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Change Your Life! |
Besides Watergate: Nixon beat wife and took drugs |
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August 29, 2000
WASHINGTON (AP) - A new biography asserts that the late U.S. President Richard Nixon over many years took a mood-altering drug without a prescription and that he beat his wife at times of personal crisis - a claim a Nixon intimate calls "inconceivable." "The Arrogance of Power" by Anthony Summers was being published Monday. It chiefly concerns the aspects of Nixon's life "that he and his supporters have preferred to conceal," writes Summers, a BBC journalist and author of biographies of J. Edgar Hoover and Marilyn Monroe. The author named his sources for most of the book's assertions. But many of those he quotes got their information second-hand. Some of the book's claims have been made in the past but in less detail. The book said that in 1968 Nixon was given 1,000 capsules of the drug Dilantin, an anti-convulsant used to counter epileptic seizures, by Jack Dreyfus, founder of an investment firm and an enthusiastic promoter of the drug. Dreyfus later supplied another 1,000, it said. White House physician Dr. Walter Tkach, "a compliant doctor who would do exactly as a patient asked," was also a user of the drug himself, the book said, citing Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman as its source. When asked later if Nixon was still taking the drug, Tkach replied, "I don't know, but the amount of pills in the bottle in his bathroom is reducing in size, so I suppose he is," according to Summers. "The Physicians' Desk Reference" lists a number of adverse reactions to Dilantin, including slurred speech, decreased coordination and mental confusion. Summers wrote that the relationship of Nixon and his wife was one of "prolonged marital difficulty, of physical abuse, of threatened divorce." But that view was contested by John Taylor, Nixon's chief aide in his retirement years, now director of the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. Summers' claims that Nixon abused his wife came from secondary sources. Among others, he cited journalist Seymour Hersh, who said he learned of three instances of Nixon wife beatings but did not identify his sources; retired Washington lawyer John Sears, who was a campaign consultant to Nixon; and the late Bill Van Petten, a Los Angeles area reporter, who years later told a friend, not identified by Summers, that just before or after his 1962 loss to former California Gov. Pat Brown Nixon beat Mrs. Nixon "so badly she could not go out the next day." Summers said Sears told him that he had been told "that Nixon had hit her (Pat Nixon) in 1962 and that she had threatened to leave him over it. ... I'm not talking about a smack. He blackened her eye." Sears said he had been told of the beating by two lawyers, both now dead, Walter Taylor and Pat Hillings. Twenty-two years later, after he resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal, Nixon "attacked" his wife at their home in San Clemente, California, and she had to be treated at a hospital, Summers wrote, citing Hersh as his secondary source. In a statement Sunday, Taylor, the former Nixon retirement aide, said he had not seen the book but had read accounts of it in the press and said the allegations were untrue. "Richard Nixon never raised a hand to Mrs. Nixon," he said. "Their affection and respect for one another is well known to all who knew them. It is inconceivable that he would have struck her for any reason. ... The book contains no evidence, only rumor and second- and third-had hearsay by the dead."
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