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

by Nancy Gibbs

  When Johnson found himself suddenly in the eye of the storm, Eisenhower stood ready to help—but like Hoover with Truman so many years earlier, he waited to be asked. “He wanted the initiative to be taken by President Johnson,” Anderson explained, “because, as a former president, he did not feel that he wanted to be in the position . . . of saying to the then-President . . . that ‘This is the way I handled it,’ or, ‘This is what I would have done.’” While Ike’s brother Milton believed Eisenhower’s affection for Johnson was genuine, Johnson always played the role of supplicant in their calls and letters, promising not to be a “nuisance,” lauding Ike as the great soldier and statesman. Eisenhower’s responses were cordial and respectful, but seldom intimate. They were always straight.

  “You had to know this man, Eisenhower,” Hagerty explained, when asked whether Johnson really valued his counsel. “There was nothing sham about him, and there was no double talking. If you asked him a question you got an answer, if he was going to give you one.”

  Eisenhower may have enjoyed giving counsel to Johnson in part because relations with his own party had cooled. As the 1964 campaign approached and Barry Goldwater’s conservative revolution gathered strength, Eisenhower looked everywhere for a more moderate alternative—including his brother Milton, and Herbert Hoover Jr., who had served in Ike’s State Department. But the newly radicalized Republican Party seemed intent on erasing the memory of its most popular member, to the point that conservative forces at the Republican convention rejected a preamble to the platform praising the record of the Eisenhower administration.

  So it was easy for Johnson, on his way to winning a historic landslide victory in 1964, to forgive Ike for being a Republican, since his heart didn’t seem in it anyway. He went to great lengths to extend Eisenhower every possible perk and privilege: helicopters to ferry him to the farm, the use of Camp David and the presidential suite at Walter Reed. He sent gifts of blazer buttons with the Presidential Seal, a tie clip, a watch with a stopwatch, and a constant supply of flower arrangements for Eisenhower’s many hospital visits. He moved Eisenhower’s portrait to a more prominent position, so that it would be visible in the background of pictures of Johnson greeting various White House guests.

  Most striking, he asked White House researchers to compile records of every contact he’d ever had with both Truman and Eisenhower, before, during, and after their presidencies: every lunch, every phone call, every bill signing and state dinner and off-the-record strategy session. It was as though he could prove, to himself and others, that these were relationships that were meaningful and real. There was the time Ike and Johnson flew together to assess the drought in Texas in 1953, the off-the-record meetings they had held throughout 1959 and 1960. Johnson was, in this sense, the club’s first true recording secretary, the man most conscious of its potential power. When Johnson gave him cuff links, Ike wrote to thank him, noting, “I think that one day they will find their place in a museum at Abilene together with a notation that they were a gift from you.”

  Johnson liked that. He attached a memo for his aides: “That’s a line we ought to use when people give us things.”

  Truman too was the object of much tender loving care. He had the invitations, the gifts, including a statuette of Johnson, which Truman promised to keep right on his desk. When Truman called to congratulate him after his 1964 victory—“I feel just as happy about it as you do,” Truman said—Johnson took the opportunity to pay homage: “You feel happier because you have always been more for your party and your other folks than you have been for yourself.” But then he went further, maybe the most explicit statement ever of the club’s unique bond: “And I just want you to know that as long as I’m in that office, you are in it, and there’s not a privilege of it, or a power of it, or a purpose of it that you can’t share. And your bedroom is up there waiting for you, and your plane is standing by your side.”

  Those were not just empty words. The following year, at the last minute, Johnson instructed that the big signing ceremony for his landmark Medicare Act take place not in Washington as planned, but in Independence, Missouri, so that Truman could be in attendance and receive the very first Medicare card, two decades after he had tried to create a national health insurance plan. It was, Truman told Johnson, “the highlight of my post–White House days.” When aides protested, Johnson brushed them off.

  “Don’t you understand?” Johnson said, demonstrating once again his acute understanding of the club’s therapeutic purpose. “I’m doing this for Harry Truman. He’s old and he’s tired and he’s been left all alone down there. I want him to know that his country has not forgotten him.

  “I wonder if anyone will do the same for me.”

  9

  “I Need Your Counsel, and I Love You”

  —LYNDON JOHNSON

  When Johnson took over the presidency, Vietnam was “a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist on the horizon,” advisor Jack Valenti recalled. “We hardly discussed it because it was not worth discussing.”

  At least not until Vietnam started falling apart. Then Johnson needed to come up with a strategy. For years Eisenhower and then Kennedy had provided economic and political support for the South Vietnamese government in its fight against the Vietcong, the communist guerrillas supported by North Vietnam. But after a military coup in Saigon and the November 1963 assassination of the corrupt President Ngo Dinh Diem, that arm’s-length support was no longer enough to avoid a collapse in South Vietnam. So the challenge was, just how important was it to Johnson to prevent one from happening?

  Whatever he did, Johnson wanted his predecessors by his side; he wanted to continue Kennedy’s policies, if only he could figure out what they would have been, and have Truman’s and Ike’s blessings for whatever road he chose. “I’m a trustee,” he told Bundy a few months after taking office. At least until he won an election on his own.

  Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was the keeper of the flame, and Johnson, obsessed with his once and future adversary, imagined the accusations if Johnson wobbled on Vietnam: “That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming all right,” Goodwin recalled him saying years later. “Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling! . . .’ They began throwing stones.” And then he would wake up.

  Just as JFK had feared Ike’s condemnation over Cuba, Johnson feared the reproof of JFK—or at least his brother—in Southeast Asia. But for much of 1964, a campaign year, his strategy was largely one of postponement: sound more moderate than Barry Goldwater but more stalwart than the French. He opened a press conference in June of 1964 by reading a letter Eisenhower had written to Diem in 1954, offering to help Saigon build “a strong, viable state,” and resist communist pressures following the collapse of the French colonial empire. That afternoon, however, Robert Anderson suggested that Johnson consult Eisenhower; he’d just had lunch with the former president, and among the Republicans “you do not have a greater admirer,” Anderson assured him. “Why don’t you ask him to come down and talk to you about this thing in Southeast Asia?” But the campaign of 1964 was in full swing, and Johnson was not eager to confer with someone who could potentially leak to the opposition. All in all, the less said the better.

  “I don’t think it’s worth fightin’ for,” he told Bundy, “and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess.” Still, the contingency planning for an actual ground war was already under way.

  No sooner had Johnson secured his blowout victory that fall than he was forced to make a decision. “I’m perfectly willing and anxious to admit,” he said, prophetically, to the House Republican leader, Gerald Ford, “just like I know you would be if you wound up here in the morning by fate, like I did! . . .
that I don’t know all the answers.” This was not yet America’s war; fewer than five hundred U.S. soldiers had died, and whatever commitment America had to the dysfunctional government in Saigon, it was diluted by the fact that since Diem’s assassination that government was now changing every few months in a series of coups. South Vietnam was not even a real country, but more a jury-rigged improvisation created after the French defeat in 1954 to block the rise of the popular revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. There was no way to measure how much popular support the communist guerrillas commanded. A special National Intelligence Estimate predicted that the South Vietnamese army would never be an effective military force. Stalwart establishment columnists like Lippmann argued that it was “a grievous mistake to have involved ourselves so much in a part of the world where it is impossible for a non-Asian country to win a war against Asians.”

  “I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” he told Goodwin. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. . . . But if I . . . let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser.” That would yield “a mean and destructive debate, that would shatter my presidency, kill my administration and damage our democracy.”

  Indeed conservative columnists like Joe Alsop were invoking Kennedy facing down the Soviets over Cuba and saying that if Johnson walked away from this fight it would be “his defeat, as well as a defeat for the American people.” And all he heard from his military advisors, Johnson complained, was “bomb, bomb, bomb,” which he was not convinced would do any good at all. He’d always been wary of military men, he said, because of their thirst for glory: “It’s hard to be a hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That’s why I am suspicious of the military.”

  What he needed, in other words, was a military man he could trust—one who had already won all the glory he needed, who understood the weapons of war but also a president’s reluctance to wield them. He called Eisenhower before Christmas to check in: “I’m not going to drag you in to get any chestnuts out of the fire unless I really get my tail in a crack internationally,” he assured him. “And when I do, I’m going to come running.”

  That would not take very long. The end of January brought yet another coup in Saigon; the army was a mess, the Vietcong growing stronger. Bundy and McNamara warned Johnson that America’s current, passive posture “can only lead to disastrous defeat. . . . The time has come for harder choices.” After an assault on February 7 at Pleiku killed eight U.S. servicemen, Johnson’s military advisors argued for a major offensive, not just tit-for-tat strikes. Bundy, after a quick trip to assess the situation on the ground, argued that the Vietnamese did not believe the United States—meaning, of course, the president—had “the will and force and patience and determination to take the necessary action and stay the course.” He urged a full bombing campaign—“Measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam, this program seems cheap.”

  But Johnson understood very well the stakes he was facing as he pondered moving beyond military assistance to bombs and boots on the ground. The problem was not political: an overwhelming majority of Americans—83 percent—favored an expanded bombing campaign, and 79 percent supported a policy of preventing the communists from taking over Southeast Asia. The problem was more personal. “I’m not temperamentally equipped to be Commander-in-Chief,” Lady Bird overheard her husband tell Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the internal debate raged. “I’m too sentimental to give the orders.”

  What Johnson really wanted was someone to hold his hand. He didn’t want to rally the country to a great cause, or do anything that might distract Congress from the other missions he had set for it. In fact he didn’t even want anyone to know how desperate he was to talk to Eisenhower.

  “General, I want to visit with you in the next day or so on our problems out in Southeast Asia,” he told Ike when he called the night of February 15, “and I just wondered what your schedule was . . .”

  Eisenhower, ever the good soldier, replied he could make whatever arrangements were needed.

  “I don’t want to put it up like we’re in deep trouble, because I don’t think it’s reached that point,” Johnson assured him, but then offered to send a jet to pick him up, provided it could be done discreetly: “I’m a little concerned about leaving the appearance that we’ve got an emergency or something.”

  “I see,” Eisenhower said. “Well, I think I could manufacture something.” They debated whether they could pretend he was on his way to see his publisher and just happened to be in town for a visit.

  “Why don’t you . . . come on down here and spend a day with me at the White House and let me say, for the public, that I understood you were going to be in New York and I wanted to advise with you on general problems . . . so it doesn’t look too dramatic, that we’ve got a real emergency,” Johnson proposed. “It’s not that deep. But it’s deep enough that I want to talk to you. I think that probably you could be more comforting to me now than anybody I know. . . . Why don’t you come stay all night with me? I’ll put you in Lincoln’s bed.”

  At this Eisenhower chuckled. “Lincoln’s bed?” he asked, Lincoln, another great war president, whom Ike revered.

  “I wish you would stay at the White House,” Johnson pressed. “I need you a little bit. I need a little Billy Graham these days. I need somebody. . . . You come prepared to stay with me for a day or two. Don’t be in a hurry, because I need you.”

  And Eisenhower wasn’t the only one.

  A half hour after calling Ike, Johnson called Truman.

  “How are you?” Truman asked.

  “Oh, I’m having hell,” Johnson replied, and explained he was in search of advice and inspiration from the man who, in Korea, pioneered the discomfiting concept of a limited war in a nuclear age. “I’ve been reading history and saw how much hell you had, and you handled it pretty good, and I just thought maybe I could learn something from you.”

  He was just trying to do the right thing, Johnson insisted, the vision of dead soldiers, past and future, clearly haunting him. “I think when they go in and kill your boys, you’ve got to hit back. . . .”

  “You bet you have!” the feisty Truman said, affirming once again how much easier it can be to take a hard line when the responsibility is no longer yours. “You just bust them in the nose every time you get a chance. And they understand that language better than any other kind.”

  Johnson issued another invitation—bring “Miss Bess. . . . I’ll just send a plane for you and pick you up and you can all spend the weekend at the White House. . . . You don’t have to make any presentation. Don’t have to raise any hell. We’ll just go in there and we’ll have a drink or two together and then we’ll go to church.”

  Truman admitted that he hadn’t been feeling well lately, and in the end his health was too frail to manage the trip.

  “I don’t want to tax you,” Johnson said, “but I always want you to know I need your counsel, and I love you.”

  Ever faithful, Truman released a statement supporting Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Ike meanwhile made his way to Washington; the White House told reporters that he was coming to Walter Reed for his annual checkup, and had time to swing by the White House to see his old friend.

  And to guide him through the most fateful decisions of his presidency.

  The Club War Council

  The key players assembled in the Cabinet Room at ten on February 17: Johnson and Eisenhower, McNamara and Bundy, Army Chief of Staff General Earle Wheeler, and Andrew Goodpaster, who kept the notes and would become Johnson’s personal emissary to Eisenhower for the next three years. Everything was on the table: Vietnam’s history, the role of the French, the Soviets, and the Chinese, the o
dds of success, the risks of escalation, the case for using nuclear weapons if it came to that.

  At this crucial meeting, Ike acted as if he were still the commander in chief—and Johnson let him. Eisenhower began his opening remarks before Johnson was even in the room, and went on for forty-five minutes; it felt like a freshman seminar in the proper use of power. He did not believe in sending small packets of troops to fight “peripheral” wars, or in giving commanders a task and then placing them in handcuffs. He stressed both soft power and hard, the use of “information and inspiration,” to buck up an ally and psych out the enemy, and the use of any necessary force if all else fails. Again and again he tried to focus Johnson’s intention on something other than choosing the bombing targets. He quoted Napoleon on the importance of morale, and the need to boost Saigon’s while breaking Hanoi’s.

  While he came down hard in favor of air strikes—it was time, Ike advised, to mount “a campaign of pressure”—they weren’t going to stop the infiltration from North to South: the goal was to convince the North Vietnamese of the costs of supporting the Vietcong. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed by Congress the previous summer to permit “all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces” without a formal declaration of war, gives you all the authority you need, he assured the president, and “he thought such strikes could be well justified before the world,” Goodpaster reported in his notes of the meeting.

  The other reason to strike hard now, Ike argued, was to bring peace more quickly. Here he invoked Lincoln, who he said wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and then waited until after a major military victory to issue it, as he was determined that it come from a position of strength. In Vietnam, Eisenhower warned, “negotiation from weakness is likely to lead only into deceit and vulnerability, which could be disastrous to us.” The greatest danger was if the Chinese were to conclude that the United States was limiting its reach. “That would be the beginning of the end,” Eisenhower argued, “since they would know all they had to do was go further than we do.”