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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Sincerely,

  Dick

  Reagan replied twelve days later and let Nixon off the hook just as Nixon had done for him in July.

  August 16, 1967

  Dear Dick,

  Thanks for sending me the column. I’m quite sure the pace of this sort of thing will step up in the days ahead. I think it is very important that all of us on our side keep reminding ourselves and each other that we shouldn’t believe any quotes unless we hear them first hand. I’m always reminded of the Hollywood days and how the people in our business would read the gossip columns and your first reaction was always how dishonest they were about yourself, but two paragraphs later you’re believing every word when they talk about someone else.

  Sincerely,

  Ron

  Then Reagan went back to campaigning.

  In October, he raised $350,000 at a dinner in Columbia, South Carolina, the biggest fund-raising banquet in the state’s history. The next night, in Wisconsin, thousands jammed Milwaukee’s cavernous Municipal Arena (some paying $100 a plate; others $5 just to sit unfed in the balcony) to hear Reagan give his trademark speech. “We have some hippies in California,” Reagan told the crowd. “For those of you who don’t know what a hippie is, he’s a fellow who has hair like Tarzan, who walks like Jane and who smells like Cheetah.”

  Reagan campaigned in Oregon in November and then went to Connecticut in December, where he wooed Yalies with talk of a volunteer military and insisted that “anyone would have to be out of his skull to want to be President.”

  But with the publicity Reagan was getting, he’d have been out of his mind to stop. In mid-October Time splashed both Reagan and Rockefeller on its cover, suggesting that only by harnessing its two undeclared candidates could Republicans defeat LBJ and Hubert Humphrey. The cover story bent over backward to ignore Nixon’s existence or any role he might play in 1968, except for a remark or two leveled obliquely at Reagan. “In a world series game,” Nixon was permitted to say, “they often call on the seasoned hitter whose recent batting average isn’t so good, but who is reliable in a pinch. The next president must have that same judgment, coolness and poise. It can’t be his first world series.”

  The Western Star

  When it finally got under way in 1968, Reagan’s public campaign was a little odd. Inexperience, just as Nixon had alleged, was its hallmark. Reagan sat out the early states and did not campaign much where he was on the ballot, while Nixon rolled up delegates. When Rockefeller pulled out of the race in March, Nixon phoned aide Bill Safire and said, “The only one who can stop us is Reagan.” A week later, Nixon wrote Reagan a veiled cease-and-desist order under cover of a thank-you note.

  April 4, 1968

  Dear Ron,

  Now that the results of the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries are in, I just want you to know how much I have appreciated your using your influence to discourage some of your very enthusiastic supporters who understandably wanted to launch a major campaign on your behalf in those states.

  I understand completely the very difficult position you are in due to the necessity of your maintaining your Favorite Son position in California. Whatever happens in the balance of the primaries, you can be sure we shall all be working together for victory in November.

  With best personal regards,

  Sincerely,

  Dick

  Reagan fired a note right back, which pretended not to hear what Nixon was asking.

  April 10, 1968

  Dear Dick,

  Congratulations on your excellent showing in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. It’s truly good of you to take the time to write and I greatly appreciate hearing from you.

  I’m especially happy to know you understand the touchy position I’m in at this time maintaining a neutral stand while running as California’s Favorite Son.

  My wish, like yours, is to have a united Republican Party behind our candidate in November.

  Sincerely,

  Ron

  And then Reagan went to work to become that candidate.

  He did a speaking swing in April in Idaho and Colorado, and then captured 22 percent of the vote in Nebraska after spending only $13,500 there. Reagan, Nixon told reporters, had done “very well.” Reagan reset his sights on the Oregon primary in late May and there he made his biggest charge, running twenty-second and sixty-second television and radio ads comparing Nixon’s poor 1962 showing against Pat Brown to his own triumph over Brown four years later. His aides distributed 750,000 flyers in Oregon newspapers and tried to win CBS’s permission to rebroadcast his triumphant debate with Bobby Kennedy. (CBS declined.) But again Nixon trounced him, this time by a three-to-one margin. Less than a week later, running unopposed, Reagan won the California primary. But his win went unnoticed because Kennedy was assassinated late that night in a Los Angeles hotel.

  So did the fact that Reagan came out at the end of the 1968 primaries with more popular votes than Nixon.

  But delegates, not voters, matter in nomination contests. Even though the primaries were over and Nixon had the nomination virtually sewn up, Reagan kept on fighting. He next launched a swing through a handful of Southern and border states, which, under the cover of party fund-raising, was a last-ditch hunt for stray and undecided delegates. Reagan flew from Sacramento to Amarillo to Little Rock to Charlottesville, and then on to Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Kentucky, and finally to Birmingham. This barnstorming tour was doomed to fail, but it gave Reagan his first real taste of nonstop presidential campaigning. Reporters tracking Reagan’s movements closely noted that virtually everyone at a meeting of Kentucky’s Republican delegates asked for a picture with him. Lou Cannon, covering the odyssey for the San Jose Mercury News, reported that not a single delegate at such events switched sides to Reagan. The faithful were shopping, but not buying.

  Nixon certainly noticed what Reagan was doing. He recalled later that Reagan flew Southern delegates to California for conversation and courtship and, when he arrived in Miami Beach, made the rounds of key hotels, “charming the delegates with his personality and speaking ability.” Perhaps the strangest part of the brief campaign was that Reagan waited until the last possible moment to publicly admit that he was running at all. On Sunday, August 4, on the eve of the convention, Reagan made official what he had been up to for nearly two years. “Once I’m placed in nomination,” he announced on Face the Nation, “I am a candidate, if the delegates choose to consider me along with those who have been campaigning, this they are free to do.”

  This was a strange last-minute maneuver, so unexpected that Nancy Reagan learned about it from the radio. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Reagan aides cornered delegates and urged them to remain uncommitted until after a first ballot. If Nixon could be halted on the first count, they argued, Reagan could emerge as the party’s preferred choice later on. Even at the eleventh hour, with the feet of most of the Republican establishment locked in concrete, Reagan doubled down. “The marriage of convenience between Rockefeller and Reagan was now operating at full force,” Nixon observed. “Rockefeller worked on the northern and Midwestern states while Reagan tried to breach my southern flank.”

  The announced campaign of Reagan was short-lived—a matter of just a few days. For all his team’s efforts to keep questions about Nixon’s viability alive, Reagan’s chances slipped away fast once the voting began. Nixon quickly rolled up the 667 delegates needed for the nomination on the first ballot. There was no need for Reagan’s complex, second-ballot strategy because there was no second ballot. Sometime after 2 A.M. on August 8, as defeat neared, Reagan rushed to the podium and pleaded to be recognized. And when he finally got the floor, he asked the convention to “declare itself unanimously and unitedly behind the candidate Richard Nixon as the next President of the United States.”

  And that was how Reagan’s first race for the presidency ended: the same man who had worked to deprive Nixon of the nomination rushed to deliver the prize once it was out of his reach.

 
; The final delegate tally: Nixon 697, Rockefeller 277, Reagan 182.

  Only one question remained: who would be Nixon’s running mate? Buchanan, Sears, and Richard Whalen, a young campaign speechwriter, urged Nixon to put Reagan on the ticket as a way to peel away white Southern Democrats who were leaning toward Alabama governor George Wallace. By midsummer, Wallace was attracting nearly a quarter of the vote in some polls and Nixon’s men were determined to find a way to cut that bloc down to size. By Sears’s analysis, Wallace would get several dozen Electoral College votes in the South, but with Reagan as his number two, Nixon could shrink that number to perhaps half that. In a state-by-state analysis, Sears argued that Reagan was “the only officeholder in the country who can out-talk and out-campaign George Wallace.” Pat Buchanan made a similar argument in a separate paper that suggested that Nixon could take the high road if Reagan were free to court the Wallace vote. “We are going to have to be bold to win this one,” Buchanan argued, “and I can currently think of nothing bolder than to put the hero of Bedtime For Bonzo on the GOP ticket.”

  Richard Allen, Nixon’s foreign policy research chief, had begun the summer thinking Nixon needed a moderate sidekick, such as Illinois’s Chuck Percy, to appeal to liberal voters. But as the Wallace boomlet grew, he changed sides and argued internally for putting Reagan on the ticket because the California governor could appeal to white Southerners without sounding divisive. “With [Reagan], there is no crude appeal—his ‘old time’ religion is founded on the very elements which are missing today: law, order, patriotism, thrift—and in language which the common man can understand.”

  At the heart of all these memos was the still unproven idea that the nation was moving to the right. Not everyone in Nixon’s camp believed it; not everyone had seen in the 1966 election results the beginning of a giant, forty-year tide; but conservatives in Nixon’s inner circle argued that putting a liberal or moderate on the ticket would be a huge misreading of voters’ growing antiliberal, antitolerant, antiestablishment mood—and would only bolster Wallace’s hand.

  In a memo to Nixon, Allen went so far as to say that the liberal establishment was horrified by Nixon and would be doubly horrified by Reagan—which made it all the more imperative to put Reagan on the ticket. “The Establishment forbids a Nixon presidency. Thus all who consume and swear by the Establishment views are votes lost forever, votes we cannot capture.”

  But that idea was still a little too radical for Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president.

  And so in the end, it came down to the human factor. Richard Whalen went so far as to personally make the case for Reagan to Nixon, who dismissed his young aide with a wave and the comment, “[Reagan’s] just an actor.” But veterans of that campaign say that language was Nixon’s personal code for a deeper worry. Sears and others believed that Nixon feared that the telegenic Reagan might simply outshine him on the stump, just as Henry Cabot Lodge had done in 1960 when they were on the same ticket. “He didn’t want to go through that again,” Sears recalled. “All things being equal, Nixon probably should have picked Reagan. But Nixon would not consider it.” Whalen recalled that the entire subject was a sensitive one for Nixon. “The more attractive we made Reagan appear, the less he appealed to Nixon, who would suffer from the inevitable side-by-side comparison.” Buchanan, who had traveled with Nixon through much of the race, added, “Nixon clearly did not think Reagan was in his league.”

  In the end, Nixon surprised much of the Republican Party by picking Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, someone who would never upstage the real star of the ticket.

  The battle of Dick and Ron was quickly forgotten in the ensuing fights over the general election campaign. Not many people outside conservative circles took Reagan seriously or imagined that he would run twice more before becoming president. But the Kabuki race between them altered their relationship. Years later, Nixon pointedly recalled in his memoirs that Reagan’s “unifying gesture” during the roll call vote was “in keeping with his posture of being a strong party man” (italics added). Reagan’s two-year dance of the veils left some scars.

  And not just on Nixon. Reagan, for his part, left most of the 1968 story out of his memoirs; and where he did write of the campaign, he cast it almost entirely as a crusade conceived, directed, and produced by others, sometimes, if not always, against his will. Even after his name was placed in nomination, Reagan insisted, he was angry at the implications. And when Nixon won on the first ballot, he wrote, no one was happier than he was. As he put it decades later in his memoirs, “When Nixon was nominated, I was the most relieved person in the world. I knew I wasn’t ready to be president.”

  With twenty years’ hindsight, maybe not. But at the time, it seemed like a shot worth taking. In a September 1968 letter to two of his oldest friends, Lorraine and Elwood Wagner, with whom he’d maintained a long correspondence, Reagan admitted that he had boldly rolled the dice in Miami Beach. “The convention was exciting and you are right about the first ballot. If he hadn’t made it on that one, the ball game was over because of the number of delegates who were pledged for only one round and intended changing votes on the second. Anyway, we’ll work our heads off to elect him.”

  JOHNSON AND NIXON:

  Two Scorpions in a Bottle

  The club is bound together by an unspoken pledge to protect the presidency; but its members are often driven by an even more fierce desire to protect a legacy.

  For most presidents, those missions coincide. But with the arrival at center stage of two of the century’s larger and more devious characters, the club came under pressure in ways that threatened to tear it, and the country, apart. Over five years, across three continents, through two presidential campaigns, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson played one of the great political chess matches of all time; great because the stakes were so high, the moves so complex—and because both sides cheated.

  At issue was the Vietnam War—the war that Henry Kissinger warned was one of those tragic, cursed messes that destroy any president who touches it. More than anything, Johnson wanted to leave office as the Peacemaker, so that the sacrifices—of lives and treasure and his own presidential dreams—had not been wasted. Nixon privately promised to help end the war with honor and share the credit. Johnson believed him, embraced him, conspired with him as the 1968 campaign unfolded, right up until he discovered that Nixon had betrayed him, by secretly disrupting the Vietnam peace process to assure his own victory.

  That left Johnson with a choice: protect his dream, or protect the office. He chose the latter. In a year of blood and fire, that had seen heroes slain and consensus shredded, how could he add the trauma of accusing a newly elected president of something close to treason? And so Johnson would remain silent. For the time being.

  Nixon of course saw it all very differently: he had saved the country from a bad peace deal cut by a desperate president looking for redemption. If that meant denying Johnson his redemption—and perhaps missing a chance to shorten the war—it was a price Nixon was willing to pay. He was going to be a great president. The country needed him. He had earned this, after so many years of patient planning and serial humiliations. He would show them all.

  What unfolded in late 1968 was the club’s first dirty war. And the choices each man made would set the country on a path that would end with a president’s resignation, and change American politics forever.

  11

  “This Is Treason”

  —LYNDON JOHNSON

  Unlike the Eisenhower-Truman feud, the Johnson-Nixon matchup was not personal. “I never shared the intense dislike of Richard Nixon felt by many of my fellow Democrats,” Johnson wrote in his memoirs. In fact they had much in common; their humble roots, their devout mothers and loutish fathers, their resentment of the silver-spooned, their promiscuous relationship with the truth. But where Nixon was awkward, pinched, a man with his arms forever folded across his chest, Johnson was expansive, invasive, desperately needing to be loved where Nixon never expected
to be.

  It was the cagey, courtly Bryce Harlow, who had coached so many presidents in the ring, who explained the twisted dynamic between the two men. “I’d compare the President and Dick Nixon to a couple of fighting roosters, circling each other, with knives attached to the spurs,” he said. “Nothing will happen, mind you, unless one makes the first move.”

  Nixon owed Johnson, among others, a debt for his restoration as a Republican contender. He may have spent the years since his 1960 defeat building his organization and collecting IOUs, but he was still a loser; the Republican Party was so thoroughly headless that in November 1965, Newsweek put a handsome junior congressman named John Lindsay on its cover, christening him “the most exciting and important politician” of his age. Bookies put the odds of a Nixon comeback at a thousand to one.

  It would take the 1966 midterm elections to rehabilitate Nixon—thanks largely to Johnson, who alone as president had the power to elevate an adversary as his equal. That spring, the two men made a gentleman’s agreement regarding their coming proxy war. At the Gridiron Dinner in March, Johnson invited Nixon to come by the White House for coffee the next morning. “He had stayed up late after the dinner,” Nixon recalled. “He had developed a terrible sore throat, laryngitis, and was in bed.” Eight years as Ike’s vice president, and this was the first time Nixon had ever been upstairs in the private quarters, where Johnson sat in his pajamas in the great king-sized bed. They talked about Vietnam and China—and the coming campaign, in which each would be key surrogates for his party’s candidates. “I know you will understand and not take any criticism I make on issues as being directed personally at you,” Nixon said.