Funeral Brings Daughters Back to the Limelight

As the nation heard Richard Nixon eulogized Wednesday, television cameras focused repeatedly during the 85-minute service on the resolute faces of the fallen President’s daughters. For what sometimes seemed like anguishing minutes, TV seemed to get closer and closer, painfully close.

Julie and Tricia Nixon were the kids parents told their children to be like. Supporters of the Vietnam War viewed them as models of American youth; while opponents heaped them with scorn. And they are perhaps the only sisters who can play Trivial Pursuit and realize that they are one of the answers.

As the children of the former President and First Lady Pat Nixon, Julie Eisenhower and Patricia (Tricia) Cox were two of the most recognizable siblings in the United States during Nixon’s six years in the Oval Office.

Except for Eisenhower’s book writing and occasional guest speaking, the Nixon women, especially Tricia, have largely faded from public view. But on Wednesday, both stood firm before the world, along with their husbands and children.

Through the memorial service and eulogies, they displayed the same patriotism and pride their father exhibited on formal occasions. At the same moment, they evoked the image of their mother, standing by their father no matter what, insistent on being the backdrop and not the main event.

“Richard Nixon has a beautiful family, and he was devoted to them,” Gov. Pete Wilson told the audience. “Anyone who ever saw them together knew that his beloved Pat and his girls, Tricia and Julie, were everything to him. He was so proud of them.”

Only in the final moments, when the ceremony moved graveside, did emotion surface. As a major general presented each with a flag that draped the coffin of their father, Tricia--the oldest--choked back tears, then Julie caught her breath, dabbed at her upper lip with a handkerchief and cried. The Rev. Billy Graham was there for comfort. Julie gave him a hug as the family headed into the library for a private reception.

The last time the media paid so much attention to them, Julie and Tricia were standing next to their father during his farewell speech to the White House staff in August, 1974. Privately, they had urged him not to resign the presidency.

In much better times, the media covered Julie’s pre-inaugural wedding in New York City, and Tricia’s wedding in 1971, the last to be held at the White House. The reception was in the East Room.

Julie’s engagement to David Eisenhower was on the cover of Life magazine. And it was the eldest daughter who pulled the family together, locked arm in arm, for a final White House news photograph as Watergate descended.

At the private reception after the service Wednesday evening, Tricia and Julie warmly welcomed more than 500 guests and tried to be upbeat.

“They are two beautiful girls,” said Carl N. Karcher, the owner of the Carl’s Jr. hamburger chain and a longtime friend of the Nixons. “Their spirits were great. I told them their father was a great leader and they had great parents. They agreed.”

Toward the end of their lives, Nixon and his wife visited frequently with their daughters’ families, usually at the Nixon home in Park Ridge, N.J. Together, they worked hard creating the Nixon library that opened in 1990.

With Nixon’s death there has been speculation whether any of his family will run for office. Neither David nor Julie have ruled it out. Regardless, Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose told New York’s Newsday that they will remain “fierce defenders” of their father.

Recently, Nixon lawyers said the family also will continue their father’s 20-year fight to control thousands of hours of White House tapes and more than 150,000 pages of presidential papers. Only 63 hours of the famous tapes, the portion provided to a federal grand jury during the Watergate investigation, have been released to the public.

“Some people say there were only three people in this world that Nixon ever loved--Pat and his daughters,” Ambrose said. “And they felt that way about him.”

For several years after Nixon’s resignation, Julie maintained a high profile as her father’s most respected defender. “The most credible Nixon,” she was once called.

Today, Julie is the author of three books--two about her family--and has been working on a fourth about the 1968 presidential election with her husband David, the grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. They live in Berwyn, Pa., a woodsy suburb of Philadelphia, with their three children, Jennie, Melanie and Alex.

The elusive Tricia, who was dubbed the “the mystery princess” by the White House press, now lives quietly in New York City. Her husband, Edward Finch Cox, one of the original seven “raiders,” who worked for consumer advocate Ralph Nader, practices law. They have a son, Christopher.

During their youth, the girls appeared regularly in their father’s campaigns. Widely disseminated photos of Julie and Tricia sitting on their parents’ laps appealed to the public, and they contributed to their father’s political success in other, more subtle ways.

During the 1952 presidential election as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate, Nixon defended himself on television against charges that he was the beneficiary of a generous slush fund set up by rich California Republicans. In the famous “Checkers Speech,” he referred to the one gift he had received from a wealthy Texan, a black and white cocker spaniel the girls named Checkers. The girls loved the dog, he said, and under no circumstances would the family return it.

Both daughters became the object of adulation and scorn while living in the White House at the peak of the nation’s most tumultuous and divisive time since the Civil War. Race riots and student demonstrations were widespread.

Julie, now 45, went to Smith College, an all-women’s school that was in the vanguard of campus radicalism in the late 1960s. Some of her classmates regarded her as a traitor to her generation.

Protest chants vilified her and her husband. David was lampooned as a good-natured “Howdy Doody,” and the media used words like “jug-eared,” “gangly” and “awkward” to describe him. Threats of protests at Smith kept Julie from attending her graduation.

Tricia, now 48, was probably more insulated than her sister from direct, personal attack. She attended Finch College, a private school, in Manhattan. She tutored low-income children. Quiet and shy, she rarely revealed her inner feelings to anyone, even her friends.

When a teen-age visitor to the White House once asked about Tricia’s whereabouts, the First Lady said: “If you can find out, you are better than I am.” Her personal life remains largely private.

Once their father resigned the presidency, both women seemed to welcome private life. Though they had advised their father not to resign, they were weary of the scandal and the coverage. Both had found the lack of privacy and intrusions that accompany the presidency almost unbearable.

The years out of the limelight, Julie once told the Washington Post, “have been some of the happiest years I’ve known. I’m so grateful for this time leading a normal life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” She once joked their lives were so all-American she and her husband could be “Dave and Julie Smith.”

More on Nixon

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* FUNERAL EULOGIES--Excerpts from the five eulogies. A18