to cool off or change the subject.
⁴⁶
Despite Ehrlichman’s undercutting, Mitchell remained a constant presence at meetings convened to deal with crises at home and abroad. Nixon was confident enough to play commander-in-chief in the war in Vietnam, but he needed a general he could trust to run the war in the streets, the growing wave of protests, riots, and bombings that threatened upheaval in the cities and on campus.

The tide of unrest was actually cresting in the spring of 1970;
soon, troop withdrawals and, in time, the end of the draft would deplete the protester ranks.
*
³
But Nixon had inherited an anxious government buffeted by an extremely turbulent time. Ehrlichman recalled that shortly after he came to the White House in January 1969, he had received a visit from an old law school classmate, Warren Christopher, the outgoing deputy attorney general. Christopher handed Ehrlichman a stack of documents and explained that they were martial law proclamations—the president needed only to fill in the date and the name of the city.
⁴⁸
The leftist rhetoric of the time was pre-revolutionary. Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of communication of the Black Panther Party, whose motto was “Off the Pig,” was calling on the masses to kidnap ambassadors, hijack airplanes, and blow up buildings. The Weathermen, a radical fringe of the student protest group Students for a Democratic Society, had become the Weather Underground and ominously disappeared. Between 1969 and the summer of 1970, hundreds of bombings, most of them unsolved, claimed forty-three lives.
⁴⁹
After a Weather Underground bomb factory blew up in a New York brownstone in March 1970, Pat Moynihan wrote Haldeman, “It seems to me that we have simply got to assume that in the near future there will be terrorist attacks on the federal government, including members of the Cabinet, the Vice President, and the President himself.”
⁵⁰
So many airliners were hijacked (thirty-three in 1969 alone, most of them by foreigners, not radicals) that the Secret Service told the president that his family members could no longer fly commercial.
⁵¹

Nixon felt sure that foreign agents—Russian? Cuban? North Vietnamese?—were behind the bombings and hijackings. But the U.S. intelligence services were unable to provide any direct proof.
⁵²
Nixon, chronically suspicious of bureaucratic foot-dragging, correctly believed
that turf battles stymied cooperation between the various spy agencies—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and military intelligence.