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

by Nancy Gibbs

  The meeting effectively ended the partnership between the two men on U.S.-Soviet relations; they had grown too far apart in outlook to team up behind the scenes again. Their work together in Reagan’s final year would be limited to politics—and the lessons each had learned the hard way.

  Ike and Dick and Ron and George

  From: The Reagan Diaries

  Thursday, July 28, 1988

  . . . Lunch with George B. We talked possible V.P. cand’s. Both of us are without a firm choice. . . . Then the Bush campaign spot ads and finally upstairs to await visit by Richard Nixon. As always, he had some campaign suggestions that make great good sense.

  By now, Reagan was a lame duck, modestly popular at home, wrapping up a handful of items on his to-do-before-I-go list. The men around him were busy trying to figure out how to continue the Reagan revolution in spirit since they couldn’t extend the Reagan presidency itself. And because of his Eisenhower days, no one had a more acute understanding of what was involved in extracting a vice president from the shadow of a popular president—while retaining the incumbent’s sheen of power—than Richard Nixon.

  Sometime during the early summer of 1988, Reagan White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein called Nixon at home in New Jersey with a question: What should a sitting president do—or not do—in his final months to help his vice president win the top job? Might Nixon be available sometime to discuss the problem?

  It had been a busy winter for Nixon, finishing another book, talking privately with select reporters at his home in New Jersey, and above all keeping a close eye on the 1988 campaign. Nixon watched that contest with a mixture of pride and wonder as two of his protégés, Bush and Bob Dole, arm-wrestled for the Republican nomination. Though Nixon had groomed, promoted, and advised both men at different points over several decades, he had long favored Dole. Bush was a turn too smooth and well-born for Nixon’s taste and he feared that Bush might not be tough enough to stand up to a Democratic challenge—much less a Russian one. By contrast, Dole was the kind of small-town scrappy infighter that Nixon imagined himself to be; indeed, Dole’s great weakness was that he sometimes came off as too tough and unforgiving—as a little too much like Nixon himself. Though he struck a pose of neutrality in the months leading up to 1988, “Nixon was for Dole,” explained a Bush aide who managed the relationship, “Quietly.” In a private memo to just a few friends that winter, Nixon described Bush as “weak” while praising Dole as “strong and courageous.” After Bush lost the early caucuses in Iowa to Dole, Nixon diagnosed the vice president with a case of “insufficient drive.” But when Bush battled back in mid-February to win in New Hampshire, Nixon reported that Bush had “really come into his own.” If Nixon admired the winner in Bush, he admired the survivor even more. “It is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up,” he told Time that spring. “Renewal. Americans are crazy about renewal.”

  Nixon was betting on that. He appeared on Meet the Press on April 10, his first appearance on TV in eight years, and led viewers on a tour of world affairs and his controversial presidency. He admitted to fouling up Watergate and regretted only that he hadn’t bombed Vietnam earlier. During the commercial breaks, he joked about his habit of perspiring on camera. (“I’m famous for that,” he said.) He dismissed all the criticism of Reagan for trading arms for hostages in the Iran-contra affair and then reviewed some of the 1988 campaign’s most memorable performances. “The best politics is poetry, not prose,” Nixon said. “Jesse Jackson is a poet. Mario Cuomo is a poet and [Michael] Dukakis is a word processor.” As for the national mood, Nixon said he sensed “a restlessness amid prosperity.” A few days later, Nixon told a gathering of newspaper editors that Bush would beat Dukakis in November. “The election is close with Bush winning by a nose and it will be decided in California.” He urged Bush to pick Dole as his running mate but noted, “Bush can pick anyone—nobody is going to hurt him.”

  In mid-April, Nixon dined privately with the vice president and his wife, Barbara, as well as campaign advisor Lee Atwater and his wife, all at the Naval Observatory. After the meal, Bush and Nixon met alone for an hour to talk. Nixon told Bush that his path to the presidency was clear but not by any means assured. According to the definitive account of the session by Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, Nixon urged Bush to take a hard line on crime and the Soviet Union to keep any Democratic rival off balance (Bush would do both); to develop a persona independent of Reagan’s while campaigning, but to wait until after the convention in August to do so (Bush followed this advice down to the letter, even when advisors were close to pulling out their hair). In addition, Nixon warned, Bush needed to be mindful about the reaction of the Republican right wing to his eventual choice of running mate—a lesson Nixon had learned the hard way in 1960, when he chose moderate Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his party’s conservative flank howled.

  And finally, Nixon urged Bush to do everything he could to lure Reagan back onto the campaign trail. Nixon had long believed that he had made a mistake by not pressing Eisenhower to help him in 1960.

  Bush took this all on board, well aware that much had changed since 1960 and that while Reagan had never been as widely popular as Ike, he remained plenty popular with Republicans.

  A few months later, in July, Nixon was in Washington and called Duberstein at the White House. If you come to my hotel, Nixon proposed—he preferred One Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom to the Lafayette Square clubhouse—we can discuss the 1988 campaign. Duberstein immediately took a car over from the West Wing.

  Nixon launched into a history lesson. He spoke about how difficult the separation problem had been for him in 1960, how little Eisenhower had done to help him. Nixon urged Duberstein to think carefully about how to deploy Reagan, but to find a way to get him out there on Bush’s behalf. Barely an hour had passed when Duberstein, sensing his opportunity, told the former president that while he was being extremely helpful, it would be even better if he could come back with him to the White House to brief Reagan in person.

  Nixon replied, “I would enjoy that if you think it would be helpful.” But then Nixon added: “I have a tendency to lecture.” No president likes lectures, particularly from former presidents with whom they have had textured relations—much less disagreements going back a generation or more. And so Nixon offered some strategic stage management. When we sit down with Reagan, he told Duberstein, “You could ask me questions.”

  Later that evening, Nixon was ushered in a back door of the West Wing and then up the small elevator to the residence. Nixon and Duberstein were joined in the West Sitting Hall by Reagan and Nancy.

  Reagan sat in an armchair, flanked by Nixon nearby on a red and white chintz sofa, hands folded in his lap. Nancy Reagan sat on Nixon’s left, on the same couch but at a safe distance. This was never going to be a fun visit; the events of the year before had put a strain on the friendship. Virtually throughout the unusual tutorial, there was little to no eye contact between Nixon and Reagan. Nixon, Duberstein guessed, knew that Nancy had her misgivings about any contact between her husband and the thirty-seventh president. And then there was that item in U.S. News & World Report a few months earlier, which quoted Nixon telling friends privately that Reagan could survive the Iran-contra mess simply by acting “stupid.”

  Still, the conversation about how to help Bush lasted an hour and before it ended, Nixon offered an unusually specific prophecy: Bush, he told Reagan, is going to call you in the last week of October and say that he needs you to campaign in California. Southern California in particular, Nixon predicted.

  Even Reagan rolled his eyes at this last touch, Duberstein recalled. Such was Nixon’s obsession with politics and power: he didn’t need merely to guide a president about how to handle the future; he needed to be able to predict it for him as well.

  The Last Campaign

  Over the next few months, Nixon would check in with Duberstein every week or so, getting the latest g
ossip, offering a running commentary on events at home and abroad, passing along political tips and hunches from his fraying network of listening posts around the country. Nixon urged Reagan to attack the Democrats in order to keep Dukakis off balance, particularly on national security. In mid-August, after the Republican convention in New Orleans, Nixon dashed off a handwritten note to Reagan praising his speech. “You have given George a great sendoff; it will be close but if he can make ideology the issue, it could mean 4 more years for the Reagan revolution.”

  In late October, just slightly more than a week before the election, Bush campaign manager James Baker phoned Duberstein. “We need the President in California on the final weekend, Ken. That will sew up the race so that we won’t have to worry about the other states.”

  Duberstein was speechless: Nixon’s prophecy had come true. And right on schedule too. Bush was running only slightly ahead of Dukakis in Illinois, Missouri, and, most critically, California. If the Republican team could simply hold California and its fifty-five electoral votes, Bush would not need to win the other close states to capture the presidency. Thus unfolded Baker’s plan for an eleventh-hour club fly-in—just as Nixon had predicted.

  The Bush campaign, Baker told Duberstein, hoped to send both Reagan and Gerald Ford to California during the final weekend of the campaign. The two-pronged club attack would energize voters and help nail down the Republican win.

  The next day, Duberstein called Nixon. “Are you sitting down?” he asked, explaining how he had heard from Baker and, just as Nixon had foreseen, the Bush forces had called on the White House for help in California. Then Duberstein added: “Thanks for the heads up.”

  Which is how it happened that, on the last weekend of the 1988 campaign, Ford went to Contra Costa County near San Francisco while Reagan flew south; first to Long Beach, where he addressed a rally of four thousand in a parking lot next to the Queen Mary, on which Reagan had traveled to England some forty years before. White House advance teams spared no expense: fireworks, water-spitting fireboats, a flyby of eleven World War II vintage T-6 airplanes in tight formation, and a dramatic launch of hundreds of red, white, and blue balloons.

  Then it was on to San Diego’s Civic Center where Reagan gave his final campaign speech. He played it for all it was worth: “Now please forgive me if from time to time over the next few minutes there seems to be a lump in my throat and a catch in my voice. This is a special moment for me in a special place and yes with special people. I closed both of my campaigns for the Presidency right here in San Diego . . . and when I finish in San Diego, I feel I’m with family and I know I’m with friends.”

  Reagan talked about his hardworking underemployed father, a shoe salesman who tried to keep his family fed through the Depression but who preferred to sleep in his car to staying in a hotel that would not allow Jews; and he fondly recalled his mother, Nelle, who despite her own modest means never turned down a panhandler at the back door and whom Reagan brought out to California when he was in Hollywood, where he bought them “a home, the first they had ever owned.” It was a marvelous piece of storytelling, mythic and emotive—punctuated by calls for “four more years,” as well as “Bush, Bush, Bush.” He was campaigning one last time, he told the crowd, for his mom and dad.

  “So, now we come to the end of this last campaign, and I just hope that Nelle and Jack are looking down on us right now and nodding their heads and saying their kid did them proud. And I hope someday your children and grandchildren will tell of a time that a certain President came to town at the end of a long journey and asked their parents and grandparents to join him in setting America on a course to the new millennium and that a century of peace, prosperity, opportunity and hope had followed.

  “So, if I could ask you just one last time: Tomorrow, when the mountains greet the dawn, would you go out there and win one for the Gipper?”

  Nixon had been right. The race in California had become too close to call in the last days of the contest. Exit polls would later reveal that those who made up their minds in the final days broke five to four for Dukakis. But in Southern California, experts on both sides said later, it was the election eve visit of Reagan that turned the tide for the Republicans. The next day, when the totals were completed, Bush had won California 51 to 48 percent. Bush held the land of Reagan and Nixon by 300,000 votes. And in some small way, he had Reagan, Ford, and Nixon to thank for it.

  BUSH AND NIXON:

  No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

  The story of Nixon and George Herbert Walker Bush is a tale of loyalty and its limits. Eleven years apart in age, they were miles apart in origins. Nixon grew up poor, smart, and striving on the West Coast; Bush was the son of a Connecticut senator, whose own parents had hailed from powerful Midwestern industrial clans. Nixon spent his summers working as a house painter, a chicken plucker, and a carnival barker; Bush worked at a summer camp. Nixon was the first of two California Republicans who would ride a powerful conservative tide into the White House; Bush’s political roots and instincts were decidedly more eastern seaboard and moderate; he wrestled with distrust on his right flank throughout his career.

  But when the two men finally crossed paths in the 1960s, Bush found a mentor who would change his life. The older man helped lift Bush from political obscurity and propelled him to the front ranks of the Republican lineup. Nixon had his doubts about Bush—about his politics, his judgment, and that all-important Nixon metric, his toughness. Bush admired Nixon’s brains and large parts of his agenda, but worried about his character, his expediency, and the men he kept around him. He would remain loyal to Nixon as president virtually until his resignation; and as a person long after.

  When Bush became president a decade and a half later, Nixon had a curious way of paying that loyalty back.

  18

  “I’m Convinced . . . He Feels I’m Soft”

  —GEORGE H. W. BUSH

  Long before he became president, George Bush had learned when to listen to Richard Nixon and when to ignore him.

  The two men got to know each other in 1964, when Nixon flew to Houston to help Bush raise money for his campaign for a Texas Senate seat. It was an unlikely bid: there weren’t many Republicans in Texas in the early 1960s. One year after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats had little to fear from Barry Goldwater and the Republicans. “We got whipped and whipped soundly,” Bush reported to Nixon a week after losing in the Johnson landslide. Bush didn’t dwell on the loss: in 1966, he won a seat in Congress from Houston’s Westside.

  And so it was something of a miracle that, just two years later, the forty-four-year-old freshman congressman was on Nixon’s short list as a possible running mate in 1968. How did that happen? An unlikely but potent coalition of leading Republican lights had mentioned the young comer to Nixon: Eisenhower, who knew Bush’s father, Prescott, urged Nixon to consider him during a 1967 chat at his Gettysburg farm. So had Billy Graham, whom Nixon trusted implicitly and who had been holding irregular Bible study for Bush’s parents for nearly a decade. Chase Manhattan Bank CEO George Champion was a Bush man; and so was former New York governor Thomas Dewey, who had been the Republican nominee in 1948 against Truman. It was as if the oldest of the Republican moderates had caucused in secret and voted to put a Bush on the ticket.

  Bush never had much of a chance in Nixon’s Miami Beach gambling parlor—he was too green to be Nixon’s vice president. But it got him thinking that he might have what it took to go all the way. He later thanked Dewey for lending a hand to “this Silky Sullivan longshot,” a reference to an early-1960s thoroughbred who specialized in dramatic, come-from-behind victories. “Though we finished out of the money,” Bush wrote Dewey, “it was a great big plus for me.”

  It was just the first of many times Nixon would call. In 1970, Nixon pressed Bush to quit his safe House seat and run again for the Senate in Texas. This push, coming from the president himself, was heady stuff and it appealed to Bush as he watche
d others in his generation climb the House leadership ladder, move to the Senate, or even get White House jobs. Bush took everyone’s temperature on the matter and even made a pilgrimage to the Texas Hill Country to get a second opinion from another president. The club verdict was unanimous: though a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson urged Bush to run by invoking a salty aphorism: the difference between the House and the Senate, LBJ advised his fellow Texan, was the difference between “chicken shit and chicken salad.” Recalling that moment more than four decades later, Bush noted, “You never had to guess what Lyndon was thinking. He was many things but ‘mysterious’ was not one of them.” Bush’s father, who had stepped down after a decade in the Senate for health reasons, argued against making the race, fearful his son was giving up a safe seat to make a stab at a longer shot. But in the end, the offer of White House help was too good to pass up and so Bush agreed to do what Nixon asked.

  But not the Nixon way—and that quickly became the problem. Instead of facing the liberal Ralph Yarborough in the general election, Bush instead found himself facing moderate Lloyd Bentsen, a Democrat who was nothing like Yarborough: he was rich, popular in the Rio Grande Valley, and conservative enough to appeal to Texas Republicans. He had also been out of politics for twenty years. Nixon’s henchmen dug up everything nasty they could find on Bentsen and shipped it down to Houston for Bush to use against him in ads and speeches, along with more than $100,000 from Nixon’s secret campaign slush fund funneled through seventeen different accounts. But after reading through all of the anti-Bentsen material, Bush set it aside. This isn’t how the game is won, Bush thought. The White House even offered to send down political ax men Bob Dole and Spiro Agnew to go after Bentsen if Bush wouldn’t. No thanks, Bush said, I’ll do this my way. “George and Lloyd were gentlemen running a gentleman’s race,” said Richard Whalen, a former Nixon speechwriter who worked for Bush that year. “But the men in the White House were not gentlemen.”