14 
RICHARD M. NIXON AND GERALD R. FORD
The Unlikeliest Gastro-diplomat and the Instant President
Richard Nixon: The Thirty-Seventh President
January 20, 1969–August 9, 1974
I. “Just a Bowl of Cottage Cheese”
After years of wandering the political wilderness, Richard Milhous Nixon defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the fraught campaign of 1968. In the run-up to the election Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, and the country was racked by furies. Though the Oval Office would prove as narcotic to Nixon as the One Ring was to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, he began his administration on a gracious, optimistic note, saying, “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”
After the ceremony the Nixons moved into the White House. The executive chef, Henry Haller, was ready for them. The kitchen staff had spent two weeks researching the Californians’ diet and laid in so many supplies that Haller joked, “I think we could open a grocery store in the pantry. We’ve tried to find out everything they like.”
As she prepared for the parties that evening, Patricia “Pat” Nixon ordered four steaks—for the president, their daughters, Tricia and Julie, and Julie’s husband, David Eisenhower (Ike’s grandson). President Nixon liked his steak lightly seasoned and cooked medium rare, while the others preferred theirs braised in a light sauce of herbs, garlic, and shallots. Nixon thanked Haller in person, while his son-in-law declared the dinner as good as that at any French restaurant. Haller beamed. The kitchen was off to a perfect start with the new First Family.
In the meantime, Mrs. Nixon asked for “just a bowl of cottage cheese.” It was a simple request, but it was as if she had tossed a bucket of gravel into the smoothly whirring gears of Haller’s Swiss food production machine, causing them to seize and shower sparks. Cottage cheese?! Frantically searching the refrigerators, the chef realized there was not a single “spoonful of cottage cheese in the house….No one had alerted” him about the Nixons’ devotion to the diet food.
Cottage cheese is a mild, loose curd mixed with whey, low in fat and calories, but high in protein, which makes it a popular snack. As healthy eating gained adherents in the 1960s and 1970s, cottage cheese came to symbolize California cuisine and was a leitmotif in the Nixons’ San Clemente household. But it was not yet a staple in Washington. On the night of the inauguration many stores were closed, and the streets of Washington were clogged with celebrants. But an intrepid staffer commandeered a White House limousine, scoured supermarkets, and triumphantly returned with a container of the precious curds.
“After that night,” Haller vowed, “cottage cheese was always on hand.”
Pat was not the only curd-loving Nixon. “I eat cottage cheese until it runs out of my ears,” the president said, with only slight exaggeration. Every week, Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman had a fresh batch of Nixon’s favorite cottage cheese flown in from the Knudsen dairy in Los Angeles. And nearly every day the president ate a dollop for lunch. He’d plop it on a pale-yellow ring of canned pineapple, occasionally dress it up with a Ry-Krisp cracker or, when he felt daring, a squirt of ketchup. “Ketchup disguises almost anything,” Nixon said, in what might have been a Freudian slip.
Richard Nixon did not savor his food, care about its textures and flavors, linger over dessert, or enjoy a communal table. For him, eating was a means to stay alive and a trial. “Unless I have a guest, I eat breakfast alone in five minutes, never have guests for lunch—I do that in five minutes, too,” he said. Dining with his family, he rushed through his meal and spoke in monosyllables. “Dick eats everything but he likes meatloaf” best, Pat said. He disliked dinner parties and seemed incapable of small talk, an odd trait for a career politician. “I am an introvert in an extrovert’s profession,” he acknowledged.
Yet, in retrospect, the meals Nixon ate, the banquets he attended, and the food policies he championed helped define his legacy and era, and—like Woodrow Wilson, another food-phobe—he forged nutrition programs with lasting impact.
Born in 1913, and raised with four brothers in Yorba Linda, California, Nixon was a poor athlete but a good student who excelled at debate. His parents were devout Quakers. Frank Nixon had a sixth-grade education, had failed as a lemon farmer, and ran a grocery store/gas station in Whittier. Hannah Milhous Nixon named four of her five boys after English kings: Richard was inspired by Richard the Lionheart. The Nixons struggled through the Depression, and two of their sons died of tuberculosis. But the family was hardworking and survived on California’s bountiful meat, vegetables, and fruits.
Hannah recalled Richard as a fastidious boy who channeled his adolescent energy into mashing potatoes. He was “the best potato masher you could wish for,” she said. Unlike his brothers, who crushed the spuds to smithereens with an up-and-down motion, Richard used a whipping motion that smoothed the potatoes so that his batch was the only one without lumps. For Nixon, mashing seemed a form of therapy. “Even in these days when I am visiting Richard and Pat in Washington, he will take over the potato mashing,” his mother said. “He actually enjoys it.”
As a young man Nixon worked hard, carefully positioned himself, and took advantage of lucky breaks. He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II and made enough by gambling on poker to finance his early political career. In 1946, he was elected to the House, in 1950 to the Senate. To appeal to his Southern California base, he positioned himself as an unyielding anti-Communist conservative and would growl in private, “If you can’t lie, you’ll never go anywhere.”
In 1952, Eisenhower named Nixon, who was thirty-nine, his vice president. Though he served as veep for eight years, Nixon alienated the general. First, when Nixon was accused of accepting illegal campaign gifts in 1952 (he barely salvaged his career with the Checkers speech, in which he declared his innocence and refused to give up Checkers, the family dog who was one of the illicit gifts), then by leaking the guest list to Ike’s secret dinner in 1956. Their lack of chemistry grew farcical when Ike attempted to teach Nixon to cast for trout. “After hooking a limb the first three times, I caught his shirt on my fourth try,” Nixon recalled. “The lesson ended abruptly.” When asked about the vice president’s contributions to his administration, Eisenhower grunted, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
Nixon had no choice but to row his own boat into the election of 1960. Public interest was so intense that minor incidents seemed to reflect larger meaning, and concerns about food safety reflected the unease of the era. Take Nixon’s choice of a dinner condiment in November 1959, which resulted in an odd front-page headline in The Washington Post: “Vice President Has Cranberries in Wisconsin.”
In the weeks before Thanksgiving 1959, Arthur Flemming, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, announced that “some” cranberries had been contaminated by a weed killer that caused “cancer in rats,” and to be safe, he advised people not to buy the tart red berries. The announcement scared the public and jolted the $50 million cranberry industry. Restaurants struck the berries from their menus, grocers emptied their shelves, and consumers threw cranberries into the garbage. Mamie Eisenhower announced that she would serve applesauce with her turkey.
Farmers and cranberry lovers were outraged. To demonstrate a common touch, Nixon ate not one but four helpings of cranberry sauce at a political dinner. “I see no reason for hysteria,” he declared. “I am certain [Flemming] is working rapidly to separate those comparatively few contaminated berries, and I…expect to eat traditional cranberries with my family on Thanksgiving Day.” Not to be outdone, his rival, the Democratic senator John F. Kennedy, drank two glasses of cranberry juice and joked, “If we both pass away, I feel I shall have performed a great public service by taking the Vice President with me.”
The Food and Drug Administration had detected the herbicide in cranberries, and it fell to the agency to test tons of the fruit as quickly as possible. The FDA dedicated a quarter of its staff to sample trainloads of cranberries. Meanwhile, newspapers published recipes for substitutes, such as lingonberries, spiced cherries, and pickled pear. Just before Thanksgiving, the government announced it had verified seven million pounds of cranberries and created a label “to tell the housewife whether she’s buying tested, taint-free cranberries.” Newspapers printed a recipe for “Mrs. Flemming’s Cranberry Ring”—a package of lemon Jell-O mixed with a quart of cranberries—for Thanksgiving. Yet cranberry sales dropped 70 percent below average for Thanksgiving and 50 percent below average for Christmas. By January 1960, the Ocean Spray cooperative had laid off a third of its workforce, and cranberry growers reported $20 million in losses.
The great cranberry scare of 1959 heralded a new public concern about food safety, which anticipated later fears about tainted grapes, spinach, cookie dough, deli meats, burgers, and other staples of the American diet. The cranberry case also marked the beginning of a new kind of consumer activism, led by women, who were largely responsible for preparing the nation’s meals. In response, a Virginia housewife named Ruth Desmond established the Federation of Homemakers to address “deep concerns” about the chemical treatment of vegetables and meat and the lack of food industry oversight. The federation grew into an effective consumer watchdog that later testified against General Mills and spurred investigations into the ingredients of baby food and peanut butter.
Gastronomically speaking, the Nixons—California “waist watchers” who insisted on light meals, small portions, little sugar, and no snacks—were the opposite of their predecessors, the barbecue-, chili-, beer-, soda-, and whiskey-inhaling Johnsons.
Pat Nixon stood just five feet six inches tall, kept her weight at 110 pounds, and looked so frail that her husband forbade photos of her in a bathing suit. Dick Nixon was proud to have maintained his “marriage weight” of 175 pounds, kept slim to look good on television, and wore a suit and tie for every meal, even when dining alone. (He also wore a suit and dress shoes at the beach.) A child of the Depression, his controlled diet verged on mania, as if any hint of corporeal indulgence led to feelings of guilt.
Nixon usually began his day with a bowl of wheat germ, a bit of fruit, a glass of OJ, and a cup of coffee, sometimes with nondairy creamer. The First Lady also ate simple breakfasts, but had a weakness for Haller’s blueberry muffins. The president’s lunch was the ubiquitous cottage cheese and/or an occasional green salad, sometimes with a piece of banana bread. He hydrated with a glass of ice water or milk. Family dinners followed the same pattern: no appetizer but for the occasional baked grapefruit or clams on the half shell; an entrée of red or white meat, with a baked potato or pasta, and vegetables or a salad. The Nixons were particularly fond of chicken—baked or broiled, in a pot pie, cordon bleu, with mushroom crepes, divan, in a sauce supreme, or à la king. They also liked a boiled dinner of cabbage and corned beef, and “ethnic dishes” such as spaghetti and meatballs, a Spanish omelet, or beef enchiladas with refried beans.
Nixon was not a frequent or adept drinker. But he was a California native and oenophile who collected fine bottles from estates such as Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Haut-Brion, and Dom Pérignon champagne. He was notorious for his covetousness. As the story goes, Nixon would serve bottles of $6 wine to guests and keep a $30 bottle of Château Margaux for himself—wrapping the bottle in a towel, or pouring the wine from a decanter, to obscure its label.
The Nixons reserved dessert for special occasions. When they indulged, they gravitated to classic sponge cake, Boston cream pie, or napoleons. The president enjoyed baked Alaska, a meringue and sponge cake edifice that envelops an ice cream core—his favorite flavors were vanilla and pistachio paired with raspberry sorbet—and set alight (which reminded Chef Haller of the White House illuminated by floodlights, a Nixon innovation).
Tricia and Julie shared their parents’ plain tastes. One night, Tricia asked Haller for a hot dog. He didn’t have any but remembered the vending machine in the West Wing. Using the loose change in his pocket, he bought a hot dog from the machine, reheated it, and served it to Tricia. She deemed it the best she’d ever tasted.
Given Nixon’s disinterest in food, it was paradoxical that he convened the first and so far only White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health. Though he never fully articulated his motivation, it is likely the initiative was driven by a mixture of political pressure, scientific consensus, business opportunism, and perhaps the memory of his own Depression-era privations.
In 1967, Americans were shocked to learn that malnutrition and chronic hunger were pressing issues in the wealthiest nation in the world. That year, the NAACP attorney Marian Wright brought a group of senators including Robert F. Kennedy to the Mississippi delta, where they met impoverished Black children with open sores and bloated bellies, a sign of malnutrition. When RFK publicized the racially tinged issue, Mississippi’s governor, Paul B. Johnson Jr., dismissed “Socialist-minded senators” from the North, adding, “All the Negroes I’ve seen around here are so fat they shine.” The Jackson Daily News argued that studies claiming fifty-four thousand Mississippians were dangerously hungry simply couldn’t be true: “Who would stand idly by and permit starvation when there is so much plenty in the land?”
Their responses revealed misconceptions about federal food policies and what famine can do to the human body. The media latched on to the story, and in 1968 CBS aired “Hunger in America,” an exposé that showed malnutrition was a far greater problem than many knew, especially in rural areas. Further reports prompted corporate chieftains such as the president of Quaker Oats, Robert Stuart, to push for federal intervention. “The nation cannot live with its conscience if the [hunger] problems are not solved,” Walter Cronkite intoned.
The public was moved, farmers saw an opportunity to sell surplus commodities, and Nixon was goaded into action. In December 1969, he convened the White House conference on nutrition and asked three thousand experts to study the matter. On Christmas Eve, Dr. Jean Mayer delivered a report that included eighteen hundred recommendations. Vowing to “put an end to hunger in America for all time,” Nixon followed 1,650 of them. He authorized feeding programs for women and children, expanded the food stamp program, improved the labeling of ingredients, and nearly doubled school lunch initiatives to cover some 6.6 million students.
These changes dramatically improved nutrition in the 1970s, but in the 1980s the Reagan administration whittled Nixon’s programs down, and when the fiftieth anniversary of the Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health was celebrated in 2019, Donald Trump didn’t bother to mention it.
II. Chopstick Diplomacy
Unlike presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Richard Nixon disdained official meals, and he held diplomatic dinners in extra-special contempt. After hosting his first state dinner, for Canada’s Pierre Trudeau in 1969, he analyzed the evening “as if it had been a major military battle,” Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman recalled. The president’s main grievance was that official meals took too long. Like a fidgety child, he complained “about the ineffable boredom of state dinners,” Henry Kissinger said. He “cajoled and threatened to speed up the serving of White House meals in order to reduce the time he had to spend in small talk with his visitors.”
The fastest state dinner Nixon ever managed, “the world record for White House dinners, so to speak…was an hour and twenty minutes,” Kissinger wrote, “even under the merciless prodding of Haldeman.” In an effort to lower the record, Nixon suggested cutting the soup course. “Men don’t really like soup,” he alleged. Suspecting there was more to the story, Haldeman asked Manolo Sanchez, Nixon’s valet, “Was there anything wrong with the President’s suit after that dinner?” Sanchez nodded and said, “Yes, he spilled the soup down his vest.” That was the last time soup was served at a Nixon state dinner.
When the president visited Italy in September 1970, his “obsession,” as Kissinger put it, was “unintentionally let loose…and caused unending discomfiture.” Between morning meetings about NATO and a visit to the Vatican in the afternoon, Nixon was treated to lunch in the Quirinale Palace, overlooking the Eternal City. Most Italians consider a lengthy midday meal a birthright, but the lunch for Nixon was over in just fifty-five minutes, a standard that the president “never permitted the White House staff to forget,” Kissinger lamented. “Alas, like many Roman achievements, it proved impossible to emulate” in America.
Against this backdrop, it was a quintessential Nixonian contradiction that the greatest triumph of his presidency would revolve around a diplomatic dinner featuring an exotic cuisine, unfamiliar eating implements, and toasts with potent liquor in a place he loathed. Nixon was heading to Communist China.
One afternoon in February 1972, Jack Davies got a call in his office at the Schramsberg Vineyards, in Napa Valley, California. A man on the other end ordered fifteen cases of Davies’s 1969 Blanc de Blancs, a sparkling white wine. The vineyard produced only five thousand bottles of the wine every year, which were aged in caves dug into a hillside by nineteenth-century Chinese laborers. Though not widely known, the Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs was coveted by aficionados, and Nixon had served the delicate, lemony-flavored vintage at his inauguration.
The man on the phone ordered 180 bottles, enough to serve three hundred people. They retailed at $6.49 apiece, and the $1,300 order was “extraordinary,” recalls Davies’s son, Hugh, who now runs Schramsberg. When Jack Davies asked whom the large order was for, the caller declined to answer or identify himself. He did say, however, that if the winery delivered twelve cases to Travis Air Force Base, a government jet would pick them up. With a shrug, the winemaker packed his International Harvester Scout with cases of Blanc de Blancs and drove an hour to Travis. He delivered the wine, then returned to work.
On February 24 a neighbor called, saying, “Jack, turn on your TV!” When he did, Barbara Walters was standing in Tiananmen Square with a bottle of his Blanc de Blancs. She said something like “This is the blank-de-blank wine from California that will be served at Premier Zhou Enlai’s banquet,” in her distinctive nasal voice. Davies was stunned.
“We had no idea where our wine went,” Hugh says, laughing. “And that’s how we found out it landed in Beijing with President Nixon.”
Nixon had flown there on Air Force One—renamed the Spirit of ’76 for the visit—to attend a landmark diplomatic tour of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Diplomatic relations had soured in 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Communists took control of mainland China, and worsened during the Korean War. The “Nixon in China” trip was the culmination of years of advance work and part of a grand overture intended to open the Middle Kingdom to the world after twenty-two years of miserable isolation. As at the Big Three meetings at the end of World War II, food and drink played a central role in Nixon’s Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. Over a series of banquets, meetings, and carefully staged tourist excursions, Chinese and American leaders brokered a détente and posed for photo ops that flashed around the world.
In fact, Nixon’s overture was rooted in the dank soil of Machiavellian electioneering. With the 1972 campaign under way, he wanted to burnish his diplomatic credentials, isolate the Soviets, and pry China’s enormous market open for U.S. business. But “the silent majority” of Middle Americans who had put him in office were leery of the Communist “reds.” The administration used this mistrust to its advantage by repeating the phrase “Only Nixon could go to China”—meaning that only an uncompromising leader could broker peace with a despised enemy. In the end, Nixon’s overture ranked among the seminal geopolitical coups of the twentieth century, one he described, immodestly but accurately, as “the week that changed the world.”
If Nixon’s tour of China represented a historic opportunity, it also contained pitfalls. His negotiations with Premier Zhou Enlai would include knotty questions about Taiwan and China’s sponsorship of North Vietnam, and neither side forgot that their armies had clashed in Korea a dozen years earlier. But China’s relations with neighboring Russia had soured (they fought a border skirmish in 1969), and Chairman Mao understood that one way to reestablish ties with the West was to break bread together—or, as the Chinese put it, “If you eat the things of others, you will find it difficult to raise your hand against them.”
Noting that banquets play an outsized role in Chinese culture, Nixon’s advisers wrote, “The Chinese take great pride in their food….They react with much pleasure to compliments about the truly remarkable variety of tastes, textures and aromas of Chinese cuisine.” The diplomat Winston Lord, who was married to the Chinese novelist Bette Bao Lord, coached Nixon on what he might be served—from dog meat to sea cucumber, bear paw, or bird’s nest soup. “Banquet food served in [the PRC] is to the ‘Chinese food’ served in restaurants in the U.S. as Beef Wellington is to a cafeteria hamburger,” a memo read. “Fortunately, one’s taste buds are a more reliable guide to the excellence of these delicacies than one’s imagination. Most Westerners are surprised to find…that they like them very much.”
The State Department tutored Nixon on the importance of “face,” or maintaining dignity at the table, and warned, “You should not be offended at the noisy downing of soups, or even at burping after a meal.” (Burping is considered a compliment to the host.) But they advised against false praise—saying that “a particular dish is ‘good’ or ‘interesting’ when in fact you do not like it, as your hosts, in an effort to please, may serve you extra portions to your embarrassment.”
Nixon spent weeks studying Chinese history, politics, and culture, with an emphasis on eating. One of his biggest challenges was chopsticks. He was not dexterous, but in practicing with ivory, wood, and silver chopsticks, he trained himself to pluck wood chips, marbles, and mothballs from plates. Eventually, he could hold a cashew without bobbling it. This was no trivial matter. His ability to use chopsticks adroitly could seal a deal with the Middle Kingdom and would prove more important to American public opinion than his groundbreaking statesmanship.
Another concern was that aside from ersatz chop suey or sweet-and-sour chicken, Nixon didn’t eat much “Asian” food. When Henry Kissinger took a reconnaissance trip to Beijing in 1971, he was served “Dragon, Tiger, Phoenix” stew, an amalgam of snake, cat, and chicken. And when Deputy National Security Adviser Alexander Haig visited in 1972, he was served tiny deep-fried sparrows. “It was very crunchy, but not bad,” an aide said. Nixon’s aides worried that complex, flavorful Chinese dishes would prove challenging to the impatient, cottage cheese–loving president and could lead to a diplomatic faux pas.
Equally eager to put on a good show, Beijing asked, “What is President Nixon’s favorite Chinese food?” Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, a former J. Walter Thompson adman, understood China’s real question: What did Nixon want the American public to see him eat?
Haldeman’s job was to portray the stiff, awkward president as an effective leader by staging photos with Nixon standing beside Chairman Mao Tse-tung, striding atop the Great Wall, and eating Peking duck in a palace while his Democratic challenger, George McGovern, gnawed stale doughnuts in freezing Iowa. (Haldeman didn’t mention that the Spirit of ’76 was packed with hamburger, steak, lobster, bean and bacon soup, white bread, ketchup, cherry pie, ice cream, scotch, champagne, and wine—just in case.) Taking this into account, the chief of staff replied, “The President will eat anything served to him.”
The Spirit of ’76 touched down in Beijing on February 21, 1972. It was 11:32 a.m. local time and 10:32 p.m. in the States: prime time. For the first time, every moment of a diplomatic visit would be transmitted into millions of American homes via satellite link. Though he loathed the press, and they him, Nixon had brought a hundred journalists and had rehearsed looking into the camera, smiling, engaging in lively banter, keeping his sweat in check, and projecting self-assuredness to the folks back home.
Nixon’s weeklong visit would take him from Beijing to Hangzhou and Shanghai. On his first day, Nixon met with Chairman Mao, unaware that the chairman was ailing. (This would be their only meeting.) Born a peasant, Mao had a gruff humor and laid out China’s policies in a brief, casual-seeming way. Only later did the Americans realize how disarmingly effective he had been. That evening, the more polished and long-winded premier, Zhou Enlai, hosted a banquet for six hundred people in the Great Hall of the People, a palatial space abutting Tiananmen Square. Under bright television lights and enormous flags, the president and the premier sat at a large ring-shaped table in the main dining hall. The dinner lasted for four hours, all of which was televised live.
“We had our first taste of food and, Ed, you know what? It tasted like Chinese food!” Barbara Walters reported. “It’s just better than the Chinese food we get in our country.”
A white tablecloth was decorated by a centerpiece of low greenery highlighted by orange kumquats. Twenty places were set, each with chopsticks personalized with the guest’s name, along with knives and forks, plates, and three glasses: for orange juice, wine, and Maotai—a brand of baijiu, the potent spirit distilled from sorghum and rice that was a Politburo favorite.
At Chinese banquets toasts with cups of Maotai, and hearty shouts of “ganbei!” (or “dry your cup!”), are a virtually required form of welcome. But with an alcohol content well over 50 percent, Maotai had a reputation as “pure gasoline.” This was a grave challenge for Nixon. When it came to hard liquor, he was “much more susceptible” to inebriation than most people, warned the domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman. If Nixon was tired, just one drink could knock him “galley west,” Ehrlichman said; when well rested, “about two and a half drinks will do it.” Alexander Haig was so concerned that he cabled, “UNDER NO REPEAT NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE PRESIDENT ACTUALLY DRINK FROM HIS GLASS IN RESPONSE TO BANQUET TOASTS.”
At the opening banquet Zhou rose to toast Chinese-American friendship. Nixon responded with compliments to the chefs and quoted Chairman Mao, saying the two nations should “seize the day, seize the hour.”
Each time Premier Zhou raised his glass of Maotai, all eyes and cameras shifted to Nixon. Though he took very small sips, and visibly winced as he swallowed the firewater, Nixon kept pace with Zhou, drink for drink. It was a test of fortitude, and to the intense relief of his staff Nixon passed.
Meanwhile, platters of food came whizzing into the banquet hall, nine courses in all, a gourmet feast reserved for very special guests. First, the cold hors d’oeuvres—salted chicken, “vegetarian ham” (tofu), sliced cucumber and tomatoes, crisp silver carp, duck with pineapple, Cantonese salted meat sausage, and three colored eggs (including preserved, “thousand-year” eggs, an acquired taste with a sulfurous aroma that caused a Today show host to look physically revolted). To put the Westerners at ease, plates of bread and butter were incongruously spread around the table. The meal continued with delicacies such as a consommé with spongy bamboo shoots and egg whites; shredded shark’s fin; fried and stewed prawns; dark, woody mushrooms with mustard greens; steamed chicken with coconut; cold almond junket, pastries, and melon with tangerines for dessert.
A few items were lost in translation, such as the beverage labeled “boiled water (cold).” And there were moments of levity, such as when the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite squeezed his chopsticks and accidentally squirted an olive onto the next table. But there were no major missteps, and Nixon and Zhou got acquainted as two human beings and not simply as government proxies. Both sides considered the banquet a success.
Some American observers critiqued the dinner as too simple, not understanding the political context. The official menu released to the Chinese public (and written in Taiwan) was kept deliberately brief: after the austerity of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao did not dare highlight a luxe cornucopia prepared for foreigners. But the actual meal drew from classical Chinese cuisine—sophisticated dishes that relied on restrained flavors and subtle mouthfeel rather than bright sauces and pungent spices. “The food is vastly more interesting and delicate than the kind of mixture you tend to get in the United States,” The New York Times reported. The shark’s fin and almond junket, for instance, were examples of “bland” dishes coveted by Chinese diners with refined palates.
Like his gambling in the navy, Nixon’s bet on “chopstick diplomacy” paid off handsomely. The two nations issued their first joint communiqué in February 1972, which signaled the end of two decades of hostilities and the beginning of a new era of diplomacy. While government representatives conducted sometimes contentious negotiations in private, it was the image of Nixon wielding a duck gizzard with chopsticks that helped convince American voters that he was worthy of reelection. “Here is a tremendous picture: the President of the United States with chopsticks!” ABC’s Harry Reasoner marveled. The New York Times reported that “some images were simply beyond words or still photographs,” such as the sight of the president “carefully wielding chopsticks.” Nixon’s foray to China scored the highest public recognition of any event in the history of the Gallup poll to that point.
One of the great ironies of the trip was that the timorous, taste-challenged president exposed American palates to a cuisine built on multilayered sauces, exotic ingredients, and occasionally pyrotechnic spices from the other side of the globe. In the aftermath, Chinese food became all the rage back home. Though it had been in vogue in the United States a century earlier, when gourmet Cantonese cookery flowered in 1880s New York (some claim it was first popularized in 1860s San Francisco), Nixon’s trip inspired Americans to abandon the bland, gooey fare at chop suey joints to try more challenging Sichuan or Hunan cooking and sip Maotai.
Nixon did not explore authentic Chinese cuisine further, but as the heights of 1972 tilted into the depths of 1973, he found solace in the pupu platters and cocktails at an ersatz tiki bar a stone’s throw from the White House.
III. The Comfort of Mai Tais and Corned Beef Hash
President Nixon was not shy about eating and drinking in public and enjoyed going to fine restaurants with friends like Bebe Rebozo, a Cuban American millionaire, to eat duck à l’orange or beef Stroganoff. But his “favorite” venue was Trader Vic’s, the pseudo Polynesian-Chinese-themed pub that drew tourists and college kids like flies to honey.
One evening in October 1973—when the Watergate hearings were under way and Vice President Spiro Agnew was being excoriated for bribery and tax evasion—Pat, Julie, and Tricia Nixon decided to walk across Lafayette Square to dine at the Trader Vic’s in the Statler Hilton. Passing between large faux tiki heads at the door, they proceeded into a dim basement decorated with Oceanian paraphernalia—spears, carved masks, clamshell lights, Japanese fishing buoys, and bamboo. Sipping the bar’s famous rum cocktail, the mai tai (the name supposedly means “out of this world” in Tahitian), they perused the menu, which included pork in sweet-and-sour sauce, barbecued beef, fried rice, and rum raisin ice cream with pralines.
The brainchild of “Trader” Victor Bergeron in Oakland, California, in 1944, the mai tai is a deep yellow potion composed of aged dark rum, fresh lime juice, orange curaçao, and the almond syrup orgeat. It was one of many cocktails—including the Samoan fog cutter (“a potent vaseful” of rums, fruits, and liqueurs, the menu promised), the suffering bastard (“a forthright blend of rums, lime and liqueurs”), and the scorpion bowl (“a festive concoction” of rums, fruit juices, and brandy, bedecked with a flower)—that graced the Gauguin-inspired menus illustrated with topless islanders and a rum-soaked seafarer. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Bergeron franchised twenty-seven Trader Vic’s, from Honolulu to Atlanta, Dubai, and Munich. The outpost in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan was a beloved fixture from 1958 until 1993, when the building’s owner, the brash real estate developer Donald J. Trump, deemed it “tacky.” Recalling that franchise’s closing, Nixon lamented, “My entire family was very sorry.”
In its heyday, the Trader Vic’s in Washington was a clubhouse for Nixon confidants like Agnew and Attorney General John Mitchell (later imprisoned for his role in Watergate). The columnist Diana McLellan recalled “seeing Julie Eisenhower breast-feeding her baby and drinking a mai tai in one corner while Democratic mayors were debating marijuana laws in another.”
On October 3, 1973, a month before Nixon declared, “I am not a crook” as the Watergate investigators closed in, he and Pat joined Julie and some friends at Trader Vic’s. “We decided, ‘Why not be young again and go along,’ ” Pat recalled. Under the circumstances, it’s easy to understand the appeal of the bar’s mind-boggling drinks and decor. The president sipped a mai tai and Pat had a Jack Daniel’s. They ordered platters of Americanized “Asian” food—egg rolls, crab Rangoon, lobster Cantonese, pressed almond duck, beef and tomatoes, sweet-and-sour pork, fried rice, snow peas, and “royal tropical fruits” for dessert. The dim subterranean bar was a fantasy, and it provided a momentary sense of innocence and escape for the embattled president. For an hour and a half, people lined up to talk to him, while he hugged a waitress, signed autographs, and posed with the Saudi ambassador and his son. Nixon was so distracted that he forgot to pay the check; the restaurant billed the White House.
As his presidency staggered, Nixon turned to a different kind of comfort food: a dish he reserved for special occasions, one that held a mysterious, Rosebud-like significance for him, as if it were too special for daily consumption and could be eaten only at moments of great celebration or stress.
Amid daily revelations about Watergate in November 1973, seventy-five worried Republicans attended a White House breakfast. They pressed Nixon on the “childish” burglars and his firing of the special prosecutor Archibald Cox. The president claimed he knew nothing about the scandal and pleaded to his allies, “I need your help.” But it was too late. In a private meeting with GOP supporters on August 8, 1974, Nixon tearily acknowledged he had lost their support and would step down, becoming the only president to resign from office. Then he tripped over a chair and nearly crashed to the ground. Recomposing himself, Nixon delivered the message to the nation on live television and radio: “I shall resign the Presidency at noon tomorrow.”
At six o’clock the next morning, Henry Haller arrived at the White House to discover Nixon, dressed in pajamas, standing in the private kitchen. Instead of his usual wheat germ and coffee, he ordered one last presidential breakfast: corned beef hash topped by a poached egg—the dish that held special significance for him. He sat alone at a table in the Lincoln Sitting Room and savored every bite. Once he had cleaned his plate, Chief of Staff Alexander Haig laid down a letter with a single typed sentence: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”
Nixon picked up a pen and signed his name.
At 12:03 P.M. on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford was hastily sworn in as the nation’s thirty-eighth president by Chief Justice Warren Burger, making him the only man to serve as both vice president and president without being elected by the Electoral College.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” he declared wishfully. Nixon did not watch the swearing-in, and as the two couples walked toward Marine One, Ford made awkward small talk: “Drop us a line if you get the chance. Let us know how you’re doing.” Nixon scoffed at Ford’s sentimentality. As the Nixons clattered away in a helicopter, Ford assured his wife, Betty, “We can do it.”
The Nixons transferred to Air Force One and winged across the country to San Clemente. They were the only passengers aboard. Observing rows of seats usually filled by the press, Nixon muttered, “Well, it certainly smells better back here.” Somewhere high above Jefferson City, Missouri, Dick and Pat poured themselves martinis, then retreated to separate compartments to sip their numbing drinks and stare out the window as the nation slipped away beneath them.
IV. Gerald Ford: The Instant President
The Thirty-Eighth President August 9, 1974–January 20, 1977
The turnover on August 9 happened so quickly that the Fords did not have time to pack for the White House, and after the inauguration they returned to their split-level ranch house in Alexandria, Virginia, where they celebrated over lasagna. The next morning President Ford, dressed in short baby-blue pajamas, walked out to pick up the morning paper, and was startled when a clutch of reporters began firing questions at him. He waved sheepishly, then went inside to fix a breakfast of orange juice, melon, an English muffin with margarine and jam, and tea.
“You are what you eat,” Haller observed. Gerald Ford, like his food, was “unpretentious, honest, wholesome, hearty, and all-American.” In the wake of the dark melodrama surrounding Nixon, the chef wrote, America was “prepared to trade political pomp and glory for public confidence and stability.”
A genial, modest man, Jerry Ford had an unorthodox rise to the top of the political heap. In October 1973, the Michigan Republican was minority leader of the House who aspired to nothing more than becoming Speaker. But the GOP was in disarray, and he was considered a safe candidate to replace the convicted Spiro Agnew as vice president.
“I happen to be the nation’s first instant Vice President,” Ford told the Grocery Manufacturers of America. Adding that he preferred instant coffee and instant oatmeal to the genuine articles, he said, “I only hope that I prove to be as pure, as digestible, and as appetizing to the consumers who did not have a chance to shop around for other brands of Vice President when I was put on the market.”
Ten days after his swearing-in, the Fords and two of their four children moved into the President’s House. That evening they celebrated with prime rib, new potatoes with parsley, green beans, salad, and ice cream. The basic, hearty dinner was typical of the Fords’ “Michigan gourmet” diet.
Ford did not cringe at socializing the way Nixon did, but he did enjoy quiet meals at “home” in the mansion. Ford maintained that “eating and sleeping are a waste of time,” and his lunch, like his predecessor’s, often consisted of a ball of cottage cheese slathered in A.1. Sauce, a slice of raw onion, and a bite of ice cream. Betty favored leftovers or soup with homemade “toasting” bread. Dinner favorites included midwestern classics like tuna casserole, stuffed cabbage, spareribs with sauerkraut, hamburgers topped with bacon, liver, and onions, or lobster foo yong (a “Chinese” egg and lobster dish) with a salad or cooked vegetables. While the Fords did not eat a lot of sweets, the First Lady liked to serve chocolate angel food cake, which was light and sweet but not high in fat, for dessert. The president’s favorite food, she said, was butter pecan ice cream.
To celebrate their first White House Christmas, the Fords hosted a congressional ball for a thousand guests. In a new spirit of openness, it was a nonpartisan event and the first party for the entire Congress in six years. Many of the legislators had never attended a formal White House party before, and were agog. The State Floor was transformed into a holiday wonderland, with a large crèche in the East Room, an enormous buffet and a gingerbread house in the State Dining Room, and a Christmas tree in the North Hall. In a toast, the dieting President Ford observed, “That big Michigan Christmas tree and I have a lot in common. Neither of us expected to be in the White House a little while ago. Both of us were a little green. Both of us have been put on a pedestal and—I will add this as a postscript—both of us have been trimmed a little.”
Presidential meals say something about their eaters, their era, and what it means to be American. The details of each dish—the ingredients, where they were sourced, who prepared them and how, the way they were presented, to whom, when, and why—send a powerful message about the president’s values and the state of the nation. And the public pays attention.
In 1976, Ford, who was prone to gaffes, invited ridicule by biting into a tamale still wrapped in its corn husk on a visit to San Antonio. His faux pas seemed to mirror the country’s post-Nixon stumbling. Trying to quell the fallout from the “Great Tamale Incident,” Mayor Lila Cockrell said, “The president didn’t know any better….[H]e didn’t get a briefing on the eating of tamales.” But when Ford shed fifteen pounds at the White House, people clamored for details about his diet, and magazines reprinted Haller’s low-calorie menus. The president got a kick out of that. But not everyone was pleased by the example set by the Instant President.
Julia Child, a diet skeptic who was attuned to both the symbolic and practical roles of presidential food, scoffed at Ford as a tête de lard (“fat-head”) who lacked the wit to recognize that what he ate represented something far more important than his own looks. Similarly, when the Fords hosted the Windsors at the 1976 bicentennial celebration, Julia was thrilled to attend, but resented the tacky entertainment, the amateurish telecast, and, most of all, her inability to taste the wine or comment on Henry Haller’s cooking for a large audience eager to hear about it. Ford, it seemed, did not fully grasp the significance of the moment, his role in it, or the broader importance of food and entertaining. He had a good time and danced with Queen Elizabeth that night; but a more savvy president, like Jefferson, FDR, or Kennedy, would have seized the opportunity to spread “the good news about good food at the White House,” as Julia put it—and reaped the political dividends.
With the arrival of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in 1977, Julia was optimistic that they would “do something about improving” the fare at the People’s House, and promote regional dishes. She advised Mrs. Carter to look deep into her larder, consider its symbolic importance, and promote “the good in American cooking.”