He wakes during the night, switches on the light, speaks into his tape recorder or takes notes, it’s impossible.” The couple kept separate bedrooms, and Dick unintentionally raised tension by assigning Bob Haldeman, who savoured his role as the “president’s son-of-a-bitch,” to deliver messages to his wife. She would say, ‘That was a disaster,’ or ‘Well, I’ve heard you make lousy speeches, but that was the worst.’ ”Īt the White House, Pat told a member of the staff, “Nobody could sleep with Dick. A reporter who travelled with the Nixons recalls of Pat, “God, she made it rough for him. “He flared at her like a prima donna” and “ordered her out with as little ceremony as you would a dog.” Dick was moody and snappy. Swift talks to someone who still remembers being offended by Dick’s treatment of Pat at a radio station in 1945. In Pat and Dick, Swift digs all the way back to the 1930s and ’40s for this sympathetic picture of a couple deeply in love but beset by awkwardness-Dick shunned public displays of affection, unlike the Reagans who laid it on for show-and the stress that shadowed them for decades. In 1970, writer Judith Viorst ridiculed the marriage of Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, in the pages of the New York Times, calling the union “as dry as dust.” Newly released love letters between the former first couple show that Viorst apprehended only a portion of the story. Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of A Marriage
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