Silent Partner

On the night of November 8, 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon settled down in his fifth-floor suite in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles for what he knew would be long, anxious hours in front of his television sets. After campaigning in all fifty states, Nixon could now do little more than wait for the ballots to be counted to determine whether he or Massachusetts senator John Kennedy would be the nation’s thirty-fifth president. Nixon’s immediate family was down the hall, and political aides were sequestered a floor below. Nixon took out his yellow legal pad; the pad was what one aide later described as his “true” best friend. Nixon started taking notes on the results trickling in from around the country. All three broadcast networks that night were trotting out their newest computer technologies for quicker and more accurate projections. Early in the evening CBS was saying that Nixon was headed toward a big victory while ABC, then a less robust news operation, interrupted its election reporting to show Bugs Bunny cartoons and The Rifleman before predicting a more narrow victory for Nixon. At midnight, NBC’s RCA 501 computer projected Kennedy would win with 51.1 percent of the vote. As the hours ground on, the flickering black-and-white images on the TVs a few feet away from Nixon were all telling him the same thing: It was going to be an agonizingly close election.

A loner since childhood, Nixon wanted only one other person by his side that night, the most important of his life. Remarkably, Nixon had known him for only nine of his forty-five years, but in that short time they had formed a bond unlike any other in his life. The two rarely if ever talked politics, didn’t share the same party affiliation, and often spent large chunks of time together in silence. But there was something in this man’s soothing and calm presence that gave Nixon comfort, almost a reassurance that the world wasn’t quite as hostile as his paranoid mind told him.

Nixon’s friend wasn’t judgmental, didn’t often if ever challenge him, and never brought up unpleasant topics. They both came from modest backgrounds but through dint of hard work and sharp instincts had become successes in their respective fields. The only man in the country to witness the torment Richard Nixon suffered over losing the closest general election in presidential history—100,000 votes out of 65,000,000 cast—was a banker and businessman from Florida who met Nixon on a boating excursion off of Key Biscayne. His name was Bebe Rebozo, and over the next fifteen years, he would become one of the most famous First Friends ever—as much for his ubiquitous, dapper presence as for his role in the most infamous scandal in presidential history.

Charles Gregory (“Bebe”) Rebozo was born two months before Nixon, on November 17, 1912. He was the youngest of nine children in a family of Cuban emigres that traced their ancestry to the Canary Islands. He acquired his nickname, Bebe, from a brother who couldn’t pronounce his name, resorting instead to the Spanish word for “baby”—bebe—which stuck for life. Young Bebe grew up first in Tampa and then in Miami. He helped add to his father’s modest earnings by delivering the Miami Herald. In the fifth grade he took on a second job, killing and plucking chickens for a local poultry market. “I had never killed a chicken before and I’ve never killed one since, but it was the only job I could get at the time,” he later said.

Bebe had big ambitions. He wanted to be an entrepreneur, without knowing yet what the word meant. Still in high school and slinging newspapers, he was beginning to think more boldy about what he could do with his modest delivery savings. He settled on real estate—putting down $25 for a small lot in a nearby town. He never actually saw or even took possession of the property, and lost it during the Depression after failing to make timely payments. But Rebozo was learning, most important, that the best way for him to succeed in school and in business was to be modest and unobtrusive—smiling a lot while speaking little. More charming than scholarly, he was known best for the white suits he wore and the deft moves he made on the dance floor. His fellow classmates voted him the best-looking boy of his senior class.

Just after graduating, Rebozo married his high school girlfriend, Claire Gunn, the sister of his best friend. By 1933, the marriage was annulled, with Claire claiming it had never been consummated. Nine decades later, that fact would be used in part to suggest Bebe was gay and that the basis for his relationship with Nixon was sexual somehow, but no evidence ever emerged to support either claim. In fact, in the thirties, lawyers often counseled clients to use that reason as an easy and quick way to obtain an annulment in state courts.

In 1930, Rebozo secured a job with the fledgling airline Pan American as one of its first ten stewards assigned to the sea planes that flew between Miami and the West Indies as well as to Panama. During his year as a steward, he saved enough money to buy a gas station in Miami. A year later, he closed the business and made his living driving tourists around the city. But his fortunes began to turn when he was able to open, in 1935, a new service station—Rebozo’s Service Station and Auto Supplies. This time business was good. Months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he added a new feature to the station—recapping tires—on the advice of a silent investor and friend who had inside information from his government job that with war looming there would be rubber shortages.

Rebozo spent the war as a Pan Am navigator on loan to the US Army while one of his eight brothers ran the service station. When his friend’s tip proved right, Rebozo’s tire business exploded, returning him to civilian life a wealthy man. He used his newfound status to make inroads into Miami’s elite. His experience as a steward provided him with the manners to assimilate into a world that had once been beyond his reach. Rebozo learned to fly and bought a small plane. He became more involved in the community, sponsoring baseball and bowling leagues and making major commitments to the Boys’ Club and Junior Achievement. Meanwhile, he smartly spotted the opportunity to capitalize on the hot real estate market of postwar Miami and began buying “every good property I could afford”—including large lots in Biscayne Bay such as the one that would become known in the Nixon years as “the winter White House.” All the while, Rebozo kept building businesses, buying a single laundromat that quickly turned into a chain and seeding two finance companies where he served as a principal. With his wealth, he bought a new house on Key Biscayne’s most expensive street and a new boat that he loved to skipper. He also remarried his ex-wife, Claire.

By his forty-second birthday, Bebe Rebozo had made it. He was known around town as a successful businessman with impeccable style, an easygoing grace and a gift for telling jokes. He was also a flirt. After divorcing Claire a second time, in 1950, he became known for squiring different women around town to Miami social events. He would remain a bachelor for the next twenty-one years until remarrying in 1971; he never had any children. But if lasting love eluded him, he was lucky in most everything else: Fun, empathetic, rich, charming, Rebozo was the companionable man required when, on a warm January morning in 1951, an anxious and exhausted US senator-elect from California arrived looking for some rest.

Richard Nixon was coming to Florida that December weekend to “chase the sun.” He was trying to alleviate some stress after conducting one of the ugliest Senate campaigns in US history. A month earlier, Nixon had beaten Helen Gahagan Douglas in a race so nasty it earned him the enduring moniker “Tricky Dick.” Nixon accused Douglas of being “pink right down to her underwear” as part of a relentless, vitriolic, red-baiting attack on her supposed communist sympathies. He ran a flawless if ugly campaign, garnering the widest margin of victory of any Senate winner that year; his victory also generated enormous national prominence. And yet fame gave him no peace of mind. Nixon had long been fighting demons real and perceived that left him at heart a lonely and emotionally fragile man devoid of close friends. In a letter to his new wife, Pat, shortly after he enlisted in the Navy in 1943, Nixon wrote: “I’m anti-social, I guess, but except for you—I’d rather be by myself as a steady diet rather than with most people I know. I like to do what I want, when I want. Only where you are concerned do I feel otherwise.”

Like Rebozo, Nixon grew up in modest circumstances. His parents were Quakers, strict disciplinarians who exhibited little affection to their five boys. Many years later, his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, said: “Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?” Friends and relatives remember a young boy “lying by himself in the grass, staring up at the sky, or wandering past the clusters of playing boys, lost in his own thoughts.” Nixon’s thoughts typically revolved around dreams of greatness. In his eighth-grade autobiography he wrote, “My plans for the future if I could carry them out are to… study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people.” Above his bed throughout his youth was a poem from Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life,” that speaks of “great men” who upon departing “leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.”

When Nixon was twelve his younger brother Arthur died. It was a crushing loss. He cried every day for weeks. But he persevered, as would be his nature throughout his life. He learned to use his innate ambition, that constant drive, to conquer the emotional pain that so often burdened him. And he was learning he could overcome his often powerful feelings of loneliness and despair by exerting power and control over others. Shortly after Arthur’s death, he ran for his first office, the eighth-grade presidency, and won. When his older brother, Harold—whom Nixon looked up to—died during his junior year at Whittier College, Nixon suffered another breakdown. But again, it wouldn’t overwhelm him. Despite being an underdog and lacking any close friends on campus, he won the race to become student body president.

After Whittier, Nixon headed east to Duke Law School on a full academic scholarship. Despite graduating at the top of his class, none of the top New York City law firms hired him. Dejected by what looked like Ivy League elitism to him, he returned to Whittier and bided his time as a small-town lawyer. He was luckier in love, marrying Pat Ryan, a student at USC whose beauty had earned her bit roles in Hollywood movies. He met her at a play rehearsal in 1938 and discovered he “could not take my eyes away from her.” Before their first date he declared. “Someday I’m going to marry you.” She laughed. It took more than a year of relentless pursuit (Nixon often drove her to Los Angeles for dates with other men, just so he could spend time with her) before Pat decided she too was in love with Dick. They married a year later. In 1941, the newlyweds moved to Washington, DC, where Nixon landed a job as a government lawyer. He despised the work and escaped within a year, enlisting in the Navy, where he became a lieutenant and saw combat in the Pacific. A steady stream of letters back and forth to each other during the war are poignant reminders of how deeply in love the two were during this period. Afterward, depending on the historical source, the feeling would vary between cool and hostile.

Home from the war and back in the government job he loathed, Nixon knew he needed to do something more exciting and important with his life. His deliberations became much easier when Republican leaders from Whittier began looking for a new face to take on Jerry Voorhis, a five-term Democratic incumbent running for reelection to the US House of Representatives. A cold call from a party leader to Nixon asking if he was interested was all that was needed to start him on his way. With no political experience beyond his eighth-grade and Whittier College wins, Nixon nevertheless impressed party elders at his audition with his command of the issues and political acumen. His general election campaign was ugly, foreshadowing the campaigns he would run for the next twenty-six years: under-the-table money from oil interests, unrelenting smears against his opponent, lying about his opponent’s record. Nixon’s desperation—“I had to win,” he later told a friend—resulted in an overwhelming victory. Four years later, in 1950, riding the fame won from leading the House Un-American Activities Committee’s pursuit of Alger Hiss and his spying for the Soviets, Nixon beat Douglas to win a seat in the US Senate.

His takedowns of Voorhis, Hiss, and Douglas came at a high cost, however. He established his bona fides as an anticommunist crusader and a reliable conservative, but in the process he alienated a generation of left-of-center journalists, influencers, and voters with his win-at-all-costs approach to campaigning and governing. His increasing number of opponents never forgave him and, in a sign of just how raw a nerve Nixon touched, would haunt him for the next quarter century.

Part of the cost of victory was also the emotional toll it exacted on the senator-elect. He was a man in need of a break. In his own curious way, he would soon get the respite he so desperately needed. But in the process, he would acquire something far more valuable and sustainable: a lifelong First Friend.

Nixon’s trip to Florida at the beginning of 1951 came at the suggestion of George Smathers, a Florida Democrat who had also won his first Senate campaign that fall and feared Nixon was having a “nervous breakdown” from the stress of the campaign. Known as “the Collector” because he acquired so many friends, Smathers had been a high school classmate of Rebozo and remained friends with him. After being elected to Congress in 1946, Smathers began luring political friends like John Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson down to Florida with promises of afternoons fishing on Bebe’s boat and evenings carousing in Miami’s clubs. Nixon agreed to come down, Rebozo agreed to host, and the trip was on.

Smathers’s campaign manager, Richard Danner, picked Nixon up at the airport. “He was tired, worn out and wanted to relax,” Danner recalled. The senator-elect was also dressed for winter, so Danner took him to buy suitable clothes before driving him to the Key Biscayne Hotel, where Rebozo was waiting in the bar. Nixon gave Rebozo a polite brushoff and went straight to his room.

The next day didn’t go much better. Nixon went out on Rebozo’s thirty-three-foot Chris-Craft houseboat called the Cocolobo, but in a dramatic departure from every other trip Bebe had hosted with Washington pols, his new guest showed no interest in fishing and he made no effort to hide it. Instead of socializing with the other guests, Nixon stayed apart, catching up on paperwork. After the boat trip, instead of joining in the other planned activities of golf and tennis, drinking and carousing, Nixon again stuck to himself and his yellow legal pads. Rebozo was so put off by Nixon that he immediately afterward wrote to Smathers: “Don’t ever send another dull fellow like that down here again. He doesn’t drink whiskey; he doesn’t chase women; he doesn’t even play golf.”

If Bebe thought his friend shared his same disappointment with the weekend, he was pleasantly surprised a few days later to receive a gracious thank-you note from his guest. Years later, now close friends, Rebozo would remember his first encounter far more charitably: “He had a depth and genuineness about him which didn’t come through because of his shyness, but I saw it.”

Nixon continued his rapid political ascent, becoming at age forty the second-youngest vice president in US history in 1952, when the Republican ticket led by Dwight D. Eisenhower won an overwhelming victory over former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. His new status only enhanced his relationship with Rebozo. The trips to Florida became more frequent as the two men developed a natural rhythm; Nixon needed a place to unwind where he could fish (he overcame his earlier reluctance), eat well, drink martinis (Nixon’s initial abstinence was an anomaly—they would consume enormous quantities of alcohol together the rest of their lives), and sit quietly on the houseboat. An extraordinary friendship took root. For the next forty-two years it would remain a constant in both men’s lives.

In Nixon’s 1990 memoir, In the Arena, he devotes a chapter to “friends,” which begins with the quote, erroneously attributed to Harry Truman, that “if you want a friend [in Washington] buy a dog.” Like his predecessor Jack Kennedy, Nixon’s concept of friendship distinguished between the personal and the political. He too subscribed to the Palmerston theory that to have a political friend required shared interests. Since a politician’s interests typically changed depending on the issue at hand, Nixon, like Kennedy, found it hard to maintain a genuine, longstanding friendship with any of his professional peers.

Sadly, Nixon appeared to have very few friends in or outside of politics. One day during his vice presidency, his boss, President Eisenhower, went to visit him in the hospital. When he returned to the White House, Eisenhower remarked to his secretary how lonely Nixon had seemed. “How could that be?” Eisenhower wondered aloud. How could a grown man—no less a man at the absolute top of his profession—have so few friends? For the handful of friends he could claim, Nixon believed all that was required was shared “values.” In his memoir’s brief chapter on friends, Nixon never directly addressed why he had developed such a close relationship with Rebozo or what values they shared. That vacuum leaves the reader to speculate what “values” they allegedly held in common. On the surface, what they seemed to share the most was unspoken, unswerving loyalty. Both were self-made men; neither needed nor asked for anything from the other except for reliable and true companionship (and the accoutrements that made it possible). It seemed, at least on the surface, to be as simple as that.

On a deeper level, their relationship is more enigmatic. Was it a friendship between equals, for example, where each gave as much as he received? Based on most public accounts, it seemed one-sided, with Rebozo in a subservient role. He was always the one reading Nixon’s mood to determine when to speak or to be silent. It was up to him to provide the entertainment: the boat, the barbecue, or whatever else his friend might like to do that day. Rarely would an observer get a sense of what Bebe wanted or derived from the friendship. Was it just the thrill of being close to power? Was Nixon as accessible to Rebozo as Rebozo was to him? Nixon liked being around Rebozo because—at a minimum—he gave him companionship without demanding much from him in return. But why did Rebozo like being around Nixon? He never spoke or wrote in any detail about his friendship to answer these questions, but it certainly must have been enough to keep them so close for more than four decades.

A close relative to the president who witnessed their relationship over more than a quarter century saw a logic to why an intellectual like Nixon would want as his best friend an “intense, careful non-intellectual” like Bebe: “The president’s mind was always churning, whether he was writing, reading, or just looking at the expanse of the sea.” Bebe’s unique gift was his ability to provide “structured frivolity” that could “break [Nixon’s] intensity with just the right anecdote or joke at just the right moment” that then allowed him to return to his thoughts with renewed energy. The close relative added: “The president had plenty of writers and thinkers at his disposal to consult with when he wanted intellectual sustenance. That wasn’t Bebe. He never interrupted him with a thought or an argument. He was very careful not to exercise his own ego or talk about things he knew nothing about.”

Viewed from this insider’s perspective, Bebe became in essence a human sounding board for Nixon. “Bebe doesn’t present Nixon with any intellectual problems, so Nixon doesn’t feel threatened,” one mutual friend later wrote. Pat Nixon put it more sharply: “Bebe is like a sponge; he soaks up whatever Dick says and never makes any comments. Dick loves that.” Years later as president, Nixon called Lyndon Johnson at his ranch in Texas just two weeks before his predecessor would die of a heart attack, describing Bebe as the perfect tonic: “[He’s] a great guy to have around; he cheers people up, you know, he never brings up any unpleasant subjects.” Smathers, for one, interpreted Bebe’s approach to the friendship in far more cynical terms: “Bebe’s level of liking increased as Nixon’s position increased.”

If Smathers’s cynicism was right, then Bebe’s level of liking rose to new heights in the summer of 1960 when Nixon became the Republican nominee for president. Bebe threw himself into the race, accompanying the candidate on trips while he helped secure Florida for the Republicans at home. He even engaged in a little skullduggery, paying a private investigator to dig up dirt on Kennedy. The damaging material he passed on about Kennedy—that he had married once in 1947—was ultimately based on forged documents and went nowhere. For much of the general election campaign, Nixon seemed to have the edge in a race where the two candidates competed to see who could be tougher on the Soviets. But Kennedy took advantage of the new medium of television and the introduction of televised national debates that year to narrow the gap, and as election day neared the race looked to be a dead heat.

So there they were on November 8, 1960: Nixon and Rebozo, alone in a suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles watching Nixon’s early lead slide away as Tuesday turned to Wednesday morning. When the final returns came in from Illinois, Kennedy had won by 0.2 percent of the overall vote. Bebe was in the room that Wednesday afternoon when Nixon picked up the phone and conceded the election to Kennedy. Later, Nixon would ponder a series of what-ifs to try to make sense of his loss: “I can think of a hundred things I could have done or said that might have changed the result,” Nixon wrote to a friend shortly after the election.

When everyone else futilely warned Nixon against challenging incumbent California governor Pat Brown in 1962, Rebozo moved at great financial sacrifice to Los Angeles to support his best friend’s losing campaign. The morning after that election, Rebozo was at his side again when Nixon famously declared to the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because this is my last press conference.” Of course it would not be his final press conference. Whether the reporters believed it, the colorful quip gave them an irresistible opportunity to write his political epitaph, and they did so enthusiastically.

Throughout Nixon’s wilderness years, Rebozo remained close, and the devotion went both ways. In 1964, when Rebozo chartered his new Key Biscayne Bank, Nixon showed up for the official groundbreaking, shovel in hand. “Where other banks have branches, we have roots,” was the bank’s slogan, and Nixon became its first and most famous depositor. Rebozo even had a bust of Nixon installed in the bank’s lobby, where it remained until the bank was sold. Just over five years later, when Nixon became president, he divested all his stocks and bonds, depositing the proceeds in Rebozo’s bank.

The fact that Nixon was making deposits in Rebozo’s bank showed that—for the first time in his life—he was making real money. After his loss to Governor Brown, Nixon moved the family to New York City, where he became the lead partner in the Wall Street law firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. From 1963 to 1968, he pulled down a six-figure income, all the while ingratiating himself with New York’s monied elite in case he ever returned to politics. He was one of the firm’s primary rainmakers, taking full advantage of the fact that corporate titans loved to tell friends and colleagues that the former vice president was now their lawyer. To get their business, all he had to do was regale them with political insights. Privately, he was more biting. “I just got $25,000 for telling a bunch of stupid jerks something they could have learned from the newspapers.”

In addition to all this extra income, for the first time in twenty-five years Nixon was enjoying a relatively uncluttered personal calendar. That meant more time with his Florida friend. The trips down to Key Biscayne became more frequent. They found a new favorite haunt, the English Pub, with its wooden booths and hundreds of pewter mugs hanging from the ceiling—including two bearing the names Bebe Rebozo and Richard Nixon. Nixon would almost always order chop steak (medium rare), and just as surely Rebozo would pick up the tab, tip generously, and ask the staff to say nothing to the few journalists who sometimes snooped around, looking for a scoop.

Their matchmaker, Smathers, who often joined the men in Florida, was especially attuned to the unusual quiet of their relationship. Others marveled at it, too. When Nixon was president, John Dean, Nixon’s young White House counsel, remembers being approached by the Secret Service when they became concerned that Rebozo, not their agents, was driving the president around—a major breach of protocol. Dean worked out a compromise with Rebozo whereby the Secret Service would always drive the cars, but when it came time to captaining Bebe’s Florida houseboat, an agent would sit up top above the boat while Bebe took the helm. On his first outing, the agent became concerned after hearing only silence from below for the first hour of their trip. He climbed down and peered into the stateroom to see two men sitting in total silence, both looking out at the sea. The agent continued to watch for the next hour and still heard not a peep. He came back to Dean and expressed his confoundment: “They didn’t exchange two words to each other.” Intrigued, Dean went back to the Secret Service and asked what they witnessed when the president took beach walks with Rebozo. He heard the same thing: They walk in silence. “I suppose they were just so comfortable with each other that they could often occupy each other with literally no words,” Dean said in an interview fifty years later.

Monica Crowley, Nixon’s foreign policy assistant for the final four years of his life, spent dozens of hours with the two men, including on what would be Nixon’s final trip to the Far East. What Crowley observed was “two different but very complementary personalities.” As she described the two friends: “It wasn’t that Nixon didn’t like people—he did, very much—but he also found constantly being around a lot of people somewhat draining, and he needed time to recharge, emotionally and physically. Bebe was an extrovert; he loved people, was always gregarious, hilarious, a shoot-from-the-hip wisecracker. Nixon loved all that in him and that’s why he enjoyed being around him so much.”

One aspect to Rebozo that became especially attractive to Nixon during this time was his skill at generating wealth, especially for a man who lived on a public salary for much of his adult life. Rebozo, a gifted moneymaker, began to offer Nixon opportunities to make investments in his real estate projects. Nixon proved smart entrusting his investments to Rebozo: In 1967, Nixon took out loans from two Miami banks to purchase 199,891 shares of stock in a company Rebozo had created to develop Fisher Island in Miami Beach, today one of the wealthiest enclaves in America. Others around Nixon—including his secretary, Rose Mary Woods; his valet; and his speechwriter, Pat Buchanan—also bought stock, all at $1 a share. Two years later, the now-president Nixon sold his shares back to Rebozo at $2, doubling his initial investment. At the same time, on Rebozo’s recommendation, Nixon purchased two vacant lots in Key Biscayne for $38,000. Right after his reelection in 1972, he sold the lots for a profit of $111,000. Years later these profits would become public and raise a furor in the press.

For the time being, though, Nixon and Rebozo freely mixed money with friendship—or, more accurately, family. Childless and again single, Rebozo became almost an extension of the Nixon family, growing especially close to Nixon’s two daughters, Julie and Tricia. As Julie Eisenhower wrote, he seemed “more like an uncle” to her and Tricia than just their father’s friend. A decade later, Tricia’s fondness for her adopted uncle was so great she made him a godfather to her son Christopher. He was the only non–family member invited to celebrate the Nixons’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and, right afterward, Nixon’s only companion on an extended trip to South America.

So when Nixon began contemplating another run for the presidency in late 1967, it was only natural that Rebozo would be among the few who knew. From the very start, Rebozo was a vocal opponent of the idea. As much as anyone, including the family, Rebozo had witnessed the rawness of Nixon’s emotional pain after his losses in ’60 and ’62. Normally reticent to take such strong positions, Rebozo stepped out of character because he feared what failing again might do to his friend—and to Pat and the girls. Evidence emerged decades later that Nixon’s pain may have been so great following his ’62 loss that he physically abused Pat—“blackened her eye”—according to former Nixon campaign aide John Sears’s account of a conversation he had with a Nixon lawyer right after the election. Sears maintained that the incident was so serious that Pat threatened to leave Nixon afterward. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims to know from informed sources of at least “three alleged wife-beating incidents” Nixon inflicted on Pat. Julie Eisenhower has firmly denied the charge.

Whether true or not, Nixon evidently shared Rebozo’s reticence about re-entering the political arena. After his annual Christmas party, he retreated to the quiet of his library late in the evening of December 22. At the top of a fresh legal pad, he wrote, “I have decided personally against becoming a candidate.” He then listed all the reasons that supported his decision, agreeing with Rebozo that “losing again could be an emotional disaster for my family.” But ultimately he surprised himself when he wrote, “I don’t give a damn.” Because he in fact did give a damn. As he recounted in his memoir RN, “I did want to run. Every instinct said yes.” He knew if he was ever going to “leave footprints in the sand,” as Longfellow had silently exhorted him, this was his time. Still, he agreed with Rebozo’s assessment that the cost of losing, especially to Pat and his daughters, would be great.

Paralyzed with indecision, Nixon decided to fly down to Florida right after Christmas for some “concentrated thinking.” With Rebozo “silently” at his side (“I already knew what he thought,” Nixon wrote), he walked along the beach, mulling his decision. It happened that the Reverend Billy Graham was in Miami that week recovering from pneumonia, and he joined Nixon and Bebe on their first day there. Nixon and Graham by then already knew each other well, and Nixon respected Graham’s judgment and wisdom. The reverend wasted no time appealing to Nixon’s sense of destiny. He pulled out his Bible and, reading from Romans, shared the same message Nixon was coming around to himself: This is your moment. Seize it. By their third day together, Graham had shed any pretense of impartiality: “Dick, I think you should run.… It is your destiny to be President.” In the end, the First Preacher had trumped the First Friend. The race for the presidency was on.

Rebozo put all his reservations aside once Nixon formally announced his candidacy in mid-January 1968. Apart from raising money for the candidate, Rebozo also changed his lifestyle in deference to his friend’s new circumstances and his own rising national visibility. Since his divorce from Claire in 1950, Rebozo had become known in Miami as a consummate ladies’ man, squiring an ever-changing cast of women around town as he moved from one social engagement to another. Now, he decided, it might be better to act with more caution. He started an exclusive relationship with Jane Lucke, his lawyer’s assistant and a twice-divorced mother of two. They would marry a few years later, though Jane always knew where she ranked in her new husband’s life: “Bebe’s favorites are Richard Nixon, his cat, and then me,” she later remarked. They would remain married until Bebe’s death in 1998.

The general election pitted Nixon against Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace. Nixon ran a much better campaign than in 1960, but like his 1950 Senate campaign, it was ugly—built on a “law and order” message that set Black people against whites, city dwellers against suburbanites. His primary strategy was to appeal to older white voters seeking to restore the traditional social order, and everyone else who despised the progressive policies of Johnson’s Great Society. It was an “us versus them” gambit, and it worked—though just barely. By the time Illinois (again) finally certified its results at noon on Wednesday, November 6, Nixon had secured 301 of 538 electors and won the popular vote by half a million ballots. Nixon could barely conceal his joy when taking the podium to claim victory on his second try for the White House: “I can say this—winning’s a lot more fun,” he said.

Later that day, the president-elect and his family boarded an Air Force jet provided by President Johnson and flew to Key Biscayne. It took only minutes once the plane landed for Nixon to appreciate how different life would be on this modest barrier island. As the president-elect, he was now trailed by the Secret Service and a large national press contingent. Once ignored by the locals and tourists, Nixon and his family suddenly found themselves hounded. Nixon soon realized big changes were needed. He decided to sell his New York apartment and to buy two lots right next to Bebe’s home for $250,000, equal to half his declared net worth at the time. The idea was to create a winter White House—an enclave during the winter months where he could move his office into the sun for his “perfect day,” as daughter Julie described it in her memoir: “Reading in deck chairs, looking out over the glassy calm toward the city… a morning and afternoon swim, always a walk on the beach, [ending] the day with Bebe’s delicious steak and Cuban black-bean dinners.”

Within a month of becoming president, Nixon pressed Rebozo into service. He had vast new powers at his disposal, and he wasted no time enlisting intimates in his schemes, legal or not, to keep himself firmly in power. Twenty-eight days after an inaugural speech in which the president spoke of “the better angels of our nature” and “building a great cathedral of the spirit—each of us raising it one stone at a time, as he reaches out to his neighbor, helping, caring, doing,” H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote a confidential memo to John D. Ehrlichman, another top aide to the president:

Bebe Rebozo has been asked by the President to contact J. Paul Getty in London regarding major contributions. Bebe would like advice from you or someone as to how this can legally and technically be handled. The funds should go to some operating entity other than the National Committee so that we retain full control of their use. Bebe would appreciate your calling him with this advice as soon as possible since the President has asked him to move quickly.

Until this moment, there exists no record of Nixon ever asking his friend to do anything beyond the customary parameters of their friendship—certainly nothing as nefarious as routing a campaign contribution outside the normal channels of the party so he could “retain full control” of it. And while there is no evidence that Bebe ever acted specifically on this request, it is the first of Nixon’s presidential efforts to draw Rebozo into his dark view of the world—an attempt that would one day succeed, with painful results.

For Nixon, always paranoid, always an introvert, the new strains of being president seemed only to exacerbate his darker instincts. From his first days in office, he was seeing enemies at every corner and plotting retribution in response. Like his campaign, his presidency quickly descended into an “us versus them” operating mode—the few whom he perceived were with him versus the hordes he believed despised him. “He had no personal ability to get control,” media advisor Roger Ailes recalled. “He has to live in a drama—in a Western: Nixon against the world.”

The ultimate power of his office, rather than emboldening him, seemed to exacerbate his feelings of unworthiness. On a trip to California a few months after becoming president, Nixon took Rebozo and Henry Kissinger, his new national security advisor, on a tour of his hometown. “As he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental,” Kissinger wrote. “There was no moral to the tale except how easily it could have been otherwise.… He never was certain that he had earned it.… He could not find the locus of his achievements.”

Nixon’s untethered ambition, combined with paranoia, ultimately forced many of those closest to him to choose between their loyalty and their conscience. For Rebozo, a private citizen who until now had enjoyed a relatively simple relationship with the president, the conflict could have been especially vexing. But it wasn’t, and one reason might have been his own history of shady dealings—details that were just then coming to light among law enforcement officials in Washington.

By the late 1960s, FBI agents investigating criminal syndicates had identified Rebozo as a “non-member associate of organized crime figures.” Their conclusion arose from Rebozo’s numerous and long-standing business ties with well-known mob leaders from across the country, relationships that in some cases created real estate opportunities not only for Rebozo but also for Nixon. For one, the FBI now had reason to believe the Key Biscayne lots Nixon had purchased were owned by a business associate of Rebozo’s connected to organized crime, who sold them to the then-aspiring candidate at bargain rates. The FBI also focused closely on Rebozo’s Key Biscayne Bank, and in particular Rebozo’s role in selling stock that earlier had been stolen by a crime syndicate and deposited in his bank. Even the English Pub they loved to frequent in Key Biscayne was now off-limits to the president because of the FBI’s concerns over its involvement with organized crime. How much the president knew about these Rebozo connections, if anything, has never been firmly established.

The best retelling of Rebozo’s central role in Nixon’s life and work comes from Bob Haldeman’s exquisitely detailed diary. Every night for the nearly four and a half years he served as Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman would dictate an account of his day, which more often than not was spent at the president’s side. What becomes abundantly clear from Haldeman’s diary is Nixon’s near-total reliance on Rebozo for companionship—no matter whether the location was the White House, Camp David, Key Biscayne, or San Clemente. One entry from early 1969 described a typical Southern White House day, “The P [the President] generally spent most of his time working alone, relaxing alone with family, or with Bebe.” When the president decided to have a “stag party” for his closest friends—all six of them according to Haldeman—Rebozo was guest number one. When Nixon planned to give a major national television address and wanted emotional support, he would ask Haldeman to get his friend up to the White House. And if Haldeman needed help convincing the president to take more relaxation time away from the White House, there were only two people to call who could make sure it happened: Rebozo or Billy Graham.

Within the White House, Bebe played an equally prominent role in the social life of the First Family. Though Lucy Winchester had the official role of White House social secretary, Rebozo was the de facto secretary—often choosing the First Family’s movies and entertainment while playing an active role in revamping the White House kitchen. Whenever he flew on Air Force One, which was often, Rebozo proudly wore a blue flying jacket emblazoned with the presidential seal. At the Rose Garden wedding of Tricia Nixon and Ed Cox in 1971, Rebozo was the Nixons’ houseguest for the weekend. Knowing how much his friend liked bowling, Rebozo even paid to install a bowling alley in the White House basement.

On numerous occasions, the president would enlist Rebozo on delicate matters he wouldn’t entrust to his staff or thought his friend could uniquely handle. One of Nixon’s first initiatives as president was to resume the CIA’s activities to destabilize Fidel Castro and Cuba. A second-generation Cuban-American, Rebozo shared Nixon’s hatred for Castro and was tasked by his friend to devise new covert efforts to undermine his control. When the president fretted over how to silence an increasingly erratic and alcoholic Martha Mitchell, wife of his good friend and attorney general John Mitchell, Nixon urged Rebozo to take her on “frontally.” In 1971, Nixon wanted revenge on the Washington Post for printing the Pentagon Papers. The Graham family, which owned the Post, also controlled television stations, so the president asked Rebozo to organize a group of pro-Nixon businessmen to challenge their FCC television station licenses. In the end, the challenge to the Post broadcast properties never cost the company its licenses, but it did cost the company a lot of its market cap when its stock tanked on news of the challenge.

And there were the absurd moments involving the two friends, often fueled by alcohol, that got wide play within the White House complex. In one oft-repeated story, the president and Rebozo were enjoying a weekend alone together at Camp David in April 1970. The issue consuming the White House at that time was whether to commence the bombing of Cambodia. As the two men sat down for a dinner of steaks and multiple martinis, Kissinger and his national security team were at the White House planning various scenarios. Every few minutes, Nixon interrupted them, calling with orders and then promptly hanging up. An incredulous Kissinger “rolled his eyes each time,” an observer later recalled. After one call Kissinger turned to his colleagues and finally told them, “Our peerless leader has flipped out.” But Nixon wasn’t done. Later, after watching his favorite movie, Patton, the president called again. By now he was slurring his words as he barked even more orders at Kissinger. Finally, Nixon said, “Wait a minute. Bebe has something to say to you.”

Rebozo got on the phone. “The president wants you to know if this doesn’t work, Henry, it’s your ass,” Rebozo told the future secretary of state.

In truth, Rebozo was much more comfortable in his role of loyal companion than provocateur. From his second inaugural through his resignation twenty months later, the president took sixty separate trips to Camp David, Key Biscayne, or San Clemente with Rebozo as his sole friend. In spite of his proximity to power, Rebozo never sought to advance an initiative or espouse a cause. Nor did he ever appear to enjoy or seek any fame at all as the president’s best friend. For its cover story in the summer of 1970, Life magazine sent a reporter to shadow Rebozo in Key Biscayne for almost two weeks. The closest the reporter got to him was on the other side of a window at Rebozo’s Key Biscayne Bank. The reporter waved, and Rebozo waved back. When the reporter then entered the bank and asked to speak to him, a secretary came out to tell him her boss wasn’t in.

On June 18, 1972, readers of the Washington Post awoke to a front-page story about five men getting arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex, a cluster of luxury residential and commercial properties on the banks of the Potomac. Nixon and Rebozo were relaxing on a private island off of the Bahamas owned by Robert Abplanalp, the multimillionaire inventor of the aerosol valve and perhaps the only other person Nixon considered a close friend. The reporter, Albert E. Lewis, who covered local crime, began his story this way:

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

Nixon and Rebozo were down by the sea that morning when a Secret Service agent came out to the shoreline to tell the president about the reported break-in.

“What in God’s name were they doing there?” asked Nixon, according to an account Rebozo gave in 1990, adding:

“We laughed and forgot about it.”

The men continued their swim, but the laughter would not last long. Both men by the time of the Watergate arrests were well aware of the nefarious acts (if not specifically of the DNC break-in) already underway in support of Nixon’s reelection efforts. But neither could have known that a little more than two years later, this single act of brazen foolishness a thousand miles to the north would unspool the greatest presidential scandal of our time, forever changing their lives. For Nixon, of course, it would lead to resignation and disgrace. For Rebozo, it would mean notoriety bordering on ignominy as his own involvement in Watergate became national news. Over the next twenty-four months, the scandal would thrust him into the national spotlight, embroil him in expensive and embarrassing investigations, and, fairly or not, forever brand him as the president’s bagman.

The first inkling that the press was catching on to some of the dirty acts being engineered out of the White House surfaced nearly a year before, in August 1971. Jack Anderson, a syndicated columnist known for breaking major news stories, wrote an item alleging that Howard Hughes, the reclusive Las Vegas billionaire and famous germophobe, had given Bebe Rebozo $100,000—all in $100 bills—who then put it in a Florida safe-deposit box. The money was delivered by Richard Danner, the same Smathers aide who had picked Nixon up on his first visit to meet Rebozo in 1950 and now worked for Howard Hughes.

Anderson’s news raised eyebrows at the time but not much more. A few months later, though, a Nevada publisher, Herman Greenspun, followed a hard lead suggesting that the Hughes money had actually gone from Rebozo to Nixon to purchase his home in San Clemente. When Greenspun tried to confirm it with the White House, aides realized the story could spell trouble. And in fact, in January 1972, Nixon and his aides were sent into a panic when Anderson reported he now had “evidence” that Rebozo had indeed received the money from Hughes.

The questions raised were troubling: Why would Howard Hughes give Rebozo $100,000? Was it a loan or payment of some sort? Was it a campaign contribution, and if so, why wasn’t it sent immediately to a proper account instead of sitting in Rebozo’s safe-deposit box?

By then too many people knew that Hughes in fact had a direct financial interest in wanting to see Nixon reelected: He needed a favor, and it was a big one. Already a major casino operator in Las Vegas, Hughes was eager to purchase another one, the iconic Dunes Hotel. The problem was that seeking to own two casinos would certainly generate concern from lawyers at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Hughes’s hope was that timely support of Nixon would convince the president to get the DOJ to back off and help him gain approval for the acquisition. In this context, all the parties understood that the line between a loan or a campaign contribution and a bribe was about as thick as Richard Nixon’s skin.

The trail from Hughes to Rebozo to Watergate threaded through one formidable man, Larry O’Brien. A former senior aide to President Kennedy, O’Brien had helped run Humphrey’s campaign in 1968 before becoming chairman of the Democratic Party in 1972. But in between those two jobs, O’Brien worked briefly for Howard Hughes as a highly paid public relations consultant, right around the time Hughes had given the $100,000 to Rebozo. As the theory goes, Nixon and his top aides were fully aware of this, and their fear was twofold: First, O’Brien might know how the cash was intended to be used; and second, he could now be preparing to make it all public and ruin Nixon’s reelection chances.

All this caused a serious case of déjà vu to descend on the president. In the 1960 presidential campaign, word had leaked out of a $205,000 loan from Hughes to Nixon in 1956 that Nixon long believed had led directly to his defeat. He vowed now not to let that happen again.

So at the start of this reelection campaign, the president acted. Nixon impressed upon his senior aides his fears about the Hughes money, and they then translated those fears into an illegal plan of action: They would break into O’Brien’s new offices at the Democratic National Committee and wiretap his office and phones to find out what he knew about Hughes’s $100,000 cash payment and what he might be contemplating to do with such information. At the same time, they hoped to collect incriminating information about O’Brien’s own connections to Hughes that they could then use offensively to attack the chairman and the party he led.

On May 28, 1972, Nixon’s men broke into the Watergate offices of the DNC, sifting through files, taking photographs, and planting bugs, including one they thought was on O’Brien’s phone that failed to work. When they started to listen to their handiwork, they soon realized that not only did the bug (allegedly) on O’Brien’s phone not work, but they had also bugged the wrong phone and office. The bumbling team returned three weeks later, this time to reinstall a wiretap that would work and on phones in the right suite. But a piece of tape on the outer door of the office complex alerted the security guard on duty that a break-in was in progress. Minutes later, off-duty DC detectives entered the office and caught the five men red-handed. Watergate was born.

Whether Hughes’s cash was the main driver—or even among the reasons—for the Watergate burglary is far from settled history. Watergate investigators spent two years probing the matter without reaching a consensus. John Dean, Nixon’s former White House counsel, scoffed at the suggestion when asked about it in 2020. He and others still believe the impetus for the break-in was a more general interest in learning how the Democrats planned to win the campaign and what they knew about Nixon’s own illicit acts to defeat them. But a report of the Senate Watergate Committee unsealed after Nixon’s resignation built a circumstantial and theoretical case that the White House’s motive was indeed fear that the disclosure of the Hughes-Rebozo transaction would damage the president’s chances for reelection in 1972.

In his own testimony before the Watergate grand jury in 1973, Nixon offered some support for the committee’s theory: “O’Brien was giving us a rough time, he was the only effective pro that [DNC presidential candidate George] McGovern had working for him, and he was worrying us.” But then he added: “The Howard Hughes organization at that time was under intensive public investigation as well as private, with regards to payoffs, and here Larry O’Brien had his hand in the till.” In that testimony, Nixon himself outlined a clear rationale for the break-in and wiretaps—keeping O’Brien from exploiting the Hughes-Rebozo connection by threatening to expose evidence of his own corruption.

Of course it wasn’t only the break-in itself that caused Nixon’s downfall but instead his later attempts to cover up the crime. Whether Nixon himself had plotted the actual burglary or even knew of it beforehand has never been established. Nevertheless, as the Watergate scandal began to unravel, it would inevitably close in on the president, and on his best friend.

Despite news of the break-in, the public largely ignored the story in the summer and fall of 1972, and Nixon for once enjoyed a relatively stress-free campaign. He was riding high from his foreign policy triumphs, opening up relations with China and signing a series of nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviets. Détente was working, the economy was humming, and in McGovern, a liberal senator from South Dakota, he was facing one of the weakest candidates the Democrats had put up in decades. McGovern made the contest even easier for Nixon by running one of the most disorganized, blundering general election campaigns in party history. All of Nixon’s concerns at the beginning of the year—worries that precipitated Watergate, other similar break-ins, and off-the-books fund-raising—proved needless. Voters returned him for a second term in the biggest landslide in American history, with 60 percent of the popular vote and a record 520 electoral votes.

Ten days after Nixon became the second person in American history to be inaugurated four times (FDR being the first)—twice as president and twice as vice president—a jury returned a guilty verdict against two of the Watergate burglars. If the country hadn’t focused on the scandal before, it did now, accelerating efforts by investigators and journalists to better understand the impetus for the break-in and how far up the hierarchy the conspiracy climbed. Nobody pursued the story more relentlessly than two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who would earn Pulitzer Prizes and lasting fame for their investigative work. It took three more months for the press to link the burglars to people deep inside the White House. Testimony from Dean before the Senate Watergate Committee directly implicated the president’s two top aides in covering up the crime. For their involvement, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were forced to resign. A despondent Nixon told them he would rather “die in the night” before asking for their resignations. But a few hours later, the president appeared on national television announcing their departures from the White House. For blowing the whistle, Dean was rewarded with a swift firing.

Weeks before Haldeman and Ehrlichman were officially let go, the president had begun to focus on how their inevitable testimony before grand juries and congressional committees would affect his future. To that end, the president organized an outing with his best friend on the Sequoia, the 104-foot presidential yacht that boasted a mahogany hull and a rich history. It was on board the Sequoia that FDR and Churchill had drafted plans for the D-Day invasion, and where Nixon, who made eighty-eight trips on the yacht (more than any other president), negotiated the SALT I nuclear arms treaty with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Nixon’s aim this night wasn’t quite as noble. As the boat set out on the Potomac, Nixon laid out a set of grim facts to his friend. Within weeks, Haldeman and Ehrlichman would be unemployed and under indictment from federal prosecutors for crimes related to their involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Neither man had the means to pay for proper counsel, a concerned Nixon told Rebozo. Now he got to the point of the voyage: Could Rebozo discreetly raise a slush fund to pay for their defenses? If he paid for their counsel, the president likely reasoned, he could have greater visibility into their defenses and possibly blunt the worst of their testimony. Without hesitation, Rebozo told a relieved president that he and Robert Abplanalp could raise several hundred thousand dollars without trouble. Within weeks he fulfilled his promise. On the transcript of a White House tape from April 30, 1973, Nixon told his two departing aides about the existence of the slush fund raised for their defense.

“No strain,” Nixon said. “Doesn’t come outta me. I didn’t, I never intended to use the money at all.

“As a matter of fact, I told B-B-Bebe, uh, basically, be sure that people… who have contributed money over the contributing years are, uh, favored and so forth in general.”

The existence of this secret fund was reconfirmed for Watergate investigators by Lawrence Higby, Haldeman’s top aide, who testified under oath that Haldeman had told him that “the president indicated that Mr. Rebozo did have some funds that could be made available to Mr. Haldeman and… Mr. Ehrlichman for the purpose of assisting in a legal defense.” The Senate Watergate Committee’s final report concluded that Rebozo’s secret fund amounted to about $400,000.

As Rebozo was setting up his slush fund, he was also appearing under subpoena before the Senate Watergate Committee. The committee wanted to hear directly from Rebozo why the Hughes money was given in the first place, where if anywhere it was disbursed, and what if anything was left of it. In sworn testimony before Senator Sam Ervin’s committee, Rebozo said the $100,000 he received from Danner had remained in the original safe-deposit box until, under Nixon’s direction, he returned the money untouched to Hughes. The president, he said, believed it would be wrong to use the money because it was a campaign contribution. He also testified that Nixon advised him to talk to Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, about how best to handle the matter with the IRS. Without evidence that Rebozo was lying, the committee tabled the matter, though not for long.

Later that fall, six days after the “Saturday Night Massacre” (when Nixon in quick succession fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general for failing to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox) set the machinery of impeachment in motion, Nixon was questioned at a press conference about Rebozo’s handling of the Hughes cash payment. In a defiant tone, the president backed up Rebozo’s spring testimony to the committee, saying that the funds had never been touched and all had been returned to Hughes in the same manner in which they’d been delivered. “I think that is a pretty good indication that he is a totally honest man, which he is,” Nixon insisted.

At another press conference three weeks later to quell the rising clamor for his impeachment, Nixon tried to assure the nation he was still an honest man: “People have got to know if their president is a crook. I am not a crook.”

But the Senate remained skeptical. All that summer and fall, Watergate investigators were developing sworn testimony that directly contradicted Nixon’s assertion that Rebozo was a “totally honest man.” Most damningly, Kalmbach revealed to Terry Lenzner, the committee’s chief investigator, that Rebozo had directly told him he’d parceled out much of the $100,000 to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime secretary, and to the president’s brothers, Ed and Donald, along with a few others. Once Rebozo found out about Kalmbach’s devastating testimony, he knew he had to act swiftly to protect himself and the president from being implicated any further. On March 21, 1974, Rebozo and his attorney asked to meet with committee chair Sam Ervin, the crusty old North Carolina senator and now national celebrity as a result of the highly rated and riveting hearings he had led the previous summer. Ervin insisted Lenzner be in the meeting, too. The men entered a small side room in the Capitol. Rebozo proceeded to put his briefcase on a table, open it up, and reveal two stacks of $100 bills, each bundled with a rubber band.

“I remember Ervin’s astonished expression—his busy eyebrows fluttered up and down, and he gasped,” Lenzner wrote in his book, The Investigator. “The cash,” Rebozo’s lawyer announced as he pointed to the stacks. With all eyes riveted on the money before them, Rebozo’s lawyer assured Ervin and his investigators that his client had left the money “untouched” in order to return it to the Hughes organization. This was their attempt to prove, Lenzner later wrote, that the money had not been used.

There were a few problems with this account from Rebozo and his lawyer, however. Most troubling, Kalmbach had already testified that Rebozo told him he’d disbursed the funds. If that was true, what was the source of this $100,000 that Ervin was gaping at? A forensic accountant stepped in to investigate. Every bill released by the Federal Reserve has an index number that is tied to its date of release. The accountant soon discovered, according to Lenzner, that more than thirty of the bills had been issued after Danner had given the money to Rebozo, meaning that the original bills had gone elsewhere. Making matters worse for Rebozo, the stacks contained an extra $100, making for a total bundle of $100,100 in the briefcase. To Lenzner, who described Rebozo as an “uncooperative” and “arrogant” witness who “acted as if he could get away with anything,” the discrepancy of the serial numbers and the extra bill meant that the committee needed Rebozo to re-testify. It issued another subpoena to him, and Rebozo promptly left the country. He never testified again before the committee.

In 2005, a 60 Minutes segment on CBS attempted to answer the riddle of the Hughes cash. The piece offered some tantalizing new clues, including a chart prepared by Senate investigators that had not been included in their final report. Tracing the money through various bank accounts, Lenzner could now assert that $46,000 of the Hughes money went directly to Nixon’s Key Biscayne house for such distractions as a putting green and a pool table. Lenzner came to an unequivocal conclusion: “This was a bribe… in effect through Mr. Rebozo to the President.” Lenzner recalled that he had written an entire section laying the blame for Watergate on the Hughes bribe, but for reasons he didn’t disclose, his explanation was never included. One theory later propounded for its omission was that Democrats had also received Hughes money and didn’t want to draw more attention to it.

And did O’Brien in fact know about the money, warranting the wiretap put on his phone? CBS interviewed Hughes’s right-hand man for eighteen years, Bob Maheu, who had been directly responsible for making sure the money got to Rebozo thirty-five years earlier. Asked if he ever told his then PR consultant O’Brien about the loan, Maheu scoffed: “Never, never. I had no reason to tell Larry. Why the hell would I tell Larry about this?”

The break-in that would take down a president may have all been for naught.

By the summer of 1974, a pervasive gloom hung over the White House. Nixon’s last chance to save his presidency seemed to rest on the US Supreme Court. After US District Court judge John Sirica demanded the president turn over tapes of his private White House conversations, Nixon appealed on the grounds of executive privilege in Nixon v. U.S. On July 24, the Court ruled 8–0 (Justice William Rehnquist recused himself) that the president must surrender the tapes to the Watergate investigation. Days later the House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment. The transcript of the tapes was not yet public, but Nixon knew that the entry recorded on June 23, 1973, would seal his fate. For nearly two years, the president had been telling the country that he’d known nothing about an attempt to cover up the Watergate break-in. But in that recorded conversation a week after the break-in occurred, Nixon and Haldeman talked in detail about how they could scuttle the FBI investigation by having the CIA pretend it was a national security matter.

On the night of August 2, the president, his family, and Rebozo again boarded the Sequoia for what would be a somber voyage. On a yacht that in times past had given the president such solace, Nixon decided that he was going to become the first man in history to resign as president of the United States. Rebozo, who had flown up from Miami the day before, tried to dissuade him.

“You can’t do it. It’s the wrong thing to do. You have got to continue to fight. You just don’t know how many people are still for you,” Rebozo urged.

Four days later, on August 6, the Washington Post carried the latest, and biggest, story based on the now public June 23 tape. “President Nixon personally ordered a pervasive cover-up of the facts of Watergate within six days after the illegal entry into the Democrats’ national headquarters,” the story began.

Despite this damning revelation, Nixon’s family made the same entreaty as Rebozo. “Go through the fire just a little bit longer,” Julie wrote in a note she left on her father’s pillow. “You are so strong! I love you. Millions support you.” Nixon saw his daughter’s tender note in the early hours of August 7, but in his mind and heart the decision was already made. He had to resign. His impeachment was inevitable. Earlier Arizona senator Barry Goldwater had delivered the news that Nixon knew sealed his fate: Once impeachment reached the Senate for trial, he could count at best on only ten votes for acquittal. As much as he relished a good fight, Nixon knew that his options had run out. It would be better for him, for his family, and for the country to leave. That night, speaking to the nation from the Oval Office, Richard Nixon resigned as the thirty-seventh president.

Nixon, his wife, and his daughters flew back to California and their oceanside estate in San Clemente. Rebozo and Abplanalp visited the president in those first days of exile, as they would regularly for the next twenty years. As much as Howard Hughes’s $100,000 cash contribution to Rebozo had abetted his downfall, Nixon could never fault his old friend for it. Rebozo ultimately was not charged by the Justice Department for putting the money to personal use, although a subsequent IRS investigation did find he underreported his taxable income for 1970 and 1971, forcing Rebozo to repay more than $50,000 in back taxes and interest. In the end, all Rebozo could be accused of was excessive—even blind—loyalty to Nixon.

A half century after Nixon and Rebozo stepped off center stage, there are still puzzling aspects to their forty-year friendship that defy logic. For such a public relationship—one intensely scrutinized amid an electrifying scandal—questions still come more readily than answers. Why would such an intellectual as Nixon choose a nonintellectual for his best friend? How could they derive such satisfaction from a friendship that was so often spent in silence? Was it all based on unwavering loyalty? With few definitive answers, differing theories, from the benign to the salacious, still compete for acceptance: The rags-to-riches Rebozo thrilled just being in the room as history unfolded; Nixon valued him because he aided and abetted his nefarious side, secretly plotting and then executing some of his most unsavory acts; they were gay lovers; or that Nixon needed Rebozo to fill an emotional void left by an intensely complicated marriage, one that swerved between periods of closeness and alienation, affection and possibly physical abuse. Or the most likely: that Nixon, even beyond his loveless marriage, found in Rebozo a level of comfort and intimacy otherwise absent from his life.

Ultimately, no sure answers exist. Discreet to their core, neither man ever divulged so much as a glimmer of what bonded them so tightly beyond the occasional bromide. All that we really know is that Rebozo served as an intimate witness to Nixon’s greatest triumphs and his most bitter defeats—frequently the only witness. And that they felt comfortable enough in each other’s presence to spend more time together than with anyone else, including their own wives.

Perhaps in the end what that unloved young boy from Whittier needed most in life was someone to shield him from the world. A paradox to be sure, Nixon was a public man with the heart of a loner—aloof, uptight, and nursing grievances against enemies both real and imagined. With Rebozo by his side, he could focus on how best to build on his successes while moving past his all-too-painful failures. Bolstered by a friend who gave him respite, a steeled Nixon emerged better equipped to face what life threw at him. He could be kicked around, again and again, but with Rebozo’s steady presence, he could still get up and plow forward. The basis of their special dynamic may be as simple as what Nixon sparingly describes in In the Arena: a friendship in which neither asked anything of the other beyond just being there.

Even as the friends reached their ninth decades, their devotion to one another remained as strong as ever. In 1990, nearing his seventy-seventh birthday, Nixon made his final visit to Miami—this time as a favor to Rebozo. He agreed to be the guest speaker at a sold-out, $250-a-plate benefit for the Miami Boys’ Club, the same charity Rebozo had started supporting a half century earlier. In a rare interview with the Miami Herald to help promote the event, he continued to protect his notorious friend, still vouching for Nixon’s essential goodness. When the subject of Watergate arose, Rebozo blamed the scandal on others, never on the president himself.

“I know that in the beginning he was just appalled by it,” said Rebozo, without a hint of doubt. “I was convinced that he was the last to know what was going on.”