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Pat, too, began to drink alone in the closing weeks. Despondent and withdrawn, she was embarrassed one noon when surprised by kitchen help as she was filling a tumbler with bourbon. She would spend long hours in her pale yellow bedroom, often returning her luncheon tray with the food untouched.
The book implies that Pat and Dick had long been cool toward each other —too cool to be able to confront each other as the end neared. Pat had confided to a physician that they "had not been close since the early '60s." Pat rejected her husband's advances, and this, the book says, "seemed to shut something off inside Nixon."
Pat had seriously considered seeking a divorce after her husband lost the election for Governor of California in 1962. She urged him not to seek office again, but stuck it out stoically when he did. When the two dined alone, the silence was so uncomfortable that servants rushed about to meet the Nixons' obvious wish to get the meal over with as quickly as possible.
The book dwells on the somewhat odd dining and drinking habits in the White House. It reports that Nixon preferred a 1966 Chateau Margaux wine with dinner. On the yacht Sequoia, he instructed stewards to serve him this $30 wine, wrapped in a towel to obscure the label, while his guests got a $6 vintage. Ron Ziegler, Nixon's beleaguered press aide, had special drinking habits too: he would not take his White House cocktails unless the glass bore the presidential emblem. He even wanted his coffee served in a cream-colored Lenox china cup and saucer bearing the presidential seal, identical to the cups Nixon used.
Despite this evidence of hero worship, Nixon was not close to Ziegler—or, really, to anyone. Certainly, he did not feel that he could confide in his new Vice President. In fact, Nixon was convinced that Gerald Ford was incapable of ever assuming the presidency. Still, his political advisers, including Barry Goldwater, pushed for Ford to replace the denounced Vice President, Spiro Agnew. After choosing Ford with considerable reluctance, Nixon turned to Goldwater and snapped: "Here's the damn pen I signed Jerry Ford's nomination with."
Ironically, it was Henry Kissinger to whom Nixon turned when he could no longer keep his emotions in check. The book's most moving scene describes how Nixon summoned Kissinger to the small Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House living quarters. Nixon had been drinking. To Kissinger's relief, the President said he was going to resign. He was full of self-pity. "Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?" he asked. Then he began sobbing. Trying to be fatherly, Kissinger reminded the President that he would be remembered for his peacemaking.
"Nixon got down on his knees," the book relates. "Kissinger felt he had no alternative but to kneel down, too. The President prayed out loud, asking for help, rest, peace and love. How could a President and a country be torn apart by such small things?
"Kissinger thought he had finished. But the President did not rise. He was weeping. And then, still sobbing, Nixon leaned over, striking his fist on the carpet, crying, 'What have I done? What has happened?'