After the Fall

by Kasey S. Pipes

  “What starts the process, really, are the laughs and snubs and slights you get when you are a kid. . . . You were a good athlete but I was not and that was the very reason I tried and tried and tried.”6

  Then he spoke again of Watergate. “Now some people we both know think that you go stand in the middle of the bullring and cry, ‘mea culpa, mea culpa,’ while the crowd is hissing and booing and spitting on you. But a man doesn’t cry.”7

  Clawson, perhaps made uncomfortable by the introspective direction the conversation had had taken, tried to change the subject and inquired about Nixon’s leg.

  “They say it’s very bad,” he said. “But I’ve already told them to go to hell. I’ve told them I wasn’t setting foot outside the wall around my property no matter what. They can cut off the damn leg . . . I don’t care.”

  At that point, Nixon took another introspective turn.

  “You’ve got to be tough,” he said. “You can’t break, my boy, even when there is nothing left. You can’t admit, even to yourself, that it is gone.”8

  Clawson left Nixon worried about his former boss's physical condition. He wasn’t alone. Many of those who saw Nixon in the first few weeks since the resignation noticed his deteriorating health. His mind wandered, his words trailed off, and his spirit seemed broken. “Bob, a lot has happened, but I’ve realized something,” he told his longtime friend Robert Finch. Then after a long pause, he said quietly, “You don’t realize until too late who your real friends are.” Many of those friends now worried whether Nixon would live through the year.

  None more so than John Lungren, who returned on September 16 to examine Nixon again. Nixon valet Manolo Sanchez met the doctor at the gate and led him to the swimming pool area where Nixon was casually dressed and seated in a lounge chair next to Pat.

  “I believe the damn leg is worse,” the ex-president complained, with “more pain and swelling.” Lungren pushed his hands against the leg, and the pressure caused Nixon pain. Still, the doctor knew it wouldn’t be easy to get Nixon to do what was needed and go to the hospital. Julie Eisenhower was in town and Lungren enlisted her support.

  Nixon finally grew too ill and too weak to resist any longer. “How can I not say yes?” he asked. “Go ahead and call.”9

  Nixon was scheduled to be admitted to Long Beach Memorial on Monday, September 23. When he arrived, Lungren met him at the loading dock in the back of the hospital. The hospital, located on Atlantic Avenue, was widely regarded as one of the best in Southern California. The khaki-colored building had been around since 1937. Nixon had visited the hospital before and the Secret Service agents had decided that it was best to take him inside the back entrance.

  “Jack,” Nixon said to his doctor as he got out of the car, “the leg is even worse. The pain and swelling have traveled up to my thigh.” After riding up the elevator to the sixth floor, Nixon was placed in a wheelchair and pushed down the hall into a private room. There, Lungren performed an examination on the president and found the left leg “to be enlarged from the toes to the hip.” Still, Lungren hoped this could be treated with an anti-clogging drug called Heparin.

  After Lungren met with the family and told them about the exam and the medication he was prescribing, Ron Ziegler asked him to meet with reporters. The doctor made a brief statement in which he confirmed publicly for the first time that Nixon suffered from “chronic phlebitis” and talked about the treatment plan going forward.

  Once he left the press conference, Lungren made one more stop by his patient’s room.

  “I’m miserable,” Nixon told the doctor. “If I ever get out of this hospital, I’ll never enter one again.”10

  Lungren scheduled some standard testing. He specifically asked for the medical staff to perform a chest film and a lung scan. The next day as he looked over the results, Lungren noticed a blood clot in the right lung. Yet the doctor still believed the medication and the rest at the hospital were what Nixon needed.

  Not only did Lungren have to deal with Nixon’s health problems, but he also had to deal with the press. Nixon still made news around the country and reporters camped out at the hospital hoping for updates. Lungren routinely kept them updated, but he was becoming increasingly frustrated with some of the reporting—in particular, with speculation about a possible medical “hoax” that might keep Nixon from flying to Washington to take part in a trial. Even though Nixon had been granted a pardon, his former aides had not. Prosecutors were eager to put the former president on the stand as a witness. If they couldn’t prosecute him, they could at least persecute him with endless courtroom examinations.

  Lungren was enraged at the insinuation that he was taking part in a coverup. When Lungren again met with reporters on September 30, the event was billed as off the record—meaning that the reporters couldn’t quote anything said at the event but could gain a better understanding of what was going on with the president’s health. After opening with a statement in which he chided reporters and called the “hoax” talk a “despicable remark,” Rick Davis of CBS News asked Lungren if Nixon would be able to travel in the near future and testify.

  “Now you’re getting political,” the doctor angrily replied, “politically oriented. I don’t want to be that way. I want to give you my professional opinion.”

  Lungren was shocked at how “relentless” the reporters were in pursuing the idea of a “hoax” cooked up to keep Nixon from testifying.11

  The ex-president’s doctor retreated from press conferences and began focusing exclusively on his patient. On October 4, Nixon’s health had improved so much that Lungren discharged him and allowed him to return to San Clemente. Yet Nixon’s condition remained serious enough that Lungren notified Judge John Sirica (who was presiding over the Watergate-related trials in Washington) that Nixon’s phlebitis was life-threatening.

  Lungren remained bewildered at the politics that had now invaded his medical practice. And he was outraged at what had happened to his patient, who was also his friend. On October 13, Lungren joined the Nixons at La Casa de Pacifica for dinner. Nixon appeared in a dark suit and tie for the event that was supposed to be a casual affair. Yet before long the conversation turned serious.

  “Pat and I would both like to know what did we do wrong?” Nixon asked, clearly referring to Watergate and not his recent health scare. He then blamed the “double standard” of the press. After Lungren reflected on his own unhappy recent experiences with the media, Pat Nixon spoke up.

  “I would have destroyed the tapes, but Dick’s legal honesty prevailed,” she said.

  Lungren thought he had come for a casual dinner on a Sunday night, and instead he was hearing Richard and Pat Nixon talk openly about their feelings on Watergate.12

  “My excesses were never greater than any of my predecessors’,” Nixon continued with sadness tinging his voice. “Yet I attempted to protect my closest friends and in the process let my country down.”

  Lungren left the dinner worried not only about the physical health of his patient, but about his mental health, as well. Richard Nixon remained a deeply discouraged, depressed man.

  * * *

  Lungren had scheduled a lung scan and venogram for October 23. Nixon arrived again at Long Beach Memorial Hospital and was taken to the sixth floor for the tests. Although the test results revealed no new clots, blood-vessel blockage now existed in the femoral vein of his upper left thigh. The danger was that additional blood clots could develop and potentially cause a massive and fatal embolism.

  Lungren immediately went to Nixon’s room to give him the bad news.

  “You’re going to have to spend the night,” he told his patient. After consulting with another surgeon, Dr. Wiley Barker from UCLA, Lungren knew that only one option remained, and he and Barker met with the former president to discuss his options.

  “So it’s surgery then?” the patient asked.

  “If you want to go on living, it is,” Barker answered.

  “I can assure
you about that,” Nixon responded. “I’ve got too many things to do to go on being sick. Let’s just get it out of the way.”

  He then turned to Lungren.

  “Jack, I am glad you’re here,” he said. “Let’s go and get it over with.”

  Later that day, Lungren again met with the media to break the news. He read a statement that said the “presence of a large clot extending to the left external iliac artery” required that “urgent surgery should be scheduled.”13

  The primary challenge facing the doctors was that Nixon’s clotting now blocked more than 99 percent of his blood flow. And if the clot traveled to the lung, the result would be death.

  So Lungren decided to insert a “Miles Clamp” that essentially would allow for circulation of the blood flow and stop the clot from moving upstream.

  On October 30, 1974, at five o’clock in the morning, Nixon was wheeled into the surgery area. With Secret Service agents wearing scrubs, Lungren was joined by Dr. Eldon Hickman, a specialist in thoracic and cardiac surgery, and several other doctors. At five thirty, they began the operation.

  The Miles Clamp was successfully inserted, and by 6:50 a.m. they were able to take Nixon out of the surgery room and into a recovery room.

  Lungren went to tell Pat the news.

  “I think Dick is sufficiently stabilized for you to see him,” he told her.

  “Is he going to make it?” she responded.

  “I think so,” he said, “but the next forty-eight hours will be the critical period.”

  Then, suddenly, Nixon took a turn for the worse. Lungren had returned to his office, but early that afternoon he received a call from the hospital. Nixon’s blood pressure had dropped dramatically.

  When Lungren got back to the hospital, he found his patient in “vascular shock.” He was suffering from internal bleeding. Blood was storming into his vital organs. Lungren knew he had only about an hour to save the former president.

  As medical staff urgently began administering intravenous fluids and blood transfusions, Nixon continued to drift away. At one point, he fainted and began falling out of the bed toward the floor. Two medical personnel grabbed him and pushed him back onto the bed. One of them, a female nurse, instinctively slapped his face.

  “Richard, wake up!” she said. “Richard, wake up!” she repeated, and she continued to smack the former president across the face.14 Amazingly, Nixon began to wake up.

  He would recall those first few moments of consciousness: “My first recollection was of a nurse slapping my face and calling me. ‘Richard, wake up,’ she said. I knew it was not Pat or Lungren. In fact, only my mother called me Richard. When I woke up again, Lungren was taking my pulse.”

  Nixon remembered talking to Pat as she kept vigil by his bedside. “Pat and I have seldom revealed our physical disabilities to each other,” he said. “This time I couldn’t help it. I said I didn’t think I was going to make it. She gripped my hand and said almost fiercely, ‘Dick, you can’t talk that way. You have got to make it. You must not give up.’ ”

  On another occasion, Nixon awoke to see his old friend and longtime valet at his bedside.

  “Manolo,” he said, “I don’t think I’m going to get out of here alive.”15

  Though Nixon was now awake, he still hovered near death. At one point, he said he wanted to record some final thoughts. Pat began writing as he talked. Later, Ron Ziegler took her place before Frank Gannon took his.

  “Nixon looked utterly helpless with tubes up his nose and drips going into his veins,” Gannon said. “He said he knew he might not live through the night.” Nixon mainly spoke of his achievements and of what might have been. “It was a moving and rather terrifying experience,” Gannon remembered.

  For the next two days, Nixon improved slowly. Closely monitored by Lungren and his team of doctors and nurses, the former president’s blood pressure stabilized. More importantly, the clot showed signs of dissolving.

  The patient was improving, but the road ahead remained a difficult one.

  * * *

  The current president had been keeping up with his predecessor’s condition. And in late October, President Ford, who was campaigning around the country for Republican candidates in the upcoming midterm elections, found himself in Southern California. Always a thoughtful man, Ford suggested that he would go see Nixon. His staff was appalled. With just a few days to go before the election, why put Nixon back in the news?

  Ford insisted. “If there’s no place in politics for human compassion there’s something wrong with politics,” he said. He did add that he would “leave it to Pat” as to whether Nixon wanted a visit from Ford.

  On October 31, he called the former first lady to ask if she thought it “would help” if he came to see his old boss.

  “I can’t think of anything that would help Dick more,” came the response from Pat.

  On November 1, Nixon was sleeping when the loud sound of a hammer pounded into his dreams. He awoke to see hospital workers breaking through the door of his room, which had somehow become jammed. As it was pushed aside, in strode President Gerald Ford.

  “Hi, Jerry,” Nixon gamely offered as he lay half asleep with an air tube in his nose.

  “Oh, Mr. President,” Ford responded, shocked at Nixon’s appearance. They talked for several minutes about the upcoming election. Ford put a brave face on the likely Republican defeat.

  “We’re going to do fine,” he said. Nixon wasn’t fooled. He knew the Republicans would lose seats. But he wanted Ford to stay the course—especially with his new vice president. He urged him to “hang in there with Rockefeller. . . .”

  As Ford got ready to make his exit, he thanked Nixon for “all you did for me.”

  Nixon responded by thanking Ford for coming: “I’m not feeling too well, but I’m going to make it.” And no doubt thinking of the tremendous political risk that Ford had taken in coming to see him, Nixon thanked him and said he was “deeply grateful.”

  As Ford made his way to the motorcade outside the hospital, he stopped momentarily to brief reporters about the visit.

  “He’s obviously a very, very sick man,” Ford said, “but I think he’s coming along.”16

  Ford’s quote made headlines around the nation, but his words did little to quiet the demands of Democrats who still viewed Nixon’s illness as an excuse to escape from testifying in the Watergate trials in Washington. Judge John Sirica, presiding over the trial of former Nixon top aide John Ehrlichman, sent a team of doctors to examine Nixon. They unanimously agreed with Lungren and Ford: Nixon was indeed a very, very sick man.

  On November 14, a few days after Ford’s hopes of a strong election for the Republicans were met by a Democratic landslide in the midterm elections, Nixon was released from the hospital. Wearing a navy blue bathrobe, the former president was wheeled back to the elevator and then out to a waiting car. The three weeks in the hospital had taken a toll on Nixon and he had lost fifteen pounds. But he was alive. And that was no small feat. Lungren had worked magic.

  But at home in San Clemente, Nixon soon realized how far he had to go in his recovery. The ex-president took the Republican Party losses in the congressional elections personally. “Watergate is a terrible burden for all of our people. . . .” he lamented. He was especially pained by the defeat of four former prisoners of war in Vietnam who had run for Congress. “Just think, it was only a year ago in 1973 that we had that magnificent party for them and that the whole nation was at their feet.17

  But the bad news extended beyond the election. Nixon also learned that he owed nearly three hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. And since he no longer had health insurance as a government employee, he would have to pay the entire bill for his hospital stay. In fact, Nixon’s bills were enormous. He owed Long Beach Memorial Hospital twenty-three thousand dollars for his surgery, he owed a projected three hundred thousand dollars in legal bills, he owed $148,081 in back taxes for improper tax deductions he had claimed, h
e owed seventy-five thousand dollars in California state income taxes, and he owed thirty-seven thousand dollars a year in property taxes on La Casa Pacifica.

  But those were battles for another day. For now, he focused on his health. Pain still consumed his body. He took codeine for it, but hated the side effects. “I would wake up at night and the room would be upside down,” he wrote in his diary. So he began weaning himself off the painkillers.

  But the mental pain proved to be a bigger enemy than the physical pain. Though it was never diagnosed, Nixon was almost certainly experiencing depression during this time. As he wrote in his diary: “I have a rather depressed feeling again. I have simply got to get over this because we just can’t continue to exist with nothing but depression or bad news coming in.”18

  Later he would write that he and Pat would “see it through” and that the entire ordeal they were going through was a “test of character and we must not fail the test.”

  In his farewell speech to the White House staff in the East Room, Nixon had spoken about being in the “deepest valley.” Now he began to set his sights on the road that would lead him out of the valley.

  As he wrote in December, he knew he would have to “fight over the papers” and the “trial” and start thinking about writing “a book—maybe one, maybe more—and to follow it with speeches, television where possible, which will maybe put some things in perspective.”

  Here was the first glimpse of the roadmap that Nixon would use in guiding himself out of the valley of disgrace and despair. He would fight the government over his presidential papers, stand his ground in court, and start writing books and doing appearances as soon as the public was ready to hear from him again. He would try to escape his private turmoil by returning to the public square in some form. Nixon, ever the intellectual, had always been miscast as a politician. Now, at last, he could be what he had been created to be: a thinker and a scholar. In those dark days of late 1974, Nixon could see a shimmering light ahead. He could finally see a way forward.