Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 58, originally released in print form in 2020. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. Š 2020 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.
BOTH IMAGES THIS SPREAD: RICHARD M. NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Writing with Photographs: OLIVER ATKINS Documents the Nixon Presidency m ary jo b i nker
The president had a “six and out” rule, which meant Atkins could click his camera shutter only six times. Then he had to leave.
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oliver (“ollie”) atkins thought he knew his way around the White House. After all, as the Saturday Evening Post’s man in Washington since 1945, he had photographed every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had even been president of the White House Press Photographers Association—twice. So it came as a surprise when in his new capacity as official White House photographer he found himself lost on the morning of Richard Nixon’s first Inauguration in January 1969. He had already photographed the swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill and had returned to the White House to photograph the festivities there. Everything had gone smoothly until the veteran news photographer decided he wanted pictures of the first family leaving the White House to view the Inaugural Parade. That’s when his mind went blank. He could not remember the route the Nixons needed to take to get to the North Entrance of the White House. “After frantically tearing around looking for the right hallways,” he arrived “just in time” to get his shot.1 Arriving “just in time” was second nature to Atkins, whose height, “ready smile,” and large, darkframed eyeglasses made him stand out in the gaggle of news photographers assigned to the White House.2 From long experience he knew that “great photos seldom are arranged—they happen.” As both the official White House photographer and Nixon’s personal photographer from 1969 to 1974, Atkins would have plenty of opportunities to watch historic events “happen.” But even he could not anticipate how the administration would end or how a photo he saw “out of the corner” of his eye would become emblematic of its final days.3
PHOTOGRAPHING NIXON Atkins’s posthumous memoir, The White House Years: Triumph and Tragedy, documents many of the highlights of his time as official White House photographer. Written in diary form, the book is a series of verbal snapshots of life in the Nixon administration written by a man who despite his access was often frustrated by the limitations he faced. For example, although Nixon understood the need for favorable publicity—and indeed had sought it earlier in his political career as a congressman, senator, vice president, and presidential candidate—he was fundamentally a reserved, private man who found it difficult to relax or be spontaneous in front of the camera like his predecessor,
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Lyndon Johnson. He also refused to do anything he considered undignified such as wearing unusual headgear or posing in shorts. Nixon also distrusted the media generally, fearing that news publications would find a way to use photographs to embarrass him and his family.4 Nixon’s reluctance to pose was so great that he initially decided not to appoint an official White House photographer. Only after his staff explained the need for a visual record of his administration did he relent. Atkins, who had taken a leave of absence from the Saturday Evening Post to work on Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, got the job, but even he was never sure why Nixon chose him. “I don’t really know,” he wrote. “He [Nixon] once said that he felt comfortable with me.”5 For his part, Atkins never felt close to the president. “I was and always would be an employee.”6 Perhaps Nixon’s comfort with Atkins stemmed from the photographer’s background. Like the president, Atkins had modest beginnings. Raised by his widowed mother in Wellesley, Massachusetts, he had worked his way through the University of Alabama, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1938. In 1939 he moved to the Birmingham Post, where he eventually became chief photographer. In 1940 he joined the Washington Daily News, staying until 1942. During World War II he worked as a photographer and correspondent for the American Red Cross, covering the war in Africa and Europe. Returning home in 1945, he joined the Saturday Evening Post as the magazine’s Washington correspondent. From that base, Atkins spent the next twenty-three years traveling and photographing the major figures of the Cold War era, including British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He even made a trip to Cuba to photograph Fidel Castro after he came to power in 1959.7 During this period, Atkins also photographed Nixon and his family for several Saturday Evening Post stories. Nixon in those early years was affable and accessible, even inviting reporters and news photographers to social events at his home.8 Those good feelings evaporated in the aftermath of his failed attempt to become governor of California in 1962. By the time Nixon ran for president in 1968, however, his relations with the press had improved, although, like most politicians, he chafed at media
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Ollie Atkins, seen at work discreetly photographing President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office (right), also captured this famous photograph (left) of a group of American Field Service students from sixty countries, most at work with their own cameras, as the president speaks to them on the White House lawn, July 22, 1969.
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Surrounded by photographs of the president, Atkins stands at his desk in the White House Photo Office while reviewing portraits of President and Mrs. Nixon, 1969.
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criticism.9 While Lyndon Johnson restricted photographers’ vantage points, permitting them to photograph him only on his right side and never when speaking or wearing glasses, Nixon was “an old shoe,” according to Atkins. He did not “care” which way he was photographed—“front back, sideways.”10 Nixon may not have been vain, but he was formal, and Atkins and other presidential aides waged a constant guerrilla campaign to show him in more informal situations. Atkins recounts one such attempt that, instead of portraying the president in a casual situation, just reinforced Nixon’s distant image. After months of negotiation, the president had finally agreed to an informal photo shoot with Atkins and press photographers assigned to the
White House—a stroll along the beach near his San Clemente, California, home. On the appointed day, however, Nixon arrived, said Atkins, “looking like the president of the board out for a walk in between acquisitions” in dress slacks and wingtips.11 Nixon could be spontaneous, however, when the mood struck him. During a 1971 visit to a flood-stricken Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for example, Atkins photographed the president talking with cleanup crews, attending a town meeting, and even posing on the church steps with a very surprised bride and groom.12 Nixon could also go with the flow when public events went awry, as happened at the dedication of a Montana dam in 1971. Nixon and the other dignitaries on the platform were supposed
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to pour a large bucket of cement into the dam forms. However, because the ceremony had been delayed, the cement had hardened and would not flow out no matter how hard the presidential party pulled on the bucket rope. The whole group, Nixon included, burst into laughter and then waited patiently for the workmen to break up the cement so some of it could “flow” downward.13 Mishaps aside, nothing energized Nixon more than big events such as rallies, speeches, and public appearances. He “loved the spotlight,” Atkins wrote. “He came to life when he appeared in public.” During a 1974 visit to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, for example, “he was like an old trooper [sic] who suddenly finds himself pushed out in front of the public,” Atkins recalled. “With the spots on him, he beamed, tried to use a yo-yo . . . and played . . . the piano.”14 While Nixon loved the limelight, his suspicion of those in the media and elsewhere who he felt were hostile to him ultimately had harmful consequences. By limiting his personal contact to a few trusted aides, the culture of his administration became one of protection rather than promotion—a situation that would worsen with the Watergate crisis.15 This desire to control access extended to Atkins. Unlike his predecessor Yoichi Okamoto, who had reported directly to Johnson, Atkins reported to Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler. Ziegler, not the president, reviewed Atkins’s work and decided which photos to release to the press and the public. Then there was the question of whom to photograph when. Atkins made those decisions after reviewing the president’s daily schedule, but he always had to check in with Nixon’s appointments secretary before actually entering the Oval Office. Once inside, Atkins was further limited by the president’s “six and out” rule, which meant he could click his camera shutter only six times (Nixon sometimes counted). Then he had to leave.16 For his part, Atkins developed his own protocol that he and the two photographers he supervised17 followed when working with the president. •
Be discreet and unobtrusive all times.
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Shoot with the camera and lens you have, rather than reach for another lens you think you need at the moment when a significant action is taking place.
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Dress, speak and act like a gentleman . . . Over-aggressiveness creates antagonism.
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Create goodwill—and future cooperation—by displaying results of your picture-taking in whatever public manner you can.18
Ironically, for a photographer who knew that the best photographs just “happen,” Atkins writes nothing about what eventually became one of the most often requested White House photo of the Nixon years: his 1971 image of the president and Elvis Presley. “The King” had requested an Oval Office meeting to discuss the nation’s drug problem. He believed that he could be a useful conduit between the authorities and young people because “the drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], Black Panthers, etc.” did not regard him as “their enemy.” He also wanted a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge to add to his collection of police badges, an ironic request given the singer’s addiction to prescription drugs. After the Secret Service confiscated the rock star’s gift to the president—a wall-mounted chrome-plated Colt .45 automatic with a clip of silver bullets—the two men met. Atkins’s image captures the surreal nature of the encounter: Nixon in his usual suit and tie and Presley in a purple velvet suit and a half open white shirt accessorized with a large gold chain and an even larger gold belt.19 Such surreal encounters were not limited to presidential meetings with rock stars. World leaders could also go rogue. The 1973 State Visit of Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was a case in point. An ebullient man who spoke no English, Brezhnev went out of his way to do something unscripted whenever photographers were nearby. For example, arriving at a poolside reception at the Nixons’ San Clemente home, he “ran toward the [swimming] pool . . . pretending he was going to jump in” before taking his assigned place for the opening ceremony. When actor Chuck Connors presented him with a pair of gold-colored cowboy pistols, Brezhnev, a fan of Western films, pretended “to draw” like a gunman.20 Brezhnev may have been clowning for photographers, but the Soviet leader was also paying careful attention to their work. When he spotted Atkins using a Russian camera, called a Horizant, he asked through an interpreter if the photographer liked it. Atkins replied that he did and that he used it “quite frequently,” which pleased the Soviet leader, who thereafter always checked to see if the lensman was using that camera.21
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Although it proved difficult to capture Nixon in casual situations, Atkins was able to photograph some spontaneous moments. Clockwise from top left: President Nixon joins other dignitaries in a group effort to pull a bucket rope at the dedication of a Montana dam; Nixon foils Atkins’s attempt to capture an informal walk on the beach by overdressing; while surveying the damage caused by hurricane Agnes in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Nixon surprises a bride and groom and poses for pictures with the wedding party; and creating what would become the most requested image at the National Archives, Nixon poses with “The King,” Elvis Presley, in the Oval Office.
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ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: RICHARD M. NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
TRAVEL AND SPECIAL PROJECTS Brezhnev’s openness in the United States stood in stark contrast to the restrictions Atkins encountered when he accompanied Nixon on his historic visit to the Soviet Union in 1972. To photograph the president and Mrs. Nixon at a Moscow church service he had to smuggle his camera in under his raincoat and then surreptitiously make pictures while sitting among “a lot of little old Russian ladies.”22 After the president’s televised speech to the Russian people, Atkins, who customarily led the traveling press pool photographers, was grabbed by a burly Soviet guard as the group tried to enter the room to photograph Nixon. Only the timely intervention of the president’s appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, who “pushed” the guard “up against the wall,” and two Secret Service agents who pushed Atkins forward, let the photographer slip “on through” to record the event.23
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It is surprising that Atkins writes very little about Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 other than to comment on the president’s ability to maintain a grueling schedule that at one point kept him up until 5:00 a.m. working on a communique. When Atkins asked Nixon how he “managed to keep looking so fit when working so hard,” the president replied, ‘“Some people wear out inside, Ollie, and some people wear out outside. I happen to wear out inside.”’24 Atkins also records Nixon’s banal comment after he visited China’s Great Wall. Asked for his impression, the president simply replied, “This is a great wall.” Apart from those encounters, Atkins’s most memorable image of the trip was a photo of the president at a formal banquet looking quizzically at a morsel of food he had speared with his chopsticks.25
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Ollie Atkins accompanied Nixon on his famous trip to China in 1972, capturing him at the Great Wall (above) and puzzling over his food (opposite top). Atkins views The First Two Years: A Photographic Impression of the Presidency, a traveling exhibition of his work, with First Lady Pat Nixon, January 1971.
ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: RICHARD M. NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Apart from photographing Nixon in the White House and traveling with him, Atkins’s duties included special projects. As part of Nixon’s reelection effort, Atkins and his staff created a traveling exhibit, The First Two Years: A Photographic Impression of the Presidency. Atkins also collaborated with Nixon’s daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and the presidential speechwriter William Safire on a book of photographs entitled Eye on Nixon, which was published in 1972. In addition, he provided photographs for a book on Nixon’s 1973 Inauguration and did the same for publications published by the Republican National Committee. After Julie Eisenhower joined the staff of the Saturday Evening Post’s parent company, Curtis Publishing, in 1973, Atkins worked with her on some of her editorial projects. He even stepped into the breach and took the engagement photographs for Nixon’s older daughter, Tricia, and her fiancé, Ed Cox, after she had rejected the results of an elaborate Time magazine photo session.26
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While he had no direct knowledge of the 1972 Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up, Atkins could not escape the “great gloom” that descended on the White House once the congressional hearings got under way in the spring of 1973.27 His memoir provides brief, telling glimpses of the toll the controversy took on Nixon. Waiting to take photographs following president’s nationally televised address announcing the resignation of his two closest aides in April 1973, he saw Nixon crying as he talked to one of the television technicians. The following August Nixon reasserted his innocence and right to executive privilege in a televised speech in which looked “haggard and tired.”28 As Nixon’s intimate circle contracted, Atkins described his surprise at being the president’s guest at a small private dinner held at Nixon’s Key Biscayne home.29 As the scandal unfolded, Atkins documented some of its most important moments. In October 1973 he photographed Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger accepting the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the public learned he had accepted bribes while vice president and governor of Maryland.30 Atkins was even called upon to photograph a re-creation of the famous scenario of Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, allegedly erasing the missing eighteen minutes of tape-recorded conversation between the president and an aide.31 Atkins and his cameras also accompanied Nixon on his foreign travels during this period as the president sought to counteract the Watergate scandal by bolstering his image as a world leader. In one three-month period in 1974, Nixon went to Paris for the funeral of French president Georges Pompidou, toured five Middle Eastern nations, and held a summit with Soviet leaders in Moscow.32 Shortly thereafter, Atkins found himself embroiled in Watergate when it was discovered that he was mentioned “very lightly” in some of the White House’s tape recordings as being the sole photographer making pictures in the president’s office. News outlets clamored for these pictures and others of Nixon. When a newspaper editor requested a photo of Nixon looking depressed, Atkins said to his assistant, “Tell him we have no depressing pictures.”33 By August 7, Atkins knew “things weren’t really right.” Rumors “of all kinds, shapes and sizes
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ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: RICHARD M. NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
WATERGATE AND AFTER
Explaining to his wife that he wanted the pictures for history, President Nixon asked Ollie Atkins to take several specific family photographs on August 7, 1974, the day before his resignation from the presidency. Atkins captured the president and his daughter Tricia (opposite) as they retraced the steps they took when he gave her away at her Rose Garden wedding in 1971. He also took a group shot of the family in the Solarium (above). After seeing them embrace out of the corner of his eye, Atkins also took an unplanned photograph of the president hugging his daughter Julie (right).
were floating around.” All Atkins knew for sure was that he better “hang around” in case something happened. Something did. He got a call from the press office asking him to meet the president and his daughter Tricia in the Rose Garden. Atkins arrived to find the afternoon light too poor to make the kind of mood picture the occasion demanded. Nevertheless, he obliged when Nixon asked him to photograph the pair as they walked the route they had taken for Tricia’s 1971 wedding.34 After a brief, contentious exchange over the photo with press secretary Ron Ziegler, who wanted to orchestrate the shoot, Atkins returned to his office. Shortly thereafter he was summoned again, this time to the White House Solarium, where the Nixon family and Rose Mary Woods were to have dinner. According to Julie Eisenhower’s account, Mrs. Nixon did not want any photos taken, but the president overruled her, saying he wanted the pictures “for history.”35 Nixon then began organizing his family for a group shot. “It was a pathetic thing,” Atkins recalled, “and brought tears to my own eyes just watching them.” He may have been upset, but Atkins was also a consummate professional. He took the photos. Then “out of the corner” of his eye, he saw the photo that “happens,” the president suddenly reaching over and hugging his daughter Julie “very close.” Julie then hugged Atkins, and the photographer, who was very fond of her, “wondered” if he “was going to go to pieces.” He did not. Instead white house history quarterly
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he kept clicking his shutter oblivious to Nixon’s “six and out” rule.36 Mrs. Nixon wanted the photos kept private, but the president intervened. “No Ollie,” he said. “You look through them. You pick out the picture you like best of the family and release that to the wire services. That’s your job.”37 Atkins left the Solarium, sent the film to the lab (in those days it took more than an hour to develop black-and-white film, and longer for color), and went to dinner. When he showed Ziegler the results, the press secretary, who had wanted pictures of the family at dinner, promptly threw all the photos in the trash despite the president’s orders.38 The next day Atkins loaded two cameras with black-and-white film, scouted locations for likely shots, and awaited events. He made photos of Nixon walking to the Oval Office along the White House colonnade and photos of him with Vice President Gerald Ford. He was also photographed himself as he photographed the president. Later he made photos of the president headed to his hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building.39 Later returning to his office, Atkins found a raft of phone messages from his former press corps associates asking for pictures and information about what had happened in the Solarium the night before. Knowing he could not provide what they asked for, Atkins “ignored” them.40 He reviewed the prints of his work that morning and then met with Ziegler. To his surprise, the press secretary had a change of heart (or perhaps he had heard from the president). Ziegler told him to release the photos
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he had taken in the Solarium to the wire services and tell them what had happened there. Atkins did so, bypassing his friends who were waiting in the White House Press Room and meeting privately with the two wire service reporters assigned to the White House. His Solarium photos, especially the one of Nixon and Julie embracing, were widely reproduced and became the defining images of the end of the Nixon presidency.41 Atkins’s work was not yet finished. He wanted to photograph the president’s televised resignation speech from the Oval Office. However, Nixon had given strict instructions that no one was to be in the room with him except the television and sound technicians and the required Secret Service agent. Deciding to “risk the consequences,” Atkins positioned himself behind the television camera so he could photograph the proceedings. When the president came in to do his voice check, Atkins moved out of the shadows and started shooting. Spotting him, Nixon said, “Did you get enough pictures, Ollie?”42 When Atkins said he was going to make one long shot from his hiding place, Nixon at first said no, then relented and said yes, telling the photographer that he could “use it as the official broadcast picture.” Atkins clicked his shutter three times and left the room with seconds to spare before the television cameras started rolling. He then went outside and took a photo of the president giving the speech so there would be “a factual record of ” the president “actually giving his history-making resignation speech.”43 The next day, Nixon’s final morning as president,
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On August 8, 1974, Ollie Atkins captured President Nixon meeting in the Oval Office with his successor, Vice President Gerald R. Ford. Although he was not asked to be in the room during the president’s televised resignation speech, Atkins “risked the consequences” and photographed Nixon during the sound check. The president then allowed the photographer to take the official broadcast picture.
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ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: RICHARD M. NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Following the president’s resignation, Atkins traveled with the Nixons on their trip home to San Clemente. He photographed the family approaching the helicopter on the White House Lawn (left) and as they walked from the plane in San Clemente (below). Atkins would never see the president again.
ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: RICHARD M. NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Atkins assigned his assistants the task of photographing the president’s televised farewell to the White House staff in the East Room while he prepared to join the members of the first family who would leave directly thereafter for San Clemente.44 When the plane landed in California, Atkins photographed Nixon and the crew and made photographs of the family walking to the helicopter that would take them home, where Atkins took his last picture of Nixon waving to the crowd who had greeted his arrival. He would never see the president again.45 Atkins’s book ends with his own resignation shortly after he returned to Washington. Although he had been asked to stay on as manager of the White House Photography Office, his “heart was no longer in the work.” Instead he became a vice president at Curtis Publishing, the parent company of the Saturday Evening Post, a job he held until he died at age 60 from cancer in 1977, the year his memoir was published.46 In the book’s introduction, Nixon paid tribute to the photographer he had not been sure he wanted, noting that Atkins “wrote with photographs the intimate, inside story of the Presidential years.” Then perhaps remembering those poignant family pictures Atkins had made “out of the corner” of his eye in the Solarium, the
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intensely private former president did something he had never done while in the White House. He called Atkins “a friend.”47 notes 1.
Ollie Atkins, The White House Years: Triumph and Tragedy (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1977), 6.
2. Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 424. 3. Ollie Atkins, “Photographing the President,” U.S. Camera World Annual 1968 (New York: U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., 1967), 205; Atkins, White House Years, 216. 4. John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 269; Kenneth T. Walsh, Ultimate Insiders: White House Photographers and How They Shape History (New York: Routledge, 2018), 73, 82. 5. Atkins, White House Years, 16. 6. Quoted in Walsh, Ultimate Insiders, 78. Atkins was also the first White House photographer to come from the press corps. Previous White House photographers had come from the civil service or the military. Ollie Atkins, “Ollie Atkins: It Was a Very Good Year,” Saturday Evening Post, Fall 1972, 44. The Saturday Evening Post was a weekly until 1963, then a biweekly until 1969. It briefly ceased publication, starting up again in 1971 as a quarterly. It is now published six times a year. 7. Ollie Atkins to Mr. Editor, September 9, 1971, box 103, folder Correspondence Miscellaneous 1960s–1970s, Oliver Atkins Papers, George Mason University Library Special Collections, Fairfax, Va.; “Biographical Note,” Atkins Papers. Between 1947 and 1950 Atkins also worked for the Washington Post as a photography columnist. Martin Weil, “Ollie Atkins, Journalist, Photographer for Nixon,” Washington Post, January 10, 1977, C26. 8. See, for example, the following, all in the Saturday Evening Post: Lynn Bowers and Dorothy Blair, “How to Pick a Congressman,” March 19, 1949, 31; Patricia Ryan Nixon and Joe Alex Morris, “I Say He’s a Wonderful Guy,” September 6, 1952, 17; Rose Mary Woods and Don Murray, “Nixon’s My Boss” December 28, 1954, 20. See also George Tames, Eye on Washington: The Presidents Who’ve Known Me (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 109, 110. 9. William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the PreWatergate White House (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 607. 10. Atkins, “Photographing the President,” 8, 200–201; Vera Glaser and Malvina Stephenson, “Nixon’s Photographer Finds ‘No Vanity at All,’” Charlotte Observer, n.d., clipping in box 105, folder Publications Miscellaneous Articles 1960s–1970s, Atkins Papers. 11. Atkins, White House Years, 56. See also Walsh, Ultimate Insiders, 78–79.
Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 288–89. Apparently, Nixon remarked on Elvis’s attire, saying, “You dress kind of strange, don’t you?” Presley replied, “You have your show and I have mine.” Quotations in Walsh, Ultimate Insiders, 81–82. 20. Atkins, White House Years, 148, 149. 21. Quoted in ibid., 138. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had given the Soviet camera to Atkins. 22. Ibid., 87. 23. Ibid., 88–89. 24. Quoted in ibid., 77. 25. Quoted and reported in ibid., 76. 26. Desfor, “Photo Tour”; Julie Nixon Eisenhower, ed., Eye on Nixon (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974), 123–24; Leroy L. Preudhomme, ed., The Inaugural Book 1973 The Spirit of ’76, box 105, folder The Inaugural Book, 1973, Atkins Papers; The Republican, July 1969, in box 107, folder 1, Atkins Papers; Atkins, White House Years, 48–55, 161, 196. 27. Atkins, White House Years, 151. 28. Ibid., 132, 154; James Reston, “Old Story, New Words,” New York Times, August 16, 1973, 1. 29. Atkins, White House Years, 169–72. 30. On the same day, Agnew pleaded no contest to a federal indictment of tax evasion. The plea was tantamount to a felony conviction. Ibid., 165–66; Anthony Ripley, “After the Defiance: Guilt and Resignation,” New York Times, October 14, 1973, 206; John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017), 519. 31. These photos first introduced as exhibits in federal court were widely reproduced across the country. Atkins, White House Years, 173, 176–79. 32. Ibid., 197–204; Farrell, Richard Nixon, 527. 33. Atkins, White House Years, 206–07. 34. Ibid., 208, 210–13. 35. Quoted in Eisenhower, Pat Nixon, 424. 36. Atkins, White House Years, 216, 219. 37. Quoted in ibid., 219–20. 38. Ibid., 220. 39. Ibid., 222, 226–30. Newspapers then used only black-and-white photos, and Atkins and his colleagues usually carried at least two cameras, one with black-and-white film and one with color film. 40. Ibid., 231–32. 41. Ibid., 232, 234–35. 42. Quoted in ibid., 235. 43. Ibid., 236. 44. The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia, and her husband, Ed Cox, accompanied them to California. Ibid., 239. 45. Ibid., 240.
12. Atkins, White House Years, 103–05. See also Ehrlichman, Witness to Power, 269–70.
46. David Kennerly served as the official White House photographer during the Ford administration. Ibid., 244.
13. Atkins, White House Years, 59, 61.
47. Ibid., 216; Richard M. Nixon, introd. to ibid.; Weil, “Ollie Atkins.”
14. Ibid., 187. 15. Walsh, Ultimate Insiders, 86. 16. Atkins, White House Years, 19, 22; Walsh, Ultimate Insiders, 73. 17. Bob Knudsen and Jack Kightlinger were the other two photographers whom Atkins supervised. As chief of the White House Photo Office he also supervised a darkroom technician, an assignment man, and a secretary. The office ran twenty-four hours a day. Vera Glaser and Malvina Stephenson, “Nixon Doesn’t Care About Photo Angles,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 6, 1971, clipping in box 105, folder Publications Miscellaneous Articles 1960s–1970s, Atkins Papers. 18. Irving Desfor, “Photo Tour Shows Nixon in Candids,” Detroit News, June 17, 1971, clipping in box 105, folder Publications Miscellaneous Articles 1960s–1970s, Atkins Papers. 19. Quotation and description in Richard Reeves, President Nixon:
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