A Simple Spectacular at the White House

JUST after 4 on Saturday afternoon, the Army Band will sound Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary. At that signal, Richard Nixon will lead his daughter 'Tricia down the wisteria-laced stairs from the Blue Room balcony and into the White House Rose Garden. There, in front of a bowered altar just outside the President's Oval Office, before 400 guests, Tricia Nixon will become Mrs. Edward Finch Cox.

Except for the fact that the father of the bride is President of the U.S., the Nixon-Cox nuptials would attract little more public attention than, perhaps, a few paragraphs in the Sunday New York Times, Eastern society's county clerk. But a White House wedding, whoever the incumbent or the bride, has a certain nimbus of history about it. Tricia's will be the fourth presidential wedding in five years, counting Julie Nixon's marriage to David Eisenhower when her father was President-elect; yet repetition has not much dimmed the novelty. Enough atavistic American love of royalty and appetite for pageant remain, along with gossips' curiosity about the powerful, to make it a kind of minor national ceremony.

The betrothed merit close scrutiny. Unlike, say, Luci Johnson, who was a fairly girlish and unformed 19 when she married Pat Nugent, Tricia Nixon, at 25, is a young lady of high, imperious and sometimes mysterious definition. Whatever the lollipop image her Buster Brown hats and patent shoes may have given her, Tricia is a cool, self-possessed woman with a porcelain near beauty and a talent for conservative mots. Some detect in her a steely if youthful combination of the manner of Grace Kelly and the views, not so oft expressed, of Martha Mitchell. And, of course, a psychogenetic blend of Pat and Richard Nixon.

Ed Cox is a fascinatingly subtle contrast. A tall (6 ft. 1 in.), circumspect liberal Republican seven months younger than his bride, he is a scion of Eastern gentry who trace their bloodlines back to the Revolution. He served as one of the original Nader's Raiders, and his reticent charm, some friends believe, masks an incisive intelligence and healthy ambition. It is an American marriage to be reckoned with.

Some in New York's Social Register set believe that the marriage is somehow vaguely morganatic. Eddie's mother, Anne Finch, is descended from Robert R. Livingston, who signed the Declaration of Independence, administered the oath of office to George Washington and was envoy to France in Napoleon's time. His statue stands in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. The other side of the argument is that the daughter of an American President does not marry up. In a meritocratic society, it is not convincing to suggest that the groom outranks the bride socially because of a forebear's accomplishments six generations back.

In some ways, a White House wedding reflects the style of a presidency. Luci Johnson was married in the largest Roman Catholic church in the Western Hemisphere--in a ceremony to which, as Comedienne Edie Adams said, "only the immediate country was invited." Tricia's wedding will obey a Nixonian instinct for the via media. It will be neither the largest nor smallest: a simple spectacular.

Bruised Egos

One trait Tricia and Eddie zealously share is a passion for privacy. (Much of the White House staff often does not know whether Tricia is at home or halfway across the country.) That inclination has been somewhat strained since March, when they made their engagement public and began marshaling forces for the wedding. At first, Tricia hoped that the ceremony could be private. She relented because, as she told TIME'S Bonnie Angelo last week, "we both thought it fitting and appropriate to share it with so many of the American people."

But how much to share? There followed long and delicate negotiations over television coverage. It was finally agreed that TV cameras could video-tape all of the wedding proceedings except the actual ten-minute ceremony. Even what the cameras can record cannot be shown live; the networks will telecast the tapes later in the day.

The weather and guest list were special problems. If it rains, as it has often in Washington this spring, the ritual will be moved inside to the East Room, which can comfortably accommodate only about 400 standees.

Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice, who, at 87, will be a Nixon guest on Saturday, discovered as much in 1906 when she packed in 680 for her marriage to Congressman Nicholas Longworth; some of the ladies began to swoon in the crush.

Thus limited to 400 guests, the senior Nixons and Coxes are inviting from 40 to 50 couples each, with the rest allotted to Tricia and Eddie. As a result, many Washington egos have been bruised. The diplomatic corps is excluded--although the slight was softened by a reception for Tricia and Eddie last week that was given by Secretary of State William Rogers' wife Adele.

Even the leadership of Congress was struck from the list.

The Nixons, for their side of the aisle, are asking mostly old, close friends: Los Angeles Businessman Jack Drown and his wife, Industrialist Robert Abplanalp, Bebe Rebozo, PepsiCo President Donald Kendall. Other guests: Chief of Protocol Emil Mosbacher Jr., Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns and Paul Keyes, a former writer for TV's Laugh-In. The President's brothers, Donald and Edward Nixon, will attend, as will Mrs. Nixon's brothers. William and Thomas Ryan, and her half brother, Matthew Bender. At one point, Mrs. Nixon suggested throwing all the names in the air and inviting the ones that landed faceup. After the invitations went out, the White House phone began ringing with calls from scores of chagrined friends --and strangers--who claimed that their invitations had been lost in the mail.

One improbable person who did receive an invitation at the bridegroom's insistence--and plans to attend--is Eddie's friend Ralph Nader.

Meantime, a tidal flow of nuptial in pursuit, and then blithely departed with his bride in the fifth.

Tricia and Eddie Cox will be among the handsomest of White House couples. They are certainly entering their marriage with more knowledge aforethought than most. They have known each other for more than seven years, since first they met at a dance at Manhattan's Chapin School, where Tricia was a student.

Sense of Struggle

They bring interestingly disparate backgrounds to the match. Tricia was born in Whittier, Calif., soon after her father announced for a seat in the House. She seems to possess a first-born's empathy for her parents--meaning, in Tricia's case, a honing sense of struggle, of discipline, of success and abrasive failure. Whatever Pat Nixon's efforts to shield her daughters in normal pursuits (Brownies, Girl Scouts), Tricia obviously suffered through enough of her father's famous Six Crises to emerge resolutely conservative and, like her father, a tensely private person.

One Republican has located Tricia "slightly to the right of Ivan the Terrible," and she has been called the most conservative of the Nixons. She has, for example, congratulated Spiro Agnew for throwing "fear" into the press and television, and once approved of Lester Maddox's refusal to serve blacks in his Atlanta fried-chicken restaurant. She later explained that she meant only to defend the prerogatives of private property.

Some at the White House regard Tricia as a singleminded, foot-stamping girl with a "princess complex." With equal accuracy and a bit less stereotype, she is known to some friends for a rollicking and spontaneous sense of humor. At her bridal showers, she clowned by donning a red wig and outsize dark glasses from a "White House getaway box," mugging happily. She may be Garboesque in her reclusiveness, but on a televised tour of the White House a year ago, she displayed, some thought, more charm than Jacqueline Kennedy on a similar show in 1962. As startling as it may seem in her generation, Tricia is capable of complete filial piety. "Our parents," she says, "were so wonderful to Julie and me. My father is one of the most compassionate people I've ever met."

The Pick of Now

Tricia knows, despite her disclaimers, that she is misread--and may realize that the misreading has come largely from her flowing blonde hair, which adds to the fairy-princess stereotype, and her too-young clothes, which are the outcome of both her taste and her tiny size-4 figure. She liked it when she heard that a photographer had found her "sexier" of late. "I think that everyone is a combination of different qualities, of different ideas," she says. "I think it's good for people to see you in different lights, so they can see you as a total person. Although you can never get the total picture of anyone. So much is response."

A friend of the groom's says that "Tricia is getting the pick of the Now Generation"--which may be an eccentrically enthusiastic way to describe Ed Cox. He is, in fact, a collage of suavely melded opposites. His mother, Anne C.D. Finch, is descended from pre-Revolutionary Van Rensselaers and Schuylers. His father, Howard Cox, takes some pains to explain that although he is widely known as Colonel Cox, "the highest I ever got was lieutenant colonel" while serving as a cargo pilot in World War II. A New York lawyer, he is a former National Commander of the Military Order of the World Wars, and the family orbits from a town house on Manhattan's East End Avenue to the exclusive River Club to the family's "place" on Long Island's Westhampton Beach, where the colonel sails and pilots a chartered Twin Comanche plane.

In such an atmosphere, Ed Cox developed the accent and leisurely skills of the established Eastern WASP: boating, tennis, squash. In an almost ostentatious triple play, he went from Princeton to Yale to Harvard--Princeton as an undergraduate majoring in public and international affairs, Yale for one year as a graduate student in architecture, then Harvard Law School.

The Dating Years

Ed Cox, however, is as susceptible to misleading stereotyping as is Tricia. In his senior year at Princeton, he attended a seminar in corporate practice led by Ralph Nader and became fascinated by Nader's references to Delaware's corporate laws. He did a term paper on the subject, which he later turned into his undergraduate thesis, attacking the laws; it sufficiently impressed Nader to earn a place for Cox on the original seven-man Nader team that studied the Federal Trade Commission in 1968. During that summer, Cox proved a dogged investigator. The following year, he worked for the New Republic--a liberal journal that is hardly one of Richard Nixon's favorite magazines--writing editorials about cigarette ads and the use of pesticides and two signed pieces on corruption in the United Mine Workers Union and the need to develop a new steam-powered car as an alternative to the polluting internal-combustion engine.

The year after they met at Chapin, Eddie escorted Tricia to the International Debutante Ball. By then he was a freshman at Princeton. Over the years, they dated more or less constantly and quietly, although Tricia often went out with other young men. Barry Goldwater Jr. escorted her to a White House masked ball, causing at least some ideological titillation. Ed took time out from his Nader's Raiders project in 1968 to be with Tricia at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, but most of the attention then was fixed on David and Julie. Eddie was so discreet about his relationship with Tricia that most of his colleagues at the New Republic were unaware of it.

The Nixon family itself was a bit late in finding out how serious the couple was. Eddie proposed to Tricia in the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House shortly after Nixon's inauguration, but it was not until last Thanksgiving, during a holiday at Camp David, that Cox approached the President about the engagement. Ed gave Tricia an heirloom sapphire and diamond ring that his grandmother had worn.

The fact that Ed proposed so quickly after Tricia began her new life at the White House might suggest to pop-psychers that he was afraid of losing her. "I don't really know if that was his feeling," Tricia says. "For feel although Ed and I have discussed this period a great deal, because it was a very important period in our lives, a sort of crossroads, I really don't know the answer. I think that any time a change is involved, people feel, if not threatened, either a loss or a gain. Maybe he felt that, as opposed to the feeling that this life might take me away. After all, people don't really change."

Tricia and Eddie have almost cured their relationship like tobacco. "Eddie," says Tricia, "is my first and last love."

What Tricia especially cherishes in Eddie, she says, "is his sincerity. He is a completely sincere person. He won't go out of his way to say anything about any one, but he always says what he is think ing. He is never dishonest." Like many brides, Tricia also cheerfully concedes that her groom is "more intelligent" and "more intellectual" than she.

Friends of the President say that Eddie has made his feelings about pollution and ecology known around the White House dinner table, and that he has been known to argue with his future in-laws. At the 1968 convention, his choice for the vice-presidential nomination was said to have been New York's Mayor John Lindsay or Oregon's Senator Mark Hatfield. Tricia can easily imagine Ed becoming a Nader-bred advocate lawyer and even perhaps going into politics himself. "You know the saying," she says, "that every lawyer is a frustrated politician."

Saunas at Camp David

Ed and Tricia have managed to go out frequently without undue attention, dining in restaurants and attending concerts. Her Secret Service agents usually asked the maitre d' not to publicize their visit -- and whenever their presence at a certain place made its way into Washington society columns, that restaurant was struck from Tricia's list. They have few complaints about living in a fishbowl. If anything, being the President's daughter afforded Tricia additional protection for the privacy that both she and Eddie cherish.

Ed came frequently for unpublicized weekends at the White House, and occasionally for a visit of nearly a week.

Sometimes he was assigned the Queens' Bedroom, more often a third-floor guest room. In fact, with only the Secret Service as chaperons, they have week ended wherever they chose -- at Camp David, the White House, Key Biscayne.

At the White House, they played pool --"Fast Eddie" usually won--and frequently watched movies. "That's one of the wonderful things about living in the White House," says Tricia. "You can get any movie on 24 hours' notice. We've seen all the old movies we've always wanted to see--Humphrey Bogart and W.C. Fields. We're great fans of W.C. Fields; his sense of humor is so droll." Both are interested in history and savor the White House because of its former tenants, Tricia's favorite being Dolley Madison. "Because she was so outgoing and warm," says Tricia, "I think she bridged so many gaps present in the country."

For nearly hermetic privacy, no place was better than Camp David on Maryland's Catoctin Mountain. Tricia especially liked getting away from the omnipresent guards and tourists around the White House grounds. Along with privacy, the camp, like a resort hotel, offered swimming, tennis, skeet shooting, putting green, movies, bicycling and roller-skating. Tricia, who calls herself "the world's most unathletic woman," tried to keep up with Ed, who has an almost indiscriminate passion for sports. "The only time I have seen Edward uncoordinated," Tricia says, "is on a surfboard." In winter there is a roaring fire in the lodge, but Tricia unexpectedly came up with another pastime: "Eddie and I have discovered a marvelous thing to do up there in the winter. We discovered the sauna, and then we go into the pool afterward instead of the snow. It's fantastic!"

Love Story

Many of the summer weekends of their courtship they spent at the Cox home, Ann-How-Ten, at Westhampton Beach. "You can hang loose there," according to Tricia. The one time she tried to sail Ed's Sunfish by herself, she capsized. Ed rescued her. On visits to Cambridge, Tricia ate with Eddie at local restaurants or at his law school club, Lincoln's Inn.

As the wedding approached--along with Ed's law school exams, which ended last week--Tricia and her mother mobilized a small army of more than 100 chefs, florists, seamstresses, painters and calligraphers. Pat Nixon threw herself into it with a special enthusiasm that may have assuaged the unhappiness of knowing that both of her daughters have left her wing. Even though she and the President will celebrate their own 31st wedding anniversary nine days after Tricia's wedding, Mrs. Nixon insists that she has no advice to offer her daughter. "We've always been so close," she says. "We've always confided in each other. There's really nothing I can tell her now. My only advice is--just be happy!" She adds warmly: "I'm so glad that Eddie is finished with exams now and can enjoy the fun. He's going to be a wonderful son-in-law."

After a year in which Julie was often in Washington while David Eisenhower went through Navy officers' training, the Nixons will face an emptier house this summer. The Eisenhowers are moving to Atlantic Beach, Fla., near David's new naval base. Eddie and Tricia will live in New York while Ed clerks in a federal attorney's office, then settle in a two-bedroom Cambridge apartment in September as Ed begins his third year of Harvard Law School; the locale, if not all of the circumstances, conjures up Erich Segal's Love Story. Except for the few months after Lynda Johnson got married, it will be the first time since the '50s that the White House has no presidential sons or daughters running around to enliven the mansion.

For the Nixons, the contrast will be all the bleaker after the noise and gaiety of the wedding. Tricia and Eddie will exchange vows in a ten-minute service presided over by the Rev. Edward Gardiner Latch, a Methodist who is the Nixons' old family pastor and chaplain of the House of Representatives. While hardly venturesome as the new improvisational weddings go--Kahlil Gibran will not be recited--the service will be mildly ecumenical. There will be Episcopal (Ed is an Episcopalian) as well as Methodist and Catholic prayers.

In fact, it will be the most innovative of any White House wedding. Then, to Purcell's Trumpet Tune and Air, Tricia, in her Priscilla of Boston gown, will climb the curving south stairs on Eddie's arm, followed by the rest of the bridal party, including Matron of Honor Julie Eisenhower.

Aiming for Maizie

White House regulars may notice one singular change from the usual presidential party: instead of the Marine Band, which prides itself as "the President's own," the Army Strings will play, their first time at any major White House event. The only Marines will be a harpist and flutist providing back ground music in the Diplomatic Reception Room. There is a reason, whispers a White House source: the Nixons feel that the Army has had to suffer so many indignities of late, so much at tack from within, that this is one small way to honor it.

Inside, the champagne will froth in the Diplomatic Reception Room, with a lavish buffet of smoked salmon, roast beef and shrimps in coconut (caviar and foie gras were eliminated for economy rea sons) spread in the State Dining Room not far from the multistoried cake. After an interval at the reception, Tricia will climb halfway up the red-carpeted grand stairs and toss her bouquet down to the attendants waiting below; if Tricia's aim is on, it probably will fall to Ed's 25-year-old sister Maizie, who will be a brides maid. Then, reversing the White House pattern of more than 100 years -- brides customarily change to traveling clothes and sneak away -- Tricia and Eddie will leave by the North Portico in full wedding regalia while the guests pelt them with rose petals.

There will be one other diverting change. Richard Nixon, who has never been seen doing so since he became President, promises that he will dance at his daughter's wedding.

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