Pat Nixon: The Untold Story

Description for PAT NIXON: THE UNTOLD STORY by Julie Nixon Eisenhower:

She is instantly recognizable anywhere in the world, but very few people have ever know what goes on behind her elegant and attractive public face. Here, at last, is the real, the untold story of an intensely private woman who has been in the spotlight for nearly forty years, told---as it could only have been---by her daughter Julie.

Even had she not become First Lady, Pat Nixon's story would have been fascinating. Born in a miner's shack in Nevada in the dead of winter, she was orphaned before she was out of High School and left with the care of two brothers, the house and the family truck farm. While still in her teens, in the depths of the Depression, she got herself work; first driving a car all the way across the country on her own; then, in New York, where she found a job in the dispensary of a tuberculosis hospital. Fiercely independent, she enjoyed herself enormously in New York but finally there was enough money for her to return to California and college where she carried a full course load as well as juggling several jobs (including the one that was the most fun, as a movie extra). After graduating with honors she accepted a position teaching high school in Whittier, where, one evening when she went to try out for the local little theater, she met a young lawyer named Richard Nixon.

The rest, literally, is history. This country's political history since World War II is the backdrop for the enthralling story of a self-made, strong, independent woman; the dual portrait of a remarkable marriage; and finally an eyewitness report on life withing the family quarters of the White House by someone who grew up there. We all know the public fact, the landmarks of Richard Nixon's long political career, but only Julie Nixon Eisenhower could show us the vital and less-well-known role Pat played in the Nixon story:

*1952 The Campaign Fund Speech---Despite the fact that the public questioning of her husband's integrity, and therefore her own, was so painful that she can barely discuss the incident today, it was Pat who urged him to do what he had to do even though it meant disclosing their personal finances.

*1958 The mobbing and stoning of the Vice-Presidential limousine in Venezuela---"She told me she was more angry than frightened: "I kept thinking that here were were on a trip that was supposed to be goodwill and we wanted it to be a success.'"

*1960 The unsuccessful Presidential bid---"I knew it would be close but I thought we would win. I knew Kennedy too well to think that the country would would elect him."

*And, of course Watergate. It was Pat who, when the story first broke, thought the tapes should have been destroyed, but it was also she who, as late as August 1974, when the alternatives were clearly resignation or impeachment, urged the President to fight to the finish.

But this is not only Pat's story, it is also the story of an extraordinary family. We are given a privileged insider's view of what it was like to grow up in politics---to be involved in congressional and senatorial campaigns, two Vice-Presidential ones, three Presidential; how it felt to attend grade school with the children of your father's political opponents; to be the daughter of a Presidential candidate dating the grandson of a former President and then a newlywed surrounded by the Secret Service; and finally how the members of a courageous family supported one another during times of unbearable stress.

In one way this could be the story of many American families, but because the Nixons were in public life, the supporting players whom we glimpse are often names well-known to us. We see Konrad Adenauer sending Pat rose bushes, Prince Charles bending etiquette to quash a rumor of a "palace romance," Jacqueline Kennedy bringing her children back to visit the house they had lived in with their father, and hundreds more---from Chou En-lai to Madame Khrushchev to Whittaker Chambers.

The result if unique: an informed history of so many of the events that have shaped our country's recent history centered around a touching portrait of a woman who emerges as a loyal wife, a loving mother, but most of all an indomitable fighter for the things she believes in. The flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional character in these pages is a tribute both to Pat Nixon who lived this live and to Julie Nixon Eisenhower who was able to write it.