The Woman in the Cloth Coat

By Bonnie Angelo

Somehow Pat Nixon never quite captured the fancy of the American public. The cameras that caught the angular planes of her face missed the soft contours of her heart. Her Republican, cloth-coat persona was no match for the glamour of her predecessors: Jacqueline Kennedy, international trendsetter, and Lady Bird Johnson, poetic beautifier of highways. But most likely it was because Pat Nixon stood by her man in the best Tammy Wynette fashion. And from his ambitious first days in politics to the catastrophic final days, her man could not shake the visceral distrust of the public and the media.

As a result, the cool, composed Pat Nixon of endless bunting-draped platforms obliterated the warm Pat Nixon who put the shy at ease and never forgot a birthday. She excelled in keeping the White House a national treasure, acquiring more fine American furnishings than any other First Lady. Thanks to her, James Monroe's special-order French bergere was returned to its rightful place in the Blue Room, and Gilbert Stuart portraits of John Quincy Adams and his wife replaced copies in the Red Room. "She wouldn't allow anybody to give her the credit," says White House curator Rex Scouten. She initiated Christmas candlelight tours, enjoyed by more than half a million visitors, and seasonal garden tours in April and October. She had White House police who served as guides wear jackets and slacks instead of uniforms to avoid intimidating the tourists. And everyone who thrills to the White House bathed in golden light by night is seeing another souvenir of Pat Nixon's attentive care of that historic home.

In 28 turbulent years in the political vortex, she got scant credit for her lasting contributions as First Lady, or even for being a real person behind the tautly composed image. Mostly forgotten is her expansion of the role of First Lady as foreign emissary, on her own. She loved traveling and blossomed visibly in direct ratio to the distance between her mission and the inhibitions imposed on her at home. In 1970 she warmed the frost between the U.S. and Peru when she traveled to towns destroyed by earthquakes, delivering aid and personal comfort to survivors. In West Africa in 1972 she was cheered by huge throngs, exotic tribal kings and bare-breasted dancers. At home, in the protest years, she met with demonstrators in Los Angeles' Watts ghetto and heard out hostile students on campuses.

She was too self-effacing to write her memoirs, but it was quite a story. She was a child of the frontier, born in scruffy Ely, Nevada; a daughter of the Depression, helping coax a living out of four acres of Southern California soil; a wife of the '50s, on the ladder to success. Christened Thelma Catherine Ryan, she was dubbed Pat by her Irish-American father, a miner, to mark her arrival on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. Eventually she made the nickname legal, but somehow she was always more a Thelma than a Patricia, the kind of girl that in those days was called spunky. Life was marginal -- an ice cream cone was a special treat. When she was 13, her mother died of cancer; her father was claimed five years later by silicosis, the miners' scourge. She nursed them both.

On her own at 18, Pat Ryan put herself through the University of Southern California, graduating cum laude. Her first job was teaching at Whittier High School, where the lively Miss Ryan was the students' favorite. At an amateur- theater try-out, she met young lawyer Richard Nixon, who proposed on the first date. "I thought he was crazy," she declared years later. He persevered for three years, and in 1940 they were married.

Pat never wanted a life in politics. But her husband did, so she gave it her all. "I do or die," she once said, "but I never cancel out." She was such the perfect wife and mother -- pressing his pants, making dresses for daughters Tricia and Julie, doing her own housework even as the Vice President's wife -- that she was tagged "Plastic Pat." Washington sophisticates just didn't get it: that was the real Pat Nixon doing those homely family tasks, loving the life that had always been on the other side of the candy-store window. Far from plastic, she was steel, celebrating his victories even when she was often overlooked, biting back tears at his humiliations.

In the end she turned her back on the public that in her view had destroyed their life. She no longer owed it anything. She never again entered the White House. She became virtually a recluse at their home in San Clemente, California, seeing almost no one except her family, especially the four grandchildren (Julie and David Eisenhower have three children, Tricia and Edward Cox have a son), whom she adored. In 1976 she suffered her first stroke. Her family put the blame on the Woodward-Bernstein book The Final Days, as if reading about the nightmare was worse than living it. She recovered from that stroke and another after they moved to New York in 1980. Beset by emphysema and then lung cancer, she grew ever more frail. Last week, after 81 years, the life that had been a study in selflessness came to a quiet close, surrounded by the family who understood the real Pat Ryan Nixon.