The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Henry Kissinger, initially national security adviser and later secretary of state, has written of Nixon in his memoirs with compassion, yet the odder aspects of Nixon’s nature surface time and again. “Nixon seemed driven by his demons,” Kissinger recalled, in a description of the 1973 ceremony at which he was elevated to secretary of state. “His remarks at the swearing-in ranged from the perfunctory to the bizarre.” Among other things, Nixon had relentlessly pursued the topic of Kissinger’s hair, going on and on about how he was the first secretary since World War II who did not part it. At other times Kissinger emerged from his office after a phone call with Nixon—he had his staff monitor such calls—rolled his eyes, and asked, “Did you hear what that madman said?”

  _____

  Just months before he joined the Nixon administration, in 1968, Kissinger had been a dinner guest at the home of Fawn Brodie, professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of an acclaimed book on Thomas Jefferson. At the dinner, Brodie recalled, he “electrified our guests by telling them that Richard Nixon had had four years ‘on the couch.’ ”

  A decade later, when Brodie came to write her book on Nixon,4 she asked Kissinger for an interview, reminding him of his comment about Nixon’s supposed sessions with an analyst. By that time, however, having served eight years at the pinnacle of government, Kissinger no longer wished to discuss such topics. Others, including the longtime press aide James Bassett and Herbert Katcher, an attorney for the New York Psychoanalytic Association, also referred to Nixon’s having received treatment from a psychoanalyst. Katcher certainly was referring to a therapist other than Dr. Hutschnecker. Did Nixon, then, at some point overcome his fear of analysis? If so, who was the psychiatrist involved?

  The sketchy evidence on the subject suggests the other doctor was a woman. Dr. Hutschnecker himself recalled having heard as much but said he never learned the analyst’s identity. Robert Finch, Nixon’s aide and friend from early days in Congress, said that he too had heard Nixon had been treated by a “woman psychiatrist in New York.” Sources differ on whether the city involved was New York or Los Angeles. The suggestion, though, is that the treatment occurred after Nixon’s defeat in the 1962 gubernatorial elections, the lowest ebb of his prepresidential career. The chronology, and what we know of his use of Dr. Hutschnecker, also indicates that—if he did see an analyst—it was at that time, when he was based in Los Angeles.

  Professor Foster Sherwood, a former dean of UCLA, has recalled a woman psychoanalyst’s asking his advice on depositing her files on Nixon. Interviewed for this book at age eighty, he said he could not remember the analyst’s name. Other information suggests the analyst died in the late sixties. Katcher revealed the analyst’s identity to his brother Leo, but swore him to secrecy. Both Katcher brothers are now dead, and there the trail ends—except for one last detail. While refusing to reveal the woman analyst’s name, Leo Katcher said she had been “deeply troubled” at the possibility that Nixon might one day achieve great power.5

  Although he never expressed them publicly, Dr. Hutschnecker allegedly made similar comments about Nixon. That he had such concerns of course does not imply that he considered Nixon mentally ill. “He didn’t have a serious psychiatric diagnosis,” the doctor told the author, “Nixon wasn’t psychotic. He had no pathology. But he did have a good portion of neurotic symptoms.”

  Six months into the presidency, in 1969, after a story in the press about the consultations by his famous patient, Hutschnecker responded with a long article in Look magazine. “During the entire period that I treated Mr. Nixon,” he wrote, “I detected no sign of mental illness in him. . . . After his election as President, I felt confirmed in my belief . . . that Richard Nixon had not only the strength but the imagination and clarity of goal that I thought were prerequisites for a successful leader.”

  It may be that the doctor was damning with faint praise. The title of his Look piece was “The Mental Health of Our Leaders,” and its message—repeating an old Hutschnecker theme—was that “a kind of mental health certificate” should be required of all young adults, as a precondition for their seeking any responsible political job.

  Curious though this suggestion may sound, even in the year 2000, Hutschnecker was not alone in holding this view. Dr. Lawrence Kubie, a former president of the New York Psychoanalytical Society, said in 1972 that he favored “a careful medical screening of every candidate for important office, including psychological screening. . . . Perhaps the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health or an organization like the New York Academy of Medicine, or some of our major and presumably incorruptible schools, could be assigned to the task.”

  In the Look piece, Hutschnecker returned to a favorite formula, derived from Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, that identified four personality categories in terms of reaction to stress:

  1) The strong, excitatory type

  2) The lively

  3) The calm-imperturbable

  4) The weak, inhibitory

  Applying those categories to humans, Hutschnecker said, Types One and Four were “the most likely to break down under stress. Therefore, they become a risk in social and certainly in political positions of responsibility. Men of Type Two represent the most desirable leaders because they show a controlled reaction when exposed to stress.”

  Nixon, Hutschnecker wrote hopefully in 1969, “may turn out to be a Type Two leader, the controlled, adjusted personality. . . .” In 1995, in his interview for this book, Hutschnecker conceded that Nixon had in fact been a Type One, a person who “released his aggression so as to feel better.” This was “healthy for an individual who cannot live with inner tension, but mature it was not.” In The Drive for Power, a book published after the president’s resignation, the doctor wrote that, in spite of the pressure of office, Nixon had not had a “nervous breakdown.”

  How did Hutschnecker account for Nixon’s role in Watergate and the collapse of his presidency? “I am in no position to give an answer,” wrote the doctor, who is not known to have seen his patient for many months. “I wish to express my hope that at some point in history all can be told.”

  The Hutschnecker-Nixon story probably never will be fully told. The doctor was still alive, age 102, as this book went to press. He had, however, become wheelchair-bound and without the power of speech, following a fall at his home in Connecticut. Records relating to Nixon’s contacts with Hutschnecker in the fifties, stored at the National Archives, are properly withheld on the grounds of doctor/patient privilege. If there are signficant records for a later period, and if they are held at the Nixon Library, it is unlikely that they will be released in the foreseeable future.6

  _____

  Some astute observers, men who followed Nixon from start to end of his career, have wondered if any man who drives himself to the peak of power in America can arrive at his goal and remain entirely—however inadequate a word—normal.

  “The awful burden of the presidency does things to the mind,” said Dr. Paul Smith, former president of Whittier College. “I know that the thinking process can be frightfully inhibited by mental overload. . . . Maybe Nixon was mistreated, I don’t know. Maybe he mistreated himself. . . .”

  A presidential candidate, John Ehrlichman thought, “is not like ordinary Americans. The aspiration demands enormous sacrifice. . . . Candidates are hybrid humans, from whom are plucked the normal joys, emotions and experiences of life, that they may single-mindedly run the race. . . . Then, when one of them is elected, we wonder at the man in the White House who is so strangely different from the rest of us. . . . It doesn’t lead to a well-rounded individual.”

  “They’ve nearly all been strange,” said Len Garment. “I mean, they are the strangest. Just to go through all that to become President of the United States. With the exception of most of those who sort of inherited the office—George Washington, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford, who turned out to be men of exemplary character and (for po
liticians) decency, courage, and common sense—so many of them were very weird. Those who campaigned for the presidency have to have been among the strangest of Americans. Their life is a combination of lying and cheating, nobility and patriotism, and cowardice. There’s a sort of presidential gene, a predilection in people who become President that makes them very strange. And Richard Nixon just happened to be one of the strangest of a very strange crew.”

  “Deep down,” commented Henry Kissinger, “one could never be certain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within oneself.”

  Former Attorney General Elliot Richardson had no difficulty, years after his own bruising experience during Watergate, in reconciling Nixon’s talent and intellectual capacity with his human fragility. “You could well say he never would have been president,” said Richardson, “if he hadn’t had that basic core of insecurity. You could say that, except by chance, no totally healthy human being is likely to become President of the United States. . . .”

  11

  * * *

  Bebe Rebozo is a man of great character and integrity.

  —Richard Nixon, in his memoirs

  Part of Dr. Hutschnecker’s early prescription for Nixon was a vacation in the sun. Nixon headed for Florida and there began a relationship that, in the words of Bob Finch, “provided therapy for relief of tension.” It was a relationship Nixon maintained until he died, so discreetly at first that no coverage of it appeared in the New York Times for nearly twenty years. As former congressional reporter George Reedy was still saying long after the presidency had ended, it has remained “the most important unsolved mystery in Nixon’s life.”

  The new friend was Charles Gregory (“Bebe”) Rebozo, American-born Cuban property speculator and wheeler-dealer and—for Nixon—much else besides.

  _____

  The friendship began, apparently, with an emergency phone call from the Florida Democratic senator George Smathers to former Miami city manager Richard Danner. “Dick,” said Smathers, calling from Washington, “is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. We’re all concerned about him.”

  Smathers had been elected to the House at the same time as Nixon, and both subsequently moved up to the Senate. He was on the right wing of the party, sufficiently so to have sent Nixon tips on how to defeat his fellow Democrat Helen Douglas, and was also prominent on the Washington social scene, known as Gorgeous George for his success with women. When an exhausted Nixon turned to him for help, Smathers packed him off on a train to Florida.

  Danner, one of the friends Smathers assigned to look after Nixon, recalled his arriving in Miami wearing a heavy raincoat, “like a northern hick.” Danner took him for treatment by an osteopath, who in his turn recommended sun and sea air. So it was, apparently in December 1951,1 that Nixon first stepped aboard the boat of another pal Smathers had lined up, Bebe Rebozo.

  This encounter did not go well. “Bebe wrote me a letter after that visit,” Smathers recalled, “saying, ‘George, don’t ever send that dumb son of a bitch Nixon down here again. He’s a guy who doesn’t know how to talk, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t chase women, doesn’t know how to play golf, doesn’t know how to play tennis. . . . He can’t even fish.’ ”

  The “son of a bitch,” however, was back in Florida within three months, and by then Rebozo had warmed to him. “I don’t want to say that Bebe’s level of liking Nixon increased as Nixon’s position increased,” Smathers said dourly, “but it had a lot to do with it.” From that point on the pair invariably vacationed together. Although Pat was often along, and Rebozo became an uncle figure to the Nixon girls, Nixon increasingly spent time with Rebozo alone.

  The friend from Florida was there to support Nixon at all the milestones on his political trail: in Florida after the 1952 election that made him vice president, after the major Republican setback in 1958, and at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1960, when news came in that he had lost to John F. Kennedy. In 1962, when Nixon ran for the governorship of California, Rebozo was there to comfort him in defeat. He traveled around the world with Nixon during the wilderness years of the mid-sixties and celebrated with him after he reached the White House in 1968. Nixon wrote his inaugural address while with Rebozo in Florida, and a rough calculation indicates that Rebozo was at his side one day in ten for the duration of the presidency.

  The friendship had grown so close that Rebozo effectively had the run of the White House and his own phone number there. He flew on Air Force One, donning the coveted flying jacket bearing the presidential seal, cruised on the presidential yacht with Nixon and Kissinger, and picked movies for Nixon to watch at Camp David.

  Despite his intimacy with the president, Rebozo long managed to keep a relatively low profile. Then came Watergate, and he was suddenly at the center of allegations about misuse of campaign contributions, gifts of jewelry for Pat Nixon, and secret presidential slush funds. Still he stayed close to Nixon, whenever possible under deep cover. He slipped into the White House without being logged in by the Secret Service and, using a false name, into Nixon’s hotel suite during a trip to Europe.

  Rebozo was one of the first to advise Nixon it was probably best that he resign.2 Afterward he frequently joined him in his exile in California, remaining a close companion through Nixon’s years of rehabilitation until, by one account, he sat at Nixon’s bedside during his final illness in 1994.

  “I say to myself,” Rebozo recalled of the occasion he advised Nixon to resign, “ ‘What’s a punk kid like you, Bebe, doing talking to the President of the United States that way?’ ” That remains a valid question. Who was Bebe Rebozo, and what accounted for the closeness he achieved with Richard Nixon, a man almost notorious for his lack of close friends?

  Born Charles Gregory Rebozo the same year as Nixon, he never used Charles Gregory except as a cover name for business operations. He was Bebe from infancy, after one of his nine siblings had trouble pronouncing the word “baby.” (Everyone pronounced it “Be-be” except Nixon, who called him Beeb.) The youngest child of Cuban immigrants living in Tampa, he had Latin good looks—they won him the “best-looking boy” vote at high school—but, as he came to adulthood in the Depression, little else to launch him in life.

  While wealthier classmates went on to college, Rebozo worked for a year as a steward with Pan American Airways, flying Caribbean routes. Then he pumped gas and chauffeured tourists before embarking on his first business venture, Rebozo’s Service Station and Auto Supplies, at the age of twenty-three. After branching out into the lucrative retread tire trade during World War II, he emerged in 1945 as a man of some substance.3

  By 1951 the substance had grown considerably, for Rebozo had established a self-service laundry chain and begun buying and selling land. The land speculation had started in a small way at the gas station, where he papered the bulletin board with real estate notices. Then he formed syndicates with friends, buying up undeveloped tracts that he sold at huge profits as Miami expanded. Rebozo also ran two finance companies at a time when Florida law permitted the charging of exorbitant interest. He was a hardheaded businessman: A 1953 writ of attachment showed that he repossessed a baby car seat, a tricycle, and a toy truck from a couple unable to repay a $150 debt.

  By now Rebozo had also broken into Miami society. A woman who knew him after the war recalled an occasion when Rebozo was asked to make up the numbers at a posh party. The nervous hostess, who had expected him to look “as if he worked in a garage” or like “a flashy gigolo,” was relieved to find him immaculately turned out, with “nice instincts.” Later, when Nixon was president, he had Rebozo buy clothes for him. “Blue suits,” said one of Rebozo’s neighbors, “are a badge of respectability for both of them. Bebe is Nixon’s class of people.”

  Behind the success, though, Nixon’s friend had a sad personal story. His love life had started disastrously and long continued in that fashion. In 1931, at the age of eighteen, Rebozo had followed �
�an intense friendship” with Donald Gunn, a well-heeled young man, by rushing into marriage with Gunn’s teenage sister Clare. She agreed to the union, she explained four years later at the annulment hearing, only after endless badgering by Rebozo and on the understanding that he would never reveal it and never live with her as man and wife. The marriage, she said, was never consummated.

  In the early forties, Clare remarried and had two children, but Rebozo remained a bachelor. When she returned to Miami alone, her husband having been killed in the war, he pressed his suit again. Again they married, and again the marriage failed, with Rebozo moving out after only two years, “Who knows why?” said one who knew them both. “Maybe Bebe was too unctuous, too fawning. Clare was very domineering. . . . Maybe, having finally made it with Clare, Bebe believed he had proved himself, and that was all he wanted.”

  Clare took yet another husband but then died young, and the faithful Rebozo hurried to pay a last visit to her when she was on her deathbed. He shied away from remarriage until middle age, when he formalized what Newsweek called an “antiseptic” relationship with his lawyer’s secretary. She was said to have been a “reincarnation” of his former wife.4 Clare’s sister-in-law, who stayed in touch with Rebozo, said in 1996, “I have been told not to talk about these things.”

  In 1951, when the two men first became friendly, Rebozo was fresh from his second divorce from Clare and Nixon was perennially exhausted and troubled. Accounts of their early times together suggest a curious relationship. Their boat trips, which continued throughout the years, were notable mainly for the silences. “Nixon would go out on Bebe’s boat,” said George Smathers, “get off in a corner with a yellow pad, and sit there making notes. He might never fish, never say a damn thing. He was really sort of a screwball.”