Special People by Julie Nixon Eisenhower (Simon and Schuster)

This is an exercise in distraction. Julie Nixon Eisenhower must surely realize that as we slog through the quicksand of these negligible portraits of celebrities she has known, we are all the time thirsting for something about the two people—or at least the one father—she knows best. After all, if she weren't Richard Nixon's daughter she would never have made the acquaintance of Prince Charles, Golda Meir, Mrs. Billy Oaham, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mao Tse-tung or Mamie Eisenhower, or had the opportunity to publish her vapid impressions of them. What is intriguing is that her essays manage to belie the title, and ostensibly interesting people are revealed as not very special after all, or at any rate not very special in her presence. What hand would not wither, so to speak, gesturing in interview with Richard Nixon's daughter? I should have thought Lynda Bird Johnson's 1967 account in McCall’s of her engagement (crawling across the presidential bed to give LBJ and Lady Bird the good news) had put an end to the literary aspirations of White House children, but, alas, no.