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

by Nancy Gibbs

  This was a dramatic departure, even for Nixon. If he had promised to be Reagan’s “to command,” Nixon was now organizing a rebellion. Over the next year, Nixon waged a deliberate campaign to reshape U.S. policy toward Moscow, enlisting much of the foreign policy establishment and his dwindling disciples in the press to his cause—all in opposition to the policy of a sitting president from his own party. Nixon would do this just as Bush was facing a primary challenge from, of all people, a combative conservative whose feel for the jugular was legendary and whose primary sponsor had been none other than Nixon himself. That would be Pat Buchanan.

  Nixon made the first move, offering an essay in Time that would disclose his view that Gorbachev was a goner. Nixon jotted a few notes on paper for Simes, who would draft the essay, to follow: “You may not agree with me but with the exception of an occasional piece by [Charles] Krauthammer, I have found most of TIME’s essays erudite, elegant, fashionable and virtually irrelevant as far as affecting the course of events. I want our essay to be totally different. Instead of elegant poetry, I want to use muscular prose. While TIME’s essays are usually for those who pride themselves on being intellectuals, I want ours to be one that can be understood and will appeal to the silent majority.”

  The final version of the two-page essay, which appeared in Time in the third week of April, read like Gorbachev’s death warrant. “Gorbachev seems unable to realize that there is no halfway house between a command system and a free market. He is unable to cut the umbilical cord to the Marxist Leninist philosophy that has nurtured him all his life.” Nixon then carefully prescribed a new approach for Bush. “I’m not saying that the US should start interfering in Soviet internal affairs and side with Yeltsin against Gorbachev. The US must continue to deal with whoever is in charge of the other nuclear superpower’s foreign policy. Today that happens to be Gorbachev and for the time being there is no alternative to him. But at the same time we can and should strengthen our contacts at all levels with the reformers in Russia and other republics. Gorbachev will not like that. But we must remember that he needs us far more than we need him.”

  Just as Nixon had pushed Reagan to toughen his terms with Moscow, Nixon was now pressing Bush to take the longer view, to look beyond the Soviet Union to a time when it might no longer exist. Nixon’s message had not really changed; he was just as focused on the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 as he had been on squeezing it in 1987, when he believed Reagan was offering far too generous terms on an arms control deal and refused to back the president in public. Now, Nixon was refusing to cooperate in private. And in public, he was preparing to go rogue.

  Whatever the wisdom of those tactics, events soon proved Nixon’s instincts right. In June, Yeltsin became the first democratically elected leader of Russia, which was the largest state in Gorbachev’s USSR. Then, in August, right-wing military officers tried to overthrow Gorbachev himself while he was on vacation in the Crimea. Bush’s reaction was uncertain for the first twenty-four hours; he called the coup “extra-constitutional” and noted that “coups can fail.” But he also half dangled an olive branch to the plotters. Gorbachev certainly looked finished: in the Crimea, KGB officers surrounded his villa; they cut his phone lines, including his direct links to the Ministry of Defense. Plotters parked farm tractors across the runways at a nearby airfield in case Gorbachev tried to fly back to Moscow to assume command. It looked like a classic putsch.

  In Moscow, however, a different story was taking shape: the next morning Yeltsin and a small band of perhaps two hundred Russians armed with rifles, grenades, and shovels gathered at the Russian parliament. Around noon that day, Yeltsin climbed atop an armored truck and denounced the coup, called for a general strike, and demanded the reinstatement of Gorbachev’s post of president of the USSR (if not the man himself). With only a few hundred supporters facing the prospect of a military attack on his office, Yeltsin cabled Washington and pleaded for Bush to back him up. Bush changed course and began to call for the coup plotters to back off. Over the next twenty-four hours, the crowd outside the Russian White House mushroomed to more than 150,000. The Russian air force simply declined to lend a hand to the army generals. Russian tank crews, a handful of which were arrayed around the parliament, refused to fire on protesters. Within seventy-two hours the coup began to fizzle. A day later, it was dead. Gorbachev returned to Moscow four days after being taken prisoner, but Yeltsin had become the man to see in Moscow. Bush now realized that the Gorbachev era was finished. So, in many ways, was the old Soviet Union—just as Nixon had predicted.

  The Secret Memo

  By autumn 1991, with a brief recession getting under way in the United States, Nixon was privately astounded by Bush’s lack of vigorous leadership. His daily comments to his research assistant Monica Crowley reveal a man who was itching to be back in the game, fearful that Bush was “in over his head” and unable to seize the economic initiative. But more than these specific concerns, Nixon was angry generally that while a political campaign was looming and the world was unwinding in historic fashion, no one was paying him any attention.

  And then, someone did: in late 1991, former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan decided to challenge Bush for the nomination. His campaign would be isolationist, protectionist, and heavy on conservative social issues—positions that Nixon had long opposed. In fact, Nixon was alarmed when he first learned of Buchanan’s campaign. On December 5, Buchanan called Nixon and informed him of his plans. The two men talked and while Buchanan could not recall if Nixon discouraged him or not, Nixon afterward told Crowley that perhaps Buchanan would help galvanize Bush into action. Nixon said a few weeks later that Buchanan might take as much as 40 percent of the New Hampshire vote from Bush—another prediction that would prove to be on target.

  With the 1992 campaign getting under way, Nixon was ramping up his profile in every direction, whatever the cost to Bush. In December, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling on the White House to act more aggressively in the former Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ethnic civil war. He prepared a second column criticizing a thawing trend between Washington and Hanoi. It was almost as if Nixon wanted a confrontation with Bush: when Billy Graham engineered a pacifying phone call from Bush to Nixon one evening in late January, Nixon complained afterward that Bush hadn’t thought of making the call himself. “Bush put me on with Graham and Barbara, who thanked me for ‘all I was doing for George.’ That’s a laugh. This was the first time in a long time that he’s really called for me and it took Graham to put him up to it.” Crowley recalled how Nixon saw the deals: “If he cultivated Nixon, Bush would get valuable advice and a prominent ally. If he ignored him, he would face a troublesome adversary.”

  Adversary it would be. For weeks, Nixon and Simes had been planning a high-profile conference on the future of U.S. foreign policy. The confab would mark the opening of the Nixon Center, a Washington-based think tank on foreign and domestic affairs that was designed to put another tent pole in Nixon’s revival show. Nixon and Simes wanted the conference to be bipartisan and wide-ranging; they spent months planning the speakers and choosing the topics for discussion. They were shooting for scale: the conference would turn on nothing less than the future of American diplomacy in a one-superpower world. And it would be a flashy club event too: Nixon would speak at lunch on the first day; Bush would be invited to speak at a black-tie dinner that night. As for dates, Nixon and Simes chose March 11–12, 1992, the two days after the big Super Tuesday primary contests that were designed to pick, if not confirm, both the Republican and Democratic nominees. With the primaries largely over, Nixon was hoping to set the agenda for the fall campaign.

  Nixon knew that inviting Bush to kick off something called “The Nixon Center” in the middle of a presidential campaign was politically awkward. This slowed Nixon down, but it did not stop him. He agonized how best to invite Bush: he wanted to give the president a chance to come (and enhance Nixon’s own stature) but also the option of
saying no (in case the politics were simply too toxic). And so a host of lesser players were tapped to invite the president first by writing pleading letters to White House aides. When those efforts yielded no response, Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote Bush herself.

  But what Nixon did next, even before he had heard back from Bush, made his conference scheme look positively charitable.

  In late February 1992, Nixon condensed his greatest worries about the overall direction of U.S.-Russia policy into a withering 1,800-word memo. He chose a provocative title—“How to Lose the Cold War”—and rather than send it only to the president, Nixon decided he would share it instead with several dozen columnists and foreign policy thinkers around the country. Nixon would not tell his correspondents to keep the memo to themselves; instead, he hoped that they would talk it up, write about it, or leak it to others who would.

  Nixon did not tell anyone—not even Simes, who was busy trying to get the president to attend the Nixon Center dinner—about his memo. But Nixon knew exactly what he was doing, and he proceeded as meticulously as a bomb maker. He mailed his memos out from his home in New Jersey in plain brown envelopes. Each copy included a handwritten note (“Dear Bill”) followed by a simple, one-sentence typed explanation: “I have enclosed some thoughts on a vital issue that deserves priority attention during the ’92 campaign.”

  The gist of the memo was that Bush needed to propose millions more in foreign aid to Russia to prevent the former Soviet Union from falling back into tyranny or, worse, into chaos. It was implicitly critical of Bush for being too cautious. His language was as pointed as it was apocalyptic: “In light of the stakes involved, the West must do everything it can to help President Yeltsin succeed. . . . The stakes are high and we are playing as if it were a penny-ante game.”

  Nixon was turning a club rule—when giving advice, try to do it privately in order to minimize friction—on its head: he was sending out his private advice in order to pick a fight in public and elevate his stature at the president’s expense. Even the delivery system was designed for effect: as Marvin Kalb later reported, “The memos left New Jersey in two batches, one dated February 25, 1992 and the other dated March 3, 1992, a week later.” Before the days of blogs and email, the secret memos caused a chain reaction in Washington. William Safire said the fifty-odd people who got it were part of the most prestigious cabal to come out of Washington since Nixon’s “enemies” list of 1972. One who made both lists—reporter Daniel Schorr—brought the memo to the attention of the New York Times by submitting a column about it to the op-ed page. Former Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist William Safire called the secret memo a “swift kick in the teeth”; Crowley called it “revenge,” for being ignored, which was hard to square with the fact that it was Nixon who had ordered Simes to break off further relations with the White House a few months earlier.

  Whatever it was, it hit the front pages right on schedule—the day before the Nixon Center conference opened in Washington at which Bush was set to be the keynote speaker. This, of course, was excellent political theater, just as Nixon had planned, and it offered everyone in the audience a story line of their choice: one Republican president going into battle against one of his protégés; two foreign policy masters fighting it out through means fair and foul; not to mention the spectacle of a man nicknamed Tricky Dick mounting a comeback at the expense of a man whose childhood nickname was Have-Half because he readily shared his candy bars with friends. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman’s analysis story the next day twisted the knife: “Nixon’s Save Russia Memo: Bush Feels the Sting.”

  Not everyone found Nixon’s cleverly timed proposal for massive Russian aid wise. The United States was slowly coming out of a recession in the first quarter of 1992 and there was little interest in either party in spending more on foreign aid. The United States was already dropping more than $1 billion on Russia in 1992 in commercial and security credits, and not many people believed the Russians could responsibly absorb more. Former Pentagon official Leslie Gelb, writing in the New York Times, pointed out the flaws in Nixon’s logic. “Russia is not ours to win or lose,” Gelb wrote. “If democracy fails there, the blame will belong almost exclusively to the Russians.”

  That view was widely held inside the White House. Bush got a copy of the Nixon memo from Scowcroft and sent its author a private reply from Air Force One. “I certainly agree with the major principle of this paper, namely, that we have an enormous stake with the democratic Russia,” he wrote. And then Bush went on to firmly dispute much of what Nixon had claimed about the extent and the feasibility of further Western aid to the disintegrating Soviet Union. Bush called Nixon to talk about the memo as well.

  He explained to reporters the next day that he and Nixon weren’t that far apart. “I didn’t read it as criticism,” he said, “because I talked with the man. And I learned to go to the source. . . . You know he’s got very good ideas on this subject and we’re in very close touch on it.” The next morning, Bush sounded far more circumspect. “There isn’t a lot of money around,” he said at one of his regular press briefings. “We are spending too much as it already is. So to do the things I would really like to do—I don’t have a blank check for all of that.”

  Bush was being polite, as usual. Scowcroft said later that Bush was “amazed” by the brazen, self-promotional nature of Nixon’s campaign. “We had bent over backwards to scrape together the money we were providing,” Scowcroft recalled, “and here Nixon was pushing—pushing hard—for more.”

  The Speech

  Just as Bush was gently dismissing Nixon’s memo in public, Nixon’s long-awaited conference, “America’s Role in the Emerging World,” was getting under way at what was then Washington’s swankiest hotel. The Four Seasons ballroom was packed with foreign policy heavyweights: former secretaries of state, aging spooks, U.N. ambassadors, as well as a huge helping of people who had worked for Nixon over the previous fifty years. It was as much a reunion as it was a policy conference. “Our speaker,” former Pentagon boss James Schlesinger said by way of introducing Nixon, “is a man who has weathered a storm that would have been fatal to most other men.”

  And then Nixon rose to speak. For the next thirty-five minutes, Nixon held forth, talking without notes, his hands clasped in front of him, warning that both parties were flirting with a “new isolationism.” Unless the United States came to Russia’s aid, he added, a new kind of despotism in the former Soviet Union would reemerge, forcing the United States to spend more on defense than it had before the Cold War ended. He called on the United States to make $20 billion available to Russia immediately. When he finished, he received a standing ovation. Veteran Nixon hands were convinced the old man had memorized his remarks.

  Nixon had certainly succeeded in restarting the debate. That very afternoon, Bush officials defended their allegedly measly Russian aid requests in hearings on Capitol Hill; Edward Hewitt, an NSC official, told attendees at the conference that the West had already shipped some $40 billion to Russia in the previous two years and that no one could account for its whereabouts. Sending more, therefore, made little sense. After his luncheon speech had ended, Nixon was asked by reporters why he was “attacking” Bush. Nixon disputed the suggestion. He was, he said, merely trying to “focus attention on what I consider to be the major foreign policy issue of our time.”

  That evening, it was Bush’s turn. After a dinner of filet of sole with salmon mousseline had been cleared, Nixon introduced the forty-first president as “without question . . . the best qualified to lead the United States and the free world in the years ahead.” But Bush’s speech was a dud. Some of it was a predictable broadside against the kind of isolationism that Pat Buchanan had been advocating. Some of it was a review of Bush’s foreign policy accomplishments. But most of it was a lukewarm tribute to Nixon and all he had done for Bush over the years. There was little or nothing in the way of new ideas or more investment in Russia. Instead, Bush simply said he valued Nix
on’s advice. “I get it. I appreciate it,” Bush said. “. . . we invested so much to win the cold war. We must invest what is necessary to win the peace. If we fail, we will create new and profound problems for our security.”

  Who Lost Nixon?

  After all that, it would have been reasonable for Nixon to declare victory and head back to New Jersey. Instead, four days later, on March 16, he wrote Bush another memo and sent this one directly to the president. In it, he urged Bush to focus not on Buchanan but on Bill Clinton, who was poised to capture the Democratic nomination and whom Nixon had been watching for some time. And, like a dog with a bone, Nixon called again for a new round of aid for Russia.

  A day later, Bush won both the Michigan and Illinois primaries, effectively ending Buchanan’s quixotic but damaging campaign. Though he never won a single contest, Buchanan attracted between a quarter and a third of the vote every place he was on the ballot. His campaign was finished, but it had left the strong impression on political observers that the incumbent president might be beatable. Buchanan called Nixon for advice. “I’m ten for ten,” he joked, referring to his unbroken string of defeats by Bush.

  “Buchanan, you are the only extremist I know with a sense of humor,” Nixon replied. “Come on up and see me.”

  Nixon quietly alerted a few friends in the press to Buchanan’s visit—and then phoned White House chief of staff Sam Skinner with a heads-up too.

  That was enough to provoke a call the next day from Bush, who was understandably concerned about whether Nixon would press Buchanan to get out of the race or would quietly encourage him to stay in a while longer. Nixon promised Bush, according to conversations he had the same day with Crowley, that he would apply some “pressure” on his old speechwriter to get out quickly.