Asked late in his life to explain the under-appreciation of Pat Nixon, her husband kept the expletives to a minimum but answered with some force: “Because she was my wife. If she had been the wife of a liberal, my God, they would have canonized her.” True enough, but Mrs. Nixon’s considerable, if quiet, contributions as First Lady were never fully valued in Nixon’s own White House. Chief of staff H. R. Haldeman sustained a nasty contempt for her, something better interpreted by psychiatrists than political scientists.
The life story of Thelma “Pat” Ryan Nixon was far more plucky than plastic, but she preferred to keep her early struggles private, no matter how much they might have endeared her to voters. Most Americans had no idea that she’d been born in a miner’s shack in Ely, Nevada; had nursed her dying father; kept house for her brothers; worked as a nighttime janitor in a bank; and, at 20, drove an elderly couple from California to New York, handling all the navigation and the flat tires. Finding employment at a tuberculosis hospital in the Bronx, she only returned to the West Coast two years later, where she took a number of jobs to help get through the University of Southern California. In L.A., she occasionally found work as a film extra in pictures such as Becky Sharp and Small Town Girl.
Heath Hardage Lee’s well-researched but awkwardly constructed new biography, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, sometimes comes close to being the canonization that Richard Nixon felt his wife had been denied. But in its less lyrical moments the book ably demonstrates such characteristics as Pat’s thrift, her “deadpan sense of humor,” and her gifted way with children, including her own two daughters.
She detested politics pretty much from the start, though she became the only spouse of a major-party candidate, aside from Eleanor Roosevelt, to participate in five national campaigns. The “Checkers” speech of 1952 saved Nixon’s first vice-presidential run, but to combat the “secret fund” smear (and it was a smear), Nixon made a granular televised display of his young family’s modest assets and debts. Pat, part of the live broadcast, was, according to Lee, “paraded financially naked through the streets like Lady Godiva.”
The simile is odd, given how Nixon’s speech immortally clad his wife in a “good Republican cloth coat,” but Pat never fully got over the mortification. She resented Eisenhower’s hemming and hawing over whether to keep her husband on the ticket, though Ike came to have real admiration for the dignified way she performed the exhausting diplomatic travels he assigned the Nixons, from Accra to Hanoi to Caracas, where the couple came close to being killed by an anti-American mob.
The word “poise” recurs throughout Lee’s book, which also makes clear that Pat could be a tougher customer than her husband. She urged him to challenge the fishier state results after his 1960 election loss to J.F.K. A decade later, she wanted him to get rid of the White House tapes, refuse resignation, and reject Gerald Ford’s pardon. Her political judgment was keen: she told Nixon not to make his doomed run for the California governorship in 1962 and was later repelled by Roger Ailes and his media strategies. In 1987, she predicted Donald Trump’s eventual electoral success.
When Nixon met Pat, a pretty high-school teacher in Whittier, California, he fell fervently in love. The letters he wrote to her during their courtship and the early part of their marriage are as tender as the later presidential tapes would be profane. Lee quotes one he sent as a naval lieutenant in the South Pacific in 1943:
I love you most for the traits I know so intimately—and which outsiders do not have the opportunity to see—the way you get up in the morning, full of cheer—your sweet modesty—the soft caress of your hand in the movie. The delicate fragrance of your hair as you sleep with your head rested on my shoulder.
Pat had warmed to him slowly, moved more by his persistence than any sudden ardor of her own. For decades, Lee points out, her shy husband often communicated through “intermediaries.” His difficult mother, Hannah, once had to guide Pat through a serious marital quarrel, and in 1974, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, was dispatched to tell the president’s wife that he was going to resign. But the couple’s attachment, however undemonstrative, was deep. Few who watch the YouTube clip of Nixon, racked with sobs at Pat’s funeral in 1993, will forget the sight.
There have been several previous studies of Mrs. Nixon, including her daughter Julie’s very readable book from 1986. More recently, Will Swift’s Pat and Dick (2014) was a sensitive portrayal of the Nixon marriage. I made Pat a major character in my novel Watergate. Mrs. Nixon’s life is indeed “compelling,” a word Lee chooses well, but it’s not especially “mysterious,” as the book’s come-on title would make it.
One crippling feature of Lee’s technique is the way it often and exasperatingly doesn’t make clear who is speaking or writing within a set of quotation marks. The voices are responsibly identified in the endnotes, but without an “As X writes” or “As Y said” within the text itself, a reader can develop carpal tunnel flipping to the back of the volume just to find whether some words belong to Julie or Stephen Ambrose or even Rick Perlstein.
Mrs. Nixon worked hard during her tumultuous White House years. She made the Mansion accessible to the blind and disabled, and she acquired more historical furnishings for it than even Jackie Kennedy had. She flew into a Vietnam war zone, an earthquake-ravaged Peru, and, most famously, China. She and Zhou Enlai, premier of the People’s Republic of China, charmed each other at a banquet when she complimented a cigarette tin with a panda design. Lee reproduces the conversation:
”Aren’t they cute?” [Pat] said as she picked up the tin. “I love them.”
Zhou replied: “I’ll give you some.”
”Cigarettes?” she asked.
”No,” Zhou said. “Pandas.”
Two new ones are due to arrive in Washington before the year is out, taking up residence at the habitat Mrs. Nixon opened in 1972. When my fictionalized version of her appeared, one reader e-mailed me: “Don’t you think that the Panda Exhibit at the D.C. Zoo should bear her name?” It’s a capital idea.
Thomas Mallon is the author of several novels, including Fellow Travelers, Watergate, and, most recently, Up with the Sun
