By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. Oct. 19, 2015: A new book on the life of a former U.S. president has revealed how he was “pranked” by two of his friends who were tapping into his sexually immature nature.
“The Last of the President’s Men” released last week by Simon & Schuster and written by veteran journalist Bob Woodward quotes Alexander Butterfield, deputy assistant to former US President Richard Milhous Nixon as saying two of the president’s friends found him so juvenile that they put a blow-up doll in his bed during a Caribbean trip.
Woodward exposes one of the final pieces of the Nixon puzzle in his new book through Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the secret White House taping system that changed history and led to Nixon’s resignation.
In forty-six hours of interviews with Butterfield, supported by thousands of documents, many of them original and not in the presidential archives and libraries, Woodward has uncovered new dimensions of Nixon’s secrets, obsessions and deceptions.
They include the prank which was relayed to Butterfield by Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.
In the book, Woodard quotes Rebozo as telling Butterfield: “Last weekend we put a naked girl in his bed,” referring to Nixon.
“A naked girl?,” Butterfield is quoted as saying in response.
To which Rebozo is quoted as saying: “Well it was a life sized blow up doll.”
The prank was played by Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp on Nixon while he was in the Caribbean.
The book also quotes Butterfield as relaying how the married Nixon openly flirted and ogled his secretaries including patting one on her bare legs while flying on Marine One from Camp David to the White House.
Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974 when he became the only U.S. president to resign the office. He died in New York City in 1994.
Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where he has worked for forty-four years. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for The Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, and later for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He has authored or coauthored twelve #1 national nonfiction bestsellers.
