The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon
The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A new, revolutionary look into the brilliant life of Pat Nixon.
In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June of 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974, forging her own graceful path between the protocols of the strait-laced mid-century and the bra-burning Sixties and Seventies.
Pat was a highly travelled First Lady, visiting eighty-three countries during her tenure. After a devastating earthquake in Peru in 1970, she personally flew in medical supplies and food to hard-hit areas, meeting one-on-one with victims of the tragedy. The First Lady’s 1972 trips with her husband to China and to Russia were critical to the detente that resulted. Back in the US, Pat greatly expanded upon previous preservation efforts in the White House, obtaining more art and antique objects than any other First Lady. In the domestic arena, she was progressive on women’s issues, favoring the Equal Rights Amendment and backing a targeted effort to get more women into high level government jobs. Pat strongly supported nominating a woman for the Supreme Court. She was pro-choice, supporting women’s reproductive rights publicly even before the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973.
When asked to define her “signature” First Lady agenda, she defied being put into a box, often saying: “People are my project.” The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Heath Hardage Lee presents readers with the essential nature of this First Lady, an empathetic, adventurous, self-made woman who wanted no power or influence, but who connected warmly with both ordinary Americans and people from different cultures she encountered world-wide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Lee (The League of Wives) paints an intriguingly sympathetic portrait of first lady Pat Nixon (1912–1993), framing her as an unfairly maligned figure (she was famously nicknamed "Plastic Pat" for her apparent aloofness) who deserves credit for having "moved the needle substantially forward for women's issues." It was during Nixon's stint as second lady that the press first tagged her as "too perfect" (she had "a doll's terrifying poise," according to one journalist). Though such perceptions were "partially a problem of Pat's making" because of her reticence with the press, Lee argues that Nixon was still greatly misinterpreted and contends that "cold and calculating" presidential aide H.R. Haldeman worked insidiously to build her negative reputation. Haldeman, incensed by Nixon's pro-woman political agenda (including her support for abortion rights), attempted to isolate the first lady politically and socially; he covertly took over East Wing operations with his own aides, advised others not to socialize with her, and packaged her for the media "like a 1960s Barbie doll." Lee's fine-grained biography, though elegantly written, really only pops when the villainous Haldeman enters the scene ("One former staff person claims Haldeman told them directly that the president should... put in a mental institution"). Still, readers in search of a new perspective on the Watergate era will find it here.
