The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Those who knew Nixon after the breakup and far into the future had theories about the effect the breakup had on him. “She broke his heart,” said Hubert Perry, a Whittier contemporary and son of the family friend who later helped launch Nixon in politics. Bryce Harlow, a longtime friend and senior White House adviser, believed that in his youth Nixon had been “hurt very deeply by somebody he trusted . . . hurt so badly he never got over it and never trusted anybody again.” Harlow guessed that this person had been a friend, or a parent, or a lover.

  If there were such wounds, the deepest and most lasting were surely inflicted as much by a parent as by a sweetheart. When Ola Welch had at last written begging Nixon to stop his letters, he replied as follows:

  February 2nd, 1936

  Dear Ola Florence,

  Finally I have become wise! And although I regret having embarrassed you with my letters, I don’t regret the feeling I’ve had towards you for the past year. In the year and a half I’ve been at Duke, I’ve realized more than ever the perfection, the splendor, the grandeur of my mother’s character. Incapable of selfishness she is to me a supreme ideal.* And you have taken your place with her in my heart—as an example for which all men should strive. Old memories are slowly fading away. New ones are taking their place. But I shall always remember the kindness, the beauty, the loveliness that was, that is, and shall forever be Ola Florence Welch.

  Your friend,

  Richard Nixon

  What can Ola have thought of this, a “last” letter from a lover faced with losing her to another man, that focused on his mother?

  If Ola’s rejection affected Nixon so greatly, it may have been because he had dared to utter to her the words he was to report—approvingly—that his mother had never spoken to him: “I love you.” For any man or woman to say those three words aloud for the first time is, or should be, a large step. For Nixon, coming from a home where affection was never shown physically and where “love” went unspoken, it must have been a giant one.

  Sadly, his “I love you” had failed to convince Ola. She told an interviewer years later that she thought Nixon “may have been playacting” when he spoke of his feelings.1

  Nixon’s six-year romance with Ola had begun when they were actors in the make-believe world of a school play. His next relationship with a woman also began on a stage, but this one would endure.

  _____

  In the month he turned twenty-five, January 1938, Nixon auditioned for a part in a Whittier amateur production of a melodrama titled The Dark Tower. He had recently played an attorney in another play, after a colleague told him that portraying a stage lawyer might help bring in clients to his real-life law firm. Now, as he read for the part of Barry—a “faintly collegiate, eager blushing youth”—a young woman was waiting to try out for the part of Daphne, which called for “a tall, dark sullen beauty of twenty wearing an air of permanent resentment.” In the play Daphne is wooed by Barry.

  Pat Ryan, a slight, fair twenty-six-year-old teacher, got the part—and Richard Nixon for life. “That night,” he recalled, “a beautiful and vivacious young woman with titian hair appeared whom I had never seen before. I found I could not take my eyes away from her. . . . For me it was a case of love at first sight.”

  Nixon drove the young woman home, along with her friend Elizabeth Cloes, who had suggested she do the audition. “On the way,” Nixon was to claim, “I asked Pat if she would like a date with me. She said, ‘I’m very busy.’ I said, ‘You shouldn’t say that, because someday I am going to marry you!’ . . . I wonder whether it was a sixth sense that prompted me to make such an impetuous statement.”

  Cloes recalled the anecdote differently, saying that Nixon began his talk of marriage only after the third rehearsal, when Pat refused even to sit next to him in the car. Pat’s response, however, is not in dispute. “I thought he was nuts,” she said years later.2 The Nixon version of course made better copy for the newspapers in future years, as did another harmless fiction.

  “Her name was Patricia Ryan, and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day,” Nixon was to tell a television audience of millions in his Checkers speech in 1952. This was a cozy line, handy for wooing the Irish vote, but it was not true. Nor had Pat been born in 1913, as was claimed in early handouts, conveniently making her the same age as her husband. These were fibs, like the claim—useful for a football audience—that they had met not at the audition but at a Rose Bowl game. On the one hand, Nixon thought it “silly” that he attracted criticism when caught out in such minor untruths. Yet he could also insist, at a later press conference, “We must not permit even a little lie.”

  Her birth certificate shows that the woman Nixon was to marry was born in March 1912, making her almost a year his senior. She was born not on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, but the previous day, March 16.* The baby’s registered name, moreover, was Thelma Catherine, and Thelma she was called by most people during her childhood. The exception was her father, who, with his Irish roots and the proximity of her birth to the Irish patron saint’s day, called her Pat as a pet name. She took the name Pat only after his death, in part because she loathed her given names. Far into the future the White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, with whom she did not get on, referred to her as Thelma behind her back as an expression of derision.

  Whatever the deceits about her birth and name, the future Mrs. Nixon came from a background of genuine deprivation and tragedy. She was born in a shack in a Nevada mining town to Will Ryan, a former seaman turned prospector, and Kate, the widow of an engineer killed in an accident. When circumstances in Nevada proved unpromising, they moved to try their luck in Artesia, California—eight miles from Whittier, where Richard Nixon had just been born.

  Life in Artesia was hand to mouth. A family of six crowded into a two-bedroom bungalow with no plumbing or electricity. Will Ryan made a meager living as a vegetable farmer. For the children, happy memories of the outdoor life would be outweighed by harsh realities at home. Their father, a hot-tempered drinker, fought regularly with their mother.

  When Pat was fourteen, her mother died of kidney disease and liver cancer, and the burden of feeding her father and brothers and keeping house now fell on her. At seventeen, in addition to her other duties, she took on a part-time job as a cashier at the local bank, where one dramatic afternoon she found herself confronted by a holdup man. When she was eighteen, her father died of tuberculosis.

  With both her parents dead, Artesia did not hold Pat for long. At nineteen, offered a job chauffeuring an elderly couple to the East Coast, she seized the opportunity to leave. In New York an aunt found her a job as a secretary at a Catholic hospital for TB patients. While the work could be distressing, there were compensations, among them a busy social life.

  As an attractive woman in a hospital filled with bachelor doctors, Pat was much in demand. One man, an Irish doctor in his thirties, wooed her assiduously. According to the 1986 biography of Pat, written by her daughter Julie, he courted in vain. “When he hinted about marriage,” according to Julie’s account, “she responded by continuing to accept invitations from other men. She felt the need for the freedom to go where she liked, when she liked. . . .”

  This may be accurate, but a little mystery eddies around the future Mrs. Nixon’s time in New York. During the 1960 presidential campaign it was rumored that she had been briefly married before. Washington Post reporter Maxine Cheshire even obtained the name of the alleged first husband. “When I called him,” she recalled, “he denied it in such a way that I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.” Some thirties-vintage documentation, which should have included Pat Ryan’s marital status, seemed to have gone missing.

  The notion of an undisclosed first marriage may not be as preposterous as it sounds. The fact that President Ford’s wife, Betty, had been married before was unknown until a Time magazine reporter dug into her background in 1974. Did the future Mrs. Nixon have a similar secret? The question may now be unanswerable, not least becau
se of the needle-in-the-haystack nature of hunting down old marriage records in New York State.3

  By the time Pat Ryan met Richard Nixon, in early 1938, she had been back in California for three years. She had completed her education, earning a B.S. degree in merchandising from the University of Southern California. She had worked at various jobs, including a stint at a department store and—more glamorously—as an extra in a couple of Hollywood movies. Then, putting aside plans for a business career, she decided to become a teacher. So it was that Pat found herself teaching secretarial skills, and dabbling in amateur dramatics, in Nixon’s hometown.

  Nixon’s own life was not yet living up to the promise of his high-flying school years. Within days of joining Wingert and Bewley, a local law firm specializing in probate casts, he had been assigned a role in a bad debt case. Out of his depth, the new law graduate promptly made a blunder that resulted in his firm’s being sued for negligence by the client and in Nixon’s getting a drubbing from a municipal court judge.

  By one lawyer’s account, he had merely done “a very stupid thing,” but according to two others Judge Alfred Paonessa rebuked him as follows: “Mr. Nixon, I have serious doubts whether you have the ethical qualifications to practice law in this state of California. I am seriously thinking of turning this matter over to the Bar Association to have you disbarred.”4 Readers of Nixon’s memoirs will find no mention of this episode.

  While working for Wingert and Bewley, Nixon joined two local businessmen in a frozen orange juice venture, an innovative idea at the time. He set up the company, became its president, even labored in shirtsleeves at night at the plant, all in vain. They never got the packaging right, and the project ended messily when a consignment of frozen juice bags exploded in a refrigerated railroad boxcar. Nixon’s savings were wiped out and some angry investors wound up, as his boss Tom Bewley put it, “hating his guts.”

  Working as an attorney also meant handling lurid divorce cases. Evlyn Dorn, Nixon’s secretary, remembered his embarrassment when a witness described catching a couple having sex in the open air. Nixon himself recalled with a shudder the day a “good-looking girl, beautiful really, began talking to me about her intimate marriage problems. . . . I turned fifteen colors of the rainbow.”

  Nixon was still a virgin, a fact he confided to a fellow officer during World War II, and remained so until his marriage at age twenty-seven. In 1938, at twenty-five, he continued to live at home. Two years after the breakup with Ola he regularly received dinner invitations from hopeful mothers with available daughters but still had no girlfriends. When he met Pat Ryan, he launched into an almost desperate courtship, so desperate that it is surprising he let so many of its details become public in his lifetime.

  Pat fended Nixon off from the start, yet—as once he had with Ola—he engineered a meeting between his parents and her even before having a proper date with her. He insisted they come to the play in which he and Pat were appearing, then invited Pat home afterward. His mother was noncommittal, and never really hit it off with Pat.

  For all of Nixon’s promise, and for all of Pat’s experience outside California, these were hometown young people in a hometown situation. Even though their families had not previously known each other, their worlds had intersected. Nixon’s father had helped build the brick fireplace in Pat’s childhood home. He and Pat’s father had purchased adjoining plots at the cemetery.

  Yet Pat did not wish to see herself in those terms. During the four years she had been teaching in Whittier, she spent not one weekend there but headed instead for Los Angeles, where for a long time after meeting Nixon, she continued to date other men. Once, when Pat explained to him that she had a date in the city, Nixon asked if he could “have her company” by acting as chauffeur. Sometimes, having driven her to Los Angeles, he would just kill time waiting to drive her back to Whittier again.

  When Nixon showered Pat with flowers and poems, she told him she could not return his love and tried to fix him up with one of her girlfriends. Nixon responded with the sort of abject devotion that invites rejection. When Pat begged off seeing him, claiming pressure of work, he settled for helping mark her students’ papers. When she refused to go for a walk with him, he wrote describing what it had been like to take the walk alone. “I know I’m crazy,” he wrote, “and I don’t take hints, but you see, Miss Pat, I like you!”

  Nixon’s love letters, published in Julie’s biography of Pat, reveal a man prostrating himself in the face of rejection. Months into the one-sided relationship, after Pat had shown him the door one night, Nixon wrote a confused, pathetic letter:

  Dear Patricia,

  Please forgive me . . . I appreciated immeasurably those little rides and hats. I hope that you survived them without too much mental worry over the problem “what shall I do to get rid of him before he falls?” . . . May I tell you now what I really thought of you? You see, I too live in a world of make believe—especially in this love business. And sometimes I fear I don’t know when I’m serious and when not! But I can honestly say that Patricia is one fine girl, that I like her immensely, and that though she isn’t going to give me a chance to propose to her for fear of hurting me! and though she insulted my ego just a bit by not being quite frank at times, I still remember her as combining the best traits of the Irish and the squareheads [Germans]—

  Yours,

  Dick

  Pat kept Nixon at arm’s length for months. For a while, when his novice’s blunder in the bad debt case was becoming a crisis, she broke off contact altogether. Still, he was persistent, and a year after their first meeting was seeing her regularly. Pat liked dancing, and Nixon—a famously poor dancer—muddled along with her. She was a good ice skater, an activity at which Nixon was also hopeless, and he was once spotted staggering around the rink alone, his face bloodied from falls, doggedly preparing for a skating date. Nixon, not known for his sense of humor, kept Pat laughing. At one party he had her in stitches during an impromptu performance of “Beauty and the Beast,” in which he played the Beast.

  Pat liked having fun, and Nixon suggested they visit a Los Angeles club with another couple, all of them dressed in weird outfits. He wore a tight-fitting raccoon coat that had belonged to his mother. One of their companions, Curtis Counts, recalled how a stripteaser “came on strong, taking off her clothes and swinging her fanny all over the place, until some guy in the front seat touched her butt with a lighted cigarette. . . . I’ll never forget how much we laughed, including Dick.”

  Eighteen months into their relationship Pat had relented enough to send him notes from a vacation trip. A postcard to Nixon’s business address bore only the sardonic three-word message “Love from mother.” In another note, signed “Lots of luck,” she admitted to feeling “sorta lonesome.”

  At the time Nixon needed some luck. While pining for Pat, he was presiding over the collapse of the orange juice venture, single-handedly opening a new branch of his boss’s law firm, and plunging into a whirl of activity with local business groups. While president of a young businessmen’s club, the 20- 30’s, he indulged in the bachelor’s fallback, a fair amount of drinking.

  Alcohol was banned in the Quaker town in which Nixon had grown up, and he had encountered it only at nineteen, when he sipped a Tom Collins in a San Francisco bar. At law school in North Carolina, a dry state, drink was routinely smuggled in for student celebrations. “Those parties were real blasts,” he remembered in 1990. “Most of us drank a lethal concoction of sloe gin and grapefruit juice. The next day we all awoke with terrible hangovers.”

  In Whittier, when he became an assistant city attorney, Nixon ostentatiously pursued businesses that broke the local prohibition. Meanwhile in private he cheerfully broke the rules with his friends. Philip Blew, an old college contemporary, recalled a night on which a business meeting turned into a booze-up. Nixon got so drunk that his friends had to drive him home. “We got him on the back porch,” said Blew, “took off his shoes . . . and instructed him to tipt
oe into bed and not let his father hear him . . . we had to pour Dick into bed.”

  In 1995, when the Oliver Stone movie Nixon appeared with scenes suggesting Nixon had problems with alcohol, the loyalists cried foul. Yet he was to have such problems, before the presidency and during it.

  In early 1940 Nixon’s long wooing of Pat Ryan seemed to be nearing success. That February, in a letter marking the second anniversary of their meeting, he felt safe in addressing her as “Dearest Heart.” “Nothing so fine ever happened,” he wrote, adopting the old Quaker usage, “as falling in love with Thee. . . .”

  So persistently had he asked for Pat’s hand over the months that she had imposed a three-month ban on proposals. In March that year, though, Nixon drove at sunset to a promontory looking out on the Pacific Ocean and a beach the couple had come to love, a place they were one day to make famous as the site of the Western White House, San Clemente. He proposed once more, and this time Pat said yes. Even as she did so, she admitted years later, she had lingering doubts.

  They were married on June 21, 1940, in a Quaker ceremony at a Spanish-style inn near Whittier. The wedding was held in the presidential suite, apparently not because it had housed three presidents over the years but because it was the least expensive room available. The president of Whittier College officiated, and Nixon’s mother provided the cake. Only two dozen guests attended the reception. Oddly, in this heavily documented life, no photographs of the wedding have surfaced. Afterward the bride and groom headed off by car for a two-week honeymoon in Mexico.