Nixon's Secret (51 page)

While some viewers and reporters saw Jackie as a bit too perfect, labeling her a phony, Pat came across all too often as stiff and programmed, an unemotional smile pasted on her face. To her credit she agreed with some of the criticism, telling one reporter, “I may be dying, but I certainly wouldn’t say anything about it.”
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And she “spoke only occasionally about her fear of making a mistake that would hurt her husband—a fear that left her tense, curtailed her spontaneity in public, and allowed her detractors to caricature her.”
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However, when Nixon promised to campaign in all fifty states, while his advisers told him not to, Pat stood by his side. And as the pace of the campaign grew more frantic and the days before the election dwindled down to a precious few, Pat’s calm, steady hand on the tiller was in great contrast to Nixon’s increasingly angry outbursts and frustrations. She did get angry at him, however; when he used an aide as a go-between to cancel their private dinners together because of another campaign chore he chose over her company, she made sure to tell him so. As the
Parade
article reported, both Pat and Nixon agreed that she was emotionally and physically stronger than he was. During their international trips and political campaigns, she could easily work for fifty hours non-stop with little to eat.
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In the final month of the campaign, Nixon’s advisers realized Pat’s value and her popularity with American women. They dubbed the week of October 3, “Pat Week,” and sent out colorfully decorated vehicles to canvass key districts under the slogan, “Pat for First Lady.” And in the final sprint to Election Day she campaigned with Nixon on a barnstorming tour of several states, during which the couple managed only a few hours of sleep each night. But if the 1952 “secret fund” controversy didn’t cause Pat to hate politics completely, the fraud in the 1960 election surely did.

In the end, Kennedy won by a hair’s breadth. Prior to the official final tally, Nixon went on TV from his bedroom suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and acknowledged his loss. If you look at the 1960 video, you see Nixon smiling broadly, which must have taken a superhuman effort, when he says, “If the current trend continues, Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States.” The video also shows Pat clearly on the verge of tears. According to one published story, she then quickly took refuge in her separate hotel bedroom, where she could escape the frenetic campaign. When a friend passed by her door later, Pat beckoned her to come in. “Now I’ll never get to be First Lady,” she reportedly said.
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She was not initially in favor of Nixon running for president, however as she had done so many times when she was confronted with challenges—many not of her own doing—she had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the campaign and did whatever she could to win. The loss stayed with her for the rest of her life, and she always believed that Nixon should have insisted on a recount.

Pat Nixon was well aware of John Kennedy’s “womanizing” and deeply resented the efforts by the Democratic Madison Avenue ad men, efforts funded by JFK’s wealthy father, to depict the naval veteran as a “family man.” Pat Nixon told friends she looked forward to moving back to California and a more normal life.

The Nixons went first to Florida to decompress and then to New York for Christmas. They returned to Washington, where they sat through the Kennedy inauguration on January 20, and then promptly left for the Bahamas. They planned to stay for a month, but like many vacationers who soon grew bored with the soporific pace of their holiday hideaway, the Nixons returned to the states after only two weeks. Nixon himself was incapable of relaxation.

The former vice president moved to Los Angeles in February to rekindle his career as an attorney while Pat stayed in DC so their daughters could finish school there. It was their longest separation since the war. Pat and the girls returned to California in June, and the Nixons moved into a new home in the Beverly Hills area. The Nixons had shopped for a new home, but ultimately decided on a home in the Trousdale Lake area of Bel Air and were inordinately proud of the home. The following year it would be learned that Nixon had been sold the lot for a bargain-basement price by developer Clint Murchison Jr., who financed the development with millions from the mobbed-up Teamsters pension fund. Murchison would host Nixon in Dallas on November 21, 1963, the day before John Kennedy was murdered in that city.

Time healed many of her wounds as Pat renewed old friendships and together they began to entertain friends and other visitors. There, Nixon penned
Six Crises
, which hit the bookshelves in 1962. His dedication to Pat, “who also ran,” was viewed as cold and perfunctory, but Pat took it lightly, knowing of her husband’s aversion to any public displays of affection, even in print.

Nixon’s decision to seek the governorship of California in 1962 once again sorely tested their marriage because Pat had had enough of campaigns, even one confined to her home state. She wanted none of it, preferring to stay home as a family and to travel a bit. She even warned Nixon that if he chose to run, she would not campaign with him, so turned off politics as she was. Nevertheless, despite all her doubts about the wisdom of another grueling political campaign, she acknowledged his need to run. “I’m trapped,” she told a friend. “Which way can I go? He can’t help it. He must always have a crusade.”
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So when Nixon threw his hat in the ring, so did Pat. While Pat would not take to the hustings till the final weeks of the 1962 campaign, she would attend dozens of events and shake thousands of hands in Nixon’s ill-fated California drive. She must have been told with maddening frequency what a great First Lady she would have made.

Nixon’s bitter California loss, his first in his home state, validated Pat’s earlier fears and she retreated to suffer again in silence while he uttered his famous “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” It was perhaps the only statement that Nixon made during the entire campaign that she cheered, yelling “Bravo!” while she and the girls watched his press conference at home on TV. Yet, when the defeated man came through the door later, she rushed to hug him as he bolted past her and into the backyard to mourn alone. The loss caused the terms of their marriage to shift again. Pat was no longer as willing to cater to Nixon.

After Nixon’s defeat the family flew to Europe and then to Egypt with their close friends Jack and Helene Drown, before relocating to New York. People who knew Pat then said they “never saw her happier” than when her husband was “retired” from politics. Daughter Julie wrote, “As far as my mother was concerned, the ‘62 campaign was best forgotten,”
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and she enjoyed the anonymity that New York City afforded its residents and visitors. But in 1967 as Nixon edged toward a second Republican presidential nomination, “Mother was unmistakably troubled as she faced the prospect of another political race,” Julie wrote.
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Even as late as that Christmas, Pat was not on board. But “she told him she would help if he felt he had to make the race”
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because deep down she believed in Nixon’s talent and ability to solve many of the problems created by the ongoing Vietnam War.

When the “new Nixon” sewed up the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in that turmoil-filled summer of 1968, Pat too was seen as a new woman, more outgoing and less reserved than anyone could remember. I think it was those years in the wilderness that had had a calming and restorative effect on her. Pat affected an easier and more modern “look.” While never a purchaser of couture like Jackie Kennedy, she still dressed in a simple and flattering style. She loved to shop at Bloomingdale’s in New York, knowing full well that the days of privacy would soon be over. As for the inevitable criticisms, she said, “I am who I am and I will continue to be.”
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As she told Gloria Steinem in a 1968 interview, “Now, I have friends in all the countries of the world. I haven’t just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do. Oh no, I’ve stayed interested in people. I’ve kept working. Right here in the plane I keep this case with me, and the minute I sit down, I write my thank you notes. Nobody gets by without a personal note. I don’t have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I’ve never had it easy. I’m not like all you . . . all those people who had it easy.”
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Pat rallied to support Nixon’s comeback campaign with a makeover. She abandoned her Mamie Eisenhower–style bangs for the popular bouffant hairdo of the day in a lighter blond color. Still a handsome woman at fifty-five, she was again an asset on the campaign trail. As Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote, “It took courage to re-enter public life as spiritedly as she did. She had no illusions about campaigns or Washington; no confidence that success lay at the end of the rainbow. She knew that her husband was bucking history by running. If he won, he would be the only presidential candidate to have been defeated, denied re-nomination four years later, and then succeeded in recovering sufficient political strength to win on the second bid,”
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And she broke new ground when she became the first presidential candidate’s wife to go on her own campaign tour instead of just appearing with her husband at selected events. She even was able to put up with Nixon’s autocratic campaign manager and later White House Chief of Staff Haldeman (known as the “Iron Chancellor”), who snidely called her “Thelma” behind her back.

In the closing hours of the 1968 race and with the evaporation of Nixon’s earlier lead over LBJ’s vice president Hubert Humphrey, the polls were showing a much closer race than expected. The Democratic-leaning Harris poll even had Humphrey leading Nixon by 3 percent. Nixon prepared his wife and daughters for the possibility that they might once again experience defeat. At 6 a.m. with the election still in doubt and TV commentators reporting that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was holding back (largely Republican) precinct votes from Cook County, Pat experienced a wave of nausea recalling the voter fraud of the 1960 campaign. She ran into the bathroom, where she was sick to her stomach. After Daley was forced into releasing the votes, Illinois went to Nixon, giving him a stunning, come-from-behind victory by some half million votes over Humphrey. Pat had been spared a replay of that terrible night in 1960.

The White House had changed greatly since the Eisenhower administration, and so had coverage of the First Lady, which had been perfunctory as far as Mamie Eisenhower was concerned. Now substance replaced the superficiality of the First Lady reportage, and Pat saw the press on a regular basis. And by the end of the Nixon presidency Pat had visited seventy-eight countries, the most ever by a First Lady.
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Her daughter Julie said Nixon’s first campaign manager in Whittier in 1946, Roy Day, made perhaps the best assessment of how Pat would play the role of First Lady. In an interview the day after Nixon’s election, Day said, “Well, she’ll never be traipsing along behind the president, she’ll never be in front of him, but she’ll always be at his side.”
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In fact, during the Nixons’ historic trip to China in 1972, Pat enchanted Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou En-lai so much that he gave two rare pandas to the United States as a gift to her from China.

Although most everyone who remembers the JFK White House credits Jacqueline Kennedy for the major makeover of the mansion, it was Pat who quietly and without fanfare transformed the mansion’s rather pedestrian art collection into a preeminent national treasure. And just as she had been an excellent hostess in her own home, she was equally attentive to all guests at the White House, hoping to make everyone, from foreign heads of state to Appalachian quilt makers, feel at ease in the historic building. When I attended a Christmas party at the Nixons’ home in Saddle River, New Jersey, I found her to be friendly and deeply devoted to her husband. She was charming and gracious to everyone, a sharp contrast to Nancy Reagan, who had her intense likes and dislikes and never bothered to hide them.

When the end of the Nixon presidency loomed in August 1974 and the family gathered in the Lincoln Sitting Room to discuss whether he should resign or fight charges of an impeachable offense, it was Pat who first said, “But, why?” She did not even deign to look at the transcripts of the incriminating phone call tapes that the rest of the family read during the meeting. As Nixon wrote in his
Memoirs
, “Pat, who had let the others do most of the talking in our meeting, told me that now, as always before, she was for fighting to the finish.”
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I met Mrs. Nixon as a sixteen-year-old at the Women’s National Republican Club in Manhattan in late 1967. I was wearing an enormous “Nixon for President” button and approached the low dais where she was seated. “I like your button,” she said. I was beaming.

In the holiday season of 1979 I would spend two hours with Pat Nixon at a Christmas party for staff, family, and the inner circle where both she and the former president socialized. Nixon gave a brief speech about Christmas and the state of the country and toasted the new year by enumerating the challenges of the forces of freedom around the world. “Always remember those in uniform, the men and women serving this country,” Nixon said. “I was one of them. They risk their lives and give their all every day, while others sit on their butts and complain about everything.” Pat Nixon stared adoringly at her husband through his entire remarks just as she had on thousands of platforms across the country in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1962, 1968, and 1972. It was a gaze the media would use to mock her, but it was undiminished. She had an amazing ability to put people at ease and seemed to have an amazing repoire with children.

Pat Nixon’s cousin, Ned Sullivan, lived in Westchester and had served as an advance man to Nixon on occasion. Sullivan was friendly with Nixon crony Robert Abplanalp and his Republican consigliore Bill Griffin, a burly Irishman. Ned and I chatted with Mrs. Nixon about the looming 1980 presidential contest. Mrs. Nixon’s cousin Ned was a Connally man. I argued for Reagan. Mrs. Nixon heard both arguments, whereupon she winked and said “I like Reagan.” She then turned on her heel to join another group of Nixonites imbibing in the holiday cheer.