The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  By 1961, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, Truman had been restored to his place as revered elder statesman. That November he paid the young president a visit, and took the opportunity to blast Eisenhower’s “wrong and unwise policies,” in a speech at the National Press Club. Asked about the possibility of forming “a troika of former presidents,” Truman smiled and revealed that he and Hoover had already started the Presidents Club. “He’s the president and I’m the secretary. The other fellow [Eisenhower] hasn’t been taken in yet.”

  Eight days after Truman’s White House visit, historian Steve Neal recounts, “Ike applied for membership.” He was designing his library in Abilene, and wanted to see how Truman had organized his. He was already planning a trip to Kansas City to help rededicate a war memorial, so a stop in Independence was discreetly orchestrated.

  Truman insisted that Eisenhower call on him in his private office at the library. “I want to have some time with him,” Truman had instructed.

  “Come in, come in,” he welcomed Eisenhower. The two presidents talked in private for about a quarter hour before beginning their tour. Should he sign the guestbook? Eisenhower asked.

  “Definitely,” Truman teased. “Then if anything is missing, we’ll know who to blame.”

  They explored the replica of the Oval Office, re-created down to the gadgets on the desk. Ike would eventually send back the globe that the men had now passed back and forth three times. Eisenhower noticed that his portrait was in the place of honor, to the right of the entrance; Truman’s was on the left. “You know that fellow,” Truman said, smiling. He noted that it had been given to the library by Eisenhower’s friend Kansas senator Harry Darby.

  “But you got it on the preferred side,” Eisenhower observed.

  “Yes sir, General,” Truman replied, “and I had it put there.”

  Truman also pointed out the signed copy of Crusade in Europe; Eisenhower read his flattering inscription, Truman’s aide Rufus Burrus said, and turned red. Eisenhower told him after the tour that he wished he had visited sooner: “He said he would have made some changes in his own Library, because he liked the arrangement better here.”

  “It was obvious to all observers,” the New York Times proclaimed, “that Mr. Eisenhower had been admitted to the ‘Former Presidents’ Club.’”

  About a week later one of the giants of their generation, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, died at the age of seventy-nine. His Texas funeral would bring together Presidents Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman, and Vice President Johnson in the pew at the First Baptist Church in Bonham, Texas. “You know, having met as we did at the Library before that,” Truman recalled, “it made it less awkward to meet at the funeral service. I’m glad we had the chance to do that.” Eisenhower flew the last leg of the trip in a helicopter with President Kennedy. He and Truman chatted at the graveside.

  They met again at Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral at Hyde Park a year later. But it was their encounter in November of 1963, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that made all that had come between them seem suddenly rather small.

  KENNEDY AND HIS CLUB:

  The Hazing

  If Eisenhower, given his stature and circumstances, had little need to call the club into action, John F. Kennedy was a different story. Maybe it was the lingering concern about his narrow victory, or relative youth, or the fact that his ability to get anything done depended on a measure of bipartisan support. But it may also have been that Kennedy knew that a predecessor, if not handled correctly, could do a president more harm than good.

  He didn’t need to worry about Truman, the faithful fellow Democrat, or Hoover, an old friend of his father’s. It was Eisenhower who mattered, his popularity still vast, his authority unassailable, and his contempt for Kennedy palpable. “I think he always felt that Eisenhower was unhappy with him,” Bobby Kennedy said soon after his brother’s death. “And so . . . he always went out of his way to make sure that Eisenhower was brought in on all matters and that Eisenhower couldn’t hurt the Administration by going off and attacking . . . not that Eisenhower ever gave him any advice that was very helpful.”

  The record suggests otherwise. Presidents typically land in office thinking they know better than their predecessors; having just spent an entire campaign convincing voters this is the case, they naturally come to believe it themselves. But then something like a chain reaction occurs: they win the office, then the office strikes back, challenging a president, chastening him, confronting him with all he doesn’t know. Kennedy’s humbling came within months, with the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion—a result of, among other things, his determination to blow up the decision-making machinery that Hoover and Truman built and that had served Eisenhower well. Whatever his appetite for instruction at that moment, Kennedy knew the world needed to see the two presidents together, an insight that yielded the iconic, page-one photo of the old president and the new one walking the paths of Camp David together, deep in conversation.

  Thus did the club become the woodshed for a talented president who still had a lot to learn.

  5

  “He Had No Idea of the Complexity of the Job”

  —DWIGHT EISENHOWER

  President John F. Kennedy had a slip of paper he liked to carry around in his pocket: 118,574, it read, reminding him of the sliver of votes that he had to stretch into a mandate to do the job he had fought so hard to get.

  That alone set him apart from the club’s members, to say nothing of the vast differences in age, experience, and temperament. Hoover hadn’t liked being president; Truman and Eisenhower hadn’t expected to be. Kennedy was eager, impatient, unwilling to wait his turn. Though he ascended at a moment of existential threat, it was not a burden he shrank from. “Sure it’s a big job,” he told a Time reporter, sitting in his Georgetown living room just before his inauguration in January 1961. “But I don’t know anybody who can do it any better than I can. . . . It isn’t going to be so bad. You’ve got time to think—and besides, the pay is pretty good.” But from his very first days, his toughness was tested by both his enemies and his advisors, including the seasoned soldiers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which he did not have the advantage of ever having chaired.

  This is one reason why, of the club’s members, he would court most faithfully the one he liked least: that would be Eisenhower.

  It is testimony to Kennedy’s lowly place in the Senate hierarchy that he and Eisenhower never met when Ike was in the White House. They had, however, crossed paths a decade before, in 1945 when Kennedy was a twenty-eight-year-old war hero traveling with Navy Secretary James Forrestal to Potsdam. When Forrestal’s plane landed in Frankfurt, one journalist recalled, “the plane doors opened, and out came Forrestal. Then, to my amazement, Jack Kennedy. Ike was meeting Forrestal. So Jack met Ike.”

  Kennedy’s icon was Roosevelt, the model he leaned on and learned from across a generation. He was endlessly curious about FDR, recalled his advisor Arthur Schlesinger, even adopted some of his mannerisms. Both men were urbane, patrician, easy with power, strengthened by the suffering of afflictions they worked hard to conceal. Roosevelt’s handicap was more obvious—but Kennedy received last rites at least four times in his adult life, and “in a lifetime of medical torment,” biographer Richard Reeves observes, “Kennedy was more promiscuous with physicians and drugs than he was with women.”

  Like his hero, Kennedy wanted America to see herself anew, though his challenge was very different from Roosevelt’s in the midst of a crushing Depression. Climbing to power during the placid 1950s, Kennedy didn’t look to raise hopes; he wanted to raise questions, make people restless and adventurous. He rejected less Eisenhower’s policies than his pieties; he saw the Eisenhower years as soul-crushing, humorless, anti-intellectual. “In some influential quarters,” Schlesinger charged of the Eisenhower years, “it was almost deemed treasonous to raise doubts about the perfection of the American way of life.”

  The antagonism was political as well as
cultural and generational: JFK thought Eisenhower didn’t grasp the full power of the presidency. Ike’s landslide victories and long coattails had granted him immense power, which Kennedy felt he squandered. Kennedy had his micro margin and a Democratic majority in name only, since lawmakers owed him nothing and conservative Southern Democrats who rejected most of his priorities controlled much of the legislative machinery. “The word ‘politics.’ I have no great liking for that,” Ike once said. This was mystifying to Kennedy. “I do have a great liking for the word ‘politics,’” he said. “It’s the way a President gets things done.”

  Finally, there was something personal; whatever reverence Ike deserved as a general, Kennedy did not extend to the man himself; he called him “that old asshole.”

  “I could understand it if he played golf all the time with old Army friends,” he told Schlesinger as the campaign was just getting under way. “But no man is less loyal to his old friends than Eisenhower. He is a terribly cold man. All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.”

  No one knew that better than Ike’s political “partner,” and Kennedy’s 1960 opponent, Richard Nixon. It is one of those forgotten plot twists that Kennedy and Nixon had been friends early on—closer, you could argue, than Nixon would be with Eisenhower during his formative political years. Nixon and Kennedy entered Congress together in the Class of 1946, two young Navy officers returned from war as passionate anticommunists and pragmatic reformers, with offices across the hall from each other. Kennedy was the golden boy from Harvard whose father’s money lubricated his path to Congress; Nixon had won a scholarship to Harvard but couldn’t take it, since he couldn’t afford the travel cost to get there. But very quickly, it was Nixon who was the star, vaulting to national fame by taking down the great patrician traitor Alger Hiss. Jack appeared at his door one day in the summer of 1950 with $1,000 from his father, for Nixon’s Senate race. When Kennedy applied for membership at the Burning Tree Club, Nixon wrote the sponsoring letter. They even shared a sleeper compartment, traveling back to Washington by train one night after a debate in Pennsylvania; they drew straws for who got the lower berth. Nixon was invited to Kennedy’s wedding in 1953; the only reason he missed it was to accept a rare invitation to play golf with Eisenhower. The following year, Kennedy lay near death, after surgery to insert a metal plate in his spine; he got an infection and fell into a coma. Nixon wept: “Oh God, don’t let him die.” He told Jackie that if there was a tie vote in the Senate in Kennedy’s absence, he would not exercise his right as vice president to cast the deciding vote.

  Ike had tapped Nixon as running mate in 1952 and yet throughout the next eight years in the White House never once invited his vice president up to the residence or to his farm in Gettysburg. It was a relationship of king and courtier; Nixon was unfailingly respectful and loyal to Eisenhower, even when he was given the ugly jobs of firing cabinet members Ike didn’t want to confront, or being sent out as the political hit man so Ike could remain above the fray.

  Nixon was the fray; his essential nature—so resentful, so suspicious, with a drive unique to a man who lost two brothers, one of whom had been the family golden boy. After brother Harold’s death, Richard “sank into a deep, impenetrable silence,” his mother, Hannah, recalled. “From that time on it seemed like he was trying to be three sons in one.” Nixon’s father, a bully and blusterer, who at various times worked as streetcar motorman, farmhand, butcher, housepainter, sheep rancher, and telephone pole climber, claimed as his greatest achievement that he once shook hands with President William McKinley.

  Imagine what it would mean if his son could win that prize?

  Into Battle: The 1960 Election

  Since in 1960 Eisenhower remained the most popular man in the country, both Nixon and Kennedy knew better than to cross him, even as they tried to satisfy voters hungry for change. The substantive differences between Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon were marginal at best; Schlesinger even dashed off a quick 1960 book, Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?

  Instead the campaign was about other things; age and energy and a vision for a new decade. Kennedy would “get the country moving again.” He would jostle the economy out of stagnation, rebuild the muscles of a country gone flabby under its war hero president, restore its prestige—all promises precisely engineered to drive Eisenhower crazy.

  Eisenhower was proud of his success in keeping the country safe and sound: safe from attack, without going bankrupt in the process. He had killed weapons systems, pursued a test ban treaty that both the Democrats and the military opposed, ignored Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s boasts about “cranking out missiles like sausages” because he knew that it was more talk than action. The two leaders were silent partners, resisting calls in both countries to hurl billions more into missile systems and civil defense networks. “I don’t believe we should pay one cent for defense more than we have to,” Eisenhower declared at a press conference early in 1960. Pressed by reporters about “adequacy of defense” Ike replied, in essence, Trust me. “I’ve spent my life in this,” he said, “and I know more about it than almost anybody.” Now here was this junior senator, egged on by allies in Congress, accusing him of placing fiscal security ahead of national security, and warning of a “failure of nerve” that allowed the opening up of a “missile gap.”

  Ike was so annoyed at Kennedy’s portrait of him as a caretaker president that he went to battle more to defend his own image than to enhance Nixon’s. Eisenhower had never felt much warmth toward his vice president, a man he barely knew when he hoisted him onto the ticket in 1952, and he had a list of Republicans to whom he’d have rather handed the keys, like his treasury secretary, Robert Anderson. He refused to endorse Nixon before the Republican convention. Once Nixon’s nomination was assured, his praise was so thin you could see through it: “I am not dissatisfied with the individual that looks like he will get it.” He managed to deliver his prime-time speech at the convention in which he celebrated the achievements of the past eight years, the “unprecedented prosperity” and “the strongest security system in the world,” without once mentioning Nixon’s name—only his prayer that “the next President of the United States will be a Republican.” He would come to regret his failure as president to do more to shape the Republican Party, build a new generation of leaders in his image. Instead there he was, delivering lethal injections into the campaign, like his remark, when asked for an example of Nixon’s role in a key decision, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

  If it was any consolation, at least Kennedy was having the same problem with his party elders. During the Democrats’ nominating process Truman was no more help to Kennedy than Eisenhower was to Nixon—in fact Truman did everything he could to block him. He disliked Kennedy’s faith, his father, and his fortune. Given the fact that he had experienced a party mutiny himself in 1948, when the surviving Roosevelts tried to topple him, Truman’s efforts to derail Kennedy spoke both to the depth of his hostility—and his reflex, shared by many former presidents, to flex his clout as kingmaker. After the hard-fought primary season against Hubert Humphrey, and a mere three days before the Democratic convention opened, Truman held a nationally televised press conference in which he attacked the convention as “a prearranged . . . mockery . . . controlled . . . by one candidate.”

  “Senator,” Truman intoned, “are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is ready for you in the role of President?” Such dangerous times called for “a man with the greatest possible maturity and experience . . . may I urge you to be patient?”

  Patience was nowhere in Kennedy’s repertoire, nor deference to the Old Frontier. Kennedy called a news conference of his own at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, and retorted that “Mr. Truman regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records and then takes his advice.” He demolished the experience argument so effectively that he should have thanked Truman for raising it
: if fourteen years in elective office were not sufficient preparation, Kennedy declared, then that would have ruled out the candidacies of every Democratic president of the century—including Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman himself.

  But Truman was not the only one out to stop the Kennedy juggernaut. Lyndon Johnson, the towering majority leader of the Senate with whom Eisenhower had cut many a successful legislative deal, was just as intent on derailing Kennedy, though in his case it was to clear the way for himself. The Democrats’ convention was due to open in Los Angeles on July 11; Lyndon Johnson finally declared his candidacy on July 5, and on the night before he flew to the West Coast he stopped by the White House to have a long talk with his Republican friend.

  Kennedy, Johnson complained to Eisenhower, was a mediocrity, “a nobody who had a rich father,” and insisted, “Ike, for the good of the country, you cannot let that man become elected President. Now, he might get the nomination out there, he probably will, but he’s a dangerous man.”

  Of course, it would only be a few nights later that Eisenhower got a big surprise when he turned on his TV. As he told interviewer Earl Mazo, “there was that son of a bitch becoming a vice presidential candidate with this ‘dangerous man.’”

  All the candidates and their prospective patrons continued this rugby match through the summer: having secured the nomination and roped Johnson tightly to his side as his running mate, Kennedy set out to appease his elders. He went to Hyde Park to woo Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom he had had a long and prickly relationship. In early August he flew to Missouri to pay homage to Truman. He was a hard case: “I never liked Kennedy,” Truman told one Senate friend. “I hate his father.” But Truman would embrace the enemy of his enemy. “That no good son-of-a-bitch Dick Nixon called me a communist and I’ll do anything to beat him.”