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longtime friend and senior White House adviser, believed that in his youth Nixon had been “hurt very deeply by somebody he trusted . . . hurt so badly he never got over it and never trusted anybody again.” Harlow guessed that this person had been a friend, or a parent, or a lover.
    If there were such wounds, the deepest and most lasting were surely inflicted as much by a parent as by a sweetheart. When Ola Welch had at last written begging Nixon to stop his letters, he replied as follows:
    February 2nd, 1936
    Dear Ola Florence,
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    Finally I have become wise! And although I regret having embarrassed you with my letters, I don’t regret the feeling I’ve had towards you for the past year. In the year and a half I’ve been at Duke, I’ve realized more than ever the perfection, the splendor, the grandeur of my mother’s character. Incapable of selfishness she is to me a supreme ideal. * And you have taken your place with her in my heart—as an example for which all men should strive. Old memories are slowly fading away. New ones are taking their place. But I shall always remember the kindness, the beauty, the loveliness that was, that is, and shall forever be Ola Florence Welch.
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    Your friend,
    Richard Nixon
    What can Ola have thought of this, a “last” letter from a lover faced with losing her to another man, that focused on his mother ?
    If Ola’s rejection affected Nixon so greatly, it may have been because he had dared to utter to her the words he was to report—approvingly—that hismother had never spoken to him: “I love you.” For any man or woman to say those three words aloud for the first time is, or should be, a large step. For Nixon, coming from a home where affection was never shown physically and where “love” went unspoken, it must have been a giant one.
    Sadly, his “I love you” had failed to convince Ola. She told an interviewer years later that she thought Nixon “may have been playacting” when he spoke of his feelings. 1
    Nixon’s six-year romance with Ola had begun when they were actors in the make-believe world of a school play. His next relationship with a woman also began on a stage, but this one would endure.
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    In the month he turned twenty-five, January 1938, Nixon auditioned for a part in a Whittier amateur production of a melodrama titled The Dark Tower. He had recently played an attorney in another play, after a colleague told him that portraying a stage lawyer might help bring in clients to his real-life law firm. Now, as he read for the part of Barry—a “faintly collegiate, eager blushing youth”—a young woman was waiting to try out for the part of Daphne, which called for “a tall, dark sullen beauty of twenty wearing an air of permanent resentment.” In the play Daphne is wooed by Barry.
    Pat Ryan, a slight, fair twenty-six-year-old teacher, got the part—and Richard Nixon for life. “That night,” he recalled, “a beautiful and vivacious young woman with titian hair appeared whom I had never seen before. I found I could not take my eyes away from her. . . . For me it was a case of love at first sight.”
    Nixon drove the young woman home, along with her friend Elizabeth Cloes, who had suggested she do the audition. “On the way,” Nixon was to claim, “I asked Pat if she would like a date with me. She said, ‘I’m very busy.’ I said, ‘You shouldn’t say that, because someday I am going to marry you!’ . . . I wonder whether it was a sixth sense that prompted me to make such an impetuous statement.”
    Cloes recalled the anecdote differently, saying that Nixon began his talk of marriage only after the third rehearsal, when Pat refused even to sit next to him in the car. Pat’s response, however, is not in dispute. “I thought he was nuts,” she said years later. 2 The