The Nation: A Simple Spectacular at the White House

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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