Julie's Tribute

By Ann Blackman

He besieged her with love letters and flowers and took her for long walks on endless stretches of beach. He dressed up in an old raccoon coat to take her to Topsy, a local nightclub; he loved to hold her in his arms during the tango and foxtrot. On the second anniversary of their meeting, after she continued to turn down his proposals of marriage, the young swain wrote her, "When the winds blow and the rains fall and the sun shines through the clouds . . . he still resolves as he did then, that nothing so fine ever happened to him or anyone else as falling in love with Thee -- my dearest heart."

Hard to believe, but that love-struck suitor was Richard Nixon.

The future President's courtship of his wife Patricia is detailed in Julie Nixon Eisenhower's sympathetic account of the trials and triumphs of the family Nixon as seen through her mother's eyes. Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, to be published in November by Simon & Schuster, portrays the former First Lady as an intensely private woman from whom the entire family, particularly her husband, drew strength.

Julie's book comes on the heels of Husband David Eisenhower's biography of his grandfather, Eisenhower: At War 1943-1945, published in September. "I wrote my book for a lot of reasons," Julie said last week. "I wanted to give * a full picture of my parents together, because so many times they've been viewed from controversy." Julie strips away the image of her mother as "Plastic Pat" to show a woman who held hands with her husband in White House receiving lines when she thought no one was looking, who escaped the claustrophobic atmosphere of the White House by occasionally sneaking out after dinner to stroll the streets of downtown Washington. Rather than complain about the frigid air conditioning in King Faisal's guesthouse on a visit to Saudi Arabia, Julie writes, her mother spent the night trying to keep warm by huddling in a marble bathtub filled with bedding.

Julie sets the stage for her book with a description of her mother as a wistful young woman from Artesia, Calif., whose childhood was painful. She put herself through college and became a schoolteacher in Whittier, Calif., where she caught the eye of young Nixon. After a long courtship, she decided to accept the diamond engagement ring he sent to her classroom in a May basket. And she has stuck by him ever since.

But the details Julie provides of the Watergate years are what make the book particularly touching. Drawing from her own diaries as well as those of her father and her sister Tricia, she recounts the painful months leading up to Nixon's resignation in 1974, the helplessness the family felt as events unfolded, and the loneliness of their subsequent exile in San Clemente.

Pat Nixon thought her husband should burn the Watergate tapes, Julie reports. Her mother was so upset by the scandalous disclosures that she stopped reading the newspapers, and she believed to the end that Nixon had done nothing to require a pardon. For her the pardon was "the saddest day of my life."

While recovering from a debilitating stroke -- suffered in part, says Julie, because her mother read Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's account of Nixon's fight for his presidency, The Final Days -- Pat Nixon was resting on the patio one afternoon in San Clemente, looking through the window into the house where her husband sat. "Watergate is the only crisis that ever got me down," she told her daughter. "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. He's always thinking about the country and not himself." For Julie Nixon Eisenhower, both her parents have suffered enough.