
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994                   TAG: 9404240106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Boston Globe
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

HE WANTED FUNERAL OUT OF WASHINGTON

Funeral services for the nation's 37th president will be Wednesday at the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif. He will be buried on the library grounds next to his wife, Pat, who died last year of lung cancer.

Nixon's body will remain until Tuesday at an undisclosed funeral home in New Jersey, where relatives and invited friends were to pay their respects, a Nixon staff assistant said Saturday.

The Rev. Billy Graham, a longtime Nixon friend, will officiate at the funeral. Eulogies will be delivered by President Clinton, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Pete Wilson, governor of California.

Former Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush have confirmed they will attend, a Nixon Library spokesman said.

A Nixon spokeswoman said it was the decision of Nixon and his family not to have his body lie in state in Washington. She did not elaborate on this break with recent tradition, but former Nixon aide David Gergen, now a Clinton adviser, speculated that Nixon either sought to avoid the awkwardness of returning to the government from which he resigned or the Congress that might have impeached him.

"I think that he decided that it was a matter of propriety and he didn't want to raise some of the painful questions about the past about Washington," Gergen said.

by CNB