Authors: Margaret Truman
Reporters called her Plastic Pat and ridiculed her frozen smile. But behind the scenes, Pat Nixon was a warm and caring woman—especially when children visited the White House
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(The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace)
Although Dick Nixon had semirebuked her when she said their White House entertaining would not be limited to big shots, Pat made good on that promise. Her most innovative idea was a Sunday prayer service in the East Room, to which several hundred Washingtonians were invited every week. It was not only deeply religious in the Quaker tradition Pat had embraced when she married Dick—it was profoundly democratic. African-American clerks from the Bureau of Printing sat beside cabinet members and senators and their wives. All received a personal greeting and a warm handshake from the President and his First Lady.
This people-to-people contact was the side of politics that Pat Nixon valued. What she did not like was being displayed as an icon before screaming thousands in an arena, or to millions on television. That was when she froze, when she saw politics as a horrendous violation of her private self. She was happiest when she could escape from being a prisoner of the White House. She even treasured small escapes, like walking a hundred paces or so ahead of her Secret Service guards.
She frequently bridled at the constraints of protocol and red tape and occasionally insisted on doing things her way. Perhaps the most dramatic example was her visit to Vietnam. It was part of a longer trip to Southeast Asia, which allotted only a day to embattled Saigon. When Pat was told she would spend most of the time having tea and shaking hands with the wives of Vietnamese officials, she shook her head in a way that got everyone’s attention. “I want to see some wounded Americans!” she said.
Before anyone in the Secret Service could do more than stutter an objection, the First Lady was in a helicopter, flying over eighteen miles of jungle rife with potential Vietcong sharpshooters to an American evacuation hospital. The Secret Service and Army gunners crouched in the open hatches of the helicopter, loaded machine guns poised to return fire. At the hospital the doctors had a lecture ready to give the First Lady on how well they were running the place. Again, Pat Nixon shook her head. “I want to see the boys,” she said.
She spent two hours going from bed to bed, talking with each wounded man in tones too low for frustrated reporters to overhear. More than once she got down on her knees beside a man who could not sit up in bed. Like Eleanor Roosevelt three decades earlier, she made careful notes of names and addresses, and when she returned to the White House wrote letters to parents, telling them she had seen their sons and how much she admired their sacrifices for their country.
Another mission of mercy saw a Pat Nixon who could think in large political terms. It was a glimpse of the First Lady who might have found a larger stage, with a different presidential husband. When Peru was ravaged by an earthquake in May 1970, Pat persuaded Dick to let her fly to Lima with an aid mission that brought tons of supplies and medical help. The presence of the First Lady, personifying American compassion, made the mission historic. Pat toured the devastated areas with the wife of the President of Peru. The result was a vast improvement in relations between the two countries. One correspondent who made the trip observed that not even Eleanor Roosevelt had combined diplomacy and a mission of mercy so astutely.
In 1972 Pat repeated this triumph with a four-nation trip to Africa that began with the inauguration of the new President of Liberia. American and foreign reporters who covered the trip expressed amazement at how smoothly the First Lady handled the diplomacy and the press conferences in each country. When she returned home, Nixon aide Charles Colson prepared a seven-page memorandum on the trip, thick with praise from newspapers and TV commentators. Colson concluded that after three years of the staff trying to project the human side of the Nixon presidency, “Mrs. Nixon has broken through where we have failed. She has come across as a warm, charming, graceful, concerned, articulate person.”
Pat Nixon never adopted a cause or a project with the success that gave Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson a special aura. She felt that approach narrowed the First Lady’s role, excluding all sorts of people and organizations who could use her help. The closest she
came to espousing a broad project was something she called “Volunteerism.” Pat liked it because it left her free to visit the aged, the blind, the orphaned, the handicapped—to give as many people as possible the benefit of the First Lady’s power to attract sympathy and help. Again and again, obviously speaking from the heart, she reminded Americans that government is impersonal. For help to really work, it “needs the personal touch.” This was the real Pat Nixon speaking.
One of the most moving stories of Pat’s White House years was her invitation to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to view the portraits of herself and John F. Kennedy that had recently been hung in the White House. Jackie responded that she could not face a public ceremony. She wanted to bring John Jr. and Caroline but feared the visit would revive grisly memories—especially if the press was swirling around them, asking personal questions.
Pat Nixon scrapped plans for a ceremony. Instead, she launched an operation as secret as anything the CIA has ever put together. There was no publicity whatsoever connected with Jackie’s visit. Only four people on the entire White House staff knew anything about it. No one in either the West Wing or East Wing press office was told, so they could honestly plead ignorance to the reporters.
Pat and her daughters, Julie and Tricia, greeted the Kennedys on the second floor. Julie remembers being struck by how much Jackie resembled her photographs—the large, haunted eyes, the pale skin, the perfectly coiffed hair. They went downstairs and looked at Jackie’s portrait first. The artist, Aaron Shikler, had created an otherworldly creature, with the long, tapering fingers of a fairy queen. John Jr., ten, and Caroline, thirteen, were unimpressed and said so with refreshing frankness.
From there they went to John F. Kennedy’s portrait by the same artist. His arms crossed, his head bowed, he is struggling with the forces of history. The Nixons and Mrs. Onassis watched nervously as John Jr. and Caroline studied it. Without a trace of the anguish the adults had feared the portrait might arouse, both said they liked it and asked what was the next stop on the tour. For them, this was a visit to a fabulous place, the White House, which they had been told
about many times but barely remembered. They wanted to see the whole thing.
Pat put Tricia and Julie in charge of their tour while she took Jackie through the recently redecorated state rooms. The Kennedys stayed for dinner with the President, who later took them into the Oval Office, where young John had played as a toddler, and up to the Lincoln Bedroom, where he sat John on the huge bed and told him if he made a wish, it was guaranteed to come true. (This is a piece of the Lincoln legend I had not heard before.) It seemed to work for John, who reported in a thank-you letter he had had great luck the next day in school.
With a depth of emotion only another First Lady would appreciate, Jackie thanked Pat for her top-secret hospitality. “The day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious ones I have spent with my children,” she wrote.
In her tour of the redecorated state rooms, Jackie found nothing to criticize and a great deal to praise. This was a remarkable tribute to Pat Nixon, who had undertaken nothing less than a major overhaul of these rooms. In the six years since Jackie had decorated them, over seven million tourists had tramped through; hundreds of receptions, lunches, and dinners had wreaked added havoc on draperies, wallpaper, and rugs.
Pat Nixon made redecorating these rooms one of her priorities. She recruited a first-class art historian and preservationist, Clement Conger, to be the White House curator. He had done some outstanding work at the State Department. Together they toured the White House from top to bottom, discussing what needed to be done. Conger recalls how impressed he was by the First Lady’s preparation for this tour. In three hours she did not refer to a single note. Together they chose wallpapers, fabrics, wall colors. Often Pat Nixon displayed a remarkable combination of good taste and historical appreciation. When Conger acquired a portrait of Dolley Madison from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and learned that it had once hung in the Red Room, Pat decided to hang the portrait there again and paint the room in the exact shade of the red velvet draperies in the
portrait. She also pursued hundreds of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century pieces of American furniture, paintings, and other objets d’art to add to the White House collection. As usual, Congress was in its no-real-money-for-the-White-House mode. Acquiring these treasures called for major private fund-raising.
By the time Pat Nixon left in 1974, the Executive Mansion’s antique and art collection had become one of the finest in the nation. Only a third of the furnishings were authentic antiques when the Nixons moved in. When they left, two-thirds were vintage treasures. Clement Conger often urged the First Lady to seek a little publicity for this accomplishment. But she refused to say a word about it. She did not want anyone to think she was trying to steal Jackie Kennedy’s glory.
Pat never stopped thinking of ways to help Americans and foreign visitors appreciate the White House. She launched the idea of printing well-diagrammed pamphlets in different languages so foreigners would know what rooms they were going through. Even when Watergate was haunting her, she arranged for the first time for visitor tours of the gardens. Probably her crowning achievement in this department was the decision to illuminate the White House every night. The artfully deployed lights made the mansion seem doubly majestic. In the shadows beyond their glow seemed to lurk decades of half-forgotten history.
I remember being in Washington not long after the nightly illumination began. As I walked past it, I had an unnerving experience. I turned to the friend I was with and said: “You know, the Margaret Truman who lived in that house is a complete stranger to me. She seems like a totally separate person.” I have often wondered whether Pat Nixon’s illumination has had a similar effect on other former White House residents.
This portrait of Pat Nixon is all the more remarkable if we pause to consider what was happening in the nation her husband was attempting to govern. In the first year of the Nixon administration, America was racked by no fewer than forty thousand protests, bombings, and assorted acts of violence as the leaders of the antiwar movement, convinced they had driven Lyndon Johnson from office, sought to break
President Nixon too. Wherever Pat Nixon went, protesters shouted vile names at her. Another trick was showering her with confetti, then shouting: “If that was napalm, you’d be dead.”
The peace movement came to Washington for huge demonstrations on October 15, 1969, when a quarter of a million protesters gathered for Moratorium Day. The protests became more and more violent, until they reached a searing climax in the spring of 1971. This time, two hundred thousand marchers tried to shut down the federal government. They bombarded motorists with rocks and bottles, blocked traffic, fought pitched battles with police. At the White House, buses were drawn up in the surrounding streets in a protective cordon. Armed guards with loaded weapons and canisters of tear gas swarmed behind the fence. “It was like a war,” said one of Pat Nixon’s staff.
Any First Lady who was in the White House during such days might acquire a somewhat frozen smile. Throughout these tension-filled years, Pat Nixon also had to deal with something even more unnerving: her inability to communicate with the lonely, brooding man she had married. Again and again throughout his presidency, Richard Nixon revealed almost incredible gaps in his personal relationship with his wife. When Pat returned from Africa loaded with media praise, she talked to H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s two top aides. Neither so much as mentioned the trip to the President. When she complained to her husband about this affront, he simply noted it in his diary as a sort of oddity.
Even when Pat tried to reach out to Richard Nixon, he managed to convert the attempt into a negative. In early 1972, when he was grappling with a treacherous Communist offensive in Vietnam and violent protests at home, she told him she did not know how he was able to withstand the pressures of his job. The President noted this remark in his diary and added that Pat’s questions were “not intended to hurt.” She simply did not understand the problems he was facing.
There is a lot of hidden anguish in those words. They spring, I think, from the root quarrel in the Nixon marriage—Pat’s loathing for politics, which made her husband feel that he was perpetually engaged in a profession that caused her pain. Unquestionably they
tried to love each other across this gulf, but the gulf remained, a kind of black hole that sucked into it the good feelings that might have made Richard Nixon a more human, more stable President.
Yet the Nixons continued to function as a team. The historical record is undeniable on this point. Richard Nixon refused to submit to the protesters’ demand for an immediate, unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, and his wife displayed an equal toughness. “We are not going to buckle to these people,” she told her press secretary. On one of the 1971 protest’s worst days, she went ahead with a luncheon for congressional wives. On other days she maintained her full schedule.
From a political point of view, this toughing out produced the greatest payoff in American history: Richard Nixon’s stupendous victory in his run for reelection in 1972. The protesters turned off the vast majority of American voters—and they unglued the Democrats, impelling them to nominate Senator George McGovern, a candidate who simply did not represent the moderate majority of the party. I remember my mother saying, distress in her voice, during that tumultuous election: “This isn’t the Democratic Party that I knew.” As it turned out, our party got clobbered so badly, the corpse was barely recognizable by anybody. The Nixon team garnered 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17, winning 61 percent of the popular vote to his 38.