Returned to spontaneously, twice in the course of a single interview, these were the words of a man who recognized that he had a weakness. Meanwhile, what of Ehrlichman’s reference to Seconal? What of Nixon’s use of prescription drugs?
By his own account, Nixon first used sleeping pills in the late forties. 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.” “There may have been some medication to reduce stress,” Nixon’s brother Edward agreed in 2000, “but he was not one who wanted to do anything like that habitually. . . .”
In fact, as it became clear during research for this book, 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 Nixon 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 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 eighty-six in the year 2000.
At their 1968 meeting in Key Biscayne, as Dreyfus told the author, “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.” At one point, when Dreyfus suggested that the president should perhaps get the medication from a doctor, Nixon said, ‘To heck with the doctor.’ ” The president likely had little to worry about on that front. John Ehrlichman remembered the White House physician, Dr. Walter Tkach, as a compliant doctor who would do exactly as a patient asked. “You’d go to him and say, ‘I’m going to Turkey tomorrow and I need inoculations.’ And he’d say, ‘Here, give me your book,’ and he’d stamp all the inoculations and say, ‘There! That ought to immunize you. . . .’ ”
Dr. Tkach, moreover, had used Dilantin himself and enthused over it. When asked later by Dreyfus if his eminent patient was still taking the drug, Tkach merely said airily: “I don’t know, but the amount of pills in the bottle in his bathroom is reducing in size, so I suppose he is.”
Neither Nixon’s cavalier use of Dilantin, nor Tkach’s style of doctoring, is reassuring to those who like to assume the president makes prudent use of medication under the direction of the most meticulous of physicians. Dilantin is, moreover—to the frustration of Dreyfus and like-minded converts—a medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration only as an anticonvulsant to counter epileptic seizures. While it is also effective in pain relief and may be prescribed at a qualified doctor’s discretion, it can have serious side effects.
Dreyfus has conceded that should dosages not be well calculated and observed, the user can become what he termed “a little disjointed-feeling . . . dizzy . . . [with] a drunkish feeling.” The Physicians’ Desk Reference, used by doctors nationwide, lists numerous known adverse reactions to Dilantin. They include “slurred speech, decreased coordination, and mental confusion, dizziness, insomnia, transient nervousness. . . .” Dr. Lawrence McDonald, a Washington physician consulted by the author, was alarmed at the notion of anyone’s—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,” Dr. McDonald said, “I would be very nervous. Mental confusion is not something you want in a leader. Dilantin certainly could impair someone of that caliber from making correct and timely and appropriate judgments. It’s a potential time bomb, waiting to happen.”
Nixon did use alcohol and did use sleeping pills. His longtime speechwriter Ray Price recalled how even a single drink could make him appear drunk “if he had 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 he learned that “at times he resorted to amphetamines.” Amphetamines, of course, are stimulants, the opposite of the relaxing medications mentioned by other associates.
Billy Graham, a longtime confidant, offered a startling verdict on the cause of Nixon’s ultimate downfall. “I think,” he said in 1979, “it was sleeping pills. Sleeping pills and demons. I think there was definitely demon power involved. He took all those sleeping pills, and through history, drugs and demons have gone together. . . . My conclusion is that it was just all those sleeping pills, they just let a demon’s power come in and play over him. . . .”
The evangelist’s notional demons aside, Nixon’s tenure of the White House was to bring times when it was obvious all was not well with the president. Observers who heard the slurring of the voice or saw the disjointed gestures were to wonder about his use of drink or drugs.
On the eve of the 1968 election, another highly sensitive aspect of Nixon’s private life had come perilously close to exposure, his use of a new York psychotherapist.
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On the morning of October 29, exactly a week before voting day, while President Johnson was grappling with the Republican sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks, the phone rang in the Park Avenue office of Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. It was the columnist Drew Pearson calling with a stunning double-barreled question. Was it a fact, Pearson asked, that Hutschnecker had been giving Nixon “psychiatric treatments”? If so, was it true that the doctor was concerned as to whether his patient was “the right man to have his finger on the nuclear trigger”?
Although the columnist was working largely from old information—a private investigator’s report prepared in 1960 in the hope of embarrassing Nixon during the contest with Kennedy.4 Hutschnecker, however, did not know what evidence Pearson had. Caught off guard, and with a patient in his office, he confirmed that he had treated Nixon. It was a “delicate matter,” he added, one he was “reluctant to talk about.” Would the columnist please call back in the afternoon?
The telephone hummed in the hours that followed. It was ironically Pearson’s colleague Jack Anderson, phoning Nixon headquarters for a comment, who tipped the Republicans to the threat of disastrous publicity. With Nixon and Humphrey running so closely, a story about Nixon’s receiving psychotherapy could prove critically damaging.
“We felt we had to be ready to react immediately,” press aide Herb Klein recalled. “We had friends on a few newspapers ready to alert us if they received advance copies of such a column. . . . We wanted to be ready to deny the story in a way that editors would be cautious on the use of the material. . . . One damaging column could have tipped the close election.” As another precaution, Klein put in a check call of his own to the psychotherapist.
At 4:00 P.M., when Pearson called back, Dr. Hutschnecker squelched the story. He had treated Nixon “for a brief period” while he was vice president, he said, “but only for problems involving internal medicine.” Pearson wondered why at a time when Nixon was Washington-based, he would have traveled all the way to a doctor in New York for routine physical problem
s. Not satisfied with Hutschnecker’s account, he continued digging.
Word soon reached Republican Congressman Gerald Ford, the House minority leader, that Hutschnecker was chatting socially about his call from Pearson. The Nixon damage control operation went back into action, and the doctor received separate visits from both Klein and Murray Chotiner.
Voting day came and went without Pearson’s running the story. A week later, though, the columnist used the forum of an address to the National Press Club to reveal his unwritten information. He now knew, he said, that Hutschnecker had “confirmed to others that he had treated or advised Mr. Nixon over psychiatric problems. And he had expressed some worry privately that Mr. Nixon had problems—or did have a problem—of not standing up under great pressure.”
When Nixon’s press secretary dismissed this allegation as “totally untrue,” Pearson riposted in print. Several of Hutschnecker’s patients, he said, had spoken with him about Nixon’s visits. One, who agreed to be quoted by name, said it had been “common knowledge” that Nixon received “psychotherapeutic treatments” during his vice presidency. Dr. Hutschnecker, asserted this witness, had “expressed some concern that such a man should occupy the important post of vice president.”5
Press aide Herb Klein would state in his memoirs that at the time of the early Hutschnecker treatments, the only ones the Nixon side would admit to, the doctor had merely been “studying psychiatry” and that Nixon had seen him primarily because of “severe headaches.” In 1997, interviewed for this book, he was more forthright. Nixon had gone to the doctor, Klein revealed, because “he was feeling depressed.”
During the 1968 flap the journalist Gloria Steinem joined the procession to Dr. Hutschnecker’s office and kept him talking for more than three hours. The doctor remained evasive but dropped a number of hints. “He didn’t deny and he didn’t confirm,” she recalled. “He wasn’t forthcoming about Nixon per se, but he energetically put forward his belief that all leaders, including candidates for the presidency, should have some vetting by mental health experts. And when he told me his view about examining would-be presidents, he was responding to questions I had asked about Nixon.”
In his interviews for this book the doctor said Nixon gave him to understand that should he be elected president, he would appoint Hutschnecker his personal physician. That was not to be, however, because Haldeman and Ehrlichman, whom the doctor categorized as “goons” or “gangsters,” insisted that using the doctor would be “the kiss of death . . . would destroy the presidency.”
Keeping his distance from Hutschnecker did keep the threat of the “shrink” connection at bay. Other Damoclean swords, weapons of his own making, however, were already pointed at Nixon’s head.
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Bryce Harlow, who had been associated with Nixon for many years, knew some of the man’s dangerous secrets. As early as the Pierre Hotel transition period he warned younger aides of the perils ahead, predicting that the new administration “would attract scandal like a dog would attract fleas.”
Four of these potential scandals were especially worrisome: the original assassination plots against Fidel Castro, the cash connection with Howard Hughes, the massive recent campaign contribution from the dictatorship in Greece, and the recent offense that was still being actively hushed up, the sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks.
While there were various ways these secrets might surface, one man especially, a man on the wrong side of the political spectrum, knew too much. This was Lawrence O’Brien, fifty-one, leading light of the Democratic party’s Irish Mafia and master political strategist. A veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it was O’Brien—he had taken over in late summer after the murder of Bobby Kennedy—whose expertise had brought Hubert Humphrey from almost certain defeat to almost defeating Nixon.
Within hours of the younger Kennedy’s death, issuing orders from his penthouse suite in Las Vegas, Howard Hughes had come up with a characteristically perverse scheme. As the latest ploy in his effort to turn the nation’s top politicians into his personal puppets, he set out to hire “Kennedy’s entire organization.” That being an unrealistic goal even for Hughes, he reached out for O’Brien.
Several weeks later, after negotiations with Hughes’s aide Robert Maheu, O’Brien accepted a post as the tycoon’s Washington consultant, for an annual fee of $180,000. The previous year, hints that there had been assassination plots against Castro appearing in the press for the first time had been characterized as ethically inadmissible, “a political H-bomb.” The initial report had pointed the finger only at the Kennedy brothers. Yet Maheu, now in close touch with O’Brien, well knew that the first anti-Castro conspiracy, involving the Mafia, had started in 1960, when Nixon was White House point man on Cuba. How much did O’Brien learn about Nixon’s role in the assassination plots? How much, once his Hughes consultancy got under way, was he going to learn about Hughes’ money flowing to Nixon?
Lawrence O’Brien also knew about the Greek dictators’ contributions to the Nixon campaign, a subject on which he had been briefed by exile activist Elias Demetracopoulos. It was O’Brien who had issued the press statement four days before the election, challenging Nixon to explain his relationship with Tom Pappas, the go-between with the Greek regime.
If Nixon also feared that O’Brien had knowledge of the Republican interference in the Vietnam peace process, he feared correctly. Records show that, logically enough, Hubert Humphrey had informed his campaign manager of the gist of what he had learned from President Johnson.
There was something else. The night before the voters went to the polls, when the result hung in the balance and there was little more he could do to advance his cause, Nixon—and a large proportion of the voters—had watched on television a Democratic party commercial that Theodore White called Humphrey’s “high moment of identification.” There was Senator Edward Kennedy, the last remaining brother, walking the sands of Hyannis Port. In earnest conversation with him, as the wind off the Atlantic blew their coats up in swallowtails, had been that repository of secrets so dangerous to Richard Nixon, Lawrence O’Brien.
Nixon fretted about O’Brien and about the potential threat from the last of the Kennedys. In the White House, ever insecure and determined to win a second term with a truly convincing victory, he would plot against them both. It would be the plotting against O’Brien, later elevated to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, that was to result in Nixon’s destruction and disgrace.
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At a bone-chilling noontime on January 20, 1969, as dignitaries shivered under their temporary canopy, Richard Nixon stepped out of a limousine in front of the great dome of the Capitol.
He tripped as he took his place on the dais for his inauguration so that, as the ambassador from Ecuador noted, the last word he uttered before the ceremony was “Oops!” Pat, in rosy red outfit and fur hat, held out two family Bibles dating back to the nineteenth century. Her husband placed his left hand upon them as Earl Warren, the chief justice who loathed him, administered the presidential oath.
Nixon was now the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Billy Graham intoned a prayer, and the new leader of more than two hundred million people launched into his seventeen-minute inaugural address. He spoke rapidly but evenly of winding up the war in Vietnam, ending the cold war with the Soviet Union, and bringing the divided nation together.
Both Bibles had been opened to Isaiah 2:4, the passage about beating swords into plowshares. The keystone sentence in Nixon’s speech was a Quaker sentiment from his own pen that was destined to be chiseled into his tombstone: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” On the drive to the White House afterward he could see antiwar protesters lobbing sticks, stones, and beer cans and hoisting a huge placard reading BILLIONAIRES PROFIT OFF G.I. BLOOD!
That night at the inaugural balls, throngs of Republicans from across America—huge contingents of them from Nixon’s native California
and much-favored Florida—crowded so close that few could dance. Bebe Rebozo was there of course, as was the Saudi entrepreneur Adnan Khashoggi, whose beauteous wife missed what Nixon was saying because a man behind kept pinching her.
Also present was Anna Chennault, the intermediary in the operation designed to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks. Patricia Hitt, whom Chennault had named as a possible go-between in her contacts with Nixon, hosted a party of her own. As assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, she now held the highest government position of any woman in the new administration.
Noting that one of the featured bands was Guy Lombardo’s, Nixon recalled having danced to Lombardo’s music with Pat the night World War II ended. Around 2:00 A.M., when the Nixons got back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they walked from room to room turning on all the lights.
“He seemed exultant,” Henry Kissinger would say of the inauguration, “as if he could hardly wait for the ceremony to be over so that he could begin to implement the dream of a lifetime.” Nixon’s friend Bryce Harlow, however, had doubts. “When Dick was finally elected President,” he said, “he attained eighty percent of all his goals in life. He has no idea of what he will do after he is sworn in.”
On his first working day in office Nixon invited a thousand campaign workers to the White House. He told them: “This is your house, too. We’ll get up early and work late so this will always be a happy house. And your home will always be a happy home. . . .”
It had begun.
25
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The office neither elevates or degrades a man. What it does is to provide a stage upon which all his personality traits are magnified and accentuated.
—George Reedy, President Johnson’s press secretary