The Arrogance of Power (15 page)

Looking back, Hutschnecker suspected Nixon had “guilt feelings” for having pursued politics in the vindictive style of his father rather than on the “saintly” path of his mother. Nixon's fervent wish, the doctor felt, was that someday he would be able to say to Hannah, “Mother, I have made peace. Now I am worthy of you.”

In the course of discussing Nixon's relationship with his mother, the author raised the possibility that he had suffered at some point from sexual impotence. According to James Bassett, who from 1952 became unusually close to Nixon as a press aide—and drinking companion—this was the case.

Hutschnecker denied having treated Nixon for impotence. He said, however, that his patient would “become fourteen years old, red-faced, and stammer” when matters of sex were raised. The doctor did speak a little about Pat Nixon. He had learned from her directly “how much she detested politics. She wanted a simple life . . . wanted to be a housewife. But he couldn't. He liked to be in the thick of things.” On the one hand, Hutschnecker regarded Pat as “a wonderful lady . . . loyal . . .” who gave her husband limitless support and encouragement. On the other, he said Nixon viewed her as “his sun”—to a degree that was not entirely healthy. “He was devoted,” said the doctor, “but that was like the relationship with his mother . . . one-sided. He became very dependent on her.”

Pressed again on the alleged impotence problem, Hutschnecker hesitated. “Every boy,” he said, falling back on a psychiatric staple, “has the imprint of his mother as an ideal. And unless he drowns out that ideal woman, he cannot do sex.” Asked if he was applying that principle to Nixon's relationship with Pat, Hutschnecker responded, “I cannot say it,” but he then added, “If someone was like a mother and was a saint, you don't have sex. That far I can go.” He would say no more on the subject.

In
The Will to Live,
the book that first encouraged Nixon to consult him, Dr. Hustchnecker suggested that the late twentieth century should be named the Age of Ambivalence. In psychiatry, he wrote, “ambivalence” is a term meaning “the simultaneous existence within us of opposite emotions towards the same object or person.” For Hutschnecker, it explained the darkest, most destructive side of man. Were modern man to understand this, he maintained, he would no longer have an excuse for “emotional immaturity.”

The ambivalence concept, said the doctor, dealt at one blow with the constant references to the notion that there was an “old Nixon,” and “a new Nixon.” For Hutschnecker, it explained “the contrasting behavior of an almost puritan Nixon with the Nixon of uninhibited language and angry outbursts. It is a direct reflection of the opposing parental personalities. . . . We all judge what we see, but what could not be seen was the Quaker boy who had a ‘saintly' mother and an angry father, filled with the unknown hungers and conflicts of his inner self that would become his remarkable ‘sense of mission.' ”

Somewhat less charitable is the view Hutschnecker shared with dinner companions one loquacious night in 1965, according to the lobbyist Robert Winter-Berger, who was present. “Nixon is happiest,” the doctor said then, “either when he has no responsibility or when he has it all. When he has no responsibility, he can't be criticized for anything and he can relax and be a little boy. When he has all the responsibility, he feels he has the right to exercise it as he alone sees fit, and he can't bear to be criticized for anything at all. That's when he says or does shortsighted things, and I get a call.”
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So it was that, although Nixon shied away from therapy, he continued to use the doctor as a kind of medical life preserver, to be consulted at times of crisis.

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Hutschnecker's 1955 decision to narrow his practice to psychotherapy alone alarmed Nixon. He was well aware that should the press start probing, the fragile pretense that he was consulting the doctor purely for physical complaints was unlikely to hold up. “It is safer for a politician to go to a whorehouse than to see a psychiatrist,” Hutschnecker himself once said mournfully. To protect himself, Nixon went out of his way to decry psychiatry in public and in private. “People go through that psychological bit nowadays,” he told a writer in 1966. “They think they should always be reevaluating themselves. . . . That sort of juvenile self-analysis is something I've never done.”

Roger Ailes, a television producer hired to make seemingly spontaneous Nixon interview programs for the 1968 campaign, remembered calling a Nixon aide to tell him the makeup of the panel for one of the shows. All was going well, Ailes reported—they had a black man, a newsman, and other professional people—until Ailes said he had booked “a Jewish doctor from Philadelphia, a psychiatrist.” The aide, Len Garment, immediately rejected the idea. “Jesus Christ!” Ailes told a companion when he hung up. “You're not going to believe this, but Nixon hates psychiatrists. He's got this thing apparently. They make him very nervous. You should have heard Len on the phone! . . . Did you hear him? If I've ever heard a guy's voice turn white, that was it. He said he didn't want to go into it. But apparently Nixon won't even let one in the same room.” Ailes dropped the psychiatrist and went out to look for a cabdriver to appear on the show in his place.

Three years earlier, in a late-night conversation with Garment, Nixon had said that he “would do anything to stay in public life—‘except see a shrink.' ” To Garment this “was a sure sign, in Nixon-speak, that despite himself, he had indeed seen a shrink.” Garment learned only later about Dr. Hutschnecker.

Nixon remained concerned about the “shrink” taint even after the resignation. According to the doctor, Nixon was concerned to conceal the nature of their meeting at San Clemente. “Just say,” Nixon advised him conspiratorially, “that you came to visit an old friend.”

Exposure of their relationship, Nixon impressed on Hutschnecker, would lead to people's believing he “must be cuckoo” or “nuts.” The irony of course is that even without knowledge of the relationship, precisely this thought did cross the minds of a good number of people. The comments that follow, many of them by men who could hardly be considered Nixon's enemies, constitute a stunning chorus of misgiving, surely not comparable with assessments of the mental state of any other president in American history.

George Christopher, a former mayor of San Francisco and senior Californian Republican, recalled that “Nixon would be depressed long before the 1962 election—kind of moody and withdrawn. There was nothing to hate about the guy at such times. He was just in a terrible state of mind, in which I think another man might have done away with himself.”

Kenneth O'Donnell, John Kennedy's close confidant, was more blunt. “JFK,” he said, “never trusted his mental stability.” A key supporter,
San Diego Union
publisher James Copley, was troubled when he saw Nixon debating Kennedy on television. “Dick's expression was very studious,” he wrote to a colleague, “but to the point where it looked almost like he was mad or disturbed.”

Journalists also perceived the instability. Eric Sevareid, writing in 1960, referred to Nixon's “black spells of depression. These moods may last for an hour, or even days, when he feels ‘circumstances' are against him.” “At times,” wrote Walter Cronkite, “he actually seemed unbalanced. I was a guest at a state dinner on one occasion when I noticed his eyes fix on the molding at the edge of the ceiling. Then they began following the molding across that side of the room, then across the adjoining side, even to the side behind him, and back along the next wall to the starting place. One would assume that he was following an intrusive beastie in its circumnavigation of the room, but I could see nothing there. . . .”

Robert Greene, senior editor of
Newsday,
spoke of “Hamlet-type moments,” adding, “There was some kind of quality, or lack of quality, in Nixon in terms of his mental stability, that would have him go off into these off-drift things where nobody existed around him. . . .”
Newsweek
's John Lindsay regarded Nixon as a “walking box of short circuits.”

During the Watergate crisis the concern reached a crescendo. “He was acting so strangely,” thought John Herbers of the
New York Times,
“acting obviously so deeply troubled and so weird in his actions, that it just brought on speculation.” Henry Hubbard, of
Newsweek,
said that at one point most of the White House press corps believed the president had gone “off his rocker.” As reported in detail later, Tip O'Neill—the House majority leader—and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox privately had the same concern.

One of the men who lived closer to Nixon than anyone except his immediate family, a White House Secret Service agent, found him “very depressed.” Deep Throat, the anonymous source quoted by the
Washington Post
's
Woodward and Bernstein, reportedly told Woodward Nixon had been “having fits of dangerous depression.”

“What the men in the White House were involved in was the management of an unstable personality,” concluded Theodore White. “Here was the leader of the free world in an almost shattered condition,” Attorney General Richard Kleindienst recalled of the meeting at which his resignation was decided. “His sobs and distraught manner were, to me, profound and genuine. . . . Richard Nixon was President of my country and he was imperiled. If he was imperiled, my country was endangered.”

Kleindienst's successor, Elliot Richardson, was said by Vice President Spiro Agnew to have believed Nixon was “losing control, emotionally and mentally.” William Saxbe, who followed Richardson as attorney general, thought Nixon's actions were not those of a “reasonable man.”

Alexander Butterfield, cabinet secretary and senior factotum, was struck early by Nixon's obsession with detail that seemed utterly out of proportion. It did not seem reasonable that on a trip to Yugoslavia Nixon took time to dictate a letter about “the lousy restroom facilities we had around the Mall.” Butterfield characterized it as “abnormal” behavior, in “the strangest man I'd ever met . . . a strange, strange fellow.”

Even Haldeman, the keeper of the gate, later agreed that Nixon was “the strangest man he ever met.” As for John Ehrlichman, he told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973, “From close observation, I can testify that the President is not paranoid, weird, psychotic on the subject of demonstrators, or hypersensitive to criticism.” Three years later, asked if he would still make the same assessment, he replied curtly, “No, I would not,” adding, “There was another side,” he said of the man he served loyally for so long, “Like the flat, dark side of the moon.”

Henry Kissinger, initially national security adviser and later secretary of state, has written of Nixon in his memoirs with compassion, yet the odder aspects of Nixon's nature surface time and again. “Nixon seemed driven by his demons,” Kissinger recalled, in a description of the 1973 ceremony at which he was elevated to secretary of state. “His remarks at the swearing-in ranged from the perfunctory to the bizarre.” Among other things, Nixon had relentlessly pursued the topic of Kissinger's hair, going on and on about how he was the first secretary since World War II who did not part it. At other times Kissinger emerged from his office after a phone call with Nixon—he had his staff monitor such calls—rolled his eyes, and asked, “Did you hear what that madman said?”

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Just months before he joined the Nixon administration, in 1968, Kissinger had been a dinner guest at the home of Fawn Brodie, professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of an acclaimed book on
Thomas Jefferson. At the dinner, Brodie recalled, he “electrified our guests by telling them that Richard Nixon had had four years ‘on the couch.' ”

A decade later, when Brodie came to write her book on Nixon,
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she asked Kissinger for an interview, reminding him of his comment about Nixon's supposed sessions with an analyst. By that time, however, having served eight years at the pinnacle of government, Kissinger no longer wished to discuss such topics. Others, including the longtime press aide James Bassett and Herbert Katcher, an attorney for the New York Psychoanalytic Association, also referred to Nixon's having received treatment from a psychoanalyst. Katcher certainly was referring to a therapist other than Dr. Hutschnecker. Did Nixon, then, at some point overcome his fear of analysis? If so, who was the psychiatrist involved?

The sketchy evidence on the subject suggests the other doctor was a woman. Dr. Hutschnecker himself recalled having heard as much but said he never learned the analyst's identity. Robert Finch, Nixon's aide and friend from early days in Congress, said that he too had heard Nixon had been treated by a “woman psychiatrist in New York.” Sources differ on whether the city involved was New York or Los Angeles. The suggestion, though, is that the treatment occurred after Nixon's defeat in the 1962 gubernatorial elections, the lowest ebb of his prepresidential career. The chronology, and what we know of his use of Dr. Hutschnecker, also indicates that—if he did see an analyst—it was at that time, when he was based in Los Angeles.

Professor Foster Sherwood, a former dean of UCLA, has recalled a woman psychoanalyst's asking his advice on depositing her files on Nixon. Interviewed for this book at age eighty, he said he could not remember the analyst's name. Other information suggests the analyst died in the late sixties. Katcher revealed the analyst's identity to his brother Leo, but swore him to secrecy. Both Katcher brothers are now dead, and there the trail ends—except for one last detail. While refusing to reveal the woman analyst's name, Leo Katcher said she had been “deeply troubled” at the possibility that Nixon might one day achieve great power.
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