For most of his political life Richard Nixon was prey to drink, prescription drugs and fits of rage. Talking to Nixon’s psychotherapist and key figures in his administration, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan piece together the events that culminated, astonishingly, in the president being asleep and incapable when his country went on nuclear alert against the Soviets One day in 1950 a congresswoman from California found herself being warned about Richard Nixon by the venerable Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. Rayburn thought Nixon “the next thing to McCarthy in the United States”. He advised his colleague “not to make any mistakes”. The warning was timely, for the congresswoman was Helen Gahagan Douglas, then about to battle Nixon for a seat in the Senate. Nixon’s run for the Senate that year was a virtual replay of his legendary and successful 1946 campaign against Democrat Jerry Voorhis, who had previously held his seat in the House of Representatives through five elections – except this time there was an even cruder use of dirty tricks and inflammatory rhetoric. Douglas, a 49-year-old former Broadway star and opera singer, had begun her political career as a left-wing Democrat. She was both a supporter of the New Deal and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. While outspokenly anti-communist, she was also – to her detriment – in favour of reining in big business, not least the oil industry. She proved no match for the Nixon operation.
In the anti-communist ferment of 1950, with the Korean War in its first months and American casualties mounting daily, the “Pink Lady”, as the pro-Nixon Los Angeles Daily News dubbed Douglas, was doomed. Yet Nixon did not behave as though he expected to triumph. On election day he sat on the beach in the drizzle with his wife, Pat, then went to the movies by himself. He emerged “sure that we were licked”, only to learn that he had won a fabulous victory. Nixon made light in his memoirs of the fact that the Senate fight earned him the nickname that stuck with him for the rest of his life: “Tricky Dick”. In 1950 he was 37 and a veteran of four years in the House of Representatives. He was now a US senator, and his star continued to rise. Yet for all his success, or perhaps because of it, Nixon was starting to lose his balance.
The strain on Nixon had started to show long before he reached the Senate. Overwork made him quick-tempered with colleagues, as well as “mean” with his family. When he had trouble sleeping, he resorted to sleeping pills. The campaign against Douglas had only driven him to greater limits. As a senator he continued to work obsessively, sometimes sleeping the night on a couch in his office. A month or two into this punishing schedule, Nixon began to be plagued with persistent back and neck pain. The first doctors he consulted were no help, and he found himself perusing a book on psychosomatic illness pressed on him by the outgoing senator from California, Sheridan Downey. The book was The Will To Live, by Dr Arnold Hutschnecker, an easy-to-read bestseller written for people “in the grips of acute conflict”. Hutschnecker dealt with a range of human complaints: chronic fatigue, hypertension, ulcers, insomnia, the inability to love, aggression, impotence in men and frigidity in women. On reading it, Nixon took a step that was to lead to a long and trusting relationship with the doctor – as well as to future political embarrassment. Probably in the early autumn of 1951, Nixon went to New York and presented himself at Hutschnecker’s imposing office at 829 Park Avenue. He was to see Hutschnecker several times that first year and in the years that followed – initially publicly, later privately, when Hutschnecker began to specialise solely in psychotherapy and Nixon became worried about publicity. When Nixon called, said Hutschnecker: “He’d never say, ‘I have a problem.’ He’d say, ‘Could we have breakfast?’ And I’d go. He needed me. It was what we call a transference, a trust. He came to me when he had decisions to make. Or when something was pending, and it troubled him.” Nixon did not always reveal what was on his mind. After one 1952 visit Hutschnecker was astonished to learn from the press of his patient’s possible selection as Eisenhower’s vice-presidential running mate. It must have been the matter uppermost in Nixon’s mind during the consultation, yet he had failed to mention it. Later the same year, however, when enmeshed in allegations of having taken under-the-table money – the fund scandal – Nixon tried frantically to reach the doctor. During the campaign against John F Kennedy in 1960 there was another summons. From 1968, however, after he had become president, Nixon’s aides saw to it that the link to Hutschnecker was virtually severed. There were some meetings outside the White House, but only when Nixon felt he could avoid detection. Later, after the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, the doctor was to visit Nixon at San Clemente. By then he seemed, Hutschnecker thought, “like a confessant”. They met for the last time in 1993, when Nixon asked the doctor to accompany him to Pat’s funeral. When we interviewed him, still sprightly at 97, Hutschnecker revealed only a little of Nixon’s first visit back in 1951. His patient’s initial complaint, he said, had been of feeling “a little nervous, irritable, and not sleeping so good. I gave him a mild sedative and told him to come back in two weeks.” One aspect of Nixon’s problem, he has said, was depression. As early as the end of the second session, Hutschnecker was certain that his patient’s sharp intellect and outward selfconfidence masked “deep-seated inhibitions”. He thought “Nixon was an enigma, not just to me but to himself. And … had to try to understand what motivated his superdrive, and – paradoxically – his inhibitions.”
Hutschnecker believed that Nixon’s father, Frank, had been a “brutal and cruel” man who had beaten his sons and “brutalised” his wife. While the doctor viewed this as an enormously important factor in Nixon’s make-up, the heart of the problem, he believed, was Hannah, Nixon’s mother, a devout Quaker. “Clinically,” Hutschnecker said, “it started with the mother. Nixon’s mother was so religious he was trapped in many ways. I wouldn’t say that he was really religious but he was totally devoted to his mother – like a robot, if you want. Even to the last, you know, he was kneeling down to pray every day. He was completely smothered. His mother was really his downfall.”
Looking back, Hutschnecker suspected that Nixon had “guilt feelings” for having pursued politics in the vindictive style of his father rather than on the “saintly” path of his mother. Nixon’s fervent wish, the doctor felt, was that someday he would be able to say to Hannah: “Mother, I have made peace. Now I am worthy of you.” In the course of our discussion on Nixon’s relationship with his mother, we raised the possibility that he had suffered at one stage from sexual impotence. According to James Bassett, who from 1952 became unusually close to Nixon as a press aide – and drinking companion – this was was one problem that led him to consult the doctor. Hutschnecker denied having treated Nixon for impotence. He said, however, that his patient would “become 14 years old, red- faced and stammer” when matters of sex were raised.
The doctor did speak a little about Pat Nixon. He had learned from her directly “how much she detested politics. She wanted a simple life … wanted to be a housewife. But he couldn’t. He liked to be in the thick of things.” On the one hand Hutschnecker regarded Pat as “a wonderful lady … loyal …”, who gave her husband limitless support and encouragement. On the other, he said Nixon viewed her as “his sun” – to a degree that was not healthy. “He was devoted,” said the doctor, “but that was like the relationship with his mother … one-sided. If someone was like a mother and was a saint, you don’t have sex. That far I can go.” The damage from Richard Nixon’s loss in the 1960 presidential campaign against John F Kennedy went beyond politics. On the day the moving van was being loaded for the Nixon family’s return from the capital to California, Pat suddenly came rushing out of the house. She was “screaming like a banshee”, recalled Washington Daily News reporter Tom Kelly, “completely out of control. Her hair was dishevelled, her face red, and her eyes were wild.” This was a Pat the public had never seen, a Pat embittered by the experience of the previous year. The months after the election, the Nixons’ daughter Julie said, marked a “turning point in my mother’s attitude toward politics – 1960 disillusioned her beyond redemption.”
What Julie did not reveal was what other intimates noted: much of Pat’s rage was directed against her husband, who had ignored her appeals to quit politics. In early 1961, before leaving the capital, the couple took a vacation in the Bahamas, planned to last a month but cut short by Nixon after just two weeks. “The shallow talk, the lack of interest in subjects of importance,” he remembered, “grew more and more boring … I could hardly wait to get back to work.” He was already planning his return to politics. During the vacation, Nixon had mentioned the possibility of running for governor of California. The pharmaceuticals tycoon Elmer Bobst had warned him, as they cruised in the Caribbean aboard Bobst’s yacht, that the race would do nothing to help him reach his ultimate goal, the presidency. Other long-time colleagues were divided on the subject. Press aide Herb Klein cited polls indicating that Nixon would beat the incumbent governor, Pat Brown. Jim Bassett told him he would be “out of his mind to run”, that in California he would get tripped up by local issues while his expertise was in foreign affairs, that the Democratic legislature would “cut [his] balls off”. Nixon did not heed the warnings. The thought that he might lose, Bassett said, seemed not to have occurred to him. Nixon sat up most of election night in November 1962 watching the returns come in at Los Angeles’ Beverly Hilton Hotel, in the same presidential suite where Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy had all stayed. “We had,” he wrote later, “to play the dreary drama through to its conclusion.” The outcome was clear enough by midnight, and at 4am Nixon went to bed. Four hours later, when he woke and called for coffee, he learned that he had indeed lost by 297 000 out of six million votes cast. Press aide Herb Klein went in to see him with a draft concession statement and thought Nixon looked “haggard … bad”. Told that the press was waiting to see him, Nixon just stared and then simply said: “Screw them.”
Soon after, he changed his mind. Nixon’s friend Pat Hillings recalled what happened next: “Suddenly the figure of Richard Nixon came hurtling into the room and practically pushed Klein off the platform. He was angry. It was quite apparent …” Nixon now launched into the rambling speech that no one was ever to forget, the one with the famous “last point”. It was then that he told startled reporters: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference …” At that “last” press conference, local reporter Jack Langguth thought Nixon looked like “someone you’d see if you went into a bar on Eighth Avenue in New York at seven in the morning, talking almost to himself, so exhausted but too tired to sleep”. He and fellow journalists concluded that Nixon had been drinking.
Even at the start of the campaign, Nixon admitted: “I was more tired than I had been at the end of the 1960 campaign … and I became short-tempered at home.” Just how short-tempered was not revealed while he was alive. Nixon called Pat his “secret weapon” and, in an allusion to her namesake Pat Brown, dubbed her the new Pat, destined soon to reside in the state capital.
Watching as she went through the motions, the Los Angeles Times’s Richard Bergholz thought her “just a stick of furniture sitting there, someone who smiled and had that adoring look on her face when she’d heard the same speech for the 50th time … she was obviously on edge, and we all suffered when she suffered. He abused her perpetually.”
Word spread about an ugly moment during a plane trip from San Francisco. Pat, sitting apart from her husband while he talked with others, had asked if she might join them for a drink. The answer, reportedly, was a snarled “Keep your fucking mouth shut.” Research suggests that Nixon physically attacked Pat after the 1962 defeat. Credible corroboration of the 1962 allegation comes from former Nixon aide John Sears. “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.”
Sears identified the lawyer as the late Waller Taylor, who in 1962 had been a senior partner at the law firm that Nixon had joined after his defeat by Kennedy. As Sears understood it from Taylor, the 1962 beating was not an isolated incident. 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.” Sears recalled the family lawyer telling him there were divorce discussions at the time: “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 …” Within a month of the loss to Pat Brown, Nixon had met with intimates in a suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria to discuss how to keep himself politically in play. New York, in fact, seemed the one place where resurrection might be possible. To that end Nixon wanted an attorney’s job in Manhattan, one that would pay $250 000 a year and leave him free to use his time as he liked. “He had to have his cake, money,” said one aide, “and eat it, too – pursue his interest in foreign policy.” In any event, Nixon became a senior partner of a New York law firm, thenceforth to be known as Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander. The Wall Street firm was a long- established champion of big business, described by Life’s Hugh Sidey as a place where “the faces inside are commanding but for the most part unrecognisable … the talk about corporations and dollars”. Nixon went on to win the 1968 presidential election by an infinitesimal margin: 43,4% of the national vote to the Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 42,72%, with Alabama’s George Wallace and marginal candidates taking the rest. Even though four million more Americans had voted than in 1960, Nixon received more than two million votes fewer than he had against Kennedy. But he had the victory he had yearned for. He was about to take possession of the prize that only 36 men had won before. Yet he seemed a man at ease with his destiny. Nixon’s public stance at the start of the presidential race had been that he seldom drank anything. “When I’m campaigning, I live like a Spartan,” he declared even as he was nursing a whisky. Where the subject of Nixon and drink was concerned, the issue was one of propaganda versus reality. Nixon told Theodore White, the authoritative election chronicler, that he realised that, once in office, he “couldn’t take a drink again, couldn’t party it up. You can’t drink and think clearly … two drinks and your mind isn’t quite sharp, and you may not be able to think clearly when that phone rings at night … you’ve got to be ready … No more drinking, no more late hours… I felt I knew what Jefferson meant when he said the presidency was a ‘splendid misery’.”
By his own account, Nixon first used sleeping pills in the late 40s. His fellow Republican in the 1962 California race, George Christopher, thought he used “some pills to ease his mind a bit. Dispassionate pills to cool down. He was under great, great pressure.” In fact, it became clear during our research, Nixon consumed large quantities of one particular drug over a long period, apparently without a prescription or proper medical supervision. The drug was Dilantin, the brand name of an anti-epileptic medication known to pharmacologists as Phenytoin, and the circumstances in which he came to start taking it were alarmingly casual. He heard about the drug, probably soon after being elected president, while dining at Key Biscayne with his long-time friend Bebe Rebozo and the millionaire founder of the Dreyfus Fund, Jack Dreyfus Jr.
Dreyfus, who had contributed to the Nixon campaigns in both 1960 and 1968, had no medical qualifications. Having credited Dilantin with relieving him of chronic depression almost overnight, he had become the leading advocate of it as a panacea for all manner of ailments. He poured millions of dollars into promoting the drug, which he considered a “gift from God”, with properties that could bring almost miraculous relief from disorders ranging from heart problems and asthma to leprosy and arthritis – beliefs he still held at age 86 in 2000.
At their 1968 meeting in Key Biscayne, as Dreyfus told us, “Nixon said, ‘Why don’t you give me some Dilantin?’ So I thought, ‘What the heck, he’s [going to be] president of the United States. I can’t get in trouble …’ So I went out to the car and got a bottle of a thousand and gave it to him. A few days later he called me and said, ‘Is it all right if I take two a day?’ I said, ‘Yes, I think so.’ Later on, when I went to see him at the White House, he asked me if he could have some more. I gave him another large bottle.” Asked what Nixon wanted the Dilantin for, Dreyfus was vague. Nixon, he said, had “a lot of things … worries”. The Physicians’ Desk Reference, used by US doctors nationwide, lists numerous known adverse reactions to Dilantin. They include “slurred speech, decreased coordination, mental confusion, dizziness, insomnia, transient nervousness”. Dr Lawrence McDonald, a Washington physician we consulted, was alarmed at the notion of anyone – especially a person in a position of high responsibility – using Dilantin in uncontrolled doses or combined with other medications or alcohol. “If such a user of the drug were the president of the United States,” McDonald said, “I would be very nervous. Mental confusion is not something you want in a leader. Dilantin certainly could impair someone of that calibre from making correct and timely and appropriate judgements. It’s a potential time bomb, waiting to happen.” Nixon did use alcohol and did use sleeping pills. His long-time speechwriter, Ray Price, recalled how even a single drink could make him appear drunk “if he had taken a sleeping pill”. As if the drinking, the sleeping pills and the Dilantin were not troubling enough, Rabbi Baruch Korff – a Nixon apologist late in the presidency – said that “at times he resorted to amphetamines”. Senior aides noticed the tension in Nixon early on. Even a press conference, Henry Kissinger observed, could leave him “so drained that he sought to avoid stress for days afterward … sustained efforts, especially on routine matters, exhausted him physically and made him extremely irritable”.
Reflecting on the Nixon presidency years later, John Osborne, White House correspondent of the journal New Republic, would state openly what he had long been hinting: “Even in the first years of his presidency,” he wrote, “reporters who followed and observed Nixon as closely as I tried to did so in part because, way down, there was a feeling that he might go bats in front of them at any time.” Alcohol had alarming effects even when Nixon drank little. Some officials who served him were aware of the problem. “He was given to exploding,” said deputy assistant secretary of state William Sullivan, “particularly in the course of the evening if he had had a few drinks. He would call up [secretary of state] Bill Rogers or somebody else and say, ‘Fire this man’ … Bill said Nixon would forget this the next morning.” The Washington Post’s Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, wrote of learning about a call in which the president “drunkenly related to Dr Kissinger the Vietnam military policy of his friend Bebe Rebozo…. During another call Kissinger mentioned the number of American casualties in a major battle in Vietnam. ‘Oh, screw ’em,’ said Nixon.” l Read the second part of ‘Tricky Dick: Drunk in charge’ here next week. c Anthony Summers. This is an edited extract from The Arrogance Of Power: The Secret World Of Richard Nixon, by Anthony Summers, with Robbyn Swan, published by Victor Gollancz/Jonathan Ball next month at R190.