Watergate might not have been President Richard Nixon's only scandal. INSIDE EDITION speaks to the author of a new book on Nixon about his secret scandals and skeletons in his closet.
Was Richard Nixon gay?
That's the stunning claim in a new biography, Nixon's Darkest Secrets -The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President.
Author Don Fulsom, a veteran reporter who covered the White House during the Nixon years, is claiming Nixon may have had a lifelong romantic relationship with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo, a shady Florida businessman. He's saying reporters often saw them holding hands. One reporter claimed she saw them cuddling at a restaurant in Miami.
"He even while waiting for the Presidential limosine to pull up outside, they were still kind of holding hands," says Fulsom about the allegations made by the reporter.
Rebozo had an office and a bedroom at the White House, even though he never actually worked for the Government. And Nixon apparently spent more time with Rebozo than with his long-suffering wife Pat.
Fulsom says, "He spent aproximatly a half hour a day with his wife, he spent one in every ten days with Bebe Rebozo they were almost inseperable."
Fulsom says that even though Nixon and his wife appeared close in public, behind closed doors, Nixon was verbally and physically abusive.
INSIDE EDITION asked Fulsom if it appeared that the marriage between Nixon and his wife was a sham?
Fulsom claims, "He not only disliked his wife but was physically abusive toward her and beat her up several times at least one time where she had to be hospitalized."
Nixon, who was known as 'Tricky Dick," resigned in disgrace following the Watergate scandal but it now appears that Watergate may have been just the tip of the iceberg.
The new biography also claims that Nixon had a serious drinking problem, that his staff called him "Our Drunk" and that his drinking often led to bizzarre, even dangerous behavior.
"When he was drunk too much, Nixon would make strange phonecalls ordering nuclear weapons to be dropped on one country or another, and in one case he ordered it to be dropped on Capitol Hill" Fulsom says.
