A June Wedding in the White House

"I'VE encouraged her to elope," White House Press Aide Connie Stuart confided two months back. No such luck. The announcement was leaked in advance, but when President Nixon went before the St. Patrick's Eve crowd of 300 in the East Room he insisted: "Until I say it, it's not official." So he said it: "Mrs. Nixon and I are very honored to announce the engagement of our daughter Tricia to Edward Cox of New York." Petite and elegant in a low-cut white gown bordered with ostrich feathers, Tricia led her fiance onto the stage to warm applause. She outshone everybody that evening--the guest of honor, Ireland's Prime Minister John Lynch: her mother, whose 59th birthday was part of the celebration; and her prospective in-laws, whom Nixon failed to introduce. It will be a White House wedding, the eighth for a daughter of an incumbent President, some time in June. The exact date depends on when Eddie Cox can get free from his second-year exams at Harvard Law School.

Careful Tricia has not exactly rushed into marriage. The two met on a blind date at a Chapin School dance in 1963, during the Nixons' first year in New York; in 1964, he was one of her escorts at the International Debutante Ball. After she had graduated from Finch and he from Princeton in 1968, he appeared at her side to watch the nomination proceedings in the Nixon family suite at Miami Beach during the Republican Convention.

They became secretly engaged two years ago; since then the romance has gone on from coast to coast, from the Cox family estate in Westhampton Beach, L.I., to San Clemente, from Camp David to Key Biscayne. She has visited Cox frequently in Cambridge, Mass., where they customarily dine--surrounded by Secret Service agents--at small, inexpensive restaurants or at Lincoln's Inn, a law-school social club. Last Thanksgiving Cox asked Nixon for his daughter's hand. "Eddie was white as a sheet," Bebe Rebozo, who was standing by, recalled; her father, Tricia said, was "speechless for a moment--you know how fathers are." Since just before Christmas, Tricia has been sporting a diamond-and-sapphire ring, an heirloom first given to Cox's maternal grandmother. Eddie is 24, Tricia 25--only seven months apart.

Six Flights. Cox is more than suited for the match. "One wonderful thing about Eddie," says a White House source, "is that he is not after Tricia because she is the daughter of the President." His parents are Social Register New York; his father Howard, who likes to be called "Colonel," is a lawyer who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. A forebear, Robert R. Livingston, administered the oath of office to President-elect George Washington. Eddie Cox wears tweed jackets and speaks in impeccable prep-school accents. He earned the wry nickname "Fast Eddie" at Manhattan's Trinity School--after a dissolute pool shark in The Hustler, whom the studious Cox scarcely resembles--because he was a stickler for deadlines when editor of the school paper. He drives an old Ford station wagon and regularly runs up the six flights to his Cambridge apartment. ("This building is full of elderly widows," he says. "It makes it quiet, all right.") After graduation in 1972, Cox will enter the Army with an ROTC commission earned at Princeton; following that, he plans to practice public-service law. This summer he will work in the office of Whitney North Seymour Jr., U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In the past he has been more adventurous. He studied architecture at Yale before switching to law because it offered a greater chance for involvement in social issues. He spent one recent summer writing for the liberal New Republic, another working with Nader's Raiders, where he helped assemble a scathing report on personnel practices at the Federal Trade Commission. One law school acquaintance calls him "a left leaner from the right side of the tracks." Tricia insists that Cox is a registered Republican. "He considers himself an independent," she said at a press conference last week. But "I think he'd vote for my father if he ran again."

Without question, Cox is a good bit more liberal than his intended. "She is slightly to the right of Ivan the Terrible," says one Republican campaign worker. Last year she said of Spiro Agnew: "The Vice President is incredible. It's amazing what he has done to the media, helping them to reform themselves. You can't underestimate the power of fear." In 1964, Tricia, then only 18, sent an admiring letter to Lester Maddox, later Governor of Georgia. She suggested that he might avoid serving blacks by turning his fried-chicken restaurant into a private club. Subsequently, she expressed dismay that her letter had been taken as racist and denied that it was so intended.

For all her aloofness Tricia commands a ready reservoir of warmth and charm when she chooses: many apolitical viewers thought her televised tour of the White House last May outdid Jackie Kennedy's celebrated 1962 performance. But, as one friend explains, "Tricia is a private person living her private life the way she wants." Her romance with Cox remained secret for a long time because she always flies by military jet. So they were able to spend nearly every weekend together in assorted family homes and those of friends--un-tracked. Between weekends, Eddie telephoned every day, "sometimes twice, three times" a day, beams Tricia.

Even the domestic staff at the White House cannot say with certainty what she does with her time, apart from very occasional service as a teacher's aide in an all-black Washington third-grade class. The press has dubbed her "the Howard Hughes of the White House." In the back halls of the mansion, her iron will is legend. "Despite that Dresden-doll look, Tricia could handle anything," says the President's longtime personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Nixon agrees. "Tricia has a very strong personality," he said in an interview last year. "For example, when I say, 'Let's go to church,' sometimes Tricia says, 'No.' And she doesn't go." One White House staffer puts it less kindly: "Tricia has a princess complex. When she stamps her little foot, you'd better snap to." Tricia, however, finds the princess description "unreal."

Good Marks. Usually Tricia keeps to herself around the White House. Luci and Lynda Bird Johnson often slipped downstairs to stand with the social aides at the back of the East Room during the after-dinner entertainment, but Tricia does not appear unless she is a full-fledged dinner guest. Except for an outdoor affair honoring Prince Charles and Princess Anne, last year she attended only the dinners honoring French President Georges Pompidou, British Prime Minister Edward Heath, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the African ambassadors to Washington. One friend's explanation for her seeming aloofness is persuasive: "Tricia is basically shy. It takes three times as much effort for her to meet people and chat with strangers as it would for Julie." When Tricia does make the effort, she gets good marks for grace. Says the same friend: "She's like an actress who goes on."

Like a good actress, Tricia had something to offer the Love Story set when she met the ladies of the press on the morrow of the engagement announcement. "The most important thing for a successful marriage is love, but love is so intangible," she observed. "It's so important to accept one another, even though you are very different. I think you should complement one another." She said she may study American history while Cox finishes law school, and she told the startled newswomen, whom she had sedulously avoided: "I envy you all your jobs." On a more immediate point, she allowed that she knows how to make Eddie's favorite chocolate-chip cookies and can cook eggs and pancakes. But, well, "bacon is hard." Not a moment too soon, Mother Pat gave her a book of "foolproof" recipes as an engagement present.

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