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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Kennedy and his entire cabinet had suspended further campaigning on behalf of Democratic lawmakers; to their annoyance, Eisenhower kept right on helping Republicans, but the next day he did call on all Americans to assist Kennedy in this crisis. “So far as Cuba and Soviet Russia are concerned, in the weeks ahead we cannot be partisans.”

  By the end of the week, Kennedy would be on the phone with the club one more time, to tell them, essentially, the crisis was passing. Khrushchev would withdraw his missiles and technicians in return for a U.S. promise not to attack the island—and a private understanding that the United States would withdraw its missiles from Turkey. “Now we have to wait to see how it unfolds,” Kennedy told Eisenhower, who had expressed concerns that the Soviets could never be trusted to keep their word. His call to Truman was half as long and purely congratulatory on Truman’s part: the first words out of his mouth were “I’m just pleased to death the way this thing came out.”

  So why did this story have the happy ending, after the first challenge in Cuba had ended so badly?

  Certainly the U.S. arms buildup had something to do with it; Khrushchev knew he was outgunned once the United States signaled its determination to get the missiles out one way or another. But the military portion was just one piece of a much bigger political puzzle, and here, some historians argue, Kennedy was served both by the lessons he had learned from Eisenhower, and the ways in which he remained different.

  On the one hand, Eisenhower’s more hierarchical style, argues Michael Beschloss, might not have left him with the flexibility needed to steer the crisis to its peaceful end. “If Eisenhower had been running those meetings, with his Olympian approach, they might not have been nearly so effective. Here, Kennedy’s talent for crisis management may have saved the world,” Beschloss wrote.

  On the other hand, Kennedy handled the two Cuba crises very differently, and had incorporated some of Ike’s guidance after the first to steer him through the second. It helped that as of the beginning of October, he had in Maxwell Taylor a chairman of the Joint Chiefs he trusted. Kennedy did not sit in on every meeting of the ExComm; people talk differently—and more freely—when the president is not in the room. As Schlesinger described it, “Every alternative was laid on the table for examination, from living with the missiles to taking them out by surprise attack. . . . In effect the members walked around the problem, inspecting it first from this angle, then from that.”

  A couple of weeks later, when Westinghouse president William Knox was traveling in Moscow, Khrushchev summoned him for an audience, clearly eager to tell his own story. He would hate to believe, he said, that Kennedy acted as he did because of impending elections. But he noted that while he had had his issues with Ike, he was sure that the former president would have handled things in a more mature manner. Part of the problem in U.S.-Soviet relations, Khrushchev said, arose from the fact that his eldest son was older than Kennedy.

  When it was over, Reeves notes, when Khrushchev had backed down, the ships reversed course, the missiles been removed, Kennedy called Tiffany’s and ordered thirty calendars made of Lucite, showing the month of October with the thirteen fateful days engraved more deeply and his initials and the various ExComm members in the corners. Tiffany president Walter Hoving proposed that sterling silver would be more appropriate, and offered to pick up the cost.

  The Weight of History

  Kennedy had many favorite poems. One he recited on the day he learned of the missiles went like this:

  Bullfight critics row on row

  Crowd the enormous plaza de toros

  But only one is there who knows

  And he is the one who fights the bull.

  By that time, he knew in a way only presidents can how different their role was than that of anyone else in the orbit of the White House. “There is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate,” he told Time, “and . . . the man who must . . . finally make the judgment. . . . Advisors are frequently divided. If you take the wrong course, and on occasion I have, the President bears the burden of the responsibility quite rightly. The advisors may move on—to new advice.”

  Early in 1962, Arthur Schlesinger’s father, also an eminent historian, conducted a poll of scholars to rate presidential performance. He asked Kennedy for his vote; he qualified not just by holding the office but by having analyzed it himself, as a student of leadership and a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

  Kennedy started to fill out the ballot; but then he stopped. He had come, Schlesinger the younger concluded, to “feel the mystique of the Presidency strongly enough to doubt whether the quality of the presidential experience could be understood by those who had not shared it.”

  So Kennedy wrote back to Schlesinger Sr. “A year ago, I would have responded with confidence,” he explained. “But now I am not so sure. After being in the office for a year I feel that a good deal more study is required to make my judgment sufficiently informed.” It was easy enough to pick the obvious ones, Washington, Lincoln, FDR. But “I would like to subject those not so well known to a long scrutiny after I have left this office.”

  He was more blunt with the son than the father: “How the hell can you tell?” Kennedy asked Arthur Jr. There was no way to know how Lincoln would have handled Reconstruction; voters often don’t know when presidents are getting credit for doing things they had no choice about, or how much difference their individual effort made. “Only the president himself can know what his real pressures and his real alternatives are. If you don’t know that, how can you judge performance?”

  Still a partisan warrior, he was pleased, of course, to see when the results were published that Truman had ranked in the “near great” class while Eisenhower drifted down near the bottom of average. He joked to Schlesinger that it was those ratings that drove Ike to dive headlong into his redemptive mission to help Republicans in the midterm elections. “It is all your father’s poll,” Kennedy asserted. “Eisenhower has been going along for years, basking in the glow of applause he has always had. Then he saw the poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. Now he’s mad to save his reputation.”

  There was some truth to that; Ike could have ignored the poll as partisan theater. But he took it to heart. “The old man,” said Ike’s son John, “was wounded by the thing.”

  The exercise was a reminder that the club had its uses: Salinger especially looked for chances to get the three former presidents together. They all declined the invitation to attend Churchill’s citizenship ceremony. Truman and Hoover were invited to serve as honorary co-advisors to the American Food for Peace program; they consulted with each other and agreed to say no. Truman sent a copy of his refusal letter to Hoover, who said he was grateful: “Apparently we have avoided this one.”

  Kennedy rallied them in support of broadening the president’s trade authority, supporting the test ban treaty signed in the summer of 1963, and of course on Cuba, which, given the shared anticommunist convictions of all three, was almost the easiest. With Eisenhower especially, Kennedy made sure he felt consulted, sending McCone out to Gettysburg to brief him regularly.

  As for Truman, Kennedy never missed a chance to congratulate him for the honors he racked up in retirement. Both men had May birthdays; in May of 1963, Kennedy wrote to Truman that he was his model for aging well. “It is my hope that forty six years will rest as lightly on me as seventy nine do on you.”

  Kennedy never had the chance to find out.

  7

  “How About Coming in for a Drink?”

  —HARRY TRUMAN

  Until Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, no American president had been murdered since McKinley in 1901; the sudden death of one so young was like a national heart attack. But for the former presidents it was an especially sharp reminder of the role they had played and the risks it carried. The club was never so close as in death, whether of a member, a friend, or a first lady. But in the
modern era, only Kennedy died while still in office, and it brought the others back into service in an instant, to comfort one another, serve the country, and raise Lyndon Johnson suddenly into their ranks.

  All three living former presidents had faced assassination threats, which in Truman’s case included a failed attempt in November of 1950. “Dad was terribly shaken by it,” Margaret Truman said of Kennedy’s death. “For the first time in his life, he was unable to face reporters.” Herbert Hoover was so upset that his son Allan decided to spend the night at the Waldorf with him. Lyndon Johnson tried to reach him, and the next morning Hoover wrote to the new president, “I am ready to serve our government in any capacity, from office boy up.”

  Nixon had just flown home to New York from Dallas, where he had attended a Pepsi board meeting; he heard the news in the cab coming from the airport. That afternoon he talked to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who would tell him that he, Nixon, was the original target: Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife had told Hoover, Nixon wrote in his memoirs, that “Oswald had been planning to kill me when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so.”

  Eisenhower heard the news from a policeman in New York; it brought to mind his decision to get a concealed weapons permit, back when he was president of Columbia and would walk across Central Park with a derringer in his pocket. In The Death of a President, William Manchester wrote how as a young officer in Haiti, Ike used to wander through the national palace, see the busts of chiefs of state, and realized, by their dates, that two out of three of them had been killed in office. That’s how backward nations worked, he thought, but his country wasn’t like that. “Now he wasn’t so sure,” Manchester wrote, “and he felt heartsore.”

  The funeral brought the world to Washington. The line to view the casket stretched eight abreast for thirty-two blocks from the Capitol. A million people lined the street on the cold, sunny morning of November 25. The city was in lockdown; Truman and his daughter, Margaret, were staying at Blair House; Eisenhower was with Mamie at the Statler. Ike heard that the Trumans were stranded without a limousine.

  “I don’t know who was responsible,” recalled reporter Edward Folliard, “but he was either a blunderer or a genius at protocol.” Soon the phone was ringing at Blair House, as Eisenhower declared, “Hell, I’ll have my car. He can ride with me.”

  The drums sounded like thunder. Ike and Truman were not up to the walk to St. Matthew’s Cathedral for the funeral mass, but all the presidents were present in spirit if not in fact; the caisson that carried Kennedy’s coffin was the one used for Roosevelt eighteen years before, followed by Black Jack, the riderless horse, skittish, tugging at the arm of the Army private leading him. The family walked behind, then President Johnson. In the river of people behind marched French president Charles de Gaulle, Queen Frederika of Greece, King Baudouin of Belgium, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, 213 world leaders in all, and the justices of the Supreme Court, the cabinet secretaries, then personal friends, then mourning strangers.

  At the requiem mass, Eisenhower and Truman joined the Kennedys, the Johnsons, the Nixons, Billy Graham, Henry Ford II, and Martin Luther King Jr., who came late and left alone. Among the Bible passages was one from Kennedy’s speech the night before he died: “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” The cardinal wept; the son saluted; the band played on, so sadly, hailing the chief.

  As Bobby Kennedy helped Jackie into her limousine, Eisenhower and Truman both came over and spoke to her through the window. Then they rode together to Arlington Cemetery for the burial, past the Lincoln Memorial, another leader martyred, and over the Potomac to the gravesite. They talked about the assassination, whether Oswald had acted alone, or was it some kind of cabal. And they talked about the old days.

  Mamie had a bad foot, and the scene at Arlington was a free-for-all; so both presidents ended up, as Ike said, “out in left field.” It was approaching twilight by the time the burial was over; on the way back into the city, Truman asked Ike and Mamie about their plans. They said they were driving straight back to their farm in Gettysburg. It had been a long, hard day, and no one had had lunch. Margaret suggested that they come back to Blair House to fortify themselves before the trip. When Truman got out of the limousine, he turned around, and said, “Ike, how about coming in for a drink?” Eisenhower looked at Mamie, who seemed to agree.

  And that was it. For eight years Truman had not stepped foot in the Eisenhower White House. For a decade their relations had evolved from actively hostile to carefully formal. But formality cannot withstand the brute, reckless intrusions of mortality, and so it was that in the late afternoon, the two men, along with Mamie and Margaret and a few close aides, sat in the living room at Blair House, eating sandwiches, drinking coffee.

  “There were only a couple of us there,” recalled Truman’s former naval aide Admiral Robert L. Dennison. “I don’t know where the magic came from, maybe President Truman inviting him to come in or maybe because of Eisenhower’s thoughtfulness in calling up in the first place, but at any rate they sat down by themselves on a couch and started talking and reminiscing.”

  Including, of course, about their own deaths. The spectacle of the funeral had left its mark on the modest men. “I think I’ll probably be buried in Abilene,” Ike said. “I don’t know whether I’ll have a Washington funeral or not, and I’m really not concerned about that.” Truman had already planned to be buried in the courtyard of his presidential library in Independence.

  As the two sat talking, a Secret Service agent entered to tell them that an Army officer had arrived with a message for them. Admiral Dennison went out to investigate, and found a very sheepish-looking colonel at the door.

  “What’s your problem?” Dennison asked.

  “Well, Mrs. Kennedy sent me over here,” he replied. “She’s upset and embarrassed because she forgot to invite these two gentlemen to come over to the White House.” Many of the foreign dignitaries had convened at the White House for a reception following the burial.

  It was Eisenhower who spoke first.

  “Well, please tell Mrs. Kennedy that I understand completely,” he said. “It was very kind of her to think of us, but we must get back to Gettysburg, so please present our apology.” Truman spoke up next, that he too appreciated the gesture and was not at all offended. “I understand why we weren’t thought of in the first place. She has so much on her mind. But I, too, am tired and I’ve got to rest and I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  The relieved colonel departed, and the two presidents went back to talking, poured another drink as the twilight settled. Margaret was dispatched to deal with the tribe of reporters who had gathered outside, sensing a story and demanding to talk to the two presidents. Neither was at all inclined to oblige.

  “I thought it would never end,” Dennison said, “but it was really heartwarming because they completely buried the hatchet and you’d think there had never been any differences between them and they were right back where they came in when Eisenhower came back from Europe.”

  When it truly was time for the Eisenhowers to get on the road, Truman, to the horror of the Secret Service, went out to the curb and started talking again while the car waited to take the Eisenhowers away. Margaret kissed Eisenhower. Mamie kissed Truman on both cheeks. And she thanked him for bringing her son home for her husband’s inauguration a decade before.

  As for the two presidents, “It was a long, lingering, silent handshake,” wrote reporter Warren Rogers, “with both men looking into each other’s eyes.”

  Their friendship never fully revived in the years that remained to them; but the hostility dimmed. They met next two and a half years later, on the twenty-second anniversary of D-Day at a Kansas City luncheon sponsored by an organization called U.N. We Believe. They bantered warmly. “I liked what I saw,” said Truman’s close friend Tom Gavin. “I thought it was great. President Truman does too.”r />
  Margaret’s husband, Clifton Daniel, sensed what had let the men move on after the funeral meeting. “They had been very closely associated, and on that day they shared something very much in common; they shared with Jack Kennedy the fact that all of them had been President, and this engenders a greatness of spirit in people sometimes they don’t otherwise have.”

  JOHNSON AND EISENHOWER:

  Blood Brothers

  Because of who he was, because of what he confronted, but also because of how Lyndon Johnson came suddenly to be president, his relationship with the club was the most intense of any modern president. Truman had recruited Hoover largely because he needed his expertise, though the stagecraft of bipartisan outreach didn’t hurt. Kennedy had managed Eisenhower because he knew Ike’s opposition could do him real harm. But Johnson was a very different man, and his reliance on the former presidents was at once highly political and deeply personal. If for no other reason than to signal America’s stability, he called both Truman and Eisenhower within hours of his swearing in following Kennedy’s assassination, and they were at his side at the White House the next day.

  He was fully conscious of the power of his predecessors and protective of their privileges. He studied them, fed and tended them, sent flowers, cuff links, statues, put Air Force jets and helicopters at their disposal, had his aides research every single contact he had ever had with any one of them, going back to his earliest Senate days.