The Nation: A June Wedding in the White House

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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.