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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Bush lost his 1970 Senate bid, capturing fewer votes statewide than he had in 1964. He summed up the landscape on election night: “Like Custer, who said there were just too many Indians, I guess there were too many Democrats.” And though everyone else in his family was distraught, Bush smiled through the worst of it and at five the next morning got out his list of several hundred people he needed to thank and reached for the phone. He got off sixteen hours later. For his trouble, Nixon rewarded Bush with a pair of administration jobs: first as U.N. ambassador and then as chairman of the Republican Party.

  Nixon was gimlet-eyed about Bush: he liked him because he was young and seemed to represent a new breed of Southern Republicans the party had never seen before. In part because Eisenhower had plucked him to be his running mate at age thirty-nine, Nixon was well known in Republican circles for nurturing young talent long before he got the top job himself. But Nixon already had a Texas favorite in John Connally and there was the added problem that Nixon and his aides found Bush too much of a Boy Scout for their no-prisoners style of politics. In April 1971, while Bush was U.N. envoy, Nixon and Kissinger had agreed that Bush was “too soft and not sophisticated enough” to handle what was then the beginning of the Nixon opening to China. Nixon later mentioned to Bob Haldeman that Bush was “a worrywart” when it came to Watergate.

  Bush’s doubts about Nixon were nearly as great as Nixon’s about Bush. While neither of the posts Nixon had handed to Bush were backwaters, each was in its own way at a thankless remove from Nixon’s highly centralized West Wing. Bush’s letters to Nixon, written as he either weighed or accepted these appointments, are still painful to read; you can hear the protégé swallow his doubts and say, Taking this job goes against my instincts but I will do it for you anyway. If Bush was too nice for Nixon and his heavies, they were too dodgy for him. As chairman of the Republican Party in 1973–74, Bush watched Nixon virtually destroy the party in order to save his own skin. Between 1973 and 1974, Bush logged 97,000 miles raising money as Republican Party boss; for this, Bush was told by the White House to do things that were, he told his wife, Barbara, “just wrong.” He often simply refused to follow orders.

  Bush, who never loved politics as much as policy and resisted the game when it turned dirty, found Watergate wrenching, dreadful, embarrassing. In public, he stuck by Nixon virtually until the very end, defending the boss’s record, criticizing his tormentors, clinging to the narrowing evidence that Watergate was just a Democratic fantasy. But privately, he was in agony—not only because of what Nixon was doing to the party and the presidency, but because he knew, deep down, that Nixon had doubts about him. In July 1974, three weeks before the resignation, Bush wrote his four sons a long, revealing letter about Nixon’s record and his character. It’s as good a psychological profile of Nixon as any that exists. Nixon was a great leader, he told his boys, and a first-rate intellect but also a third-rate person. “He is enormously complicated. He is capable of great kindness. . . . I am not that close to him as a warm personal friend, for he holds people off some. But I’ve been around him enough to see some humor and to feel some kindness.” Then Bush went on: “He has enormous hang-ups. He is unable to get close to people. It’s almost like he’s afraid to be reamed in some way—people who respect him and want to be friends get only so close—and then it is clear—no more!”

  Bush told his sons that Nixon had little respect for Congress or his party machinery and felt outright contempt for the Ivy League, partly because it tilted left but also because of what Bush described as Nixon’s habit of equating the Ivy League with “privilege and softness in a tea sipping, martini drinking tennis playing sense.” Bush took this cultural bias of Nixon’s personally: “It stings but doesn’t bleed because I know if I said, ‘Mr. President, do you mean me . . .’ he’d say no. But I must confess that I’m convinced that deep in his heart he feels I’m soft, not tough enough, not willing to do the ‘gut job’ that his political instincts have taught him must be done. . . . He surrounded himself on his personal staff with people unwilling to question the unlovely instincts we all have—and that he has in spades.”

  The letter is even more remarkable because one of its recipients is a future president himself. In one aside to his twenty-eight-year-old eldest son about Nixon’s Ivy League resentments, Bush wrote, “Thank God, George, you got the best from Yale but you retained a fundamental conviction that a lot of good happens for America south and west of Woolsey Hall.” And then, in perhaps the best advice one future president gave to another, not to mention from a father to his sons, Bush added: “I shall stop with this gratuitous advice. Listen to your conscience. Don’t be afraid not to join the mob—if you feel it’s wrong. Don’t confuse being ‘soft’ with seeing the other guy’s point of view.”

  The day after Bush wrote that letter, the Supreme Court ruled 8–0 that Nixon had to turn over the June 23, 1972, tapes in which he had ordered the FBI cover-up of the Watergate break-in. Once those “smoking gun” transcripts were released and Bush read them, he reluctantly changed course. On August 7, Bush sent Nixon a letter urging him to step down for the good of the country, praising his “massive achievements,” and expecting Nixon “in his lonely embattled position” to see Bush’s request as “an act of disloyalty.” Indeed, Nixon noted in his memoirs how Bush had backed away from him in the final days. But if Bush had given up on the president, he didn’t abandon the man: he trooped down to the White House early on August 9 and found Nixon’s family, his staff, and the president himself were all in tears or “close to breaking down” that final morning. “One couldn’t help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame,” he wrote in his diary, “and wonder what kind of a man is this really? No morality—kicking his friends in those tapes—all of them. Gratuitous abuse. Caring for no one and yet doing so much.”

  Bush checked in on Nixon a month later, partly to seek his advice about whether to go to China as Gerald Ford’s first envoy, and partly just to see how he was. The call did not go well. Bush noted in his diary that Nixon was “reserved, very reserved . . . he was less than warm personally.” Nixon ignored Bush’s offer to fly out to San Clemente and pay him a visit. And when Bush tried to give Nixon credit for the new position he was about to undertake, Nixon ignored him. “He never warmed up at that,” he wrote. “The conversation was very brief.”

  Would You Like a Secure Phone With That?

  Fifteen years later, Bush was still reaching out. Only now, he was president and Nixon had spent nearly fifteen years fighting to redeem his place in history.

  Bush had a wide range of talent in the club at his disposal and the temperament to use it. Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan were all still alive and Bush had worked directly for three of the four. In February and March 1989, Bush sent National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to personally visit every former president. Scowcroft asked what, now that Bush was president, they might want in the way of regular briefings and other logistical favors. This was self-protective on Bush’s part: he knew that his predecessors could be excellent allies on all sorts of issues; and regular briefings in advance of big decisions could keep them sounding supportive when reporters called.

  In return, Bush offered the usual club benefits: special government airlift when necessary and extra security as it might be required. These were standard privileges, just like those Bush’s predecessors had doled out for years. But Bush offered new club perks as well. Scowcroft proposed to install in each of their offices a secure telephone so that Bush could reach them night or day. In an era before cell phones, Bush was regarded even by his aides as a little manic about the phone; he liked to have one at his side constantly, and used it at all hours, even at the dinner table in some cases. The scrambled telephone lines, encoded in order to prevent electronic surveillance, would also permit Bush to call and consult his predecessors at moments of crisis without fear of being overheard.

  Over the next four year
s, Bush filed a series of semiregular dispatches to his predecessors to keep them up to date. These memos, a kind of club newsletter, were usually stamped SECRET or Confidential, and often explained various problems of foreign policy. Bush would write these himself—the prose bears his distinctive style—and they lack the stilted formality that so many previous presidents used when corresponding with their predecessors. For example, Bush’s seven-page, single-spaced explanation of the coming Gulf War on December 11, 1992, is lucid, candid, and distinctly nonpartisan.

  Scowcroft made the rounds to New Jersey, Plains, Beaver Creek, and Pacific Palisades, taking every ex-president’s temperature and letting them know they could call at any time. This was territory the retired Air Force general knew well, having worked for two of the four and having had responsibility as a young colonel in Nixon’s White House for fielding what seemed like endless requests for airplanes from Lyndon Johnson. Yet most of the former presidents declined Bush’s special phone line because, as one official familiar with the conversations explained, they valued their independence and did not want to be part of even a semiofficial network. Only Ford accepted Bush’s offer, but even he came to regard the larger-than-normal desktop handset as something of a bother. The Scowcroft missions remained a secret but the private message to the club was clear: Bush was counting on their help and advice; and if he couldn’t get that, perhaps he could at least win their silence.

  That was unlikely in Nixon’s case. “He used to call all the time,” recalled Scowcroft. “It was his way of unburdening himself. Sometimes it would be to find out what was going on. Sometimes he wanted to assuage his ego. But it was always helpful. He knew it would get to Bush and he didn’t always want to bother him.” Nixon knew Bush’s strengths and weaknesses and wasn’t shy about listing them. Bush, he told reporters, was steady, not flashy—but not a big risk taker, either. “He is highly intelligent. He is hands-on. He’s not a bomb thrower but because he isn’t a bomb thrower he doesn’t have any interceptions. . . . He’s the Joe Montana. The short, sure pass. He has a very high percentage.”

  Nixon was tougher on Bush than he was on Reagan, in part because, at least as president, Reagan paid more attention to what Nixon advised. And this really was the heart of what turned out to be a difficult Nixon-Bush relationship: unlike Reagan, Bush wasn’t looking for foreign policy advice. Thanks to Nixon and Ford, he had already served at the U.N., in China, and at the CIA. He had a broad network of contacts overseas and didn’t really need Nixon whispering in his ear about statecraft and strategy. Nixon at times felt pushed away, even by Scowcroft, his old military advisor. “Brent was always correct in his dealings with Nixon,” recalled Dimitri Simes, a Soviet émigré who was serving as Nixon’s foreign policy advisor in Washington. “But Nixon did not feel that Brent was really listening.”

  On China, specifically, Bush had developed his own outlook, which happened to align with Nixon’s. The day after Chinese tanks broke up a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square by more than 100,000 students in June 1989, Nixon counseled Bush in an 8 A.M. phone call not to overreact. Here, the architect of the Chinese opening in 1972 was urging his successor not to turn back the clock. “Don’t disrupt the relationship,” Nixon told Bush, who recorded his words in his diary. “What’s happened has been handled badly and is deplorable, but take a look at the long haul.” Bush, who took the entire U.S.-Chinese relationship “personally,” as he put it, was already thinking in those terms. He would secretly send Scowcroft to Beijing later that month in an unmarked C-141 cargo jet for private conversations with Chinese leaders to make certain bilateral relations were not sidetracked. When word of those talks leaked weeks later, Bush and Scowcroft were pilloried by Democrats for coddling Beijing.

  A few months later, in November 1989, Bush and Nixon met upstairs in the White House. Bush was preparing to meet Gorbachev in Malta for their first face-to-face talks; Nixon had just returned from a trip to the People’s Republic of China. Nixon had been helpful to Bush during that journey, telling a gathering of Chinese leaders in private that the breach over the Tiananmen shootings with the American public was “large and unbridgeable.” Now, at a working dinner in the residence that Scowcroft and Barbara Bush attended, Nixon urged Bush to send Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady or another envoy to Beijing to try to nudge the relationship forward again. Bush had a shrewder idea: he would indeed send an envoy—it would again turn out to be Scowcroft—to Beijing but only after the meetings in Malta with Gorbachev. As he listened to Nixon, Bush knew that he would be making something of an ally of Gorbachev at Malta; and a visit to Beijing by Scowcroft in the aftermath of that summit would be more persuasive if Washington was coming off a successful meeting with the Soviet leader. But Bush liked what he was hearing from Nixon and agreed that the two nations needed to continue their progress. As he noted in his diary: “[Nixon] lectured the Chinese pretty clearly when he was there and gave them a realistic view of how things were in this country. He thinks the best thing to do is send Brady over there. I’m not sure. I still think we ought to put it in the context of my meetings with Gorbachev and make clear to China that we’re not overlooking their views or their positions.”

  But if Nixon and Bush mostly saw eye to eye on China, the USSR was another matter. Managing the U.S.-Soviet relationship, at least for Nixon, was the whole shooting match, the most important part of being president. When it came to relations with Moscow, Nixon felt duty-bound to express his opinions, even if it meant breaking with the president. Normal club rules did not apply.

  So in April 1991, Nixon issued his own personal declaration of independence from Bush. It began over something small: the month before, Nixon had gone to Europe to check on Mikhail Gorbachev’s progress toward economic and political reform, making stops in Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine, and then spending two days in talks with a variety of political figures in Moscow, including Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the chairman of the Russian parliament. Nixon came away certain that Gorbachev was, by most measures, moving backward on reform. He was drawn, however, to Yeltsin, a former mayor of Moscow and member of the Supreme Soviet. “I’d say this,” Nixon concluded at the end of the trip, when he sat down to render his findings with three carefully chosen American reporters in Moscow. “Gorbachev is Wall Street and Yeltsin is Main Street; Gorbachev is Georgetown drawing rooms and Yeltsin is Newark factory gate.”

  What Nixon really thought was more dire: he told his friends that Gorbachev’s time was short and that the United States must start looking beyond the charismatic Soviet leader. “It’s really all over for the Soviet Union,” Nixon remarked, returning to his Moscow hotel room after an hour-long meeting with the Soviet leader. “Gorbachev still doesn’t get it. He still talks like the clock can be stopped, like he can find a formula to outsmart history. But the poor bastard belongs to the past. The Soviet Union is beyond salvation. It’s time for Bush to understand that.”

  But when Nixon returned to the United States a few days later, he discovered that few in the White House shared his doubts about Gorbachev’s longevity—or really cared what he thought. It’s easy to see why. Just five weeks before, Bush and his foreign policy team had completed a dramatic, nine-month diplomatic and military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army from Kuwait. Bush was enjoying a 90 percent approval rating at home in part because he organized dozens of countries against the Iraqi tyrant and then launched, won, and halted the ground war after five days. It was a tour de force by an American president and had unfolded with Moscow’s acquiescence if not always its outright help. Bush, Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker were on top of what they regarded as a new world order; they didn’t really need a lot of kibitzing from an old Cold Warrior who was still trying to redeem himself for Watergate.

  Besides, Bush and Baker had already spent a year sizing up Gorbachev to make sure that he had legs. At the Malta meetings they had offered the Soviet leader unprecedented inducements to move toward economic and political r
eform. And while there were those on Bush’s team who had their own doubts about Gorbachev’s staying power, Bush was not about to abandon him. To Bush, Nixon was the worrywart now.

  But Nixon did not like being ignored. And so he laid out his plans to get the attention he felt he deserved in a letter to Dimitri Simes, his informal advisor on foreign affairs, who was increasingly serving as Nixon’s point man in Washington. “In view of the Administration’s obvious lack of interest in what we learned, the only way we can get across a point of view different from the conventional Washington beltway wisdom is through going public. I would prefer that you not follow up on trying to get people in the White House to talk to me with reference to that trip. I think they have their plate full and that apart from that, they are quite reluctant to hear any view point which is inconsistent with the line that both Bush and Baker have taken that Gorbachev is our best and only hope if we want constructive discussions and agreements with the Soviet Union.

  “Under the circumstances, I would prefer to have a more arms-length relationship. This will give me more freedom to be constructively critical of Administration policy, when I think it is appropriate to do so. I would prefer not to run the risk of being co-opted by cozy little suppers in the White House family dining room since I prefer substantive conversation to substantive meals! Since that does not appear to be in the cards at the moment, I have decided to follow an entirely different course of action to get my views across and to affect the course of the foreign policy debates in other forums.”