San Clemente Sheltered Reclusive Political Wife

The Southern California that Patricia Ryan Nixon remembered from her childhood days was a place of green trees and dirt paths, a wide-open “wilderness” area that held treasured memories for a former First Lady who died Tuesday at age 81.

But by the time she and Richard Nixon moved into Casa Pacifica--known as the Western White House when Nixon was there as President--in San Clemente in 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate, the place had become a fortress of sorts--a place of refuge for a woman already known as a recluse.

“San Clemente was a wonderful place for her to lick her wounds and come back to life and be left alone,” Patricia Reilly Hitt of Corona del Mar, a close friend of the Nixons for more than four decades, said Tuesday. “She was able to do that” there.

For a woman hailed for her quiet strength and determination, Casa Pacifica served as the locale for some of her highs and lows--the place where she and her husband spent some of their fondest vacations during his glory years as President, as well as the place where they retreated in tears and humiliation after his resignation in 1974.

Now, in the wake of Mrs. Nixon’s death Tuesday in New Jersey after a long struggle with lung cancer, Orange County will also be the site of her burial as dignitaries worldwide gather for a Saturday service at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

During her 5 1/2 years in San Clemente as a former First Lady, Mrs. Nixon ventured out in public only rarely--for a drive down to Oceanside or a trip to Walter Annenberg’s Palm Springs-area estate or even a night out at Anaheim Stadium for an Angels’ baseball game.

But the results of her public appearances sometimes ended bitterly.

Shortly after her husband’s resignation as President in the face of impeachment, Mrs. Nixon was spat upon at a south Orange County supermarket.

And in 1978, the house in which Mrs. Nixon was reared in the Cerritos area--a local landmark that she had revisited years before as part of a school dedication in her honor--was gutted by a fire believed to have been started by Molotov cocktails. The violence was seen as a message of hatred against the Nixons’ post-Watergate legacy.

On at least one occasion, the former First Lady donned a dark wig while leaving San Clemente to throw off anyone who might recognize the woman who for so long had stood at the center of a storm. But more often, she simply stayed home inside her 12-room mansion, her health eroding.

“My mother is enjoying her first moments of privacy in 5 1/2 years,” daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower said in September, 1974.

The San Clemente home was built in 1926 by Hamilton Cotton, an oil tycoon and onetime national finance chairman of the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an occasional guest at the estate, and Cotton used pulleys to hoist the disabled President up to the gazebo overlooking the coastal railroad tracks.

After he bought the white stucco-walled, red-tile roof home for $343,000 in the late 1960s, Nixon dubbed the estate La Casa Pacifica--or the peaceful house. But a more popular moniker--the Western White House--soon stuck because of the frequent strategy sessions that Nixon and his aides conducted at the estate during his Administration.

During Nixon’s presidency and in the years afterward at San Clemente, Mrs. Nixon hosted several famous parties at Casa Pacifica, including fund-raisers for the Orange County Republican Party. But the First Lady, in keeping with her tradition, preferred to stay out of the limelight, concentrating instead on redecorating the house and tending to gardening.

“The thing that I always remember is her great love of gardening and flowers here in San Clemente,” Orange County developer George Argyros, who owns part of the San Clemente estate, said Tuesday.

“She was a very courageous and very gallant lady,” he said. “Mrs. Nixon was just a wonderful woman who really, I think, symbolized what we thought our First Lady should always be. She was a very strong lady, and she was important in the healing of the nation.”

The Nixons gave up San Clemente after 11 years and moved to New York City in February, 1980, moving into a four-story townhouse on the East Side.

The proximity to their children and grandchildren was only part of the reason for the move, daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower said in her 1986 tribute to her mother, called: “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story.”

In the year before the move, she said, both her parents “increasingly had felt isolated at La Casa Pacifica. San Clemente is a two-hour drive from Los Angeles and an hour and a half from San Diego, not a convenient stopover for friends, or, for that matter, foreign visitors.”

The former President was eager to resume his old political contacts, and Mrs. Nixon was also ready for a move, their daughter said. “I was surprised by the sureness of my mother’s desire to make a major change. She told me, ‘We’re just dying here slowly.’ ” the Nixon daughter wrote in the biography.

Despite her eagerness to leave Orange County, Mrs. Nixon made a triumphant return in July, 1990, for the opening of her husband’s library in Yorba Linda. In her first public appearance in years, she appeared frail after a string of illnesses, but stood beaming that sweltering summer day as she watched world leaders pay tribute to her once-fallen husband--and to her.

“She is a true, unsung hero of the Nixon Administration, and our country owes her a great debt of gratitude,” said former President Ronald Reagan.

The dedication, said longtime friend Hitt of Corona del Mar, was one of the former First Lady’s happiest moments--in large part because the Nixon facility, unlike the presidential libraries before it, had been built through private contributions, without any public money.

“She was very proud of the library and the way that all worked out,” Hitt said. “She remembered this place with love and affection, or she wouldn’t be coming back to be buried.”