Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage

by Will Swift

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2015 Plutarch Award for Best Biography, “the most humanizing portrait of the Nixons we’re likely to have” (Douglas Brinkley) is a sweeping depiction of the turbulent fifty-three-year marriage of Richard and Pat Nixon.

When Americans remember the controversial Nixons, they usually focus on the political triumphs, the turbulent White House years, and the humiliating public downfall. But a very different image of the polarizing president emerges in this fascinating portrait of the relationship between Richard and Pat Nixon. Now, the couple’s recently released love letters and other private documents reveal that as surely as unremitting adversity can fray the fabric of a marriage, devotion can propel it to surmount disgrace and defeat.

In Pat and Dick, biographer Will Swift brings his years of experience as a historian and marital therapist to this unique examination of a long-misunderstood marriage. Nixon the man was enormously complicated: brilliant, insecure, sometimes coldly calculating, and capable of surprising affection with his wife. Much less is known about Pat. With the help of personal writings and interviews with family and friends, Swift unveils a woman who was warm and vivacious, yet much shrewder and more accomplished than she has been given credit for. From Dick’s unrelenting crusade to marry the glamorous teacher through the myriad crises of his political career, the Nixons’ story is filled with hopes and disappointments, both intimate and global.

Written by a leading presidential biographer who “narrates with grace and style” (Kirkus Reviews), this remarkable biography shows us a couple who, despite their trials, managed to find the strength, courage, and resilience to sustain a true connection for more than half a century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451676952
Publisher:	Threshold Editions
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	811,320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Will Swift has written for more than twenty years on American leaders and British royalty of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Roosevelts and the Royals and The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm. A dynamic public speaker, Dr. Swift has been interviewed about political, presidential, and royal history on prominent radio stations across the country. He has been a featured speaker at presidential libraries and on CSPAN. He is also a founding board member of the Biographers International Organization. Dr. Swift has been in private practice as a clinical psychologist and marital therapist in Manhattan for more than thirty years. Visit him on the web at WillSwift.com and
Facebook.com/PatAndDickTheNixonsAnIntimatePortraitOfAMarriage.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part 1 An Ambitious Young Couple

1 "Will You Think of Me Sometimes?" 9

2 Going Places 24

3 Married, Happily 32

4 Love After Pearl Harbor 45

5 Giant Slayers 58

6 The Faces of America's Future 74

7 Crises on the Home Front 84

8 Safeguarding the American Home 98

Part 2 Cultural Leaders and Private Citizens

9 "Heroes" and "Housewives": Dick, Ike, Pat, and Mamie 115

10 A Turbulent Ascent 138

11 Enduring Defeat 153

12 Darkness 171

13 Your Turn, My Turn 182

Part 3 White House Dreams and Nightmares

14 Adjusting to the White House Fortress 207

15 "We Had Held Our Own" 226

16 A Private Marriage in the Public Spotlight 243

17 Love in the White House 266

18 The Zenith 283

19 Falling Apart 309

Part 4 Affliction and Recovery

20 Renewal in Exile 341

21 A Peaceful Twilight 357

Epilogue 378

Acknowledgments 383

Notes 387

Index 449

Editorial Reviews

"[A] fair-minded and thorough attempt to trace the long, jagged arc of the Nixons' marriage...highly intelligent and far more sophisticated than the decades' worth of quick takes...Swift's psychological paradigms serve him well."

The New York Times

"The daunting challenge in writing a dual biography, particularly one about a president and First Lady, is composing the subjects in a comfortable balance, so that one does not eclipse the other. Swift meets this challenge brilliantly, and his Nixons—equally fascinating—illuminate each other. The result is an insightful and engaging book."

Daniel Mark Epstein

"Will Swift's deeply moving and nuanced portrait of the Nixon marriage sheds new light - and brings a fascinating layer of human emotion - to the most controversial President of the 20th Century. This is not just a book for scholars, but for anyone who has ever wondered about the real lives behind the scandal of the Nixon era."

Amanda Foreman

"Pat and Dick is a joy. It is smart, thoughtful, poignant and insightful. Will Swift sensitively renders two of the most caricatured and pilloried Americans of the late twentieth century in all their multi-dimensionality and complexity. Pat and Dick offers readers a guided tour of America, illuminating its politics, the American family, the White House, and the American home."

Gil Troy

"In analyzing the Nixon’s marriage, Will Swift provides new insight into two of the most complex political actors of the twentieth century. Swift further erodes the “plastic Pat” image, giving her a place of prominence beside, not behind, her husband."

Mary C. Brennan

"Will Swift's excellent Pat and Dick is thorough, fair-minded, and evidence-based. This is a compelling and eye-opening portrait of a complicated, but good marriage. In this beautifully written book, Swift gives us an incisive lens to understand the politics and psychology of late 20th-century society."

Evan Thomas

"Will Swift's Pat and Dick is the most humanizing portrait of the Nixons we're likely to have. Based on first-rate research, clear writing and smart analysis Pat and Dick triumphantly sets the historical record straight in these illuminating pages. Highly recommended."

Douglas Brinkley

"In his sympathetic yet not uncritical portrayal of the Nixon marriage, Will Swift brings his keen insights as a clinical psychologist and his considerable skills as an historian to explain the always fascinating and complex relationship between two very private public figures. Moreover, he perceptively describes their enduring relationship in the context of evolving attitudes toward marriage in postwar America."

Melvin Small

"For someone who was taught from childhood to loathe Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon — and to pity poor plain, stoic Pat — Will Swift's sympathetic but rigorous examination of their marriage upended many long-held assumptions and left me deeply moved by the end. This president and his first lady left such a deep mark on their times and our history that it is important to come to understand, in reading Pat and Dick, the intricate personal drama that was going on behind the public upheavals.

Kate Buford

"A complicated picture of the Nixons...[a] largely sympathetic examination of one of America's most mysterious political couples...the distance from Watergate — and access to new personal documents — gives Pat and Dick a freshness to a much-considered chapter of history."

USA Today (3 out of 4 stars)

"Presidential biographer Swift focuses on the spousal team of Pat and Dick Nixon, zeroing in on the incredibly strong marriage that sustained them through both personal and political triumphs and humiliations... This intimate portrait into their marriage not only humanizes their carefully constructed and often maligned public image but also illuminates the strong ties that irrevocably bound the private couple. Admire Nixon or revile him, his biggest success in life was forging a long-term marriage and fostering the devotion of his indomitable family unit."

Margaret Flanagan

"Pat and Dick is a portrait of two tough-luck kids who fell in love, took on the world, were savaged by their foes, lashed back, claimed the highest prize - and lost it. Spectacular, yet intimate. The Nixons you didn't know."

John Farrell

Will Swift, a superb researcher and an insightful psychologist, has written the first dual biography of Pat and Dick Nixon. This intriguingly fresh and lucid portrait of these two epochal figures will be the standard reference work for many years.

Irwin Gellman

With an eye for the telling detail, Will Swift deftly revises our view of the Nixon marriage, showing that the reserve the couple displayed in public masked a deep love and abiding respect. The marriage underwent strains that would test even the strongest ties, and Swift is frank in assessing these. He uses his expertise as a psychologist to compare the Nixon marriage to others—in the ups and downs, the use of varying techniques to preserve the union, and the differing needs of the two partners. Even readers who thought they fully understood “Plastic Pat” and “Tricky Dick” will be enlightened by Swift’s perspective and delighted with his vivid descriptions.

Betty Boyd Caroli

"Pat and Dick does exactly what a biography should do: show its subjects with empathy, insight, and critical acumen. We see Richard and Pat Nixon as they saw themselves, beleaguered and underdeserving of the bad press they often received. At various points, the hard-driving Nixon tried to modify his public image as a political hit man to no avail, even when he proposed progressive policies. His shrewd and sensitive wife was sometimes shut out of key decisions, and yet he also acknowledged what a great ambassador she was for his politics and their marriage. Swift does not minimize their failings, especially their vindictive and petty efforts to punish their critics, but he also shows why the pressures of office made them behave, at times, with such animosity. In Pat and Dick the personal and political merge in a narrative that makes Swift's book one of the must-read biographies of the age."

Carl Rollyson

"All marriages are mysterious and few were more so, or suffered more stress, than the fifty-plus-year union of Richard Nixon and Thelma (Pat) Ryan. Will Swift, a biographer and a psychologist, gets as close as anyone is likely to get in giving us a realistic and nuanced understanding of the Nixons in hard times, good times, and the very worst of times."

Jeffrey Frank

"Presidential biographer Swift focuses on the spousal team of Pat and Dick Nixon, zeroing in on the incredibly strong marriage that sustained them through both personal and political triumphs and humiliations... This intimate portrait into their marriage not only humanizes their carefully constructed and often maligned public image but also illuminates the strong ties that irrevocably bound the private couple. Admire Nixon or revile him, his biggest success in life was forging a long-term marriage and fostering the devotion of his indomitable family unit."

--Margaret Flanagan

  "All marriages are mysterious and few were more so, or suffered more stress, than the fifty-plus-year union of Richard Nixon and Thelma (Pat) Ryan. Will Swift, a biographer and a psychologist, gets as close as anyone is likely to get in giving us a realistic and nuanced understanding of the Nixons in hard times, good times, and the very worst of times."

 Jeffrey Frank

"[A] fair-minded and thorough attempt to trace the long, jagged arc of the Nixons' marriage...highly intelligent and far more sophisticated than the decades' worth of quick takes...Swift's psychological paradigms serve him well."

The New York Times

…Will Swift's fair-minded and thorough attempt to trace the long, jagged arc of the Nixons' marriage…for the most part succeeds in showing a partnership that was complicated and "spacious," strategically flexible…Swift, who is a clinical psychologist…sometimes sounds like a gentle couples therapist…but Pat and Dick remains highly intelligent and far more sophisticated than the decades' worth of quick takes from self-satisfied sharpies who dismissed Plastic Pat and Tricky Dick as a couple of squares.

The New York Times Book Review - Thomas Mallon

02/10/2014
Long derided as "Plastic Pat," Patricia Nixon, along with her relationship to her infamous husband, Richard, is given a new examination in this anecdote-filled account of the Nixons and their long, controversial political career. Swift (The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm) thoroughly discusses both Nixons' humble beginnings in Southern California as well as Richard's awkward romantic pursuit of Patricia. He provides one of the best, if starkest, descriptions of Richard in love and politics: "He would win, not from being loved, but from being inevitable." Throughout their time in politics, the couple revealed themselves to be remarkably capable, from Richard's appearance in the first televised Congressional Hearings, when he grilled Alger Hiss, to Patricia being voted the most admired woman in the world in 1972. But their fury at mischaracterization by the media would drive them both into bitterness, pushing Richard further into the kind of secrecy and paranoia that led to Watergate, while keeping Patricia in the dark about his actions. Swift tends to meander, strangely noting, "When people become more assertive, they often start by building up resentments and then exploding." But Overall, Swift has formed an absorbing depiction of Richard and Patricia Nixon, one that does not excuse their failings, but gives us a broader sense of their lives. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2013-11-07
The marriage of Richard and Pat Nixon undergoes sharp analysis by Swift, a formally trained psychologist and first-family historian (The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938-1940, 2008, etc.). The author had access to letters and other of the first lady's materials unavailable to previous biographers and historians. He uses them wisely, smashing stereotypes of Richard Nixon as a cold personality who had no clue how to treat his wife and of Pat Nixon as a plastic female too old-fashioned in her idea of marriage to make an impact as a political wife. The book is certainly no valentine to the Pat and Dick of the title, however. It is a nuanced portrait of each as an individual and of them as a married couple, working through good and bad times while being scrutinized intensively by political foes, ideologues, academics and journalist gossipmongers. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion by Swift is that Pat demonstrated sympathy for women's rights not only in the United States, but around the globe. The author's evidence is plentiful, and he writes with grace throughout the mostly chronological narrative. From the opening chapters, it is obvious that Swift understands the skillful use of details and anecdotes that have escaped a large number of Nixon biographers. Even his telling of the couple's lengthy courtship feels fresh, as the ambitious but socially awkward young Quaker lawyer trapped in the small California town of his upbringing pursues the self-possessed, physically gorgeous, much-sought-after young teacher who grew up with almost no advantages. Swift delves into their compatibility ups and downs, their parenting skills and other private matters, but he focuses mostly on the difficult decisions Pat and Dick had to make together before undertaking seemingly long-shot attempts to serve in the House of Representatives, Senate and the White House. A model of well-documented revisionist history.

Kirkus Reviews