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.
