Rose Woods: The Fifth Nixon

When Rose Mary Woods met Richard Nixon in 1947, she was a secretary for a House committee studying the Marshall Plan and he was a freshman Congressman serving as a committee member. She noticed him because, after a committee junket to Europe, Nixon turned in the only expense account "titled, totaled, signed and all properly done."

Miss Woods obviously made an impression on Representative Nixon as well. In 1951, after he had gone to the Senate, he asked her to become his personal secretary. Now 55, Rose Woods has held that position (now elevated in title to executive assistant to the President) ever since. She is on such intimate terms with all of the First Family, in fact, that she is often called "the fifth Nixon."

Miss Woods' cruel working hours and scant personal life have gradually been rewarded with increased responsibilities, a staff of her own (three sub-secretaries work in her office) and occasionally a chance to influence the thinking of the President. Nixon is said to regard her as a shrewd judge of politics.

Her most important clout is in helping exercise the gatekeeper function of deciding who should get through to the Boss--and woe to anyone who tries to interfere with her preserve. Among those who did early in the Nixon Administration was White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, who tried but failed to proclaim his total control over the White House staff by having her office moved farther away from Nixon's.

The third of five children born to an Irish-American family in Sebring, Ohio (pop. 5,000), she remains especially close to Brother Joseph, a member of Illinois' Cook County board of commissioners. After joining Nixon's staff, she began to share in no small way the ups and downs of his career. A member of the vice-presidential motorcade that was stoned by Venezuelan Communists in 1958, Rose quickly donned dark glasses "so those people wouldn't see me cry." In California, after Nixon's losing presidential race in 1960, she bought a convertible and began to live a more relaxed West Coast life. Then, when Nixon joined a New York law firm, it was another unquestioning move and a cozy Manhattan apartment. In Washington, she bought a co-op in, of all places, the Watergate complex.

Fiercely loyal to Nixon, she has dressed down more than one newsman for stories that were critical of him; last week, asked by a reporter if she still considered Nixon an honest man, she replied in her best Irish temper: "That is a rude, impertinent question. And the answer is yes." But she is normally good-humored, especially during the occasional evenings of ballroom dancing and other social affairs that she loves. Though she has never married, a regular on the party circuit says that "she has gone out with lots of fellows." Other evenings, including many Thanksgivings and Christmases, are spent at quiet family dinners with the Nixons. Yet all these bonds of closeness have still not completely solved the enigma of her boss. "After 22 years, I still don't know Richard Nixon," Rose recently confided to a friend. "I don't think anybody does."

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