My Brother's Beeper?

"They call me 'Big Don,' " he once said. "I'm larger than Richard. I'm not a public figure--I'm just a fellow trying to make a living. I don't want to be in the limelight at all."

Big Don--F. Donald Nixon--was caught in the limelight again last week, and the man who put him there was none other than Brother Richard. The Washington Post reported--and nobody really denied--that for more than a year during the President's first term in office he had had the Secret Service tap his brother's telephone.

In recent months, the White House has justified tapping the phones of 17 Government officials and newsmen on the grounds of national security. And the White House has excused the secret taping of conversations in the Oval Office, including those with visiting foreign dignitaries, on the theory that history demanded such a record.

But why should the President want to keep an ear on the activities of his brother? The most common conjecture in Washington was that the President had been worried about Don's efforts at "trying to make a living." In the past, F. Donald Nixon's attempts to get along in the business world have caused the President acute embarrassment.

A plump, genial figure with the trademark family nose. Don Nixon is a businessman of varying interests who can win friends and influence people not by dropping a name but by bearing it.

He has always taken a back seat to Dick, the brother who was expected to get ahead by hard work. When they were children together, Don learned to live with his brother's long and moody silences, which occasionally exploded into angry outbursts. "One time he lit into me and gave me a dressing down I'll never forget," Don once said. "He aired all of his gripes of the past two or three years."

As teenagers, the two brothers worked side by side in the family grocery store -- Don behind the meat counter and Dick handling the produce. Despite their differences in personality, there were bonds between them. In 1940, when Dick was interested in a young schoolteacher named Pat Ryan, he kept Don up half the night talking about the types of engagement rings that he had diligently investigated.

Hughes Loan. When Dick went into politics, Don stayed on with the family store, later worked as a sales manager for Carnation Milk. The first trouble Don caused his brother could not have come at a more sensitive time -- the 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy. Word got out that Howard Hughes had loaned Donald Nixon $205,000 to help save his chain of quick-order California restaurants called Nixon's. Despite the transfusion from Hughes, which was never repaid. Don went bankrupt. Worse yet, the voters were left to speculate why Hughes, a major manufacturer of defense components, might want to get into such expensive good standing with the Nixon family.

The Hughes connection was revived in 1969, when Donald Nixon was roving around with John Meier, who had been engaged in a search for profitable mining properties for the billionaire recluse. Don made a scouting trip with Meier to the Dominican Republic, where the government greeted them like potentates and laid on a heavy military escort. Later, White House Detective John Caulfield wrote a memo to Presidential Counsel John W. Dean III warning that Don had gone to the Dominican Republic with "a small group of wheeler-dealers" who were connected with Hughes. The results of the mission remain, like most Hughes missions, mysterious. Meier was subsequently dismissed from the Hughes hierarchy, and last month was indicted for income tax evasion. (Now Meier's lawyer is charging that the Government may have obtained evidence against his client illegally through the tapping of Don Nixon's phone.)

More dark rumors arose in 1971, when Don's only son Don Jr., then 24, was hired as a personal aide by Robert L. Vesco, the wandering financier now under federal indictment for illegally contributing $200,000 to the Nixon campaign in 1972 and conspiring to obstruct justice. Vesco took such a liking to young Don Nixon that he invited him to move into the family home in Boonton, N.J. It is not altogether clear what work Don Jr. does in return for such treatment, but the two have traveled together abroad and Don Jr. has been quoted as calling Vesco his "best friend."

The senior Don Nixon is now vice president for "industry and community relations" for the Marriott Corp., the motel and restaurant chain headed by J. Willard Marriott, a major contributor to Republican causes and a presidential friend who needs no influence to get into the White House. But despite this job in a safe haven, the rumors persist in Washington and California, as they have for years, that Don Nixon is often on the verge of somehow getting tangled up in some kind of deal that could cause grief for his brother.

If in a family context the phone taps were understandable, the question remains: Were they legal? While refusing to confirm or deny the story that the taps had taken place at all, Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren did say: "I am certain, after checking, that any monitoring of the President's immediate family by the Secret Service would have related to the protective function performed by the Secret Service." The Secret Service promptly agreed that it was authorized, if need be, to listen in on the conversations of Nixon's wife and two daughters, but noted that the President's brother was not considered part of the immediate family.

The relations between brothers are not defined by Secret Service regulations, however F. Don Nixon is, for better or for worse, indisputably part of the presidential family.

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