San Antonio College Library

"Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon's wife: "interchangeable with a Martian," she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to accounts...

This portrait follows the former First Lady from her birth in a boomtown mining shack to the White House and is full of anecdotes and behind-the-scenes glimpses of historical figures.