Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

a few sips.
    At dinner I told him, “Dick, Dr. Lungren thought you looked too pale and thin on television, and we don’t want people to havethat impression, so he’s come up with a plan for you to drink a number of milk shakes every day before the third debate.” We already knew the makeup had made his beard look worse, so that was going to be changed.
    “Pat,” he said, “how many milk shakes are we talking about?”
    “Four,” I said, honestly. “And if you drink two more today, you’ll have had at least twenty milk shakes, and will have gained a bit of weight before you see Mr. Kennedy again.”
    “Apologizing to the Russians would make us look weak!” he said. He was really very upset about Mr. Kennedy’s proposed solution to Mr. Powers’s plane being shot down.
    “Dick,” I said, “be that as it may, I will bring you milk shakes four times a day, and you can have the last one before bed.”
    “What if I miss out on sleep, getting up to pee?” he wanted to know.
    I told him that I would give him the last milk shake half an hour before bed.
    This is what we did, from October 8 to 12, and on the morning of the thirteenth, he drank a final milk shake before leaving for the studio. I reported to Dr. Lungren that we had executed his plan, and I know he was pleased. Also present were Dr. Malcolm Todd and Dr. Hubert Pritchard, who were there to brief Dr. Lungren on Dick’s knee infection and his stay at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
    Dick did well in the debate and looked better on television, in my opinion. The milk shakes were chocolate, except for my presenting him with one strawberry, for variety. It was an easy way to prepare his “prescription” milk shakes.
    Rinsing immediately afterward keeps you from having to immerse the cocktail shaker in soapy water.

Friendly, Faithful, Fair
    A s a young woman, Buddy was busy taking care of the house, cooking, and cleaning, before and after her parents died. There was always very little money. Pleasures were few, and those were intermittent and small: when her father had money, he occasionally bought her a strawberry ice cream cone. She worked when she went to college—among other places, in a bank, where she was both a teller and a floor cleaner. She was always busy, and she had no objection to hard work. She had a lot of energy, but people with energy can also be self-indulgently lazy, so we can’t draw too tidy a picture here. She had ambition, but that can be even more problematic than energy: ambition dissipates, does not necessarily prosper by being thwarted, devolves over time into other ways of achieving things. She yearned to travel, and in 1934 went by bus to Niagara Falls—a forerunner to Princess Di going alone to the Taj Mahal. We have no shoe box filled with her childhood memorabilia under the bed, no drawings, poems, or even report cards. At one point or another—often when young—people usually write a few poems. I have no idea if she ever wrote one. What come to mind are the rare occasions when Mrs. Nixonexpressed herself quite tersely and sarcastically, being nobody’s fool. Again like Princess Di, she was drawn to the sick and needy. She did work nursing patients, and she preferred seeing schoolchildren to seeing politicians, as who would not. She sewed curtains and slipcovers for the houses the Nixons rented or bought. Many people rolled their eyes about her pressing her husband’s trousers. More people rolled their eyes about her “respectable Republican cloth coat,” but this was her husband’s term, not hers—and eventually there were plenty of photographs of her attired in fur. She was not averse to sitting with fur flung over her on a cold day, and was willing to share with her friend Mamie Eisenhower. Julie Nixon Eisenhower recounts: “In the bitter cold of the football stadium Mamie and Pat huddled shoulder to shoulder, the future First Lady’s warm white-fox fur draped protectively over both.”
    She once walked some distance