Overview

A new, revolutionary look into the brilliant life of Pat Nixon. In America's collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted ""Most Admired Woman in the World"" in 1972 and made Gallup Poll's top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and ""plastic"" in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June of 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974, forging her own graceful path between the protocols of the strait-laced mid-century and the bra-burning Sixties and Seventies. Pat was a highly travelled First Lady, visiting eighty-three countries during her tenure. After a devastating earthquake in Peru in 1970, she personally flew in medical supplies and food to hard-hit areas, meeting one-on-one with victims of the tragedy. The First Lady's 1972 trips with her husband to China and to Russia were critical to the detente that resulted. Back in the US, Pat greatly expanded upon previous preservation efforts in the White House, obtaining more art and antique objects than any other First Lady. In the domestic arena, she was progressive on women's issues, favoring the Equal Rights Amendment and backing a targeted effort to get more women into high level government jobs. Pat strongly supported nominating a woman for the Supreme Court. She was pro-choice, supporting women's reproductive rights publicly even before the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973. When asked to define her ""signature"" First Lady agenda, she defied being put into a box, often saying: ""People are my project."" The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Heath Hardage Lee presents readers with the essential nature of this First Lady, an empathetic, adventurous, self-made woman who wanted no power or influence, but who connected warmly with both ordinary Americans and people from different cultures she encountered world-wide.

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9781250274342

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"""I first met Pat Nixon in October 1952 when I was six years old. Over the following two-plus decades, she became one of the most admired women in the country. Yet, somehow, Americans never seemed to come to really know her. In The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Heath Lee reveals Pat Nixon to be a strong, complex, intensely human woman whose life deserves to be appreciated in full. Mrs. Nixon is a mystery no more."" - Christine Todd Whitman, 50th Governor of New Jersey and best-selling author of It's My Party Too"

Author Information

Heath Hardage Lee is the author of League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from. She holds a B.A. in History with Honors from Davidson College, and an M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. Heath served as the 2017 Robert J. Dole Curatorial Fellow, and her exhibition entitled ""The League of Wives: Vietnam POW MIA Advocates & Allies"" premiered at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics in 2017. Heath's first book, Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, won the 2015 Colonial Dames of America Annual BookAward as well as a 2015 Gold Medal for Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

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