Love Ticket: David and Julie

In a year of wee-hour skull sessions, G.O.P. strategists could hardly have cooked up such a promotional coup. The idea would have seemed too stagy or cloyingly obvious: the candidate's perky, pretty 20-year-old daughter Julie becoming engaged to the 20-year-old grandson of Dwight Eisenhower on the very eve of the presidential primary race. They would then campaign hand-in-hand toward November victory and a White House wedding.

As it happened, Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower came up with that script on their own. They fell in love during a year-long courtship at Smith and Amherst colleges and became engaged last November. Richard Nixon is personally delighted--not to mention his political gratification. Along with Daughter Tricia Nixon, 22, David and Julie are among the most engaging performers in his campaign road show.

Certain Symmetry. "I always campaign better with an Eisenhower," Nixon winks as he introduces his future son-in-law. Indeed, David has become something of a star attraction. Inheriting both the name and his grandfather's magnificent grin, the tousled, sometimes diffident college junior lends a certain symmetry to the Nixon drive in the minds of many Republicans. His very presence recalls calmer times when Ike was in the White House.

Understandably awkward during his first few campaign appearances--last spring he self-consciously delivered histrionic paeans to Julie's dad--David has evolved a low-keyed approach.

"I have even kissed my first baby," he says wryly. Like Julie, he has developed a knack for graciously self-effacing banter. When a group of elderly Rhode Islanders recently presented him with a pair of cuff links, he grinned: "Mr. Nixon is getting a little sick of my using his cuff links all the time, so thanks very much."

Compromise. David proselytizes at campaign rallies where he and Julie appear, but he has learned to speak briefly. "Julie gives me advice," he says, and in fact she can sometimes be blunt. "If she doesn't like the emphasis of the speech," David smiles, "she'll say so. Usually, I'm stunned for a little while, then I'll come around and we work out a compromise."

A political science major, David plans to study law on the West Coast after college and confesses he would like some day to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Julie took a semester's leave of absence from Smith to campaign for her father this fall, but David merely reduced his course load. Julie will doubtless need the extra time after November to fuss over arrangements for the wedding--though she will not say when it might be.

David's politics pretty much coincide with Nixon's, although David initially disagreed when the candidate suggested eventually abolishing the draft in favor of a volunteer army. "I interpreted that at first to be the end of everybody being equally responsible for the country's welfare," says David. "I mean, you hear a lot of guys talking about how they are being excluded from the political process and on the other hand saying that it is in the national interest, as they have defined it, for them not to be drafted."

As national chairman of Youth for Nixon-Agnew, David will try to recruit collegians for the Nixon campaign. He and Julie probably have their greatest impact, however, among the nation's parents and grandparents. Angered and bewildered by marijuana, campus rebellions and antiwar demonstrations, many older voters dote upon David and Julie. Many were particularly edified when David condemned the Chicago demonstrations during the Democratic Convention.

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