Free The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers Page B

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,
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    Please forgive me . . . I appreciated immeasurably those little rides and hats. I hope that you survived them without too muchmental 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]—
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    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