Jesse Marx

Palm Springs Desert Sun

Out of the public eye, but very much on its mind, Richard M. Nixon drove into the Coachella Valley unannounced.

The former California senator and president of the United States, who’d resigned office the previous month under the threat of impeachment, was looking for a place where he could to elude reporters on what he knew would be an important day in history.

It was Sept. 8, 1974.

In a televised broadcast, President Gerald Ford told the nation that he would be pardoning his predecessor for any crimes connected to the Watergate Hotel break-in and cover-up. The decision to preemptively absolve Nixon was widely unpopular among the public and rocked the foundation of the rule of law.

There’s no public record of what Nixon said on the day of his pardoning, but the guestbook he signed while entering Sunnylands, the estate of Walter and Leonore Annenberg in Rancho Mirage, offered a glimpse into his emotional state. “When you’re down you find out who your real friends are,” he wrote. “We shall always be grateful for your kindness and your loyal friendships.”

Time and again, over the course of four decades, Nixon returned to Coachella Valley as a means of escape, following in the footsteps of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and setting an example of his own for future presidents. In a memoir, Nixon remembered how Walter Annenberg attempted to lift the former president’s spirits during those post-White House days with a simple reminder that “life is 99 rounds.”

Nixon took 13 documented trips to Coachella Valley between 1950, when he attended a California Newspaper Publishers Association cocktail party, and 1992, when he privately addressed a group of top GOP strategists in Indian Wells. During those intervening years, he would visit with former President Eisenhower, Palm Springs pioneer Frank Bogert and others.

Occasionally, Nixon’s presence was felt even when he wasn’t physically in the area. In 1971, for instance, he served as honorary chairman of a fundraiser in Beverly Hills that raised $2 million for the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Desert.

More often than not, though, his connection to the desert was the Annenbergs.

Jack Brennan, a part-time Cathedral City resident who served as Nixon’s top aide after he left the White House, remembered how Nixon would completely turn over his schedule to Walter Annenberg while staying on the estate, sometimes to humorous effect.

One night, Brennan recalled, they were in the cocktail room and Annenberg casually mentioned that Frank Sinatra had called: “‘He wanted to cook pasta for you and Jack, and I told him you weren’t interested.’”

“We both wanted to kill him,” Brennan said.

Nixon enjoyed his time at Sunnylands so much that he chose the site for his first social appearance after leaving the White House in February 1975. He stayed at the estate for five days. The day before he left to return to his San Clemente villa, three of his former aides were sentenced to jail over their role in Watergate.

The press wasn’t allowed to get near Nixon, but Bob Hope later described the mood of the event to The Desert Sun. “It was a very sentimental evening,” he said. “Considering everything, the circumstances and all, I think everything went pretty well.”

The mid-1970s have been characterized as a period of self-imposed silence for Nixon. Brian Ellis, a Melvyn’s maître d' who got his start in 1975, remembered the former president visiting the Palm Springs restaurant on at least two occasions, both of which were quiet affairs. It was clear to him that the former president just wanted to be left alone.

His biographer, Jonathan Aitken, once wrote: “He bore more than a passing resemblance to Napoleon at Elba, with the added integrity of being desperately short of money.”

In 1977, Nixon agreed to a long series of interviews with the British journalist David Frost in exchange for $600,000, and it was Brennan – portrayed in the 2008 film “Frost/Nixon” by Kevin Bacon – who helped broker both the television event and its most memorable moment. After his insistence, Nixon apologized for putting the country through the Watergate scandal without taking personal responsibility for it. Everyone on set got what they wanted.

“It made Frost look like a hero and he made a lot of money,” Brennan said. “And Nixon got to say what he wanted to say.”

Nixon took the opportunity to re-enter public life. He left Southern California and appeared more confident to speak his mind, even critically. His trips to the Coachella Valley were less frequent, and in at least one interview, he expressed some animosity toward the place.

“To me, one of the most boring things to do is go to Palm Springs or Palm Beach or Newport and see the so-called beautiful people with their inherited money, and some have earned it, showing off their gowns and their furs and their diamonds and their jewelry and talking of nothing but money and food and houses and sometimes a little sex. But it’s a bore,” he told CBS's “60 Minutes” in 1984.

Nixon spent the remaining years of his life mostly on the East Coast while writing books.

When he died in 1994 at the age of 81, Ford called a press conference to praise the man he’d pardoned 20 years earlier. Nixon’s legacy, Ford said, was greater than Watergate, and he cited among Nixon’s accomplishments the opening of diplomatic relations with China.

Ford spoke these words from Rancho Mirage, where he lived.