The Silent Partner

(See Cover)

The recreation hut in Squaw Valley's Olympic Village was a wall-to-wall mob scene of vividly dressed, ruddy-cheeked young athletes, gathered there from 30 countries for the 1960 Winter Olympics. In their midst a smiling, fragile-looking woman in a ruby-red suit and a black topcoat struggled to keep her footing. As two waves of muscular young men converged on her, someone called out: "Can you breathe?" Breathing hard, the Second Lady of the Land nodded, finally succeeded, by holding her pen at chin level, in writing her autograph for an eager French athlete. "I'm getting squashed," admitted Pat Nixon, "but it's all right."

Three feet away, her husband, Vice President Richard Nixon, proudly recited his few Russian phrases to a beaming blonde in a bright blue ski suit. "Pat," he called over his shoulder, "come here and talk to this girl. She's from the Urals." For a moment the three stood swaying and talking together in the midst of the crowd, recalling the Nixon visit last summer to the Soviet Union. Then a Japanese skier crowded in, said he was from "the Northern Islands." "I've been there." said Dick Nixon. Between autographs and greetings, Pat gratefully gulped down most of a chocolate milkshake in a paper cup which a friend handed her. A group of Australian hockey players squeezed in. "We'll be watching you in the next few days," promised Pat. The trainer of the Russian skating team swiveled into position before the Nixons, fastened a silver tie clip to the Vice President's collar. "Sputnik," he said, pointing to the engraving on the clasp. "We're so happy to see you," said Pat. "I have a memento for you." And she handed him a green ballpoint pen.

"You Raise Oranges." After half an hour of jostling conversation with the Olympians, the Nixons slipped away and walked down an icy path to Squaw Valley's reception center, where a welcome party for them was already blazing up. In front of a huge open fire, Pat paused long enough to take off her coat (with lapels solidly festooned with Olympic buttons pinned on by the eager young athletes) and fur-trimmed galoshes (borrowed for the occasion from her teen-age daughter). Then she headed resolutely for the reception line. A Swedish official in a white sweater kissed her hand. Danny Kaye stopped to chat for a moment, and Art Linkletter, in a shaggy bearskin scrape, got a guffaw from Dick Nixon, and a comment: "Is this man or beast?" Then a stocky man in a blue-and-white Norwegian sweater came by. "I'm Bob Bennett," he said. "I'm sure you don't remember me, but I'd like to shake your hand." Replied Pat, without a moment's hesitation: "Of course I remember you. You were our campaign manager in Tulare County in 1950. After that big meeting we had there, we went out to your house. You raise oranges." Muttered Bennett in wonderment as he walked off: "It's been ten years."

Night was falling when the Nixons finally left the reception and swirled off through the snow in a red Chevrolet to the home of their friend Charles Thieriot, editor and publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle. It had been a long, hard day in a long, hard week, but Pat Nixon still managed to look as fresh and animated as if she were about to compete in the ladies' giant slalom.

Marathons & Menus. The busy week began in Detroit with a grueling, 17-hour marathon of receptions, press conferences, speeches and ceremonial meals (in the course of the day, she shook 3,650 hands). Back in Washington for 30 hours, she bore down on the affairs of her large and lively household: the problems of her daughters, Tricia, 14, and Julie, 11, reading the mail (40 letters a day, most of them answered personally), accepting and declining invitations, writing out menus and grocery lists, and packing her well-scuffed bags for the California trip. Then she and the Vice President were off to Squaw Valley--by commercial jet to San Francisco, with an overnight side trip to Sacramento, then on to Reno by plane and on to the Olympic Village by car over snow-muffled mountain roads. At week's end, the Nixons headed back to Washington, landed at 7 a.m. on the day of Tricia's 14th birthday. That afternoon Pat was efficiently shepherding the youngsters and their two guests to a special birthday celebration at the Columbia Country Club.

No Time for Bridge. A few days of such staggering activity would put many a woman in a rest home or bore her to tears, but Pat Nixon seems to thrive on it.

During the past seven years at her husband's side, she has covered 148,229 miles in 52 foreign countries, 125,266 miles in political peregrinations at home. Even in her private life--which she ruefully admits has been whittled down to 10% of her total time--she rarely relaxes. Whenever she and Dick Nixon get home after a formal evening--no matter how late at night--she methodically inspects her evening gown for superficial damage and makes any necessary repairs then and there, then catalogues the dress on a rotation calendar before hanging it up. She cannot enter a room without plumping up a pillow, offering a cigarette to a guest, or somehow making herself useful. In Pat Nixon's busy life there is little room for bridge, or bird watching, or other leisure.

Her friends suspect that she is busy planning and reviewing her life in her dreams during the six or seven hours of sleep she permits herself most nights. "I'm a perfectionist," she agrees. "I won't do a thing without trying to do it well." Along with her bottomless energy, Mrs. Nixon has formidable reserves of poise and aplomb, and a notably retentive mind. It is doubtful whether she could have worked her way through the forks in a formal place setting when she first went to Washington 14 years ago, but she observed, and she learned fast. Since her abrupt debut into public life, there have been many occasions to test her serenity, and she has never failed to meet the test. She has dined with the Queen of England and the Emperor of Japan; and blind Oriental children have "read"' her face with their fingers. During the big crisis of her husband's political life--the famous "Checkers television speech" --she seemed utterly cool and collected to 50 million viewers, whatever her mental anguish.

The greatest test of Pat's unbreakable poise came in Caracas, Venezuela two years ago, when she walked grimly through a Communist mob that hurled rocks and spat at her. A jeering Red harridan was completely abashed when Pat reached across the bayonets of the Venezuelan guards to offer her hand. Although she was profoundly shocked by the experience, Pat Nixon, in the words of the Air Force major who accompanied her, was "as brave as any man I've ever seen."

Glamour for Grownups. Her critics--and the farthest-ranging Second Lady in history is bound to have a few--say that Pat Nixon is too serene, too tightly controlled; that she smothers her personality with a fixed smile and a mask of dignity.

She candidly admits to a stoical attitude: "I may be dying, but I certainly would never say anything about it." Her temper, too, is always under rigid control. "I never have tantrums," she says. "If anything makes me mad, I'm silent. If I'm not talking, leave me alone." She is just as silent--in public--on the subject of politics. "I've always been a part of what's done," she explained to a pride of society-page lionesses in Detroit last week, "but ; silent partner." Underneath her carapace of reserve Pat Nixon carries the ambitions and anxieties of any other woman. She worries about her children and gives herself wholeheartedly to them during the 10% sliver of private life. (Once, when a withering Washington heat wave threatened a promised Sunday picnic. Pat simply moved the lunch hamper and the family to the floor of Dick Nixon's air-conditioned office and carried on from there.) Recently a young friend asked about the rigors of public life. Pat Nixon's eyes suddenly filled with tears. ''I've given up everything I ever loved," she blurted, and looked out the window until composure returned. Then she continued: "The people who lose out are the children. Any of the glamour or reward in it comes to the grownups. It's the children who really suffer." But such unguarded moments are rare indeed. Pat Nixon's stamina and courage, her drive and control have made her into one of the U.S.'s most remarkable women--not just a showpiece Second Lady, not merely a part of the best-known team in contemporary politics, but a public figure in her own right.

A Strawberry Cone. She earned that right the hard way--in a tough childhood that knew little luxury. Before she was in school she already knew how to suppress her tears and keep her head high.

One of her earliest memories is of riding into the little Southern California town of Artesia with her farmer father to buy the weekly staples. While Will Ryan shopped, his four-year-old daughter waited patiently, perched on the high seat of the family buggy. "I would never, never ask for anything." she remembers, "but how I hoped! I'd watch the corner to see if he came back carrying a straw berry cone. That was the big treat." If there was no cone, the little girl understood that her father had no money left for treats, and she stifled her disappointment. "I just waited and hoped." The future Second Lady was born on March 16, 1912, in the mining town of Ely, Nev., and her birthplace may well have been a tent. (No one is certain, but Ely was a rowdy tent town at the time, and at best the towheaded baby came into the world in a miner's shack.) William Ryan was a footloose Irishman who had met and married Kate Halberstadt Bender, a young widow with two children. Kate, who had emigrated from Germany as a ten-year-old girl, soon presented her husband with two sons, Bill and Tom. The youngest of their three children was formally baptized Thelma Catherine, but Will Ryan, mindful of the fact that she was born on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, added the name Patricia. Before the baby was a year old, Kate Ryan persuaded Will to give up mining (her first husband, an engineer, had been killed in a mining accident), and the family moved West, settled on an eleven-acre truck farm (he called it a "ranch") near Artesia, 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

It was a hardscrabble life, with scant plumbing and no electricity and few creature comforts. During hot spells, the neighbors pumped so much water that the Ryans could not raise water in the daytime, had to spend the night hours vigorously pumping. "It was very primitive," admits Pat Nixon, but since nobody in Artesia was any better off, it seemed to be a perfectly normal existence.

"It was a hard, life, that's true. I didn't know what it was not to work hard as I grew up." But there were a few pleasures, too: amateur theatricals with the two Rains sisters on a neighboring farm, occasional trips to Long Beach, a little girl's pride in raising a prize-winning sow, bareback rides on the Ryan plow horse. One memorable day Will Ryan drove up grandly in the family's first car, a used model T with fancy isinglass curtains. "Everybody piled in--the neighbors, too--and he took us for a ride.

He went so fast--he kept putti"? on the gas instead of the brake, and couldn't figure out what he was doing wrong. We were all terribly frightened, but it was fun." When Pat was 13 her mother died, and Pat became the homemaker for her father and brothers. (The Bender children had grown up and moved away.) During the harvest, she worked in the fields with her family and the hired hands, then headed back to the kitchen to cook. "I learned fast," she remembers. "I'd bake a half-dozen pies at a time, two or three chickens--farm fare, lots of it." Pat was a senior at the Excelsior Union High School, when her father became seriously ill. She dropped her plans for a college scholarship and assumed the job of nursing him.

After nearly two years, Will Ryan died of silicosis. On the day of his death she decided to drop the name Thelma and styled herself Patricia, in memory of her father. "He always thought I was all Irish anyway," she says.

Round Trip. Bill and Tom Ryan were in Los Angeles, working their way through college, and Pat, at 18, was completely on her own. Says she: "I have made my own decisions ever since my father died." Among the young girl's big ambitions, two predominated: travel and a college education. "I always wanted to do something else besides be buried in a small town ... I wanted to start with an education." For a year she attended nearby Fullerton Junior College, stopping off on her way to school to sweep out the First National Bank of Artesia and returning after school to work as a teller. The opportunity to travel came in the summer when an elderly couple, friends of her family, asked her to drive them to New York in their big Packard in exchange for a return-trip ticket on the bus. Pat eagerly accepted.

Once in New York she decided to stay a while. She got a job in Seton Hospital, first as a secretary, later as an X-ray and laboratory assistant. The young doctors and interns gave her a merry social life, and she tried to save money for the longed-for education. After two years, the call of college became irresistible, and Pat collected her bus ticket and went back to Los Angeles (by way of Niagara Falls, at no extra charge). Bill and Tom made room for her in their tiny apartment near the University of Southern California. One morning Tom Ryan took Pat to the U.S.C. job-placement office. "This is my kid sister," he said. "Can she work her way through college?"

On to Whittier. "I remember her well," says Dr. Frank Baxter, English professor, Shakespearean specialist and latter-day TV raconteur. "She was a quiet girl, and pretty. And it always used to disturb me how tired her face was in repose. There seemed to have been plenty of reason for it. As I recall it, if you went into the cafeteria, there was Pat Ryan at the serving counter. An hour later, if you went to the library, there was Pat Ryan, checking out books. And if you came back to the campus that evening, there was Pat Ryan working on some student research program. Yet with it all, she was a good student, alert and interested. She stood out from the empty-headed, overdressed little sorority girls of that era like a good piece of literature on a shelf of cheap paperbacks."

With all her campus activities, plus keeping house for her brothers, Pat still had energy left over to fill extra roles in motion pictures (she had a $25-a-day walk-on part in Becky Sharp) and to work as a part-time saleslady at Bullock's-Wilshire, a fashionable department store. She graduated with honors and a high school teacher's certificate. Finding a job was no problem: her first assignment, at $187 a month, was teaching commercial subjects at Whittier Union High School in the quiet, Quaker suburb of Whittier. Some of her colleagues foresaw trouble for the pretty young newcomer. One was Helene Colesie, another young teacher who became Pat Nixon's oldest and closest friend (and who later married one of Dick Nixon's closest friends, Los Angeles Magazine Distributor Jack Drown). Says Helene Drown: "You take a woman as young and beautiful as Pat Ryan was then, and put her in with a faculty of older women, and you've got almost certain trouble. Except that with Pat it didn't work out that way. All the older teachers loved her. I think one of the reasons for that was that she arranged it so that they would always be in the forefront of faculty and P.T.A. functions, and things like that. When they were out in front of the audience, Pat would be serving the coffee or out in the kitchen doing the dishes." Predictably, Pat was soon in a kaleidoscope of extracurricular and above-duty activities. Whenever the children of migratory workers dropped out of her classes --a frequent phenomenon in Whittier--Pat resolutely scoured the nearby orange groves, tracked the truants down, and convinced their parents that education was more important than picking oranges.

At a Little Theater tryout she met a young lawyer, Dick Nixon. They were cast in the leading roles of The Dark Tower, and Lawyer Nixon immediately began a dogged, offstage courtship. He learned to dance, nearly fractured his skull trying to ice skate--and according to an oft-told story, he even drove Pat to dates with other young men in Los Angeles, waiting around to drive her home.

(Says she: "That's true--but it's mean to report it.") After three years they were married, set up housekeeping in an apartment over a Whittier garage.

On to Politics. During the war, Nixon was a naval officer, and Pat dutifully followed him from billet to domestic billet--Washington, Ottumwa, Iowa, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, methodically getting a new job, buying secondhand furniture and setting up house in each post. While he was on duty in the Pacific, she lived in a boardinghouse in San Francisco, worked as an OPA economist. At war's end, Lieut. Commander Nixon and his lady were stationed in Baltimore. Pat was pregnant, and the future was uncertain. Then a now-famous telegram came from Whittier: a "Committee of One Hundred" active Republicans wanted to know if Dick would be interested in running for the congressional seat solidly held by Democrat Jerry Voorhis. After discussing the proposition at length, says Pat, "I could see that it was the life he wanted, so I told him that it was his decision, and I would do what he liked." Nine days after Dick Nixon announced his candidacy in what seemed to be a hopeless race, his first daughter was born.

As soon as Pat was out of bed she put all of her energy into the campaign. She attended teas, accepted bouquets, chatted with women voters. She also took off her hat and went to work at Nixon headquarters. During that first campaign, she served as her husband's office manager and his entire staff. "We had no employees and no money for any. There was just Dick and me." At the outset, Pat established two ground rules: 1) she would make no political speeches, and 2) she would fight to keep her home as a quiet sanctuary for the Nixon family. She has broken the first rule only once--in Oklahoma City in 1956, when she made a three-minute speech as a pinch hitter for Dick, who was momentarily silenced by the flu. The second rule has been harder to maintain.

One bitter recollection: on the 1952 night that Nixon was nominated for Vice President in Chicago, photographers called at the Nixon home, brushed past the bewildered baby sitter, woke the girls up, posed them for pictures and scared them to tears with their flashbulbs.

Always during campaign years and frequently in times of crisis, Pat has had to drop everything domestic and become the public Mrs. Nixon. In the hectic days when Dick, young Congressman, was deeply involved in the investigation of the Alger Hiss case, Pat hired a baby sitter four days a week, reported for emergency duty at Dick's office, and coped with the tide of letters that was flowing in.

Dated Image. As the Nixons have risen dramatically to national and international eminence, their home has changed with their lives. After Nixon went to the Senate in 1950, he moved the family from a cramped duplex in a Virginia housing development into a spacious home near Tennessee's Estes Kefauver in swank Spring Valley--but the Nixons did most of their formal entertaining in hotels or restaurants. Still later, after he became Vice President (salary: $35,000, plus a $10,000 expense allowance), Nixon bought his present home, a big (eleven rooms) fieldstone house on a secluded dead-end street, for $75,000 (with a $50,000 mortgage). His investment in the house represents Nixon's principal saving. As their lives have grown more complicated, the Nixons have also employed servants. But Pat Nixon is reluctant to disturb the public image of herself as a housewife who presses her husband's pants, cooks the meals and scrubs the floors. A Swedish housekeeper she employed for two years was kept discreetly in the background, never mentioned publicly, and Pat refuses to pose for pictures with the Negro couple who keep her present home in apple-pie order.

Pat and Dick make the most of their limited time within the family circle.

Unofficial entertaining or dining out is almost unknown to them--every spare moment belongs to the kids. On Sunday nights the family frequently eats supper at the Columbia Country Club, the one place in Washington where the arrival of the Nixons does not set off a stir. Nixon helped build the girls a tree house in the backyard, and he and Pat are faithful members of the Sidwell Friends School P.T.A. "Even though I'm gone a lot, I concentrate on the girls when I'm home," says Pat, "and I think I give them more attention than most of your bridge-playing mothers. We have four cats, a dog [the same Checkers], parakeets, children staying over weekends--it's a lively place." The possibility that the Nixon family might move again next January--into the White House--is one that Pat refuses to discuss. "I live each day as it comes," she says. But each day's problems, whether they involve Olympic athletes or birthday parties, Soviet premiers or Brownie meetings, receive the full force of her power, energy and concentration. "People say, 'You're thin; you work too much,' " says Pat. "But if I weren't thin because of political work, I'd be thin doing something else. That's the way I am."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.