Being a wife was job one for Pat Nixon. “I have sacrificed everything in my life that I consider precious to advance the political career of my husband,” she once said.
Tagged as “Plastic Pat” for being too perfect and for keeping her own counsel, the media portrayal of Pat Nixon was not particularly flattering. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein accused her of being a heavy drinker and a recluse during the Watergate years. She disliked publicity and refused to toot her own horn, an omission that sometimes worked against her when she declined to take credit for her achievements.
“The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady” by Heath Hardage Lee takes a look at the perception and reality of the woman who was first second lady during Eisenhower’s administration and then first lady from 1969 through her husband’s resignation in 1975. On Feb. 19, her book will be the subject of her talk at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.
Lee’s last book “The League of Wives” was about the wives of Vietnam War serviceman who were POWs or MIAs. She kept running across photos of the POW/MIA wives with Pat Nixon, who consistently appeared engaged and dynamic. “Those photos were at odds with so many of the media portrayals of Mrs. Nixon as aloof and reserved,” Lee says. “I surmised the real story about her might be much more intriguing than the simplistic portrait the media painted during the time her husband was President.”
Researching the former first lady took Lee to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, the Nixon Foundation Archives in Yorba Linda, and the Hoover Institution Library in Stanford. She interviewed scores of people who knew the Nixons: staff, friends and family members including both the Nixon daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Eisenhower, and their husbands Ed Cox and David Eisenhower. She managed to get an interview regarding Mrs. Nixon with Henry Kissinger before he passed away. “I spent a lot of time with the East Wingers, members of Mrs. Nixon’s White House staff, to get their side of the story which hadn’t been captured in depth before,” Lee says.
A hard-scrabble youth contributed to Nixon’s personality and work ethic. Born in 1912 in the tiny mining town of Ely, Nevada, her family soon moved to Artesia, California where her entire family worked hard to make their small farm a success. Both parents died by the time she was 17, so she had to work multiple jobs to put her brothers and herself through college. She drove cross country in the late 1930s to New York where she worked for a time in a tuberculosis hospital.
Later, she returned to Whittier, California, becoming a teacher at Whittier High School and meeting her future husband. “Pat’s early years taught her the value of hard work, independence and self-determination, all traits that helped her later,” Lee says. “At heart, Pat was a frontier girl with very Western DNA.”
Nixon was the first incumbent First Lady to support the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been part of the GOP platform since 1940, but really came into the spotlight when Nixon and later Mrs. Ford were first ladies. “While not a feminist in the second wave sense, Mrs. Nixon was extraordinarily pro-women, supporting not only the ERA but also a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices,” Lee says. “She also pushed hard to get a woman on the Supreme Court.”
To Pat Nixon, as for many women in the 1970s, the ERA was just common sense. She believed qualified women could do anything men could do, including running for president, a fact she shared with a young reporter named Barbara Walters in a TV interview.
Nixon often acted as a solo global ambassador for her husband, who knew from their many years together in politics as the “Pat and Dick Team” that she was a talented diplomat and could handle foreign trips and diplomacy on behalf of the U.S. on her own. Preferring hospitals and orphanages to attending teas and luncheons, she once visited a leper colony in Panama. “She went to Peru and Africa solo,” says Lee. “Everywhere she went, she won hearts and minds with her enthusiasm, warm nature, and humanitarian efforts.”
Despite her controversial husband, she maintained a wide popularity among many Americans. She was voted most admired woman in the world in 1972, and she made the Gallup poll’s top ten list of most admired women 14 times. Lee says Nixon always put family first, charted her own path, reached out consistently to those in need, and kept calm and carried on during the worst of political storms. “I think a person has to just be herself,” Nixon said of her efforts as first lady.
Despite the stiff perceptions about “Plastic Pat,” Nixon embraced cultures different from her own with gusto and genuine interest, treating everyone she met like a head of state. Everywhere she went, both foreign and domestically, she elevated women’s issues and women’s rights. “And she never forgot her roots. In her words, she was just Pat Nixon from Artesia,” Lee says. “I’ll always think of her as the California girl next door.”
“The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady” with author Heath Hardage Lee takes place on Wednesday, Feb. 19 at 6 p.m.at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 428 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd. Tickets
