Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon's wife: 'interchangeable with a Martian,' she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from M...