Free The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers

Nixon version of course made better copy for the newspapers in future years, as did another harmless fiction.
    â€œHer 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. Yethe 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’saccount, “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