Woe is Pat

Last night, honest to God, I couldn't get to sleep for worrying about Pat Nixon. 

You know that perception we all had when she was First Lady that she was terribly pent-up, always doing the right thing but in a mechanical way?   (During Watergate, I remember my friend Rob postulating that she must have had one friend who visited once a year so the two of them could go into closet and close the door so Pat could unload.  He was just about right--her name was Helene Drown.)

Turns out we were all correct.     Reading about her in "Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages that Shaped our History," by journalist Kati Marton, had me feeling sad and riled.   I don't like reading about empty marriages that eat up decades of lives.

Marton says that after Nixon's 1960 defeat, Pat had had it with politics.  Nixon lived for politics, and she wanted to stay married, so she endured both her marriage and the role she'd been thrust into.

  According to Marton,  the Nixons did nothing together, except when protocol required it. They barely spoke.  If Nixon wanted to tell her something, he'd direct aides to send a memo to her office.

 Their daughter, Julie, who wrote a biography of Pat, described her parents' relationship as "very private; they were "undemonstrative."  Marton terms their marriage after 1958 "a charade," which seems closer to the mark.

"She and her husband continued to value above all else harmony in their marriage--at almost any price," writes Marton.  And what a price.   Marton quotes Pat as saying of a trip to Hawaii  in 1952, that it was "the last carefree vacation I ever had."

The Nixons in 1952, the year of the "last carefree vacation."

Pat Nixon died in 1993.  That's forty-one years of doing the right thing even though it lacks personal meaning or the embrace of love underpinning it.

Sometimes I'm puzzled by somebody else's marriage.  I see that it's one I might not want for myself, but then I think a) you can never know what goes on in some one else's marriage, and b) they probably talk a lot when they're alone together.

Neither a) or b) worked last night when I was trying to get to sleep.

The truth is so haunting that I lose track of the fact that they were Republicans and just feel sorry for them.