Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 23, 1993 TAG: 9306230200
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Boston Globe
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Yet she was, during the years in the wilderness and during the long campaigns, a woman alone.
Pat Nixon died of lung cancer Tuesday at 81 at home in Park Ridge, N.J.
She was in many ways the last Nixon traditional First Lady - strong and silent, long-suffering and loyal, without causes or ideology.
For 53 years Pat Nixon was comfortable first as Richard Nixon's wife, then as Tricia's and Julie's mother, and later as a grandmother of four. In the political world, where the currency is self-interest, she was selfless.
Even so, she was at the center of some of the greatest tumult and tempests of our time, from the Cold War and the Red Hunt to Vietnam and Watergate.
She was the first wife of a Republican president to have a substantial travel schedule of her own, and she made important contributions to her husband's battles to win a seat in the House in 1946, in the Senate in 1950 and as vice president in 1952.
She was born Thelma Catherine Ryan in a home in the Nevada hills that had no running water or electricity. Known as "Pat" because she was born the day before St. Patrick's Day in 1912, she neither sought attention nor enjoyed it. And it wasn't until Nixon's forced retirement from politics in 1974 that friends say the couple reached peace with their fate and, ultimately, with each other.
"In the post-Watergate period, Nixon found real solace in his marriage," said Roger Stone, a Republican consultant and now a Nixon confidant for the past decade. "He became reacquainted with her."
Their marriage was animated by one assumption: His occupation was politics, and her occupation was him. They both stated it simply, without rancor or resentment. "A wife's first duty is to help and encourage her husband in the career he has chosen," she once said.
The young Pat Nixon once said she believed "a woman must first and foremost be a homemaker."
She was that, and more. When Richard Nixon desperately fought back from charges that he had a secret campaign slush fund for the 1952 vice presidential campaign, he cited her Republican cloth coat as evidence of his family's financial probity in his "Checkers" speech; it was, for him and for millions of viewers, an unforgettable symbol of modesty and rectitude.
"She was strong, very protective of Nixon and yet lived with the constant tug of the public life," said John Whitaker, who was secretary of the Cabinet during the Nixon presidency.
"For her, there could be no criticism and no revelation of the despair she may have felt," Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote in a book about her mother.
Pat Nixon was warm and thoughtful in private. Stephen Hess, then a Nixon aide, remembers flying in a six-seater during the unsuccessful 1962 gubernatorial campaign in California and passing San Simeon, the Hearst castle. Nixon urged the pilot to circle again, saying Hess, who was from the East, had never seen it.
"The public never got to know her or appreciate her," said Rosemarie Codus, whose husband was the former president's deputy chief of protocol.
She didn't involve herself in the substance of politics. She once opened a news conference on San Francisco's Nob Hill by saying, "I don't discuss politics," which was blunt enough and also the truth.
"For better or for worse, she was a politician's wife, and knew what had to be done," wrote Stephen Ambrose, Richard Nixon's biographer.
President Clinton, who spoke by telephone with former President Nixon, said, "The American people appreciate the dignity with which she served as First Lady."
by CNB