Pat Nixon
Eisenhower, Julie Nixon
BOOK REVIEWS Iishard to imagine anyone calling her "Babe," or that as a schoolgirl in the 1920s she gave a speech for La Follette instead of Coolidge, but those are facts about Pat Nixon. Her...
...The smell of the disinfectant "was so nauseating she was barely able to stomach her meals...
...In the spring of 1975 Julie begged off visiting, since she wanted to stay in Washington with her husband, who was studying for law-school exams...
...She says Pat "loved Dick's romantic nature," but that it took her a while to accept his proposal of marriage...
...smiling in a second-ladylike way at thousands of Communists and Rotarians...
...He and Pat staked all their savings on a very long shot against New Dealer Jerry Voorhis...
...when they won they packed up theirclothes and kitchen utensils and made the 3,000-mile trip to Washington by car...
...Except for one incongruity: she was sitting on the top of theback seat, almost on the trunk, and her high heels were digging into the limo's red upholstery...
...There's a disagreeable nobility to what she does, and one can't but feel every man should be blessed with such a daughter...
...For each bunch of well-meant banal tributes quoted from loyal friends and staffers ("She never changed from the day I met her...
...the First Family have retired from a state dinner, but it is hard to sleep over the store: the sounds of the party keep coming up...
...When Pat redoes the White House family quarters, we're told how she removes LBJ's "elaborate telephone with its taping capability and dozens of buttons...
...Despite Woodward and Bernstein, it doesn't feel like any of my, or the republic's, business...
...Julie, nevertheless, is out to depict her courting Dad as a fun guy...
...When it looked, in the early-morning hours after Election Night 1968, that Illinois might be made off with once again—Mayor Daley was holding back votes from Cook County—she got up from a hotel couch, went into the bathroom, and vomited...
...At one point I even argued, 'Mother, don't give those who would be happy if Daddy's and your portraits never hung in the White House a victory by default.' Her response was matter-of-fact: 'Why not...
...More and more often, long after she had sat through dinner barely touching her food, she would make a batch of fudge for herself and eat it for dinner...
...until shrewd RN restrained her...
...M rs...
...She was especially busy during harvesting time when she had to cook for extra hired help...
...I would very much doubt that children as loyal as the Nixons' would have resulted from a completely loveless marriage, just as I doubt that two single adults (Rose Mary Woods and Bebe Rebozo) would find among the Nixons what seem to have been their real homes, if there hadn't been a glow of some genuineness coming off the family hearth...
...Her mother asked her to reconsider: "You have only one person to take care of there but two broken people here...
...On tiptoes, she moved gracefully across the gleaming parquet floor...
...If she learned to be stoical ("In our family, we held our disappointment"), she remained kindly and pretty enough to become an exceptionally popular teacher at Whittier High School...
...Then firmly, so that I would know she was speaking her final words on the subject, she said: 'I detest temper...
...Her childhood was tough, and her daughter Julie gives a memorable account of it in the first chapters of this book...
...Thelma "Pat" Ryan was born in 1912 in Ely, Nevada...
...seeing her husband through the wilderness years PAT NIXON: THE UNTOLD STORY Julie Nixon Eisenhower/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Thomas Mallon THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 39 of the sixties...
...Kennedy stole the '60 election, etc...
...The form of address is inevitably shaky—Pat and Dick are sometimes "mother" and "father"—but this is not unappealing...
...I saw it with my father.' She paused for a moment and then added: 'And so to avoid scenes or unhappiness, I suppose I accommodated to others.' " These latter-day mother-daughter interviews make up the best paragraphs in the book...
...The 37th President, one also learns, wasn't the only cottage-cheese eater in the Nixon family...
...There is a predictable, slightly feminist slant to this daughter's account of her mother's unpaid activities, and it's justified...
...He sent her presents, among them a pumpkin (no microfilm inside) and, finally, a May basket containing an engagement ring...
...o get back to Pat: she was a transitional political wife—newly visible, then too visible, then not visible enough...
...And ten years after that, finally in the White House, she would be sneered at as a plastic wifey without her own Eleanorean role...
...Pat Nixon's lifelong thinness was not a matter of self-induced chic...
...She was, her daughter Julie says, "old before her time," but had a gaiety that continued to surface amidst hardship...
...since loyal Julie becomes diverted in purpose, seeking to offer not only her mother's life story, but also a spirited defense of every controversial moment in her father's career...
...Ten years later, some would criticize her for being too active a campaigner...
...He met Pat at some amateur theatricals in town...
...When the reader first meets Martha Mitchell, he learns that she's "just been released from a private sanatorium where she had undergone psychiatric care.and treatment for alcoholism...
...It seems that Pat Nixon has little desire to be remembered by anyone but her family...
...Wonder if it's for sale...
...She grew up in California...
...I detest scenes...
...She was always the same sweet person"), this book contains a reticent revelation that Julie was able to provoke from Pat: "Only once did she admit to me her father's temper and confrontations with Kate...
...A poignant image of this admirable woman in this unyielding book by this valorous daughter...
...Their daughter says that both "were shy and both would find it difficult in the years ahead to break through their reserve and discuss their deepest feelings...
...talking up "volunteerism" while the country ululated through the early seventies...
...Miss Ryan lives on Terrace Place next to a vacant lot...
...If you totalled the effect, it came to a startling one of somebody dwelling in unanticipated circumstances...
...the two of them watching "Bonanza" reruns while eating dinner from TV trays...
...After the 1960 election, firmly convinced that the Democrats had stolen Illinois and the White House, Pat was "disillusioned . . . beyond redemption" with politics...
...One feels as if one is watching the class nerd's attempts at grooviness...
...The most ardent Nixon-haters may be moved by Julie's chapters dealing with the early days of exile in San Clemente: the former President's near death after a phlebitis attack...
...An item from the school paper: "The boys of Miss Ryan's class say, 'We sure are lucky'—`Wonder where she lives...
...When Charles Colson wrote a memo praising the PR-impact of her solo trip to Africa in 1972, she sent a copy to her longtime friend Helene Drown, with the annotation: "Thought you'd be amused at late recognition...
...In 1950, during the race against Helen Douglas, she passed out plastic thimbles...
...She got herself through college by taking jobs as a janitor, salesgirl, and movie extra and by living with her protective brothers...
...They won, didn't they?' " Julie says that these days her mother "cherishes the privacy of her retirement years and the family times that have been among the happiest of her life...
...Julie goesdown to get something to eat from the second-floor family kitchen: As I stepped off the elevator into the long, wide hallway, only one lamp was lighted on a table a few feet from where I stood...
...Pat's stroke (after reading The Final Days...
...Not a self-pitying person, she could still sometimes feel her own contributions being slighted...
...Thirty yards away, at the entrance to the Grand Staircase, I saw my mother, still dressed in her evening gown...
...She was swaying to the faint sound of music coming from the Grand Foyer where some of the guests were still enjoying the dancing...
...His love letters are pretty awful: in 1938 Nixon Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College and is the author of A Book of One's Own...
...Right near where I stood the motorcade stopped and Nixon got up to make a stump speech full of World Series imagery...
...their parents' White House portraits...
...Certainly Richard Nixon's 1946 congressional campaign (during which his headquarters were burgled) had a romantic aura...
...She arrived at the White House with the sense of Nixon as a habitual victim of dirty politics, and five years later her instinct was to fight his Watergate troubles to the end, even if she wouldn't ask him much about what was going on...
...Flash...
...One learns that in the early fifties Miss Jacqueline Bouvier, the Washington Times-Herald's "Inquiring Photographer," came upon little Julie Nixon and asked: "Do you play with Democrats...
...Lyndon and Lady Bird, it seems, didn't touch the stuff...
...The exact state of her health remains discreetly unclear at the end of the book...
...I just can't be that way...
...One night twenty years later, Julie, who by then knew all about Democrats, would be showing Carolineand John E Kennedy, Jr...
...It was a curiously luxuriant sight, almost decadent, out of keeping with the rest of the picture...
...Ionce saw Pat Nixon in person...
...During the '64 Republican convention, Pat was about to stand up and join the cheering for "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...
...I looked at Pat, who seemed to me pale and old (everyone looks old when you're sixteen) but otherwise pretty and as expected, on the middle-class order of Beaver Cleaver's mom...
...The job of preparing huge quantities of food affected her own appetite...
...she tells about his winning a garter-tossing contest and quotes one friend's recollection of Dick as "the one with the crazy ideas...
...Describing reporters' attempts to get the First Lady's comments on public issues, Julie reminds us that "Even thirty years before, a reporter would never have dreamed of asking the very approachable Eleanor Roosevelt at a tea what she thought of the morality of her husband's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, or, later, about the war ,policy of fire-bombing Dresden...
...If this papalogia seems beside the point and overly familiar (Adlai had a secret fund, too...
...Blame her, not Kissinger, for detente...
...THEY ALL DID IT is the supplementary theme of this book, and Julie is so good at the sneak attack that her grandfather-in-law could have made use of her behind enemy lines on Omaha Beach...
...Her mother, Kate, died of liver cancer before Pat turned fourteen: "With Kate at Doc Haskell's, thirteen-year-old Babe took over most of the responsibilities of the house...
...Pat sent him books, including Karl Marx...
...Were they happy together, then andafterwards...
...they're affecting, but one has to wince...
...Eisenhower's writing is generally concise, though her book is less well composed—in both senses of the term—in its later portions, as the author fights more and more shrilly for her father's reputation...
...T hen he showed up...
...When her father got sick with TB (he died when she was eighteen) she had to spend at least an hour after every meal sterilizing his dishes...
...She thought he should have burned the tapes...
...Richard Nixon was a persistent, awkward suitor...
...Julie responded: "What's a Democrat...
...After marriage in 1940 and a brief period with the OPA in Washington, Dick was off to New Caledonia with the South Pacific Air Transport Command...
...What is irrefutable is how hard she always worked, not only in Nixon's campaigns, but also helping manage the "delicate and tenuous" relationship between Nixon and Ike in the fifties...
...Pat asked for some before going out to the Inaugural balls on January 20, 1969: someone from the White House kitchen had to run out to a 24-hour deli to get it...
...Julie pursues it so relentlessly that a reader has to marvel...
...When I was sixteen, during the '68 campaign, she and Richard Nixon came down Hempstead Turnpike, in Franklin Square, New York in an open car...
...seems no more natural saying something's "swell" than he would thirty years later asking voters to "sock it to" the Democrats...
...Julie seems to think he was a fast worker...
...Like all inside biographical jobs, this one offers pleasurable trivia, tasty morsels of historical junk food...
...It was years after the resignation before Julie could persuade her to have her portrait done for the White House: "I told her I hoped she would do it for Tricia and me and for our children...
...I was reminded of this image by a prettier one given by Julie Nixon Eisenhower in Chapter 22 of this book: It is during the early days of the first Nixon Administration...
...Julie says yes, and I'm perfectly content to take her word for it...
...Her father, Will, was a sailor, prospector, miner, and farmer...
...Only a month after the performance of The Dark Tower, he surprised Pat with flowers on her birthday...
...Her main technique is the sly, ironic throwaway...
...It is around this time in the book that the reader will begin occasionally to ask, "Where's Pat...
Vol. 20 • January 1987 • No. 1
