Nixon's Secret (50 page)

Nixon first thought the speech was a failure. Pat reassured him that he was wrong, the speech was by no means a failure, and taking the unfamiliar role of political analyst, she even praised him for attacking the finances of the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson. Practically overnight, public opinion shifted from the decidedly negative to overwhelmingly positive. Nixon had adroitly removed the decision from Ike’s hands by urging viewers to contact the Republican National Committee who had the technical legal authority to replace him as the party’s vice presidential nominee. The El Capitan television studio that Nixon was broadcast from, the Eisenhower campaign offices, and the Republican National Committee were inundated with a deluge of letters and telephone calls backing Dick.

Whatever misgivings Pat may have had about the course Nixon and she had embarked upon, she kept them to herself. But one incident clearly reveals how she felt about the affair and her ever-growing dislike of politics. Eisenhower would finally embrace Nixon as his running mate in Wheeling, West Virginia. On the trip back to the airport afterward, the two candidates rode in one limousine and their wives in a trailing vehicle. According to Roger Morris, Ike didn’t acknowledge the ordeal Nixon had just been through and talked mostly about campaign tactics. “The conversation in the trailing limousine was more candid. Mrs. Eisenhower had been silent most of the way but nervously began to speak when they became separated in the gloom from the rest of the motorcade. The Nixon story had only hurt the campaign, she was saying. ‘I don’t know why all this happened when we were getting along so well.’ Pat Nixon replied in controlled fury, ‘But you just don’t realize what
we’ve
[italics as printed] been through.’ Her icy tone, she told her daughter a quarter century later, ‘ended the conversation.’”
17

Besides pulling Nixon’s political career out of the dustbin of history, the Checkers speech served as a template for how Pat would deal with Richard Nixon’s future campaigns that led him into and then out of the White House. She would handle their life together with two personas. One, as the smiling supportive wife in public who could connect especially with women voters and said all the right things when interviewed (she won over so many voters that many “We Like Nixon” banners were altered to “We Like Nixons”). Then there was the private Pat who spoke her mind to Nixon, telling him off when she thought it necessary even if it provoked her to tears and him to a furious outburst. As Anthony Summers writes: “The crisis [over the secret fund] had only multiplied Pat’s previous doubts. ‘Why?’ she had sobbed. ‘Why should we keep taking this?’ . . . Three decades later, when Pat’s daughter Julie asked her to discuss the fund, she turned her face to the wall for long minutes before replaying [sic]. ‘There was so much pain in her eyes,’ Julie recalled, ‘that I could not bear to look at her.’”
18
Looking back on that period in his life, Nixon himself later acknowledged the pain the episode had caused her. “I knew how much it had hurt her, how deeply it had wounded her sense of pride and privacy. I knew that from that time on, although she would do everything she could to help me and help my career, she would hate politics and dream of the day when I would leave it behind. . . .”
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Pat did her “second lady” chores dutifully throughout the eight years of Nixon’s vice presidency. She went along with Nixon when Eisenhower sent him on a seventy-day goodwill visit to nineteen Asian countries in the fall of 1953, prior to which Pat had pored over State Department documents to learn as much as she could about the places they would visit, in effect becoming Nixon’s living
Michelin Guide
. Although she hated the thought of leaving the girls behind, she accepted her role as a high-level distaff envoy and even rankled the men at Foggy Bottom when she added to her “woman’s role” of visiting schools, hospitals, shopping, and social teas speaking out for women’s rights in a bold attempt to break down some of the traditional Asian barriers that prevented women from social and professional advancement. In Australia, New Zealand, and Malaya, her appearances forced previously all-male bastions to admit women to their private sanctuaries. To many she was the first woman of her generation to balance being a dutiful wife with advocating for the public prominence and the worth of women. In following the path of Eleanor Roosevelt, Pat Nixon demonstrated “through her attentions to others the values that Mrs. Roosevelt spoke about explicitly.”
20
A profile of Pat Nixon’s public life published in the Sunday magazine
Parade
noted that she “invited foreign women to events they had never been allowed to participate in and encouraged them to build their self-confidence during her trips throughout the Far East, Africa and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and the 1970s.”
21
She also won praise from the local press when in 1955 she and Nixon made a month-long trip to Central America that included Pat’s visit to a leprosarium in Panama. There she shook hands with patients; something many people would have declined due to the mistakened belief that the disease was contagious and incurable.

When Nixon’s 1958 trip to Latin America turned violent, Pat showed her inner strength. The tour of Latin America in 1958 provoked anti-American demonstrations. Those demonstrations turned violent when protestors turned into an unruly mob wielding pipes. Upon their arrival, Communist-inspired crowds in Caracas chanting “death to Nixon” spit at them, and threw rocks. During the playing of the Venezuelan national anthem on the tarmac, Pat stood stoically beside Nixon, no doubt frightened, as tobacco juice rained down on her red suit from the mob above. Riding in separate limos from the airport into Caracas, the Nixons again encountered a threatening situation when the anger spilled into the streets and the mobs tried to overturn their limos. Pat was the picture of clench-jawed poise as glass shards from the limo window flew into her lap. Nixon himself was the picture of steely calm when one of his Secret Service agents unholstered his weapon with the belief that the mob would soon turn Nixon’s limousine over and set it ablaze or lynch the visiting dignitaries. The local police vanished as the engulfing mob blocked the exit of the vice presidential limousine. Then, as if by magic, the mob would briefly part and the traveling American dignitaries would escape the howling rock-throwing throng.

Intelligence reports said agitators planned to bomb them when Nixon was to lay a wreath at the tomb of Simon Bolivar, so that event was cancelled. But the violence there and elsewhere rattled the couple to their core. They realized that their lives were truly in danger. And while most press accounts singled out Nixon for praise for the courage to stand up to the angry demonstrators—even goading them by standing fast when someone spit directly in his face—Pat too showed equal courage by continuing the tour as planned. The popularity of both Nixons soared in the United States, as they had showed personal courage in the face of dangerous adversity while representing their country.

Upon their return Pat gave numerous interviews to women’s magazines in which she again promoted the important role that women could play in all walks of life. At the same time she continued to embody the American Housewife, so much so that she was named Outstanding Homemaker of the Year in 1953, Mother of the Year in 1955, and the nation’s Ideal Wife in 1957 by the Homemaker’s Forum. “Every bit as much as her husband, Pat sought to control and promulgate her image” as the paragon of perfection, Pat Nixon biographer Will Swift said. “She allowed photographers to snap pictures of her vacuuming or pressing her husband’s pants, but she made sure that there were no photos of her staff”
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(Any such staged photos of recent first ladies would be deemed incredulous and a source of mockery and humor especially by the late night TV wits. It’s hard to imagine Nancy Reagan or Hillary Clinton at an ironing board.). At the same time Pat impressed Eisenhower with her intelligence and political savvy as a capable emissary of the United States who studiously pored over dossiers prior to meeting foreign officials. Perhaps her only public faux pas during those years came when she stretched that public image of the perfect wife in a perfect marriage a bit too far. She insisted to a reporter that she and Nixon never quarreled because their opinions were always alike, clearly a lie, as any married couple would know. And when the reporter wrote that they were slow to anger and always even-tempered, that only underscored the fable.

Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955, which pushed Nixon to within a heartbeat of the presidency, gave Pat reason not to want Nixon to serve a second term on the ticket. She saw how much of a physical toll the job had taken on him—and her—thus far. When Ike recovered, he left Nixon in the lurch once again, failing to publicly endorse him on the ticket again as his second in command, saying it wasn’t up to him to tell his vice president what to do (a strange statement from the man who previously had commanded the world’s greatest military force involving thousands upon thousands of soldiers, airmen, and sailors from several nations). This vacuum would create the opportunity for a “Dump Nixon” movement spearheaded by former governor Harold Stassen. Nixon had the strong and broad support of party regulars for another term and Eisenhower’s letting the question of Nixon’s candidacy linger was yet another humiliation Dick suffered at the hands of Ike. Nixon again fell into a depression over the perceived slight and, according to Swift, visited several physicians, some of whom prescribed barbiturates for him.
23
When Nixon’s mood revived after a Miami vacation with his pal Bebe Rebozo, Pat changed her mind about a second term and told a close friend that no one–meaning Eisenhower–would “push us” off the ticket. Ike’s refusal to act gave Nixon the green light, and the couple campaigned aggressively and successfully.

While Nixon and Ike worked independently for the most part, their spouses had a different relationship. Mamie came to rely increasingly on Pat, often tasking her with chores at short notice such as filling in for her at White House occasions. Whether this was due to Mamie’s many years as a military wife used to the common practice in the service of assigning tasks to the wives of subordinates or of her sincere friendship for Pat Nixon, the chronic stress on Pat led to severe back strain and a hospital stay early into Ike’s second term.

That assessment proved true also on their two subsequent trips abroad. The Nixons went to London in November 1958 to honor the GIs who died there in the war. During the four-day visit Nixon’s clear, concise speeches won over a normally skeptical British press (always eager to knock down an American envoy a peg or two) as well as the English Speaking Union. Pat matched her husband by eliciting rare positive reviews from the women of Fleet Street, who praised her for her manners and wardrobe (this was the 1950s after all). By this time, of course, Pat had learned how to handle the press and to avoid saying anything that could damage the Nixon’s carefully cultivated image of partnership and domestic bliss. So when she was asked at a press conference for women reporters at the American ambassador’s residence to describe her marriage, she replied, “This might sound exaggerated, but I am just as much in love with my husband as I was on the first day.”
24
It was as ambiguous a statement as ever uttered by the most expert of politicians, and it satisfied the ladies of the British press who of course were unfamiliar with her early ambivalence toward the young Nixon.

In July 1959, the Nixons went to Moscow, where Nixon famously engaged Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the so-called “kitchen debate,” at an American model home exhibition. While dutifully attending to her scheduled visits to kindergartens, pioneer camps, farmers markets, and the GUM department store, Pat also engaged the Soviet leader, questioning him as to why his wife and those of other Soviet officials were not included on a welcoming banquet guest list, a common practice of Communist leaders everywhere who preferred not to bring their wives into the public. Khrushchev, however, gave in to her request. And when she met with some of the women she urged them to play a more active role in their country. Her frankness and candor impressed Khrushchev so much so that at a luncheon at his dacha, the Soviet leader intervened when his deputy Anastas Mikoyan tried to engage her in a conversation, saying, “Mrs. Nixon belongs to me. You stay on your side of the table.”
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And when Nixon raised the issue of missile fuels and Khrushchev had no reply, Pat said to him half-jokingly, “I’m surprised that there is a subject you’re not prepared to discuss, Mr. Chairman. I thought that with your one-man government you had everything firmly in your own hands.”
26
Her performances in Moscow and also in Poland afterward earned Pat rave reviews at home. The
New York Times
labeled her a diplomat in high heels.

Despite their diplomatic triumphs abroad in the late 1950s, the Nixons in the early 1960s “lived through two enormously painful electoral defeats, both of them rife with bad luck, poor judgment, and self-doubt. Pat bore the hardship of two political campaigns she definitely did not relish, and Nixon submitted to a restless interim year out of the political arena.”
27
The 1960 presidential campaign was a study in contrasts; Vice President Nixon was only forty-seven years old, but he had already been in the public eye for about a dozen years, and with his five-o’clock shadow and studious expressions, he came across as much older than his youthful Democratic opponent Senator John F. Kennedy, who was actually only four years Nixon’s junior. And Pat, the stay-at-home, cloth-coat-clad mother, had the insurmountable task of competing for America’s affections against the designer-clad, bilingual, former photographer, and career woman Jackie Kennedy. The 1960 campaign introduced the American people to televised presidential debates, so it was only natural for reporters to suggest that the two women debate a topic they believed was of interest to all American women—fashion trends. Pat said she was willing, but only if the topic was “something of value,” and in her mind fashion definitely was not. There was no distaff debate (and never has been).