Controversial book reports Nixon beat wife, took drugs

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (August 27, 2000 7:23 p.m. EDT
http://www.nandotimes.com) - A new biography asserts that 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 will be 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," also was a user of the drug, the book said,
citing Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman as its source.

Summers said that when Tkach was later asked if Nixon was still taking the
drug, he reportedly 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."

"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, Calif.

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.

The book reports 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, Calif.,
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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