by Nancy Gibbs
“Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs have taken us inside one of the most powerful and unusual families in American life—the brotherhood of former presidents of the United States. Political junkies, historians, psychologists, and Main Street citizens will find the tales of friendship, envy, conspiracy, competition, and common cause irresistible.”
—TOM BROKAW, bestselling author of The Greatest Generation
“This is a brilliant idea for a book. At Eisenhower’s inauguration, Hoover and Truman half-jokingly decided to form a ‘presidents club.’ With surprising reporting and insights, this book reveals the relationships and rivalries among the few men who know what it’s like to be president. It gives a new angle on history by exploring the essence of the presidency.”
—WALTER ISAACSON, bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin
“Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy have given us a great gift: a deeply reported, highly original, and wonderfully written exploration of a much-overlooked part of American history. The tiny world of U.S. presidents is our Olympus, and Gibbs and Duffy have chronicled the intimacies and rivalries of the gods.”
—JON MEACHAM, bestselling author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
The Presidents Club is magnetically readable, bursting with new information and behind-the-scenes details. It is also an important contribution to history, illuminating the event-making private relationships among our ex-presidents and why we should do a far better job of drawing on their skills and experience.”
—MICHAEL BESCHLOSS,
bestselling author of The Conquerors
“This is essential reading for anyone interested in American politics.”
—ROBERT DALLEK,
bestselling author of An Unfinished Life:
John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963
The first history of the private relationships among modern American presidents—their backroom deals, rescue missions, secret alliances, and enduring rivalries.
The Presidents Club, established at Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration by Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover, is a complicated place: its members are bound forever by the experience of the Oval Office and yet are eternal rivals for history’s favor. Among their secrets: How Jack Kennedy tried to blame Ike for the Bay of Pigs. How Ike quietly helped Reagan win his first race in 1966. How Richard Nixon conspired with Lyndon Johnson to get elected and then betrayed him. How Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter turned a deep enmity into an alliance. The letter from Nixon that Bill Clinton rereads every year. The unspoken pact between a father and son named Bush. And the roots of the rivalry between Clinton and Barack Obama.
Journalists and presidential historians Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy offer a new tool to understand the presidency by exploring the club as a hidden instrument of power that has changed the course of history.
“Forget Rome’s Curia, Yale’s Skull and Bones, and the Bilderbergs—the world’s most exclusive club never numbers more than six. Its rules are inscrutable, and its members box the compass politically and stylistically. . . . Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs have penetrated thick walls of secrecy and decorum to give us the most intimate, revealing, and poignant account of the constitutional fifth wheel that is the ex-presidency. Readers are in for some major surprises, not to mention a history they won’t be able to put down.”
—RICHARD NORTON SMITH,
author of Patriarch: George Washington and the
New American Nation
NANCY GIBBS and MICHAEL DUFFY are editors at Time and the authors of The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.
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ALSO BY NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY
The Preacher and the Presidents
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2012
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CONTENTS
Introduction
TRUMAN AND HOOVER: The Return of the Exile
Chapter 1: “I’m Not Big Enough for This Job”
Chapter 2: “Our Exclusive Trade Union”
EISENHOWER AND TRUMAN: Careful Courtship, Bitter Breakup
Chapter 3: “The News Hounds Are Trying to Drive a Wedge Between Us”
Chapter 4: “The Man Is a Congenital Liar”
KENNEDY AND HIS CLUB: The Hazing
Chapter 5: “He Had No Idea of the Complexity of the Job”
Chapter 6: “The Worse I Do, the More Popular I Get”
Chapter 7: “How About Coming in for a Drink?”
JOHNSON AND EISENHOWER: Blood Brothers
Chapter 8: “The Country Is Far More Important Than Any of Us”
Chapter 9: “I Need Your Counsel, and I Love You”
NIXON AND REAGAN: The California Boys
Chapter 10: “You’ll Have My Promise—I’ll Speak No Evil”
JOHNSON AND NIXON: Two Scorpions in a Bottle
Chapter 11: “This Is Treason”
Chapter 12: “I Want to Go; God Take Me”
NIXON AND JOHNSON: Brotherhood and Blackmail
Chapter 13: “I Want the Break-In”
NIXON AND FORD: Mercy at All Costs
Chapter 14: “I Had to Get the Monkey off My Back”
FORD AND REAGAN: The Family Feud
Chapter 15: “It Burned the Hell out of Me”
NIXON, FORD, AND CARTER: Three Men and a Funeral
Chapter 16: “Why Don’t We Make It Just Dick, Jimmy and Jerry?”
REAGAN AND NIXON: The Exile Returns
Chapter 17: “I Am Yours to Command”
BUSH AND NIXON: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Chapter 18: “I’m Convinced. . . He Feels I’m Soft”
BUSH AND CARTER: The Missionary Goes Rogue
&n
bsp; Chapter 19: “I Am a Better Ex-President Than I Was a President”
SIX PRESIDENTS: The Golden Age of the Club
Chapter 20: “The Guy Knows How the Game Is Played”
Chapter 21: “I’m Sending Carter. You Think It Will Be OK, Don’t You?”
Chapter 22: “Bill, I Think You Have to Admit That You Lied”
BUSH AND CLINTON: The Rascal and the Rebel
Chapter 23: “He’s Never Forgiven Me for Beating His Father”
BUSH AND BUSH: Father and Son
Chapter 24: “I Love You More Than Tongue Can Tell”
Chapter 25: “Tell 41 and 42 That 43 Is Hungry”
OBAMA AND HIS CLUB: The Learning Curve
Chapter 26: “We Want You to Succeed”
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
THE PRESIDENTS CLUB
INTRODUCTION
So you’ve come to talk about my predecessors.” Bill Clinton greets us in his Harlem office, looking thin, sounding thin, his voice a scrape of welcome at the end of a long day.
It is late, it is dark, pouring rain outside, so beyond the wall of windows the city is a splash of watery lights and street noise. But inside, past the two armed agents, behind the electronic locks, the sanctuary is warm wood and deep carpet, a collector’s vault. A painting of Churchill watches from the west wall; a stuffed Kermit the Frog rests on a shelf, while a hunk of an old voting machine, with names attached and levers to pull, sits behind his desk. “This is my presidential library, from Washington through Bush,” he says, pointing to bookcases full of memoirs and biographies, and in the course of the séance that follows he summons the ghosts not just of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt but Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes.
He dwells on one president he misses—Richard Nixon—and another that he loves: George H. W. Bush. “A month to the day before he died,” he says of Nixon, “he wrote me a letter about Russia. And it was so lucid, so well written. . . . I reread it every year. That one and George Bush’s wonderful letter to me, you know where you leave your letter to your successor.”
That was the letter that said, “You will be our President when you read this note. . . . I am rooting hard for you.”
Along the windowsill are dozens of pictures; he looks at the signed photo of Lyndon Johnson, a prize given to him forty years ago when he worked on a campaign in Texas. “Over time,” he predicts of LBJ, “history will tend to be kinder to him.”
In the meantime, it falls to the presidents to be kind to one another. “There’s just a general sympathy,” he says, among the men who have sat in the Oval Office. “President Obama and I didn’t talk much about politics when we played golf the other day.” There are plenty of other people around a president to talk politics; sometimes you need someone who just makes you laugh. Or tells you not to let the bastards get you down. Clinton was exhausted that day, he recalls, but “when my president summons me, then I come and I would play golf in a driving snowstorm.”
My president, he calls him, which suggests how far the two men have come since their proxy war in 2008. Such are the journeys this book attempts to trace: the intense, intimate, often hostile but more often generous relationships among the once and future presidents. It makes little difference how much they may have fought on the way to the White House; once they’ve been in the job, they are bound together by experience, by duty, by ambition, and by scar tissue. They are members of the Presidents Club, scattered across the country but connected by phone and email and sometimes in person, such as when five of them met at the White House after the 2008 election to, as President Carter told us, “educate president-elect Obama in a nice way without preaching to him.”
Throughout its history, the club has never numbered more than six. At the moment, there are branches not just in Washington and New York, but in Atlanta, Dallas, and Kennebunkport, Maine, in a saltbox cottage on the grounds of the Bush family compound. You climb the creaky staircase lined with framed photos so treasured they aren’t even in the Bush presidential museum. It is here that the elder Bush brought Clinton, the man who had defeated him, to play golf, spend the night, hurdle the waves at breakneck speed. From the moment the two men bonded in 2005, they didn’t talk much about politics either, or world affairs or strategy and tactics. It has always been more about fellowship. “You are right,” President Bush explains in an email. “We don’t talk about it. You don’t have to. No matter the politics, you know and understand the weight of the decisions the other guy had to make, and you respect that.”
The Presidents Club has its protocols, including deference to the man in the chair and, for the most part, silence about how the members of the world’s most exclusive fraternity get along and the services they provide one another. Harry Truman privately offered to serve as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president if Ike decided to run in 1948; Nixon’s secret letters to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1981 were a virtual blueprint for setting up his White House; Carter promised not to talk to reporters about a mission he undertook for Obama in 2010. “When your ambition is slaked, it becomes more important to see something good happen for your country than to just keep winning arguments,” Clinton says. “At some point, you’re just glad when the sun comes up in the morning, you get up and you want something good to happen. I don’t think it’s because we all become saintly.”
The Presidents Club, like so much else, was founded by George Washington, thanks to the second-best decision he ever made. The first was agreeing to take the office in the first place; but then he chose to leave it, retiring in 1797 after two terms. Which meant that rather than becoming America’s President for Life, he instead became its first former president.
Everything Washington did set a precedent: to accept a salary though he didn’t need one, so that future presidents would not all need to be rich; to go by Mr. President rather than Your Excellency, so that future presidents might remain grounded; but most of all to relinquish his power peacefully, even prematurely given his immense stature, at that time a striking act of submission to untested democratic principles.
With that decision Washington established the Presidents Club—initially a club of two, once John Adams took office. Faced with the threat of war with France, Adams named the revered Washington commander of the Army, where he served until he died the next year. Adams was the first to discover that, whatever jealousies lingered in private, a former president could be highly useful.
He would not be the last.
In the two centuries that followed, the club’s ranks rose and fell. It grew to six under Abraham Lincoln, though that was partly because none of his living predecessors had managed to win a second term. The club would not be that large again until Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, when Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush all stood ready to assist. Some presidents—Adams, Jefferson, both Roosevelts—had only one president in reserve. Like Washington, Richard Nixon, upon his reelection in 1972, had none: Harry Truman died just after Christmas, Lyndon Johnson a month later. At that dangerous moment in American history, the club disappeared entirely.
So why does this matter?
First, because relationships matter, and the private relationships between public men matter in particular ways. For the former presidents, the club can be a vital, sometimes surprising benefit of post-presidential life. They have relinquished power, but not influence; and so their influence becomes a piece of the sitting president’s power. They can do more together than apart, and they all know it; so they join forces as needed, to consult, complain, console, pressure, protect, redeem.
As voters we watch the presidents onstage, judge their performance, cheer their successes, cast them out of office for their failures. This is the duty of democracy. But judgment is not the same as understanding, and while what a president does matters most, why he does it is the privilege of history. To the extent that we learn about these men by watching the
way they engage with their peers—the loyalty, the rivalry, the pity, and the partnerships—the club opens a new window into the Oval Office.
Second, it matters because the presidency matters, and the club serves to protect the office. Once they’ve all sat in the chair, they become jealous of its powers, convinced that however clumsy the other branches of government can be, the president must be able to serve the people and defend the nation when all else fails. They can support whomever they like during campaigns; but once a new president is elected, the others often act as a kind of security detail. Thus did Johnson once present Eisenhower with a pair of gold cuff links bearing the Presidential Seal. “You are the only one along with Harry Truman who can legitimately wear these,” Johnson observed, “but if you look closely, it doesn’t say Democrat or Republican on them.”
