Lewis Nixon, the hard-drinking intelligence officer made famous by Band of Brothers, carried a life that swung between extraordinary privilege and profound loss. Born on September 30, 1918, in New York City, he was the son of Stanhope and Doris Nixon, and the grandson of Lewis Nixon I, a naval architect and shipbuilder who founded Nixon Nitration Works in New Jersey in 1915. The company made gunpowder for European nations during World War I and later shifted to manufacturing cellulose nitrate, the first man-made plastic, used in pencil tubing, eyeglass frames, and playing cards. That business came with danger.
In 1924, a massive explosion destroyed much of the factory and the surrounding town of Nixon, New Jersey, killing twenty people and injuring roughly one hundred. The blast was felt fifty miles away. The family rebuilt on the same site. Lewis Nixon spent his early childhood in Manhattan and on the family estate in New Jersey.
At twelve, the family moved to an estate in California, where he lived until adulthood. He attended the Kates School, a strict boarding school near Santa Barbara, then studied engineering at Yale for two years and took summer courses at MIT. He returned to work at the family company, but by the time he enlisted in the Army at Fort Dix on January 14, 1941, he was a hard-drinking twenty-two-year-old who had already traveled across Europe. Years later, he would inherit the family villa in France and lease it to the Kennedy family before attempting to sell it in 1957.
Military service ran deep in the Nixon family. His ancestors had fought in every American war since the Revolution, and he was a direct descendant of General Andrew Lewis, George Washington’s chief of staff and one of the founders of Richmond, Virginia. His grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War, and his father served as a lieutenant in World War I. For Lewis Nixon, joining the Army was almost a rite of passage.
He completed basic training at Camp Croft, South Carolina, in December 1941. Around the same time, he married Katherine Page in New York City. The couple had a son, Michael, born in October 1943, after Nixon had already shipped overseas with the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Katherine later informed him she was divorcing him by letter while he was still at war.
In a rare moment of visible frustration, he told his friend Richard Winters she was taking everything, including the dog. Winters, who had visited the Nixon home before deploying, believed there was no love in the marriage and that Katherine was interested only in the Nixon money. Nixon’s drinking was also cited as a factor in the divorce. Nixon and Winters first met at officer candidate school at Fort Benning in the spring of 1942.
They became lifelong friends despite their differences. Winters came from a middle-class family and did not drink. Nixon was extravagantly wealthy and spent much of his time drinking and socializing. In his memoir, Winters explained the bond simply: despite their differences in lifestyle, he sensed they shared mutual feelings and ways of looking at life.
Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote that every member of Easy Company interviewed for his book said Winters was the best combat commander they ever saw, and that Nixon was the most brilliant staff officer they knew. Winters recalled that when they shipped overseas, Nixon hid his entire inventory of Vat 69 whiskey in Winters’s footlocker, under the tray holding his socks and underwear. He joked that no greater trust could be asked for than guarding that precious supply. Nixon’s reliance on alcohol worsened during the war.
After Easy Company fought in the Battle of Carentan on June 12, 1944, Nixon was promoted from battalion intelligence officer to regimental intelligence officer for the 506th. But Colonel Robert Sink, the regiment’s commander, eventually grew tired of Nixon’s drinking and wanted to transfer him. Winters convinced Sink to let Nixon stay, though Nixon was demoted back to battalion staff in the spring of 1945, where he served directly under Winters as operations officer and stayed out of Sink’s way. Nixon returned home from Europe in September 1945.
He had invited Winters to come to New Jersey after the war and work for Nixon Nitration Works. Winters accepted. Within two weeks of returning home, he traveled to New York City to meet Nixon’s parents, and Nixon’s father offered him the job. Winters worked as personnel manager and eventually general manager for about six years, from January 1946 until December 1951.
The job came with family drama that Winters found hard to tolerate. Nixon’s father, Stanhope, was a hard-drinking womanizer who once pointed a gun at Winters while drunk. Winters planned to leave as soon as he found another position. When he was recalled to active duty for the Korean War, he used it as an excuse to step away from the company.
He served briefly as a regimental planning and training officer at Fort Dix, then was given the option to resign and decided not to go to Korea. He had had enough of war. When Winters tried to return to Nixon Nitration Works in September 1952, he discovered his position had been filled. Everyone, including Winters himself, had assumed he was going to Korea.
It was likely an awkward situation for Nixon, who had to tell his best friend his job was gone. Nixon gave Winters six months’ pay and signed over the company car, feeling badly about losing his friend and wanting to help him stay on his feet. Winters found work as a production supervisor with Johnson and Johnson, and eventually bought a 106-acre farm in Pennsylvania, where he built a home for his family and found the peace he had promised himself on D-Day. The years immediately after the war were difficult for Nixon.
His divorce from Katherine was finalized in December 1945. On his June 1946 affidavit for a marriage license before marrying his second wife, Irene Miller, an Englishwoman five years his junior, the grounds for divorce were listed as incompatibility, but that word was crossed out and drunkenness was written above it. Winters believed the divorce stemmed from the lack of love in the marriage and Katherine’s interest in the family fortune, but Nixon’s drinking was clearly also a factor. Nixon married Irene in June 1946 at Manhattan City Hall, with Winters present.
They were together for fifteen years before separating in the fall of 1961, though they did not divorce. Nixon’s drinking likely contributed to the separation. There was also speculation about arguments over his inheritance from his father, who had died in 1958. Nixon wanted the bulk of his share to go to his son Michael from his first marriage, who was by then an adult and apparently living under the same roof as Lewis and Irene, which strained the marriage further.
Shortly after separating from Irene, Nixon began dating Grace Umezawa, a native of Southern California who was three years his junior. They married in Nevada on March 19, 1969, when Nixon was fifty, though both the series and Winters’s memoir incorrectly state they married in 1956. Irene died on February 2, 1969, at forty-six, and despite being separated from Lewis for years, they had remained legally married. Nixon married Grace the following month.
It is possible he waited out of loyalty to Irene, or that he was comfortable with the arrangement and wanted to avoid an ugly divorce. Winters said Irene was a good woman who had been there for Nixon through some of the toughest times of his life, including the deaths of his mother in 1948, his father in 1958, and his sister Blanche, who died by suicide in 1955 at thirty-one after battling depression. Grace’s own story was remarkable. She had been a music major at San Diego State University in 1942 when her studies were interrupted by President Roosevelt’s executive order authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans.
Told to bring only what they could carry, Grace and her family were taken to Santa Anita Racetrack and housed in converted horse stalls. She kept her spirits up by dancing the Jitterbug with her sister Dorothy. The family was then sent to an internment camp in Arizona. To escape the unhappiness of camp life, Grace seized an opportunity to become a nurse, which the government considered an act of loyalty in wartime.
She studied at the Mayo Clinic and worked at a VA hospital in Brooklyn. She later became a flight attendant with Northwest Airlines, a job that required a nursing certificate, and took international flights in order to visit her elderly grandfather in Japan. She eventually moved back to the West Coast, working at a VA hospital in Los Angeles, and continued to play the cello. Winters credited Grace with helping Nixon overcome his addiction to alcohol.
He wrote that until Lewis met and married Grace, he had never found true love, and that only after the marriage did he find happiness and peace. The couple traveled the world together, visiting South Africa, Tibet, China, and Japan, and settled in Sherman Oaks, California, where they raised a menagerie of pets including Anubis the cat, Nicholas the one-eyed dog, and Peter the Rabbit. They fed a neighborhood of raccoons and a pair of ducks that returned each year. Though they had no children together, they enjoyed time with their nieces and nephews and Lewis’s two grandchildren from his first marriage.
Winters noted that Grace’s letters and Christmas cards always said the same thing: Lewis is so brave, he never complains, and he always has a smile for me. Lewis Nixon was far from perfect. Fellow veterans described him as blasé and an alcoholic, and Buck Compton, who shared a particular distaste for him, called him a prick. But his skill and courage were real.
Winters said of his friend that they were together every step of the way from D-Day to the war’s end, and that Nixon was the best combat officer he worked with, never showing fear and thinking clearly under fire. In Normandy, Nixon ran three miles to Utah Beach to deliver a map of German artillery positions discovered by Winters, which so impressed command that they sent tanks to assist the 101st. In the Netherlands, a bullet from a German MG42 went through his helmet and grazed his forehead, leaving a burn mark without breaking the skin. He was one of only a few men in the 506th to earn three stars on his jump wings, jumping into combat in Normandy and Holland and once as an observer with the 17th Airborne Division, where he narrowly escaped a plane that took a direct hit from anti-aircraft fire.
And in Bastogne, Nixon won a thirty-day leave to the United States by lottery, then refused it, saying he wanted to stay with the outfit on the line. Lewis Nixon died of complications from type 2 diabetes in Los Angeles on January 11, 1995, at seventy-six. Winters gave the eulogy at the request of Grace. She lived for another two decades and witnessed the release of Band of Brothers, accompanying Winters and his wife to events celebrating Easy Company.
Winters credited Grace’s love and care with keeping his best friend alive for so many years. She died on January 16, 2016, at ninety-four. Winters once explained what Nixon meant to him: by the time they jumped into Holland, he was so lonely he needed someone to confide in, and that someone was Nixon. Nixon was always there, offering counsel and keeping him from second-guessing himself.
Whenever the bullets flew, Winters could turn and there stood Nix, one or two steps behind him on his left side, a token of respect for him as a commander. In hindsight, Winters reflected, Nixon probably needed him as much as he needed Nixon.