Dear Donald, Dear Mr. President: A Trump-Nixon ’80s tale

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 thirty-something Donald Trump and a seventy-ish Richard Nixon struck up a decade-long, 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...