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Nixon’s Darkest Secrets’: New biography digs up rumors of Richard Nixon’s gay affair with Mafia banker
Former White House reporter Don Fulsom’s book says 37th President was a drunk and a wife beater.

BY Philip Caulfield
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS





A new book by an ex-White House reporter claims that President Richard Nixon was a mobbed-up drunk who beat the First Lady and may have had a decades-long gay affair with a shady Miami-area businessman.

In the shocking new biography "Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President," former United Press International Washington bureau chief Don Fulsom writes that Tricky Dick had mob ties for more than 20 years before he was elected in 1968 and lusted after his best pal, dashing Cuban-American playboy Charles (Bebe) Rebozo.

Nixon and Rebozo, who the feds believe laundered money for mob kingpins in Florida and Cuba, swam, sunbathed and dined together during guys-only vacations in exclusive Key Biscayne, Fla., and were once spotted holding hands under the table during a dinner with K Street power brokers, according to a report on the book in the Daily Mail.

Another Washington reporter told Fulsom that he once spotted a boozy Nixon nuzzling Rebozo "the way you'd cuddle your senior prom date."

The pair's friendship was no secret to Washington insiders, and the book claims that there were whispers that the two were more than just pals up until Nixon's death in 1994. (Rebozo was by his side. He died four years later.)

White House aides at the time said Rebozo was nothing more than "the guy who mixed the martinis" and showed the notoriously stuffy Nixon how to hobnob, the Mail said.

The new book also charges that Nixon guzzled bathtubs of booze — earning the name "Our Drunk" from his own staff — and abused First Lady Pat Nixon.

Fulsom writes that an aide had to coach Nixon on how to kiss Mrs. Nixon so that they'd come across as a loving couple, the Mail said.

But behind closed doors, Nixon called his wife a “f------ b----” and often beat her before, during and after his presidency, the book claims.

Macmillan, the book's publisher, said that "Nixon's Darkest Secrets" is based on Fulsom's reporting during the Nixon administration, along with interviews with members of Congress, former White House staffers and others from the 37th President's inner circle.

He also covered the Johnson, Ford, Reagan and Clinton presidencies and teaches a course on the Watergate scandal at American University.

The Nixon Foundation has not commented on the book.



Replies sorted oldest to newest

It has nothing to do with politics? The Republicans always portrays themselves a the most moral and righteous people on the planet. They are anti-gay, and then we find out what happens behing closed doors.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. But as a politician if you can lie about your sexuality, can you be trusted?
FM
Toronto Star


Richard Nixon may have had gay relationship with Bebe Rebozo, his confidant and banker, book alleges


Lesley Ciarula Taylor
Staff Reporter

Richard Nixon managed to hide his wife-beating, heavy drinking and a possible gay relationship with his confidant and banker, Bebe Rebozo, while he was U.S. president, a new book alleges.

Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, to be published Jan. 31 by Macmillan, is the work of former UPI White House bureau chief Don Fulsom, now an adjunct instructor in American University’s Department of Government.

Fulsom based his book on his own work covering Nixon and four other U.S. presidents, new evidence from U.S. presidential libraries and “scores of interviews with members of Congress, White House staffers and others close” to Nixon, the publisher says on its website.

Allegations of an intimate relationship between Nixon and Rebozo have surfaced before. In his praise for Fulsom’s book, fellow Washington reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Patrick Sloyan recalled Nixon’s “public hand-holding with a boozy Bebe Rebozo.”

In Anthony Summers 2001 book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, he wrote the degree intimacy between Nixon and Rebozo “was really remarkable.”

Summers quoted former Lyndon Johnson aide Bobby Baker as saying they were “close, like lovers.” Others, including Pat Nixon and Nixon aide Charles Coulson, said it was one-way: Rebozo “worshipped” Nixon, Pat said.

In one of 14 articles Fulson published on Nixon for Crime Magazine, he said Rebozo kept an office and bedroom at the White House during the Nixon years at the same time Rebozo was “cosy with Mafia biggies.”

“Indeed,” wrote Fulsom, “Rebozo was Nixon’s No. 1 bagman for payoffs from not only the Mafia — but from mobbed-up loopy billionaire Howard Hughes.”

“They were inseparable — you just can’t imagine how close two men could be, “ Louis P. Fineman, a Republican campaigner, was quoted as saying in Rebozo’s obituary in the Miami Herald.

Rebozo, who died in 1998, was at Nixon’s bedside when the former president died four years earlier, ending a 44-year friendship.

As in the forthcoming book, Fulsom also wrote in Crime about Nixon as the “Batterer in Chief.”

Nixon punched his wife Pat in the face after his loss in the California governor’s race to Pat Brown. “He blackened her eye,” the 2008 article quoted former Nixon aide John Seara as telling Summers.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersch “learned of three alleged Nixon wife-beating incidents, one that sent Pat to a nearby emergency room,” Fulsom wrote.

Nixon vented his “volcanic temper” on aides and reporters, he said. One 1960 incident in which he sucker-punched a disabled political aide has been verified, Fulsom wrote, in a newly released document from the U.S. National Archives.

Fulsom described as treason Nixon’s sabotage of then President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 Paris peace talks to end the war in Vietnam in a 2008 Crime article, which is also recounted in the book.

In a newly released tape from the Johnson library, Johnson tells the Republican leader in the Senate to stop Nixon, then a U.S. presidential candidate: “They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war. It’s a damn bad mistake.”

Nixon’s drinking, Fulsom’s book said, earned him the nickname with staff, “Our Drunk.”
Wally
quote:
Originally posted by Wally:
Even if the man was bisexual what does that got to do with the man as a politician. In my opinion nothing.
if he did indeed beat his wife is of relevance and his closet homosexuality is also a dimension of this if it implied a hatred of women.
FM

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