by Nancy Gibbs
This is the club’s constant tension: among its crucial services is the repair of ragged reputations. When former presidents, like Nixon or Carter, do this at the sitting president’s expense, all hell breaks loose. But members more often conspire than collide. They extol each other at library dedications. They exalt each other in eulogies. They line up together with fat bristle brushes to whitewash the stains on their records. Go to WhiteHouse.gov and read the presidential biographies; they are feather soft and heartily heroic, valentines straight from the Oval Office. Under Bill Clinton, “the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well being than at any time in its history.” He got into trouble over his “indiscretions with a young White House intern,” but “apologized to the nation for his actions and continued to have unprecedented popular approval ratings for his job as president.” George W. Bush “cut taxes for every federal income taxpayer . . . modernized Medicare . . . empowered America’s armies of compassion . . . built global coalitions to remove violent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that threatened America; liberating more than 50 million people from tyranny.”
You can view the work of rehabilitation as purely self-interested: they all compete for history’s favor. But they may also defend each other, not out of sympathy or affection, but because the club functions as the protective arm of the presidency itself. That role sharpens their advice, mostly ensures their silence, and offers the promise of a gentling redemption they will need someday, too. It is a shadow Secret Service, patrolling the power and privilege of an office that its members think America needs now more than ever. Sometimes burnishing a legacy serves to bolster the institution, so that presidents like Truman who were reviled in office are revered in retrospect, and everyone wins. Club members do not want to see the president look bad, no matter who it is.
But the club’s most secret handshakes are less about membership than stewardship. In 1960, after one of the closest elections in history, both Hoover and Eisenhower quietly told Nixon not to contest the results, even as rumors spread of Chicago precincts where machines registered 121 votes from 43 voters. It was not because they wanted to see Kennedy in the White House; it was to protect the presidency from a crisis of legitimacy. “I think we are in enough trouble in the world today,” Hoover told Nixon. “Some indications of national unity are not only desirable but essential.” When Kennedy and then Johnson came under fire for foreign policy decisions, Eisenhower stared down his fellow Republicans: at a time of crisis, he said, “there is only one thing a good American can do, and that is support the president.” Ford pardoned Nixon not to save the man but to restore the office and let the country move on; he lost the next election, but forever defended the choice. It fell to the Kennedys twenty-seven years later to give Ford a Profile in Courage Award, the family of one president symbolically pardoning another for deciding to pardon a third. “We want you to succeed,” George W. Bush told Obama after the 2008 election. “All of us who have served in this office understand that the office transcends the individual.”
When the political culture is splintered and siloed, the president alone serves all the people. The sight of the presidents meeting in the Oval Office after a tough election, or hitting the road together to do hurricane relief, the sight of them standing side by side, old enemies reconciled, can offer a rare moment of truce when politics is turned off and the common good wins out over personal pride or public ambition. When Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush began working together raising relief money for disaster victims, they knew their buddy movie ran completely against the bitter grain of the times; that was partly why they delighted in doing it. “Americans like politics,” Clinton said. “They like us to air our differences, because they know we have got to have an honest debate to come to a good answer. But then they also think that debate ought to have limits to it.” For too long, politicians did not just disagree with opponents: they despised and demonized them, he observed, and the country suffered for it. “It keeps us from solving a lot of problems and doing a lot of things that we could have done otherwise. So I think people see George and me and they say, ‘That is the way our country ought to work.’”
So just how crucial is the club in the early twenty-first century? In every age, three factors determine its performance: the needs and choices of the sitting president, the needs and talents of the former presidents, and a climate that welcomes or deplores their partnership. It was no accident that the club’s founders had all three factors in their favor. Hoover and Truman showed just how much good they could do, through an alliance that was as productive as it was unexpected. Much about the country, and the world, was broken in 1945: neither the Congress, the parties, the press, nor the public was going to throw up much resistance to two men so resolutely committed to fixing it.
That episode, while formative, was also unusual. Under Eisenhower, the club lost much of its clout; in that case, the president simply didn’t feel the need. Later presidents would feel the need but lack the resource; there was not much help Nixon could offer Gerald Ford, other than to remain as quiet as possible. But the club has proven over time that it is a force in itself, able to change the course of history by bringing out the best and the worst in its members.
Back in the beginning, when the club was born, the very idea that it would exert its own power was so outlandish that even the two presidents who started it were wrong about how it would all turn out.
TRUMAN AND HOOVER:
The Return of the Exile
The modern Presidents Club was founded by two men who by all rights should have loathed each other.
There was Harry Truman, the humble haberdasher from Missouri, hurled into office in the spring of 1945, summoning to the White House Herbert Hoover, a failed Republican president who had left town thirteen years earlier as the most hated man in America, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit. They were political enemies and temperamental opposites. Where Truman was authentic, amiable, if prone to eruptions of temper, Hoover could be cold, humorless, incapable of small talk but ferociously sure of the rightness of his cause. Yet they shared some personal history and, more important, some public goals. Though they saw the world differently—Hoover’s faith lay in private initiative, Truman’s in the promise of benevolent government—they were men of Middle America, of Iowa and Missouri, the first and second presidents born west of the Mississippi, with a shared suspicion of elite Easterners and a common commitment to Wilsonian idealism. Both men were more loyal to their parties than their parties were to them.
“I’m not big enough. I’m not big enough for this job,” Truman said to a Senate friend the day after Franklin Roosevelt died. But he was, not least because he did not let his pride interfere with his needs—and during the crucial postwar years, Truman’s needs and Hoover’s gifts were perfectly matched. Across a devastated Europe, a hundred million people were at risk of starvation. Truman was determined to help them, Hoover was the man who knew how, and from that simple equation, an alliance was born. Together, Truman and Hoover probably saved more lives than any two players on the stage of the twentieth century.
Hoover served Truman so well that Truman next enlisted him to help sell a suspicious Republican Congress on the notion of an entirely new role for America in the world, promoting European recovery as a counterweight against Soviet influence. And if that was not enough, Hoover then proceeded to lead the top-to-bottom overhaul of the presidency itself, strengthening the office to meet the demands of the modern age. It was the gift the two unlikely partners bequeathed to all the rest who followed.
Truman gave Hoover what any failed president dreams of: a chance to rewind the tape and replay it, reveal the compassion obscured by the caricature, and erase the image of a hapless president by being the one who saved the presidency. It didn’t matter that Truman thought Hoover was “to the right of Louis the Fourteenth.” He was honest and honorable, and they never talked about politics anyway, since they had something more important in common. “We talked,” Truma
n said, “about what it was like being president.”
As for Hoover, as emotionally austere as any president ever, he would one day write to Truman that “Yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know.” Truman was so moved by the letter, he framed it so it could remain on his desk until the day he died.
1
“I’m Not Big Enough for This Job”
—HARRY TRUMAN
Harry Truman had fond memories of his first White House meeting with Herbert Hoover.
It was May 1945. He’d been in office less than two months, and a week after the German surrender on May 7, newspapers were already warning of the next disaster: “the most stupendous feeding problem in history,” as the New York Times described the hideous famine facing 100 million European civilians. Roads out of Germany were a cortege of refugees, many too weak to walk; in Dutch cities people were making soup by cutting the poison centers out of tulip bulbs and boiling them. One in three Belgian children was tubercular; one in four children in Belgrade died before their first birthday.
“I knew what I had to do and I knew just the man I wanted to help me,” Truman recalled many years later. Hoover had made his fortune as a mining engineer, but had made his reputation as the man who saved millions from starvation as Woodrow Wilson’s food czar during the First World War. So Truman invited the former president to meet with him in the Oval Office.
“Mr. President,” Truman said, “there are a lot of hungry people in the world and if there’s anybody who knows about hungry people, it’s you. Now there’s plenty of food, but it’s not in the right places. Now I want you to . . .”
As Truman supposedly told the story to oral historian Merle Miller, it was at this point that Hoover started to lose it.
“He was sitting there, just as close to me as you are, and I saw that great big tears were running down his cheeks.” Truman said he was pretty sure he knew what the problem was. “It was the first time in thirteen years,” he told Miller, “that anybody had paid any attention to him.”
Such a sweet story; such a testimony to a sitting president’s magnanimity and a former president’s gratitude for a chance to serve once more.
And such a sentimental whitewash of what actually happened.
Being president involves a crash course in mythmaking, and many of these friendships would acquire a glaze of nobility that was often missing in real time. Memory can work that way; by the time Truman was writing his memoirs and talking to Miller, he and Hoover had indeed become unlikely brothers. But back in 1945, relations between the two men were by no means so warm. Much as both men wanted it, their first date nearly didn’t happen because they were so suspicious of each other’s motives—and both left with their doubts intact. While pleased at being back inside the halls of power, Hoover dismissed the meeting as “wholly political,” designed to show that Truman was above partisanship; there was no chance Truman would actually let any Republican participate in his administration.
“Nothing more would come of it,” he concluded in his memo of the meeting.
That turned out to be wrong.
The Most Despised President
Truman had no use for posers: he was suspicious of wealth and privilege and the entitled ease of the country club. His happy Missouri childhood took a hard twist after his father lost everything betting on wheat futures; from the age of eighteen, hardly a day went by that Truman wasn’t worried about money. His path to the White House moved from the mailroom at the Kansas City Star to railroad timekeeper to bank clerk to farmer to soldier to haberdasher to machine politician in Kansas City, where he was distinguished by a refusal to enrich himself at the public trough. When he ran for reelection in 1940, he couldn’t afford the stamps to write to old friends asking for money. He knew what it was like to have to sleep in his car; and he was a man for whom there was no place like home.
So how could he ever forge a bond with Hoover, so rich, so remote, a true man of the world who, when he and his wife didn’t want to be overheard in the White House, used to speak to each other in Chinese? By 1945 as Truman moved into the White House, Hoover was living in a $32,000-a-year suite in the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, alongside neighbors like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cole Porter, and the shah of Iran, with cooks at their command who could prepare chicken seventy-one ways. A self-made man, he lived so well that most people forgot that as a child he had learned the meaning of poverty from actual experience.
Truman, however, came to appreciate qualities in Hoover that many people missed. Hoover “wasn’t one of those fellows born with a gold spoon in his mouth,” Truman observed in one of his memoirs. “His father was a blacksmith in West Branch, Iowa and both of his parents died before he was nine years old, and he and his brother and sister were split up and sent to relatives.”
Some combination of independence, ingenuity, and force of will carried Hoover to Stanford to study geology, then into the mining business, eventually taking him all around the world as an engineer. His organizational prowess and urgent Quaker philanthropy drew him into public service under Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Wilson put him in charge of managing food shortages; until that point, it was not uncommon for as much as a third of the population in a war zone to die of hunger. Hoover, Truman said, “had the skill and the humanity to save millions of people threatened with starvation.” Streets would be named for him in Belgium. In Finland his name became a verb, meaning “to help.” Both parties flirted with him as a candidate in 1920. “He is certainly a wonder,” a young Franklin Roosevelt said at the time, “and I wish we could make him president. There certainly couldn’t be a better one.” A poll of the Harvard faculty preferred him two to one over any other contender.
By the time Hoover actually became president in 1928—he won with 444 electoral votes—he had added to his reputation the rescue of victims of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, leaving many people convinced there was not a problem on earth he couldn’t solve with his technical and organizational acumen. America, he declared, was “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.” Even eight months later when the markets crashed, he was praised for his handling of the crisis. “No one in his place could have done more,” affirmed the New York Times. “Very few of his predecessors could have done as much.”
Four years later Franklin Roosevelt would carry all but six states; Time christened Hoover “President Reject,” the lame-duck Congress considered impeachment, and a would-be assassin tried to kill him. Herbert Hoover, “the Great Humanitarian,” was accused of callous indifference to the suffering of his own citizens, the man who fed his dog T-bone steaks in the Rose Garden while proud men were reduced to selling fruit on street corners. “We’ll hang Herbert Hoover to a sour apple tree!” cried the protesters marching on Washington.
How had it all gone so wrong? There were a great many theories, but for our purposes Truman’s is the most relevant. “I think he and his administration were blamed for things that were not their fault,” Truman argued, once he too was safely out of office and no longer invoking the “Hoover Depression” during his campaign speeches. Hoover, Truman said, was handicapped by having arrived at the White House too easily. The only political job he had ever held was as commerce secretary; he’d never had to run for Congress, or even for sheriff, and had informed his advisors in 1928 that “I’ll not kiss any babies.” Without a strong attachment to the grass roots, Truman observed, “he didn’t really understand . . . the needs of the American people.”
Or at least that was the impression he gave, and Roosevelt did everything he could to promote it. Between election day and Roosevelt’s inauguration in March, the nation’s banks began to wobble. Hoover tried to enlist his successor to act with him, although in ways that could have undercut Roosevelt’s own progressive agenda. Roosevelt rejected the overture: “It was also his ego, I think, that prevented [Roosevelt] from even listenin
g,” Truman concluded. “The campaign had been a pretty rough one, and many people were blaming Hoover for the depression as though he’d caused it all by himself, calling cardboard shanties Hoovervilles and empty pockets Hoover flags. . . . Roosevelt decided that he was smarter than Hoover in every way and [that] Hoover just didn’t know what he was talking about when he suggested closing the banks. But the bank closings were an absolute necessity.”
That refusal on Roosevelt’s part helped ensure he would take office in an atmosphere of total desperation—and that Hoover would become as widely hated as any president in history. There were rumors that he’d been arrested trying to flee the country aboard financier Andrew Mellon’s yacht, with $200 million in gold. When stock markets rose, comedians asked, “Did Hoover die?” Roosevelt did nothing to divert the blame from his predecessor, and actually worked to deny him credit for his successes. That first spring in office, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes ordered that the immense dam on the California-Nevada border that Hoover had launched as commerce secretary, and that was referred to in multiple appropriations bills as Hoover Dam, be known as Boulder Dam; Hoover was not invited to its dedication in 1935. His tax returns were audited; there were no routine birthday greetings from the Oval Office.
His own party pretended he didn’t exist; during the 1940 campaign, Connecticut Republicans asked him not to appear in the state, since his presence was poison. “I shall never understand the long neglect of Herbert Hoover,” Truman once observed. “He deserved better treatment at the hands of his own party.”
After Pearl Harbor, Hoover spoke out in support of Roosevelt’s response and offered to help in any way; given his experience after the First World War, he thought he might be able to serve again. Belgium, Norway, Poland, Holland, and Finland all tried to enlist Hoover’s aid; Congress asked his advice. Secretary of State Cordell Hull tried several times to convince Roosevelt to call him. But both Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill rejected Hoover’s initiatives to get food to the occupied countries, on the grounds that this amounted to aiding Hitler by relieving him of his obligation to feed the nations he overran. Hoover was pilloried in some quarters as a pro-German isolationist. “Roosevelt couldn’t stand him,” Truman told friends, “and he hated Roosevelt.” For the Democrats, involving Hoover in a humanitarian mission would have meant rehabilitating the most useful scapegoat the party had ever had. “I’m not Jesus Christ,” Roosevelt declared, after financier Bernard Baruch recommended soliciting Hoover’s help. “I’m not raising him from the dead.”