Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (22 page)

“When I heard about it,” said a man who used to work in the White House, “when I heard that Rose Woods had
to go out and get a lawyer, I thought, Well, that’s it. They have now reached the point where they’re having hand-to-hand combat in the Oval Office.”

The relationship between Rose Mary Woods and Richard Nixon is a complicated one. He counts on her. He respects her judgment on political matters, particularly where people are concerned. She is not afraid to disagree with him, even to snap back at him. In
Six Crises
, Nixon calls her “one of my most honest critics,” and says, “She has that rare and unique characteristic that marks the difference between a good secretary and a great one—she is always at her best when the pressures are greatest.” The emotional content of their relationship fascinates people.

“She’s a little like the choir member in the Baptist church who falls in love with the minister,” says one administration insider. “It’s the classic Christian fantasy of the virgin and God—and obviously a part of the fantasy is that nothing ever happens. It just remains a kind of worship.”

“Have you ever been in love?” asks another man who considers himself a friend to both Nixon and Miss Woods. “Really in love? Over a long period of time? She’s been in love with Nixon—though not at all in a sexual sense—for over twenty years. Have you ever played poker? She’s an extremely good poker player in the political world. She’s smart, tough, ruthless, experienced, all the things you have to be. And she plays on behalf of Nixon, not on behalf of herself.

“Rose has provided him with the feeling that there was support for him and his cause, emotional sustenance at times when there really wasn’t anyone else—not even Pat. At various times, Pat laid down the law
and said, ‘No more politics.’ Rose always encouraged him to persevere. Another thing she does is to provide him with emotional and intellectual justification. During the period prior to the 1968 convention, she was always ready with criticisms of his rivals. In the fall of 1967, Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s press agent, broke the story of the homosexual ring that was active at the top level of Reagan’s administration. Rose had found out about it a few weeks before, and I remember a dinner with her and Nixon where she presented that to us, saying, in effect, that that was what one could expect from Reagan, that he would be so careless about his staff selection he couldn’t possibly be a good President.”

There has always been a slight tinge of the martyr in the way Miss Woods operated with Nixon. In early 1969, when she was engaged in a power struggle with H. R. Haldeman and became so disturbed by it that she considered leaving her job, she never once mentioned what was going on to the President. And according to Charles Rhyne, the President has never once referred to, much less reassured his secretary about, her legal problems since the gap was found on November 14, when she claims she told him that she might well be responsible for four or five minutes of it, but would not take the blame for the full eighteen. Rose Woods presumably would never think to bring the question up herself. The only family or administration member who has spoken up for Rose since then has been Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who called her “a woman of complete integrity. She would never commit a criminal act.”

Rose Mary Woods went to work for Nixon on February 21, 1951, just after he had been elected to the Senate. She
is red-headed, well groomed, with a peaches-and-cream complexion. She gives the impression of being quite petite, and her friends say that she is somewhat frail physically and has suffered periodic bouts of pneumonia from overwork. She has literally worked seven-day, hundred-hour weeks, fifty-two weeks a year for twenty-three years—and in many ways she is not at all unique. There are thousands of women like her in Washington, women who come here as girls, get secretarial jobs on Capitol Hill, devote their lives to politicians, and end up elderly spinsters, living on their government pensions in apartments full of political knickknacks.

“They are a special twentieth-century breed,” Helen Dudar wrote in the
New York Post
, “those ladies who guard the boss’s door and fend off the telephone calls and read his mail; women largely without private lives because the real world is right there in the vortex spinning around the great man; women usually without husbands because the job takes most of their time and energies; women with small fiefdoms of their own encompassing sub-secretaries, the Xerox machine, the messenger service, and some nervous stenographers. Selfless, happily job-enslaved, eager to be useful, they are the vestal virgins in the temples of business and politics, the Indispensables, the private secretaries.”

“It’s a very exciting life,” said Doris Jones, secretary to former Nixon aide Robert Finch and a close friend of Miss Woods’s. “You get caught up in it. You get so busy. The next thing you know, you turn around and you’re forty-five or fifty years old and unmarried, and you hadn’t intended for it to work out that way at all. I know I never did.”

• • •

Rose Mary Woods came to Washington from Sebring, Ohio, where she was born fifty-five years ago, the middle child of five children. Her parents were devout Catholics; her father worked at the Royal China Company, first as a potter, then as foreman, finally as personnel director. Her parents died a few years ago, and Miss Woods refers to them frequently: her father, she says, was a temperamental Irishman, while her mother was a calm, pacific woman. “Rose is a strange combination of Irish fire and quiet determination,” says Robert Gray, a public-relations executive at Hill & Knowlton, who is Miss Woods’s most frequent escort. “She often says, ‘I’ve got to pray to God to let my mother’s cool head prevail, and not my father’s temper.’ ”

But for a series of misfortunes, Rose Mary Woods would probably have grown up to lead a traditional small-town Midwestern life. But in her last year at McKinley High School, she contracted a mysterious disease. “I weighed eighty-two pounds,” she once said. “It was a growth. It may well have been cancer. Nobody knows. They X-rayed it and it disappeared. I wasn’t able to work when I first got out. I wasn’t able to go to school.” Ultimately, she recovered and went to work as a secretary at Royal China; she became engaged to a young man who died. In 1943, she came to Washington. “I had a sister here who had a very tragic personal problem and I was the only one who could come.” The sister was employed at the Office of Censorship, and Miss Woods went to work there, too. After the war, she joined the International Training Administration and then a committee
on Capitol Hill run by Christian Herter. There she came to the attention of Richard Nixon, then a young congressman, and he to hers. She has often said that she was very much impressed by him before she even knew him, because he kept such neat expense accounts.

In the 1950s, Miss Woods lived on California Street in Washington, first in an apartment she shared with an elderly woman, then in a studio apartment of her own. She had almost no time for the few activities she favors—dancing, duckpin bowling, entertaining—and her moments of leisure were mostly spent grabbing sandwiches with other Capitol Hill secretaries. These women—who are still close to her—paint a picture of Rose Mary Woods and her life that is low-key and muted. They emphasize her devout Catholicism, her sacrifices, the thoughtful favors she does for friends, her total integrity. They believe every word she has testified, assure you she would never have done anything like what she has been accused of. “She’d probably lay down her life for Richard Nixon,” says her friend Winnie De Weese, who used to be with the Republican Policy Committee, “but she would never lie for him.”

Another close friend, Eloise De La O, former secretary to Senator Clinton Anderson, says, “I called her the night I heard she had gotten a lawyer. She said to me, ‘You know, Eloise, my boss would never ask me to do anything like that.’ She is a good Christian, a good Catholic, a practicing Catholic. You don’t do things like that if that’s the kind of person you are. Somebody is trying to do something to her.”

The men who have known Rose Woods over the years tell a slightly different story. “There was a story about her dancing the tango alone one night at San Clemente,” said
one man. “Don’t let it confuse you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking of her as a sad, fragile, overworked secretary. She’s a complicated woman who’s been at the center for twenty-five years.” And the men tend to be far more cynical about just what Rose might have done. One, a former White House aide who considers her a dear friend, was asked what he thought when he first read about the gap.

“My first thought,” he said, “was that I hoped my secretary would be that loyal.”

The women in the office have seen little of Rose Woods but her extraordinary stenographic skills, but the men have seen her function as an almost legendarily firm Nixon appendage. Following Nixon’s 1960 defeat, several Republican leaders claimed that Miss Woods had kept them from communicating with the candidate during the election. Senator Styles Bridges, who was chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, telephoned at the end of the campaign, and, as the late columnist George Dixon reported at the time, reached Miss Woods.

“The Vice-President is very busy,” she told him.

“I just want to tell him,” Bridges said, “that our reports show your boss is not doing too well.”

“We disagree with you,” Miss Woods replied. “Our reports are different.”

In 1968, after Nixon was nominated, former Republican National Committee Chairman Leonard Hall made a courtesy call to the candidate to offer congratulations. Hall had been Nixon’s campaign manager in 1960, but he had spent the last year working for two Nixon rivals—Governor George Romney and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Hall got as far as Rose Mary Woods. She listened to him, said she would give Nixon the message, and ended the conversation with a flat “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“Rose is Nixon’s memory,” says a former White House aide. “She knows who was with him when the chips were down. She reacts purely politically to people.
What have you done for him lately?
During the Watergate hearings, she was complaining about Senator Baker for asking such tough questions, and she said, ‘How dare he do that? We went into his district twice to help him.’ ” Another Washingtonian tells the story of a local Republican politician Miss Woods deliberately kept off the White House party list because she had heard that during the 1968 convention the man had put a picture of Nixon out on his front lawn with a sign reading, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

After Nixon’s defeat in 1960, Miss Woods followed him to Los Angeles, where he ran for, and lost the race for, governor of California, and then to the New York law firm Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. She lived on East 50th Street, in a cheerful apartment with a paper rose on the front door, and her friends were happy for her because they felt that for the first time she had some balance in her life. She gave dinner parties. She dated frequently. She was able to afford pretty clothes—her evening dresses are elaborate, with ostrich feathers and the like. She went to the theatre. She made new friends.

When prominent Republicans came to New York, they checked in with Rose. When young Republicans came to New York, they went to see her—and every third time, she gave them a few minutes with The Boss. After 1966, when Nixon decided to try again for the Presidency, she and Pat Buchanan, now a White House aide, were the only people on his staff, and she had considerable influence and total control over access to Nixon. But as the
1968 campaign got under way, her power diminished. And immediately after the election, she came up against the President’s new chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman.

The fight between her and Haldeman was, at its simplest, over office space. It began with his decision not to let her have Evelyn Lincoln’s old office, directly connected to the Oval Office, and it went on for months as he tried unsuccessfully to move her out of the White House entirely and into the Executive Office Building across the alley. But, at bottom, the dispute was over something far more substantive: both wanted to control access to the President. They went to the mat, and the President went with Haldeman. “Rose kept saying she didn’t want to go to the President with her problems because he was too busy,” said Eloise De La O. “Her office was moved, down the hall. Wouldn’t you think the President would be aware of it? It seems to me that if all of a sudden my secretary was moved, I’d notice. But she said she didn’t want to worry him. She is so loyal.” Significantly, Miss Woods never blamed Nixon for choosing Haldeman over her and instead focused her anger solely against the chief of staff.

The politicians and friends who had always counted on Rose as a way to the President’s ear found themselves up against the Berlin Wall, and Rose found herself increasingly excluded from the meetings she had expected to be part of. “Suddenly, she never seemed to be there,” said one Republican politician. “She was always off typing or something. After the election, I had a meeting with the President. I was waiting outside, and Haldeman came out and said to come in and meet Dr. Kissinger. I went in. Haldeman, Kissinger, and Nixon were there talking,
and Bob was making notes. Then they left and the two of us started to talk. I was just telling the President what the mood was in a couple of states I’d been to—nothing confidential—when Nixon pushed a buzzer. Something I’d said had triggered something in his head. Bob Haldeman came in and took the notes on it on his yellow pad. It struck me not only as a little odd, but also inefficient—he didn’t even take shorthand.”

In February, 1969, Haldeman managed to keep Miss Woods’s name off the list of people who were to accompany the President on his first official trip to Europe, and she was devastated. “It was a classic example of Haldeman’s sadism,” said one former aide. “She never complained and never raised an objection. But a few days before the trip, the President was leaving the White House and Haldeman walked him out to the helicopter. Nixon must have mentioned something about it, because Haldeman came back to tell Rose that she was going on the trip after all. It was a great victory, although she hadn’t done anything.” And in 1971, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman made yet another attempt to remove Miss Woods from power. At that point, she was demoralized; she was almost the only old-time Nixon aide who had survived Haldeman’s machinations. “Hans and Fritz said she was drinking,” said one observer, “and that it had undermined her health. They went to work and started telling Nixon that she was unreliable. Of course, it was their sadistic pressure that had driven her to it. But she pulled herself together and snapped out of it.”