Returning to Whittier to practice law, he met Thelma Catherine (“Pat”) Ryan (Pat Nixon), a teacher and amateur actress, after the two were cast in the same play at a local community theatre. The couple married in 1940. In August 1942, after a brief stint in the Office of Price Administration in Washington, D.C., Nixon joined the navy, serving as an aviation ground officer in the Pacific and rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. Following his return to civilian life in 1946, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating five-term liberal Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis in a campaign that relied heavily on innuendos about Voorhis’s alleged communist sympathies.
