A new bio of Richard Nixon is coming out next month that claims he has a longtime gay lover; a Cuban mafioso no less!
Don’t know anything about this book or the claims that it makes, but the claim itself sounds so bizarre, I’m just going to have to check it out.
I do suspect though, that it will likely amount to nothing more than a passing “undisclosed sources alleged that rumors about Nixon & Rebozo hinted that there was something more than a close friendship.” And that this claim is just being trumpeted as an advance publicity-churner. Still, the idea is fascinating. Normally, I don’t buy into the notion that every person who did anything noteworthy in history was a closet homosexual, but Nixon was so paranoically secretive about so many things, it almost fits.
I don’t know about “secret gay lover” but there were rumors the two of them would blindfold each other, slip into the White House pool and one would holler out “Bebe!” while the other answered with “Rebozo!”
I remember a National Lampoon “Young Love” comic book parody that had the whole Nixon White House as a gay bathhouse, with John Dean as the wide-eyed ingenue.
Rebozo and Nixon were certainly very tight, but there’s even less evidence that they were gay lovers than there is that J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson were - that is to say, none at all. From all I’ve ever read, R&N were just really good pals.
Sounds pretty lightweight to me-the whole quote is that Nixon ‘may have…’ If the teaser is that limp, the rest is gonna go over like a Robin Williams movie.
hh
We’ve been over the Hoover/Tolson relationship many times here. Even the photos - which I’ve heard mention of, but have never seen - don’t mean they were gay lovers.
Well, I’m getting that from an NPR story about the movie J. Edgar, and the commentator also noted that, then-and-there, if such a relationship ever were consummated, it would be over – not an inflexible rule, but the way it usually went in Washington in the 1920s-50s.
In J. Edgar,Hoover has what he thinks is evidence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s affair. With a man. He does not find out about her lesbianism until, IIRC, long after FDR’s death.