Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (20 page)

The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration
who has any credibility—and as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe
she
believes what she is saying. They will tell you that she is approachable, which is true, and that she is open, which is not. Primarily they find her moving. “There is something about a spirited and charming daughter speaking up for her father in his darkest hour that is irresistibly appealing to all but the most cynical.” That from the
Daily News
. And this from NBC’s Barbara Walters, signing off after Julie’s last appearance on the
Today
show: “I think that no matter how people feel about your father, they’re always very impressed to see a daughter defend her father that way.”

There
is
something very moving about Julie Nixon Eisenhower—but it is not Julie Nixon Eisenhower. It is the
idea
of Julie Nixon Eisenhower, essence of daughter, a better daughter than any of us will ever be; it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six. This idea is apparently so overwhelming in its appeal that some Washington reporters go so far as to say that Julie doesn’t seem like a Nixon at all—a remark so patently absurd as to make one conclude either that they haven’t heard a word she is saying or that they have been around Nixon so long they don’t recognize a chocolate-covered spider when they see one.

I should point out before going any further that I have a special interest in Presidents’ daughters, having spent a good thirty minutes in my youth wanting to be Margaret Truman. And even back then, I knew it was not a perfect existence—Secret Service men trailing you
everywhere, life in a fishbowl, and so forth. Still, whatever the drawbacks, it seemed clear that if you were the President’s daughter, you at least got to date a lot. The other attraction to the fantasy, I suppose, had to do with the fact that the role of the President’s daughter is the closest thing there is in America to being a princess, the closest thing to having stature and privilege purely as a result of an accident of birth. It is one of life’s little jokes that both America and Britain have suffered through remarkably similar princesses in recent years: the Johnson girls, the Nixon girls, and Princess Anne are all drab, dull young women who have managed to acquire enough poise and good grooming to get through the public events their parents do not have time to attend.

Julie and Tricia were born just as their father was beginning public life. They grew up in Washington as congressman’s daughters, senator’s daughters, and Vice-President’s daughters. Then they moved to California to be gubernatorial candidate’s daughters, and later to New York to be Presidential contender’s daughters. After graduating from the Chapin School, Tricia went on to Finch College, Julie to Smith. There she began dating, and married—not a commoner, but a President’s grandson. (David Eisenhower, with his endless tables of batting averages and illogical articles on the American left, is the perfect Nixon son-in-law. Still, he is not stupid. Last summer, after working as a sportswriter for the Philadelphia
Bulletin
, he was asked if he had any observations on the American press. “Yes,” he reportedly said. “Journalists aren’t nearly as interesting as they think they are.”)

Marriage—which might logically have been expected
to move Julie into a more removed and private existence—has instead strengthened and intensified her family connections and political role. During college, the Eisenhowers spent their summer vacations in a third-floor suite at the White House and took time off from school to campaign for Nixon’s re-election. These days, they see Julie’s parents several times a week; the Nixons often sneak off to eat with Julie and David in the $125,000 two-bedroom Bethesda home that Bebe Rebozo bought and rented to the Eisenhowers, presumably at well below its market price.

A few months ago, Julie took a full-time job at $10,000 a year at Curtis Publishing, where she is assistant editorial director of children’s magazines and assistant editor of the
Saturday Evening Post
. She announced at the time that the children’s magazine field attracted her because it would be impossible for her, as the President’s daughter, to write for adult magazines on sensitive political subjects. An upcoming article for the
Saturday Evening Post
, however, while hardly on anything sensitive or political, is nonetheless on a topic that could not be more calculated to draw attention to her position: it is a profile of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who is now eighty-nine and in the seventy-third year of her career as a President’s daughter.

Julie, of course, is nothing like Alice Roosevelt, or any of the other flibbertigibbet Presidents’ daughters in the history of this country. In the months since the Watergate hearings began, she has become her father’s principal defender, his First Lady in practice if not in fact. “It was something I took on myself,” she said. “I just thought I had a story to tell, that there were certain points I could make, and I was very eager to do it. The
idea that my father has to hide behind anyone’s skirts is of course ludicrous.” In any case, Julie’s skirts were the only ones available: Pat Nixon is uncomfortable in press and television interviews, and Tricia is in New York. (Washington rumor has it that her husband, Edward Cox, and the President do not get on.) “And that leaves me,” said Julie.

It has left her to make two appearances on the
Today
show, a television hookup with the BBC, a guest shot on Jack Paar’s show. She has survived Kandy Stroud of
Women’s Wear Daily
and lunch with Helen Thomas of the U.P.I. and Fran Lewine of the A.P. Odd little personal details about the President have slipped out during these interviews—whether deliberately or not. She has said that her father sometimes doesn’t feel like getting up in the morning, that he took the role of devil’s advocate in a family discussion on whether he should resign, that he often sits alone at night upstairs in the White House playing the piano. During her last appearance with Barbara Walters, whose interviews with her have been dazzling, she even came up with a sinister-influence theory of her own to explain everything: “Sometimes I think we were born under an unlucky star.”

Her performances are always calm and professional and poised, her revelations just titillating enough, and after all, she’s only a girl—and the combination of these has tended to draw attention away from the substantive things she is saying and the way she is saying them. Julie Eisenhower has developed—or been coached in—three basic approaches to answering questions. The first is not to answer the question at all. During her BBC appearance, an American woman living in England phoned in to say, “I would like Mrs. Eisenhower to know
that her father’s actions have made our position abroad untenable … it would be better if he came forward and answered questions himself instead of putting you in his place.” Julie replied, “I’d like to ask … how she thinks my father can answer more on Watergate without pointing the finger at people who have not been indicted.” This answer—in addition to skirting the question and making Nixon look like a man whose sole thought is of the Constitution—utterly overlooks the fact that almost everyone connected with Watergate has been called to testify, a good many have been indicted, and some have even been convicted.

The second approach is to point to the bright side. Thus, when she is asked about Watergate, she talks instead of her father’s successes with China, Russia, and the Middle East crisis. When she is asked about the number of Presidential appointees who have been forced to resign, she mentions Henry Kissinger and Ron Ziegler, whom she once called “a man of great integrity.” “And I’d go beyond that,” she said once. “I’d say that many of these people we’re talking about, these aides, were great Americans, really devoted to their country, and they didn’t make any money on Watergate, they didn’t do anything for personal gain. They made mistakes, errors in judgment. I don’t think they’re evil men.”

The third, and most classic, of Mrs. Eisenhower’s techniques is simply to put the blame elsewhere—on the press. She combines the Middle American why-doesn’t-the-press-ever-print-good-news theme with good old-fashioned Nixon paranoia. I spoke with her the other day for five minutes, and she spent most of that time complaining that her mother had met the day before with a group from the Conference on the Role of Women
in the Economy, and not one word about it had been printed in the papers. “Instead we get all these negative things,” she said. When she was asked recently what she thought of Barry Goldwater’s charge that her father’s credibility was at an all-time low, she replied: “Barry Goldwater also had a press conference during this whole period … and he said that the press were hounds of destruction. I don’t think he meant all of the press, but, um, Goldwater
is
a quotable man, isn’t he? I didn’t hear
that
on the networks. But when he says [my father’s] credibility is at an all-time low, that
is
on the networks.”

The only questions that stump Julie Eisenhower at all are the ones that concern her father’s personality. She has said that she is sick of telling reporters what a warm, human person he is—a fact that fortunately has not stopped reporters from pressing her to give examples. One story she produced recently to show what a card her father can be in his off moments concerned the time her husband, David, took the wheel of Bebe Rebozo’s yacht—and the President, in response, appeared on deck wearing not one but two life preservers. “He is quite a practical joker,” she said on another occasion. “He likes to tease and he likes to plan surprises when he can. Things like getting birthday candles for a cake that don’t blow out. You know, all nice and lit and you sit there huffing and puffing and they don’t go out.… Things like that.”

There is no point in dwelling too heavily on the implications of a daughter who has managed to play a larger role in her father’s life than his wife seems to. And there is also no point in wondering what is going to happen to Julie Eisenhower’s view of her father if the fall actually comes. It is safe to say that breeding will out, and all
the years of growing up in that family will protect her from any insight at all, will lead her to conclude that he was quite simply done in by malicious, unpatriotic forces. What is clear, though, is that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is fighting for herself and her position as hard as she is fighting for her father and his. She once said that if her father was forced out of office, she would “just fold up and wither and fall away.” What is more likely is that she will deal with that, too, vanish for a couple of years, and then crop up in politics again. That, after all, is what Nixons do, and that, in the end, is all she is.

December, 1973

The
Ladies’ Home Journal
is after her.
Cosmopolitan
is after her. I am after her. All of us think that there is something to the story of Barbara Mandel, something positively paradigmatic. After all, what happened to Barbara Mandel last year happens to thousands of American women. After thirty-two years of marriage, her husband left her for another woman. Moved into a hotel. Called a lawyer. It happens every day. The difference, in this case, was that Barbara Mandel’s husband was Marvin Mandel, the governor of the state of Maryland. And Barbara Mandel was having none of it.

It is safe to say that there was no way Marvin Mandel could have left his wife that would have made her happy; nonetheless, he managed to leave her in a way that was bound to humiliate her as completely as possible. To begin with, he did not even tell her himself. Well, that’s not entirely fair: for two years he had been telling her he wanted a divorce, and for two years she had been telling him she would never give him one. But he never told her he was actually moving out; the morning he did, July 3, 1973, he arranged an appointment for her with the family doctor and had him break the news. His press
secretary read her the statement over the telephone. And when Barbara Mandel called her husband to beg him to hold off, he informed her that it was too late; the press had already been given the statement.

“I would like to announce that I am separated from Mrs. Mandel,” it read. “My decision and separation are final and irrevocable, and I will take immediate action to dissolve the marriage.… I am in love with another woman, Mrs. Jeanne Dorsey, and I intend to marry her. Mrs. Mandel and I have had numerous discussions about this matter and she is completely aware of my feelings, of my actions, and of my intentions.… Mrs. Mandel and I no longer share mutual interests nor are our lives mutually fulfilling.…”

There was not a mention of the good years, the old times spent growing up as childhood sweethearts in northwest Baltimore. There was not a mention of what she had done for him, all those hands she shook, all those ward heelers’ names she memorized, all those rooms in the governor’s mansion she repainted. He was leaving her. He was leaving her publicly. He was stripping her of her only weapon—the threat of exposing his liaison—by announcing it himself. Barbara Mandel, First Lady of Maryland—that was how she signed the souvenir ashtrays and the 8” x 10” glossies—reacted by refusing to go.

“The governor crawled out of my bed this morning,” she told the reporters she telephoned that afternoon. “He has never slept anyplace but with me. I think the strain of the job has gotten to him. I’m surprised. Marvin has not discussed this with me. I don’t know what in the world he’s talking about. I hope the governor will come to his senses on this. You don’t take thirty-two years of
married life and throw them down the drain.” Mrs. Mandel added that she thought her husband “should see a psychiatrist.” In the meantime, she said, she would wait for him in the mansion.

So far, a fairly ordinary American tragedy. A woman invests her life in her husband’s career, and he pays her back by leaving her. A woman grows up in a society where the only option seems to be to dedicate herself to her husband. “My case is just different because I helped to make him governor,” Mrs. Mandel said.