Richard Nixon le romantique

Nixon fut l'un des hommes politiques les plus détestés de l'histoire américaine. je n'ai cependant jamais caché qu'il me fascine. De récentes révélations tirées de la relation épistolaire entre Nixon et son épouse montre un Nixon différent de l'image qu'on retient généralement, un homme plus tendre et très amoureux.

 "When Dick and Pat Ryan met at a community theater play rehearsal on January 18, 1938, he found that he “could not take my eyes away from her.” He drove Pat and a friend home from the rehearsal that night and told her, “I’d like to have a date with you.” She replied, “I’m busy.” On the third time he drove her home, he said, “Someday I’m going to marry you.” She laughed.

 Twenty-five-year-old Pat, a glamorous former movie extra actress whom students called “quite a dish,” was in her first year teaching business courses at Whittier Union High, just outside of Los Angeles, when she first met Dick. After years of privation and hardship raising her brothers on her own after her parents died during her adolescence, Pat was happy living with roommates and having an independent career. She was beloved by her fellow teachers and by both female and male students, some of whom had crushes on her and even followed her home to spy on her.

 Twenty-five-year-old Dick Nixon, by contrast, was unsettled in his life. He found his native ambition blocked. He was living in a small room over his parents’ garage. He was working in a law job he had been reluctant to take, did not have a girlfriend and was back home in the California town he had tried to leave behind. He pursued Pat with the same determination and persistence he would later use to win seven elections. He hated ice-skating, but bloodied himself repeatedly to learn so he could go skating with Pat and her friends. On weekends, in order to spend time with her, he drove her to Los Angeles, where she stayed with her half-sister and went on dates with other men. He would return on Sunday afternoons and wait until she was ready for him to drive her home. Six months after they met, Pat went to Michigan to buy a car and did not contact Dick for three months. He eventually tracked her down and persuaded her to give him another chance. By the spring of 1939, Pat too began to love Dick, drawn in by his love of adventure, brilliant mind and high sense of purpose—the latter a quality she shared more than the public recognized.

  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/nixon-in-love-103490.html?hp=pm_1#.Uv6ZsPl5PAw