Word: patly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...School, where he earned the nickname "Gloomy Gus" for his cautious, pessimistic, Depression-bred outlook, Nixon finished third in his class. Unable to land work with a major New York law firm (he also tried the FBI), he returned to practice in Whittier, where he met Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan, who taught shorthand and typing at the local high school. They were married after a two-year courtship and set up housekeeping in an apartment over a garage...
Seeking a new political start, Nixon challenged the popular Edmund ("Pat") Brown for the governorship of California in 1962, but was beaten by 300,000 votes (out of 5,850,000). Fatigued and haggard, Nixon mounted a podium at Los Angeles' Beverly Hilton Hotel the following morning and, to the astonishment of the assembled newsmen, lashed out angrily at them. "Just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference...
...followed and photographed everywhere, from the top of the Great Wall of China to the high plains of Peru, but in many ways Pat Nixon as First Lady was even more of an enigma than her husband. She was a profoundly private woman whose true feelings were known only to herself. To the world, she was the perfect presidential wife, tireless, modestly chic, coolly regal. To her family, she was the ultimate support, so accustomed to smiling through adversity that it became routine. When she was a girl, she once said, "life was sort of sad, so I tried...
When Nixon was considering resigning from the Republican ticket in 1952 over a campaign-funding scandal, Pat helped persuade him to stay on. "If you do not fight back but simply crawl away, you will destroy yourself," he later quoted her as having told him. Three minutes before he went on the air with his famous Checkers speech, he faltered again, telling her that he did not think he could do it. "Of course you can," she replied. "Pat is not a quitter," he told a nationwide TV audience minutes later. "After all, her name was Patricia Ryan...
...Pat was working in Whittier, Calif., when she met Nixon, who sought a role in an amateur play just to meet the pretty new teacher. He proposed the first night he saw her, but she kept him waiting for two years before finally consenting, at the age of 28, to become Mrs. Richard Nixon. Once the vows were taken, she totally subordinated herself to his life and his ambitions, serving as wife, mother and uncomplaining companion on political platforms round the globe. "The only thing I could do was help him," she later said, "but it was not a life...