by Heath Hardage Lee at Air Mail: 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.”
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