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

by Nancy Gibbs

  The next day, wearing the bulletproof vests that made each man seem stiff, the three presidents attended the sprawling funeral held on the outskirts of the city. It proved to be a spooky and unsettling occasion. Mindful of the way several million Egyptians had disrupted Gamal Abdel Nasser’s funeral in 1970, Egyptian authorities held services for the decidedly less popular Sadat well away from the city’s teeming population. The former presidents gathered in a large pavilion and then began a half-mile walk with leaders from dozens of other nations to Sadat’s final resting place—a tomb directly opposite the very reviewing stand where he had been assassinated just four days before. “It was like being in Aida,” recalled Johnson. “There was something almost operatic about it.”

  And something frightening. The mourners marched eight hundred yards through a gauntlet of well-armed Egyptian troops, who lined the parade route on both right and left. Everyone was thinking the same dark thought: a repeat of the massacre of just a few days before, when Islamic radicals dressed as Egyptian army troops came rolling out of a truck to murder Sadat and many of his party. “We were walking in a long line, very spread out,” Dunsmore recalled. “I was close to Kissinger, who was walking with Menachem Begin. I think the presidents were just ahead of us. At a certain point in the procession, a group of Egyptian guards, their rifles not pointed directly at us but certainly in a ready position, blocked our way. All of a sudden, everyone went stiff and turned white with fear because there were at least a dozen of these soldiers in front of us. Given what had happened here just a few days before, we were all terrified. It was one of the scariest moments of my life.”

  Finally, someone barked an order in Arabic and the soldiers parted. The experience left nearly everyone in the party convinced that Reagan and Bush had been right not to attend. Ford in particular found it unnerving. “The whole thing was surreal,” said Johnson. “The assassination hung in the air. We reached the grandstand and we could see the blood that was still there.” A makeshift tomb awaited nearby. So did a plaque that read: President Mohommed Anwar Sadat, hero of war and peace. He lived for peace and he was martyred for his principles. Apparently, Sadat himself had written the epitaph three years earlier. Then a twenty-one-gun salute began, but most of the VIPs dashed for their limos before it was over. The whole thing felt like an anticlimax. But the trip was only half over.

  Where Did Nixon Go?

  Earlier that morning, an ABC producer woke up the network’s Steve Bell, who was in Cairo covering the funeral for Good Morning America. Dunsmore was breaking off from the trip, the producer explained. Might Bell be willing to fly back to Washington with the former presidents later that day? Count me in, said Bell. The flight back could be historic. And thanks in no small measure to Bell, it was.

  When the U.S. delegation arrived at the Cairo airport later that morning for the flight home, Egyptian ground personnel had wheeled one—and only one—boarding stairs up to the blue, white, and gold-trimmed 707. That may not sound remarkable, but to the three reporters, it was nothing short of miraculous: it meant that they would get the chance to board the plane through the same door as the presidents, dignitaries, and other VIPs for the ride back home, rather than the rear door. And that meant that they would get thirty seconds, perhaps more if they were lucky, to strike up a conversation as they moved through the front of the plane.

  That was all Bell needed. He climbed the stairs, entered the plane near the cockpit, and then turned right to head back to the press section. He ran almost immediately into Carter and, after introducing himself (he had covered the Carter White House), Bell said, “Mr. President, would you consider doing a joint interview with the other presidents?” Carter replied, “I don’t think so,” to which Bell responded, “Forgive me, Mr. President, but sharing the experience of being president I’d think you would be closer to each other than anyone but your wives.” Carter said with his trademark smile, “I’ll think about it.”

  Bell was no sooner back in the rear of the plane with Johnson and UPI’s Jim Anderson than the three made a formal request for a joint interview with the former presidents through advance man Robert Barrett. The interview would have to be on the record—and would be pooled to all news organizations upon landing. Barrett took the request back to the front of the plane.

  But on the way forward, Barrett met a Secret Service agent who reported that Nixon would not be coming along for the ride. The news startled Barrett, who had not heard about Nixon’s clandestine mission to Jidda. Barrett quickly secured the consent of Ford and Carter for an interview and returned to the press section. “I have some good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that the presidents would be delighted to talk on the way back. The bad news is that there are only two of them.”

  Said a stunned Haynes Johnson, “That goddamned Nixon! Where did he go?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” replied Barrett, “but I will try to find out.”

  Meanwhile, in the front of the plane, something even more important was unfolding. For Carter and Ford, time was collapsing. Their four-year feud was dissolving during the long, relaxed flight home.

  How did that happen? For starters, they had the magical plane to themselves again. The absurd Haig had stayed behind in the region and the furtive Nixon had diverted to Saudi Arabia. “The absence of Nixon made a huge difference,” Johnson recalled years later. “Not having that pallid, viral figure meant it was much more relaxed.” And there was another factor too: “We had survived,” he said. “The bulletproof vests came off, we moved around more freely, everyone was talking about how strange the funeral was.” Alcohol was served on Air Force One if you knew which steward to ask and there were surely a few requests for cocktails after the events in Cairo.

  Besides, death has a way of rearranging perspective and Carter and Ford realized how silly their grievances and disagreements had been. Barrett recalled that Ford, Carter, Kissinger, and Rosalynn spent part of the first leg back conducting what he called a Ph.D. course in Middle East politics. The conversation grew very animated, even heated at times, particularly as the men discussed the lingering hostilities in the United Nations toward Israel. When the three reporters came forward after a refueling stop for their interview, they found Ford and Carter sitting opposite each other at a table, each in shirtsleeves. Carter wore a tie; Ford’s collar was open. There was no camera crew; only a still photographer. Johnson and Anderson took notes while Bell kneeled on the floor of the plane and moved his tape recorder back and forth between the two presidents so that his tiny device picked up all the words over the roar of the engines.

  What the reporters got was an unusually frank—and bipartisan—dissection of dysfunction in the Middle East. “It is almost impossible for an Arab to step forward [in favor of peace] because of a threat of assassination or violence within their own fragile government,” Carter said. “They don’t have the stability of Sadat. Jordan has a weak nation. [Jordan’s King Hussein] is a weak leader. . . . And of course the Saudi Arabians also have a fragile country with a tiny population, no great military strength and enormous wealth. So they don’t have the courage of a Sadat.” Ford was no less candid when he more or less accused moderate Arab leaders of hypocrisy, of being “as anxious as Sadat was for peace. For various internal reasons, they can’t publicly come out and say what they tell me or tell President Carter or tell others.”

  Each man provided the other a lot of cover; and the club began to speak with one voice. Carter and Ford said the United States must recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization in order to advance the cause of Middle East peace. Ford said the United States needed to take that step and then predicted it would happen; Carter sketched the outlines of a possible deal: the United States should recognize the PLO at the same time the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist. “At some point it has to happen,” said Ford. “I don’t want to pick a date, but in a realistic way, that dialogue has to take place.” Carter was more emphatic: “There is no way for Israel ever t
o have an assured permanent peace without resolving the Palestinian issue so I think Jerry is certainly right in saying these discussions have to be done.” Taken together, their comments were a significant departure from official U.S. policy and everyone who was listening knew it. Johnson reported that the “frankness of the former presidents’ comments troubled some of the diplomats aboard the plane.”

  But the two men were just warming up. Though somewhat formal at the outset, their conversation had quickly turned more casual and everyone noticed that the presidents were virtually finishing each other’s sentences by the end, using their first names, going out of their way to praise each other on various issues. The session was a complete turnaround from the brittle formality of a few days before. “You could see the two of them were really engaged,” recalled Johnson. And when they were asked about the roles former presidents could play, the two men all but declared the club was back in business. “I believe this example of President Carter, President Nixon and myself participating in a mission,” said Ford, “is an excellent example of how former presidents can be brought back into service.”

  The session had gone on for more than thirty minutes, both men leaning toward each other. Someone asked, “Final thoughts?” Carter replied, “No, that is good.” And then the two men shook hands.

  Anderson, Johnson, and Bell returned to the rear of the plane and pinched themselves. Something astonishing had just taken place, they agreed, something none of them had really expected. Johnson and Anderson began to type out their notes. A transcript was produced and before the plane landed, Jody Powell was back in his old role as press wrangler, charged with running the Xerox. Within days, the presidents’ remarks shook official Washington. Columnist Mary McGrory called the session a rare burst of “out of office outspokenness.” Reagan had to distance himself from what his predecessors said. And in a reminder of the days when Washington reporters routinely self-censored, Joseph Alsop, the aging voice of Washington’s wisest elders, chastised the pool scribes for reporting the interview in the first place.

  But up front, the parley continued. The two men talked about how Carter’s arms control work on SALT II had built on Ford’s work at Vladivostok. They talked about the difficulty of safeguarding cruise missiles. They commiserated about how difficult it was to organize their presidential papers in a timely way. After five years of distrust, they mutually disarmed. “We found,” Ford said later, “that we had a lot of things in common.”

  Before long, they weren’t just talking about partnerships, they were forging them. Carter agreed to attend a conference at the Ford library; Ford volunteered to cochair several projects being launched by the Carter Center. Both men were somewhat surprised by their change in feelings. “We had hours in the plane, in a private compartment, just the two of us, to talk over previous relationships and what our children were doing and the interests Betty and Rosalynn had,” Carter said. “One of the things that we felt bound us together particularly was an onerous and mandatory task of raising money to build our presidential libraries.”

  Even among the few people who were privy to the fact that the two men had buried the hatchet at 35,000 feet, none could have imagined how harmonious the relationship would become over time. During the next three decades, Ford and Carter would team up on dozens of projects. They wrote a Reader’s Digest article in 1983 that was critical of Israel. They joined forces to push the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and jointly opposed a plan to legalize drugs in California in 1996. Their wives even teamed up from time to time.

  Perhaps most remarkably, they each agreed, whichever died first, to give the eulogy at the funeral of the other, a job that fell to Carter in December 2006—more than twenty-five years after the historic flight to Cairo.

  REAGAN AND NIXON:

  The Exile Returns

  Jerry Ford may have pardoned Richard Nixon, but it was Ronald Reagan who put him back in the game. Which was a little ironic because Nixon never thought much of Reagan, at least not when he first contemplated him as commander in chief. “Decent” but “shallow” were the words he used to describe Reagan in a 1971 Oval Office conversation with Henry Kissinger, a chat during which Nixon kept returning to the frightening prospect of Reagan becoming president. Nixon had been leery of Reagan since their strange primary contest in 1968; by 1973, with the race to replace Nixon already visible on a distant horizon, Nixon again found the prospect of Reagan taking his place unthinkable. “Good God,” Nixon waxed. “Can you imagine—can you really imagine—him sitting here?”

  But Reagan’s election in 1980 gave Nixon a chance to make a new start, to enjoy at least probationary privileges in the club whose other members—Carter and Ford—had little or no use for him. Enough time had passed since his resignation in 1974 for Nixon to start stepping out in public and working his levers behind the scenes. Nixon would earn Reagan’s confidence, offering advice as a private, back-channel problem solver, one president to another. This was a role that conveniently matched both Nixon’s preference for secrecy and, given his still tarnished public reputation, made it easier for Reagan to swallow. While that role took shape, Nixon worked to rehabilitate himself in public, writing books, giving speeches, holding forth on foreign policy questions as a private citizen. In his public remarks, Nixon was always careful to support Reagan even if he didn’t agree with him. Reagan repaid Nixon in the way Ford and Carter had not, by asking for his advice early and often—and then taking it.

  17

  “I Am Yours to Command”

  —RICHARD NIXON

  The help started even before Reagan reached the Oval Office. In September 1980, Nixon wrote Reagan a three-page, single-spaced letter offering detailed suggestions about how to handle Carter in the final weeks of the campaign. Nixon urged Reagan to dodge any debate with Carter unless third party candidate John Anderson was included. Nixon pressed Reagan, a seasoned performer, to feign political stage fright, in order to lower expectations about his competence as a debater. He advised Reagan to hire Pat Buchanan to “come up with some good lines” but strongly urged him to take a few days off before the big event. “How you look is if anything more important than what you say,” Nixon said. “Let Carter come over uptight, nitpicking and mean. You should be a contrast, strong but not shrill; in command, poised, the big man versus the little man.”

  Nixon even urged Reagan to hold his final campaign rallies indoors, the better to preserve his voice.

  Once Reagan had crushed Carter and tossed all hopes for a new Democratic revival aside, Nixon turned from being a campaign consultant to an unofficial White House guide. What would a former California governor know of all the traps and traditions of the nation’s capital? Nixon would be Reagan’s Baedeker, reclaiming some of his old powers by helping Reagan deploy his new ones. On November 17, Nixon quietly handed Reagan another, longer letter, this one a blueprint for constructing his presidency, along with specific recommendations for most of the top cabinet positions (as well as far less important posts such as head of the General Services Administration). It included shrewd prescriptions for making the White House work better: Nixon urged Reagan to focus on diversity in his appointments to subcabinet posts. (“It is time once and for all to erase the image of the Republican party as white, Anglo Saxon and Protestant.”) He proposed that Reagan make certain that none of his National Security Council aides were closet liberals; and he suggested that Reagan kick senior White House aides out of the cabinet meetings, and instead invite in promising deputies to groom a second-term farm team.

  But at the heart of Nixon’s single-spaced, eleven-page letter was a thinly disguised plea that Reagan tap Nixon’s longtime spear-carrier and spy Alexander Haig as secretary of state. This campaign was a twofer: Nixon had written the letter on the very day that press reports were hinting that former Nixon labor and treasury chief George Shultz was the odds-on favorite for State. Nixon was never a Shultz fan; their enmity dated to a flat-out refusal by Shultz in 1972 to unleash
the IRS on a number of Nixon enemies. But Nixon was pushing Haig for another reason: having the former four-star general on the seventh floor of the State Department would give him a direct line to both foreign intelligence and U.S. decision making. Nixon naturally did not mention this to Reagan; instead he sold the president-elect an unusually large helping of hokum about how Haig would “reassure the Europeans, give pause to the Russians, and in addition, because of over five years as Henry [Kissinger]’s deputy in the White House and two years at NATO, he has acquired a great deal of experience in dealing with the Chinese, the Japanese, the various factions in the Mideast, the Africans and the Latin Americans. Those who oppose him because they think he is ‘soft’ are either ignorant or stupid. Others who raise the specter that he was somehow involved in Watergate simply don’t know the facts.”

  And then Nixon added a final grace note, though it would prove a promise far easier to make than to keep. “As far as my own personal situation is concerned, I do not, as you know, seek any official position. However, I would welcome the opportunity to provide advice in areas where I have special experience to you,” he wrote. “President Eisenhower said to me when I visited him at Walter Reed Hospital after the election of 1968, ‘I am yours to command.’

  “I now say the same to you. I trust that that can be our relationship in the years ahead.”

  In a handwritten note five days later, Reagan thanked Nixon for the “sound” suggestions in both letters. “I followed your advice regarding those last campaign days although I couldn’t manage to get all the [rallies] indoors. But I did stick with the proven campaign speech and the polls kept going up a point or two each day. I can’t thank you enough for the guidelines you have [given] me on personnel and the cabinet meeting suggestions—this will be done.”