Shamed Nixon ‘ beat wife so badly she needed hospital’
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.’
Hersh said he then spoke to former presidential adviser John Ehrlichman, who ‘stunned’ him by saying that he knew of two other incidents in which Nixon had hit his wife.
The first was shortly after the 1962 race for the California governorship and the second allegedly occurred while he was at the White House.
Hersh, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting of the Vietnam War, said he now regrets his decision not to write about it at the time and admitted he was criticised for his silence by female colleagues who knew about the story.
‘All I could say was that at the time I did not – in my ignorance – view the incident as a crime,’ he writes in his memoir.
It is not the first time accusations of domestic violence 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 Nixon’s failure to win the California governorship. Mr Sears claimed a lawyer for the politician ‘told me Nixon had hit [his wife] in 1962 and that she threatened to leave him over it. I’m not talking about a smack… he blackened her eye.’
Summers also quoted several others, including former California governor Pat Brown, who had heard the same reports.
One described Nixon as a ‘terrible, belligerent drunk’ who ‘would become obnoxious at night’ while staying at hotels on the campaign trail. He claimed Mrs Nixon had been beaten so badly ‘she could not go out the next day’.
John Taylor, Nixon’s former chief of staff, has previously said: ‘It cannot possibly be true. Anyone who knows and worked with President Nixon knows he could not have done it, would not have done it, and had he done it, there are innumerable people who would not have spoken to him and yet remained active in his life.’
‘A belligerent drunk’