Kati Marton (30 page)

California at that time was a magnet for people prepared to give of their last measure to achieve their dreams. The citrus groves, the solitary pumping stations, the makeshift houses that dotted the dusty roads where both Nixons grew up marked a place of opportunity for only the most determined. The Nixons and the Ryans, of Irish and German stock, were of that unsentimental, dogged breed, prepared to keep moving until things worked out. Both families were religious, but theirs was a faith based on the belief that success comes to the tenacious, the uncomplaining men or women who put in the longest hours. Built in to that faith was a suspicion of the privileged—the wealthy, the smooth, the charming—to whom success comes too easily.

That bred-in-the-bone resentment fueled the Nixons’ rise—as well as his eventual fall. “If your anger is deep enough,” Nixon once told a friend, “and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.” This bitter summation reveals a man whose success did not diminish his anger or his suspicion. “I can’t
let my hair down with anyone,” he once confessed to the journalist Stewart Alsop, “not even with my family.” Maintaining the facade was exhausting work, so Nixon’s favorite companion was himself.

Pat was exceptionally independent for a woman of her generation. She colored her hair and wore bright red nail polish. But like her mother-in-law, Hannah Nixon, she was accustomed to hard work and keeping her own counsel. She had been the family’s mainstay, keeping house and looking after her two brothers. “I am never tired,” she once declared. Her father, like Nixon’s, was a temperamental Irishman, so Pat learned to placate and look the other way.

Dick’s courtship of Pat was as misleading about who he was as were his future political campaigns. “Dearest Heart,” he wrote her, “I want to work with you toward the destiny you are bound to fulfill. As I have told you many times, living together will make us both grow—and by reason of it we shall realize our dreams.” But even in courtship, he revealed his view that life was about struggle and called for a defiant attitude. Happiness was not a quality Nixon valued. When, much later, television journalist Diane Sawyer asked him if he was happy, Nixon cut her off, dismissing the question as both “stupid and trivial.” “It is our job to go forth together and accomplish great ends and we shall do it too,” he wrote Pat. And then, in a seemingly preemptive apology for all he would put her through, he added, “Whatever happens I shall always be with you—loving you more every hour and attempting to let you feel that love in your heart and life.” Whatever passion, spontaneity and imagination he was capable of, Pat had stirred in him. For a brief period, she was the focus of all his drive and ambition. Never again did Nixon display affection so freely, except perhaps toward his daughters. His obsession with political success soon shut out anything else in his life.

Nixon married an ambitious woman who saw him as “going places.” He promised horizons rare for Pat’s generation. What he did not make clear was how he was going to get there. “There was no talk of politics or anything of that type,” Pat said later, “I didn’t even think in terms of that. He was doing well as a lawyer. He was well liked by everybody. He was always president of some group … so I knew that he would be successful in whatever he undertook.” She aspired to the good life as the wife of an upwardly mobile California lawyer. A product of her time and
place, Pat felt that a wife’s duty was to help fulfill her husband’s ambitions. But at the outset it was a marriage of equals, with the emotional advantage tilted in her favor. Nixon had been the cloying supplicant. With both of them fearful of emotions, communication between them stayed on the surface. Subjects more complex than those of everyday life were left unspoken. Thus began a lifetime of indirection and dismal mis-communication. Pat read in his intensity a zeal to make the world better. For, after all, Dick worshipped his remote mother, who retreated to her closet to pray and who dreamed her son would achieve great things. (Pat did not much like her crude, contentious father-in-law and discounted the father’s influence on the son.)

In 1942, Pat had a premonition of what she had given up for this insistent young man. Like Lyndon Johnson, Dick joined the navy, leaving his wife on her own. “These many months you have been away,” she wrote him, “have been full of interest and had I not missed you so much and had I been footloose, could have been extremely happy.” And then, with a gentle warning that was really a plea, she wrote him, “So, Sweet, you’ll always have to love me lots and never let me change my feelings for you.” The intensity and the novelty of their early love—his particularly—compensated for their natural reserve. “I may not say much when I’m with you,” he wrote her, “but all of me loves all of you all the time.” She knew he was a loner, but felt she had penetrated his solitude. “I’m antisocial I guess,” he wrote her, “but except for you, I’d rather be by myself as a steady diet rather than with most of any of the people I know. I like to do what I want, when I want. Only where you are concerned do I feel otherwise, Dear One.”

His image enhanced by his snappy naval uniform, Nixon returned to launch the most unlikely career imaginable for such a man. In politics, he soon displayed the drive and tenacity of an Olympic champion. His first campaign in 1946, for a congressional seat, was against a five-term Democratic liberal, Jerry Voorhis. Nixon quickly developed a style of gloves-off campaigning that disoriented his opponent with insinuations impossible to prove but equally difficult to disprove. His skillful use of the nascent Red scare to tar his rivals with the dreaded label “Commie” won him two elections and the notice of Republican Party kingmakers. The paranoia of the time and the man meshed.

Pat and Dick adjusted to the California campaign trail. Within hours of their daughter Tricia’s birth, Pat was researching congressional districts for her husband. She toned down her red nail polish, gave up smoking in public and, bit by bit, learned to drain her comments of any irreverence, personality or, God forbid, controversy. She had observed, first in the Voorhis campaign, then when her husband ran for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, what strong emotions Dick aroused in people. She came to realize that he was going to be a lightning rod for the rest of their lives. If she did anything that remotely fueled controversy, his career, the core of their existence, would be threatened. It was easier to assume the role her husband chose for her—a wife beyond reproach. A look of surreal serenity, the frozen smile that would soon earn her the Plastic Pat label, became her permanent expression. She had made her choice; she would believe in him. It was not in her nature to calculate the emotional cost of her sublimation.

Eight years into their marriage, her role as equal partner was over. “Once I make a decision, she supports it,” he pronounced. The more self-effacing she became, the more he took her for granted. Whatever limited need he had for human interaction, Nixon transferred to a series of political operatives and subordinates. Murray Chotiner, a young Republican lawyer from Los Angeles, was the first aggressive, slash-and-burn campaign manager who preempted Pat’s relationship with her husband. When Pat walked into a broadcast studio just before he was about to go on the air, Dick barked at her, “You know I never want to be interrupted when I am working!” He no longer welcomed her serious contribution to what was becoming his business alone. He could not take criticism from her or anyone else, so her role was reduced to bolstering his self-esteem. Always reticent, Pat became even more so.

It may not have been the marriage Pat once dreamed of, but the young California couple arrived in Washington in the winter of 1946 with bright prospects. The times were ripe with possibilities for Congressman Dick Nixon. Domestic terror marched in step with the deepening Cold War. J. Edgar Hoover told the House Un-American Activities Committee that communism was “a condition akin to a disease that spreads like an epidemic.” Fighting it presented a fine opportunity for Nixon, who threw himself into his job. Dinners at home were reduced to once a
week. He had no hobbies, no pastimes. “He can keep right on thinking about working at politics from the time he wakes up until he goes to sleep,” Pat ruefully noted. Pat and Dick as a political couple were a thing of the past. She still believed her husband capable of great things, still clung to the belief that he was controversial only because he was so independent. There was not much left of her own sense of “destiny.” She was his meticulous wife and the mother of his two children. Her role in his career was never to embarrass him and to look at him when he spoke, no matter how many times she had heard the same speech.

Nixon’s reward came only six years after he arrived in the capital. His anticommunism and his willingness to take the low road in campaigning had catapulted him to national prominence. General Dwight D. Eisenhower picked him to be his running mate in 1952. The general saw Nixon’s tough campaign tactics as complementing his own more conciliatory style, and also felt Nixon could help him in the West. Pat was less than thrilled by the honor. After six years of public life, she was tired and bruised. Her husband was the most vilified man in American politics. She was sick of campaigning, though her husband admitted she was better at it than he. She knew what a presidential campaign would require of the party’s attack dog and his wife. She had borne up, done her duty and now wanted to head back to California, to the life she believed she had been promised. Nor did she want to leave her four- and six-year-old daughters. All this she told her husband.

He did not argue with her. They claimed they never argued about anything. Direct confrontation was not their way. He retreated and let Chotiner speak to Pat. Chotiner was powerfully persuasive. “I guess I can make it though another campaign,” she sighed. Her husband then threw her a small bone as a reward. Before plunging into the presidential campaign that would take her away from her children for weeks at a time, Pat and Dick spent a few days in Hawaii. “It was the last carefree vacation I ever had,” she later recalled.

AS WAS SO OFTEN
the case in Richard Nixon’s life, his moment of glory was shadowed by controversy. In the midst of the 1952 presidential campaign, press reports revealed that a group of seventy-six southern California businessmen had contributed to an illegal, secret fund that paid Nixon $900 a month to campaign continuously for Republican candidates. Suddenly, it was payback time for Senator Nixon the ruthless campaigner, his first taste of his own brand of personal attack. Nixon retreated into solitary gloom, unreachable to all, including his wife. “Dick was sitting in a huge leather chair,” a House colleague recalled. “his arms stretched out, his hands dangling in that characteristic way of his …. I knew I was in the presence of total despair.” Nixon knew Eisenhower was under pressure to dump him from the ticket. He had one chance to save himself—in a nationally televised speech. But two minutes before he was to go on, he was gripped by anxiety and threatened to bolt. Pat calmly took charge. “You must fight back,” she urged him. Nixon rallied and delivered the legendary “Checkers” speech.

July 12, 1952. A sight rarely seen later in their careers: Richard Nixon, then thirty-nine years old, and Pat, as he was chosen to be Eisenhower’s running mate.

Nixon avoided political death, but in the process he devastated his wife. Again, he demonstrated how insignificant she was to him. Long before personal revelations became a staple of political life, he violated this most private woman’s dignity. While his wife sat smiling her tight
smile nearby, he laid out the family’s finances and volunteered that, unlike corrupt Democrats, Pat did not even own a fur coat. “A Republican cloth coat” was good enough for his wife, he assured Americans. In his attempt to win sympathy, he went further.