WSJ: Lines that a Certain First Lady Never Would Have Uttered

In the Wall Street Journal, former Nixon aide Frank Gannon reviews novelist Anne Beattie’s new book,  Mrs. Nixon:

The real problem with “Mrs. Nixon” is that Ms. Beattie doesn’t like her subject very much. She is upfront about her distaste for RN (“I spontaneously recoil from any image of Richard Nixon”). She says, indirectly but no less cuttingly, that “Mrs. Nixon is not someone I wish I could have had to dinner.” That she always refers to her as “Mrs. Nixon” is a stylized mannerism. But it is also an admission that Ms. Beattie remains an outsider—sympathetic in a condescending sort of way (it wasn’t her fault that she married the man who would turn out to be Nixon) but never close to empathic.

Imagining various White House scenes, Ms. Beattie fancies that she has managed to internalize Mrs. Nixon’s voice, but I can guarantee that the following sentence was never ever spoken by Thelma Patricia Ryan Nixon: “You know, Dick, today is the anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death.” In a one-paragraph chapter titled “Mrs. Nixon Considers Automatic Writing,” Ms. Beattie unaccountably makes Mrs. Nixon channel some addled spirit: “If you saw a thread dangling from your hem, would you pull it and keep unwinding and unwinding until the skirt became a miniskirt, and then nothing but a waistband?”

For a work of history, the criterion for judgment is accuracy; for a work that mixes history with fiction, truth is what matters. The play and movie “Frost/Nixon” wasn’t particularly accurate, but it did capture the dramatic truth of Nixon’s post-Watergate interviews with David Frost. “Mrs. Nixon” offers a few tantalizing glimmers of its subject but never rises above its postmodern playfulness or the personal disdain that Ms. Beattie obviously feels for anyone associated with Richard Nixon, including his wife, who deserves better.

Read the whole article.