Old-school love letters between a young Richard Nixon and the woman he would later marry have been unveiled at the former president’s library in California, showing the poetic side of a man who addressed his future wife as “dearest heart.”
The letters, written by hand between 1938 and 1940, include professions of love in which Nixon tells Pat Ryan, as she was then known, that “nothing so fine ever happened” to him as falling in love with her.
“Every day and every night I want to see you and be with you. Yet I have no feeling of selfish ownership or jealousy. In fact I should always want you to live just as you wanted – because if you didn’t then you would change and wouldn’t be you,” Nixon wrote in one of the letters, part of a rotating display at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “Let’s go for a long ride Sundays; let’s go to the mountains weekends; let’s read books in front of fires; most of all let’s really grow together and find the happiness we know is ours,” he continued – Nation
