First Ladies (27 page)

“We have done a lot,” Lady Bird said, when Liz asked her for a statement for the media. “There’s a lot left to do in the remaining months. Maybe this is the only way to get it done.”

The First Lady lived up to those brave words. She continued her crusade for beautification and conservation. With her backing, Lyndon persuaded Congress to set aside millions of acres of wilderness for new national parks and wildlife refuges. Lady Bird even managed one more See America trip that took her to Florida and New Orleans and ended in Redwood National Park in California—an appropriate last stop—in the shadow of those unique, gigantic trees, among America’s greatest natural treasures.

Back in the White House, every time Lady Bird walked past the portrait of Woodrow Wilson on the wall in the Red Room, she became more convinced that Lyndon had made the right choice. Painted late in Wilson’s presidency, it was a picture of a man ravaged by history, the face gaunt, the eyes haunted by wordless pain. Events soon reinforced the wisdom of the decision as well. Within a week, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the nation’s cities erupted in orgies of looting and burning. The stature LBJ had gained as a President willing to sacrifice his pride and ambition for the good of the people was invaluable as he struggled to hold the nation together in the aftermath of this tragedy.

As far as the Vietnam War was concerned, LBJ’s noble gesture went largely unappreciated, both in America and in North Vietnam. The
protesters continued to jeer him, and the Communists paid little more than lip service to peace. But Lady Bird almost magically transcended the atmosphere of rancor and gloom that engulfed the battered administration.

Pundits from Eric Sevareid of CBS to James Reston of
The New York Times
praised her. Reston said she was “probably the most remarkable woman who has presided over the White House in this century.” Sevareid said she had created a “new popular consciousness about the precious American land.” Shana Alexander, a tough critic of things political, said she was “quite possibly the best First Lady we have ever had.” One of her beautification associates called her “the most consummate politician” he has known in Washington.

If there is a secret here, it is in that wonderful phrase this almost perfect First Lady originated when she campaigned aboard the Lady Bird Special in 1964: a journey of the heart. There is no better summary of her five years in the White House. Except, perhaps, the words of one of the members of her staff, as she said good-bye: “You made us all better people, Mrs. Johnson.”

—

B
EHIND HER BACK JOURNALISTS CALLED HER
“P
LASTIC
P
AT” AND
“The Robot.” Feminists said her subservience to her husband betrayed American womanhood. The British press sneered that her “terrifying poise” was more doll-like than human. “She just doesn’t care,” scoffed one American reporter. A slightly more charitable columnist opined: “She is really a very nice woman but seems to lack a purpose.”

Lady Bird Johnson managed to transcend her husband’s unpopularity. Pat Nixon was almost obliterated by the antagonism Richard Nixon generated. The result has been a blank in the public mind about one of the most gifted, hardest working First Ladies in the long history of the White House.

To some extent I shared this miscomprehension until I started work on this book. In my youth the name Nixon ignited sparks in Bess and Harry Truman—and even a few in me, though I tried mightily to distance myself from things political. In one of his less
appealing moments on the campaign trail in the 1950s, Dick Nixon accused Harry S Truman of being a Communist. The man who had awakened the country to the realities of Joseph Stalin’s horrendous dictatorship and charted the course to eventual victory in the Cold War! It was, perhaps, the ultimate example of the depths of bitter partisanship to which Richard Nixon could sink in his ruthless pursuit of power.

But when Nixon became President of the United States, Dad put aside the memory of that fifteen-year-old gibe and studied his performance with the nonpartisan eyes of a member of the world’s most exclusive club. (I know they used to say this about the U.S. Senate, but that has been a misnomer for a long time.) Ex-Presidents see things in a President’s performance that the average citizen misses. To Dad’s surprise, he liked the firmness with which Nixon set about extricating us from Vietnam on honorable terms. “Every so often,” he told me on one of my visits to Independence, “the fellow hits a boomer.”

Then Dad added words that to some extent sum up the tragedy of President Richard Nixon and his First Lady: “But no one gives him any credit for it.”

We have seen Lady Bird Johnson entering a White House torn by the trauma of assassination. That was in some ways a visible specter that could be exorcised. Richard Nixon brought with him a host of invisible specters—an immense list of enemies hungering for revenge. Coalescing with the passions fueled by the war in Vietnam, they culminated in the presidential disaster called Watergate. Among the many casualties of that upheaval, Dick Nixon dolefully noted in his memoirs that his wife had “not receive [d] any of the praise she deserved. There [was] no round of farewell parties… no testimonials, no tributes. She had given so much to the nation and to the world.” Her only reward, he wrote, was “to share my exile. She deserved so much more.”

Those are among the truest words Richard Nixon ever wrote. They explain why Pat Nixon is the First Lady nobody really knows. To prove my point, let me tell you a few things about her that will probably surprise you.

She was the first First Lady—and remains the only one—to venture into an overseas combat zone.

She was Jackie Kennedy’s equal—some think her superior—in redecorating the White House.

She was the first First Lady to go on record as prochoice on abortion.

She was a woman of great compassion who once said, “Helping another person gives one the deepest pleasure in the world.”

A Republican by marriage, Patricia Ryan Nixon was a small
d
democrat in her bones, someone who always preferred to iron her own dresses, wash her own clothes, who instinctively sympathized with the poor and unlucky of this world.

Helen Thomas, the White House reporter who has known all the First Ladies since Bess Truman, said Pat Nixon was “the warmest First Lady I covered and the one who loved people the most”

Without her, Richard Nixon would never have survived Watergate, mentally or physically.

All right, you are probably saying, I’m surprised. Still, when I look at a picture of Pat Nixon with her frozen smile, I can’t help thinking those cracks about Plastic Pat and the Robot have a point.

You are right, for the wrong reason. The Pat Nixon Americans saw in public was a woman struggling to play a role she hated, for the sake of the man she loved. People who knew the young Pat Ryan have testified to her being a totally different person. They use words like “approachable,” “happy,” “enthusiastic,” “friendly.” She was an incredibly popular teacher of typing and shorthand at Whittier High School, mainly because she never talked down to her students, many of them Mexican Americans.

She was no spoiled daughter of the rich, or even of the middle class. She had been born in a miner’s shack in Nevada. Her German-born mother died of cancer when she was fourteen, her Irish-American father succumbed to lung disease when she was eighteen. Pat Nixon never forgot what it meant to be poor and work hard for middling wages. Once, when the journalist Gloria Steinem began asking her about her role models, Pat snapped: “I never had time to think about things like that. I had to work.”

Then Pat Ryan married a young lawyer named Richard Nixon, who had enormous energy and large ambitions, and her life changed forever. He plunged into politics, using her life savings to finance his first campaign for Congress. In one of the most meteoric rises in history, in six years he went from congressman to senator to vice presidential candidate. Then came the first of the episodes that would eventually congeal Pat Nixon’s smile.

Accused of living on a slush fund from rich Californians, Dick Nixon discovered the Republican Party was inclined to let him swing in the wind. He rescued himself by revealing every humiliating detail of the Nixons’ parlous personal finances on national television, while Pat sat silently beside him.

Never again would Richard Nixon trust another politician. Never again would Pat Nixon like one. At a party a few years later, she told Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., that politicians made movie people look like saints. “They [politicians] are the most vicious people in the world,” she said. As the daughter of a politician, this strikes me as overkill—but it is grim evidence of the wounds that 1952 ordeal inflicted on Pat Nixon.

Thereafter she loathed politics and dreamt only of the day when Richard Nixon would somehow be cured of his hunger for power and fame. After his failed 1960 bid for the presidency, she made him put in writing a promise to quit politics. A year later, when he told her that he had decided to run for governor of California, she burst into tears. When he announced, without consulting her, that he was going to run for President in 1968, she plunged into a depression and told her daughters she did not know if she could face another campaign.

Yet she faced it, she shook the hands, she answered reporters’ questions, she smiled her smile from a thousand platforms. What enabled her to stay in the game? Along with love, it was the conviction that Richard Nixon had gifts, ideas, policies, America badly needed. She wept joyous tears when he won the White House in 1968 because she felt “he was where he could really be of value to the country and to the world.”

Incidentally, the American people—unlike the Washington press corps—were unbothered by Pat’s frozen smile. If public opinion polls
tell us anything, among the voters she was one of the most admired women in America—and she stayed near the top of the polls, even after Watergate. Maybe they intuitively sensed what all but the most compassionate reporters missed: here was heroism in action, a woman doing a job she intensely disliked because fate had handed it to her, and doing it very well.

J. B. West, the White House chief usher who retired soon after the Nixons began their tenure, said it was his “distinct impression” that Mrs. Nixon was not happy in the White House. In later years, when he was more reflective, Dick Nixon himself admitted as much. He said Pat was “very good onstage, so to speak, even though she prefers not to be onstage.” I find this deeply moving—and as admirable in its own way as Lady Bird Johnson’s consummate performance as First Lady.

Pat Nixon seldom if ever used the word
partner
to describe her relationship with Richard Nixon. “We’re a team” was the expression she preferred. It was a team on which Dick was the coach-captain and Pat and to some extent her daughters were players, doing the bidding of the boss. When asked if Richard Nixon ever tried out his speeches on her, Pat said: “He never tries out anything on me.”

Yet Pat Nixon worked at being First Lady, even when she was running a temperature of 102. Like the post office, she was never deterred—by snow, rain, or heat—from her appointed rounds. “I never cancel,” she said. There was a gritty Irish pride at work here, an inner toughness. But this woman was not cold. Anyone who saw her with a child or a group of children knew that. The political smile was replaced by the real thing, a veritable glow of warmth; her arms opened, she was, for a few minutes, a happy woman.

Once, when a little crippled boy came to the White House for a photo opportunity with the First Lady, Pat saw the youngster was terrified and tried everything to help him relax, to no avail. Suddenly he blurted: “This isn’t your house!”

“Why do you say that?” Pat asked.

“Because I don’t see your washing machine.”

Pat solemnly conducted him to the third floor and showed him the washing machines in the laundry rooms. He returned to the first floor
holding her hand, as contented and cheerful as if he were with his own mother. His awed parents said it was the first time he had ever been at ease with a stranger.

Another unknown side of Pat Nixon was the First Lady who tried to read every letter she received and send a personal answer. As the number of letters swelled to over two thousand a day, she realized this was impossible. But she still tried to answer more of her mail than any other First Lady. Again, it was the lowercase democrat at work. She came from a small town and knew what a letter from the White House could mean. “It’s shown to all the neighbors, and often published in the local paper,” she told reporters. “It’s important to people who receive it.”

When a letter sounded a note of desperation, Pat often did more than answer it. One young woman told her in grisly detail about her drug addiction and said she was going to commit suicide. A phone call from the First Lady persuaded her to change her mind, and it
was followed up by psychiatric help, which soon had her on the road to stability.