Thelma Ryan was only 13, a freshman at Excelsior Union High School in Artesia, Calif., when her mother Kate, a German immigrant and Christian Scientist from South Dakota, died from liver cancer at 45.
Outside Rose Hills Memorial Park, in Whittier, where the funeral was held in January 1926, Thelma’s friends stood waiting. “We were all kind of nervous,” one recalled. “It was the first time any of us had lost a parent.”
Slender and graceful, her red hair, high cheek bones, and vibrant smile already setting her apart, Thelma strode right over to her friends and asked, with a big smile, of her mother: “Didn’t she look beautiful?”
This maintenance of composure, the convincing projection of serenity amid inner turmoil and despair, would emerge as the hallmark of an eventful life.
Kate’s death imposed on the girl, now known as “Buddy,” sole responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and laundering for herself, her father Will, a prospector and rancher with Irish roots, and her two older brothers.
After 1930, when tuberculosis claimed Will, Buddy started going by “Pat” and working odd jobs — bank clerk, radiology technician, movie extra — to put her brothers and herself through college.
Following a two-year stint in New York, where she worked at a hospital and once met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Pat returned home to enroll at the University of Southern California.
She and her brothers graduated from the school as a trio in 1937, the same year Pat moved to Whittier.
There, in the winter of 1938, assuming bit parts in stage dramas put on by the Whittier Community Players, she met a lawyer with a theatrical sense of his own: Richard Nixon, who immediately declared “I’d like to have a date with you,” engendering Pat’s cool reply, “Oh, I’m too busy.”
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How Dick Nixon — awkward, Quaker-raised, overly formal — courted and landed the elusive Pat Ryan, a “model-thin” knockout, charming and much sought-after, is the chief revelation in “The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady” by Heath Hardage Lee.
As Lee, a writer and historian, makes clear, the hesitation Pat showed in dating and marrying Dick did not reflect disinterest in the “tall, dark, handsome” attorney, but an unwillingness to cede so soon the independence she had secured, a rarity for women of her era, through her parents’ deaths and her own grueling work.
The book draws extensively on love letters, some unpublished, in which Dick, “a struggling young barrister who looks from a window and dreams,” wooed his “Irish Gypsy.”
They were married in June 1940. During Dick’s Navy service in the Pacific in World War II, he wrote longingly of “the way you get up in the morning . . . the soft caress of your hand in the movie . . . the delicate fragrance of your hair as you sleep with your head rested on my shoulder.”
Pat spent Dick’s deployment in San Francisco.
“She had money, friends, and a sophisticated big city,” Lee writes, “could do whatever she liked when she liked.” As Dick’s return neared, Pat reminded him: “These many months have been full of interest, and had I not missed you so much and had I been foot loose, could have been extremely happy. So, sweet, you’ll have to love me lots and never let me change my feelings for you.”
Inevitably, the narrative tracks the arc of Nixon’s career.
Through painstaking documentary research and graceful prose, Lee draws out the true personality — shrewd, tough, clever — of the forward-looking first lady so unfairly dubbed “Plastic Pat.”
Her prominence in the 1952 Senate campaign — including her presence at Dick’s side, an icon of silent suffering, in his televised “Checkers” speech — was considered ground-breaking at the time.
Among First Ladies, she was the first to visit an active combat zone (Vietnam); to travel to Moscow, China, and Africa; and to address the Republican National Convention.
Privately, she urged her husband to keep fighting in Watergate.
Shocked by his language on the tapes, Pat nonetheless defended him to the end.
Told that President Gerald Ford would soon be issuing a full pardon for her husband, America’s only ex-president, Mrs. Nixon scoffed: “Pardon for what?”
James Rosen is chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and the author of, among other books, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate” (Doubleday, 2008).
