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The president's daughter, then and now

Ivanka Trump, meet Richard Nixon's daughter. It's eerie how little has changed.

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Julie Nixon Eisenhower literally stood behind her father, President Richard M. Nixon, as he left the White House in 1974, resigning in the face of impeachment.
Julie Nixon Eisenhower literally stood behind her father, President Richard M. Nixon, as he left the White House in 1974, resigning in the face of impeachment.MIKE LIEN/New York Times

The way I remembered it was "little chocolate spider."

The phrase, as I recalled it, appeared in an essay by Nora Ephron in her collection "Crazy Salad," and it had to be written circa 1974.

The "spider," somewhat astonishingly, referred to Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the younger daughter of President Richard Nixon.

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Now you may — as do I — have great regard for Ephron as a writer, but she could be mean in the way only women who did time in a girls' school can be mean. I never doubted that I remembered right.

Thank God, or Satan, or both for Google. I tracked down the essay, called "The Littlest Nixon," which was every bit as cutting as I remembered. Yes, Ephron spilled considerable ink to blast the president's daughter, then in her mid-20s.

The part I got wrong was the exact wording. She actually called Eisenhower a "chocolate-covered spider," and she was so pleased with the term that she laughed about it on Dick Cavett's talk show.

But what is eerie about the essay is how closely it conforms to similar writing now. Sub out certain terms and proper nouns, and this is an essay about Ivanka Trump.

"There is something very moving about [Ivanka Trump]," Ephron might have written. "But it is not [Ivanka Trump]. It is the idea of [Ivanka Trump], essence of daughter, a better daughter than any of us will be ... the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six."

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Later Eisenhower is called "her father's principal defender, his First Lady in practice if not in fact."

It goes on and on. She's so poised. She deflects. She despises the press.

Frankly, it gets a little spooky, how little can change in 43 years.

Mind you, I have huge problems with Ivanka Trump. Her cheekbones, her bland beauty, her dimpled hubby — they all pretty-wash the dank ugliness her dad drags behind him. (Can he be such a beast, with such a beauty for a daughter?)

And I apologize for mentioning the looks first, though image is clearly crucial to the Trump Kushner brand. Take that clothing line, insipid and relentlessly conventional, or the unremarkable $10,000 bracelet she tried to hawk. (As I write this, I am wearing a simple cuff that is stamped with Sartre's words "Hell is other people." It's not terribly pretty, but at least it literally says something.)

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Take, too, the unimpressive, non-inclusive maternal-leave plan she gave her dad. She's not only unoriginal; she's also clueless.

I've had glancing encounters with Ivanka-like young women in Houston: tall, blonde, moneyed, worked-on, airbrushed. But frankly, the Texas versions struck me as both crazier and more interesting than Mrs. Kushner.

Eisenhower is 68 now, and she gives the appearance of having had a good life, writing some books and tending to the memory of her parents. She gave to the Obama campaign.

Ivanka Trump's story is yet to be written, but I don't have high hopes that she will deepen or increase in intellectual rigor. But people are sometimes surprising.

Is she a chocolate-covered spider? Nah. That was a cheap shot 43 years ago.

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Kyrie O'Connor is a freelance writer living in Washington County.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It can be mean in the way only women who did time in a girls' school can be mean.

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Kyrie O'Connor is senior editor and columnist at the Houston Chronicle. From 2003 to 2012, she was deputy managing editor/features. She came to the Houston Chronicle from The Hartford Courant, where she was assistant managing editor/features.

A native of Pittsford, N.Y., she received a B.A. in English cum laude from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.