Pat Nixon Typed Letter Signed.

Thelma Catherine "Pat" Nixon (1912–1993) was the thirty-seventh First Lady of the United States, serving alongside her husband President Richard M. Nixon from 1969 to 1974, and one of the most quietly resilient and extensively traveled First Ladies in the history of the office. Born in Ely, Nevada, to Irish immigrant parents, she grew up in considerable hardship, losing both parents before she was eighteen and working her way through the University of Southern California, where she graduated cum laude in 1937 with a degree in merchandising. She met Richard Nixon in a Whittier, California, amateur theater production in 1938; he proposed on their first meeting, and she married him in 1940 after two years of patient courtship. As First Lady she undertook an ambitious program of White House restoration and historical preservation, acquiring significant works of American decorative art for the executive mansion and opening the White House grounds and gardens to the public for the first time. An instinctive and gifted diplomat in her own right, she accompanied the President on his historic 1972 trip to China and his visits to the Soviet Union and eight Latin American countries, becoming at the time of her death the most widely traveled First Lady in American history. The Watergate scandal and her husband's resignation in August 1974 — the only presidential resignation in American history — exacted a devastating personal toll, and she suffered a stroke in 1976 from which she never fully recovered. Described by those who knew her as possessed of genuine warmth, steely self-discipline, and a private depth of feeling she rarely permitted the public to see, Pat Nixon remains one of the more poignant and underexamined figures in the modern American presidency.