Pat Nixon
Thelma Catherine "Pat" Nixon was First Lady of the United States from 1969 to 1974 as the wife of President Richard Nixon. She also served as the second lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961 when her husband was vice president.
Born in Ely, Nevada, she grew up with her two brothers in Artesia, California, graduating from Excelsior Union High School in Norwalk, California, in 1929. She attended Fullerton Junior College and later the University of Southern California. She paid for her schooling by working multiple jobs, including pharmacy manager, typist, radiographer, and retail clerk. In 1940, she married lawyer Richard Nixon and they had two daughters, Tricia and Julie. Dubbed the "Nixon team", Richard and Pat Nixon campaigned together in his successful congressional campaigns of 1946 and 1948. Richard Nixon was elected vice president in 1952 alongside General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whereupon Pat became second lady. Pat Nixon did much to add substance to the role, insisting on visiting schools, orphanages, hospitals, and village markets as she undertook many missions of goodwill across the world.
As first lady, Pat Nixon promoted a number of charitable causes, including volunteerism. She oversaw the collection of more than 600 pieces of historic art and furnishings for the White House, an acquisition larger than that of any other administration. She was the most traveled first lady in U.S. history, a record unsurpassed until 25 years later. She accompanied the president as the first first lady to visit China and the Soviet Union, and was the first president's wife to be officially designated a representative of the United States on her solo trips to Africa and South America, which gained her recognition as "Madame Ambassador"; she was also the first first lady to enter a combat zone. Though her husband was re-elected in a landslide victory in 1972, her tenure as first lady ended two years later, when President Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal.
Her public appearances became increasingly rare later in life. She and her husband settled in San Clemente, California, and later moved to New Jersey. She suffered two strokes, one in 1976 and another in 1983, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992. She died in 1993, aged 81.
Early life
Thelma Catherine Ryan was born in 1912 in the small mining town of Ely, Nevada. Her father, William M. Ryan Sr., was a sailor, gold miner, and truck farmer of Irish ancestry; her mother, Katherine Halberstadt, was a German immigrant. The nickname "Pat" was given to her by her father, because of her birth on the day before Saint Patrick's Day and her Irish ancestry. When she enrolled in college in 1931 she started using the name "Pat" instead of "Thelma" but she did not legally change her name.After her birth, the Ryan family moved to California, and in 1914 settled on a small truck farm in Artesia. Thelma Ryan's high school yearbook page gives her nickname as "Buddy" and her ambition to run a boarding house.
She worked on the family farm and also at a local bank as a janitor and bookkeeper. Her mother died of cancer in 1924. Pat, who was only 12, assumed all the household duties for her father and her two older brothers, William Jr. and Thomas. She also had a half-sister, Neva Bender, and a half-brother, Matthew Bender, from her mother's first marriage; her mother's first husband had died during a flash flood in South Dakota.
Education and career
After graduating from Excelsior High School in 1929, she attended Fullerton College. She paid for her education by working odd jobs, including as a driver, a pharmacy manager, a telephone operator, and a typist. She also earned money sweeping the floors of a local bank, and from 1930 until 1931, she lived in New York City, working as a secretary and also as a radiographer.Determined "to make something out of myself", she enrolled in 1931 at the University of Southern California, where she majored in merchandising. A former professor noted that she "stood out from the empty-headed, overdressed little sorority girls of that era like a good piece of literature on a shelf of cheap paperbacks". She held part-time jobs on campus, worked as a sales clerk in Bullock's-Wilshire department store, and taught touch typing and shorthand at a high school. She also supplemented her income by working as an extra and bit player in the film industry, for which she took several screen tests. In this capacity, she made brief appearances in films such as Becky Sharp, The Great Ziegfeld, and Small Town Girl. In some cases she ended up on the cutting room floor, such as with her spoken lines in Becky Sharp. She told Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson in 1959 that her time in films was "too fleeting even for recollections embellished by the years" and that "my choice of a career was teaching school and the many jobs I pursued were merely to help with college expenses." During the 1968 presidential campaign, she explained to the writer Gloria Steinem, "I never had time to think about things like... 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."
In 1937, Pat Ryan graduated cum laude from USC with a Bachelor of Science degree in merchandising, together with a certificate to teach at the high school level, which USC deemed equivalent to a master's degree. Pat accepted a position as a high school teacher at Whittier Union High School in Whittier, California.
Marriage and family, early campaigns
While in Whittier, Pat Ryan met Richard Nixon, a young lawyer who had recently graduated from the Duke University School of Law. The two became acquainted at a Little Theater group when they were cast together in The Dark Tower. Known as Dick, he asked Pat to marry him the first night they went out. "I thought he was nuts or something!" she recalled. He courted the redhead he called his "wild Irish Gypsy" for two years, even driving her to and from her dates with other men.They eventually married on June 21, 1940, at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. She said that she had been attracted to the young Nixon because he "was going places, he was vital and ambitious ... he was always doing things". Later, referring to Richard Nixon, she said, "Oh but you just don't realize how much fun he is! He's just so much fun!" Following a brief honeymoon in Mexico, the two lived in a small apartment in Whittier. As U.S. involvement in World War II began, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., with Richard taking a position as a lawyer for the Office of Price Administration ; Pat worked as a secretary for the American Red Cross, but also qualified as a price analyst for the OPA. He then joined the United States Navy as a commissioned officer and, while he was stationed in San Francisco, she resumed work for the OPA as an economic analyst.
Veteran UPI reporter Helen Thomas suggested that in public, the Nixons "moved through life ritualistically", but privately, however, they were "very close". In private, Richard Nixon was described as being "unabashedly sentimental", often praising Pat for her work, remembering anniversaries and surprising her with frequent gifts. During state dinners, he ordered the protocol changed so that Pat could be served first. Pat, in turn, felt that her husband was vulnerable and sought to protect him, although she did have a nickname for him which he despised, so she rarely used it: "Little Dicky". Of his critics, she said that "Lincoln had worse critics. He was big enough not to let it bother him. That's the way my husband is."
Pat campaigned at her husband's side in 1946 when he entered politics and successfully ran for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. That same year, she gave birth to a daughter and namesake, Patricia, known as Tricia. In 1948, Pat had the couple's second and last child, Julie. When asked about her husband's career, Pat once stated, "The only thing I could do was help him, but was not a life I would have chosen." Pat participated in the campaign by doing research on his opponent, incumbent Jerry Voorhis. She also wrote and distributed campaign literature. Nixon was elected in his first campaign to represent California's 12th congressional district. During the next six years, Pat saw her husband move from the U.S. House of Representatives to the United States Senate, and then be nominated as Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice presidential candidate.
Although Pat Nixon was a Methodist, she and her husband attended whichever Protestant church was nearest to their home, especially after moving to Washington. They attended the Metropolitan Memorial Methodist Church because it sponsored her daughters' Brownie troop, occasional Baptist services with Billy Graham, and Norman Vincent Peale's Marble Collegiate Church.
Second Lady of the United States, 1953–1961
At the time of her husband coming under consideration for the vice presidential nomination, Pat Nixon was against her husband accepting the selection, as she despised campaigns and had been relieved that as a newly elected senator he would not have another one for six years. She thought she had prevailed in convincing him, until she heard the announcement of the pick from a news bulletin while at the 1952 Republican National Convention. During the presidential campaign of 1952, Pat Nixon's attitude toward politics changed when her husband was accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions. Pat encouraged him to fight the charges, and he did so by delivering the famed "Checkers speech", so-called for the family's dog, a cocker spaniel given to them by a political supporter. This was Pat's first national television appearance, and she, her daughters, and the dog were featured prominently. Defending himself as a man of the people, Nixon stressed his wife's abilities as a stenographer, then said, "I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything."Pat Nixon accompanied her husband abroad during his vice presidential years. She traveled to 53 nations, often bypassing luncheons and teas and instead visiting hospitals, orphanages, and even a leper colony in Panama. On a trip to Venezuela, crowds pelted the Nixons' limousine with rocks and spit on the couple for being representatives of the U.S. government.
A November 1, 1958, article in The Seattle Times was typical of the media's favorable coverage of the future first lady, stating that "Mrs. Nixon is always reported to be gracious and friendly. And she sure is friendly. She greets a stranger as a friend. She doesn't just shake hands but clasps a visitor's hand in both her hands. Her manner is direct ... Mrs. Nixon also upheld her reputation of always looking neat, no matter how long her day has been." A year and a half later, during her husband's campaign for the presidency, The New York Times called her "a paragon of wifely virtues" whose "efficiency makes other women feel slothful and untalented".
Pat Nixon was named Outstanding Homemaker of the Year, Mother of the Year, and the Nation's Ideal Housewife. She once said that, on a rare evening to herself, she pressed all of her husband's suits, adding, "Of course, I didn't have to. But when I don't have work to do, I just think up some new project."