Read the love letters between Richard and Pat Nixon: ‘I want to have a date with you’

Thelma Ryan was just 13 years old, a freshman at Excelsior Union High School in Artesia, California, when her mother Kate, a German immigrant and Christian Scientist from South Dakota, died of liver cancer at age 45.

Outside Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, where the funeral was held in January 1926, Thelma’s friends waited. We were all kind of nervous, one recalls. It was the first time any of us had lost a parent.

Slim and graceful, her red hair, high cheekbones, and lively smile already setting her apart, Thelma walked up to her friends and asked, with a big smile, her mother: Didn’t she look pretty?

This preservation of composure, the convincing projection of calm amid inner turmoil and despair, would appear as the hallmark of an eventful life.

Kate’s death left the girl, now known as Buddy, sole responsibility for her cooking, cleaning and washing, her father Will, a prospector and rancher with Irish roots, and her two older brothers.

After 1930, when tuberculosis claimed Will, Buddy began moving in with Pat and working odd jobs as a bank clerk, radiology technician, movie extra to put her brothers and herself through college.

After a two-year stint in New York, where she worked in 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 school as a trio in 1937, the same year Pat moved to Whittier.

There, in the winter of 1938, assuming small parts in stage plays performed by the Whittier Community Players, she met a lawyer with a theatrical flair of his own: Richard Nixon, who immediately declared that Id wanted to have a meeting with to you, prompting Pat’s cute reply, Oh, I’m too busy.

How clumsy, Quaker-raised, overly formal Dick Nixon behaved with the elusive Pat Ryan, a model knockout, charming and in demand, is the key revelation in The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of the First Lady Washington’s Privateest” by Heath Hardage Lee.

As Lee, a writer and historian, makes clear, Pat’s reluctance to date and marry Dick did not reflect a lack of interest in the tall, dark, handsome lawyer, but an unwillingness to so quickly give up the independence he had secured, which rare for women. of her era, through the deaths of her parents and her grueling work.

The book is based extensively on love letters, some unpublished, in which Dick, a struggling young lawyer who looks out of a window and dreams, takes a liking to the “Irish gypsy”.

They were married in June 1940. During Dicks Navy service in the Pacific in World War II, he wrote wistfully about how you get up in the morning. . . the soft caress of your hand in the movie. . . the delicate scent of your hair as you sleep with your head resting on my shoulder.

Pat spent the Dicks deployment in San Francisco.

She had money, friends and a big sophisticated city, Lee writes, she could do whatever she wanted when she felt like it. As Dixie approached, Pat reminded him: These months have been full of interest, and if I hadn’t missed you so much and had loosened my legs, I might have been extremely happy. So, darling, you will have to love me very much and never let me change my feelings for you.

Inevitably, the narrative follows the arc of Nixon’s career.

Through painstaking documentary research and delightful prose, Lee brings out the true witty, tough and smart personality of the visionary first lady, unfairly dubbed Plastic Pat.

Her prominence in the 1952 Senate campaign, including her presence alongside Dick, an icon of silent suffering, in his televised Checkers speech was considered groundbreaking 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 continue fighting Watergate.

Shocked by his language on the tapes, Pat nevertheless defended him to the end.

It was said that President Gerald Ford would soon issue a full pardon to her husband, the former President of America, Mrs. Nixon scoffed: Sorry for what?

James Rosen is the 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).