The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon

By Heath Hardage Lee

St. Martin’s Press 2024

Some first ladies have been great first ladies. Some lucky first ladies have been the subjects of great biographies. Pat Nixon was not a great first lady; and, in The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, she has not received a great biography. Nor has she received a plain ol’ competent biography. No, unfortunately, she has received a bad biography.

Heath Hardage Lee, the author of The League of Wives and a biography of Winnie Davis, begins her life of Pat Nixon with a series of hackneyed phrases wrapped in sentences that feel a bit weak, almost vacuous. The prologue begins like this: “Spotlit under blinding camera lights and accompanied by the sound of thunderous applause, Richard and Pat Nixon….” Near the end of the prologue, when Pat Nixon says of her and her husband’s farewell to the White House staff after the Watergate scandal, “Our hearts were breaking and there we are smiling,” Heath Hardage Lee comments, “Wasn’t that so often the story of her life?” Cue the eye-rolling!

Lee indulges in more lazy writing in her book’s early chapters. A highway “snakes through swaths of desolate countryside”; young Pat Nixon “didn’t ever allow herself to fall to pieces … would never be a damsel in distress. She couldn’t afford such luxuries” (the eyes roll again!). The writing gets a bit better as the book progresses, but the cliche phrases and comments still appear much too often.

This is too bad, because the story Heath Hardage Lee has to tell could’ve at least been interesting. The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon is billed as the life of a person who “was warm, generous, and above all interested in people,” who had a rough childhood, who put “not only her brothers but also herself through college at a time when many women didn’t even think about higher education,” who had prodigious gumption, composure, and unpretentious charm. Far from being the loyal politician’s wife with so little personality of her own that she was nothing more than a political prop of her husband, Lee’s Pat Nixon is a sympathetic, individualistic person. 

But Heath Hardage Lee’s portrait of Pat Nixon is not completely convincing. Lee is too prone to giving her subject the benefit of the doubt, and too often leaves the deeper questions surrounding Mrs. Nixon’s life unasked. Pat Nixon’s psychology is not examined too thoroughly, the neat composure and calmness she always appeared to have are hardly ever shown to waver. Her personality and views have a bit of nuance, but not very much. Heath Hardage Lee tries to make her Pat Nixon complex, but succeeds only in making her seem not quite like a real person. 

But Lee’s portrait of Pat Nixon is so gosh darn convincing it’s practically mathematically provable when compared to her portrait of Pat’s husband.

Most biographies of a first lady will contain a large part of the male half of the equation’s biography, too. In writing about the career of Richard Nixon (whose actions Pat Nixon always publicly supported), Heath Hardage Lee fails terribly. Her Dick Nixon is a selfless public servant, a moral man in an immoral world, a crusader for simple good and an exemplar of the picturesque American Way of Life. When (notorious red-baiting) Congressman Nixon goes after suspected communist spy Alger Hiss, Lee shows Nixon’s suspicions about Hiss to be unquestioningly genuine. Lee completes her justification of Nixon by saying that the 2009 book Spies provided “indisputable evidence … that [Hiss] had indeed been an important communist operative,” though how it did is not explained, and the source for this statement is page six of Irwin Gellman’s Campaign of the Century. A look at page six of Campaign of the Century does show that Gellman claimed that Spies “provided indisputable evidence that Hiss” was a Soviet spy, though Gellman (at this point in the book, at least) does not explain why, either. So, the reader must take Lee’s word about Gellman’s word. 

Such naive trust of “Tricky Dick” Nixon (and his associates) and superficial research come up time and again in The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon. The Nixons’ accomplishments are over-magnified (Lee once goes so far as to imply that President Eisenhower only won reelection in 1956 because of Vice President Nixon and his wife: “On November 6, 1956, all the Nixons’ hard work paid off….”). Mr. and Mrs. Nixon’s critics and rivals are all shown to be wretched, immoral people. The scandals of Richard Nixon’s life are largely shown to be things that happened to him, not things caused by him. President Nixon’s alcoholism is hardly mentioned. (For that matter, while rumors of Pat Nixon’s drinking problems are discussed—and debunked—the fact that, in private, she smoked like a freight train, is largely glossed over.) The rumors that Richard Nixon physically abused Pat are never even mentioned.

Richard Nixon wrote of his wife in his memoirs: “She had been a dignified, compassionate First Lady. She had given so much to the nation and so much to the world. Now [after Watergate had forced Richard Nixon to resign from the presidency] she would have to share my exile. She deserved so much more.” Well, if she did, she certainly didn’t get it in The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon. This book may be a panegyric, but it would make for a pretty pitiful monument.

Spencer Peacock is a student currently living in Utah