White House to host Biden’s granddaughter’s wedding. Who else has been married there?

President Joe Biden’s granddaughter is set to join an exclusive club of people who have tied the knot at the White House.

The ceremony will take place on Saturday, Nov. 19, and it will follow more than a dozen other weddings that have been held at the executive mansion over two centuries.

Naomi Biden, 28, is an attorney and the daughter of Hunter Biden and Kathleen Buhle. She got engaged last year to Peter Neal, 25, a former White House intern and law school graduate, Town & Country reported. They first began dating in 2018, according to a recent anniversary post.

The Pennsylvania Avenue venue, beyond its grandeur and exclusivity, may have been chosen out of convenience as the pair live together in the White House, according to The Washington Post.

Their ceremony will be the 19th documented wedding held at the White House, the Associated Press reported.

The history of White House weddings

The first White House wedding was held in 1812, just two years before the building was burned down by the British, according to the White House Historical Association (WHHA). First Lady Dolley Madison’s sister married Thomas Todd, an associate justice on the Supreme Court.

Over the ensuing 20 years, five other weddings were held, including for the daughters of Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler and for the son of President John Quincy Adams, according to the WHHA. Little fanfare was associated with these ceremonies, according to one expert.

“The weddings in the early 19th century were much more private affairs,” Lina Mann, a historian at the WHHA, told McClatchy News. “They would have appeared in the press, but not in the same way that you see with modern White House events.”

A turning point came in 1874, nine years after the end of the Civil War, when President Ulysses Grant’s daughter Nellie Grant wed Algernon Sartoris, a British diplomat, in the executive mansion, according to the WHHA.

Flowers were brought in from Florida, the Marine Band played, and 250 guests filled the East Room of the White House, according to a Library of Congress blog.

The ceremony “received a ton more press attention and shifted the game,” Mann said. “And it also indicated the rise of the presidency and celebrity of the first family over time.”

A dozen years later, President Grover Cleveland became the only American premier to tie the knot at the White House, marrying the daughter of his longtime friend, according to the Library of Congress blog. Though the ceremony was intimate, with only 28 guests gathered in the Blue Room, the bride, Frances Folsom, came to be considered the “first national celebrity first lady.”

Among the 20th century weddings, Tricia Nixon, daughter of President Richard Nixon, wed Edward Finch Cox, a lawyer, in the Rose Garden in 1971, according to the WHHA.

Thomas Balcerski, a visiting professor and presidential historian at Occidental College, noted that the White House nuptials, in addition to their practical purpose, can sometimes have a broader, political effect as well.

“I was recently at the Nixon library and there’s a whole exhibit about Trish Nixon and the White House and they actually have the arch that she got married under there. And it’s sort of a way to humanize Nixon in its presentation,” Balcerski told McClatchy News, adding that White House weddings are almost never “a liability for the president” in terms of optics.

In 1994, first lady Hillary Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham, exchanged vows with film producer Nicole Boxer in the Rose Garden, and most recently, in 2013, Pete Souza, a White House photographer, was married at the executive mansion, according to the WHHA.

Souza “had a long-term girlfriend and President Obama had been ribbing him about when he would finally get married and just off-handedly it seems like Pete’s response was ‘when you let me get married at the White House,’ and sure enough it happened,” Balcerski said.

Though rare, there is some precedent for a member of the staff getting married at the White House, Mann said, adding “in 1942 an administrator to FDR got married in Roosevelt’s private study.”

Although White House weddings have grown from relative obscurity to a national phenomenon, they still have a ways to go before they are on par with royal weddings in the United Kingdom, Mann said. “They can be very popular; they’ll be in the press, but the royal weddings are just on another level.”

But beyond the fanfare, Naomi Biden’s upcoming wedding may also serve as a prelude to a discussion that could have broader implications for the rest of the country, according to Balcerski.

“This is the time when Biden has already told us that he was going to gather his family, right around Thanksgiving, and have this conversation about whether or not he would run for president again,” he said. “The whole Biden clan will gather this weekend and what do you think they’re talking about?”

This story was originally published November 18, 2022 at 1:31 PM with the headline "White House to host Biden’s granddaughter’s wedding. Who else has been married there?."