Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

“Secret Service agents were at the ready to move,” says one of Nixon’s agents. “The agent who was driving was checking everything out, making sure the heater was properly adjusted. Nixon paused to talk to Pat. The driver accidentally honked his horn, and Nixon, thinking he was being impatient, said, ‘I’ll be right there.’”

While he became more depressed during Watergate, “there needs to be a new definition of depression, because that’s the way Nixon was all the time,” a former agent on his detail says.

As the Watergate scandal progressed, “Nixon got very paranoid,” a Secret Service agent says. “He didn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. He did think people were lying to him. He thought at the end everyone was lying.”

As the pressure mounted, Nixon began drinking more frequently. He would down a martini or a Manhattan.

“All he could handle was one or two,” a Secret Service agent says. “He wouldn’t be flying high, but you could tell he wasn’t in total control of himself. He would loosen up, start talking more, and smile. It was completely out of character. But he had two, and that was that. He had them every other night. But always at the end of business and in the residence. You never saw him drunk in public.”

In the months leading up to the 1972 election, under the guise of being concerned about Edward M. Kennedy’s safety, Nixon ordered his aide John Ehrlichman to arrange to offer Kennedy Secret Service protection as the Democrat campaigned for George McGovern. In fact, Nixon’s Oval Office recordings reveal that Nixon hoped to dig up dirt on Kennedy from the Secret Service agents he dispatched to protect him.

“I predict something more [besides Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident that led to the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne] is going to happen,” Nixon said on the tapes. “The reason I would cover him is from a personal standpoint—you’re likely to find something.”

Nixon made it clear that he considered Kennedy’s support of McGovern a threat to his own reelection. For that reason, protection of Ted Kennedy would end after the election. Then, said the president, “If he gets shot, it’s too damn bad.”

But like so many of Nixon’s schemes, this attempt at scandal-mongering failed. Agents knew of Kennedy’s philandering while married to his wife, Joan, but they never let on.

Like many presidents, Nixon engaged in symbolic gestures that were phony. During the 1973 oil embargo, he told the press he was flying to his San Clemente home on a United Airlines commercial flight to save fuel. He then had the military fly him back on a JetStar, which required flying the plane empty to California to pick him up.

“It was to show we were saving fuel,” Air Force One chief steward Charles Palmer recalls. “We sent the plane in [to California] empty.”

Nixon often spent time with Abplanalp on his friend’s island, Grand Cay in the Bahamas. Abplanalp started his company, Precision Valve Corporation, in 1949 to manufacture a new type of aerosol valve that he had invented in a machine shop in the Bronx. Aerosol technology was not new, but the metal valves on aerosol cans were unreliable and expensive to make. Abplanalp used plastic in a model that could be mass-produced. He lowered the price per valve from fifteen cents to just two and a half cents and made a fortune. When Abplanalp died in 2003, the company was producing four billion valves a year.

“Just to give you an idea of his athletic prowess—or lack of it—he [Nixon] loved to fish,” a former agent says. “He’d be on the back of Abplanalp’s fifty-five-foot yacht, and he would sit in this swivel seat with his fishing pole. Abplanalp’s staff would bait Nixon’s hook and throw the hook out. And Nixon would be just sitting there, with both hands on the pole, and he’d catch something, and the staff would reel it in for him, take the fish off, put it in the bucket. Nixon wouldn’t do anything but watch.”

One afternoon, Nixon was watching television at his San Clemente home, called La Casa Pacifica, while feeding dog biscuits to one of his dogs.

“Nixon took a dog biscuit and was looking at it and then takes a bite out of it,” says former agent Richard Repasky, who was watching him through a window.

Even in summer, Nixon insisted on a fire in the fireplace. One evening after he had left the presidency, Nixon forgot to open the flue damper.

“The smoke backed up in the house, and two agents came running,” says a former agent who was on the Nixon detail.

“Can you find him?” one of the agents asked the other.

“No, I can’t find the son of a bitch,” the other agent said.

From the bedroom, a voice piped up.

“Son of a bitch is here trying to find a matching pair of socks,” Nixon said, apparently joking.

“Monday through Friday, Nixon would leave his home at 12:55 P.M. to play golf,” Dale Wunderlich, a former agent on his detail, says. “He would insist on golfing even in pouring rain.”

“When you saw him play golf, you were embarrassed for him,” a former agent says. “I mean it was awful. When the Watergate scandal came out, my initial reaction was it was impossible that he was involved in that, because he couldn’t come out of a rainstorm unless somebody was with him. He was a sorry figure, really. Brilliant man, but if you set him loose by himself, out with the regular citizens in the world, I don’t think he could function.”

Nixon’s relationship with his wife, Pat—code-named Starlight—was a distant one. Like John F. Kennedy and Jackie and Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird, the couple slept in separate bedrooms.

On Air Force One, “Nixon kept to himself,” former Air Force One steward Russ Reid says. “He stayed in his compartment, and the first lady stayed in her compartment by herself. Occasionally, they would hold hands when they were getting off the plane just for show. There was little conversation.”

Pat was considerate of Secret Service agents. Instead of ordering agents around, she would ask politely, “Is it okay if we go” to a shopping center. But especially after they left the White House, Pat’s drinking problem worsened. Pat drank martinis and “was in a pretty good stupor much of the time,” an agent on Nixon’s detail says. “She had trouble remembering things.”

“One day out in San Clemente when I was out there, a friend of mine was on post, and he hears this rustling in the bushes,” says another agent who was on Nixon’s detail. “You had a lot of immigrants coming up on the beach, trying to get to the promised land. You never knew if anybody was going to be coming around the compound.”

At that point, the other agent “cranks one in the shotgun, he goes over to where the rustling is, and it’s Pat,” the former agent says. “She’s on her hands and knees. She’s trying to find the house.”

Pat “had a tough life,” the agent says. “Nixon would hardly talk. The only time he enjoyed himself was when he was with his friends Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, when they would drink together.”

An agent remembers accompanying Nixon, Pat, and their two daughters during a nine-hole golf game near their home at San Clemente. During the hour and a half, “he never said a word,” the former agent says. Nor would Nixon and his wife talk in Secret Service vehicles.

Eventually, Nixon gave up golf.

“Nixon was playing golf near San Clemente,” a former agent recalls. “He said, ‘This is a game for lazy bastards.’ He quit halfway and never returned to the game.”

Like most presidents, Nixon made a show of going to church or having services held in the White House.

“Going to church was more show than anything else,” an agent says. “That was not unusual with most of them. It was more to give the appearance you are a good Christian. Nixon went the least of all. They [the Nixons] wouldn’t go after they got out of the White House.”