I met one First Lady and saw another many years before I ever met a President.
In 1938, after graduating from law school and returning to Whittier to practice, I was elected to the board of trustees of Whittier College. I recall how impressed I was when I met Lou Henry Hoover, one of my fellow trustees. She was the exact opposite of the picture I had in my mind of her husband, who was always portrayed in the media as sour, stiff, and sullen. She was vivacious, thoughtful, and a stimulating conversationalist. When I met Herbert Hoover ten years later, I found that once you got to know him he could be just as charming as she was. The difference was that he only let his intimates see that side of him. He was an introvert in an extrovert’s profession. In that respect, she was better suited for politics than he was and thus complemented him perfectly. Those who visited the White House during the difficult days of the Great Depression were always impressed by their hosts’ grace and dignity.
In the late summer of 1943, I was driving a Jeep from Noumea on New Caledonia to the Marine Air Base at Tontouto. I heard a siren and pulled over. Two Jeeps full of MPs were clearing the way for a motorcade. I thought it might be some high-ranking general. But when the Army weapons carrier sped past I was amazed to see that the passenger, wearing a big, floppy hat to protect herself from the blistering sun, was Eleanor Roosevelt. Since the battle for the Solomon Islands was still raging a few miles to the north, her visit made a great impression on us all. Like Mrs. Hoover, she complemented her husband perfectly. While he was tied down by his duties in Washington, she seized every opportunity to travel throughout the United States and abroad to show support for the war effort.
I finally met a President when Pat and I attended the reception for members of Congress in 1947. She bought a new dress, justifying the strain on our budget by observing that it might be the only time we would see the place. It was a mob scene, but I vividly recall how President and Mrs. Truman, in the brief time they shook our hands, made us feel at home. They both had the gift of being dignified without putting on airs. Press accounts habitually described Mrs. Truman as plain. What impressed us most was that she was genuine.
My most vivid memory of Mamie Eisenhower was seeing her at the only White House dinner I hosted as Vice President. Earlier in the afternoon, after welcoming the king of Morocco at the airport, the President had suffered a stroke. Mrs. Eisenhower insisted that the state dinner in our visitor’s honor go forward as planned and asked me to accompany her. Mamie was a worrier, and in this case she had good reason. After the President’s heart attack just two years before, she hadn’t wanted him to run again. She thought it might kill him. Now she felt her worst fears were being realized. She was not one to hold things in. Before we went in to dinner, her voice broke as she poured out her fears to me. But when we entered the East Room, none of the other guests would have known anything was the matter. She was as charming and vivacious as ever, even though her heart was breaking. It was a virtuoso performance.
She also worried about her husband’s health in 1960, when my campaign strategists were urging him to make more appearances for the ticket. His blood pressure had been high, and she feared that a heavier schedule would endanger his life. She spoke emotionally about it to Pat, and the President’s doctor, General Howard Snyder, buttonholed me on the way to see the President and urged me to ask him to cut back. Eisenhower himself was eager to add an event to his schedule in Illinois, a key toss-up state. To his surprise, I discouraged him. He did not learn why I had done so until after the election.
Since we left the White House in 1974, my First Lady, Pat, has never made a speech, accepted an award, or been interviewed by the press. We entertain close friends and family at home but turn down the many invitations we receive to highly publicized New York events. But despite being out of public view for fifteen years, she has been on Good Housekeeping’s ten most admired women list every year. Some wonder how this could happen in our media-drenched, out-of-sight-out-of-mind society. I know why. Most people, even if they are basically happy, do not have an easy life. Some have had disappointments, others have suffered defeats. Many have experienced tragedy. Pat relates to these people, and they to her.
The word “character” has several meanings. When someone is an oddball, we call him a character. When someone applies for a job, we give him a character reference. Pat has character in a more profound sense. When an athlete comes back to win after suffering a defeat, we say he has character. That is Pat’s kind. She is a strong person who is at her best when the going gets rough. Millions who have followed her career during the forty-three years we have been in the political arena know that and appreciate it, and for that reason will never forget her.
Her life is a classic example of triumph over adversity. Her mother died of cancer when Pat was thirteen. She helped care for her father for two years until he died of silicosis, popularly known as miner’s disease, when she was eighteen. To earn the money for college, she worked as a bank teller, an assistant to a department store buyer, a bit player in the movies, a research assistant for a USC professor, and a hospital X-ray technician in New York City. During most of this time she helped keep house for her two older brothers. Despite her backbreaking commitments, she graduated with honors from USC in 1937.
After we were married, she continued to work as a high school teacher to supplement my meager income from my law practice during the Depression. While I was serving overseas, she was a government price analyst in San Francisco.
Our first fourteen years in Washington, when I served in the House, the Senate, and as Vice President, were an exciting and happy time. But it was not always smooth sailing. After the Hiss case, I became a major national figure but also a highly controversial one. I refused to let the critics bother me, but on occasion they got to her. She has always been a voracious reader. Hardly a day went by when she did not see a vicious cartoon, a highly negative column, or some blatantly biased news report. But she never complained to me. She had enormous respect and affection for Whittaker Chambers and his wife Esther. She knew we were on the right side. This certainly strengthened her, but it did not make the cruel barbs hurt any less.
During my trips abroad as Vice President and President, she broke new ground, refusing to follow the meaningless schedules that were usually set up for dignitaries’ wives in those days. Unless our host absolutely insisted, she skipped the shopping and sightseeing. Instead, she visited schools, hospitals, orphans’ homes, old people’s homes, a leper colony in Panama, refugee camps in Vietnam. While I was closeted in meetings, she was out making pro-American news. Eventually the press began to follow her rather than me.
Pat is an intensely private person who still proved to be a superb campaigner, because she likes people and they like her. She was by my side constantly in two campaigns for Congress, one for the Senate, one for governor, two for Vice President, and three for President, not to mention our grueling, thankless swings in off-year elections. She never set a foot wrong or gave the media a club to beat me over the head with. After a campaign appearance in Kansas in 1952, Senator Frank Carlson expressed his unbounded admiration for her campaigning ability. He told me, “Dick, you’re controversial, but everybody likes Pat.”
She did not complain about the political attacks on me. She knew they were part of the game. But the attacks on my personal integrity during the Fund controversy in 1952 left a deep scar, not just because they proved to be false but because to refute them I had to reveal our modest financial worth. She put it bluntly: “Why do we have to let everybody know how little we have? That’s nobody’s business but our own.” Losing in 1960 was a disappointment. But in her case, it was doubly so because she believes to this day that the election was stolen through vote fraud in Illinois and Texas.
Pat’s political instincts are invariably accurate. She urged me not to run for governor of California. She was right. She has an uncanny ability to assess people. Her personnel evaluations were usually better than mine. On the few occasions when I did not follow her recommendations, I wished I had. She had strong views on issues but always expressed them privately rather than publicly.
The Secret Service’s code name for her was “Starlight.” She fitted it to a “T” during the White House years. She did not need designer gowns to accentuate her natural beauty and poise. What particularly saddened her were the huge anti-war demonstrations outside the White House. They no longer shouted, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” Now it was, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your f-----g war.” She did not blame the young people. Having been a teacher, she knew how biased teachers and professors could poison the minds of impressionable students. What hurt her most was that threats of violent demonstrations prompted the Secret Service to raise such concerns about security during Julie’s graduation from Smith College that we finally decided not to attend.
The resignation was harder on her than me, because she thought it was a mistake to resign. Like Julie and Tricia, she thought we should fight through to the end. I still marvel at how she was able to go forty-eight hours without sleep while she supervised the packing of all our personal belongings for the move to San Clemente. My near-fatal illness in California was also a greater burden on her. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally drained, so in addition to keeping up her own spirits, she had to sustain mine. Our quiet dinners alone in the evening were often the only respite I had from the trauma of those dark days.
My evaluation of Pat is best expressed in this diary note I made in California shortly before the resignation:
I remember that Tricia said as we came back from the beach that her mother was really a wonderful woman. And I said, yes, she has been through a lot through the twenty-five years we have been in and out of politics. Both at home and abroad, she has always conducted herself with masterful poise and dignity. But God, how she could have gone through what she does, I simply don’t know.
After we left the White House, it did not seem possible that she could bear any more. I followed my usual practice of not reading the criticism being heaped on me. But she insisted on keeping informed. She read almost all of the articles and many of the books. One day a well-meaning member of our staff sent her a particularly vicious book written by two Washington Post reporters. It was the last thing she read before tragedy struck.
On the morning of July 8, 1976, I went into the kitchen at Casa Pacifica to get some coffee. I noticed that Pat seemed to be unsteady and that the cup and saucer were shaking in her hand. The left side of her mouth was drooping. I hoped it might have been caused by an insect sting, but I knew better. It was a stroke. As we rode together in the ambulance to the hospital, her left side became paralyzed. Her speech was slurred and her mouth contorted.
Hundreds of bouquets of flowers and thousands of get-well messages poured in from all over the world. But only she could handle this crisis. No one else could help her. Before she left the hospital, her speech difficulty had disappeared and her mouth was back to normal. But her left arm hung limply by her side.
Our home in San Clemente had a beautiful Spanish inner patio. She had an exercise wheel installed on one of the walls enclosing it. Day after day as I left the house to go over to the office, I saw her standing there, turning the wheel around and around again. At times she was discouraged because there seemed to be no visible improvement. But she never gave up. Before the year was out, her recovery was complete. Doctors did not do it for her. Her family did not do it for her. Her friends did not do it for her. She did it by herself, which is characteristic of her whole life. My critics in the media called her “Plastic Pat.” What they did not know was that her plastic was tougher than the finest steel.
The Bible is a wellspring of truths, but it contains one falsehood—that women are the weaker sex. Statistics tell us that women live longer than men. Experience tells me that women are stronger, too, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Whether it was confronting the Fund crisis, facing a killer mob in Caracas, standing up to anti-war demonstrators, or going through the ordeal of resignation, Pat was always stronger. Without her, I could not have done what I did.
When I make public appearances these days, the question I am asked most often is, “How is Pat?” Considering what she has been through, she is remarkably well. You would never know that she had suffered a stroke. She no longer participates in public events but devotes all of her time and energy to her children and grandchildren.
What is her legacy? Pat will be remembered as one of our greatest First Ladies for four things.
She was a superb goodwill ambassador. She was our most widely traveled First Lady, having campaigned in all fifty states as part of the Pat and Dick team and visited seventy-five nations around the globe. By the time she came to the White House, Pat had already traveled with me to fifty-three countries, including the remotest corners of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. She deeply believed in the importance of personal diplomacy. She accompanied me on the history-making first visits of a President to the Soviet Union and China. She traveled alone to Peru in 1970 following a devastating earthquake to bring relief supplies and galvanize volunteer efforts. In 1972, she attended the inauguration of the President of Liberia, becoming the first President’s wife to officially represent the United States abroad.
She will be remembered for championing the cause of volunteerism—especially the Right to Read program—because of her belief that the need for personal involvement in today’s complex, impersonal world is more vital than ever. She visited volunteer projects throughout America and honored hundreds of outstanding volunteers at the White House.
Before we left New York in the 1960s, the elevator operator in our apartment building told us he had never visited a national park because he couldn’t afford the travel costs. She remembered that when we went to the White House, and through her leadership, the “Parks to the People” program was instituted to establish small parks near major cities that poor people could afford to visit.
Finally, Pat will be remembered for her efforts to bring meaning to these words: “The White House belongs to the American people.” She believed that the White House should be lit at night like the Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington monuments, and at Thanksgiving 1970 the project was completed. She surprised me by having the lights turned on for the first time one night when we arrived at the White House by helicopter. She personally raised millions of dollars to refurbish the interior of the mansion, adding an unprecedented five hundred antiques and works of art to the collection. All the money was spent on the public rooms, none on the private quarters. She expanded access for the public by opening the house in the afternoons for the handicapped, establishing special tours for the blind, instituting candlelight tours at Christmastime and tours of the gardens in springtime, and opening the family quarters on the second floor to guests who attended our many Evenings at the White House.
Any one of these accomplishments would be enough for one person. But I think she would prefer to be remembered for another reason. It was hard for young people to grow up and lead useful lives during the spiritual turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly so for children of celebrities who are always in the spotlight. That generation is still struggling against the effects of rampant drug abuse and moral aimlessness. With their father subject to massive political and personal attack, it is a miracle that Tricia and Julie came through as they did. They have survived it all with the strength and serenity of their mother.
They couldn’t have done it without her. In a tribute to former Prime Minister Asquith, Winston Churchill observed, “His children are his best memorial.” I think that is the way Pat would like to be remembered. Her children are her best memorial.