In today’s hyper-partisan environment, it can be comforting to look to the past for examples of other difficult moments that the body politic managed to overcome. It’s even tempting to view those days through the lens of revisionist history because it’s soothing and serves as a reminder that we’ve been through hard times before.

Unfortunately, those rose-colored glasses do us no favors in the present, and this inaccurate spin on the past is what sinks Heath Hardage Lee’s new biography of Pat Nixon. While Richard Nixon’s wife was certainly mischaracterized at times — as all women in the public eye invariably are — Lee’s repeated contradictions and whitewashing of recent history keep The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon as unknowable as she was in life, and they leave the reader no better equipped to understand the mid-20th century or Pat’s role within it.

Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan, so-called because she was almost born on St. Patrick’s Day, began life in 1912 in a hardscrabble Nevada mining town. Her family took up farming in rural California, and Pat became the family’s caretaker after her mother’s death in 1926, when Pat was just 13. Nonetheless, she excelled at school, attended USC, and became a teacher. By all accounts, she loved being independent and self-supporting at a time when most women couldn’t be. She also strung along the awkward, dour Richard, who courted her for a couple years before she agreed to marry him.

Despite this focus on her autonomy — Lee cites letters Pat wrote to her husband emphasizing how much she valued her independence — Pat quickly became the archetypal housewife and mother, and when she returned to work, it was for her husband’s first campaign. Pat became Richard’s co-campaigner, hitting the trail as hard as he did. But, as Lee concedes:

“Her role was to look pretty and to meet and greet but never make political statements.”

The author spends significant time on Pat’s redecorating activities, whether at her private residences or, eventually, in the White House, at Camp David, and aboard Air Force One. This only gives the impression that Pat was trapped in a fishbowl and relegated to “acceptable” women’s activities, and it does little to bolster Lee’s argument that Pat’s persona as the ideal wife and mother made her powerful as well as the perfect helpmeet.

Yet Lee does show that Pat was more than just the First Interior Decorator. She recounts in detail Pat’s overseas goodwill trips from the 1950s through the early 1970s, visiting disaster zones, war zones, the Soviet Union, China, and more, and making positive impressions wherever she went. She also made a handful of public statements about women’s rights and the need for more women in government, which Lee applauds, but nowhere in this book is there an “aha” moment when the reader sees the real Pat Nixon shine through.

Anytime it seems like the actual person will appear, she dissolves beneath anecdotes of Richard Nixon ignoring her, his staff marginalizing her, or the press being unfair to her. At every turn, when Pat may have pushed back — on his policies, the press’ characterization of her, anything — she instead retreated into the perfect-wife-and-mother persona. As a result, we never truly get past the “Plastic Pat” stereotype because the subject either never allowed herself to be known, or because that’s who she really was.

Compounding this is Lee’s rewriting of Richard Nixon’s political career that at times borders on the absurd. It’s one thing to say Pat was more popular than Jackie Kennedy (which Lee inexplicably does). And it’s foolish but harmless to argue that Richard Nixon cared about female voters because he wrote to his teenage daughters at summer camp, asking what their friends thought of his enemies’ electoral chances. We can set aside how tone deaf and out of touch he was with teens and how myopic Lee’s interpretation of this story is.

What can’t be countenanced is the author’s use of “progressive” to describe Nixon and his administrations, which she does multiple times. She flatly states he supported the Civil Rights Movement and that “the Black vote was much valued by the Nixon campaign.” Her evidence is a few cherry-picked campaign stops by Pat, but she completely ignores Richard’s infamous (and damning) “Southern strategy” and racist dog whistles via the War on Drugs. Perhaps Pat didn’t share her husband’s views on people of color, but this biography is silent about what she actually did think.

As for Watergate, Lee depicts the seminal political scandal of the 1970s as one might a terrible disease or a car accident: a tragic event that befell the protagonists, not the sinister work of someone central to the narrative. Throughout Nixon’s presidency and Watergate, Pat never seemed to challenge or disagree with her husband, so it’s left to be assumed that she at least tacitly agreed with his policies and the plotting that ended his career. All the reader learns is that she soldiered on with her daily activities and stood by her man.

The reality is that in the author’s attempt to make her subject look good, she downplays or outright ignores things that were tangibly damaging. It would’ve been far better to acknowledge the Southern strategy and how it inflicted real harm on Americans of color and helped foment the polarization that continues to so badly afflict us today.

Reckoning with the fact that Pat obviously supported some of her husband’s positions while still (possibly) having a mind of her own would have made her three dimensional — maybe achieving the humanization that Lee sought in the first place. Ultimately, however, she fails to find much of anything enlightening in the impenetrable persona that Pat Nixon wrapped around herself.

Rose Rankin is a freelance writer from Chicago. She focuses on history, science, and gender issues, in particular women’s literary history.

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