"The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon is a marvelous biography--a deeply reported, illuminating story of love, ambition, and influence. With vivid detail based on new sources, Heath Hardage Lee brings to life a complex and memorable figure in a book that never fails to fascinate." -- Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of King: A Life and Ali: A Life
"Everything I thought I knew about Pat Nixon was upended by reading Heath Hardage Lee's astonishing new biography. Beautiful, steely, and charismatic, Pat Nixon was, in Henry Kissinger's words, a woman 'totally without illusions, ' who cloaked her extraordinary ambition in the guise of 'The Nation's Ideal Housewife.'
The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon convinced me that the tragedy of Watergate could have been avoided entirely had Dick Nixon followed the path of his remarkable First Lady." - Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age "For this reader, Pat Nixon came to life in surprising ways in
The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon. She was smarter than people knew, funnier than people expected and stronger than people gave her credit for. She was also a successful diplomat for her husband and contributed to his political success including her advancing of his commitment to civil rights - all documented here for the first time. As Dick later said of Pat, "She deserved so much more." That she did... and she gets it here." - J Randy Taraborelli,
New York Times bestselling author of
Jackie: Public, Private, Secret "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 "The personification of the postwar ideal of the self-effacing homemaker, Pat Nixon was an intensely private person, in a painfully public role, at a time when America's role and a woman's role were both subjects of bitter debate. To relive that era of turmoil from the First Lady's anguished vantage point in Heath Lee's thoroughly researched and elegantly written biography is unexpectedly enthralling. As her husband, Richard Nixon, put it, 'She also ran.'" - Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of
Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist.
"Drawing on her extensive interviews with family, former White House staff, longtime friends, and historians, Lee offers a clarifying portrait of this elusive and enigmatic woman." --
Booklist "...an intriguingly sympathetic portrait of first lady Pat Nixon...readers in search of a new perspective on the Watergate era will find it here." --
Publisher's Weekly "Through painstaking documentary research and graceful prose, Lee draws out the true personality -- shrewd, tough, clever -- of the forward-looking first lady so unfairly dubbed 'Plastic Pat.'" --
The New York Post
