'The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon' Challenges Accounts of the Former First Lady
Author Heath Hardage Lee hopes her exhaustive account of Pat Nixon’s life prompts a reexamination of her legacy.
There are scant reports of what life was like for former First Lady Pat Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal before her husband, President Richard Nixon, resigned from office 50 years ago this week.
For decades, she has been defined in part by a troubling depiction of her by esteemed journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their 1976 book The Final Days, which examines the final months of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
It was at the height of the Watergate scandal when then First Lady Pat Nixon returned from a South American goodwill trip in 1973 and, according to The Final Days, was “distraught and even more underweight than usual. She was becoming more and more reclusive, and drinking heavily. On several occasions members of the household staff came upon her in the pantry of the second-floor kitchen, where the liquor was kept, in the early afternoon. Awkwardly, she had tried to hide her tumbler of bourbon on the rocks.”
The claims by anonymous sources that Pat Nixon was “reclusive” and a heavy drinker in The Final Days haven't been significantly challenged—until now.
Based on her research, author Heath Hardage Lee writes in her comprehensive new biography The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady that there is no evidence supporting those claims.
“Woodward and Bernstein’s characterizations of the former First Lady ring false,” writes Lee in the book, which is being released today.
“Woodward and Bernstein’s characterizations of the former First Lady ring false,” writes Lee in the book, which is being released today.
“First, Pat was anything but reclusive from April 1973 until the end of her husband’s presidency,” writes Lee. She goes on to challenge the other piece of reporting in The Final Days that Pat Nixon was a heavy drinker.
“It is notable that out of the many subjects interviewed for [The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon], not a single source among the East Wing staff, West Wing staff, friends, family, or other outsiders, saw any behavior that would lead them to believe that the First Lady had a drinking problem,” Lee writes.
In the weeks leading up to the release of The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Lee spoke with East Wing Magazine about her biography, as well as the depiction of Mrs. Nixon in The Final Days and how, in the biographer’s view, it smeared her legacy in the years that followed.
“Everything I saw and read was totally at odds with the portrayal that the media has put out—she was reclusive, she was a heavy drinker,” Lee says, adding that she was unaware of this counterview when she began her research.
Lee, 54, was a young child when Richard Nixon resigned from office. She doesn’t remember Watergate, she says, noting she came to the project with no preconceptions about the life of Pat Nixon.
“I don’t take sides. I am completely nonpartisan,” she says. “That’s not my job. As a historian, I am the narrator of the story.”
In the foreword of The Final Days, Woodward and Bernstein—two young reporters in 1972 who did the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal—explain how they pieced together the book, which was based on interviews with 394 people: “All the interviews were conducted ‘on background’; that is, they were on the record—we could use the information—but only upon our assurance that the identity of the source would remain confidential.”
The authors go on to state in the foreword, “Nothing in this book has been reconstructed without accounts from at least two people.”
Among people close to Pat Nixon whom Lee interviewed for her book regarding the “heavy drinking” claim include Pat Nixon’s social secretary, Lucy Winchester Breathitt; Secret Service agent Bill Hudson; babysitters; and an Air Force One pilot.
“I just found no evidence to support that claim,” Lee says.
On Jan. 4, 2023, Lee also spoke with Woodward about the claim in an interview she describes in the book.
“When interviewed for this book, Woodward was still unwilling to attach any source names to this description of the First Lady,” Lee writes. “The only remark Woodward would allow to be published in this book? ‘I always had a lot of sympathy for Pat Nixon. You may quote me on that.’”
East Wing Magazine reached out to Woodward and Bernstein for comments, but the emails were not returned.
It didn’t take long for Lee to discover that this depiction of Pat Nixon as a heavy drinker was at odds with how others viewed the situation. In fact, she says, the contradictions began with the first person with whom she spoke.
“I asked literally scores of people about this,” Lee says. “It was just an emphatic ‘no’ from the very first person, and it was unanimous.”
During her research, Lee said she reviewed Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers, which were acquired in 2003 by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.
“They had an interview in there with Helen McCain Smith, who was the only on-the-record source they got to talk about Mrs. Nixon,” Lee says. “Helen McCain Smith, who was Pat’s press secretary [and] who they interviewed for The Final Days, said, ‘I never saw that. There’s no evidence of any drinking problem.’”
Woodward and Bernstein asked Pat Nixon for an interview during the final days of the Nixon presidency, and she declined, Lee says.
When asked where, then, Lee thought this depiction would come from, she could only guess: “I think it is based on a lot of secondary rumors.”
In Lee’s book, Pat Nixon’s son-in-law David Eisenhower, husband of Julie Nixon and grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, calls the claim an “imagining.”
“In other words, you have a staff person imagining that the family must be doing that, and Mrs. Nixon must be doing this,” Eisenhower adds.
As for the assertions that the former first lady was reclusive, Lee says they also are untrue.
“I show you [in the book] the official records, which completely disproves that because she was out there until almost the bitter end,” Lee says, noting Mrs. Nixon never missed a trip or event until about the last three weeks of her husband’s presidency when staff stopped scheduling public events. Even then, Lee says that Pat Nixon was working on the White House renovation and acquisition program. “She never stopped working.”
The passage about Pat Nixon is a minor part of The Final Days, which focuses on Richard Nixon and the West Wing. But the cloud it left over Mrs. Nixon’s legacy has endured.
“Compounding the injury to Pat’s character and reputation, on May 8, 1976, Saturday Night Live featured a sketch, also called ‘The Final Days,’ that used the book as the basis for its portrayal of the former First Lady as an alcoholic mess, speaking next to a half-drained bottle of gin and slurring her words,” Lee writes.
Random people who were aware Lee was working on the Pat Nixon biography and regularly watched Saturday Night Live during that time period would ask her about “the sketch.”
“It’s people who lived through Watergate,” she says. “[The sketch] is just burned in their brain.”
Additionally, Lee says, many Americans conflate First Ladies Betty Ford and Pat Nixon. Mrs. Ford became first lady after the Nixons left the White House and Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency. After the Fords left the White House in 1977, Betty Ford sought treatment for alcohol use disorder and an addiction to prescription medication, a step that contributed to Ford’s legacy of removing the stigma associated with addiction treatment, such as through the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation.
Lee says the anonymous claims in the short passage in The Final Days along with the TV satire and the conflation of Pat Nixon and Betty Ford have “contributed to a portrait of Pat that has little basis in fact.”
Furthermore, Lee says, the passage did not publicly benefit anyone.
“It underlined, for me, how vulnerable [first ladies] are to rumor,” says Lee, who believes the claims about Pat Nixon are likely untrue. “It’s a character assassination.”
“It underlined, for me, how vulnerable [first ladies] are to rumor,” says Lee, who believes the claims about Pat Nixon are likely untrue. “It’s a character assassination.”
Ultimately, Lee hopes her book sparks debate and a reexamination of Pat Nixon. The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, after all, isn’t centered solely on the passage in The Final Days. The biography begins with her rugged and, at times, painful upbringing in the remote settlement of Ely, Nevada, which steeled her with a resilience that would last a lifetime. After the deaths of both her parents by the time she was 18, Pat Nixon set out on her own and learned how to support and fend for herself. That strength led her throughout her higher education, a career path of her own and her husband’s career in politics. Given the adversity she overcame earlier in her life, she was more than prepared for the rigors of being a politician’s wife.
“Politics, at first, probably looks like small potatoes,” Lee says.
Nevertheless, Lee says the perceptions about Pat Nixon from the Watergate era have had an outsized impact on Pat Nixon’s legacy. They have been hurtful and reductive, and have obscured a lot of the first lady’s accomplishments, Lee adds. Pat Nixon died on June 22, 1993, at the age of 81.
As first lady, Pat Nixon was outspoken about having a woman nominated to the Supreme Court. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment and pushed for more jobs for women in government. And while that didn’t come about under Richard Nixon, her efforts laid the foundation. In 1972, Pat Nixon became the first-ever first lady to speak at the Republican National Convention. Pat Nixon’s role as a diplomat, Lee says, is “severely neglected.” Over five years, she visited 32 nations, including Saigon in South Vietnam during the Vietnam war, Peru after a devastating earthquake to the region, and Liberia, Ghana and the Ivory Coast in Africa in 1972. That same year, she accompanied her husband to the Soviet Union and China.
Notably, the Watergate scandal didn’t seem to impact Pat Nixon’s popularity. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top 10 list of most admired women 14 times, even after the Nixons left Washington, D.C. With her book, Lee hopes the focus will shift from stereotypes about her to what she did.
Lee writes that in Pat Nixon’s remaining hours in the White House, she ordered 38 red roses to be delivered to the Fords upon their arrival. The gesture from Pat Nixon, Lee says, was an attention to detail that shows her wits were intact.
“She’s thinking about Betty, who is taking on this massive role,” Lee says.
The handoff was professional and gracious, much like how Pat Nixon conducted herself throughout her political life. She navigated her years as first lady so beautifully, Lee says, in times that would probably have crushed most people.
Next week: Stephanie K. Bohnak, director of education for the National First Ladies Library & Museum in Canton, Ohio, reviews The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady.