Read the love letters between Richard and Pat Nixon: ‘I wish I had 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 nervous,” recalls one. “It was the first time any of us had ever lost a parent.”

Slim and graceful, her red hair, high cheekbones, and lively smile already distinguishing her, Thelma walked up to her friends and asked, with a big smile, her mother, “Didn’t you look nice?”

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’, with sole responsibility for cooking, cleaning and washing clothes for herself, her father Will, a prospector and rancher with Irish roots, and her two older brothers.

After 1930, when tuberculosis claimed Will, Buddy began dating “Pat” and working odd jobs—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 bit parts in stage plays performed by the Whittier Community Players, she met a lawyer with a theatrical flair of his own: Richard Nixon, who promptly declared “I’d like to have a date with you,” prompting Pat’s cute reply, “Oh, I’m so busy.”

How Dick Nixon—awkward, Quaker-raised, overly formal—hosted and delivered the elusive Pat Ryan, a “model-thin,” charming, and highly sought-after knockout, is the key 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, Pat’s reluctance to date and marry Dick did not reflect disinterest in the “tall, dark, handsome” lawyer, but an unwillingness to so quickly give up the independence he had secured , rare thing. for women of her era, through the death of her parents and her grueling work.

The book is based extensively on love letters, some unpublished, in which Dick, “a struggling young lawyer looking out a window and dreaming”, fell for the “Irish gypsy”.

They were married in June 1940. During Dick’s Navy service in the Pacific in World War II, he wrote fondly of “the way you get up in the morning. . . the soft caress of your hand in the movie. . . the subtle scent of your hair as I sleep with your head resting on my shoulder.”

Pat passed Dick’s placement in San Francisco.

“She had money, friends and a big sophisticated city,” Lee writes, “she could do whatever she wanted when she liked.” As Dick’s return drew near, Pat reminded him, “These many months have been full of interest, and if I had not missed you so much and had loosened my legs, I might have been exceedingly 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 graceful prose, Lee brings out the true personality—witty, tough, smart—of the visionary first lady unfairly dubbed “The Plastic.”

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 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, America’s only former female president, Mrs. Nixon scoffed, “Sorry about 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).