Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the daughter of Richard M. Nixon, the 37th President of the
United States and Pat Nixon, the First Lady of the United States. She is the younger sister
to Tricia Nixon Cox. While her father served as President of the
United States, she wrote several books and worked as Assistant Managing Editor of The
Saturday Evening Post. Since her father left the White House in 1974, she has written a
few more books and works to support her parents' legacy.
In 1968, she married David Eisenhower, grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
She is the mother of two daughters, Jennie Eisenhower and Melanie Catherine Eisenhower,
and a son, Alexander Richard Eisenhower.
Early life Julie Nixon was born while her father, Richard
Nixon, was a Congressman. Much of her childhood coincided with her father's service as Dwight
Eisenhower's Vice-President. She recalled her father as being romantic, while her mother
was "practical and down to earth". Her mother tried to "seal" her and her sister from much
of her father's political career. Julie began to cry during a celebration for her father's
and President Eisenhower's second inauguration, as a result of believing it was not fair that
the grandchildren of the President could play in the White House while she and her sister
could not. After expressing these feelings to Mamie Eisenhower, the First Lady invited
the two Nixon daughters to play with her grandchildren. Also while watching the second inauguration,
President Eisenhower suggested to her as their photograph was being taken to hide a black
eye by turning her head. Julie had acquired it in a sledding accident, and turned her
head towards David, which made it appear that he had been staring directly at her. Her grandmother
Hannah Nixon would come to watch her and her sister whenever her parents traveled. As a
child, one of her favorite pets was a small dog named Checkers, who figured prominently
in her father's most famous vice-presidential speech.
As a teenager, she attended the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington along with her
sister, Tricia. After her father lost Presidential Election of 1960 to John F. Kennedy, Julie
felt "battered" by the results and felt that the votes had "been stolen".
Julie left school in 1961, after her father lost his presidential bid in 1960, and the
family returned to California where her father ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1962. At
the time of what her father called to reporters his "last press conference", she was waiting
in a hallway with her mother and sister. That afternoon, Julie joined the two in crying
at the foot of her parent's bed over her father's loss. The Nixons moved to New York after the
gubernatorial race, and Julie attended Smith College after her graduation from high school.
She received a master's degree from Catholic University in 1972. David Eisenhower, the
grandson of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, attended Amherst College nearby. Julie and
David were both invited to address the Republican Women's Club. The club learned that the two
were only seven miles apart, and invited the two to be featured speakers. They discussed
the invitations and both chose to decline, but would come in contact again when David
visited Julie with his roommate from Amherst and took her and a friend out to get some
ice cream. David reflected: "I was broke, my roommate forgot his wallet. The girls paid."
Marriage
She began dating David Eisenhower in 1966, and became engaged to him a year later. David
once came to pick her up for a date at Smith College, and was initially stopped by security.
Both Julie and David have admitted to Mamie Eisenhower having played a major part in their
relationship. In 1966 during the funeral for Raymond Pitcairn, a friend of the Nixons,
Julie mentioned to Mamie that she would be attending Smith College. Mamie told her of
David's plans to go to Amherst College, and soon started trying to get David to talk to
her. On Julie's nineteenth birthday, David flew to Key Biscayne, Florida, the home of
her father during his stay in office, to be with her and her family. David did not tell
his grandfather, former president Eisenhower, about the trip nor when Julie visited him
in Chicago, Illinois while he was working as a trainee at Sears.
On December 22, 1968, after her father was elected president but before he took office,
Julie married David Eisenhower, grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The
week prior the wedding, for Julie, was mostly spent checking for last-minute details and
writing thank-you notes for those who had sent the couple gifts. The couple had known
each other since meeting at the 1956 Republican National Convention.
The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale officiated in the non-denominational rite at the Marble
Collegiate Church in New York City. The couple left from Massachusetts in 1970 and their
classes there were canceled after the Kent State shootings. After her father resigned
from office, the two lived in California near Julie's parents and later in the suburb of
Philadelphia. The Eisenhowers have three children: Jennie Elizabeth, an actress, Alex Richard
and Melanie Catherine. First daughter
During the United States presidential election of 1968, which her father was the Republican
nominee in, Julie began to feel that she was not active enough in her father's campaign
and became stressed over what she believed was Hubert Humphrey's popularity at Smith
College, which she was attending at the time. She took an active role in his campaign, and
shook hands for hours while greeting people. Despite not liking the publicity and hating
to answer "personal questions," she did anything she could to help her father.
While her father served as President, Julie became active at the White House as a spokesperson
for children's issues, the environment, and the elderly. She gave tours to disabled children,
filled in for her mother at events, and took an active interest in foreign policy. From
1973-75, she served as Assistant Managing Editor of the Saturday Evening Post and helped
establish a book division for Curtis Publishing Co., its parent corporation. It was during
this time that Julie wrote the book Eye On Nixon, full of photographs of her father.
At the time of graduation from Smith College, President Nixon opted not to attend it given
the possibility of antiwar demonstrations and violence.
Once she appeared on The Mike Douglas Show in 1970, and Mike asked her what she thought
about the new fad called "streaking," where someone runs naked in public. She responded,
"I don't know how they can come off like that!", a double entendre that left the whole studio
laughing. She and her sister were placed in charge of Caroline Kennedy and her brother
John F. Kennedy, Jr. when they visited the White House in 1971. The two took them on
a tour of their former residence, which included going to their old bedrooms and to the Oval
Office. Watergate
After the news of the Watergate break-in and suspicions that it might reach as high as
the oval office began to mount, Julie took on the press at home and abroad. Her defense
of her father caused people to wonder why her mother wasn't saying anything about the
scandal. Journalist Nora Ephron wrote, "In the months since the Watergate hearings began,
she [Julie] has become her father's ... First Lady in practice if not in fact."
Taking on the "role of trying to explain her father to the world", Julie's public defense
of her father began at Walt Disney World on May 2, 1973. She gave a total of 138 interviews
across the country. In the summer of 1973, she and David went to London where Julie appeared
on the BBC. Journalist George Will once reflected: "Anyone thinking that Nixon deserved a better
fate from Watergate should remember his silence as his brave daughter Julie crisscrossed the
country defending him against charges he knew to be true." On July 4, 1973, she told two
reporters that her father had considered resigning over Watergate, but that the family had talked
him out of it. On February 14, 1974, Julie underwent a 44-minute surgery to stop internal
bleeding from an ovarian cyst. After the surgery, her husband and mother came to see her. Four
days later, on February 18, 1974, her father arrived in Indianapolis to pick her and her
family up. On May 7, 1974, Julie and David met with the press in the East Garden of the
White House. She announced that the President planned "...to take this constitutionally
down to the wire." Just before noon on August 9, 1974, Julie stood behind her father while
he gave his goodbye speech to the White House staff. She would later say it was the hardest
moment for him. Life after the White House
Julie and David settled in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, where she completed several books, including
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, a biography of her mother. She has an extensive record of
community service in the Philadelphia area and is active with the Richard Nixon Foundation,
sitting on its board, as well as that of the Center for the National Interest.
She, along with her sister and father, was with her mother when she died of lung cancer
on June 22, 1993. Four days later, on June 26, 1993, she attended her mother's funeral
service on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Ten months later,
she was by her father's bedside with her sister Patricia when he died. Julie attended the
funeral on April 27, 1994. Her father's death left her and her sister with his diary entries,
binders and tapes among other things while they were secluded from the public.
She has expressed distaste in a few adaptations of presidencies, and labeled them as giving
young viewers a "twisted sense of history". This extended to Oliver Stone's Nixon, an
adaptation of her father's presidency that received positive reviews for its depiction
of his life. Walt Disney's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, wrote a letter to Julie and
her sister saying that Stone had "committed a grave disservice to your family, to the
Presidency, and to American history". The Justice Department moved on April 14,
1999 to prevent her from making an appearance to testify during a legal battle over whether
the government would pay her father's estate millions as compensation for papers and tapes
seized when he resigned. In 2001, she expressed interest in exhuming
the body of Checkers, a dog attributed to her father's career when he campaigned for
vice president that died in 1964. Her desire was to move the remains to the Nixon Presidential
Library and Museum. She and her sister got into a legal battle
over an estimated "as-high-as" $19 million, left by Bebe Rebozo for the Richard Nixon
Library and Birthplace Foundation. As opposed to Tricia's wish for the money to be controlled
by a group affiliated with their family, Julie wanted it to be controlled by the library's
board. On the relationship strain the two were experiencing during the dispute, Julie
said "I think it is very sad" and stated, "It's very heartbreaking because I love my
sister very much". On August 6, 2002, Julie met with her sister for a court-ordered meeting.
Despite the two being together for the vast majority of the day, they failed to make an
agreement. She believed that a continued support of donations for the library was not what
needed to be done, given that all of the other Presidential Libraries and Museums at the
time were funded by the Presidential System.
"It's not right, struggling for the money. My father should be in the system. As long
as he's on the outside, historians will continue to look at him, I feel, in a more negative
light. There is always going to be negativity, but he has to be part of the continuum of
presidents."
She was reported to have given $2,300 to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, despite
her and her husband's and father's Republican background and relationships to Presidents
Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower In 2012, however, she contributed to the presidential
campaign of President Obama's opponent, Republican Mitt Romney.
In 2010, she and her husband David co-authored Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961–1969, a biography of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's final
years after he left the White House. On March 16, 2012, she and her sister arrived in Yorba
Linda to celebrate what would have been their mother's 100th birthday. On November 23, 2013,
Eisenhower and her husband opened a holiday exhibit for the Nixon Library, which remained
there until January 5, 2014. Footnotes
References Penn State University biography.
Meeting Mao Zedong on January 1, 1976 Aronson, Billy. Presidents and Their Times:
Richard M. Nixon. Cavendish Square Publishing. ISBN 978-0761424284.
Marton, Kati. Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History. Anchor. ISBN 978-0385721882.
Eisenhower, David. Going Home To Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,
1961-1969. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1439190913. Frank, Jeffrey. Ike and Dick: Portrait of
a Strange Political Marriage. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1416587217.
Gibbs, Nancy; Michael Duffy. The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity.
Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1439127704. External links
A Few Good Women... Julie Nixon Eisenhower