Here’s how Nixon and Trump became pen pals
WASHINGTON — They were two men in Manhattan who craved the same thing: validation. One was a brash young real estate developer looking to put his stamp on New York, the other a disgraced elder statesman bent on repairing his reputation.
That’s how a 30-something Donald Trump and a 70-ish Richard Nixon struck up a decadelong, fulsome correspondence in the 1980s that meandered from football and real estate to Vietnam and media strategy.
The letters between once and future presidents, revealed for the first time in an exhibit that opens Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, show the two men engaged in something of an exercise in mutual affirmation.
“I think that you are one of this country’s great men, and it was an honor to spend an evening with you,” Trump writes to Nixon in
June 1982, less than eight years after Nixon resigned the presidency amid thewatergate scandal. The two had been spotted together at the “21” nightclub, and Trump was writing Nixon to thank him for forwarding a photo.
The next fall, it’s Nixon chiming in.
“Let me be so presumptuous as to offer a little free advice (which is worth, incidentally, exactly what it
costs!”) Nixon writes to Trump.
Nixon, who played football in college and never lost his love for the game, then unspools detailed thoughts on how Trump should handle the New Jersey Generals, a team he had just bought in the now-defunct USFL.
Trump, for his part, is unabashed about one of his aims for the relationship: “One of my great ambitions is to have the Nixons as residents in Trump Tower,” he writes that October.
But after the Nixons toured Trump’s flagship development on Fifth Avenue, the ex-president wrote that his wife “was impressed as I was but feels at this time she should not undertake the ordeal of a move.” She had suffered a mild stroke that August.
So it went, the patter of “Dear Donald” and “Dear Mr. President.”
Trump, putting his usual selfcongratulatory stamp on the exchanges, said shortly after the 2016 election that he didn’t know Nixon “but he would write me letters. It was very interesting. He always wanted me to run for office.”
What motivated the correspondence between a young man seeking a bright future and an ex-president with a dark past? Nixon expert Luke Nichter, a professor at Texas A&m-central Texas, says the two men “saw something similar in each other — that toughness, that guts, even being beaten up and coming back.”
At Trump’s age, says Nichter, “I can’t imagine trying to befriend an ex-president. … Somehow, I think they both pulled it off and I think they both served a need for each other.”
The two men also bonded over their shared mistrust of the press.
In 1990, Nixon reached out to Trump when the developer’s business deals were tanking and he couldn’t pay his bills, writing: “Dear Donald — I know nothing about the intricacies of your business enterprises but the massive media attack on you puts me in your corner!”
John Dean, well versed in Nixon’s personality after serving as his White House counsel during the Watergate years, sees his old boss and Trump picking up “the waves of each other’s personalities” in their letters.
“These are two authoritarian personalities who would have a natural affinity for each other,” said Dean, who helped expose the Watergate scandal and is a harsh critic of Trump.