The Mrs. Nixon I Have Always Loved

The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady
By Heath Hardage Lee
(St. Martin’s Press/416 pages/$32)

Patricia Ryan Nixon was, as far as I have ever been able to tell, pretty much flawless. She was born into extremely modest circumstances in the small town of Ely, Nevada on what was once called “the loneliest highway in America …” in 1916.

Her parents had very little money. Early deaths, bitter economic conditions, and chronic illnesses were her portion as a young woman. She worked hard helping her family on their farm and in their extremely modest businesses.

She was known by all who knew her as an uncomplaining, cheerful, hard working girl and young woman in a country and in a state where hard work and lack of complaint were not unusual. She was also movie-star beautiful, when that meant something.

She had ambitions in the general realms where females were expected to have ambitions in those days: teaching, health care, retail sales, and the theater. She was known for her beauty and her eloquence from an early age.

Her family moved to a much bigger — but still small — town when she was still young. It was there, in Whittier, a mostly Quaker Community, that she met a hard-working, also uncomplaining young lawyer named Richard Milhous Nixon, scion of what passed in those days as a well-to-do family. He was also hard working, uncomplaining, and in love with the theater — and with Patricia Ryan. Both of them were gifted in reading lines and were unpretentious and honest — which also meant something in those days.

It’s hard to believe, but the young attorney Dick Nixon was so in love with her that if he asked her out on a date and if she were already booked, he would volunteer to take the other couple to the movies in nearby Los Angeles or wherever they were planning to go. Not everyone had a car, but Dick Nixon did.

It was a different, far more chaste world then. What’s also a bit hard to believe is that everything I just wrote about the book I am herewith reviewing, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, was in a book about the Nixons that was in our Parkside elementary school library in Silver Spring, Maryland. I read it, as I recall, in about the fall of 1952 when I was seven years old. I’m not sure exactly what conclusion to draw from this, but it’s not a great sign about our educational system then and now.

Richard Nixon pursued Patricia Ryan politely but incessantly. At first, according to the author of this biography, a famed biographer named Heath Hardage Lee, she politely but firmly turned him down when he sought her hand in marriage. He was smart and well read, but apparently not as exciting as she wanted her husband to be.

However, she soon fell in love with him. He was rapidly rising in the world of law in Whittier. He was a fabulously articulate conversationalist, and “everyone” said he was a comer and would make a big name for himself and his family. During their courtship, Pat Ryan told a friend that “of course” Dick would be President.

All of that came true. RN also made a name for himself in the Navy during World War II. And he and Pat produced two spectacularly beautiful and smart daughters. One of them, Julie, is probably my wife’s and my favorite woman on earth.

Richard Nixon took to politics like a duck to water. Pat Ryan Nixon did not take immediately to political campaigning. She did it, though, because she believed, as wives did in those days, that she should help her husband get where he wanted to be.

She realized almost immediately how difficult political life could be when Dick ran for the House of Representatives immediately after World War II. The Democrats in Nixon’s area, in and around Whittier, drummed up one calumny after another to sabotage Nixon’s rise.

Mr. Nixon was riding the anti-Communist waves of the postwar days. In Mr. Nixon’s first campaign, in 1946, he took after assorted Reds and Pinks, especially Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. The nature of Nixon’s campaign, bare knuckle and face to face, earned him the undying hatred of “the ultra-left” in the Democrat party. When, in 1950, he took on a Hollywood favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas, with a long record of pro-left, pro-Russian dealing, for the U.S. Senate from Sunny Cal, the leftists in Hollywood, were after him like flies on fly paper.

They ginned up all kinds of fake stories about Nixon’s alleged crookedness. The worst was an allegation that Mr. Nixon, in contravention to law, took meaningful sums from wealthy Republicans not for his campaign but for his home redecoration and Pat’s clothing.

The allegations were, of course, false. Nixon took them on, point by point, in his famous “Checkers” TV speech. There, he detailed every cent that the family had, where it came from, and ended by saying that he would happily give every dime back. The only item he would not ever give back was a Cocker Spaniel puppy given by friends in California. “The girls love him,” Mr. Nixon said, and no matter what anyone said, “we’ll never give him back.” The dog’s name was Checkers.

From then on, Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Nixon suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in politics. From what Ms. Lee says, the worst of them in terms of personal pain came from Ike himself. Mrs. Nixon was dismayed that Ike even for a moment doubted the Nixon family’s honesty. She forgave, says Ms. Lee. But she never forgot.

Time passed. The 1960 Presidential election against John F. Kennedy was clearly stolen by the mighty war chest of Hitler fan and multi-millionaire ex-bootlegger, Joe Kennedy. But Nixon did not sue. He did not scream. He just went off to a well-paid law practice in New York City.

Pat Nixon well knew the Kennedy theft. But she also knew with Dick out of politics, she could spend more time with Julie and Tricia, and could buy herself the elegant clothes she had always wanted. She had a model-thin figure and had at one time been a model for Bullock’s-Wilshire, an elegant department store.

Time kept on passing. RN kept campaigning for a comeback (brilliantly described by Pat Buchanan in his book, The Greatest Comeback). And by 1968, RN was the GOP candidate for POTUS.

As Pat Buchanan perfectly detailed, Nixon ran a letter excellent campaign in ’68. He won against an authentically great liberal Democrat from Minnesota, Hubert Horatio Humphrey. If there has ever been a better exemplar of what American politics as it is and as it should be than the 1968 campaign, I don’t know what it would be. If there were ever a finer Democrat political figure than Hubert Humphrey, I don’t know who it would be.

These were the years when Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were the apogee of Mrs. Nixon’s life. But there were storm clouds gathering. A trivial break-in at the Watergate Office building HQ of the Democrat National Committee was amplified by the media and (now it appears) by their allies in the CIA into a national crisis. (It also now appears that even fifty years on, with hitherto secret FBI and congressional files made public, no one knows what on earth “Watergate” was about except a bunch of dopes close to Cuban émigrés and CIA morons muddling about in mud about a foot thick.)

The political left kept attacking Mr. Nixon endlessly. Nixon was a gloriously successful President. He made racial integration even in the deep South a fact of life without bloodshed. He literally saved the life of the state of Israel by standing up to the Russians even when they threatened nuclear war on Israel in the Yom Kippur War. He tamed the wildness in the streets over the Vietnam War even as he ended that war.

He inherited a nation in chaos and turned it into a productive machine for human happiness, except for the flaming hot anger over a complete phony scandal, what came to be known as “Watergate.” The attacks against the Nixon family took on an unprecedented viciousness. Mrs. Nixon was called “Plastic Pat,” a phrase that was supposed to mean she had no real feelings about what was going on around her. She was also depicted on a popular TV comedy show called “Saturday Night Live” as an out of control drunk.

Seeing Pat Nixon

Of course, Mrs. Nixon felt keenly everything that happened to her and to her family. Unlike the vipers of the media who mocked Pat Nixon without knowing her, I did know her. Not as well as I know her perfect daughter, Julie. But I knew her to be alive, witty, in no sense at all an alcoholic.

(By the way, I would love to write a book about the powers in the anti-Nixon media — what their drug and alcohol habits were, how well they treated their families, and how trustworthy I would consider their personal constitutions as well as their devotion to our magnificent Constitution.) But Pat Nixon did not live her life for tabloid consumption, print or televised.

She lived to show devotion to the people of the nation, as well as to the people of the world. She traveled the world and the nation, even to the most hostile regions of the world and the nation to show them the loving beneficent America in which she grew up. She was not afraid of the media, even though they upset her — as was their goal.

Even as the media snakes were circling her husband and his team, she worked with him to bring the Vietnam War to a close — and then to open the White House to the returning POWs in a historic gala as his endurance was running low.

After Mr. Nixon left office, she was still hounded by the media’s well-paid assassins of character. Did their wildly untrue lies about Mr. and Mrs. Nixon shorten her life? I am not a physician studying such things. But I would certainly say they did. I’ve been in the media’s crosshairs before. It hurts keenly. She had seen it and felt it incomparably more than I did.

But however she saw it and felt it, it could not have been good for a woman whose life was devoted to her family, and she saw the nation as a whole as her family, to be hacked at in the jungle of D.C. day in and day out — and for absolutely nothing.

She was not “plastic Pat.” She was not within a billion miles of being an alcoholic. She was not a dictator of the East Wing. She was a loving, loyal, beautiful woman of great intelligence. Ms. Lee makes all of this chicanery and dishonesty clear. The book is well worth reading just for that.

If you could have seen Mr. Nixon sobbing at her funeral, if you could have felt her good humor (as I did) when I met her and her husband and Julie and David for dinner shortly after Mr. Nixon’s resignation, and Mrs. Nixon said, “Julie’s been talking about you so much, it makes me want to throw up,” and she delivered the line with so much love that even now I feel tears about it, you would have no doubt. Mrs. Nixon was a saintly woman in very difficult times. My wife is flawless number one in the universe. Mrs. Nixon was a close second. For that, she had to be crucified.

This is a book worth reading.

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