The last picture that Ollie Atkins had taken of Richard Nixon was at California's El Toro Marine Base in August 1974. There, Nixon had posed briefly with the crew that flew him to the West immediately after he resigned from the presidency. Last month Atkins—the White House photographer during the entire Nixon Administration—received a surprise invitation from San Clemente to have dinner with Pat and Dick and shoot pictures of them.
Like others who have paid calls of late, Atkins found Nixon in good spirits. He looked bright-eyed and fit, showed a touch of the old presidential bearing and vigor and was seemingly determined to demonstrate that the Nixon household had weathered Watergate and returned to normality. Atkins' color photographs, shown exclusively in TIME on the following pages, bear out those impressions.
At San Clemente, Nixon follows a schedule that seems to be a leisurely version of his old White House routine. Shortly before 9 a.m., conservatively suited and always wearing an American-flag pin in his lapel, he usually rides a golf cart the quarter-mile from his house to Building A, the former Coast Guard station that serves as his private office. There he makes telephone calls, reviews his most important pieces of mail and has lengthy conferences with aides about his memoirs.
Late in the morning Nixon receives visitors—who in recent months have included Illinois Senator Charles Percy, former Italian Premier Giulio Andreotti and ex-White House Aide Bryce Harlow.
Nixon relaxes during the afternoons, frequently getting in a round of golf on the course at nearby Camp Pendleton with his aide, Colonel (ret.) Jack Brennan. Pat Nixon, by all visitors' accounts, is aglow—buoyant and relaxed as she oversees Casa Pacifica or putters in her garden. "I'm loving this place," she told a friend not long ago.
With the November 1976 deadline for Nixon's memoirs approaching, the idyllic routine has begun to change. The first 200 pages are due at the publishers at the end of this month, and Nixon has been working as much as eight hours a day. On NBC's Today show last week, Julie Nixon Eisenhower said Nixon has been working on the Watergate chapters of the book in recent weeks, and she declared that "he's going to write a very candid book." Would we, asked Hostess Barbara Walters, learn anything that we hadn't known before? Said Julie: "I'm sure you will."