Biography of First Lady Pat Nixon

Kate Halberstadt Ryan, born in Essen County, near Frankfurt, Germany, had come to the United States as a child of ten to visit an uncle who had no family. She fell in love with America and never returned to Germany. She was a widow with two children when she married William Ryan in 1909. Mrs. Nixon was the youngest of the three children born to them. Her brothers, William and Thomas Ryan, lived in California until their deaths in 1991 and 1997, respectively.

Before Mrs. Nixon was a year old, Kate Ryan, whose first husband had been killed in a mining accident, persuaded William Ryan to give up mining. The family then moved from Nevada to California, settling on a small farm in Artesia, 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Today, the site of this home in Cerritos is the Pat Nixon Park.

The future First Lady had a childhood with no luxuries except that of a warm and loving family. But this was shattered when her mother died in 1925. At the age of 13, Mrs. Nixon took over the household duties for her father and her brothers. Two years later, when she was attending Excelsior High School, her father became seriously ill and she cared for him, as she had her mother, until his death in 1930. She was then 18, a high school graduate and completely on her own.

 Her first ambition was a college education. She enrolled in the Fullerton (California) Junior College and earned her expenses by working part time as a janitor in a local bank. She was able to fulfill her second ambition - to travel - in 1931, when elderly friends of her family asked her to drive them to the East Coast. She drove them to New York where she stayed for two years working in a hospital, first as a secretary, and later, after a Columbia University summer course in radiology, as an X-ray technician.

Her first job following graduation was teaching business education courses at Whittier Union High School for an annual salary of $1,800. Whittier Union High School was located on the main street of the quiet Quaker community at the foot of La Puente Hills. There were 2,000 students. In addition to full time class work, Miss Ryan was actively involved in extra curricular activities: faculty advisor for the "Pep Committee," helping with student rallies, attending all high school sports events and every PTA meeting, and serving as director for school plays. Her ability as a teacher and her compassion for her students were noted in Whittier at that time and many years later when a former student of hers sketched a verbal portrait of Pat Ryan as a teacher in the summer 1971 issue of The Saturday Evening Post:

"Those of us who are lucky can remember in our school days who was more than just a teacher. She was a quiet inspiration perhaps, to our secret hopes. Or perhaps she brought out abilities we had never dreamed were in us. Or maybe, as in the case of my high school typing teacher, there was something about her which made us want to be as much like her as possible."

"I was a ninth grader, about fourteen, but I have never forgotten her. There was something very special about that teacher of mine. The school was in Whittier, California. Her name then was Pat Ryan; today it is Mrs. Richard Nixon."

They met in 1937, and were married on June 21, 1940, in a Quaker ceremony at the historic Mission Inn in Riverside, California. The couple left for a honeymoon in Mexico, driving to Laredo and then down the Pan American Highway to Mexico City. They returned to Whittier and settled in an apartment over a garage while Mrs. Nixon continued teaching and Dick Nixon was in private law practice.

One year later, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Mr. Nixon was an attorney in the Office of Emergency Management until he volunteered for naval service. He spent two months at Quonset, Rhode Island, and in March, 1942, he was commissioned into the Navy as a lieutenant (junior grade) and received his first active duty assignment to Ottuma, Iowa, as an aide to the officer in charge of setting up a Naval Air Base. Mrs. Nixon worked in a bank in Ottumwa and when her husband 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. After 14 months in the South Pacific, Lt. Nixon returned and they moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he handled contract terminations for the Navy.

It was in 1946 that Mr. Nixon entered political life as the Republican candidate for California's 12th Congressional District. Nine days after Mr. Nixon announced his candidacy, their first daughter, Patricia, called Tricia, was born in Whittier, on February 21, 1946. Richard Nixon was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and was re-elected to the seat in 1948, the year in which their second daughter, Julie, was born, on July 5, in Washington, D.C.

 Tricia became the 16^th White House bride when she and Edward Finch Cox of New York were married on June 12, 1971. Tricia was the first of the eight Presidential daughters to be married in a Rose Garden ceremony.

Julie joined together two Presidential families when she and Dwight David Eisenhower II were married on December 22, 1968, in New York's Marble Collegiate Church while her father was President-elect.

 In 1950, Mr. Nixon won the election as United States Senator from California. Two years later he was elected Vice President of the United States under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both were re-elected in 1956. During all of the Nixon campaigns, Pat Nixon was so effective a campaigner at her husband's side that the Nixons became known as the "Pat and Dick Team."

As the wife of the Vice President, Mrs. Nixon accompanied her husband to 53 countries around the world, visiting hospitals and schools by day and dining with heads of state by night. So effective a good will ambassador was she that President Eisenhower always sent the Nixons as a team.

In 1971, President Nixon was asked by a Washington reporter about his wife's part in the campaigns. He replied: "I remember through all of our campaigns, whether it was a receiving line or whether it was going to a face at the airport, she was the one that always insisted on shaking that last hand, not simply because she was thinking of that vote, but because she simply could not turn down that last child or that last person."

Her work in the White House flowed from her boundless compassion for humanity. She was the first First Lady to champion volunteerism. She blazed the literacy trail with the "Right to Read" program. She pushed to establish new recreational areas in or near big cities for those who could not afford to visit distant national parks.

She was a confident player on the world stage, traveling in all to over 80 countries during her years of public service. She accompanied President Nixon to the People's Republic of China and undertook solo missions to Africa and South America. A proud President Nixon called his wife "Madame Ambassador." On her trips she kept luncheons, banquets, and formal receptions to a minimum so she could visit schools, hospitals, orphanages, old people's homes, and even a leper colony in Panama.

During the Nixons' 1969 trip to South Vietnam, she became the first First Lady to visit a combat zone, in an open helicopter and accompanied by Secret Service agents draped with bandoleers. In June 1970, Mrs. Nixon flew supplies gathered by volunteers to earthquake ruptured Peru. For this, the Peruvian Government gave Mrs. Nixon the highest decoration their country can bestow - The Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun. This award is the oldest decoration in the Americas and Mrs. Nixon became the first North American woman to receive this award.

She arranged the first White House tours for the visually and hearing impaired and inaugurated the famous candlelight tours for people who worked during the day. And she believed that the house into which she brought so much light should be lit at night like Washington's other monuments, so she made all the arrangements and surprised the President by having the floodlights turned on for the first time as they arrived back at the White House one evening by helicopter.

In retirement, Mrs. Nixon was a devoted grandmother to Jennie, Christopher, Alex Richard, and Melanie. Although she kept her public appearances to a minimum, polls showed that she remained one of America's most admired women. She died on June 22, 1993 at home in Park Ridge, New Jersey with her family at her side. She was buried on the grounds of the Nixon Library, a few steps from her husband's birthplace, on June 26, 1993.