M.M. Cloutier
Before it became a private club owned by former President Donald Trump, the famed and staggeringly opulent Mar-a-Lago estate decades ago was briefly in possession of the U.S. government when another U.S. president vowed, “I am not a crook,” during a politically tumultuous time.
It will be 50 years ago this summer since the late President Richard Nixon in 1974 toured a then-shuttered Mar-a-Lago, a 17-acre showpiece that had been willed to the government by its longtime original owner upon her death.
That would be cereal-fortune heiress, businesswoman and hostess extraordinaire Marjorie Merriweather Post, who for decades presided over Mar-a-Lago and social affairs there, which ranged from soirees with Broadway casts to luncheons with royal dignitaries and old-fashioned square dances locals of a certain age still remember fondly.
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So in July of 1974, what was Nixon, who was embroiled in the Watergate scandal, doing at Mar-a-Lago? After all, just a month later, he resigned from office.
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First, Nixon visiting Palm Beach was hardly unusual then — and not because his ranch-style vacation home was nearby in Key Biscayne in Miami.
Though he was said to be ill at ease socially, Nixon, for years, had come to Palm Beach to visit good friends as society photographers in the 1950s and ’60s captured him at the Everglades and Beach clubs, The Breakers and elsewhere in a town that had what he loved: golf, warm weather and “lots of Republicans,” as Palm Beach Daily News society editor Shannon Donnelly once noted.
After Nixon championed late Palm Beach resident Claude Kirk’s successful bid for Florida governor in 1966, he attended Kirk’s Palm Beach wedding in 1967 at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church (Kirk married Erika Mattfield).
President Nixon and his wife visited Palm Beach several times
Among other things, Nixon and his wife, Pat, were guests many times at the Palm Beach home of close friends, the late Mahmouda (Bobo) and Elmer Bobst (she was a United Nations delegate, public health advocate and philanthropist; he, a close friend of Nixon’s, was chairman of Pharma giant Warner-Lambert).
The Nixons’ visits were frequent enough that the Bobsts reportedly built an addition to accommodate them and their Secret Service detail.
A handful of lots south stood the Kennedy compound, winter refuge of President John F. Kennedy, who defeated Nixon in the 1960 presidential race.
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So by 1974, Nixon was no stranger to Palm Beach.
But he’d certainly never been a personal house guest of Post’s at Mar-a-Lago, a palatial Mediterranean/Moorish fantasy mansion — called a “Xanadu” by the national press — complete with dozens of bedrooms, frescoes, gold-plated fixtures, 15th-century Spanish tiles and a 1,800-square-foot living room with a 43-foot ceiling.
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When the lake-to-ocean estate was completed in 1927, Posts’ then-husband, financier E.F. Hutton, said, exasperated, “Marjorie said she was going to build a little cottage by the sea. Look what we got!”
Before Post died in 1973 at age 86, she reviewed her life and legacy.
No doubt she had some regrets like most people do, but she’d seemingly done it all: traveled the world; run a corporation she inherited — the Postum Cereal Company, which became General Foods — and employed and inspired countless people, among many other things.
Was Mar-a-Lago to be a southern Camp David for presidents?
With one of her four husbands a Washington, D.C. lawyer-cum-ambassador, she’d been a Washington hostess who knew politics and protocol.
She decided her periodic wintertime home of Mar-a-Lago would serve as a fine refuge for U.S. presidents and visiting foreign dignitaries.
So she willed it to the government upon her death. After congressional approval, Nixon signed the act that accepted the property into the hands of the National Park Service.
And then he decided to check out Mar-a-Lago to see if in fact it would make a fine subtropical Camp David, of sorts.
After attending a summit in Moscow with Leonid Brezhnev, general-secretary of the Communist Party, Nixon headed on July 4, 1974 to his compound in Key Biscayne.
According to the 37th president’s daily diaries kept at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, he spent two days in Key Biscayne, fishing and dining at the Key Biscayne Restaurant, where he danced with a 10-year-old girl to the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”
On July 7, he took a 20-minute helicopter ride from Key Biscayne to Mar-a-Lago. “The president, accompanied by C. G. (“Bebe”) Rebozo, looked over the property to determine its potential use for U.S. presidents for foreign dignitaries,” the diaries indicate.
Rebozo, a Miami banker, was a close friend and confidante of Nixon’s and had been vacationing with the Nixons in Key Biscayne.
Among the few eyewitnesses for their tour of Mar-a-Lago was the supervisor of the estate, James Griffin.
A violation on Mar-a-Lago’s golf course
“He was very pleasant and thought the place was marvelous, but didn’t indicate one way or another whether he’d want to use it,” Griffin told Palm Beach Post reporter Eliot Kleinberg in 2004.
Griffin said two helicopters had landed on Mar-a-Lago’s golf course that day, violating a ban on helicopters landing on the island. “It was something he (Nixon) decided to do on the spur of the moment,” Griffin recalled.
Griffin also said the Palm Beach County Sherriff’s Office, the Palm Beach Police Department and the U.S. Coast Guard were not happy about only receiving hours’ notice of Nixon’s visit.
A month later, on Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon resigned the presidency before he could be impeached in the Watergate scandal.
Mar-a-Lago remained in the hands of the U.S. government until former President Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1980 handed the property back to the Post Foundation.
It then languished until 1985, when Trump, a New York real estate mover and shaker, paid $15 million for the property.
Two years later, according to news reports, Nixon sent fan mail to Trump after the latter appeared on the daytime talk show “Donahue.”
“I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me you were great on the Donahue Show. As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics, and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!”
As for Post’s wish that Mar-a-Lago become a retreat for U.S. presidents and foreign dignitaries, Trump, during his tenure as the 45th president, called the property the Southern White House and hosted heads of state there.
