Lecture Date: March 13, 2025
The Jubilation by Silver Companies Lecture
In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974, forging her own graceful path between the protocols of the strait-laced mid-century and the bra-burning Sixties and Seventies.
In The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Heath Hardage Lee presents readers with the essential nature of this First Lady, an empathetic, adventurous, self-made woman who wanted no power or influence, but who connected warmly with both ordinary Americans and people from different cultures she encountered world-wide.
Speaker: Heath Hardage Lee
Heath is an award-winning historian, biographer and curator who specialises in women’s history. Heath’s narrative nonfiction book entitled The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2019. Heath’s museum exhibition entitled The League of Wives: Vietnam POW MIA Advocates & Allies about Vietnam POW MIA wives premiered at the Dole Institute of Politics in May of 2017 and travelled to venues all over the United States through 2023. The League of Wives is currently being developed as a television series. Heath also writes about women’s history and politics for publications such as Time, The Hill, The Atlantic and White House History Quarterly. She currently serves on the Boards of FLARE the First Ladies Association for Research and Education and BIO Biographers International Organization. Heath’s new book The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: Washington’s Most Private First Lady is the first commercial biography of First Lady Pat Nixon in almost 40 years.