On Monday, August 17, 1942, in what would be the first of many partings over the next two years, Pat saw her husband off at Washington’s Union Station. Dick Nixon, then a 29-year-old lawyer for the government’s Office of Price Administration, endured a gloomy train ride to Rhode Island for two months of rigorous officer training at Quonset Point, the first week of which, Dick wrote Pat, “was the longest I’ve ever known.” He disliked studying naval science and ballistics and was no fan of the arduous physical training in the summer humidity. He found solace in his correspondence with his wife.

The Nixons’ wartime letters are extraordinary documents, offering vivid evidence of the couple’s strengthening bond and the evolution of their individual characters. Their separation allowed these emotionally straitened individuals, who had been married two years earlier, the space to discover and express their profound feeling for each other. Most of these letters were opened last January by the Nixon Foundation in commemoration of what would have been the late president’s 100th birthday; they are revealed here in their full context for the first time. And they show a surprisingly tender side of the man who would go on to become a president remembered for his pursuit of domestic enemies, real and imagined, for controversial foreign-policy decisions like the secret bombing of Cambodia and for harsh recorded remarks about people he disliked. This was the side of Richard Milhous Nixon that only one other person—Pat Nixon—ever saw. This was Dick Nixon in love.


During and after the White House years the Nixon marriage was often characterized as loveless. In September 1969, in an article in the New York Times, journalist Judith Viorst characterized the Nixons as “people who have lost whatever they once had between them,” and quoted critics who called the Nixon marriage “dry as dust.” The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee thought Nixon had “sort of a dingy marriage: I have a feeling they never touched each other in any way.” Yet insiders who witnessed the Nixons in private described a couple who faced extraordinary pressures, but maintained a warm connection, however frayed it might be at stressful times. Nixon aide Frank Gannon described his boss as “the guy with no game who couldn’t believe that he got the hot girl.” Connie Stuart, the East Wing chief of staff, Dwight Chapin, deputy assistant to the president and press secretary Helen McCain Smith all saw a playful and warm couple who sometimes held hands in private. But the wartime letters, written at a time of vulnerability and loneliness, reveal their marriage at its most affectionate and heartfelt.

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When Dick and Pat Ryan met at a community theater play rehearsal on January 18, 1938, he found that he “could not take my eyes away from her.” He drove Pat and a friend home from the rehearsal that night and told her, “I’d like to have a date with you.” She replied, “I’m busy.” On the third time he drove her home, he said, “Someday I’m going to marry you.” She laughed.

The wartime photo Pat Nixon sent to Dick. | Courtesy Will Swift

Twenty-five-year-old Pat, a glamorous former movie extra actress whom students called “quite a dish,” was in her first year teaching business courses at Whittier Union High, just outside of Los Angeles, when she first met Dick. After years of privation and hardship raising her brothers on her own after her parents died during her adolescence, Pat was happy living with roommates and having an independent career. She was beloved by her fellow teachers and by both female and male students, some of whom had crushes on her and even followed her home to spy on her.

Twenty-five-year-old Dick Nixon, by contrast, was unsettled in his life. He found his native ambition blocked. He was living in a small room over his parents’ garage. He was working in a law job he had been reluctant to take, did not have a girlfriend and was back home in the California town he had tried to leave behind. He pursued Pat with the same determination and persistence he would later use to win seven elections. He hated ice-skating, but bloodied himself repeatedly to learn so he could go skating with Pat and her friends. On weekends, in order to spend time with her, he drove her to Los Angeles, where she stayed with her half-sister and went on dates with other men. He would return on Sunday afternoons and wait until she was ready for him to drive her home. Six months after they met, Pat went to Michigan to buy a car and did not contact Dick for three months. He eventually tracked her down and persuaded her to give him another chance. By the spring of 1939, Pat too began to love Dick, drawn in by his love of adventure, brilliant mind and high sense of purpose—the latter a quality she shared more than the public recognized.

Three-plus years later, at the midpoint of Dick’s training, they met up for a weekend in New York City. As she recounted to his parents later, when Pat first spotted him in the crowd at Pennsylvania Station, Dick looked “so different: younger, real tanned, thinner, and of course very handsome in his blue uniform with all the braid and the blue cap.” Dick, she said, wanted to dine “where we can sit with real silver, on a real tablecloth with someone to serve.” They splurged on a meal at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Dick felt all the lonelier on his train ride back to Quonset. At the base, he wrote her: “This weekend was wonderful. Coming back I looked at myself in the mirror and thought how very lucky I was to have you … I was proud of you every minute I was with you.”

“I am certainly not the Romeo type,” Dick explained. “I may not say much when I am with you—but all of me loves you all the time.”

Pat also felt a keen sense of loss. After one late-night phone call, she wrote him what may be one of her first romantic missives: “It’s two o’clock but I just had to write you to say how very much I love you.” Her pet name for him was “Plum.” After telling him about a movie she had seen, she wrote, “I miss Plum’s hand very much.” In a comment that, in her concern for her husband’s burdens, foreshadows her feelings in later years in the White House, Pat wrote, “I hope I said nothing to worry you—when you are working so hard, etc. it would be awful to add to the load.”

Lt. Commander Nixon in his Navy uniform, August 1944 | AP Photo

In October, after Dick was appointed a lieutenant junior grade in the U.S. Naval Reserve, he and Pat received an unwelcome shock. Dick had requested “ships and stations” as his first choice for active duty, with the expectation that he would be assigned to a battle fleet in one of the war zones. Instead he was sent to a naval station at an air base in Ottumwa, Iowa, amid the cornfields in the southeastern corner of the state, 85 miles from Des Moines. The naval air station was not even fully built. “Its uncompleted runway stopped abruptly in the middle of a cornfield,” Dick later wrote. Soon the Nixons were itching to leave. In December, Dick spotted a listing on the mess announcement board asking officers in his age group to apply for immediate sea duty; he jumped at the opportunity. When a posting came through for New Caledonia, an archipelago over 2,000 miles north east of Australia, they hightailed it out of Ottumwa. By early May they were in San Francisco.

Pat decided to stay in the Bay Area, which had the best job opportunities, while Dick was overseas. She located a job as a correspondence clerk with the Office of Civilian Defense. After scouring the newspaper, she found a cheap bedroom and bath in a garage attached to a house at the top of a hill at 2829 Divisadero Street, an address Dick would soon come to know by heart. He wrote her there every day.

Pat and Dick returned to Whittier to store their car. After a brief visit, his family and a group of friends went to Union Station in Los Angeles to see the couple off. His parents and his 93-year-old maternal grandmother Alvira were heartsick at his assignment to a war, and not just because they worried about his safety. By joining the navy, Dick had ignored his family’s Quaker heritage of pacifism. Nixon was not, however, a pacifist, and never considered being a conscientious objector. Joining the war effort “wasn’t a move I made because I was a real brave fella,” Dick later told biographer Jonathan Aitken. “It was just simply an innate inner feeling that it was vitally important to be where the action was.”

On May 31, 1943, the day he left for the war zone, Dick undertook the somber task of writing his will—a task his legal practice left him well prepared to do—leaving all his property to Pat, appointing her “executive without bond” with “absolute discretion” in settling his estate. Asking for as “simple and inexpensive a funeral as possible,” he concluded the brief document by telling Pat to remarry, should he die, and by making clear that remarriage would have no effect on her rights under his will.

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A love letter from Dick to Pat, Valentine's Day, 1944 | Nixon Libray

Dick headed overseas on an unpleasant 17-day voyage crammed in with 3,000 fellow servicemen on the converted ocean liner SS President Monroe. “Your letters are my only happiness now,” Dick wrote her. On their third wedding anniversary (June 21, 1943), Dick penned her letter on his knee in a Quonset hut, while “wishing that you and I could be riding down the coast of Monterey to spend a month at the beach.” He spent an hour in a local cathedral “thinking of our years together and loving you every minute of the time … I think of our last few days in S.f.—our walks up Market [St.]—and into the stores. I really get a big bang out of shopping with you—and I hope you buy everything you want always.” Reminiscing about the day they met in February 1938, he could not resist tweaking her. “Remember how you treated me then?”

Dick claimed that her job with the OPA was far more important than his had ever been there. “I’m really very proud—as I have always been. I like to tell the gang how smart you are as well as being the most attractive person they’ll ever see. Dear Heart you are the tops! Small wonder that I have no other interest than you.”

His separation from his wife, combined with his frustrating and ultimately undistinguished role on the outskirts of the real war, brought up old feelings of inadequacy, heightening his attachment to Pat. In a letter replete with the sentiment of his 1938 infatuation, he wrote, “the only thing that matters is that I love you more every day,” his postscript describing her powerful impact upon his mood: “When I feel blue—I think of our times together—and it has a miraculous effect. You are a real tonic for me.” Because wartime delivery was erratic and undependable and letters would arrive in batches, they agreed to number and date their missives.

Dick did not have with him a good photograph of his wife. He badgered Pat for nine months until she set aside her reservations about doing something self-indulgent and dragged herself to a portrait studio. The beautiful picture left Dick ecstatic. Now he had something tangible to brag about with his wartime buddies. “Everybody raved—wondered how I happened to rate! (I do too),” but the image of his absent wife intensified his loneliness amid the tedium and tension of war.

Dick served with the South Pacific Air Transport Command in General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific theater, supporting ground operations on New Caledonia, Bougainville and Green Island. He prepared flight plans for the cargo and transport planes, ordered supplies for the troops and helped evacuate the wounded and dead. Later he became head of an air transport operation.

His first base was in the capital of New Caledonia, Noumea, a crucial seat for the Allied forces that had fought off Japan’s advances toward Australia, New Zealand and the Solomon Islands. The city was set on a hilly peninsula in the southeast end of the island. One Sunday Dick and several friends rode a jeep into the lush, stream-filled mountains that surrounded the base, amid shining blue butterflies and exquisite flora. “You rode along with me all the way,” he wrote Pat. “I think of you when I see beautiful things.” To bring her closer, he enclosed in his letter samples of some of the attractive and unique vegetation and the red berries he found along the way.

In September 1943, flying at 10,000 feet overlooking the South Pacific islands and the ocean, he did not have time to complete a full letter, but wanted her to know that “I love you just the same up here as down below.” The next morning when the sun came up, he flew above the clouds and saw a spectacular sunrise. He missed her then, but assured her, “We will see sunrises from the air together—and I hope very soon.”

With dull work and too much time on his hands, he was often miserable. He urged his wife to “get good dinners, see lots of shows, buy nice clothes, have your hair fixed—and anything else you want or need,” hoping that she could “make up for me here. … It will make me feel swell to think of you having some enjoyment.”

On August 24, from his new post on Vella Lavella, an island in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, Dick complained to Pat about how “the damn central office” seemed to thwart his attempts to get closer to the action. He yearned to move to a “less civilized place, where I would feel I was doing more.” In a request certain to scare a wartime wife, he added, “I am working on an angle. … Keep your fingers crossed and wish hard!” Pat wanted her husband to do worthwhile and rewarding work, but that didn’t mean she wanted him closer to Japanese bombing.

Restless, in January 1944 Dick wangled a post in Bougainville, the biggest of the Solomon Islands, where, not long after his arrival on the island, the Japanese attacked. “One night it was pretty close,” he remembered. “This plane … had come in very low. We heard the bombs dropping as they came down the runway. We dived out of our tent into the foxhole. As soon as we got out, we saw that our whole tent had been sprayed with bullets. It was a close one.” Downplaying the danger for his edgy wife, he wrote, “It isn’t really as bad as it sounds and the danger is very small. The only casualties are among those who refuse to get up and go in a foxhole and there are few people like that.”

Now styled “Nick” Nixon by his comrades, the 33-year-old lieutenant felt loosed from the restrictions of his previous sheltered civilian life. Living in close quarters with a wide variety of working-class mates, he took up drinking, swearing, smoking cigars and poker, which he mastered. Dick learned that he was a good bluffer, a skill he would later find useful in politics. On July 4, 1944, he wrote Pat that at poker he had “won over a thousand to date.”

In one letter that foreshadowed the isolation and self-absorption of his years in the White House, Dick wrote Pat, “I’m anti-social, I guess, but except for you—I’d rather be by myself as a steady diet rather than with most any of the people I know. … I like to do what I want when I want. Only where you are concerned do I feel otherwise—Dear One.”

Outwardly affable, he was popular with his fellow servicemen of all stripes, but he still had the heart of a loner. At the same time, Dick felt at home operating in a community of men. Biographer Stephen Ambrose points out that the rigid structure of the Navy hierarchy temporarily freed Dick from the urgency of his ambition, allowing him an easier sociability than he had previously enjoyed: “[No one] below him was a threat and no one above him was a block to his advancement.”

This story is an adapted excerpt from Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage, published by Threshold Editions

He formed a close friendship with Lt. James B. Stewart, with whom he spent hours relaxing while sitting on a veranda overlooking the ocean. Dick confided to Stewart about his relationship with Pat (revealing that she was the only woman he had ever slept with), his feelings about the conduct of the war and his thoughts about the future of the country.

Dick used his connections as a Navy supply officer to procure food and drink that his fellow combatants sorely missed. A “first rate scrounger,” as he called himself; he would swap anything with other units to obtain supplies for his men. He endeared himself to them by opening “Nick’s Hamburger Stand,” also known as “Nick’s Snack Shack,” where fighter pilots passing through the island could stop for a free, rejuvenating Australian beer, fresh, cold pineapple juice, good old American hamburgers and a bit of much-needed camaraderie. Dick wrote Pat that he had gone to a Cary Grant movie with several pilots, who appreciated the “Snack Shop, etc. We have had toasted hamburger sandwiches for them for the past two weeks—with cold juice or coffee. That’s making a big hit as you can imagine.”

Fantasizing about the future with Pat soothed him. “Dear one—what fun we could have on a farm!” he wrote her. “Dogs, horses, snow—and somebody to do the work! Whatever it is, whatever you do, it will be wonderful to be with you again. I love you so very very much right this minute.” On March 17, 1944 (her 32nd birthday), he happily remembered that it was the sixth anniversary of the first time that he had sent her flowers, and that a few days later they had traveled together to have dinner at a restaurant called Bird’s in Laguna, California. “For all the years to come—your birthdays will be reminders of our happiness and my love for you.” He would indeed honor her future birthdays.

Both Dick and Pat fretted over the constant possibility that Dick would die in war. The previous December, Pat had felt particularly unsettled. She had not heard from Dick in nearly a month and did not know what kind of danger he faced. She turned down several invitations from married friends to join them for Christmas dinner. Instead, she spent Christmas Day circling San Francisco in a ferry, until the lights of the city brightened the gloomy dusk. When she got home, she re-read all of her husband’s letters.

Insecure about the love he had so recently won, it would have been natural for Dick to wonder whether Pat, alone in a big city, might turn to fancy big-city men for companionship, as she had done during their courtship. Dick asked her to write at the beginning of each letter that she loved him—“I always look first for that,” he told her. Such reassurance was a balm to a man who would never perceive any victory as permanent.

Dick need not have worried. Pat embraced the identity of the model wife left behind while her husband fought overseas, socializing little and making her own hats to save money. And she focused on her work ambition, eventually landing a good job as a price economist for the San Francisco division of the OPA. A friend there, Gretchen King, described Pat as “such a warm, happy, sparkling person. There were times when we must have seemed like a couple of high school youngsters, laughing, giggling, and thoroughly enjoying each other.”

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The Nixons in 1960 | AP Photo

When Americans remember the Nixon marriage, they focus on their highly publicized conflicts of the White House years. In fact, in many ways their bond fit the pattern of many midcentury American marriages. Few, if any, long partnerships consist of one unbroken spell of mutually sought intimacy; instead they stall and progress, with a couple’s closeness waxing and waning as one or the other copes with career disappointments or ventures out toward personal and professional goals that set them at some distance from each other. After dealing with a complex and unbalanced courtship (with Dick chasing a reluctant Pat), their happy early married years in California and the separation of wartime, the Nixons navigated through some of the most dramatic political crises in American history. They worked privately and publicly as a strong team during the Alger Hiss investigation in 1948, during the 1952 campaign in which Nixon’s famous Checkers speech redeemed his vice presidential candidacy after the press accused him of having an unethical political slush fund and they survived a close brush with death when their limousines were attacked by protesters in Venezuela on a 1958 goodwill tour.

They suffered through dark years in the early 1960s when Vice-President Nixon lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy by a small margin and when Nixon lost a gubernatorial campaign he had entered in California in 1962 against Pat’s advice. Their most painful period together was a stretch from 1973 until 1976, when they endured the humiliation and isolation of the Watergate investigation during their last two years in the White House, and then helped each other recover from life-threatening illnesses during their political exile in San Clemente after Nixon resigned from the presidency. Having managed all these difficult periods without drawing too far away from each other, they enjoyed 13 peaceful twilight years in New York and New Jersey, where he campaigned to restore his reputation and she rested on her reputation as a stellar first lady.

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Before returning home in early August 1944, Dick was awarded two battle stars and a commendation from his commanding officer “for meritorious and efficient duty.” Halfway through his 14 months of service in the South Pacific, Dick had imagined his reunion with his wife. “I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good. Will you mind such a public demonstration?” He flew from the South Pacific to Hawaii and then sailed to San Diego, calling Pat the moment he arrived and arranging to meet her at the airport. When Pat, dressed in a bright red dress (his favorite color for her), spotted Dick standing behind the airport fence, “her eyes lighted up,” Nixon remembered, “and she ran about 50 yards at breakneck speed and threw her arms around me.” It was no doubt the biggest and most joyful embrace of their married life.