On September 23, 1952, more than 58 million Americans watched a young California senator defend himself on live television against allegations of financial impropriety. Richard Nixon’s political career hung in the balance, and he had brought his wife to the broadcast studio. She sat in an armchair just outside camera range. He spoke about their mortgage, their car, and her coat.
She sat perfectly still. That woman was Pat Nixon, and the press would later call her “Plastic Pat”—stiff, controlled, unknowable. What the public did not know, and what researchers have only begun to uncover in recent decades, is that she privately held beliefs that directly contradicted the public positions of her husband’s administration. Her life was a long exercise in standing perfectly still while history moved around her.
She was born Thelma Ryan on March 16, 1912, in the mining town of Ely, Nevada. Her father, William Ryan, worked in copper mines and named her for the saint whose feast day was near. Before she was a year old, the family moved to a small truck farm in Artesia, California, where the work was constant and life was hard. Pat’s mother died in 1925, when Pat was 13.
She took over the household, cooking and cleaning while still attending school. Her father died five years later, in 1930, leaving her entirely alone at 18. She later said simply, “I have made my own decisions ever since my father died. ”
She moved to New York, enrolled in a radiology course at Columbia University, and worked in a hospital as a secretary and X-ray technician.
After two years, she returned to California and earned a degree from the University of Southern California in 1937. She reportedly worked as a film extra in Hollywood during those years to pay her way. She moved to Whittier, California, to teach typing and shorthand at a local high school. She built a quiet, self-sufficient life and seemed genuinely at ease with it.
In the autumn of 1938, a friend persuaded her to audition for a local amateur theater production. At one of the first rehearsals, a young lawyer named Richard Nixon crossed the room and introduced himself. Within hours of meeting her, he told her he intended to marry her. She thought he was ridiculous.
She was not looking for a husband. But he kept coming. For two years, he drove her to dates with other men and waited in the car until they were over. He wrote her letters and showed up uninvited.
On June 21, 1940, Pat Ryan married Richard Nixon in a small ceremony in Riverside, California. She had not asked for a political life. What she wanted was a quiet existence in a California suburb. What she got instead was Richard Nixon’s ambitions, and she carried them without complaint for 34 years.
When he ran for Congress in 1946, she addressed envelopes and answered phones. She stood on stages and smiled at strangers who had come to look at the candidate’s wife. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower chose Nixon as his running mate. Almost immediately, a newspaper report accused Nixon of maintaining a secret political fund supplied by California businessmen.
Eisenhower’s advisers pressed for Nixon’s removal from the ticket. Nixon decided to go on television. On the afternoon of September 23, 1952, Nixon arrived at a CBS studio in Los Angeles visibly shaken. According to accounts from those present, he turned to Pat and said quietly, “I just don’t think I can go through with this one.
” She took his hand and said, “Of course you can. ” She walked him to the stage. For 30 minutes, Nixon spoke directly to the American people. He listed everything he owned and everything he owed.
He talked about his dog. At one point, he mentioned his wife: “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything. ”
The camera turned to her.
She was smiling. One reporter described her as looking stricken beneath the smile. Another said she was visible and still, the way a well-placed piece of furniture is visible and still. She had been summoned to this room to serve a purpose.
She was serving it. The speech worked. Thousands of telegrams flooded the Republican National Committee within hours. Eisenhower kept Nixon on the ticket, the fund story was buried, and the crisis passed.
What it meant to Pat to sit in a national broadcast and hear her coat named as evidence of her husband’s virtue, the historical record does not say. She was not asked. The years that followed brought more of the same. She campaigned beside him through the vice presidency, through a defeat, through a comeback.
By January 1969, when Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th President of the United States, Pat had spent nearly three decades standing at the edges of rooms where decisions were made, keeping her thoughts to herself. The White House years changed something. She told an interviewer once, when asked what her signature cause would be as First Lady, that she did not have one. “People are my project,” she said.
It was the truth of how she operated. She traveled to 83 countries during her time in the White House. She visited active war zones in Vietnam, earthquake rubble in Peru, and the capitals of 30 African nations as the first First Lady to travel to that continent. She sought out the hospitals, the schools, and the orphanages wherever she went.
A Peruvian general watching her move through the ruins of an earthquake zone in 1970 said afterward that her visit had done more for relations between their countries than anything America had done in a hundred years. There was another Pat Nixon that existed entirely outside the public record, visible only to the small number of people close enough to the White House to see it. She privately told aides and confidants that she supported the Equal Rights Amendment. She told people she knew that she believed women had the right to make their own decisions about abortion before it was safe to say so as the wife of a Republican president.
She said she thought a woman should be named to the Supreme Court. According to biographer Heath Hardinge Lee, drawing on research at the Nixon Presidential Library, Pat Nixon raised the question of a female Supreme Court Justice repeatedly with White House staff. A candidate was identified, but the nomination did not go forward. She said nothing about it publicly.
She also arranged, around 1971, a private visit for Jacqueline Kennedy to the White House. Kennedy had not returned to the residence since the day she left after her husband’s funeral in 1963. Pat Nixon called her and arranged for Kennedy and her children to visit privately. No press, no announcement, no cameras.
In 1972, Pat Nixon was voted the most admired woman in the world. Nixon was reelected in a landslide. From the outside, the White House had never looked more secure. On the morning of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex.
They had been there to bug the phones. Their connection to the Nixon reelection campaign would take months to surface fully. Pat Nixon read about it in the newspapers. The man whose career she had helped build had installed a secret recording system in the Oval Office, and she learned of its existence from the front page of a newspaper, like everyone else.
According to biographer Heath Hardinge Lee, drawing on research at the Nixon Presidential Library, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman had made a deliberate effort to limit Pat’s access to her husband during the Watergate period. They did not want her advising him.
They did not want her voice in the room. The woman who had been Nixon’s closest political confidant for 25 years was kept at a careful distance from the truth. When she understood the tapes existed, she argued that they should be destroyed while they were still legally private property. Nixon did not listen.
She could not defend him publicly with information she did not have. She could only stand where she had always stood, visible when the camera required it, invisible when it did not. As the summer of 1974 moved toward its end, Nixon began to consider resignation. Pat opposed it.
According to her daughter Julie’s account, she told him he should stay and fight, that resigning would be surrendering to people who had been wrong about him. Later, she told Julie, “Watergate is the only crisis that ever got me down, and I know I will never live to see the vindication. The thing that’s so sad is that I don’t think there is a man living who has more noble qualities, who is as kind and thoughtful and unselfish. ”
Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974.
The following morning, more than 400 White House staff members gathered in the East Room to hear him say goodbye. Pat stood near the front in a yellow dress. Nixon spoke for nearly 30 minutes. His voice broke several times.
He did not say his wife’s name once. Henry Kissinger, who was present that morning, wrote in his memoirs that Pat must have suffered the most grievously of all. Historian Stephen Ambrose called the omission odd and insensitive. Pat Nixon did not wince.
Or if she did, no camera was close enough to record it. When the speech was over, the family walked down the red carpet toward the waiting helicopter. Nixon raised both arms in his signature V sign. Pat followed.
The helicopter rose from the lawn and turned west. She did not cry where anyone could see her. George H. W.
Bush, present on the lawn that morning, wrote in his diary that Nixon had looked just awful. He did not write what Pat Nixon’s face looked like. Nobody was watching closely enough to record it. The helicopter carried them to California and to La Casa Pacifica, the house on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean that they had called the Western White House.
Now it was simply home. The phone calls stopped coming. The world moved on with remarkable speed. In October 1974, barely two months after the resignation, Nixon was admitted to the hospital with phlebitis.
The surgery was serious. He went into shock from internal bleeding and required a second operation. For several days, the outcome was genuinely uncertain. Pat Nixon was at his bedside.
She had been kept from the truth during the worst of Watergate. She had stood on the South Lawn and not been named in his farewell speech. Now she sat in a hospital room and held the hand of the man who had done all of that. She stayed.
He recovered. They returned to San Clemente. Nixon gradually began the long rehabilitation of his public image through interviews and memoirs. Pat did not rehabilitate anything.
She had no project, no office, no role to fill. The structure that had organized her adult life was simply gone. In 1984, a decade after the resignation, Richard Nixon was asked in an interview about the nickname that had followed his wife for 30 years. He said, “She was called Plastic Pat because she was my wife.
” Just that, matter-of-factly. The nickname had never been about her at all. On the afternoon of July 7, 1976, Pat Nixon was at La Casa Pacifica, a book open in her lap. She felt something shift inside her skull.
She set the book down, walked through the house and up the stairs, and lay down on the bed. She did not call her husband. She did not call her daughters. She kept it to herself.
Hours later, an ambulance was called. The following day, the New York Appellate Division formally disbarred Richard Nixon from the practice of law. Pat was in Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Her neurologist, Dr.
John Moser, told reporters she had suffered a stroke of 35 to 50 percent completeness. He added, “Pressures in her life certainly could have been a contributing factor. ”
She recovered, partially. She was 64 years old.
She had a second stroke in 1983. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992. She did not complain. This is documented in the accounts of every person who knew her in those final years.
When people asked how she was managing, she said she did not have time to be depressed. On June 22, 1993, she died at home in Park Ridge, New Jersey. She was 81 years old. The obituaries said the things obituaries say: that she had served with dignity, that she had traveled more countries than any First Lady before her, that she had been a devoted wife and mother.
They did not say she had been a feminist who supported abortion rights while serving as the face of a conservative administration. They did not say she had been kept from the truth by the men who ran her husband’s White House. They did not say she had suffered a stroke alone and walked upstairs without telling anyone. Richard Nixon died 10 months later, in April of 1994.
They are buried side by side at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, a few feet from the small wood frame house where Nixon was born. Pat Nixon had built herself from nothing, traveled the world, sat in an armchair on national television while her husband named her coat, stood on the South Lawn on the worst morning of their lives and not flinched, and walked upstairs alone when her body finally gave. She had, as she once said, made her own decisions ever since her father died. All of them.
Every one. The stillness was not emptiness. It was not plastic. It was the presence of a woman who had decided very early and very privately how much of herself the world was entitled to see.
She gave it exactly that much. Not one thing more.