Fifties (52 page)

They were like millions of other couples, trying new jobs in new cities and finding out that they were as able as the people who had always been in charge of things in the past. They were filled with optimism for the future. But even before they could decide what he would do next, Nixon was being asked to audition for the Republican congressional nomination to run against Jerry Voorhis in his old home district; there was an advertisement in local papers asking for bright young candidates to apply, and in addition, Nixon got a letter from Herman Perry, a local banker, leader of the Whittier establishment and father of one of Nixon’s friends. The letter seemed to offer the inside track to a local boy: “I am writing you this short note to ask if you would like to be a candidate on the Republican ticket in 1946. Jerry Voorhis expects to run—registration is about fifty-fifty. The Republicans are gaining. Please air mail your reply if you are interested.” He was a Republican, he decided, for he had voted for Dewey in 1944 while in the South Pacific. Yes, he was very interested.

At first, Pat was ambivalent about politics; it was a public profession and she was, after a terrible childhood, a very private person. This implied a different kind of career than she had in mind, almost a joint career, and she was uneasy with the demands it might place upon her. They flew out to meet the conservative Republican
group that was going to choose the candidate. Dick met with the men while Pat lunched with their wives, affluent ladies of the upper middle class. She did not make a good impression; to their eyes she was poorly dressed and did not, one of the women complained, even know what color nail polish to use. But wearing his naval uniform, he made a good impression. From his years living in Whittier he knew exactly who these men were, what their fears and prejudices were, and what they wanted to hear. They were small-town businessmen, they hated the New Deal (as he did not; he might have thought it was going too far, but it was hardly an emotional thing with him), so he talked about free enterprise and how much the returning veterans wanted it. He was their choice.

Once he started in politics, he could never stop: There would always be one more office to run for. Nothing could be allowed to stand in his way. He was a man consumed. He wanted, needed, success because it meant vindication—perhaps even revenge. Defeat meant only one more mark on the slate to wipe out. Her ambitions were very different; she sought merely respectability, a gentler environment for her children than the one she had known.

Thus he gravitated toward his first political race. So instead of all of their savings going for a house, as they had planned, half of it went for his campaign and half went for a house. Pat became, almost without realizing it, the prototype of the new political wife, always campaigning and sharing the spotlight with him. She asked only one thing—for the right not to have to make any speeches. She would work for him, but she was too shy to speak. So they campaigned together, although she was already pregnant. In February 1946, Tricia, their first child, was born; within a few weeks the baby was in the care of Hannah Nixon and Pat was out again with her husband, handing out Nixon thimbles to women, shaking hands, attending coffee hours, and running his campaign office. She also sold her share of her family’s Artesia property for three thousand dollars, which she immediately put into the campaign. Her participation helped greatly. She was young and pretty, as if cast by Hollywood for the part of the young politician’s wife. If at first it was instinctive, then as his career proceeded, their public partnership became more deliberate, particularly in 1950, when he ran for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress who was married to an actor perceived as left-wing; the Nixons, because of the simplicity of their backgrounds, seemed more the American norm: “
NIXON LIFE STORY LIKE FILM SCENARIO
,” ran a headline that fall in the
Los Angeles Examiner.
The candidate was “so average an American,” wrote Carl
Greenberg in the paper, “that unless you found out for yourself, it would smack of a campaign manager’s imagination.”

The new American candidate, it appeared, was more and more part of a team. Thanks to television, the entire family was on display. The Nixons, as much as any couple, helped pioneer this. People often liked him because they felt at home with her; if the older wives of the ruling elite in Whittier had looked down on her a bit in 1946, then she was very much someone that the wives of the young couples moving to California right after the war could identify with. They were, in those early years, showcased politically as an all-American couple doing all-American things. In particular, they shared the same financial hardships as other young couples just returning to civilian life. She learned her role as well or better than he did his. She became an expert at rolling her hair in a car while traveling from one campaign stop to another. She learned to keep a notebook to record which clothes she wore to which function in case she ever went back. In those days, she later reflected, she bought all her clothes not so much according to her own taste, but with her political appearances in mind. “I think: Will it pack? Is it conservative enough? Can I wear it for a long time? Can I doll it up with accessories?” She also mastered the art of sitting next to him on the podium and hearing him give for the umpteenth time, the same speech, while still managing to look adoring, as if she had never heard any of it before. She adored him equally in print. “I Say He’s a Wonderful Guy,” was the title of her 1952 article in the
Reader’s Digest.
They became so much the ideal young American couple that in the late fifties, Mort Sahl, the nightclub comic, joked about them sitting home at night, Pat knitting the American flag and Dick carefully reading the Constitution, “looking,” Sahl said after pausing for a moment, “for loopholes.”

In the early years she was by far the stronger of the two: She would sleep with the baby in a separate room so that he would not be disturbed if Tricia woke up. In those days she accepted, and on occasion even enjoyed, the political life. When he sank into one of his dark moods she, better than anyone else, could bring him out. When he got angry at her in front of others, she could turn away from it, even though such incidents embarrassed his associates. Gradually, she became poised and professional at the business of politics.

Her father’s emotional outbursts had terrified her, and she kept her own emotions to herself. Later, when she was First Lady, Jessamyn West interviewed her on a day when Pat Nixon had been to so many functions that she had barely eaten. Ms. West apologized
for taking her time and said that she must be very tired. “I’m never tired,” Pat Nixon answered. That, reflected Ms. West, must have come out of that hard childhood—running a family, earning a salary, and going to school—as if she had told herself: “You cannot be tired, you dare not be tired. Everything depends on you. You are
not
tired.”

She was one of the most photographed and written about women of the decade and at the same time one of the least known. She sat by his side and smiled. She could not have been at once more public and yet more private. She told an endless number of inquiring reporters that she believed in what he believed in and supported him, that they were together in all this. It was a performance so relentless that it was numbing: Her smile seemed glued on, her expression immune to all the usual signs of pain and stress. A reporter for the
London Spectator
wrote in 1958, after one of her appearances in London: “She chatters, answers questions, smiles and smiles all with a doll’s terrifying pose. There is too little comprehension. Like a doll she would still be smiling when the world broke. Only her eyes, dark, darting, and strained, signal that inside the black suit and pearls there is a human being, content not to get out.” It seemed to the
Spectator
writer an almost inhuman human performance: “One grey hair, one hint of fear, one gold teacup overturned on the Persian carpet and one would have loved her ...” She later told her own children, “I detest temper, I detest scenes. I just can’t be that way. I saw it with my father. And so to avoid scenes of unhappiness I suppose I accommodated to others.”

One of the few times her public facade slipped was when her husband was running for President in 1968. On board her plane was a young journalist named Gloria Steinem, one of the leaders in the women’s movement and obviously a supporter of her husband’s opponent. Though Ms. Steinem, a strikingly attractive young woman, had suffered through considerable adversity herself as a child, she must have seemed at that moment for Pat Nixon to epitomize the new liberated American woman, someone who enjoyed all the pleasures of success on her own terms, not derivatively through her husband’s accomplishments. Ms. Steinem led a highly visible life as a celebrity, and the list of her boyfriends was dazzling. Between her and Pat Nixon was not just the usual generation gap of twenty years—it was a chasm.

It was a memorable moment. Perhaps it was Ms. Steinem’s composure at 7
A.M.
, so early in the day; perhaps her cool and elegant manner struck Mrs. Nixon as condescension; perhaps it was the
certainty that she was there to do nothing so much as damage her husband, but when Ms. Steinem asked Mrs. Nixon about her own youth, her role models and life-style, Pat Nixon, always so cool, blew: “I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven’t just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do ... I’ve kept working. I don’t have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I never had it easy. I’m not at all like you ... all those people who had it easy.”

It would be difficult, in that rather comfortable period in America in the fifties and sixties, to imagine a harder childhood than Pat Nixon’s. She was born on March 16, 1912, in a miner’s shack in Ely, Nevada. (The nickname Pat, which eventually became her legal name, came from the proximity of her birthday to St. Patrick’s Day.) Her father was a prospector, Will Ryan, born in 1866 in Connecticut. His fortune always seemed just one step ahead of him. He had worked on a whaling ship, been a surveyor, and spent much of his life prospecting for gold. At the time of Pat’s birth he was a timekeeper in a silver mine. Her mother, Kate Halberstadt Bender, had been born in Germany and had lost her first husband in a mining accident. When Kate met Will Ryan, she was a widow with two very young children. She knew a good deal about hard times herself; she had had to give up a child from her first marriage to her own parents to raise. She and Ryan eventually had three children of their own, including Pat, the youngest.

Kate Ryan, exhausted by the harshness of mining life in Nevada, pushed constantly for Will to take the family to California and farm, which he finally did. Settling in Artesia, eighteen miles southeast of Los Angeles, he spoke of himself as a rancher. In reality he was a small-time truck farmer. The house was without electricity or running water. The family lived on the very margin of poverty. He grew peppers, beets, cauliflowers, cabbage, corn, and tomatoes. His cabbages were so big he was known as the “cabbage king.” Sometimes when her father went into town to sell them, Pat went with him. There he would joke with his friends, pretending that he was going to sell her to the highest bidder. To a small child already in a vulnerable situation, this was truly frightening. She was absolutely terrified that he would actually sell her. If he made a little extra money, he would buy her an ice-cream cone at the local drugstore. For her, that was an exhilarating moment, for hers was a childhood largely without indulgences.

Will was a man who wore his disappointments openly. When
things went badly, he drank. His wife feared the days when he came back too soon, which meant that he had done poorly and had gone to have a few drinks. On days like that he would turn on her and their children. Her mother, Kate, the one kind soul in her young daughter’s life, died of liver cancer when Pat was barely in her teens. Pat had to take over, do the cooking and cleaning and take care of the house. When her mother died she realized that she had barely known her, that they had never had the time to talk. With the death of her mother, her hard life became even harder. In the mornings she did the farm chores and cooked breakfast for herself and her brothers. Only then did she head off to school. When she came home in the afternoon she cleaned the house, did the wash, and prepared dinner. With all that, she still managed to do well in school.

Soon after Kate’s death, Will Ryan was diagnosed with tuberculosis; in truth it was black lung, the miners’ disease. As he became weaker and weaker, Pat took care of him while attending nearby Fullerton Junior College and working as a janitor at the local bank in the afternoon for thirty dollars a month. She and her two brothers made a pact to work together so the local authorities wouldn’t place them in the hands of a guardian. All three graduated from high school and won scholarships, but there was enough money for only one to go to college. They decided they would take turns and support each other. Tom Ryan had a football scholarship, so he would go first. Pat took a job at the bank to pay for the hospitalization of their father. In May 1930, Will Ryan died. Pat was still only eighteen.

In the fall of 1934, she entered USC. Living with her brothers in a tiny apartment in Los Angeles near the USC campus, she was determined, strong, unusually attractive, and very quiet. At USC she held several jobs, among them working at Bullock’s, a Los Angeles department store, doing some modeling. She wrote, “The manager of our department is always telling or describing how I drape the lovely velvet robes, etc., around me, grin at the fat, rich customers, and pff! they buy. But this is true—and I sell more than any of the other girls. Saturday I sold over $200.... Really, business is good—it makes one feel good to see people really
buying
instead of looking as in the past few years.” When she graduated from college and landed a job as a schoolteacher in Whittier, being able to put her childhood behind her was an immense relief.