Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  She moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Baltimore—in the same complex where her married son and daughter live—and when I reached her on the telephone, she told me she preferred not to say anything. “I’m very busy,” she said. Doing what? I asked. “Just the normal things,” she said, “the normal things you have to do for yourself.”

  “I’ll tell you a story,” one of her friends said a few days ago. “The day after Marvin moved out, last July, Bootsie went to the family cemetery. She sat looking at the graves, and she wished that he were dead. She felt she would have been better off as a widow. I can’t help thinking she was right.”

  January, 1974

  Rose Mary Woods—the Lady or the Tiger?

  It all depends on whom you talk to. Everything does, as it happens, but the case of Rose Mary Woods depends so much on whom you talk to that the more people you talk to, the more confused everything becomes. People in Washington talk to each other about Rose Mary Woods a great deal these days, and the conversations always end up sounding like the third-to-last chapter in an Agatha Christie mystery. Loose ends. Nothing but loose ends. The Uher tape recorder. The mysteriously elliptical testimony of J. Fred Buzhardt. The White House allegation that the subpoena did not cover the Haldeman conversation. The weekend at Camp David. The weekend in Key Biscayne. The role of Stephen Bull. And at the center of it all is Rose Mary. Dear, sweet, considerate, thoughtful, devout, loyal, put-upon Rose Mary. Tough, cunning, crafty, complicated, powerful, fanatical Rose Mary. Which one is Rose Mary: the lady or the tiger? It all depends on whom you talk to.

  “Everybody on God’s earth is against her,” Charles Rhyne is saying. “The power of the judiciary, the White House lawyers, the prosecutors, the tape experts. There’s never been a setup like this one. How can she stand up against all this by herself? She’s got the grand jury, the Common Cause people, the milk people, the Watergate committee—all of them are after her.” Charles Rhyne is Rose Mary Woods’s lawyer, has been since the day after Thanksgiving, two days after Miss Woods, who has been Richard Nixon’s personal secretary some twenty-three years, was told she had better go out and find a lawyer of her own, because the White House lawyers would not represent her on this one. The problem, of course, had to do with an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on a White House tape made June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in. And the reason the White House lawyers cast Rose Mary Woods out to pay her own legal fees was that they thought she might well be responsible for every buzzing second of it. Charles Rhyne is outraged by the whole business. He is a former president of the American Bar Association, the lawyer Central Casting sends out when you ask for Integrity, a man of impeccable connections (most of whom he appears with in photographs on his office wall), a classmate and good friend of Richard Nixon’s from Duke Law School, and his North Carolina-accented voice becomes positively mellifluous as he assures the press that his client was sold down the river. To prove it, he pulls out a transcript of a conference held the day before Thanksgiving, November 21, 1973, when White House counsels J. Fred Buzhardt and Leonard Garment finally went to Judge John J. Sirica to tell him they had discovered a gap on the tape.

  “Judge, we have a problem,” Buzhardt began that day. “In the process of preparing the analysis … one of the tapes, the intelligence is not available for approximately eighteen minutes. You can’t hear the voices.… Under the circumstances, we know at this point that it looks quite serious. It doesn’t appear from what we know at this point that it could be accidental.”

  “Does not appear?” Sirica asked.

  “Does not appear from the information we have at this point,” Buzhardt said. “At its worst, it looks like a very serious thing, Your Honor. If there is an explanation, quite frankly, I don’t know what it is at the moment.…”

  “Who was the last one that actually listened to this particular tape?” Sirica asked.

  “The original? The original, according to the record, was first checked out to Miss Woods.”

  “Was it all right before it was checked out to Miss Woods?” Sirica asked.

  “We don’t know …” Buzhardt said. “I guess she is the only one [who] listened to it.… Then the circumstance is even a little worse than that, Your Honor.”

  “I don’t know if it could get much worse,” said Sirica.

  “Just wait,” said Leonard Garment.

  “As you know, Your Honor,” Buzhardt went on, “the notes were subpoenaed, too. We found Mr. Haldeman’s notes on this meeting.… The notes reflect that the discussion was about Watergate.… When you get past the Watergate typed notes … that is where the tape picks up.… Maybe I am out of line for saying this, but quite frankly I think Miss Woods ought to have time to reflect on this and she ought to have time to secure counsel.”

  The meeting ended with Sirica’s scheduling a hearing for the following Monday, November 26. Leonard Garment accepted a subpoena for Rose Mary Woods to appear there—and telephoned her to say he was doing so. He returned to the White House and sent it over to her with a note. “Here is the subpoena we discussed earlier,” it read. “Love, Len.”

  “ ‘Love, Len,’ ” Charles Rhyne says, shaking his head. “Her own lawyers plead her guilty, then say she ought to get counsel of her own, then accept a subpoena for her when they’ve admitted they aren’t her lawyers any longer, and then send it over and sign it with love. Of course, I didn’t know anything about this in the beginning. The day after that meeting, on Thanksgiving Day, I was called by General Haig and he asked me to come down. He told me that Rose had been told to get a lawyer and was very upset. I’ve known Rose twenty-three years. I called her and told her to calm down, that I’d come down the next morning.

  “So on Friday I go down and speak to Haig and he sends me over to see Garment and Buzhardt. ‘She did it,’ they said to me. ‘No question about it. We ran tests on the lamp and the typewriter. So sorry. We don’t know what you can do for her.’ I went over to see Rose. She was enormously upset. I’ve never seen Rose upset. She said she didn’t know what was going on. ‘For the last week,’ she said, ‘everyone’s been treating me like a leper.’ ‘Well, Rose,’ I said, ‘I’ve talked to Garment and Buzhardt and they say you knocked eighteen and a half minutes off this tape.’ She just blew up. She said she’d known me a long long time and she was going to tell me everything. She would not accept responsibility for that. She hadn’t done it. She wouldn’t say she’d done it. She would not let them say she’d done it. She told me about the accident she had had October first with the tape, that she might have knocked four minutes off it. ‘But,’ she said, ‘what really haunts me is that I never heard a word on that part of the tape.’ I talked to her for three or four hours. I listened to the tape. And I said to her, ‘I believe you.’

  “This poor secretary, without any government money, all alone,” said Rhyne. “I stand between her and the world.”

  Aunt Rose. That is what Tricia and Julie call her. She is family. Dick and Pat and Tricia and Julie and David and Bebe and Rose. She baby-sat for the girls. She exchanged clothes with Pat. Her brother Joe, a former F.B.I. man who served as sheriff of Cook County, used to wear Richard Nixon’s hand-me-down suits. She attends family dinners in the White House. The President relaxes with her. He kids her—and it is not even labored. He becomes openly irritated with her—and he does that only with people he is close to. She is the person his own relatives call when they want to get through to him: the night of the first debate against Kennedy in the 1960 election, Nixon’s mother, Hannah, called Rose Woods—not Pat Nixon—to say she thought her son looked a bit under the weather. Rose has been through it all. She took dictation for the telegram he wanted sent to General Eisenhower withdrawing from the 1952 ticket after the slush-fund charges—and she would have torn it up herself but for the fact that Murray Chotiner did it instead. She was in the car when they were stoned in Caracas, in the kitchen in Moscow; she followed him to Los Angeles and New York during the long out-of-office stretch. “I
was his, I suppose you could say, personal secretary, aide, wastebasket emptier, anything else,” she testified recently. “I was the only person who worked for him at that time.”

  “When I heard about it,” said a man who used to work in the White House, “when I heard that Rose Woods had to go out and get a lawyer, I thought, Well, that’s it. They have now reached the point where they’re having hand-to-hand combat in the Oval Office.”

  The relationship between Rose Mary Woods and Richard Nixon is a complicated one. He counts on her. He respects her judgment on political matters, particularly where people are concerned. She is not afraid to disagree with him, even to snap back at him. In Six Crises, Nixon calls her “one of my most honest critics,” and says, “She has that rare and unique characteristic that marks the difference between a good secretary and a great one—she is always at her best when the pressures are greatest.” The emotional content of their relationship fascinates people.

  “She’s a little like the choir member in the Baptist church who falls in love with the minister,” says one administration insider. “It’s the classic Christian fantasy of the virgin and God—and obviously a part of the fantasy is that nothing ever happens. It just remains a kind of worship.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” asks another man who considers himself a friend to both Nixon and Miss Woods. “Really in love? Over a long period of time? She’s been in love with Nixon—though not at all in a sexual sense—for over twenty years. Have you ever played poker? She’s an extremely good poker player in the political world. She’s smart, tough, ruthless, experienced, all the things you have to be. And she plays on behalf of Nixon, not on behalf of herself.

  “Rose has provided him with the feeling that there was support for him and his cause, emotional sustenance at times when there really wasn’t anyone else—not even Pat. At various times, Pat laid down the law and said, ‘No more politics.’ Rose always encouraged him to persevere. Another thing she does is to provide him with emotional and intellectual justification. During the period prior to the 1968 convention, she was always ready with criticisms of his rivals. In the fall of 1967, Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s press agent, broke the story of the homosexual ring that was active at the top level of Reagan’s administration. Rose had found out about it a few weeks before, and I remember a dinner with her and Nixon where she presented that to us, saying, in effect, that that was what one could expect from Reagan, that he would be so careless about his staff selection he couldn’t possibly be a good President.”

  There has always been a slight tinge of the martyr in the way Miss Woods operated with Nixon. In early 1969, when she was engaged in a power struggle with H. R. Haldeman and became so disturbed by it that she considered leaving her job, she never once mentioned what was going on to the President. And according to Charles Rhyne, the President has never once referred to, much less reassured his secretary about, her legal problems since the gap was found on November 14, when she claims she told him that she might well be responsible for four or five minutes of it, but would not take the blame for the full eighteen. Rose Woods presumably would never think to bring the question up herself. The only family or administration member who has spoken up for Rose since then has been Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who called her “a woman of complete integrity. She would never commit a criminal act.”

  Rose Mary Woods went to work for Nixon on February 21, 1951, just after he had been elected to the Senate. She is red-headed, well groomed, with a peaches-and-cream complexion. She gives the impression of being quite petite, and her friends say that she is somewhat frail physically and has suffered periodic bouts of pneumonia from overwork. She has literally worked seven-day, hundred-hour weeks, fifty-two weeks a year for twenty-three years—and in many ways she is not at all unique. There are thousands of women like her in Washington, women who come here as girls, get secretarial jobs on Capitol Hill, devote their lives to politicians, and end up elderly spinsters, living on their government pensions in apartments full of political knickknacks.

  “They are a special twentieth-century breed,” Helen Dudar wrote in the New York Post, “those ladies who guard the boss’s door and fend off the telephone calls and read his mail; women largely without private lives because the real world is right there in the vortex spinning around the great man; women usually without husbands because the job takes most of their time and energies; women with small fiefdoms of their own encompassing sub-secretaries, the Xerox machine, the messenger service, and some nervous stenographers. Selfless, happily job-enslaved, eager to be useful, they are the vestal virgins in the temples of business and politics, the Indispensables, the private secretaries.”

  “It’s a very exciting life,” said Doris Jones, secretary to former Nixon aide Robert Finch and a close friend of Miss Woods’s. “You get caught up in it. You get so busy. The next thing you know, you turn around and you’re forty-five or fifty years old and unmarried, and you hadn’t intended for it to work out that way at all. I know I never did.”

  • • •

  Rose Mary Woods came to Washington from Sebring, Ohio, where she was born fifty-five years ago, the middle child of five children. Her parents were devout Catholics; her father worked at the Royal China Company, first as a potter, then as foreman, finally as personnel director. Her parents died a few years ago, and Miss Woods refers to them frequently: her father, she says, was a temperamental Irishman, while her mother was a calm, pacific woman. “Rose is a strange combination of Irish fire and quiet determination,” says Robert Gray, a public-relations executive at Hill & Knowlton, who is Miss Woods’s most frequent escort. “She often says, ‘I’ve got to pray to God to let my mother’s cool head prevail, and not my father’s temper.’ ”

  But for a series of misfortunes, Rose Mary Woods would probably have grown up to lead a traditional small-town Midwestern life. But in her last year at McKinley High School, she contracted a mysterious disease. “I weighed eighty-two pounds,” she once said. “It was a growth. It may well have been cancer. Nobody knows. They X-rayed it and it disappeared. I wasn’t able to work when I first got out. I wasn’t able to go to school.” Ultimately, she recovered and went to work as a secretary at Royal China; she became engaged to a young man who died. In 1943, she came to Washington. “I had a sister here who had a very tragic personal problem and I was the only one who could come.” The sister was employed at the Office of Censorship, and Miss Woods went to work there, too. After the war, she joined the International Training Administration and then a committee on Capitol Hill run by Christian Herter. There she came to the attention of Richard Nixon, then a young congressman, and he to hers. She has often said that she was very much impressed by him before she even knew him, because he kept such neat expense accounts.

  In the 1950s, Miss Woods lived on California Street in Washington, first in an apartment she shared with an elderly woman, then in a studio apartment of her own. She had almost no time for the few activities she favors—dancing, duckpin bowling, entertaining—and her moments of leisure were mostly spent grabbing sandwiches with other Capitol Hill secretaries. These women—who are still close to her—paint a picture of Rose Mary Woods and her life that is low-key and muted. They emphasize her devout Catholicism, her sacrifices, the thoughtful favors she does for friends, her total integrity. They believe every word she has testified, assure you she would never have done anything like what she has been accused of. “She’d probably lay down her life for Richard Nixon,” says her friend Winnie De Weese, who used to be with the Republican Policy Committee, “but she would never lie for him.”

  Another close friend, Eloise De La O, former secretary to Senator Clinton Anderson, says, “I called her the night I heard she had gotten a lawyer. She said to me, ‘You know, Eloise, my boss would never ask me to do anything like that.’ She is a good Christian, a good Catholic, a practicing Catholic. You don’t do things like that if that’s the kind of person you are. Somebody is trying to do something to her.”

  T
he men who have known Rose Woods over the years tell a slightly different story. “There was a story about her dancing the tango alone one night at San Clemente,” said one man. “Don’t let it confuse you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking of her as a sad, fragile, overworked secretary. She’s a complicated woman who’s been at the center for twenty-five years.” And the men tend to be far more cynical about just what Rose might have done. One, a former White House aide who considers her a dear friend, was asked what he thought when he first read about the gap.

  “My first thought,” he said, “was that I hoped my secretary would be that loyal.”

  The women in the office have seen little of Rose Woods but her extraordinary stenographic skills, but the men have seen her function as an almost legendarily firm Nixon appendage. Following Nixon’s 1960 defeat, several Republican leaders claimed that Miss Woods had kept them from communicating with the candidate during the election. Senator Styles Bridges, who was chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, telephoned at the end of the campaign, and, as the late columnist George Dixon reported at the time, reached Miss Woods.

  “The Vice-President is very busy,” she told him.

  “I just want to tell him,” Bridges said, “that our reports show your boss is not doing too well.”