Wife Speaks for Silenced Wilson : Politics: Under medical orders not to use his recovering vocal cord, governor listens as spouse lauds Nixon’s tenacity.

As her husband sat nearby, beaming through the silence imposed on him by doctors, Gayle Wilson delivered an eloquent ode Saturday to former President Richard Nixon and alluded to her husband as a worthy heir to Nixon’s political tenacity-- the sort of grit she hopes will also take Wilson to the White House.

The lesson of Nixon’s life was that “you can achieve great things, make great change, if you have the courage to keep working, keep fighting, and to never, never give in,” said Gayle Wilson, standing only a few hundred feet from where Nixon was buried one year ago, and not much farther from the little house in which he was born in 1913.

“That’s the spirit that we need today,” added the wife of Pete Wilson, the California governor who is seeking to follow Nixon to the pinnacle of power as President.

Not yet recovered from minor throat surgery to remove a small nodule on his vocal cord, Wilson was forced Friday night to forgo a long-scheduled keynote address to the Young Republican National Federation Leadership Conference at the Nixon Library & Birthplace.

Instead, he looked on while his wife read a version of his speech. But at times, the speech became more hers than his, such as when she declared: “My husband, Pete, is running for president.”

That was not news to the several hundred seated in the lobby of the Nixon Library. But they applauded and cheered all the same.

Many of the young GOP leaders from throughout the country are already committed to supporting several of Wilson’s foes for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. But in an informal survey, most indicated that Wilson is a popular figure among young Republican officials nationally.

As Wilson looked out at the crowd, some of the faces may have reminded him of himself when, at age 28, he took his first political job, as an advance man for Nixon in his 1962 campaign to be governor of California. Governor is the one office that Nixon failed to win. Wilson now has won it twice.

For Wilson, a flurry of mute appearances in Casper, Wyo., Yorba Linda and San Diego--watching surrogates speak for him--brought him to the end of a frustrating week, during which he prematurely used his voice too much and then was ordered to shut up.

Gayle Wilson explained: “His doctors told him he should have strict voice rest and if he spoke at all, they would have to come back and finish the job.”

They laughed at her scalpel-sharp wit. But then she turned serious again: “We want to let Pete’s voice heal so that he’ll be back in fighting shape as soon as possible for this very exciting year that we have coming up.”

After the speech, Wilson greeted well-wishers with an animated variety of facial expressions. Wilson and his wife are, after all, accomplished amateur singers and actors.

Someone asked if it had been a rough week. Wilson offered an emphatic woe-is-me grimace.

Another commended him jokingly on delivering one of his best speeches Friday night.

The governor grinned broadly and gave his wife’s work an energetic thumbs-up sign of approval.

In fact, she may have been more effective than Wilson in this setting, speaking poignantly about the difficult times surrounding the deaths of Pat and Richard Nixon, and then joking with relish about her husband’s dilemma as a politician without a speaking voice.

“I have been able to monopolize the conversation in my household for the last week,” she said to laughter. “So when I was asked to give Pete’s speech tonight, I thought it was the very least I could do.”

Those who have heard her consider Gayle Wilson to be an effective speaker, often with a more animated and crisper delivery than her husband.

She noted that Nixon had been “a counselor, a guide and a friend for Pete over three decades” and recalled that her husband delivered one of the eulogies when Nixon was buried on the library grounds after his death on April 22, 1994.

Gayle Wilson said there was more than just Nixon’s “intellectual insight and indomitable will” that inspired fierce loyalty from those who had worked for him.

“It’s what the old fighters call heart,” she said. “It was Richard Nixon’s heart that allowed him to climb back in the ring time after time when almost anyone else would have thrown in the towel.”

She did not say so directly, but it was that sort of stick-to-it quality that was attributed to her husband over the past year as he fought back from dismal public opinion ratings to win a second term as governor.

And it is that tenacity that some experts say must not be discounted as Wilson mounts a late-starting, uphill campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

In making the transition from Nixon to the race facing her husband, Gayle Wilson said: “We have that (spirit) as Americans, but we face enormous challenges today. If we have the guts to make the change and the courage to keep fighting, we can certainly meet those challenges.”

The GOP group honored Nixon posthumously with its annual Americanism award. The stage from which Gayle Wilson spoke was bedecked with 18 American flags and a giant photo of Nixon meeting with U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.