The Return Of Pat Nixon

"The years creep by, Lorena
the snow is on the grass again..."
- Henry de Lafayette Webster

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Lately, America's First Ladies have had something to say. From Nancy Reagan to Hillary Clinton to Michelle Obama. The frumpy ones, like Laura Bush, kept their distance from the press, but they had their moments.

It's been decades since Patricia Nixon led her husband, Richard, on that fateful perp walk from the White House to a Marine helicopter on the day he left office in disgrace. Pat Nixon, went the line in the nation's capital, was very much like the boxer Leon Spinks - on familiar terms with the weird.

The weird was her husband, as we all came to find out after the mess he created in authorizing that infamous break-in of the Democratic Party's headquarters, a criminal act that became known as Watergate, that being the name of the building that housed the Demos. Pat Nixon had nothing to do with it, of course. She was the last of the Doormat Wives to occupy the presidential bedroom in the people's house.

We thought of Pat Nixon when we first saw the photograph atop this story showing bombastic Rick Perry doing the Republican macarena with his wife, Anita, at his side. Anita Perry is not used to being seen with her husband. He generally travels in the company of handsome men.

Perhaps it's the anachronistic hairstyle or the ranch look on her face. Pat Nixon perfected the homely look, and although Anita Perry is lightyears more attractive than Richard Nixon's main squeeze, well, maybe it's that gray shawl that takes one back to those dark days of the mid-1970s, when Nixon lied and lied and lied, but then went on national TV to say he was not a crook. Photos taken of Nixon's wife back then told the story of great humiliation. One day she was First Lady and the next she was First Lady to depart in disgrace.

In Austin, Anita Perry does not walk ahead of great public notice. She is rarely seen, in fact. But now her crazy husband has summoned her to places like New Hampshire and Iowa and South Carolina, where Anita Perry often flashes that faraway look, as if to say, "WTF am I doing in this B movie?"

It'll be interesting to see how her West Texas personality changes once the Republican strategists walk her to some high-end fashion boutique for expensive clothes that will plunge her into the 1990s, which, as you all recall, is what they did with the Wasilla Hillbilly, one Sarah Palin in the party's doomed 2008 election.

Anita Perry is a Texas gal, however.

She may just assume the position of looking indifferent as all Hell. She certainly has not said or done anything to make herself stand out so far. I know, I know. Most Republican wives are subservient to their men.

But Pat Nixon did one thing we found refreshing in that party's women. On the night before leaving the White House, her husband called his valet, Manolo Sanchez, asking for a bottle of whiskey and stayed up most of the night, a long, drawn-out affair that had him walking the halls and stopping to mumble slurred bullshit to the hanging portraits of this country's founding fathers, people such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Nixon drank himself to sleep.

Pat Nixon had gone to bed much earlier, perhaps fully knowing her days as political captive were over and Tricky Dick could go ahead and drink himself silly. She didn't broadcast it and she did not write it in some tell-all memoir, but Pat Nixon, in her own way, told her crooked husband the jig was up way before he passed on Bourbon in favor of the whiskey.

It won't be long before Anita Perry does the same to Rick...

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