Here's the odd story of the day. Dark and dour Richard Nixon had a gushy, mooshy side:
Nixon shared the stage with Patricia Ryan in a community theater production and six of the dozens of letters they exchanged during their two-year courtship will be unveiled Friday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum as part of an exhibit celebrating the 100th birthday of the woman Nixon playfully called his "Irish gypsy."
In Nixon's letters, he recalls their first meeting in flowery prose, daydreams about their future together and waxes poetic about the first time his "dearest heart" agreed to take a drive with him.
"Every day and every night I want to see you and be with you. Yet I have no feeling of selfish ownership or jealousy," he writes in one undated letter. "Let's go for a long ride Sunday; 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."
Some people said they were surprised to read Ronald Reagan's manuscripts for his old radio shows and discover that he was a little bit deeper thinker than they had assumed. Surely this is even more surprising.
Oh, here's the best part. The name of that play Dick and Pat were in was "The Dark Tower." And that 1933 mystery melodrama was adapted into the Edward G. Robinson film "The Man With Two Faces." Can't make this stuff up.
