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

by Nancy Gibbs

  On March 21, Buchanan and his wife flew to New Jersey to huddle with Nixon for seventy-five minutes. It was a very friendly session, Buchanan recalled. But Nixon never came out and told him to get out of the race—at least not directly. Instead, about halfway through the conversation, Nixon invited Crowley to step in and asked whether she thought Buchanan should exit the race.

  “Tell him what you told me,” Nixon urged Crowley, who proceeded to tell Buchanan that she—then twenty-three years old—thought it would be a good idea if he brought the curtain down on his campaign.

  “I got the impression,” Buchanan said dryly, “that she was conveying a message from the old man.”

  The two men did a brief appearance with reporters afterward in which Buchanan made no commitment to quit the race and Nixon praised Buchanan after a fashion. “There’s only one thing worse in politics than being wrong and that’s being dull. And Pat Buchanan is far from dull.”

  Buchanan departed and Nixon was immediately on the phone to Skinner at the White House. “I told Buchanan to get out of the race,” Nixon said as Crowley listened nearby. But he really hadn’t.

  Two weeks later, Nixon had some satisfaction in seeing Bush reverse course on Russia, announcing a $24 billion aid package on April 1 for the former Soviet republic. Bush argued that he had been putting the pieces together for months, but no one really believed that. What they did believe was that aid to Russia—how much, how soon, in what form—had become a proxy issue in the presidential campaign, which was already about which candidate could embrace an uncertain future and which could not. Nixon had seen to that.

  In fact, on that same morning and in the same hour that Bush had made his new offer of assistance, Clinton announced his own multibillion-dollar Russian aid package.

  “Now, prodded by Democrats in Congress, rebuked by Richard Nixon and realizing that I have been raising this issue in the campaign since December,” Clinton said, “the president is finally, even now as we meet here, putting forward a plan of assistance. . . . I’d really like it if I could have as much influence on his domestic policy.”

  Bush had beaten Bill Clinton by exactly twenty-one minutes. He would not beat him again.

  BUSH AND CARTER:

  The Missionary Goes Rogue

  James Earl Carter was always a problem for the presidents club. Where most other members stepped back from public life after the White House, Carter spent the next thirty-some years getting even more deeply involved in world affairs, remaking himself as a global action figure, and eventually winning the Nobel Peace Prize. As Carter would be the first to tell you, no other president was so dedicated to saving the world after leaving the White House.

  But his campaign of good works overseas and political redemption at home did not make him an easy man to work with. Stubborn, fiercely independent, and on occasion unusually sensitive, Carter had the habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. He could be relied upon to engage in awkward self-promotion when cool modesty was in order. Even when he volunteered to run secret missions for his successors, he sometimes strayed beyond his brief or could not resist taking to the airwaves to brag about his achievements. Though Carter would set something of a club record by teaming up with Gerald Ford more than two dozen times between 1980 and 2000 to address a range of national problems, at times even Ford believed that Carter had gone too far and put some distance between himself and his partner.

  All presidents compare themselves to those who came before and after, but Carter had a way of doing it rather gracelessly. “I feel that my role as a former President is probably superior to that of other presidents,” he declared in 2010. His fellow club members kept their reaction to those kinds of remarks to themselves.

  And yet, Carter gave the club a great gift: something for all the others to complain about. When nothing else seemed to unite its members, the club often bonded over what an annoying cuss Carter could be. Every club needs a black sheep and after Nixon died, Carter stepped seamlessly into this role. More than Nixon, who had obvious demons, Carter was the driven, self-righteous, impatient perfectionist who united the other club members around what seemed like an eternal question: was Jimmy Carter worth the trouble?

  19

  “I Am a Better Ex-President Than I Was a President”

  —JIMMY CARTER

  Outside of Sumter County, Georgia, Jimmy Carter was never much of a joiner. He came to Washington as a self-described outsider and he and his close-knit team of top advisors never saw the need to court the high priests of his new hometown. He asked voters outside the capital to turn down their thermostats, put on sweaters, and, just when they could have used a drink, forgo the tax-supported three-martini lunch. Carter wore his righteousness on his sleeve; he was a born-again Christian who taught adult Sunday school. His abstemiousness was the opposite of clubbable; he even replaced the open bars at White House events with pitchers of sweet tea and lemonade. He dismissed the White House drivers and promised that 10 percent of all state dinner guests would be “ordinary” citizens. He auctioned off the presidential yacht Sequoia that nearly every president since Hoover had used to wine and dine political allies and opponents. He insisted on acting as his own chief of staff for the first three years but then cited his twelve-year-old daughter as an authority on priorities in a presidential debate.

  He seems doomed now to have been a one-term president. Carter was unlucky in his timing, taking over as the nation was losing its industrial competitiveness to Asia. His technocratic approach to governing made him impatient with the backslapping and logrolling that for years made Washington function. His treasury secretary at first thought Carter’s spooky silences in meetings were time-outs for consideration but came to believe they were long apneas of incomprehension at the questions placed before him. He achieved an astonishing breakthrough at Camp David with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. But at other times he seemed uneasy with power and uncertain about how to use it. On the eve of the 1980 hostage rescue mission, he asked his generals if the student guards outside the U.S. embassy in Tehran could be immobilized by tranquilizer guns, rather than bullets. (No, came the reply.) Just three years after executing a breathtaking, come-from-nowhere campaign that had dazzled Democratic Party veterans for its deft reading of the public mood, Carter was beset by a revolt inside his own party when the time came to run again. Even his final concession speech was a minor botch: he acknowledged his loss to Reagan so early on election day in 1980 that many Democrats blamed Carter for reducing turnout on the West Coast, where polls were still open.

  Carter had returned to Plains in 1981 beaten, bitter, depressed, and at age fifty-six, at a loss for what to do next. The youngest ex-president since Calvin Coolidge, he was not ready to retire and give speeches. “When I got out of the White House,” he recalled, “I had a life expectancy of 25 years and so I needed to figure out how to use it.” And so he wrote his memoirs, rediscovered woodworking, built his library, and then, in his late fifties, invented something entirely new: a full-time career as an international problem solver. Though other former presidents had dabbled in troubleshooting, Carter made it a full-time job, traveling to scores of foreign countries negotiating peace deals, opening agrarian and health centers, planning and monitoring elections. The Carter Center, which would grow into a $150 million organization, became the instrument of this ambitious campaign. He imagined the center as a kind of private sector Camp David, he said: “I want to provide a place where conflicts around the world can be solved.” It grew into something of a shadow government at times as it pushed for peaceful engagement in Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern affairs. Carter established himself as the world’s leading expert on election integrity, raised millions of dollars, hired dozens of experts, and launched scores of projects to foster better sanitation, healthier diets, and economic rights overseas. He lent his name and his face (as well as his hands) to Habitat for Humanity, a shelter-building enterprise that had i
ts world headquarters just a few miles from his boyhood home. He campaigned against river blindness and guinea worm disease in Africa; he helped free political prisoners in Cuba and dissidents in the Soviet Union; he looked for solutions to border disputes between Thailand and Vietnam and was a constant champion of Palestinian rights. More than all this, he renewed his contacts with leaders all around the world, particularly in the Middle East. In time, Carter’s influence in some parts of the world rivaled and even exceeded his clout when he was commander in chief. “I can’t deny that I am a better ex-president than I was a president,” Carter admitted in 2005.

  So even though he left the White House in 1981, Carter’s presidency never really ended. It was as if he spent a generation out of office completing a mission he never fulfilled as president. And if you happened to be president of the United States in the years that Carter was busy redefining what it meant to be an ex-president, you might just find yourself in his way.

  The Baker Opening

  Carter spent most of Reagan’s first term minding his own business. He and Reagan would never become close and their relationship ran the gamut from merely correct to icy. At one point Carter grew so tired of Reagan insisting in public that Carter had weakened America’s defenses that he phoned Reagan to insist that he stop. In late 1985, Reagan sent a “Dear Jimmy” note about the state of Middle East peace talks that was a brush-off dressed up as a thank-you note. “Forgive the informality,” Reagan wrote, “but since we are both members of a somewhat exclusive club, I thought maybe we could forgo protocol.” The letter went on to thank Carter for his interest in the region and politely set aside the former president’s offer to serve as a diplomatic go-between.

  During Reagan’s second term, Carter began to step out around the globe, reestablishing contacts with foreign leaders, both friendly and hostile. It pleased no one on Reagan’s team that Carter was back on the road, making stops in places where U.S. diplomats didn’t often go. He made a point as he traveled of sitting down with tyrants to whom the United States was often actively opposed or sometimes covertly working to weaken, such as Hafez al-Assad in Syria in 1983 and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in 1986. These conversations were chiefly businesslike but Carter often treated them like personal ministries, bringing up religion and spirituality in an effort to scratch out some common ground with despots. Conservatives complained that merely by offering an audience with a former U.S. president, Carter was conveying legitimacy on men who were, by most measures, little more than thugs. But Carter did not see the trade-off in those terms. Instead he believed that his meetings were opportunities to reset the table and perhaps extract concessions—or future concessions—in return. Peter Bourne, who worked for Carter and later wrote a book about his presidency, observed that Carter “knew that leaders would exploit their meetings to try to enhance their own stature and that he would be subjected to criticism by traditionalists in the United States who believed you should never talk to your enemies.” Through the entire Reagan era, Carter was marginalized by an administration that had kicked him out of office.

  So it had to come as something of a surprise in December 1988, as the Reagan White House was turning into the Bush White House, that James Baker, Bush’s choice to be secretary of state, stopped by Plains for a post-election visit. Carter quickly sensed that his status as outcast in Washington was changing. Bush and Baker had some specific goals in mind: in particular, they hoped to moderate U.S. policy in Latin America, which had become politically polarized in the Reagan era. After years of bitter partisan bickering about the U.S. role in the region, Baker believed both parties in Congress could unite behind a reasonable U.S. push for democratic elections in Latin America, stepping away from politically unpopular support for right-wing juntas and counterproductive covert campaigns against leftist regimes. Unlike Reagan, who brushed Carter off, Bush and Baker were looking to him as an ally.

  Carter was soon recalled to active duty. His mission: Panama City. During Reagan’s last year in office, a federal grand jury had indicted Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking. Reagan—and later Bush—gradually beefed up U.S. forces in the Canal Zone while tightening economic sanctions in hope of squeezing Noriega out of power. Those moves didn’t budge the pockmarked general from his perch; within a few months of taking office, Bush quietly authorized covert support for Noriega’s opponents—and waited for an opening.

  It came in May 1989, when Carter and Ford volunteered to lead a group of international officials to monitor and observe the Panamanian elections. The bipartisan nature of the delegation gave the Bush team some useful cover for action in case the elections proved to be fraudulent. Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft, who was now Bush’s NSC advisor, assumed—correctly, it would turn out—that Noriega couldn’t win the election and would simply try to steal it. Carter flew down to Panama City on May 5 and met with Noriega soon after. Though the voting unfolded largely without incident on May 7, once the polls had closed, bands of armed goons fanned out to polling stations, stealing the tabulation sheets, and replacing the official results with fake counts of their own. Not long after, Noriega’s murderous “dignity battalions” began to sweep the streets of dissenters, clubbing opposition candidates in Panama City and killing some of their supporters. Carter roamed the darkened countryside that night (the electricity had been shut off), checking in at polling stations while an independent count revealed that the opposition party led by Guillermo Endara had won. As it became clear that Noriega was stealing the vote, Carter phoned Noriega’s headquarters, but was told the general was too busy to speak to him.

  By now, Carter was angry that the election had been stolen, angry that Noriega was dodging him, and even angrier that he was using violence to cement the results on the street. Stopping at one tabulation center where vote tampering was obviously under way, Carter remonstrated in his rudimentary Spanish: “Are you honest or are you thieves?” And then he began to swing the spotlight on the fraud. Carter tried to call a press conference, but ran into Panamanian Defense Force regulars, complete with fixed bayonets, who proceeded to cordon off the former president and his aides in a conference center in downtown Panama City. Carter simply held his forty-five-minute press conference right there. “I hope there will be a worldwide outcry,” he declared, “against a dictator who stole this election from his own people.” As the session came to an end, one of Noriega’s intelligence officers quietly warned a Carter aide that he needed to get his team and its famous leader out of town soon. As Carter’s delegation departed a few hours later, Noriega’s armored units moved into Panama City.

  This was a gutsy performance by any measure. For most Americans, and much of the world, the verdict was clear and Carter had delivered it: Noriega was a tyrant and his elections were a charade. For the first time since he stepped down as president, Carter earned worldwide praise for making a hard and fast call at a tense and dangerous moment. (Nor had it gone unnoticed that Ford had skipped the messy election monitoring to attend a charity golf tournament.) The Bush White House was quite pleased with Carter’s work; it helped to have a prominent former Democratic president on its side calling Noriega a tyrant. Within a few months, Bush would invade Panama and push Noriega from power.

  The next stop was Nicaragua. In early 1989, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, as well as leaders of Nicaragua’s opposition parties, invited Carter and the Carter Center to monitor their pending national elections. The Marxist Sandinistas had seized power in an armed revolt in the late 1970s and then resisted U.S.-backed revolts against their regime in the Reagan era. Now, in the late fall of 1989, Ortega was betting he was popular enough to try democracy. This was a huge gamble. And so, once again, Carter gathered a team of fifty observers, toured the country three times before the voting began, and worked behind the scenes to win the confidence of Ortega both in the event the Sandinistas won—and if they lost. Armed with a $500,000 grant from Congress, the Carter Center observers held seminars in how to hold an elect
ion and even staged a small-scale mock election as practice. Carter (as well as many independent pollsters) expected the Sandinistas to win, in part because the party controlled the nation’s media outlets. Carter went so far as to predict it.

  After almost ten years of trying unsuccessfully to overthrow the Sandinistas by force, Washington was ready for a different approach. Congress passed, and Bush signed, a measure to spend $9 million on get-out-the-vote campaigns. Bush also cut a deal with Democrats in Congress to continue aid for food and housing, as long as genuinely free elections were held. While it wasn’t a unanimous sentiment, a thin majority in Washington was prepared to recognize the Sandinistas if they somehow managed to win.

  In the weeks leading up to the February 1990 vote, Carter kept Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft apprised of developments on the ground. Carter also spent time preparing members of Congress for a Sandinista victory. Coming on the heels of Noriega’s electoral theft, he argued, it was incumbent on Congress to honor the results if the Sandinistas managed to win one fair and square. And then he flew back to Managua to watch the vote come in.

  But the voting did not unfold as expected. Carter’s observers, divided into more than a dozen patrols and dispersed throughout Nicaragua, reported only minor voting problems on election day. But midway through the evening, a preliminary vote count by U.N. officials showed that Violeta Chamorro and her opposition National Opposition Union (UNO) party were on the verge of tossing Ortega and the Sandinistas from power. The margin appeared to be large—perhaps as much as fifteen points. If it held, it could add up to an upset that neither Ortega nor Carter had expected. The next question was obvious: would Ortega and the Sandinistas abide by the vote?

  Carter left nothing to chance. With fellow observer Elliot Richardson, a former U.S. attorney general, he hastily arranged a meeting with Ortega to make sure the Sandinista leader understood the implications of the early count. Carter was uniquely qualified to speak plainly to Ortega on this score: his administration had recognized the Sandinistas when they first came to power in 1979 (at some political cost at home) and he’d later called on Ortega in his years out of office. He was as close to a real friend as the Sandinistas had in the United States. Arriving at party headquarters after midnight, Carter and Richardson found the ruling party bosses in despair, if not utter shock. Pressed by Carter to accept the inevitable, Ortega resisted. Then Carter spoke plainly: “I’ve won an election, Daniel. I’ve lost an election. I can tell you from my own experience that losing is not the end of the world.” (This prompted Rosalynn Carter, who was also in attendance, to remark, “I thought it was the end of the world!”) But Carter added: “Your greatest accomplishment as president will be if you lead a peaceful transition of power.”