George W. Bush went on a disastrous first date with the daughter of President Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, according to new details divulged by the former president in a memoir about his father.
George H W Bush—then a Texas congressman—arranged for his 22-year-old son, who was then a pilot in the National Guard, to meet Tricia Nixon at a gala in honor of the Apollo 8 spaceflight crew. It all went downhill from there, the Telegraph reports.
“During dinner, I reached for some butter, knocked over a glass, and watched in horror as the stain of red wine crept across the table,” Bush writes. “Then I fired up a cigarette, prompting a polite suggestion from Tricia that I not smoke.”
The date came to an abrupt end, Bush writes, when Nixon asked to be taken back to the White House “immediately after dinner,” a drive he remembered with a twinge of embarrassment more than thirty years later, when he returned to the White House as the nation’s 43rd president.
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