Her steel was forged on her impoverished childhood. She was born Thelma Catherine Ryan in a miner’s shack in eastern Nevada, on March 16, 1912, so close to St. Patrick’s Day that her father called her Pat. The family, including two older brothers, soon moved to Artesia, Calif, where they scratched out a living on a truck farm without electricity or running water. When her mother died, Pat, then just 12, took over the cooking and cleaning along with the farm chores. When her father developed black-lung disease she took care of him, too, while scrubbing floors at a bank to help send her brothers to college. At 18 and newly orphaned, she set out for New York, where she worked as a secretary, then an X-ray technician, saving money to return to California. She paid her way through the University of Southern California partly by working as a Hollywood extra. She was teaching high school, and dabbling in amateur theater, when a young lawyer tried out for a part. Dick Nixon told her that same night that he intended to marry her. “I thought he was crazy,” she said later.
But Pat came around, as she always did. They were married two years later, and she soon resigned herself to her husband’s political ambitions. “I could see it was the life Dick wanted,” she explained. “The only thing I could do was to help him, but it would not have been a life that I would have chosen.” Her daughter, Tricia, was 3 weeks old when Pat hit the campaign trail in Nixon’s first congressional race. She never left it, but she never liked it. She urged him not to seek the vice presidency and to quit politics after he lost the presidency race in 1960 and the California governor’s race in 1962. She particularly hated the “Checkers” speech, during which she gazed supportively at him on national television while he denied unethical use of an $18,000 political fund. (“Why do we have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?” she’d asked.) It wasn’t the last time she’d be used as a political prop.
And like a prop, she seemed to be cast aside when she wasn’t needed. “In public, [Nixon] would always praise her lavishly, but once back on the airplane, he would go about his business as if she didn’t exist,” writes David Halberstam in his new book, “The Fifties.” Anecdotes abound of Nixon rebuffing her at parties, of separate bedrooms and silent meals. And he wasn’t the only one who snubbed her. Halberstam recounts how, when Nixon was vice president, Pat called Mollie Parnis and asked her to design some dresses for her, as she had for Mamie Eisenhower. Mamie vetoed it, saying: “Let the poor thing go to Garfinckel’s and buy something off the rack.”
As First Lady in her own right, Pat traveled extensively, heading U.S. delegations to foreign inaugurals, promoting educational programs and volunteer work. She was no Jackie Kennedy; White House dinners were small and sedate. But she did help gather more than 500 historical paintings and antiques for the White House collection and welcomed foreigners and the disabled to White House tours with multilanguage guidebooks and special accommodations. As Watergate unfolded, she insisted it was a minor scandal compared with her husband’s contributions and blamed the media for blowing it out of proportion. Asked in 1974 how she could stay calm with the presidency collapsing, she said: “I hate complainers, and I made up my mind not to be one. So if it’s cold, I tell myself it’s not cold and if it’s hot, I tell myself it’s not hot. And you know, it works!”
Her facade broke only once in that era; she wept during Nixon’s resignation speech. But it was back again the next day, when, in his farewell to his staff, Nixon praised his mother (“a saint”) and father (“a great man”), yet never mentioned his wife.
Their joint wave from the helicopter that morning was virtually the last the public saw of Pat Nixon. In exile in San Clemente in 1976, she suffered a stroke that left her temporarily paralyzed. Nixon attributed it to the fact that she’d been reading Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days,” over his protests. Her daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, was so upset at the book’s portrayal of her mother as a secret drinker that she wrote a NEWSWEEK MY TURN piece, defending the former First Lady’s own last White House days. Eisenhower also wrote that “people who labeled her ‘Plastic Pat’ underestimate her…My mother gives meaning to the words in the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians: ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’.”
In recent years, when reporters visited the couple’s New Jersey home to hear her husband hold forth on politics, Pat was rarely seen. She had her privacy at last, and her health was failing. She’d suffered a second stroke in 1983 and was hospitalized repeatedly for pneumonia and other lung infections. Last week her husband and daughters were at her side when she died of lung cancer at 81. She had written her own epitaph years earlier when she said: “I just want to be remembered as the wife of a president.”
