Free The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers Page A

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 because 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 witnessdescribed 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,