Still, most Americans expected Lyndon Johnson to seek a second term of his own, and he surprised them by announcing in March 1968, that he would not. The Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, outspoken critic of the American policy in Southeast Asia, had already demonstrated the potency of anti-war sentiment; and Robert Kennedy, seen by many as his brother’s rightful political heir, threatened to erode Lyndon Johnson’s support in other quarters. Neither of these challengers managed to capture the party’s nomination, one being stopped by an assassin and the other beaten at the party’s convention by the incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey. In November, when the Democrat proved unable to put enough distance between himself and the less popular aspects of the Johnson record, the Republicans took thirty-two of the fifty states. Richard Nixon, who had appeared to renounce politics after his 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, reemerged as a national leader.
Pat Nixon, who had thrived on those few years of private life, dutifully returned to full-time volunteer work for the administration, but she had to reconcile her old ideas about the job with the new models popularized by her immediate predecessors. Her entire Washington apprenticeship had been served under First Ladies Truman and Eisenhower, neither of whom moved beyond ceremonial appearances and social leadership. But styles had changed by 1969, and many Americans expected a more activist White House consort, one who employed a large staff of her own and involved herself in issues and causes.
Showing that she understood the shift, Pat Nixon tried to attach herself to a cause that would complement her husband’s agenda for social welfare measures. Before the election, she had announced that she would concentrate on adult education and job training.94 After the inauguration, she turned to volunteerism but except for one short trip to the West Coast in the summer of 1969, her efforts received little public notice. She then announced, through the Education Office, that she would spearhead a “Right to Read” program,95 and when that project produced little, she spoke of becoming “more active in the environment field.”96 The next year she widened her horizons to “improve the quality of life.”97
Some of Pat’s critics blamed her husband for her failure to identify with any one project,98 but other observers pointed out that she brought her own disabilities to the job. To ignite the country’s enthusiasm, any one of these projects needed a crowd pleaser—someone who spoke easily to large groups. Yet Pat Nixon, who could charm individuals, stiffened in front of large audiences. It was her misfortune to come into the White House at a time when leaders faced the nation through television, a medium that made her uncomfortable and one that never flattered her.
Her two immediate predecessors had often been described as distant (Lady Bird) or uncaring (Jackie) in personal encounters, but both blossomed in public appearances. Jackie Kennedy, in particular, was singled out for her icy treatment of reporters and political visitors, and Bess Truman remarked after a visit to the Kennedy White House that it was as though a “veil came down” over Jackie’s face during conversations. Yet she dazzled millions of television viewers as she conducted them on a White House tour. Pat Nixon’s veil was of a different weave—and she lowered it on public, rather than private, occasions, causing observers to characterize her as cold and unfeeling. White House aides reported that Lady Bird Johnson, even in posing with a muscular dystrophy poster child, questioned her staff on the disease, its causes and treatment, while Pat Nixon stuck to light conversation and contented herself with hugging the child and complimenting her on her dress or her smile.99
Pat Nixon’s youth, truncated like that of several First Ladies by the death of a parent, may explain some of the restraint in her personal style. For most Americans, she was quintessential Irish, because so much had been made of her name and her birth just hours before the dawn of St. Patrick’s Day in 1912. Few people realized that her mother had immigrated from Germany and was a miner’s widow with two young children when she met and married William Ryan. Later she bore him two sons and a daughter, Pat. Like many of the Europeans who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century, Kate Halberstadt Bender Ryan never lived to see her adopted country deliver on its promises. But before she died of cancer in her early forties, she had convinced her second husband to give up the dangers of mining for a more healthful, but never prosperous, small farm outside Los Angeles.
Even with the housekeeping chores that Pat assumed after her mother’s death, she continued to excel in school. She caught up, in grade level, with her two older brothers and, at the same time, took part in many extracurricular activities. When she won election to vice president of her class and secretary of the entire student body, she impressed those she worked with as masking a “strong personality” behind a “very quiet” exterior.100 “It was only after I worked with her for a while that I understood what she was doing,” the student body president later explained. “You wouldn’t know what was hitting you because it hit so suddenly. I know we’d be conducting meetings [of the student body] and I was supposed to be conducting them but it wound up that she was taking over.”101
Pat’s father died (of tuberculosis) about the time she graduated from high school. Orphaned and with little money, she earned her way by sweeping floors and working as a teller in a local bank. When the chance came to drive an elderly couple to New York, she took it, although superhighways had not yet, in 1932, smoothed the hills or straightened the curves across the continent. The couple’s old Packard performed imperfectly and she was, at twenty, she later told an interviewer, “driver, nurse, mechanic and scared.”102
For two years Pat Ryan worked in New York as an X-ray technician, and by the time she returned to Los Angeles, she had saved enough money to enroll at the University of Southern California. Before she was graduated in 1937 she had prepared herself for several careers, having earned a merchandising degree and two traditional back-ups—a teacher’s certificate and secretarial skills. She had even found work as a movie extra, but full-time jobs were scarce in the Depression years, and in the end she accepted an offer to teach commercial subjects at Whittier High School.
Little about Pat Ryan up to that time suggested the stiff, robot figure whom Americans would later caricature. Her students found her so lively and likable that they selected her to advise the Pep Committee, organized to arouse school enthusiasm.103 Robert C. Pierpoint, who later covered the White House as a correspondent for CBS, was a member of the Pep Committee, and he remembered Miss Ryan of his Whittier student days as “approachable, friendly and outgoing. She was happy, enthusiastic, sprightly. Her disposition was sunny, not intermittently but all the time. … We liked her enormously.”104
Since Whittier encouraged its teachers to take part in community activities, the new commercial subjects instructor went down to try out for a production of the local drama club. A young lawyer, back in his hometown after graduating from Duke (where his glumness had earned him the nickname Gloomy Gus),105 auditioned the same night and his attraction to the new teacher was so immediate and immense that he proposed marriage that same evening. “I thought he was nuts or something,” Pat later recalled.106 He was ten months younger than she and not yet established in his profession but he pursued her with the same diligence he turned to just about everything he did. Two years later, when she was twenty-eight years old, she accepted.
The arsenal of skills that Richard Nixon’s wife had carefully accumulated now went to develop his career. While he served in the Navy during World War II, she worked in a San Francisco bank, and when he got the chance to run for Congress in 1945, her savings helped finance the campaign.107 She contributed her considerable secretarial skills to winning that election and then to running the congressman’s office, all without a paycheck of her own.
Whenever Pat Nixon was questioned about her use of time, she emphasized (some thought excessively) her domesticity. Until 1952, when her husband ran for vice president, she did her own housework, and she once confided to reporters that whenever she had a free ev
ening, she took down her husband’s suits and pressed them.108 Rather than talking about what she read or her views on national issues, she shared her thoughts on sewing dresses for her daughters and stitching up draperies on her home machine. Her husband emphasized the same helpmate quality in Pat when in the famous “Checkers” speech, he referred to her as a “wonderful stenographer.”
Pat Nixon retreated farther and farther from the vivacity of her youth as her husband moved up in politics. She performed as energetically as anyone on the campaign trail, but she showed more stoic determination than real pleasure, and her distaste for politics grew as the races became dirtier. In 1950, when Richard Nixon ran for U.S. senator from California against Helen Gahagan Douglas, he accused his opponent of being pro-communist and called her “Pink Lady” at a time when such a charge was particularly vicious. Douglas replied in kind, pronouncing Congressman Nixon a “pipsqueak” for whom she had “utter scorn.”109 This campaign prompted the pro-Douglas Independent Review to come up with a nickname that stuck: “Tricky Dick.”110
In 1952, when Pat Nixon watched Dwight Eisenhower abandon her husband as running mate—until he could go on national television and convince viewers that he had properly handled campaign funds—her disillusionment with politics grew. Although she encouraged Richard to make the speech that could clear him, she resented the humiliation of having to bare the family’s finances for the entire nation. As her husband put it in his Memoirs, she “lost zeal in 1952 for politics.”111 By the mid-1950s she so strongly wanted her husband out of office that she obtained a written promise from him not to run again, but after signing the pledge, he broke it four times: 1960, 1962, 1968, and 1972.112
Instead of retreating (as her nineteenth-century predecessors often did) or publicly pouting, Par Nixon dutifully accompanied her husband on every trip where her presence was requested. When Dwight Eisenhower sent his vice president on all kinds of international missions and advised him to “take Pat,” she went. In Caracas, where the Nixons were spat on, had their car stoned and the windows broken, they feared for their lives. Other trips proved less dangerous but very tiring, requiring that the Nixons leave their two young daughters for weeks at a time. Pat later estimated that she spent only a fraction of her time at home.
During her husband’s vice presidential years, Pat evolved for the public, at least, a stiff, fixed smile and perfectly coiffed hair and she began to keep herself what was frequently described as “painfully thin.” If she could not control many parts of her life, she would concentrate on those she could, and in the process she obliterated the lively high school teacher who had charmed her students. Robert Pierpoint, who had not seen her since the days of the school Pep Committee, could no believe the change. He found her tense, nervous, and drawn. Off camera, she could still be caring and warm but on film she became a “marionette,” he wrote, “playing a politician’s wife.”113 Foreign reporters came to a similar conclusion. “She chatters, answers questions, smiles and smiles, all with a doll’s terrifying poise,” a London newspaper reported in 1958 after she had visited there, “[but] there is too little comprehension. Like a doll she would still be smiling while the world broke. … One grey hair, one hint of fear, one golden tea-cup overturned on the Persian carpet and one could have loved her.”114
By the time of Nixon’s presidency, the robot had become a popular image to describe wives who erased all spontaneity to please their husbands. Ira Levin’s novel (and later movie), The Stepford Wives (1972) was only one of several attempts to treat this theme. In this particular account, mechanical figures substitute for human beings with no one the wiser because the women had repressed so completely all individuality.
Stepford husbands were successful businessmen who thought they required personality-free spouses, but politicians’ wives began to apply the robot image to themselves. When Betty Ford learned of her husband’s elevation to the vice presidency, someone asked what she planned to do. “Just wind me up and point me in the right direction,” she answered, “and I’ll be there.”115 Angelina Alioto, wife of San Francisco’s mayor, disappeared for seventeen days and returned to explain: “I’m nobody’s robot.”116 Marion Javits, who abandoned her own career because of criticism that it conflicted with her husband’s Senate work, put the matter only somewhat more subtly: “No one knows better than the woman who accompanies the man who shakes the hands how faceless one can be.”117
Pat Nixon did not employ the robot image, but her husband’s cousin, Jessamyn West, hinted at it when she reported that Pat insisted she was “never tired,” something she had in common, West pointed out, with God and machines.118 Pat included subservience as an essential part of being a good wife when she told a reporter: “A man has a right to make his own decision about his career and a woman should support that decision.”119
Richard Nixon underlined his wife’s facelessness by giving no evidence that he considered her opinions when framing his own. A longtime aide to the president admitted that he had never once heard Pat’s name mentioned.120 In his books, Richard refers to his wife’s looks or to her courage and patience but not to her ideas. When questioned by the press on whether he tried out a particular speech on her, Pat replied: “He never tries anything out on me.”121 Researchers who later sought information on her White House years were likely to receive the curtest of all refusals from Richard Nixon’s office.122
There is a long, documented record of Richard Nixon leaving his wife out of significant decisions. According to one biographer, Pat thought she had convinced her husband to refuse the second spot on the Republican ticket in 1952, but then learned while watching television that he had accepted.123 The dilemma of whether or not to try again for the presidency in 1968 was resolved on a trip he made alone, and according to one magazine writer, Pat did not receive notice of his decision for several days.124
In the White House, the president’s staff quickly picked up and exaggerated for their own reasons Richard Nixon’s evaluation of Pat’s insignificance. Jealousy between the East Wing and the president’s side is a staple of White House history, especially since the First Lady’s role has become more visible and her staff larger and more astute politically. Careers on both sides are quickly made and destroyed in the high-pressure atmosphere of the executive branch, and a constant jockeying for position reminds all participants how high the stakes are. However strong the president’s advisers believe themselves to be, they understand that the president’s wife enjoys a unique position, and part of preserving their power involves limiting hers.
The staff assembled by Pat Nixon complained of condescension from the West Wingers, especially H. R. Haldeman. The First Lady and the chief of staff made no secret of their dislike for each other—he called her “Thelma” being her back,125 and she objected to his puritanical views on smoking and drinking and to his hypocrisy in other matters.
Helen McCain Smith, an aide to Pat Nixon throughout the White House Years, reported that Haldeman was “always pushing, pushing, pushing the President to keep [Pat Nixon] away from the public, to dump her, advising [the President] not to take her on trips because he would do better on his own.”126 “I couldn’t believe that Haldeman could be that stupid,” Smith continued, “He simply did not realize her potential and her very significant assets. … Many times we would receive staff memos from Haldeman informing us that the President was about to go somewhere and we would see that the First Lady was not included.”127 Pat’s assignments were sometimes treated a jokes. Rather than building a significant spot for her in some project that would complement her husband’s work, John Ehrlichman explained that he had sent her off to “do the Indians” (visit a reservation) in order to keep her quiet and get her out of sight.128
Had she been stupid or behaved in a way that would have embarrassed the president, such treatment might be understandable, but many Washington reporters liked Pat Nixon. One of their number later wrote: “[We] found that the tense, guarded campaign wife with the rehearsed smil
e was in relaxed moments a warm and peppy person.”129 Another veteran of the Washington scene put it more bluntly, perhaps because she was speaking off the record. “Mrs. Nixon had these ideas,’ but [the President] wouldn’t let her do anything about them. Each time she set out to try, her side of the White House would check with his, and by the time the answer came back, it was too late.”130 For Pat Nixon’s staff, the explanation for being excluded lay in the attitudes of the president’s staff: “You wouldn’t believe the sexist attitude of some of those guys,” one of Pat Nixon’s aides told a writer, “and Haldeman was the worst of the lot.”131
Pat Nixon was thus forced to turn her most productive efforts inward—to the White House where West Wingers apparently allowed her a free hand. Helen McCain Smith noted that Pat’s contributions lay in two areas: she made the mansion more accessible (by arranging special tours for disabled and blind persons, preparing a booklet on the gardens, adding exterior lighting, and changing the guards’ uniforms to less imposing blazers); and she restored authentic antiques to the state rooms. Many of Jackie Kennedy’s acquisitions had been copies, Smith noted, and the total effect was more “frenchified” than some people would have like. Pat Nixon managed to bring in, without congressional appropriation of any kind, chairs that had once belonged to the Monroes, Duncan Phyfe pieces, and other authentic American furniture. She also restored the Map Room and arranged for the transfer, either by gift or on loan, of several important paintings of presidents and First Ladies.132 Pat, always a modest woman, played down this particular aspect of her tenure, and when television cameras came to tour the White House, Tricia provided the commentary.
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