In July 1976, Pat Nixon sat down in her California home and read a book about her own family. Within days, she suffered a stroke that robbed her of speech and the use of one side of her body. It was far from the first thing taken from her. She was not born Pat.
Thelma Catherine Ryan arrived on March 16, 1912, in Ely, Nevada, a copper mining town in the desert. Her father, an Irish-American sailor turned gold miner, nicknamed her Pat the day before St. Patrick’s Day. Though she used the name for life, she never legally changed it.
The family moved to a failed truck farm in Artesia, California, where her childhood was consumed by labor in the fields before and after school. There was no money and no holidays. It was a hard, plain upbringing. In 1926, her mother fell ill with cancer.
Pat was 13 and took over the household, cooking, cleaning, washing, and nursing a dying woman. Her mother died that year. Four years later, her father died of silicosis that had developed into tuberculosis. Pat nursed him, too.
She was 18 with both parents gone. She kept the house going for her brothers, worked as a bank janitor, pharmacy manager, typist, shop assistant, and telephone operator, and put herself through school. In 1931, at 19, she drove an elderly couple across the country to New York, where she worked for two years as an X-ray technician at a hospital treating tuberculosis patients—a striking choice for a young woman who had just watched her father die of a lung disease. She returned to California and earned a degree with honors from the University of Southern California while working several jobs, including occasional days as an extra on film sets.
In 1938, she joined a local theater group and met a serious young lawyer named Richard Nixon. He proposed that same evening. She said no. He kept asking for two years, occasionally even driving her to meet other men she was dating.
They married on June 21, 1940, at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. Neither had money. She was 28, he was 27. They had four nearly ordinary years together before the war, during which she worked as a government economist in Washington while he served in the Navy.
In 1946, he ran for Congress. She wrote his press releases, handled correspondence, answered phones, organized volunteers, and traveled with him. Newspapers described them as a team, accurately. Their daughters arrived: Tricia in February 1946 and Julie in July 1948.
In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower chose Nixon as his running mate. That September, the campaign nearly collapsed when a newspaper reported that Nixon had benefited from a fund set up by California businessmen. Nixon bought half an hour of national television time on September 23 to explain his personal finances. Pat sat beside him in an armchair on camera for 30 minutes while he itemized their mortgage, loans, lack of savings, and the 1950 Oldsmobile they drove.
He mentioned that his wife wore a respectable cloth coat, not fur, and that the children were keeping a cocker spaniel named Checkers. The speech worked. The telegrams flooded in, Eisenhower kept him, and the ticket won. It became one of the most famous broadcasts in American political history.
Pat Nixon hated every second of it. She had argued against giving the speech at all, and she was right that the mockery would follow them. She never got credit for her role in its success. Her presence, silent and composed while her private life was itemized before 60 million strangers, was part of why it worked.
Nobody described it as something she had done. In 1958, their motorcade in Caracas, Venezuela, was attacked by a crowd. Windows were smashed with pipes, and the Secret Service nearly lost control. Pat, in the car behind, remained composed throughout and spent the next day comforting others.
The agents who were there described a woman who did not flinch, did not cry, and asked after everybody else’s families. The pattern repeated over 16 years. Something frightening or humiliating would happen; she would absorb it without visible reaction, and the absence of reaction was later held against her as evidence that she did not feel things. In 1960, Nixon lost the presidency to John F.
Kennedy by roughly 100,000 votes out of 68 million. In 1962, he lost the California governor’s race and delivered his famous bitter press conference, telling reporters they would not have him to kick around anymore. After the second loss, Pat made him promise he would not run for office again. For six years, she finally had a private life.
The family moved to New York, he practiced law and made real money, the girls were in school, and people who knew her described her as visibly happier than at any other point in her adult life. In 1968, he ran for president anyway. She campaigned anyway. He won.
She stood on the platform holding the family Bibles at his inauguration on January 20, 1969. Over the next five and a half years, she was more productive than almost anyone in America noticed. The press had already decided what she was. The nickname was Plastic Pat.
It was used constantly in newspapers, magazines, and on television throughout her White House years. Reporters wrote about her fixed expression, her stiff posture, her smile that seemed to reveal nothing. What she was actually doing was this: she traveled to more countries than any first lady before her—around 80 in total across her years as second lady and first lady. In 1970, after a catastrophic earthquake in Peru killed tens of thousands, she flew there with relief supplies and spent two days in the disaster zone, measurably improving relations between the two countries.
In January 1972, she went to West Africa as the personal representative of the president and was mobbed in the streets of Accra and Monrovia, dancing at public ceremonies. She went with her husband to China in February 1972 and the Soviet Union in May, and in both places she went out alone to schools, hospitals, kitchens, factories, and a commune. The footage that came back gave millions of Americans their first ordinary view of daily life in those countries. At home, she stewarded the acquisition of more than 600 period paintings, furniture pieces, and historical objects for the White House—more than any other first lady.
She had the exterior lit at night, created guided tours for blind visitors who could touch the objects, tours in sign language, and pushed for wheelchair access throughout the building. She went further politically than her husband wanted. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment publicly and said a woman should be appointed to the Supreme Court at a time when none ever had been. The press stayed with Plastic Pat.
Part of the problem was structural: she followed Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson, one a global style figure, the other with a clearly labeled national cause. Pat came with neither a glamorous image nor a slogan. Her chosen theme was volunteerism, which is hard to photograph. She also refused to talk about herself, and a reporter who cannot get a personal answer will eventually write that there isn’t one.
She had grown up in a house where you did not complain and built an entire personality around not letting anything show. The quality that got her through her mother’s illness at 13 and her father’s at 18 was the exact quality that read as blankness on television 40 years later. Then, in June 1972, five men were arrested inside an office building in Washington. Over the following two years, everything she had built was buried underneath it.
The person who stepped forward to defend the family in public was not Pat Nixon. She was almost silent. It was her 25-year-old daughter. Julie Nixon was the younger daughter, born July 5, 1948, and by temperament the more outgoing.
At 16, she met David Eisenhower, the grandson of the man her father served under as vice president. They married on December 22, 1968, a month before her father’s inauguration. Dwight Eisenhower, gravely ill at Walter Reed Hospital, watched the ceremony on closed-circuit television. He died three months later.
Julie finished her degree at Smith while her father was in the White House. She was 20 when she married and 23 when Watergate broke. By 1973, the situation inside the family was this: the president could not credibly defend himself in public. His press secretary’s position was disintegrating.
His wife would not speak about it. Tricia was intensely private and found public appearances close to unbearable. So Julie did it. She became the administration’s most visible defender.
She gave interviews, went on television, traveled the country giving speeches, taking hostile questions from journalists who smelled blood, repeating with absolute conviction that her father was innocent and would be vindicated. She was in her mid-20s, had no press training, no staff, and no idea what was on the tapes. People who covered the period have said she was the single most effective advocate the White House had, and that she was also being used. Through 1973 and 1974, she was on the road almost constantly, doing television, radio, print interviews, university appearances, and party events at a pace that would have exhausted a professional campaign surrogate with a full staff.
She was asked, over and over, in increasingly hostile rooms, whether her father had lied. She said no every time. She was defending a version of events given to her by her own father—the only source a daughter would think to trust. The arithmetic is brutal.
Between the spring of 1973 and the summer of 1974, a young woman in her 20s staked her own credibility on a version of events that the recordings would eventually contradict. She has never wavered publicly in 50 years and has never expressed regret about defending him. When the end came in August 1974, both daughters argued against resignation. Julie wrote her father a note, left where he would find it, telling him she loved him and asking him to hold on a few more days.
He kept that note and wrote about it afterward as one of the hardest things he ever had to read. Pat Nixon was against resigning to the very end. They were overruled by events on August 8, 1974. The second daughter’s story is the photographic negative of her sister’s.
Patricia Nixon, called Tricia to avoid confusion with her mother, was born February 21, 1946. By every description, she was extraordinarily shy. Fair-haired, small, quiet, rarely quoted. Some press coverage was openly unkind, treating her reticence as strangeness.
She married Edward Finch Cox, a Princeton student from an old New York family who had worked for Ralph Nader—an unlikely match for the Nixon household that the family handled better than anyone expected. They married on June 12, 1971, in the Rose Garden of the White House. It was the first wedding ever held there and remains one of the most photographed weddings in American history. It rained all morning.
The decision about whether to move the ceremony indoors went back and forth for hours while 400 people waited. Tricia, who wanted the garden, held out. The rain stopped in the late afternoon, and the ceremony went ahead outside on wet grass, 20 minutes late. That is very nearly the last time most Americans saw her.
The wedding happened two days before the first installment of the Pentagon Papers appeared in the New York Times, and almost exactly a year before the Watergate break-in. The photographs show a family at the absolute peak of everything. Within three years, all five of them would walk out of that house for the last time. After the wedding, Tricia moved to New York and withdrew almost entirely.
Her son was born in March 1979. Her husband built a long career in law and Republican politics in New York. She stayed out of it. She has given few interviews in 50 years.
There is no memoir, no column, no book. Whatever she thinks about the presidency, the resignation, or the coverage of her own wedding, she has kept it. On the evening of August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon told the country he would resign the following day. Pat spent the day quietly organizing the packing.
When told the official photographer wanted a picture of the family together that night, she objected. The family had been crying. There was no reason to record them that way. The photograph was taken anyway.
Five people in a line holding hands, all attempting to smile. It remains one of the most uncomfortable images in the history of the American presidency. The next morning, the family came to the East Room. The president gave a rambling, unscripted farewell about his mother, his father’s lemon ranch, about not hating your enemies because hating them means you destroy yourself.
Pat stood beside him in dark glasses. Tricia and Julie stood behind. He did not mention his wife. Then they walked out to the South Lawn, and he turned at the top of the helicopter steps and raised both arms.
Pat Nixon never went back. In 19 years after that morning, she did not return to the White House and gave no interviews about any of it. The one thing she said about the tapes, later, has stayed in the record. She described them as private correspondence, things said in confidence, never meant for anyone else, and said she wished they had been destroyed before it happened.
They went to San Clemente, California. What followed was worse than most people know. There were enormous legal bills, the real prospect of prosecution until the pardon in September, tax liabilities, no staff. Within weeks, Nixon was hospitalized in critical condition with a blood clot in his leg.
Pat kept the house running and stayed almost entirely out of sight. She swam, gardened, read, and managed a household containing a man who had lost the only thing he had ever wanted and had nearly died trying to absorb it. Then, in 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published The Final Days, a detailed reconstruction of the last months of the presidency, including painful descriptions of the marriage and of Pat herself that the family disputed. She read it.
Within days, in July 1976, she suffered a stroke. It paralyzed her left side and affected her speech. She was 64. The family has always believed the book and the stroke were connected.
It cannot be proven. Nobody who knew her doubted it. The recovery was in character. She refused most help, worked on her left hand for hours a day squeezing a rubber ball, relearning how to hold a cup, practicing words she had lost.
She was walking and speaking again within a year, but never fully returned. The couple moved east to be nearer the daughters and grandchildren. In August 1983, she had a second, milder stroke. In 1987, a cancerous growth was removed from her mouth.
She developed emphysema. Pat Nixon had been a heavy smoker for decades and was never once photographed smoking in public. In December 1992, she was found to have lung cancer. By June 1993, she was at home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, with her family around her.
June 21, 1993, was her 53rd wedding anniversary. She was awake for it. Her daughters were there, and they looked through the anniversary cards and flowers with her. Later that day, she lost consciousness.
She died the following morning at 81, with her husband and both daughters at the bedside. Her funeral was held at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, on the grounds of the house where her husband was born. Billy Graham officiated. In front of the cameras, Richard Nixon, the most guarded man in American public life, sat and wept openly and could not stop.
Several people present described it as the most shocking thing they had ever seen him do. He lived 10 more months. He died on April 22, 1994, and was buried beside her. Her gravestone carries a line of her own: that even when people cannot speak your language, they can tell whether you have love in your heart.
Then the sisters fell out. It began quietly in the late 1990s, over the Nixon Library, the only presidential library in the country receiving no federal funding and therefore permanently short of money. The trigger was the will of Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, their father’s closest friend for 40 years. Rebozo died in 1998 and left the great majority of his estate—around $19 million—to the library, on the condition that spending be directed by a three-person board: Tricia, Julie, and another old family friend.
The sisters disagreed about what to do with it. Tricia wanted the money kept under the small board’s control as the will specified. Julie, siding with the library’s executive director, wanted it handed to the foundation’s full 24-member board. Underneath the legal question was an older one: whether the family should run their father’s legacy or whether professionals should.
Lawsuits were filed in Florida and California in 2002. One attempted to remove Tricia from the board and failed. The press reported the sisters stopped speaking for roughly five years. The money sat frozen in probate the entire time.
Nineteen million dollars left to honor their father, unusable, while his two daughters fought. It ended in August 2002 with a settlement in Miami. Afterward, they posed together with Julie’s arm around her older sister’s shoulders. Both insisted the reports had been overblown and that it had been a straightforward difference of opinion made monstrous by years of being written about.
Both sisters sit on the board of the Richard Nixon Foundation today. Julie Nixon Eisenhower is 78. In 1986, she published a biography of her mother built on family papers and interviews, largely because she had watched the country decide who Pat Nixon was without asking. It is the book that put the mining town, the tuberculosis, and the 600 White House acquisitions back into the record.
Julie spent her 20s defending her father in front of hostile crowds and her 40s making the case for her mother in print. It is the reason most of what you have just read is known at all. Tricia Nixon Cox is 79, still in New York, still saying almost nothing.
And the woman at the center of it all lies on the lawn in Yorba Linda, a few steps from the little house, next to the man she told to stop running.