Shared from the 11/10/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

A MOMENT IN HISTORY

When Houston watched Trump shake Nixon’s hand

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Richard Carson / Staff file photo

Donald Trump introduces former President Richard Nixon at a tribute gala to Nellie Connally in 1989 at the Westin Galleria ballroom.

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Staff file photos

Former President Richard Nixon, from left, honoree Nellie Connally and Donald Trump visit at a tribute gala to the former Texas first lady in 1989 at the Westin Galleria ballroom.

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Ivana and Donald Trump, left, pose with their Houston hostess, Joan Schnitzer, and Continental Airlines’ Frank Lorenzo. The gala, A Night for Nellie, benefited the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

In the photos, they are both in tuxes, the president who resigned rather than be impeached and the president-to-be who would one day fight impeachment.

It is March 11, 1989. They are shaking hands at the Westin Galleria, at Houston high society’s party of the year.

Mr. Trump leans in to say something to Richard Nixon.

Nixon laughs.

In 2019, the photo is electrifying. If Trump’s unconventional presidency has any role model, it is Nixon. And it was in Houston, that weekend, that the two men got to know each other.

But in 1989, the photo wasn’t even deemed worthy of newsprint. In the days that followed, though both the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle lavished attention on the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation gala and the societal doings that surrounded it, each ran only one photo of Trump —and their photos were almost identical. In each of them, he stood behind the bare shoulder of his glamorous, glittering then-wife, Ivana, in her yellow Bob Mackie strapless gown.

At the time, Trump ranked as maybe the sixth-brightest star of the gala: after Nixon, who’d hidden away for years in retirement; after honoree Nellie Connally and her husband, former Texas Gov. John Connally; after Barbara Walters, queen of the TV interview; and even after his own wife.

“And her husband Donald,” said the Chronicle’s photo caption.

The handshake photo went straight into the Chronicle’s archive. Nothing was written about politics or history or of a torch being passed. It was not yet important to know what Trump might have taken from the weekend he spent in Houston: a city where partygoers refused to surrender to failure; where the nattering nabobs who badmouthed New York’s social elite held no sway; and where, importantly, he got to know Nixon.

History would have to catch up.

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In 2016, as Trump was running for president, it seemed strange that he took his cues not from sunny, morning-in-America Ronald Reagan, Republicans’ hero for decades, but from Nixon, the least popular former president in modern memory. In retrospect, the choice was brilliant.

The core of Trump’s campaign was, in essence, the “Southern strategy” that Nixon had used in 1968 — an appeal to the “silent majority,” to conservative white voters who felt the world was spinning out of control. Accepting the Republican nomination, Trump modeled his speech on the dark one that Nixon gave at the GOP convention in ’68 — a speech that painted a dark picture of the U.S., “the richest nation in the world that can’t manage its own economy” and was “plagued by racial violence.”

“I think what Nixon understood,” Trump said, “is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first.”

The echoes of Nixon piled up fast. Trump, too, hated journalists. Where Nixon had called to end the Vietnam War, Trump called to bring American troops home. Trump even employed Roger Stone, self-proclaimed to be one of Nixon’s old “dirty tricksters” — a man who has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back.

Once, after the Mueller Report raised the specter of impeachment, someone asked Trump the difference between himself and Nixon. “He left,” Trump said. “I don’t leave.”

The House Intelligence Committee will conduct the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry Wednesday.

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It appears that, before Houston, Trump had never met Nixon in person, or at least, hadn’t spent time with him. But before the party, an unsolicited letter from Nixon was one of Trump’s proudest possessions.

In 1987, the year Trump’s “Art of the Deal” became a bestseller, Nixon’s wife, Pat, saw Trump’s appearance on “Donahue,” a TV talk show. Trump was 40 then, lean and handsome. He complained, Nixon-like, about corruption in New York. A besotted audience member asked Trump why he wasn’t running for office.

Nixon, in the years since leaving the White House under the darkest of clouds, had kept a low profile. He and Pat had settled in suburban Saddle River, N.J. He wrote books, took long walks and received the occasional foreign dignitary at their house. They didn’t get out much.

He didn’t, in other words, travel in the same social circles as Trump . Trump — a shameless wheeler-dealer, a mainstay of gossip columns — was the real-estate gazillionaire that New York loved to hate, the flashy avatar of the city’s brash, crass 1980s. “Little Donald,” smarty-pants magazine Spy tried calling him, a “Queens-born casino operator.” Eventually, it settled on the epithet “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Maybe it was New York’s disdain for Trump that spoke to Nixon. The old-money people, the intellectuals, the cultural elites — they’d never been Nixon’s people, either.

At any rate, after the “Donahue” show, Nixon sent a typewritten letter to “Mr. Donald Trump.”

“Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great on the ‘Donahue’ show,” Nixon wrote. “As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!”

He signed it “RMN.”

Years later, on a Fox News show about people’s prized possessions, Trump would display that letter.

“It was amazing to me that he wrote it,” Trump said.

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At first, neither Trump nor Nixon figured into the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation’s plans for its 1989 fundraiser. Frann Lichtenstein, the gala’s co-chair, was mulling over possible themes for the party. She and her crew wanted something different, something fresh.

“We were all tired of casino nights,” explains her old friend Barry Silverman, an advertising and marketing consultant. “In the ’80s, that was just what you did: casino night.”

Someone — probably Silverman — suggested: Why not honor Nellie Connally, wife of former Texas Gov. John Connally?

Everyone, it was said, loved Nellie. And Nellie had just survived aspectacularly bad few years. First, she and John had declared bankruptcy. Then Nellie had gotten a diagnosis of breast cancer.

If Trump embodied New York’s go-go 1980s, the Connallys embodied Houston’s oil bust. The national media covered the auctions of their worldly belongings: Western art, antique furniture, even Nellie’s wedding silver. Through it all, it was said approvingly, the Connallys conducted themselves with grace and dignity. Nellie could be seen plumping the cushions on one of her sofas as it was about to be auctioned, apparently trying to make sure that the creditors would get the best price possible.

They were role models for Houston’s moneyed class, for whom bankruptcy had become a rite of passage. In 1989, people were beginning to hope nervously that the oil bust was over, that the city was coming back. But the fallout was still easy to see: Savings and loans were still insolvent, awaiting government bailout. “See-through buildings” — empty skyscrapers —still littered Houston’s landscape. Houston’s charities were hurting. Who could afford expensive gala tickets?

Honoring Nellie was a way to say not just to her, but to all of Houston: You’re not beaten. You made it through this. You’re back.

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“Don’t you mean that you want to honor John?” Nellie asked Lichtenstein on the phone. “Big John” was the star, the three-term governor, the man who could have been president. John Connally was the one people honored. Not her.

Lichtenstein assured her no. They wanted Nellie.

Connally loved the idea of honoring his wife. The whole world knew what she’d done for him. They’d been in the same Lincoln convertible as John and Jackie Kennedy that awful day in Dallas. After the shots rang out at Dealey Plaza, Nellie instinctively threw herself over her husband’s bleeding body. Doctors said that her move stopped his bleeding and probably saved his life.

Nellie had followed her husband to Washington in 1971, after Nixon appointed him to be treasury secretary. It was often observed that Nixon seemed in awe of tall, urbane Connally. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, told one historian that Connally was the only Cabinet member that Nixon didn’t badmouth behind his back — “a boon not granted to many,” Kissinger said drily.

Connally returned Nixon’s admiration. In Washington, John and Nellie grew close to Dick and Pat. “They didn’t have many friends,” Nellie later told Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz. “So we tried to be their friends.”

When John left his treasury job, it was to run a group called “Democrats for Nixon.” John was never implicated in Watergate, but as the scandal heated up, he didn’t distance himself from his friend the president. Instead, he doubled down: He announced that he was becoming aRepublican.

Some say that loyalty killed Connally’s political career, that voters couldn’t forgive his connection to Nixon. Nixon had often said that Connally would make a good president. But in 1980, when Connally ran for the Republican nomination, sunny Reagan trounced him.

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For Nellie’s party, Big John began to call his friends.

First Barbara Walters said she’d come. Then the Trumps: Nellie, the Post reported, had met them at the New York wedding of oilman Sid Bass and Mercedes Kellogg, and they’d become “fast friends.”

Only then, at the end, did Connally call Nixon. Though leery of public appearances, Nixon said he’d come.

Whatever the rest of the world’s opinion of Nixon, in Houston he proved amajor draw. After word got out that he’d attend the gala, demand for tables — already brisk — exploded. The organizers would have been happy to sell 500 tickets. When they sold almost 1,000, the fire marshal commanded them to stop: Cramming any more people into that ballroom would be dangerous. It would be one of the largest parties Houston had seen.

Nixon made only had two requests. He asked that the organizers set up stanchions, so he could shake hands with a line of well-wishers, White House-style.

And, to the organizers’ astonishment, he asked that they secretly provide him a white baby grand piano.

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The gala became more than a one-night party. It became a whole weekend of Houston events.

Donald and Ivana Trump brought Barbara Walters on their private 727. Merv Adelson, Walters’ husband, flew in from Aspen on his private jet.

Nixon, though, took a commercial flight. Big John picked him up at the airport.

The Trumps stayed with Joan Schnitzer, who’d hit it off with Ivana in Aspen. It was, Schnitzer says, the first time they’d visited. Schnitzer’s husband, Kenneth, the developer behind Greenway Plaza, showed Donald around town. Late Saturday afternoon, Schnitzer hosted a lunch for the Trumps, Walters and her husband.

Saturday evening, when John Connally and Barry Silverman came to fetch Nixon before the gala, he looked nervously at their fashionable tuxedos: notched collars, double-breasted. It was one of the first times since 1974 that he’d made a public appearance. His tux, unworn for ages, still had a shawl collar.

Connally — always sharp-dressed, ever polite — assured Nixon that shawl collars had actually come back in style, and furthermore, were in fact the cutting edge of fashion. It is possible that Nixon believed the white lie. He looked relieved.

Nixon’s bodyguards warned organizers that he’d leave after his salute to Nellie. He wasn’t used to being out late, they said.

But shawl collar and all, Houston gave him the warmest of welcomes. It was a forgiving town, a town where lots of people had been down. And it was celebrity-hungry, small-townish in its delight that a major national figure of any sort would visit. Hundreds of partygoers, both Republicans and Democrats, stood in the line defined by the stanchions, waiting to shake Nixon’s hand. They told him things like, “You were the first president I ever voted for.”

“Take my arm and stand close to me,” he advised people. “Then they can’t crop you out of the picture.”

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As the crowd mingled, Trump found airline-takeover king Frank Lorenzo, and the two were spotted several times deep in conversation. “Airplane talk,” they told Post society reporter Frenchy Falik. Not long before, Lorenzo had agreed to sell Trump the Eastern Airlines shuttle. Trump planned to rechristen it the Trump Shuttle.

Donald and Ivana wowed the crowd, many of whom were too shy to approach them. They were still the golden couple, untarnished by setbacks. The cracks in their marriage had not yet become tabloid headlines. They’d recently bought a glamorous Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, and also the Plaza Hotel in New York, which Ivana was to run. The bitter divorce, the string of bankruptcies: Like the presidency, those lay in the unforeseeable future.

Of all the celebrities, Falik gushed, people seemed most fascinated by Ivana, “who definitely looks more refined, graceful, beautiful and thinner than she appears in photos.”

Donald, she continued, “was approachable, outgoing and polite. (He even thanked the press for taking his picture.) He’s as handsome as any movie star, but he doesn’t look overdone either. In fact, he didn’t even wear jeweled studs in his tuxedo shirt — just plain old buttons. ‘They’re easier,’ ” he told her.

People settled into their tables for dinner and speeches. Connally himself had made the seating chart for the head table, stuffed with celebrities. Trump sat on one side of Nellie Connally; Nixon on the other.

After Walters said warm words about Nellie, it was Trump’s turn. He was introduced as an innovative but sometimes controversial New York businessman. Trump milked his bad-boy reputation. “For heaven’s sake,” he said. “With Frank Lorenzo and Oscar Wyatt in the audience, I’m controversial?”

The crowd roared.

When Trump was done, he introduced Nixon. But the former president didn’t take the podium. Instead, the white piano was rolled onto the dance floor.

Both Connallys had recently had birthdays, he explained from the bench of the baby grand. Then he began pounding the keys. The crowd sang “Happy Birthday.”

That was the evening’s main photo op: the celebrities gathered around the piano, singing to John and Nellie, Nixon at the keyboard.

The handshake photos — the ones with Trump and Nixon — must have been taken a few moments after the song ended. Behind the standing men, the baby grand gleams.

After that, Nixon didn’t make the planned speedy exit. He basked in adulation, making small talk with anyone who approached, enjoying a big, friendly crowd in a rare place where he felt loved, a city where failures and disgrace were just stuff that happened, stuff a person ignores.

John Connally, feeling the moment’s glow, hastily organized an after-party at Tony’s, Houston’s ritziest restaurant. Nixon agreed to join.

With barely a half hour’s notice, Tony Vallone somehow cleared nearly a third of his crowded restaurant and prepared a buffet. As the celebrities walked in, a standing ovation and wild applause greeted them. Champagne toast followed champagne toast. Nixon gave autographs. And he asked Vallone for his cannelloni recipe.

Cameras weren’t normally allowed in Tony’s, but it was a night for rules to be suspended. Walters’ network, ABC, dispatched Houston’s Shara Fryer. “It was a celebration of making comebacks,” Fryer intoned, Walters-like, in the segment’s voiceover.

Nixon gave her the best quote of the evening. “Defeat isn’t fatal,” he said. “Success isn’t final.”

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On Sunday, social superstar Lynn Wyatt gave a brunch for the Trumps, Nixon and the Connallys.

There, Donald Trump invited Nixon to fly back on his private jet. Nixon accepted.

Trump, the Chronicle’s Maxine Mesinger reported, “was looking forward to having three hours to chat with Nixon on the ride home.”

There is no record of what they discussed. lisa.gray@chron.com

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