Shamed Nixon ‘beat his wife’ New book claims she was hospitalised
RICHARD Nixon beat his wife so badly after being forced to resign as US president that she had to go to hospital, according to a new book.
Nixon left the White House in disgrace over the Watergate scandal in August 1974 and retreated with his wife Pat to their seaside home in San Clemente, California.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed that a few weeks later, he was contacted by a source at a nearby hospital who said Mrs Nixon had been treated there for injuries days after the couple returned from Washington.
‘She told doctors that her husband had hit her,’ the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist writes in his memoir Reporter. ‘I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency-room physician who treated her.’
Mr Hersh said he then spoke to former presidential adviser John Ehrlichman, who ‘stunned’ him by saying that he knew of two other similar incidents.
The first was shortly after the 1962 race for the California governorship, and the second allegedly occurred at the White House. Mr Hersh said he didn’t write about it at the time because ‘in his innocence’, he did not believe it was a crime.
It is not the first time such accusations have been made about Nixon, who died in 1994. A 2000 biography by writer Anthony Summers reported that various journalists had been told about beatings.
His most specific account came from former Nixon aide John Sears and related to the failed California governorship bid. Mr Sears said a lawyer for Nixon ‘told me he had hit [his wife] in 1962 and she threatened to leave him over it’. ‘I’m not talking about a smack… he blackened her eye,’ he added.
Mr Summers quoted several others, including former California governor Pat Brown, who had heard the same reports.
One claimed Mrs Nixon had been beaten so badly ‘she could not go out the next day’. John Taylor, Nixon’s former chief of staff, previously said: ‘It cannot possibly be true. Anyone who knows and worked with [Nixon] knows he could not have done it, would not have done it.’