Ed Nixon, last surviving brother of President Richard Nixon, dies at age 88

Edward Nixon, the youngest brother of President Richard Nixon and an active participant in the presidential library in Yorba Linda, died Wednesday, Feb. 27, at the age of 88.

Ed Nixon was the youngest of the five Nixon boys, and the last surviving sibling. He lived in Bothell, Wash., near Seattle.

“Since our father passed away 25 years ago, Uncle Ed was our family’s rock,” Richard Nixon’s daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, said in a statement released by the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum.

The daughters described their uncle as a mentor “with a practical mind and an ever-present, unassuming smile.”

Ed Nixon served in the Navy as an aviator, helicopter flight instructor and assistant professor of naval science before going on to a successful career as a geologist and expert on global energy use. He remained in the naval reserves as a captain.

“He was a source of guidance to our father, whose favorite little Eddie grew up into a renowned geologist with an infectious curiosity,” Richard Nixon’s daughters said in the release. “He was always thinking, always working – never for his own benefit, but to uncover the answers to questions that science poses in our world.”

Ed Nixon also got involved in his brother’s campaigns for president in 1968 and 1972.

He was an original member of the Richard Nixon Foundation’s board of directors and involved in the presidential library in Yorba Linda from the beginning.

“People loved to have their picture taken with him,” said Sandy Quinn, who worked with Ed Nixon first as a consultant and staff member to the foundation, then as the foundation’s president and most recently on the board of directors. “He looked like his brother. From the side view, it was hard to tell the difference.

“He was a very warm responsive man who did everything that we ever asked him to do at the foundation,” she said.

When the library started a monthly presidential program for middle schools with actors impersonating the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and doing Q&As with students, Ed Nixon participated several times representing his brother, Quinn said.

“He was very proud of his brother,” she said.

Ed Nixon would especially emphasize the domestic policies his brother championed such as desegregation, the all-volunteer Army and the environment, Quinn said, because he found they were often overshadowed by the president’s foreign policy achievements — including his historic 1972 trip to China — as well as the Watergate scandal.

Ed Nixon was at the presidential library regularly for events, including its reopening in 2016 after a $15 million renovation.

“He got a kick out of seeing the thousands of people who came through that day,” said Joe Lopez, the foundation’s communications director. “Ed was very supportive of the more balanced approach that the library has taken the last several years.”

He also liked to visit the Nixon family home on the property where many of the furnishings from his own childhood have been placed, Lopez said.

Ed Nixon was born in 1930 after Frank and Hannah Nixon had moved their family to Whittier. He attended Whittier High School.

“Dick was more than a brother. Because we never shared a boyhood, he assumed the role of assistant father and mentor,” Ed Nixon wrote in 2009. “At the time of my birth, he was 17 and getting ready to start college. But he realized he could be an important influence in my life, and he took his self-imposed responsibility seriously, always listening to his kid brother.”

Ed Nixon is survived by his daughters, Amelie “Amy” Peiffer and Elizabeth “Beth” Matheny. His wife of 57 years, Gay Lynne Nixon, died in 2014.