San Diego entrepreneur Arnholt Smith, one of Nixon’s earliest supporters, remembered a melancholy evening in the early ’60s when Nixon was holding a meeting and asked him to get Pat out of the way. “Pat was not feeling well physically, and even worse.mentally,” Smith said. “Dick sent word, ‘Could I please take her and hide her from the public, so to speak, let her rest her mind and what have you.’”
Gadfly Abraham Briloff (left) helped expose infamous San Diego accounting scandals such as C. Arnholt Smith’s (right) U.S. National Bank debacle.
Half a century ago, C. Arnholt Smith was “Mr. San Diego.” Smith and his close colleagues, along with relatives, owned and controlled a slew of assets that would be traded back and forth at inflated prices. The bank would do the financing. The Securities and Exchange Commission pointed out that these deals were put together to hoodwink auditors into believing the transactions were at arm’s length when in fact they were