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

by Nancy Gibbs

  And likewise on the Republican side, what finally got Eisenhower into the ring was less his commitment to Nixon and his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge than his contempt for Kennedy. By October he told one Oval Office visitor, as he jabbed a finger toward his desk chair, “Listen, dammit, I’m going to do everything possible to keep that Jack Kennedy from sitting in this chair.” He referred to Kennedy as “Little Boy Blue,” or “that young whippersnapper,” a celebrity and dilettante buying the office with his father’s money. And he started flashing a Nixon-Lodge badge as big as a butter plate.

  Ike hated the substance of Kennedy’s campaign, even though—or maybe because—it relied every bit as much on personal charisma and celebrity as Eisenhower’s had. Kennedy warned of America’s growing weakness, economic decline, failing prestige in the world. “To a country that has marched down the middle of the road behind Dwight Eisenhower to the highest level of shared prosperity of any nation in history,” Time observed, “he campaigns with Depression fervor for welfare-state reform (‘I am not satisfied that 17 million Americans go to bed hungry every night. . . .’). Kennedy’s panacea for these problems is simple: himself. Elect me, he says, and I will start the U.S. moving forward again.”

  Ike had remained largely offstage through much of the campaign. But he charged in during the final days, the cavalry appearing at the crucial moment, firing back at Kennedy’s “amazing irresponsibility” and “unwarranted disparagement of our moral, military and economic power” in a nationally televised speech, his most forceful in years. “Where did this young genius acquire the knowledge, experience and wisdom,” he charged, “through which he will make such vast improvements over the work of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the dedicated civilian and service men who have given their lives to this work?”

  That Ike had appeared at Nixon’s side at the end made his presence all the more powerful. “If Nixon had brought Eisenhower into the campaign earlier,” Kennedy’s friend Ken O’Donnell observed, “Kennedy would have charged him with hiding behind Ike’s favorable image and being unable to stand on his own record and merits.”

  As withering as Ike’s broadsides were, Kennedy knew he could not attack directly such a popular president. He had to move carefully, remain statesmanlike. “With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me,” he told his friend Red Fay as he soaked in a bathtub at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. “It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. If the election were held tomorrow, I’d win easily, but six days from now, it’s up for grabs.”

  But even as Ike drew immense crowds in the final days, it was clear his halo was not transferable—at least not to Nixon. WE LIKE IKE; NIX ON NIXON read the signs. Or WE LIKE IKE; WE BACK JACK. Ike’s popularity averaged an astonishing 61 percent throughout his last year in office; Truman’s in 1952 had been 32 percent. “Kennedy saw no reason to take him on except by indirection,” said his advisor Ted Sorensen, and showing respect for the club enhanced his own claim to be worthy of joining it. When he mentioned Ike at a speech at Dartmouth and the audience hissed, Kennedy issued a rebuke: “You mustn’t hiss the President of the United States.” When Democrats at a meeting in Tucson condemned Mamie’s trip to the “beauty ranch” Kennedy defended her: “I wouldn’t criticize anything she does—she is a very fine woman.”

  Nixon went him one better: demonstrating his precocious sense of the club’s power, he proposed on the eve of the election that if he won, he would send all three former presidents to the Soviet bloc nations on a goodwill tour, and invite communist leaders to the United States. He claimed to have discussed the idea with Eisenhower, and that it was the president who had proposed including Hoover and Truman as well. “We have our differences at home,” he declared, “but abroad . . . Mr. Truman is honored because of the Marshall Plan, which I supported and which resulted in the rebuilding of Europe.” Never mind that the first Ike heard of the joint mission was when Nixon announced the idea. According to Eisenhower’s faithful secretary Ann Whitman, the president was “astonished” at the proposal, and “did not like the idea of ‘auctioning off the presidency’ in this manner.” He was so angry at Nixon’s speech he considered having his press secretary issue a denial before he cooled down.

  But in the end even that club gambit was not enough, and Nixon fell just barely, microscopically short of the prize. “Ike’s blunder in dismissing Nixon’s claims of executive leadership,” argues historian Robert Dallek, recalling Ike’s remark about not remembering any decision Nixon had participated in, “and his failure, because of health concerns, to take a larger role in the vice president’s campaign may also have been decisive factors in holding down Nixon’s late surge.”

  Two years later, Eisenhower would publicly admit that “one of the biggest mistakes of my political career was not working harder for Dick Nixon in 1960.” But the mistake was not his alone. Nixon told the story of how Mamie Eisenhower had privately implored him not to exhaust her ailing husband on the campaign trail, and Nixon had agreed, in a gesture of loyalty and sacrifice. But years later, his daughter Julie Nixon disputed the account. “Mamie says that story isn’t true about her asking my father in the 1960 campaign not to call on Ike so much because of his health,” Nixon’s aide William Safire recalls Julie telling him. “My father had said to Ike, ‘It’s got to be my own campaign.’” That bit of personal pride would help delay the Nixon presidency by eight years.

  The Club Brokers a Cease-Fire

  The votes had barely been counted before Nixon’s supporters charged that the election had been stolen; they told him about Texas counties where there were 4,895 voters on the rolls but 6,138 voted; of precincts in Chicago where after 43 people had voted, the machine had counted 121. Kennedy had won Illinois by 8,800 votes—and the ballots were quickly destroyed. Many close friends as well as party officials urged Nixon to press for an investigation; his daughters would donate their Christmas money to the recount effort.

  Kennedy knew that the way the election played out posed a real threat to his legitimacy. His first mission was to establish, clearly and firmly, his rightful claim to an office he had won so narrowly and ruthlessly. He needed to send the message that the good of the country was bigger than party, beyond partisanship—a message that would only have meaning if Nixon affirmed it. Nixon wasn’t saying anything yet. He hadn’t demanded a recount, but hadn’t explicitly rejected the idea either. Privately, Nixon was inclined not to contest the vote; it would have caused chaos, delayed the handover for months, risked a constitutional crisis, and set a disastrous example for emerging democracies around the world.

  But Kennedy didn’t know that. The stakes could not have been higher, and it is for precisely such missions as this that the club exists. Kennedy enlisted it not on his own behalf, since he had as yet so little standing with its members, but on behalf of the office they all had held.

  The initial overture would come from a pair of cross-party allies: President Herbert Hoover and Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Joe Kennedy had been a mainstay of the first Hoover Commission, and through the decade the two old Fortress America warriors had remained friends.

  In the days immediately following the vote, an exhausted Jack Kennedy was resting at his father’s sprawling white stucco mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, so wiped out by the long ordeal that his hands shook at his press conference. Nixon and his family had flown down to Miami, crushed, exhausted, “more unresponsive than at any time I had known him,” recalled his aide Herb Klein. “He was completely depressed and had finally realized, four days later, that he’d lost the election.”

  But the fact that both men were in Florida provided the opportunity for a conspicuous parley. Joe Kennedy called Hoover at the Waldorf; wouldn’t it be a good idea for them to meet, be photographed together, to show the country that all was well and let bygones be bygones? Joe said he would arrange for Kennedy, as the victor, to fly to Miami and call on Nixon, provided Hoover could convince Nixon to see him.

&n
bsp; Which is how it came to pass that on Saturday night, Dick and Pat were having dinner with friends at the Jamaica Inn in Key Biscayne, when word came from their hotel that President Hoover was trying to reach Nixon. “I knew he would not be calling unless it was a matter of vital importance,” Nixon recalled, so he went to take the call.

  “Hello, Chief,” Nixon said.

  Hoover did not waste any time.

  “The Ambassador [Joe Kennedy] has just called me and suggested that it would be a good idea for you and the President-elect to get together for a visit,” Hoover said. If Nixon agreed, Kennedy would call him to arrange the logistics.

  Nixon asked Hoover what he thought he should do. As Nixon recalled it, Hoover replied that “I think we are in enough trouble in the world today; some indications of national unity are not only desirable but essential.” As Hoover remembered it, Nixon resisted being party to what he called “a cheap publicity stunt,” but Hoover threw that right back at him. Newly elected presidents, he informed Nixon, don’t need any help getting publicity. “This is a generous gesture on his part, and you ought to meet it.”

  So Nixon agreed, and told Hoover to give Ambassador Kennedy the green light. Back at the table, he actually seemed elated at the call: “It was the difference between night and day,” Klein recalled. They agreed that he should check in with Eisenhower first, so Nixon placed a call to the White House operator and asked if she could patch him through to Augusta, Georgia, where Eisenhower was on vacation. “He knew that it was my practice never to call him outside office hours unless the matter was of great importance,” Nixon said. When the operator got Eisenhower on the line, Nixon told him about Hoover’s proposal and asked what he thought. Eisenhower was just as blunt.

  “You would look like a sorehead if you didn’t,” he said. But Nixon was under no obligation, Eisenhower assured him, of agreeing to play a role in the administration. Already there were rumors that given the tight outcome Kennedy would be inviting key Republicans into his government, with Nixon’s name floated among them.

  They talked for a few minutes before another call came in to interrupt dinner; this time, the maître d’ said, it was Kennedy himself.

  “I would like to fly down from Palm Beach to have a chat with you—if it won’t interfere with your vacation,” Kennedy said, and Nixon agreed, even offered to make the trip himself, adding, what were, for Kennedy, the magic words: “After all, that’s the proper thing to do in view of last Tuesday’s results.” No recriminations: no demand for a deal or a recount. Kennedy brushed away the offer: after all, he now had a helicopter at his disposal. They agreed to meet at the Key Biscayne hotel on Monday.

  “As I hung up and walked slowly back to our table,” Nixon recalled, “it dawned on me that I had just participated in a probably unprecedented series of conversations. In the space of less than ten minutes, I had talked to a former President of the United States, the present president and the President-elect!”

  And they, in turn, had all talked not just to the current vice president, but a future president.

  When Kennedy was asked why he was making the trip—Eisenhower would never have called on Stevenson after the last two elections—Kennedy replied that “There are some things Democrats must do which Republicans don’t have to do.” Or at least Democrats who have just barely won.

  What are you going to talk to him about, his friend Ken O’Donnell asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Kennedy replied. “Maybe I’ll ask him how he won Ohio.”

  It was really all about the visuals. And as it happened, a kind of ritual humiliation. Kennedy was late; Nixon had to stand waiting, surrounded by the army of reporters and photographers and tourists awaiting the president-elect, who arrived with his escort of local police and Secret Service followed by Kennedy’s convertible. Kennedy sat in the backseat, Nixon recalled, “looking almost lonely.” The two men proceeded to the seclusion of Nixon’s Villa 69, following Navy protocol, the now higher-ranking Kennedy on the right. Pat and the girls were down at the beach, so the men sat and talked on the screened porch alone for a little over an hour.

  Spokesman Pierre Salinger told reporters the purpose of the meeting was to “resume the cordial relations with Vice President Nixon that existed between them during the 14 years they served in Congress,” and refused to rule out a role for Nixon in the new administration.

  Now that it was all over, they talked shop; Nixon ran through the names of some career people at the CIA and State Department. They were loyal, the men agreed, but lacking perhaps in initiative and imagination. They discussed roles Republicans might play; would Nixon consider a temporary assignment overseas? Nixon graciously declined, to what he presumed was Kennedy’s relief.

  He did have some advice for the new president, the advice White House veterans all give: make use of Camp David. You will need it. I may criticize your policies, he said, but “of one thing I can assure you: I shall never join in any criticism of you, expressed or implied, for taking time off for relaxation. There is nothing more important than that a president be physically, mentally and emotionally in the best possible shape to confront the immensely difficult decisions he has to make.”

  Kennedy could listen politely and commit to nothing; he already had what he needed, as was plain when he spoke with reporters afterward about “the very cordial meeting.” As a final indignity for the defeated warrior, Vice President Nixon had to preside over the roll call of the Electoral College. “This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated,” he told the assembled members of Congress. “I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system.” He got a standing ovation.

  Nixon’s handling of the whole matter was widely praised—especially by Kennedy supporters. “Eisenhower and Nixon, merely by meeting with Kennedy, were patriotically recognizing the certainty of his election, and thus helping to put an end to the bitter charges of fraud, the demands for recounts and the threats of Southern independent electors,” declared Sorensen. “In few other nations could so narrow a result have been so smoothly accepted.” Cardinal Cushing in Boston nominated Nixon “Good Will Man of the Year.” Editorials across the country lauded the Key Biscayne Summit. “Politics may turn into warfare every four years,” wrote the New York Times, “but doesn’t require that everyone stay angry. . . . The two men talking cordially for more than an hour and walking quietly away together across the green Florida golf course—all this was in our best tradition. It was political and human too.”

  Erasing Ike

  No one is ever prepared to be president, because no job can compare to it. But at least Kennedy knew this. “If I am elected,” he had told Washington wise man Clark Clifford, “I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and have to ask myself, ‘What in the world do I do now?’”

  Kennedy asked Clifford and presidential scholar Richard Neustadt to guide him through the seventy-three days between election and inauguration. Transitions can be a series of sand traps, warned Neustadt, whose new book, Presidential Power, was already changing the way aspirants viewed the levers and limits of the role. The Constitution provides no machinery, no means or money or method for transferring power; in 1960 this meant 2,380,475 federal employees, a $77 billion budget, and a freshly frozen Cold War. “Everywhere there is a sense of a page turning, a new chapter in the country’s history,” Neustadt observed. “And with it, irresistibly, there comes the sense, ‘they’ couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t, but ‘we’ will. We just have done the hardest thing there is to do in politics. Governing has got to be a pleasure by comparison.”

  That’s a mistake many presidents make.

  Clifford, having been around the White House since the Truman years, was aware of the risks—of ego as well as ignorance—that came with a new team. He set up a series of meetings between Kennedy’s new appointees—who were an average of te
n years younger—and their Eisenhower administration counterparts. From the start, he was disturbed by the new men’s demeanor in the meetings. “They behaved as though history had begun with them. They regarded both Eisenhower and Truman (and their own Vice-President) with something bordering on contempt,” he concluded. “Their new leader, the first President born in the twentieth century, was going to be different.” With the exception of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sorensen, and Kennedy himself, the new elite did not appear to show much interest in history, Clifford observed. “I regarded this as a form of arrogance.”

  Kennedy may not have shared that attitude about history, but he was every bit as eager to make a clean break. The conservatism of Ike’s policies, he believed, reflected the conservatism of his process; a rigid military hierarchy that crushed innovation and sapped energy in the procedural sludge. Kennedy wanted the system to be more supple than Ike’s, shaped by his strengths, matched to his metabolism, reflecting his faith in personalities over protocols. Ike had learned management in the military; Kennedy, as the child of a big family. “I never heard him talk with real interest on any topic except personalities and politics,” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy said. One reporter described the two presidents’ views of teamwork in terms of football and basketball. “The Eisenhower football method relied on regular huddles and rigid assignments. In the Kennedy Administration all team members were constantly on the move.”

  Kennedy vowed to be an activist president: no elaborate cabinet hierarchy to clog up the flow of information and leave him with little to do other than approve decisions already made elsewhere. Kennedy reached past Eisenhower to his hero, FDR, who had shared his lack of interest in administrative structures. “He paid little attention to organization charts and chains of command,” Sorensen said of Kennedy, “which diluted and distributed his authority.” The new president wanted fewer cabinet meetings; he couldn’t sit still for long stretches without getting restless, couldn’t bear repetition and circuitous argument. “The informality was amazing,” said Fred Dutton, who had worked on the campaign and would become a special assistant. He was instructed to study Eisenhower’s system—and demolish it. “They’d even have rehearsals for Cabinet meetings,” he learned when he met his Republican counterparts. “Kennedy would never have tolerated that.”