Was Richard Nixon ‘queer’?

Let’s look at the 37th president’s sexuality

I’m not sure that I know what the word ‘queer’ means. I think of people who don’t seem so straight. Richard Nixon was the Republican president from 1969 to 1974. Was he ‘queer’?

He was married, of course, to Pat Nixon. The marriage was often described as cold, as his affection was reserved for the man who seems to have been the great love of Nixon’s life.

The stories are well-known.

At a Washington dinner party, a journalist dropped a fork on the floor. When bending to pick it up, she noticed that Nixon and Bebe Rebozo were holding hands under the table.

There was plenty of talk about the two men. Nixon and Rebozo came across, as an aide to Lyndon Johnson notes, “close like lovers.”

The press kept track — but quietly. For a 2012 book, Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, longtime White House press reporter Don Fulsom gathers the clues into a chapter called “Nixon’s Sexuality.”

The president’s secretary is quoted. “He had a way of ignoring her,” she says of his wife, Pat Nixon.

“I never saw him touch Pat’s hand,” a Nixon aide says. “I have never seen quite so cold an arrangement.”

Nixon is recalled, when drinking, to be at public events “with his arm around Bebe the way you’d cuddle your senior prom date.”

Bonnie Angelo, a reporter for Time, called it as a case of “repressed homosexuality. She continues:

“Because they were both such uptight guys. I don’t think they’d ever engage in it. But their longings and devotion were so obvious. Nixon loved being with Bebe. And Bebe would do anything for Nixon. He’d lie in front of a train for him.”

They met in Miami in 1951.

Nixon, then age 38, was a congressman, and Charles Gregory “Bebe” Rebozo was a Cuban-born businessman about the same age.

The historian Anthony Summers, in his Nixon biography The Arrogance of Power, has a memory of the first meeting from a senator who recalls Bebe complaining about Nixon:

“He’s a guy who doesn’t know how to talk, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t chase women, doesn’t know how to play golf, doesn’t know how to play tennis. . . . He can’t even fish.”

In some unknown next stage, the two men bonded, and were soon seeing each other regularly. Then they were vacationing together.

Summers writes: “Although Pat was often along, and Rebozo became an uncle figure to the Nixon girls, Nixon increasingly spent time with Rebozo alone.”

They’d vacation together in the Bahamas.

It got to be just ‘Dick and Bebe’ — alone. Then during his presidency, Nixon began going down to Key Biscayne in Florida. Aides pretended that official business was happening, but the only apparent intention was for Nixon to be with Bebe.

In a 1970 memo, Roger Ailes, then White House T.V. consultant, tried to coach Nixon into not so obviously ignoring his wife. “Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public,” Ailes said. “The more attention she gets, the happier they are.”

But the Nixon relationship was known to be cold in public and very troubled in private. Secret service agents later said that Nixon would beat Pat, especially after drinking.

Journalists knew about it, too, and withheld the news for years.

Rebozo was married three times

Maybe that doesn’t sound so ‘queer’. But it wasn’t clear that the marriages were deeply felt. Summers narrates:

“His love life had started disastrously and long continued in that fashion. In 1931, at the age of eighteen, Rebozo had followed ‘an intense friendship’ with Donald Gunn, a well-heeled young man, by rushing into marriage with Gunn’s teenage sister Clare. She agreed to the union, she explained four years later at the annulment hearing, only after endless badgering by Rebozo and on the understanding that he would never reveal it and never live with her as man and wife. The marriage, she said, was never consummated.”

In later years, he’d be married — and his wife would have to adjust to Nixon seeming to be the priority. She wasn’t even second. Another of Rebozo’s wives is quoted: “Bebe’s favorites are RN, his cat — and then me.”

Nixon was famous for not having friends.

It wouldn’t seem likely he’d pick Rebozo, who was known around Miami as a “man-eating tiger,” and as Don Fulsom reported, to have been thought to be on the prowl for men.

What Nixon got from the relationship — other than a lot of gossip — would seem mysterious. Summers continues:

“As time passed, and Nixon began to be seen more and more alone with Rebozo — at the Jamaica Inn and the English Pub on Key Biscayne — rumors started. The notion that they had a homosexual relationship persisted, in part because they were two men in a close relationship, in part because, as newscaster Dan Rather put it, Rebozo ‘transmitted the sense of great sensuality. . . . [He was] magnetic . . . [with] beautiful eyes.’

Gossip about Rebozo spanned the decades. An airline steward who once worked with him reportedly claimed to have had a long sexual relationship with him. An elderly Miami resident said Rebozo had “definitely” been a member of Miami’s homosexual community. But Rebozo and Nixon? General Alexander Haig, the president’s last chief of staff, is said to have mimicked Rebozo’s “limp wrist” manner and to have joked that the pair had a homosexual relationship.”

I suddenly wonder if Nixon’s famous nickname, “Tricky Dick,” was always a queer code.

Nixon was a famous homophobe.

The stories of his aversion to homosexuals are legion. He’d talk about San Francisco as being so “faggy” that he wouldn’t shake hands with any man from there.

When J. Edgar Hoover died, Nixon is recalling saying: “Jesus Christ, that old cocksucker!”

Then he’d chatter about homosexuality ‘destroying’ Ancient Greece. He’d say: “Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates.”

The famous Nixon tapes have him holding forth on the dangers of gay men to the Western world.

“Decorators. They got to do something. But we don’t have to glorify it. You know one of the reasons fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddamned designers hate women. Designers taking it out on the women.”

The central example of this effort to ruin women was hot pants.

I sit wondering if Nixon’s life could all be re-framed, dramatically.

To think over the great themes of his life — his famous paranoia, his breakdowns, his love of his mother. Could he have been consciously a closeted homosexual?

Pat Nixon was famous for being a perfect wife, ever poised and hitting her marks. Maybe she was an actress more than a wife. Maybe she was a ‘beard’. She might’ve known it — or not.

She died before Nixon. So it was Bebe who saw Nixon to his end. Summers finishes their narrative together:

“Rebozo was one of the first to advise Nixon it was probably best that he resign. Afterward he frequently joined him in his exile in California, remaining a close companion through Nixon’s years of rehabilitation until, by one account, he sat at Nixon’s bedside during his final illness in 1994.”

Nixon didn’t think much about sexuality, it seems.

Though Nixon Off the Record, a record of his private chatter published in 1996, two years after his death, has two references. He didn’t care for the increasing Republican obsession with it. He said:

“We have too much bashing of everyone in this party . It’s an embarrassment. So many people are gay — or go both ways. I don’t care. I don’t want to hear about it.”

He didn’t like “outing.” He added: “If someone is gay, that’s their business, and they should have the right to protect their privacy about it.” But he didn’t want to see gays in the military.

If the story was that Nixon liked spending time with his friend — is that ‘queer’?

Or say the reality was that he was in love with his friend, and they had ‘feelings’ for each other, but never were sexual. Is that ‘queer’?

If they were lovers, emotionally or physically, would that make Bebe Rebozo comparable to Pat Nixon? Did America, in that scenario, have two ‘first ladies’—without knowing it? 🔶