Swift succeeds in showing a young couple united by a degree of class resentment and a political understanding of how their apparent ordinariness could spark a sense of sympathetic identification in the mass of voters who would eventually form Nixon’s “silent majority.” More profoundly, the couple shared what the author calls “an underlying, no-nonsense melancholy” that derived from “the sadness of their difficult childhoods.” Their families had been scythed by silicosis and tuberculosis at times, during their mutual climb and repeated crashes, the Nixons must have imagined they were fighting for air. She argued against his resigning even after she’d started packing. She never stopped believing that the Kennedys had stolen the 1960 election, or that Watergate originated as a plot by her husband’s political enemies. When the “slush fund” crisis broke in 1952 and he thought of quitting the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket, she insisted he stay on when he nearly cracked, a minute before going live with the Checkers speech, she convinced him he could manage it. Once she committed, her implacability could match and even exceed her husband’s. His hangdog appeals (“I’d like so very much to see you, any time you might be able to stand me”) initially repelled and finally softened her.
Certain she was “out of his league,” Nixon nevertheless set out to win her the way he would later win most everything else, through a heroic and sometimes destructive persistence. Made wary by early hardships (she’d started life in a Nevada miner’s cabin), Pat was, at most, intrigued.
He had fallen for Pat Ryan (“my Irish Gypsy”) instantly and hard when they met in 1938, through a community theater group in Whittier, Calif.
Now comes “Pat and Dick,” Will Swift’s fair-minded and thorough attempt to trace the long, jagged arc of the Nixons’ marriage, a devoted and sometimes strained journey that ended when Richard Nixon, convulsed with sobs, helped bury his wife in 1993. Nixon”) and become the subject of a reliable scholarly biography by Mary C. More recently she has been refracted into both fiction (my own novel “Watergate”) and metafiction (Ann Beattie’s “Mrs. It’s so sad.”įor many years the chief biography of Pat Nixon was a sturdy but hardly impartial book by her younger child, Julie Nixon Eisenhower. If the portrait could speak, it would most likely say what she herself did after the helicopter lifted off from the South Lawn on Aug. Nixon seems stricken, ready to brim with tears. The picture was created several years after the Nixons’ abrupt departure from Washington, and only for the sake of the subject’s daughters. Visitors to the White House who seek out the well-known portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan - eerie, El Greco-like elongations executed by Aaron Shikler - are sometimes surprised to have their attention arrested by Henriette Wyeth Hurd’s rendering of the far-less-chronicled Pat Nixon.
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