Where Presidents Go to Unwind

The White House may be home, but it has rarely been a refuge

On the night of October 24, 1973, the United States entered DEFCON 3, its highest level of peacetime defense readiness, after the Soviet Union threatened unilateral intervention to halt the Yom Kippur War. But the action was taken by Henry Kissinger, not President Richard Nixon, because Nixon was asleep and drunk — or too “loaded,” as Kissinger had desc…