Authors: Nora Ephron
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 win 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″ · 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.
But, of course, that was a big difference—and that is where the case departs abruptly from the paradigm. Barbara Mandel responded to her husband’s rejection not just as a wounded wife but as a seasoned politician. She carefully leaked tidbits of information to selected reporters. She allowed one reporter to negotiate on her behalf with the governor’s chief aide. Her statement on July 3—which seems on the surface quite hysterical—carefully left the governor a face-saving way to return: he could simply admit that she was right, the pressures of the job
had
gotten to him; now he had come to his senses. Hell hath no fury, it is true; at the same time, it was clear that part of Mrs. Mandel’s fury came not just from the fact that there was another woman involved, but also from the suspicion that the other woman wanted to use her husband and his position exactly as much as Mrs. Mandel did.
Marvin Mandel was a young Baltimore lawyer in 1952 when he first entered the state legislature. He was diligent and hardworking; in addition, he was thoroughly introverted. His outgoing wife—who was known as Bootsie, a nickname that she inexplicably rhymes with “footsie”—campaigned and went everywhere with him; she provided the warmth and earthiness he was chronically unable to convey. Mandel rose to become speaker of the House of Delegates. In 1969, after Spiro Agnew left the governorship to become Vice-President, the Mandels moved into the fifty-three-room Georgian governor’s mansion in Annapolis. By this time, the governor’s relationship with Mrs. Dorsey had been common knowledge around the State House for years; one of Mrs. Dorsey’s
four children recently told the Washington
Post
that his mother had been seeing Mandel since 1960. Mrs. Dorsey, now thirty-six, was divorced a few years ago from another Maryland legislator; she is a Democrat who served as police commissioner during a stint on her town board. (“I’m not a big story,” she told the
Post
’s Judy Bachrach recently, “and there’s no reason why I should open my private life to you. Now, frankly, there is a big story and it’s right here in Leonardtown. We have this terrific sewage problem.”)
Bootsie Mandel was never in the tradition of great first ladies—but compared with her predecessor, she did an energetic, creditable job, and she became more involved in it as her isolation from the governor increased. “God damn it, I’m nothing around here,” she told one of her husband’s supporters early in his first term. “Before he was governor, I used to drive him everywhere. Now he has a state trooper. I used to help him with his speeches. Now he has a speechwriter. What good am I?” What good she did had mainly to do with the mansion. She refurbished it, printed up lavish programs describing its interior, appeared at charity luncheons to announce that twice-a-week tours through it were available.
At the same time, she had a habit of getting everything she did slightly wrong. At one point, she discovered that a portrait hanging in the mansion had a label attributing it to Hogarth; she promptly insured it for $300,000, scheduled a ceremony and surprise announcement, and was informed by a prominent art historian that the painting wasn’t a Hogarth at all. Several years ago, she confounded the entire state legislature by inviting the wives to the annual party celebrating the legislature’s adjournment; the party had traditionally been an event for the politicians to be with whatever women they had been seeing on the sly during the session. Said one Baltimore assemblyman: “You cannot overestimate the panic that went through this place that day.”
Governor Mandel’s relationship with Mrs. Dorsey became increasingly open. In December, 1970, his unmarked state police car hit another car in Prince Georges County and the driver of the other car was killed. The governor refused to say what he was doing in an unmarked car after midnight; then he said he had been at a secret political meeting. Reporters checked and could not find any other politicians who had been to a meeting with the governor that night. When they asked whether he hadn’t in fact been returning from St. Marys County, where Mrs. Dorsey lived, he declined comment. At about that time, Mrs. Mandel apparently found out that the situation was serious and began to pump her friends for information. Sometimes she asked straight out; more often, she attempted an approach she seemed to believe was devious. “What do you think the Jewish community would say about a governor who left his wife for another woman?” she asked the wife of one of her husband’s associates.
Within a few weeks of the governor’s walkout, Mrs. Mandel realized she had made a terrible mistake. She had counted on her friends to side with her—and they sided with the governor and his power. She had counted on major political repercussions—but there was only a brief flurry of mail support from middle-aged women. She had counted on seeming to be a force for morality—and instead she became an object of ridicule. “She was playing cards in a game that had ended,” said one Maryland politician. “It had ended in American politics, in American life, even ended in her narrow circle. Divorce just doesn’t mean that much anymore.”