As presidential siblings go, Edward Nixon, who died last week in a Seattle nursing home at age 88, came close to the ideal.
Seventeen years younger than his brother relation, whom he closely resembled, down to the hairline and ski-lift nose, he seems to have regarded Richard Nixon as more of a father figure than a big brother, and by all accounts, his attitude toward the 37th president was a mixture of admiration and affection. He led an eminently respectable life. A Duke graduate and geologist/energy consultant, he had been a naval aviator and, later, flight instructor. Edward was a devoted husband, and, like his brother, the father of two daughters.
He was helpful to his brother’s political career without being especially conspicuous, serving in a largely honorary capacity as co-chairman of Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972, and, as a fundraiser, he avoided controversy, no small achievement. Offered a minor regulatory post in the Commerce Department, for which he was eminently qualified, he ultimately declined it to avoid the appearance of nepotism or impropriety. Above all, he seems never to have sought any personal advantage from his brother’s eminence.
The early years of the Nixon clan were not easy ones. Their father’s business failed, and two brothers died prematurely of tuberculosis. Edward’s gratitude to his benefactor-brother Richard was lifelong. This places him not only in contrast to some of the more notorious presidential siblings of modern times, which will be addressed more in a moment, but to the other surviving Nixon brother, Donald, an unlucky entrepreneur whose various business ventures sought to cash in on the family name — a California drive-in restaurant featuring the “Nixonburger,” for example — and whose dubious finances caused his long-suffering politician-sibling no end of headaches.
Edward’s memoir, The Nixons: A Family Portrait, was published in 2009, long after Richard’s death, and is wholly devoid of sensational content.
Of course, it cannot be easy to be a member of any president’s family. The quasi-royal status of modern commanders in chief shines an unwelcome light on people who, unlike members of actual dynasties, have not usually been raised in the expectation of close public scrutiny or service to the state. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ wife is said to have described Washington, D.C., as a capital city “full of famous men and the women they married when they were young.” Harry Truman’s spouse disliked the limelight so much that she spent much of his tenure in the safety and comfort of her mother’s home in Missouri. Younger presidential offspring have a tendency to flee White House residency at the earliest opportunity.
Then, too, you can choose your friends and political associates, but you can’t choose your relatives. The siblings of George H.W. Bush were lesser-known versions of their famous brother; the same might be said of John F. Kennedy’s surviving sisters and brothers. Ronald Reagan’s older brother was a refreshingly unobtrusive, and wholly scandal-free, Los Angeles businessman. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s five brothers, raised in genteel poverty in western Kansas, all found success in life independent of Ike.
To be sure, not all presidents have been so fortunate. Lyndon Johnson’s younger sibling Sam Houston was a lifelong political hanger-on and chronic drunk, so troublesome toward the end of LBJ’s term that he was moved into the White House residence so his brother could keep an eye on him. Billy Carter, the youngest of Jimmy Carter’s “colorful” siblings, initially enchanted the press with his good-ol’-boy candor, family peanut business, and picturesque gas station in Plains, Ga. By the end of Carter’s presidency, however, Billy was better known for his alcoholism than charm, and was the subject of a Senate inquiry into his paid lobbying for the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Roger Clinton, whose acting career and sporadic ventures into rock stardom briefly flourished during his half-brother Bill’s presidency, was known to the Secret Service as “Headache.”
No one could say anything remotely the same about Edward Nixon, whose quiet departure from existence last week was a fitting end to a life at the edge of history, lived faithfully and decently.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
