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 fiancé 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.