Presidents’ Day and My Pat Nixon Poem
The approach of President’s Day led me to reflect on one of America’s most extraordinary Presidents, the first President to ever resign the office, Richard Milhous Nixon. It also led me to reflect on the truth that there is an odd way Bill and Hillary Clinton echo Richard and Pat Nixon: the Nixon marriage, like the Clinton union, was subject to a great deal of speculation. Many observers thought there was a coldness between Richard Nixon and the First Lady. In a book called The Final Days that was written after Nixon’s resignation, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote as if they knew it for a fact that the Nixons had not engaged in sexual intimacy for many years. Some time after that, Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote Pat Nixon: The Untold Story in which she described her parents as deeply in love and her mother as fiercely protective of her father and possessing a rocklike solidarity with him.
I do not know whose version of the Nixon marriage to believe. Woodward and Bernstein were instrumental in Richard Nixon’s downfall; Julie Nixon Eisenhower was the daughter of the Nixon. They are all extremely biased sources and perhaps neither book was even near the truth about the Nixon marriage since it is so very hard to know what is really going on with a couple.
However, I have to say that I have a great fondness for stories of happy, functioning marriages. I have a special place in my heart for stories of unions in which the partners are genuinely devoted to and respectful of each other.
So I don’t know which version is closer to the truth of the Nixon marriage but I hope Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s is.
I really do.
I wrote this poem thinking primarily of the conflict between the image of Pat Nixon as she derided in some public accounts and as she lauded in others. It was previously published in The Arizona Unconservative and has appeared on the Poetry Superhighway webpage.
Pat Nixon the Public Pat Nixon
By
Denise Noe
Hating it, she waved & smiled.
Pat Nixon Plastic Frozen.
Like you were a doll pulled out of the fridge on the way to the fish sticks.
Can you imagine . . .
a woman like that . . . ?
and they
could
not
Imagine
that
Ice
Covers water
thru which life is
Swimming
away
in
terror
And
toward
in
hunger
Dropping eggs
Fertilizing
Hearing smelling
Biting and eating life still living as it
Thrashes and squirms in pain as it is
Savored in the mouth of other life . . . ?
who could guess
that
Stiff whiteness on a
polar bear
Protects
Skin
Protecting the
Blood
Red
Hot
Viscous and
Pumping
The blood of an animal
Of a special sort
Mammal
And
Of a special sort
Carnivore . . . ?
But in public Pat Nixon was always the public Pat Nixon the public Pat Nixon
So
Embarrassed and ashamed and grieving the public Pat Nixon was still the public Pat Nixon
But the public Pat Nixon
Lipcut.
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