‘The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon’

A thoughtful biographer attempts to give readers access to the essence of another person’s life. Heath Hardage Lee, in The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady, often fails to do so because the author appears to be an unashamed partisan more interested in protecting Pat Nixon from those who wish to sully her image. She even has the blessing of the Nixon daughters for this work. Nevertheless, the book is an extremely engaging read, even though its first few pages read like a press briefing.

Lee describes Pat Nixon as a proud supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and a woman who continually urged her husband to place a woman on the Supreme Court. She describes Pat Nixon as “nothing like her media-constructed persona. Pat Nixon was warm, generous, and above all interested in people. She was elegant but not aloof, accomplished but down-to-earth, in fact the opposite of what Americans thought her to be which was someone who seemed odd, introverted, and plastic: an image that exists to this day.”

Lee doesn’t dwell upon the information that has surfaced over the past decades that include rumors about Pat’s drinking and her husband’s misuse abuse of alcohol and pills. There’s evidence he was violent towards her. The marriage, according to multiple sources, was a strained one and the couple often used intermediaries to communicate with each other. Lee tends to avoid such darkness, as if to engage with such material would somehow be disrespectful to a woman she holds in high regard. Lee’s exquisite storytelling skills, which make us feel we are alongside the First Lady even while she remains an enigma to us, salvages the book from its many omissions.

 Pat Nixon was born in Nevada until her family moved to Los Angeles where her father began to learn farming. Pat was a pleasant child who loved “stories, reading, and books” from a young age, and learned early “not to complain, and not to expect too much from life.” Still, friends remember noticing an ambitious streak in her that dreamed of a bigger life. Her father was a heavy drinker and often had vicious fights with her mother when he was drunk. Lee suggests these battles between her parents upset the future first lady dearly, and perhaps explains why she shied away from direct confrontation with her future husband. Tragically, her mother would die when she was 13, and her father when she was 18, leaving her to her own devices. She got a teaching job in Whittier, California, where she met Dick Nixon who chased her relentlessly even while she dated other suitors, until she finally succumbed to his proposal.

Unlike many women of her time, Pat wasn’t eager to marry.  Lee writes: “She had her freedom and her independence.  She had been pursued before seriously in New York by a doctor but parried his advances.  She had no one she had to take care of besides herself.  Why would she give up what had taken her so long to achieve?” Dick Nixon had to work hard to win her heart and Lee suggest it was this very tenacity which she possessed as well that drew her to him despite any reservations she might have had at the time. Both of them wanted extraordinary lives even if neither of them could describe at the time precisely what that meant.

Lee doesn’t dwell upon the first years of their marriage, other than hinting that their best communication seems to have occurred when they were separated and wrote loving letters to one another. Soon enough, Pat was the mother of two little girls, Tricia and Julie, and devoted herself to the busyness motherhood bestowed upon her, as well as caring for Nixon’s ailing mother. Lee mentions Nixon’s unusually close relationship with his mother that bordered on worship, but doesn’t stop to consider the effect this adoration had on his wife Pat. She describes Pat as a doer; someone who got hold of whatever task was at hand and finished it without complaining.

As First Lady, Pat Nixon was adamant about answering her own correspondence with personally handwritten notes, which she did until Nixon’s final hours.  he made several trips to various countries where she impressed many with her empathic approach to children and overall friendliness. Many were taken by her immaculate appearance; she was always beautifully put together.  She drew raves after her trip to Peru in 1970 after the earthquake there that killed tens of thousands and brought with her relief supplies. Nixon associates Haldeman and Ehrlichman began to think of her as a political asset after this trip, whereas before they felt the administration should sequester her. She would accompany Nixon to China and Russia.

She embraced the traditional role of First Lady, paying attention to Christmas decorations and refurbishing parts of the White House that had fallen into disrepair, was adamant about making the White House accessible to the disabled long before anyone thought of such things, and held luncheons for NATO wives, diplomatic corps wives, and the Defensive Advisory Committee on Women and Service.

 But in interviews she froze up; and sometimes seemed uncertain of herself. No one would think to ask her a serious political question about Vietnam or any of the other prominent issues of the day. She made it clear that was her husband’s arena. When Helen Thomas asked her about her faith, she said “I’m a very religious person…It isn’t exactly praying. I follow the golden rule. I taught it when I was young, and I never lost it.”  In an interview with Jessamyn West for Good Housekeeping, West compared Pat Nixon to Marlene Dietrich saying “Her life, like Dietrich’s, is, insofar as the public can see, a performance; but hers is a performance where she is not the star, but a supporting actor. It is difficult to see how this role could have been performed better. But is it a role? Or is it Pat?”

 A young Gloria Steinem interviewed Pat Nixon and was one of the few reporters who threw her off-balance. She asked Pat Nixon some penetrating questions that clearly irritated her. Pat Nixon replied testily: “Now, I have friends in all the countries of the world. I haven’t sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I want to do. Oh no. I’ve stayed interested in people; I’ve kept working. Right here in the plane I keep this case with me, and the minute I sit down, I write my thank-you notes. Nobody gets by without a personal note.  I don’t have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I’ve never had it easy. I’m not like all of you…all those people who had it easy.”

 Lee’s ignoring of Pat Nixon’s undeniable anger seems an almost unforgivable omission.  We wonder about what demons stayed with her throughout her life.  What dreams did she defer to her husband’s directives?  How did Pat Nixon feel when Saturday Night Live lampooned her in 1976 portraying her as “an alcoholic mess, speaking next to a half-drained bottle of gin and slurring her words.”?

 Thomas Mallon wrote an imaginative comic novel called Watergate about Pat and Dick Nixon and the scandal that rocked the world. Critic John Dickerson wrote a review of it in Slate in 2012 in which he claims “imaginative fiction can tell a deeper truth than writing that sticks to demonstrable fact…” In the novel, Mallon shows us a lonely and deeply unhappy Pat Nixon, troubled by her turbulent marriage. Yet she manages to find happiness for herself in the arms of an Irish lover; a gentleman she met when they were living in Manhattan. In these brief moments, when she could fly under the radar of social scrutiny, she found a joy and an affirmation her life as First Lady denied her.

Mallon’s fictional imagining of Mrs. Nixon’s passionate love affair is a marvelously clever expression of her complexity and confirms a softness and longingness we sensed was always present in her. Even though Mallon’s account is something he created from his own imagination, it seems to touch the essence of Mrs. Nixon’s vulnerability in a way Heath Hardage Lee doesn’t. Lee seems disinclined to examine the crevices of human behavior and their origins as if the mess that could surface might overwhelm her.  Still, Lee presents for us with an engaging and well-researched account of the First Lady’s accomplishments which she feels The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon performed with exquisite grace and poise despite the tumult surrounding her.