Summers' reporting on this charge has made headlines despite the fact that his sources—five individuals, two of them reporters—can say only that they "heard" about Nixon beating his wife. Those sources say they talked to people who saw Pat in a condition that would seem to suggest Nixon had slugged her, but, Summers tells us, the original witnesses have all died in recent years. In legal terms, this is called hearsay, and it's not admissible in court. Qualifiers like "possibly," "apparently" and "probably" appear in any legitimate work of journalism, but they appear frequently throughout this section of the book.
Any look at Nixon's private life can rarely say anything for certain. For example, Summers relates a sensational story alleging that the Republican Party made $10 million by using advance knowledge of Nixon's 1971 act taking the nation off the gold standard. His source is a convicted gold and silver smuggler currently serving a life sentence, but Summers backs this up by showing that Nixon met the smuggler privately in the earliest years of his presidency. But like the wife-beating allegation, Summers can offer no more than a compelling case.
The allegation that Nixon beat Pat is the least satisfying part of Summers' book, but it's gotten the best play in the media. Elsewhere, Summers is more certain of his evidence, especially concerning Nixon's most private secret: that he consulted a psychiatrist for nearly 40 years.
And this one has the Nixon family fuming. Even addressing this issue "belongs to a darker age," said Tricia Nixon Cox, Nixon's daughter, in an Aug. 28 AP story on the book's release. "It is unworthy of anyone to suggest that there is something disgraceful about anyone, including prominent political figures, seeking the advice of a trained medical professional for any reason."
Cox completely misses the point. In saying that her father sought help from New York psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, Summers doesn't ridicule him but merely points out that he was a hypocrite for doing so. Indeed, it was Nixon himself—a product of his class—who saw psychiatry and psychology as dark arts. How else can one explain this key moment in Nixon's 1972 anti-McGovern campaign: when it came time to destroy the Democrats, Nixon thought he'd found his best weapon in evidence that Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame) and abortive McGovern running mate Thomas Eagleton had both consulted psychiatrists.
It's no surprise, then, that Nixon spent half his life terrified the nation would find out he was seeing Hutschnecker. He ridiculed psychotherapy every chance he got—to his aides as well as the general public. We can now see his denunciations were merely another protective screen of lies. Cox's defense of her father is ironic: Nixon—not Summers—was the one who felt his psychiatric sessions were "disgraceful."
Hutschnecker spoke to Summers at length for the book. Some topics, Summers writes, the doctor described easily—Nixon's home life, for instance. But others, like his sex life, were clearly off-limits.
Nixon's fear was simply that if the nation knew he was seeing a shrink, it would think he was nuts. But Nixon kept his secret safe, and he won election after election. Of course, where Nixon is concerned, there's always an ironic twist: although Nixon's closest aides—men like Haldeman and Kissinger—never had a clue he was under psychiatric care, they still thought he was nuts.
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon by Anthony Summers; Viking, 640 pages, HARDCOVER, $29.95.
