The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Domestic life for a top politician is rarely what most families would consider normal. What happened to bewilder the children that sad Wednesday in November 1962, however, may have been something they never learned of as children.

  Future cabinet member Bob Finch, Nixon’s intimate for many years, once admitted cautiously that he had sometimes witnessed Nixon in a rage, a rage “irrational in that it was much broader than the incident that provoked it.” Speechwriter William Safire would write of Nixon’s capacity for “deep, dark rage.” Pat had a temper too.

  Another aide remembered a night in the sixties when Nixon was enjoying a couple of vodka martinis. “God,” he said, “these martinis are great. But you mustn’t have more than two of them.”

  “Why not?” asked the aide.

  “More than two,” Nixon replied, “you fight with your wife.”

  Nixon’s offhand remark may have been more than just the exaggeration of a common cliché, for rumors that he had physically abused Pat circulated in Washington for years. Two investigative reporters stumbled on such stories, but none were at the time well enough sourced to publish. While writing The Final Days with Carl Bernstein, their account of the end of the Nixon presidency, Bob Woodward was told of an incident in which Nixon supposedly hurt his wife badly enough to put her in the hospital.10 Seymour Hersh, while working on his study of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power, learned from sources of three alleged wife-beating incidents.

  Soon after resigning the presidency, Hersh was told, Nixon attacked Pat at their home in San Clemente. According to the source, she had to be taken to a nearby emergency room. The doctor who treated her, Hersh told the author, corroborated the story.

  The most compelling account of such abuse, however, relates to the 1962 defeat and comes from several sources. Governor Pat Brown said years later, “We got word at one stage of the campaign that he kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” A senior Brown aide, Frank Cullen, used the same language, saying he heard Nixon had “beat the hell” out of his wife after his defeat.

  A former Los Angeles area reporter, Bill Van Petten, years later told of his experiences while covering the gubernatorial campaign. Nixon, he said, had been a “terrible, belligerent drunk, mean when drunk, and would become obnoxious at night when in hotels on the road.” Either during the night before the “kick around” speech or—much more plausibly, in this author’s view—after it, Nixon “beat Pat badly . . . so badly that she could not go out the next day.

  “This had happened before,” Van Petten was told, “and aides like Haldeman, Robert Finch, or Ehrlichman would on occasion have to go in and intervene. On this particular night there was a lot of commotion at an ungodly hour, and one or some of the aides had to run in and pull him off Pat. She had bruises on her face. Everyone was shaken up.”

  Van Petten is dead, and his account as related here comes from a friend to whom he spoke in the early eighties. Elements of it, however, mesh with comments later made by John Ehrlichman that Nixon’s drinking left him “very much troubled.” Alcohol, he said, made his boss “more susceptible to inebriation than the average male.” “I was in no position to ask him to stop,” he was to say a few years later. “But I didn’t want to invest my time in a difficult campaign that might well be lost because the candidate was not fully in control of himself. . . . If he wanted me to work for him he would lay off the booze.”

  During the writing of this book the first credible corroboration of the 1962 beating allegation was provided by John Sears, a former Nixon aide who went on to political distinction. Sears, now in his early sixties, came to the future president’s notice as a young lawyer sometime after the California gubernatorial. He was to be a key figure in the Nixon comeback in 1968 and would join the Nixon White House as a political strategist under Ehrlichman. He later served as Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, then worked as a lobbyist.11 As a younger man Sears looked on Nixon almost as a father, and in 1997 still discussed his former boss with considerable admiration.

  By the time he met the couple, Sears recalled in a 1997 interview, the marriage seemed to him “peculiar.” He thought Pat “a strong woman. Her overriding political view was that she hated politics. He would have run for anything.”

  Then Sears related what he had learned of Nixon’s physical abuse. “The family lawyer,” he said, “told me that Nixon had hit her in 1962 and that she had threatened to leave him over it. . . . I’m not talking about a smack. He blackened her eye. . . . I had heard about that from Pat Hillings [Nixon’s longtime friend and associate] as well as from the family lawyer.” Sears identified the “lawyer” as the late Waller Taylor, who in 1962 had been a senior partner at Adams, Duque and Hazeltine, the firm Nixon had joined after his defeat by John F. Kennedy.

  Taylor, the son of a president of Union Oil, was certainly close to Nixon. His father, Reese, had been one of Nixon’s original political supporters. After the infamous Hughes Loan to Nixon’s brother, Reese had built a Union Oil service station on the plot Hannah Nixon provided as collateral, greatly increasing the land’s value. He had also provided a private plane to fly Nixon to one of the ritual gatherings of political power brokers at Bohemian Grove, in Northern California.

  Waller Taylor, the son, was responsible for bringing Nixon together with the youthful Donald Segretti, later notorious for his involvement in Watergate. During the presidency he also reportedly served as a bagman, delivering sixty-five thousand dollars in cash from a wealthy contributor who hoped to buy himself an ambassadorship.12

  A 1960 letter, revealing that he provided Nixon with intelligence on the Democratic National Convention, establishes that Taylor knew Pat. The prominent journalist Lou Cannon, who gained extensive knowledge of Nixon during his years in California, said Taylor was “the man to talk to” about trouble in the Nixon marriage. “He knows Pat, and he would know about that.”

  As Sears understood it from Taylor, the 1962 beating was not an isolated incident. Spousal abuse, indeed, is almost always repetitive. A psychologist consulted by the author listed characteristics typical of those who abuse their partners. They are usually, but not always, men. Abusers tend to have belief systems that are “rigid, impersonal and inadequate to deal with stress” and “values that respect rigid sexual stereotypes.” They believe “aggression is a means of survival” and resort to physical abuse when they feel “backed into a corner and unable to control the situation.” They “expect others will blame, judge, or reject them.”

  It is fair to say that Nixon conformed to this profile, to one degree or another—respect for rigid sexual stereotypes included. (As late as 1970 he publicly rebuked a distinguished woman member of the White House press corps for wearing trousers rather than a skirt.) As the New York Times’s Tom Wicker wrote of Nixon at the height of the 1962 campaign: “He is more reserved and inward, as difficult as ever to know, driven still by deep inner compulsion toward power and personal vindication, painfully conscious of slights and failures, a man who has imposed on himself a self-control so rigid as to be all but invisible.”

  _____

  In her memoir of her mother Julie Nixon recalled how the day after the 1962 election ended. “Mother lay on her bed, the room darkened by closed shutters, and cried in front of us for the first time we could remember. Tricia and I sat on the floor by the bed and cried also.”

  That evening close family friends took both the Nixon daughters away to their home for a few days. “When we returned,” said Julie, “my parents seemed fine.” But “There was a sadness,” as Tricia told Nixon himself later when he asked for her teenage memories of the 1962 race, “and the sadness went on for years.”

  San Diego entrepreneur Arnholt Smith, one of Nixon’s earliest supporters, remembered a melancholy evening in the early sixties when Nixon was holding a meeting and asked him to get Pat out of the way. “Pat was not feeling well physically, and even worse . . . mentally,” Smith said. “Dick sent word, ‘Could I please take her and hide her from the public
so to speak, let her rest her mind and what have you.’ ”

  Smith took Pat to dinner that night on the Chito, a yacht that had once belonged to the president of Mexico. “Arnie,” she burst out, as they sat at the long table in the wood-paneled dining room, “is it ever going to stop?” “She felt pounded,” Smith said, “in the sense that when they pounded Nixon, they pounded her.”

  Pat now even talked of divorce. “I think she would have divorced him,” Smith went on, “if he had not agreed to stay out of politics. But Nixon wanted to go on, and without her it wouldn’t work. He’d got to have the wife, the whole nine yards. She’d have to sacrifice her feelings to go forward.”13

  John Sears recalled family lawyer Taylor telling him about divorce discussions, beginning after the alleged beating in 1962. “She may have just put some space between them, but they came to some sort of accommodation . . . the way married people do. But the idea was that she would have a break. They would live this other life for a while. She wouldn’t object, she’d go along if he wanted to run again, so long as nothing like that happened again. But it did. . . .”

  It was about this time, James Bassett told friends, that Nixon “sought out therapy in New York” because “he was in a depression . . . his sex life had diminished to such a point that he went for help.” One cause of the depression, Bassett reportedly said, was impotence. Nixon was reportedly seen entering the office of his psychotherapist Dr. Hutschnecker during that period. In 1995, pressed as to whether his patient had sexual problems, the doctor at first denied it and then equivocated at length.*

  Nixon’s appointments with Dr. Hutschnecker were made by his secretary, Rose Woods. Then in her early forties, she was fiercely dedicated to her boss, intolerant of anyone who did not believe in his political destiny. One evening, Bassett said, she and Nixon were found together in his office, a table laid for dinner and a candle burning. “Rose,” said Bassett, was sitting on the sofa “all dressed up,” and Nixon “was really making up to her.”

  This sad little scene almost certainly signified nothing more than mutual loneliness. Murray Chotiner’s wife, Nancy, recalled hearing that Woods had once been in love with Nixon. She thought it just “the kind of thing that happens to anybody who works for one person for a long time.” Bassett, too, agreed the relationship remained platonic, “the vestal virgin working for the high priest.”

  _____

  “This man will never be president,” Eisenhower had said privately. “The people don’t like him.” In November 1962 Time magazine decreed that “barring a miracle, Nixon’s public career has ended.” Two years earlier Nixon had been close to becoming president. Now, said the New York Times, he was “unelected and unmourned, an unemployed lawyer.” “He was shot down and left for dead,” was the way his friend Bryce Harlow expressed it.

  President Kennedy gloated over the news of Nixon’s defeat. Aboard Air Force One en route to Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral, the journalist Mary McGrory watched Kennedy as he sat with Chief Justice Earl Warren, an old Nixon foe. “They had their heads together over the clippings,” she recalled, “and were laughing like schoolboys.”

  “You reduced him to the nuthouse,” Kennedy told the victor, Governor Brown, in a phone call taped at the White House. “You gave me instructions,” Brown replied, “and I follow your orders.” “God,” said the president, “that last farewell speech of his . . . it shows he belongs on the couch.”

  Brown agreed. “This is a very peculiar fellow. . . . I really think he is psychotic . . . an able man, but he’s nuts . . . like a lot of these paranoiacs.”

  “Nobody,” the president had said after hearing Nixon’s “kick around” speech, “could talk like that and be normal.”

  Nixon too believed his career was over. “It’s finished,” he told Billy Graham. “After two straight defeats it’s not likely I’ll ever be nominated for anything again, or be given another chance.” Murray Chotiner, who had known him from the beginning, was a lone voice predicting otherwise. “It would be hard for me,” he said, “to visualize Nixon’s removal from the American scene.”

  As Chotiner spoke, Nixon was on vacation in the Bahamas, at first without Pat but with his pal Bebe Rebozo. Her other miseries aside, his wife had been complaining to him about their financial situation, remembering perhaps a promise Nixon had made years earlier, when they were courting. In response to a birthday present Pat had given him, he had sent her a thank-you note promising to pay her four billion dollars “when I’m fifty, or before if you’ll let me.”

  Now, at forty-nine and at his lowest ebb, Nixon would begin to pay serious attention to his bank balance. According to a number of sources, the place he chose for his 1962 vacation would become the seed ground for his future, an island called Paradise.

  20

  * * *

  I was accused in the media of . . . stashing away piles of cash . . . these charges were false. . . . I have never had the urge to accumulate wealth. . . .

  —Richard Nixon, 1990

  It is a narrow strip of land, some six hundred acres in all, separated from the Bahamian capital, Nassau, by a mere five hundred yards of water. For two hundred years it was mostly scrub, a neglected place designated by British colonialists as an execution site. They grazed pigs there too and so called it Hog Island. By the mid-1960s it had become a flawed jewel in the Caribbean, a tawdry vacation spot with a casino and a high-rise hotel. In the American underworld some called it Meyer’s Island, after mob boss Meyer Lansky, who viewed the Bahamas as an ideal locale in which to revive the gambling fiefdom lost to Fidel Castro. Officially, though, its new name was Paradise Island, and it had become the dream and folly of one of America’s richest men.

  Huntington Hartford, the A&P grocery chain heir, had decided around 1960 to turn the island into a tropical vacation wonderland. At fifty he was a sad, spoiled roué, but as a famed patron of the arts he wanted to transform Paradise with exquisite taste.

  Twenty-five million dollars later the island had a little hotel the color of strawberry ice cream, surrounded by fish pools and shaded by palm trees. There was a gourmet restaurant, the Café Martinique; a golf course; a riding stable; and tennis courts. A medieval Spanish cloister, which had originally been shipped to Florida by William Randolph Hearst, had been painstakingly reconstructed atop a small hill. Visitors were greeted by statues of Hercules, Napoleon’s wife Josephine, President Theodore Roosevelt, the explorer David Livingstone, and Faust in the company of the devil.

  It was to this odd resort that Nixon, accompanied by Bebe Rebozo, came in November 1962 after his defeat in California. (Also along for the trip, less predictably, was the rotund figure of John Davies, the phone company executive who had helped detect Democratic eavesdroppers during the campaign.) Huntington Hartford greeted the group at the airport and ferried them over to Paradise Island in his launch.

  The millionaire had been told these guests needed privacy, a request easy to accommodate because his hotel had no guests. It was so exclusive, and at the time so inaccessible, that it was proving hopelessly unprofitable. Yet Nixon and his friends were never given a bill.

  Davies would later recall that Nixon spent much of his time on Paradise alone, “deep in thought.” Others said he was very obviously sunk in despair.

  The Nixon party continued to have the hotel to themselves until Pat came with the children at Thanksgiving. Then the television personality Jack Paar arrived with his family, on a free trip organized by Hartford’s public relations people. Paar, who had interviewed Nixon in the past and hoped to again, remained silent for twenty years before describing the Nixon he had encountered on Paradise Island.

  “He was a sad, depressed man,” Paar recalled, “as pathetic a national figure as I had ever seen. He was drinking heavily, and my heart went out to his family. . . . Nixon would sit and brood and occasionally utter a few words of profanity. . . .”

  Hartford’s general factotum Sy Alter, under orders to see that Nixon was well looked after,
found him “morose. . . . I pride myself on being a pretty good amateur comedian, but I couldn’t get a laugh out of him.”

  Nevertheless, Nixon later sent Hartford an engraved silver cigarette box by way of thanks. He would return to Paradise in a cheerier mood five years later in December 1967, in the company of a group of businessmen, aristocrats, and fashion models flown in for a lavish celebration, and then again for a similar bash a few weeks later, striking an incongruous figure amid a bevy of what the tabloids used to call the beautiful people.

  Much had changed on Paradise in those five years. The parties Nixon attended were to publicize the opening of an opulent new hotel and casino. Guests no longer arrived by boat but in limousines, across an elegant bridge spanning the channel between the island and Nassau. Hartford made an appearance, but he was not in the lineup at the ceremonial opening. Nixon told nothing of this occasion in his memoirs and indeed did not mention the island at all, for good reason.

  Hard-eyed, dubious businessmen had taken over from the eccentric millionaire by 1967. The new casino, some would claim, was not unconnected with Meyer Lansky. Even the ownership of the bridge to Paradise involved a shadowy Swiss bank. There was more than a suspicion of criminality about the island, a suspicion that would soon fall on Nixon and Rebozo and fascinate and frustrate those who investigated Watergate.

  It is now established historical fact that gambling and its associated sins were brought to the Bahamas by the U.S. Mafia following the Castro revolution in Cuba. Lansky had in 1962 met with confederates—his brother Jake, Charles (“Charlie the Blade”) Tourine, Michael (“Trigger Mike”) Coppola, Dino Cellini, Max Courtney, and Frank Ritter—at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami to discuss starting a casino on Grand Bahama Island.