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Pat was a nickname of hers, but her real name was Thelma Catherine Ryan. She was born on the day before St. Patrick's Day, March 16 of 1912 in Ely, Nevada. Her father William Ryan called her his "St. Patrick's babe in the morn," because she was born just hours before St. Patrick's Day and the nickname stuck. Her father had been a sailor, a miner and a farmer. Her mother was Katherine "Kate" Halberstadt, who was born in Frankfurt, Germany. It was a second marriage for her and when Kate's first husband died, a son from that marriage was raised by his paternal grandmother. Besides her half-brother, Pat had two brothers and a half-sister.
Pat Nixon was 5' 5 1/2" tall with sandy blonde hair and hazel eyes. Her parents were of different religions: her father was Roman Catholic and her mother was a Christian Scientist. Pat was married in the Quaker faith, but she was not formally affiliated with any religion.
While in grammar school, Pat Ryan gave an oration on Progressive Party leader Robert LaFollette. In Excelsior High School in Norwalk, California, she was a member of the drama club and the Filibuster Club debating team, as well as secretary of the student body in her junior and senior years. At Woodbury College in Orange County, California, she took a night course in shorthand. She also attended Fullerton Junior College, in Fullerton, California, Columbia University in New York in the summer of 1933 (where she took a course in radiology) and the University of Southern California from 1934 to 1937, where she took education and student training classes, and obtained a certificate to teach at the high school level. She graduated cum laude from USC. Pat Nixon was the first First Lady to earn a graduate degree. (Her degree was the equivalent of a Masters Degree).
From an early age Pat worked on her parents' vegetable farm. When her mother became disabled with a liver ailment and cancer, Pat assumed the household chores. When her father contracted his terminal tuberculosis she continued with the household and farm chores and also took a job at the farmers and dairymen Artesia First National Bank, rising early to clean the floors as a janitor, then returning after high school to work as a bookkeeper. At Seton Hospital for the Tubercular run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity, Pat Ryan worked as an x-ray technician, pharmacy manager, typist, and laboratory assistant. While at USC she worked for a psychology professor, helping to grade student papers and doing research for a book he was writing. She also worked as assistant in the office of the university's vice president, cafeteria waitress, librarian, preparing graduate survey questionnaires, testing beauty products in salons, a movie extra and an assistant buyer at Bullock's Wilshire Department Store. She worked an average of 40 hours a week, in addition to her classes. She taught at Whittier Union High School and served as faculty adviser to the "Pep" Committee. She earned an annual salary of $1,800.00 and continued to work as a teacher a year after she married.
Pat Ryan married Richard Nixon on June 21, 1940 at Mission Inn, Riverside, California. They had met while both were performing in a production of The Dark Tower staged by the Whittier Community Players, a local theater group. After a honeymoon to Laredo and Mexico City, Mexico, they settled in an apartment in Whittier. The couple had two daughters: Patricia "Tricia" Nixon Cox (born 21 February 1946) and Julie Nixon Eisenhower (born 25 July 1948). Julie Nixon married David Eisenhower, the grandson of President Dwight Eisenhower, under whom her father had served as Vice President from 1953 to 1961.
During World War II, Nixon worked as an attorney in the Office of Emergency Management in Washington, D.C. while Pat Nixon worked as clerk for the Red Cross. Nixon was commissioned as a naval lieutenant (junior grade) and received his first active duty assignment to Ottumwa, Iowa, while Pat Nixon worked in a bank there. When Nixon was assigned to duty in the South Pacific, she moved to San Francisco, California, where she worked as an economist for the Office of Price Administration. In 1946 Nixon won a seat in the U.S. Congress; four years later he was elected to the U.S. Senate and two years after that, in 1952 he was elected Vice President of the United States under Dwight D. Eisenhower and both were re-elected in 1956.
Pat Nixon later declared that politics was not a life she would have chosen for herself. During his first campaign, she researched stacks of congressional records to familiarize herself with the record of his opponent, incumbent Jerry Voorhis. She wrote and edited campaign literature, typed and printed, and then hand-distributed them. Throughout the nine national political campaigns of Nixon's career, Pat Nixon often attended or reviewed the speeches of his opponents. She did not like the world of politics, however, particularly the level of viciousness it tended to draw and the intrusion it caused in her family's private life. For example when press reports of an alleged secret fund broke after his vice presidential nomination, it was Pat Nixon who advised him to ignore the advice to step aside and instead to fight the charges. He did so in a famous televised "Checkers Speech" (in reference to the name of the dog given as a gift to his daughters) with Pat Nixon on screen, and made reference to her fighting Irish spirit, her respectable "cloth" coat and the fact that she wasn't on his Senate payroll as many other such spouses were.
As the wife of the Vice President, Pat Nixon accompanied her husband to 53 countries around the world, including a visit to a leper colony in Panama. President Eisenhower always sent the Nixons as a team to foreign nations. Pat Nixon worked behind the scenes, drafting the Vice President's public correspondence, organizing his schedule and editing his speeches.
Nixon's 1960 race for the presidency used Pat Nixon's popularity as an asset. An entire ad campaign was built around the slogan of "Pat For First Lady," a message carried on buttons and bumper stickers. The narrow loss for her husband dimmed Pat Nixon's view of politics. She was less eager when Nixon ran for Governor of California in 1962 and for President again in 1968.
Following her husband's successful victory in 1968 Pat Nixon became the first incumbent First Lady to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. She was the first to disclose publicly her pro-choice view on abortion in reaction to questions on the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. She publicly urged her husband to name a woman to the Supreme Court. As first lady she instructed her correspondence director to send her several hundred of the letters sent weekly by the public to the First Lady, and she spent up to five hours a day either dictating or hand-writing her responses. If a person wrote her requesting federal assistance of some kind, she directed the letter to the proper agency, making her office function much as a congressional office did in meeting the needs of its constituency.
On February 18, 1969, she announced that she would encourage a "national recruitment program" to enlist thousands of volunteers to carry out a wide variety of community services. She honored organizations that had formed to respond to local problems. She advocated passage of the Domestic Services Volunteer Act of 1970, although she did not testify before Congress on its behalf. When Richard Nixon attended a Chicago environmental meeting, Pat spent the day visiting several conservation projects in that city. While in Denver to meet with law enforcement officials, and visited a rehabilitation center for juvenile delinquents. She sponsored a program known as "Legacy of the Parks," which turned federally developed, protected and maintained lands over for community recreation.
Pat Nixon was a member of the President's Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, and honorary chair of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's "Right to Read" program. She helped to organize the "Evenings in the Park," a series of local summer concerts in Washington, DC for inner-city youths, hosting one program on the White House lawn, and attending another on the Washington Monument grounds, amid a large number of anti-war and "Black Power" protesters at a simultaneous rally there. She also visited several local day camps for underprivileged children that the private sector supported, and took groups of the children on afternoon voyages on the presidential yacht. For groups of local, disadvantaged children she hosted the first annual Halloween parties in the mansion.
She made all the arrangements to have the White House lit by floodlights at night, as Washington's other monuments were - so those driving by on Pennsylvania Avenue or flying into or out of the nearby National Airport could glimpse it clearly. She invited hundreds of average American families to nondenominational Sunday services in the East Room, mixing with Cabinet, Congressional and other Washington officials. As hostess, she instituted a "Evenings at the White House" series of performances by artists in varied American traditions--from opera to bluegrass to Broadway musical.
On 11 Oct 1971 Mrs. Nixon was the first incumbent First Lady to toss out a baseball for a major league team, being at game two of the 1971 World Series. She made the ceremonial 'first pitch' at Baltimore Memorial Stadium.
Pat Nixon held the record as the most world-traveled First Lady until Hillary Clinton. She made an important January 1972 trip on her own to Africa, visiting Liberia, Ghana and The Ivory Coast, not only touring those nations and meeting a cross-section of their societies as a goodwill ambassador, but also addressing their congresses and meeting with those nations' leaders to discuss U.S. policy on Rhodesia and human rights issues in South Africa. In June 1970, Pat Nixon flew to Peru and lead a major international humanitarian effort along with some ten tons of donated food, clothing and medical supplies gathered by volunteers and relief organizations that she had solicited for the Peruvian people, reeling from a devastating earthquake that took 80,000 lives and left another 80,000 homeless. The Peruvian Government gave Pat. Nixon the highest decoration their country can bestow, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun. One Lima newspaper declared that she had radically improved previously strained U.S.-Peruvian relations with the trip.
In Yugoslavia, she remarked that both its parliament and the U.S. Congress should have more women members among their representatives. She encouraged women to run for office and even stated that she would support a qualified woman candidate regardless of her political party affiliation. She toured the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China with the President during his historic 1972 trips to those nations. While Nixon was in closed-door meetings most of the time with officials in China, the international media followed Pat Nixon in her bright red coat as she met with workers, students, dancers, farmers and others living everyday lives. Joining the President in his 1969 trip to South Vietnam, she became the first First Lady to visit a combat zone, flying just 18 miles from Saigon in an open helicopter and accompanied by Secret Service agents.
The Vietnam War dominated the first part of the Administration and Americans who either supported or opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam shadowed many of Pat Nixon’s public appearances. Pat voiced her support of amnesty for those men who had left the U.S. to avoid the draft. She was also appalled at the killing of four antiwar protestors at Kent State University by Ohio National Guardsmen.
Pat Nixon supported the President's run for a second term in 1972 because she hoped to see congressional action on his welfare reform, environmental and health care reform proposals. She regularly read and marked the Congressional Record, Administration issue papers, studies and reports. She did not believe that it had been a wise decision to have the Vice President Spiro Agnew so bluntly attack the national media. She was initially kept in the dark about the criminal actions that came to be known as the Watergate scandal, and when she learened of the secret tape recordings made by the President, she offered the unsolicited advice that he destroy them while they were still legally considered private property, advice he did not follow. She became deeply disturbed over how isolated he became. When the threat of impeachment became real in late July of 1974, Pat Nixon advised her husband not to resign. But as things began to look bleak, she began packing their possessions and making the immediate arrangements for their return to California.
The immediate years following Nixon's resignation and their return to their San Clemente, California estate "La Casa Pacifica" were difficult. In late 1974, he nearly died from phlebitis and other complications resulting from it, and then suffered through a depression.
In July 1976, Pat Nixon suffered a stroke, resulting in the temporary loss of speech and use of her left side. Through a rigorous physical therapy routine, she was able to rehabilitate full use of her motor and speaking skills, but she remained weak. She enjoyed the years following 1980 when she and the former president relocated to the East Coast where they were able to spend time with their children and grandchildren. Pat Nixon rarely permitted the use of her name for various projects, but did lend it to support a San Clemente historical celebration, a fundraising effort to renovate and re-interpret the Smithsonian Institution's First Lady's exhibit, and a Carter Center conference on women and the U.S. Constitution. As a former First Lady, she only appeared at three public events, the dedication of Pat Nixon School (1975) in the Los Angeles area, named for her; the dedication of the Richard Nixon Birthplace and Museum (1990) in Yorba Linda, California and the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum (1991). She accompanied her husband back to China during his first of several return visits to that nation, but never joined him on the four trips he made back to the White House.
Pat Nixon suffered another stroke in in 1983. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992 and died on June 22, 1993 in Park Ridge, New Jersey. Her husband was devasted by her death. Her funeral service took place on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California on June 26, 1993. The Reverend Dr. Billy Graham, eulogized the former First Lady. In addition to her husband and immediate family, former presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford and their wives, Nancy and Betty, were also in attendance. President Nixon sobbed openly, profusely, and at times uncontrollably during the ceremony.
Pat Nixon's tombstone gives her name as "Patricia Nixon", the name by which she was popularly known. Her husband survived her by 10 months, dying on April 22, 1994. Her epitaph reads:
“Even when people can't speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.”