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

by Nancy Gibbs

  His former speechwriter William Ewald recalled how Johnson summoned Ike to Washington for a secret meeting in a helicopter at a Washington airport. He was flying back making notes of the conversation, when an aide turned on the radio to get the sports scores; they heard a news flash that “The President has just met with General Eisenhower.”

  “That sonovabitch!” Ike growled. “He said the meeting would be secret.” And he tore up the pages he was writing.

  Eisenhower would suffer another heart attack in November of 1965; it meant yet another step back from the political scene. But when the year came to an end, Lyndon Johnson had an approval rating of 64 percent and was the most admired man in the world in a Gallup poll. Eisenhower was second.

  A Nation Divided

  By 1966, as Vietnam ground to a stalemate; the hawks wanted an all-out offensive and the protesters an immediate stand-down. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, along with several hundred businessmen, took out an antiwar letter to Johnson in the Wall Street Journal. A Boston College student set himself on fire outside McNamara’s window. Martin Luther King had come out against the war, along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, the patron saint of parenting, who had actually made a campaign commercial for Johnson in 1964. So too did pastors and housewives and people who had never protested a policy in their lives. A young Texas congressman named George H. W. Bush wrote to constituents that “I frankly am lukewarm on sending more American boys to Viet Nam.” Johnson wasn’t just looking for “spiritual and historical” support, observes David Eisenhower; he was looking for cover fighting an unpopular war, and “sought the sanction of a member of the Presidential fraternity for his historic efforts to carry out a policy against the grain of public opinion.”

  By the middle of 1967, seventy thousand Americans had been killed or wounded. “There’s nothing more brutalizing,” Jack Valenti observed, “than to order men into battle and then pick up the phone from the Pentagon and find out how many were lost that day. I once asked Johnson ‘how do you stand it?’ And he said it was like drinking carbolic acid every morning.” When he couldn’t sleep, he’d wander the White House with a flashlight, visiting the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, who had been paralyzed by a stroke while in office, or he would go to the Situation Room at 3 A.M. because there would always be people there with the latest news and body counts. “He could not rid himself of the suspicion,” Goodwin observed, “that a mean God had set out to torture him in the cruelest manner possible.”

  Eisenhower worried about Johnson’s inner resources. “A war or combat situation is upsetting and that can . . . throw off judgment,” he observed to Nixon, who came to visit at the farm in the fall of 1967, as he was laying his plans to challenge Johnson for the presidency. Ike feared that the president “lacked the inner pressure gauge that told him when to relax. He had no hobbies or interests outside of politics.” Johnson increasingly took comfort in the company of men with long memories, those who had been in the arena. He savored a visit with Truman in Missouri; he called him “one of the few comforts I had all during the war.”

  “You know the great thing about Truman,” he told Goodwin, “is that once he makes up his mind about something—anything, including the A bomb—he never looks back and asks ‘should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it?’ No, he just knows he made up his mind as best he could and that’s that. There’s no going back. I wish I had some of that quality.”

  One day when he visited Ike at Walter Reed following gall bladder surgery, he ran into Eisenhower’s pastor, Dr. Edward Elson, who asked about Ike’s spirits. Johnson’s reply suggested he himself was just as much in need of care: “Dr. Elson,” Johnson said, “when I need comfort, this is where I come and this is the man I come to see.”

  But over time even Eisenhower grew impatient with Johnson’s duplicity. Where was the honest appraisal of goals and costs? The very notion of a “painless war” of the kind Johnson seemed determined to wage was offensive to Ike. “The American people,” Ike complained, “are being promised guns and a lot more butter—guns almost smothered in butter. I don’t believe it’s possible.” Johnson’s popularity sank to the lowest level since Truman’s 23 percent in 1951. He was compared to Caesar, Caligula, and Mussolini. “Lee Harvey Oswald, Where Are You Now?” read the protesters’ signs. Bobby Kennedy called for an unconditional bombing halt. In the spring of 1967 fully two thirds of the country said they had lost faith in Johnson’s leadership. Half the country didn’t know what the war was about. That fall at a Selective Service office in Baltimore, a Catholic priest poured two pints of blood over sixteen file drawers of records; a show at Manhattan’s New School displayed Johnson flanked by Miss Napalm and other symbols of death. And then there was the March on the Pentagon, which reduced Johnson to urging companies to withhold buses to reduce the turnout.

  The White House watched in growing frustration, especially as Hanoi hailed the “valuable support” and “great encouragement” of the antiwar activists. Generals began talking openly of winning the war “over there,” and losing it at home. Advisor James Rowe warned that elite opinion was fast turning against the war, and might “eventually convert the people, especially if unopposed.” And a presidential campaign was looming.

  This was torment of a purely political kind: Johnson, who so wanted to be loved, so wanted to be a great president, concluded that the main obstacle to winning this cursed war was the opposition of a public that no longer trusted him to do it.

  While Richard Nixon would build his 1968 campaign around his appeal to the Silent Majority, it was Johnson who first sought to rally the ambivalent middle to his cause—and use the club members to do it. If he couldn’t sell this war, maybe they could. The task of taking on the protesters fell to Johnson’s canny special advisor John Roche, a former political science professor from Brandeis. Roche was a classic Cold War liberal; he had served as chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, advised Kennedy back when he was a senator, wrote speeches for Humphrey, and joined the Johnson White House as a resident intellectual. “I will argue to my dying day,” he said of Vietnam, “that this was the most idealistic war we have ever fought.”

  “In politics,” Roche liked to say, “a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.” So he came up with a circuitous one to make the case. When Johnson was desperate for allies against all the whining intellectuals and rambunctious protesters, Roche hatched a plan in the spring of 1967 for a high-profile committee of wise men; he promised, in an eyes only memo, that he would “leave no tracks.” He even promised squads of letter writers in support of the committee’s efforts. Former Illinois senator Paul Douglas was the perfect face, a strong anticommunist who was in favor of civil and labor rights. James Rowe, who also pitched in, thought Johnson would appreciate having at least two Harvard professors on the list. Johnson agreed with the plan—but “don’t get surfaced,” he warned.

  And so at the end of October, at the National Press Club, Douglas announced the creation of the nonpartisan Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Viet Nam. The honorary cochairs? Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

  The group was presented as a counterweight to the radical Left and Right: “Voices of dissent have received attention far out of proportion to their actual numbers,” the committee said in its mission statement. “Our objective is to make sure that the majority voice of America is heard—loud and clear—so that Peking and Hanoi will not mistake the strident voices of some dissenters for American discouragement and a weakening of will.” The committee reeked of sage credibility; businessmen, professors, Nobel laureates: there were former secretaries of state Dean Acheson and James Byrnes; former Harvard president James Conant; former governor Pat Brown of California; AFL-CIO president George Meany; author Ralph Ellison; and Omar Bradley, the only other living five-star general.

  The world was watching to see whether America’s will was disintegrating: “If the silent center in the U.S. can find an effective voice, through the new Citizens Com
mittee or any other channel,” Time argued, “American foreign policy will carry considerably greater authority with friends and foes alike.”

  Again and again, former senator Douglas would faithfully affirm the committee’s independence: “Despite your implication, we are not a front for the Administration,” he said at a news conference some months later, when the committee issued a statement warning that one-sided concessions to Hanoi were the road to surrender. It was too late for any committee of heavyweights to soothe the growing anxieties of Middle America about the war.

  Eisenhower would continue to express support for Johnson’s efforts, and urged him to get tough right to the end. “Once I complained to him about the trouble Fulbright and his friends were making for me,” Johnson recalled. “He told me ‘Why, I’d just go ahead and smack them, just pay no attention to these overeducated Senators, that’s all there is to it.’” In an interview at Christmastime Ike declared that any Democrat or Republican running for president on a platform of pulling out of Vietnam “will have me to contend with.” He warned, “That’s one of the few things that would start me off in a series of stump speeches across the nation.” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker noted “the remarkable bellicosity” of his remarks, and marveled at the distance from the candidate in 1952 who had asked of the Korean conflict “Where do we go from here? When comes the end? Is there an end?”

  In any event, Eisenhower’s campaigning days were over—and so, in a sense, was Johnson’s presidency. By early 1968 he was practically a prisoner of the White House. The Tet Offensive began at the end of January, eighty thousand communist troops hitting more than a hundred cities and towns in the South. By the time it was over, the losses for the North were devastating; but gone too was all credibility, all the Light at the End of the Tunnel promises coming out of the White House and Pentagon. McNamara resigned; Westmoreland asked for still more troops. Once again, as they had against Harry Truman in 1948, the liberals of Americans for Democratic Action plotted mutiny. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite declared publicly that the war was unwinnable; “I’ve lost Mr. Middle America,” Johnson declared. Peace candidate Eugene McCarthy won 42.4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary—though only later did a close analysis show that 60 percent of his vote came from people who felt Johnson was not escalating fast enough. They were just sick of the stalemate, and the lies, and the unending train of bodies coming home.

  Johnson announced a unilateral bombing halt on March 31, 1968, named Averell Harriman his personal envoy who would “go anywhere, any time” to make peace, and then the shocker: with “the world’s hopes in the balance,” he said, he needed to devote every hour, every breath to the “awesome duties of the presidency”—and so he “would not be seeking and would not accept another term.”

  Thus ended, for all intents and purposes, the extraordinary presidency of Lyndon Johnson. But in the next seven months he’d have occasion to reconsider his decision—especially once he found himself in the middle of the most devious, and dangerous, club collision of the modern age.

  NIXON AND REAGAN:

  The California Boys

  Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan defined Republican politics in America from 1966 until Nixon’s death in 1994. Raised by religious mothers and luckless fathers, they both had roots in Southern California’s conservative crucible. But like other men born under the same star, they functioned as much like rivals as allies over the course of their nearly fifty-year relationship.

  And as both began to crowd the national stage, it became clear that their politics were nearly as different as their personalities. Where Nixon was a bloodless realist, Reagan was an ardent optimist. Where Nixon was suspicious and calculating, Reagan was trusting and often naive. Nixon was never as personally popular as many of the initiatives he launched at home or overseas. By contrast, Reagan’s policies were never as popular as the sunny persona he created through his speeches and stagecraft. Even after they left the presidency, one of them fourteen years after the other, they took separate paths. One man lingered in the public eye for two decades, fighting for redemption. The other disappeared, almost overnight. Their correspondence lasted thirty-five years. Their letters are always friendly, respectful, and proper. But they only begin to tell the story.

  10

  “You’ll Have My Promise—I’ll Speak No Evil”

  —RONALD REAGAN

  Richard Nixon could not get through.

  On the June night in 1966 that former actor Ronald Reagan had defeated all comers in California’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Richard Nixon, still stinking of the defeats of 1960 and 1962, could not raise the party’s new phenom on the telephone.

  Reagan had trounced—flattened is a better description—George Christopher, the moderate Republican mayor of San Francisco, winning all but three of the state’s fifty-eight counties (and he very nearly won two of those). Nixon, the last Republican to win the gubernatorial nomination, was unable to get a congratulatory phone call through. The telephone lines from New York to Los Angeles were all jammed, as sometimes happened in those days. Western Union was in the midst of a strike. And so Nixon was forced to reach out to the Republicans’ hottest property in the worst possible way: through the U.S. mail.

  “Your primary race was conducted with great ability, dignity and effectiveness,” Nixon wrote Reagan, apologizing for resorting to the Postal Service. “Your refusal to be baited into attacking your primary opponent tremendously enhances your chances in November.” Trading desperately on their shared Midwestern heritage—Reagan was born in Illinois; Nixon’s parents were from Ohio and Indiana—he added, “I am sure you know the assault on you will reach massive proportions in the press and on TV as [Pat] Brown and his cohort realize they are going to be thrown off the gravy train after eight pretty lush years. There is an old Midwestern expression (my roots are also in the Midwest) which I would urge you to bear in mind as the going gets tougher. ‘Just sit tight in the buggy.’”

  By the middle of 1966, Nixon had been courting and advising Ronald Reagan for nearly twenty years. But now Reagan’s path began to diverge from Nixon’s; and though both men took pains to disguise the fact, Nixon and Reagan were no longer allies.

  Instead, they were heading for a brawl.

  “The Movie Star?”

  The two men met in the summer of 1947, when a thirty-four-year-old freshman congressman sat down for a private conversation with a thirty-six-year-old actor in California. Nixon had heard from his political patrons that Reagan, the new president of the Screen Actors Guild, was concerned about communist infiltration of his trade union. To a junior member on the House Labor Committee, which was then investigating communist influence in American power centers, this was a tip worth checking out. And so Nixon paid Reagan a visit while he was back in his home state that spring.

  They had more in common than they might have imagined: both were Depression kids who spent happy times in the spotlight at small-town colleges (both men played football and pursued drama), and both by 1947 had young, growing families. But they were otherwise a study in contrasts. Nixon, a Navy vet who’d won a seat in Congress from Orange County the November before, was making a name for himself as a sharpie who was going places. Reagan was in the early days of shooting a dreadful movie with Shirley Temple entitled That Hagen Girl, but was spending a growing portion of his time on union politics as his film career began to turn down. Certainly, Dick and Ron were political opposites: Nixon a conservative Republican on the rise; Reagan an outspoken FDR Democrat in a town where politics didn’t matter. Where Nixon was reserved to the point of awkwardness, Reagan was relaxed and charming, having cavorted with starlets and sported with other leading men for more than a decade. Reagan’s first job out of college was as a football play-by-play man at a radio station in Davenport, Iowa; after law school, Nixon sought a job with the FBI.

  Reagan looked like an ideal witness for Nixon’s committee. “I was particularly impressed by his attitude and I b
elieve that he can be extremely helpful in the committee’s investigation,” Nixon reported to Herman Perry, the Whittier banker who had first urged him to run for Congress. “Reagan would make a particularly good witness in view of the fact that he is classified as a liberal and as such could not be accused of simply being a red baiting reactionary.”

  Reagan did testify in Washington that fall; and Nixon was present for the hearing, though he asked no questions and the actor’s remarks were largely inconsequential. And so the Nixon-Reagan partnership went dormant.

  The two men had little contact until 1959. In the interim, Reagan had divorced, remarried, moved away from the movie business, and begun traveling the nation for General Electric, giving speeches to its employees—his liberal antifascist philosophy slowly morphing into a conservative antigovernment outlook. Nixon, meanwhile, had defeated a former Hollywood actress (and friend of Reagan’s) turned congresswoman named Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate after Nixon labeled her “pink down to her underwear”; and then was lifted to the vice presidency under Dwight Eisenhower at the unlikely age of forty.

  In 1959, as Nixon prepared to mount his own bid for the White House, Reagan again crossed his path. This time, he appeared in the form of a speech, called “Business, Ballots and Bureaus,” sent to Nixon by an ally in New York City. The speech, which was Reagan’s standard stump, was an appealing mash-up of conservative principles, anecdotes about government waste, and stories from American history. It is hard to imagine that Nixon found it remarkable, but being on the verge of a nationwide campaign and knowing Reagan spoke to hundreds, if not thousands, of people each month in his role as GE’s spokesman, Nixon saw the chance to reconnect with the man he had met twelve years earlier. “I thought you did an excellent job of analyzing our present tax situation,” Nixon wrote. “In recent months, I have been greatly encouraged by the apparent trend on the part of the American people to question the tax and tax, spend and spend . . . elect and elect philosophy. . . . I hope that you will have many opportunities to repeat your wise words.” In a brief postscript, Nixon mentioned that he recalled how the two men had met in 1947.