From the Venus Rx in Gemini Files: Julie Nixon-Eisenhower

This is the third installment in our series of profiles of people with Venus retrograde in Gemini. While I’m not sure I’ve picked up a clear common thread yet, so far these charts have all been remarkable (here are the first and second). This week’s case study is Julie Nixon-Eisenhower. I’m going to try to limit the aspects I cover since there’s a lot going on, but you’re encouraged to investigate her chart (small version below) to see what else is there.

Julie is the younger daughter of 37th U.S. president Richard Nixon and his wife Pat. Shortly after her father was elected, she married David Eisenhower, grandson of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Julie was an active spokesperson for the White House on children’s issues, the environment and the elderly – and from 1973-75 served as Assistant Managing Editor of the Saturday Evening Post. During this time, she wrote a book of photographs of her father (she has continued to write books throughout her life).

Then the proverbial shit hit the fan: the Watergate scandal. This is when Julie’s role in public life got highly focused, as she traveled across the country giving 138 interviews in 1973 defending her father’s refutation of the Watergate accusations. Julie’s involvement as her father’s political partner eclipsed that of her mother’s, to the point that journalist Nora Ephron remarked on Pat’s relative silence, “In the months since the Watergate hearings began, she [Julie] has become her father’s … First Lady in practice if not in fact.”

All of the public speaking and writing (and the sense of dual relationship – to father and to husband) make immediate sense when we look at Julie’s Venus placement. It is in Gemini, in her 1st house, in a snug group conjunction with the Moon, Uranus and Mercury. Having Mercury in Gemini as the rising sign pretty much assures that she was going to be expressing her soul journey through written and spoken language in some kind of double capacity. Mercury also lends an affinity for children; add Venus, and you get maturity. Uranus gives the situation extra wattage and ensures plenty of surprises – I think the Watergate scandal qualifies, even though Julie was not directly involved. Uranus launched her from White House tour guide for kids into the role of high-level spokesperson.

Venus conjunct the Moon here speaks to a couple things. One, both planets in Gemini give a certain ‘emotional intelligence’ to Julie. She understood her role intellectually as one that could bring cohesion and synthesis between her family life and political/public life. She could be her husband’s marriage partner and her father’s public partner without conflict; they were merely two sides to the same coin. In that, the Moon here is especially intriguing. Representing Julie’s mother as well as Julie’s inner emotional life, it is the planet closest to her ascendant, by exactly four degrees. Part of Julie’s personal identity was to function in her mother’s public role as First Lady when the scandal broke.

Check out what is across the wheel in opposition to the Moon-Venus-Uranus-Mercury grouping: Jupiter, retrograde in Sagittarius, sitting on the 7th house cusp. Julie has the rulers of her ascendant and descendant in their respective signs (Jupiter rules Sagittarius), and they’re talking to each other. The 7th house is the house of relationships, and Julie has the principle of expansion there in the form of retrograde Jupiter. On some transcendent, inner level, she got that her relationships were part of something larger. Thanks to her Gemini ascendant full of important planets, Julie could feel this opposition as an extension of her own inner polarity and cooperate with it, rather than feel pulled apart by the external ‘other’.

Almost incidentally, the Sun – another representative of self in a chart, but also signifying the father – is just over the second house cusp in Cancer. The second house represents what one values, and Julie clearly valued her dad.

The Sun rules Leo, which is Julie’s 3rd house. This is the house of mental processes, writing, some publishing, some travel and one’s local environment (plus siblings). We already know Julie’s sense of self was tied to her mind, writing and publishing because of that Gemini 1st house. But the 3rd is also related to the hidden psychological legacy of the father. Pluto is there; however, what I want to point out is the Vesta-Saturn conjunction in Leo. Venus-Saturn is making a sextile to the Moon and Venus. Julie is absolutely devoted to the form her self-expression takes: her writing, and her public role as First Daughter/de facto First Lady. The latter looks like it taps into that hidden material she inherited from her father.

Finally, we can’t leave out Mars in Virgo square Venus and the Gemini cluster. Isabel Hickey notes that this square can produce emotional suffering from the husband or father in a female chart. I can only imagine how painful it must have been for Julie to go to bat so fiercely for her father’s honor, only to see him resign in disgrace. It’s hard to say just how much she may have struggled with conflict between passion and love, or whether the current retrograde Venus transit – which was recently conjunct her natal Venus and square her natal Mars – is stirring up any kind of gender issues for her. This might be a very interesting time for this woman with a very interesting chart.