by Nancy Gibbs
It takes at least two sides to play that game and so the Carters next called on UNO’s Chamorro and made it clear to the incoming president that an orderly transition would not be helped by any sort of gloating victory remarks. Then, around 4 A.M., Carter called Baker back in Washington with a request that the secretary issue a no-Ortega-bashing order to government officials later that day. Carter, the aging fly fisherman, was trying to bring in a ten-pound fish on a five-pound test line. He knew who to call and what to say, and had the stature to say it.
Carter in Managua was one of the club’s finest moments. While countless issues of security and personnel remained to be worked out over the weeks that followed, many of which Carter helped arrange, Ortega took Carter’s advice. Chamorro was sworn in on April 15. When it was over, both Baker and Bush paid tribute to Carter for his role in the peaceful transfer of power, both at the time and later in their memoirs. For the first time since leaving office, Carter was earning a reputation as a wise man worthy of the name. By early 1990, an ABC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that Carter’s popularity among Americans nearly equaled that of Ronald Reagan.
“Carter is really quite easy to deal with,” Baker said later. “He just wants to be useful. He never complains. But if you don’t clearly spell out his assignment and then ride herd over him, then he can get in your way.”
And that’s exactly what happened next.
When Carter Went Rogue
The most delicate task of the Bush presidency was the high-stakes bid to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The United States was the world’s clearly dominant military power; but the stability of the region and the security of the world’s oil supplies required more than a unilateral response, and Bush set about assembling his unprecedented coalition and lining up support for an invasion if Saddam refused to retreat.
But Carter saw things differently. In late 1990, Carter secretly and repeatedly lobbied the United Nations Security Council and other foreign leaders to vote against a resolution, proposed by President Bush, authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam from Kuwait. Carter’s little-known campaign to delay and perhaps even derail the 1991 Gulf War would remain a secret for several years and is one of the strangest chapters in club history, in part because Carter had worked so hard in 1989 and 1990 to develop the kind of working relationship with the Bush White House that he could never have had with Reagan. Bush put Carter back in business, gave him some jobs to do and some missions to execute. And then Carter turned around and threw it over the side.
Carter’s behavior on Iraq was not merely coloring outside the lines. His performance, several former Bush advisors said later, bordered on treason.
The episode was all the more remarkable because it wasn’t George Bush who declared, for all time, that an attack on one of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf would be treated as an attack on the United States. That president was Carter, who in his 1980 State of the Union address to Congress said, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” It even had a name: the Carter Doctrine.
After Saddam overran Kuwait in August 1990, George Bush decided to make the Carter Doctrine stick. He appeared before reporters a few days after the invasion and said, “This will not stand,” a remark that surprised even some of Bush’s own top aides. Soon after, Bush asked Pentagon officers for an estimate of the number of troops it would take to eject the Iraqis; when the generals came back with a half million—what they thought would be a prohibitively high number—Bush coolly said, “Fine. Move ’em.” The generals gulped. Meanwhile, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft began to lay down a series of deadlines and timetables for Saddam to meet—or be forced out of Kuwait.
Not everyone in Washington realized just how serious Bush was. But Carter did and he recoiled. He believed that the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq could somehow have opened the door to a new round of Middle East peace talks between Israel and Egypt—unless the U.S. overreacted. But more importantly, Carter in general was opposed to the use of force to solve problems. That was what the Carter Center was all about and that was how he defined his post-presidency. Carter took his crusade for negotiations to the op-ed pages, fearful that a U.S. invasion would be bloody and upend decades of work in the region by the United States (and by Carter himself). These op-eds were curious documents: they dodged the central question of whether Saddam should be ejected from Kuwait by force—Carter seemed to think not, but he wouldn’t exactly say—and called instead for talks to avert war, if not before the shooting started, then afterward to settle the peace.
But it is also clear that Carter completely misunderstood Bush’s war aims; he assumed Bush would not be content to merely throw Saddam out of Kuwait but would instead chase him all the way to Baghdad. “There is little doubt that an attack on Iraq without further provocation from Saddam will erode US support in the Middle East,” he argued in Time in mid-October. Maybe so, but Bush wasn’t planning to invade Iraq; the remarkable coalition of thirty-two nations had been assembled solely to eject Saddam from Kuwait, and it was that very limited goal that enabled him to build such a broad alliance. In any case, the best that can be said about Carter’s efforts in this period is that he meant well. He even held a conference in Atlanta on the Gulf crisis and how to avoid war through negotiations. Through October, Carter was dancing on the edge of opposition, but had not crossed over.
Then he did. In mid-November, in a personal letter to the leaders of the countries on the U.N. Security Council, Carter called for good-faith negotiations with Saddam Hussein. And then he secretly sent that letter to twelve other heads of state, hoping they would put pressure on the other four permanent members of the Security Council to put peace talks before military action. It was the second letter that was in some ways the most egregious because Carter was urging the allied nations to drop out of the U.S.-led coalition and give “unequivocal support” to an Arab League effort to resolve the conflict through talks.
“Recent statements from Washington and other national capitals make it increasingly clear that patience and persistence are being abandoned and that great pressures are being exerted for approval of a military solution to the present Gulf Crisis,” he wrote. “History has shown that momentum of this kind is extremely difficult to reverse. Since armed intervention by forces of the United States and other nations is predicated on prior approval of the United Nations Security Council, your own decision can be a deciding factor in making this momentous judgment.”
The meaning of the letter could not be clearer: a former president was lobbying foreign heads of state to work against a sitting U.S. president as war loomed.
Rather than alerting Bush in advance of his plans, Carter sent Bush a copy of the letter the day after he mailed it around the world and then couched it in a fashion that it might have seemed, as his biographer Douglas Brinkley noted later, that the letter was “written directly and only” for Bush when in fact Carter had already distributed his views widely.
Even in his worst post-presidential mischief, Nixon had never gone this far. Nixon may have differed with Reagan about arms control strategy, and opposed Bush’s gentle handling of Gorbachev, but he made his arguments in public and always kept a line to the Oval Office open. And Nixon’s arguments were largely academic differences about the shape and size of foreign aid levels and what sort of concessions Washington might make in arms control talks. Carter, by comparison, had gone operational: he had mounted a lobbying campaign in the run-up to a war in which the United States had organized and was leading a global coalition.
Given the distribution list, it is unlikely that Carter intended his gambit to remain a secret for very long. After Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney called Pentagon chief Dick Cheney and read him Carter’s letter word for word, the White House came unhinged. Bush was privately furious. Scowcr
oft told Carter through back channels to cease and desist. Decades later, top Bush officials still complained that Carter’s actions were tantamount to treason, a probable violation of the 1799 Logan Act, which made it a crime for any private citizen to try to conduct U.S. foreign policy without proper authority from the U.S. government. “He heard from us,” Scowcroft recalled, still a bit amazed. “I recognized his right to speak out,” Bush said later. “What I violently disagreed with was his writing to heads of foreign governments, urging them to stand against what we were trying to do in the UN.” If Carter ever apologized for his action, there is little evidence of it. On the contrary, when we asked him years later if he would do the same all over again, Carter quickly replied, “Yes, I would because I sent exactly the same letter to President Bush as I did to the other members of the Security Council, and I just expressed my opinion that the war was not necessary. Because I knew from my own sources that the Iraqis were willing to withdraw from occupied territory and then pay reparations and so forth, but that’s ancient history.”
But Carter did not stop with the letter to the Security Council. In January, just days before the deadline set by Bush for Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait or face air strikes, Carter wrote Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad (all of whom were members of Bush’s anti-Saddam coalition) urging each to “call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis.” This last-minute move was never designed to become public; it was a one-man end run around U.S. foreign policy. In fact, in an especially divisive suggestion, he informed his counterparts that U.S. voters might in some way support his personal search for peace. “You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets and others fully supportive. Also, most Americans will welcome such a move.” And unlike the letter of a few months before, there is no evidence that Carter ever told the White House about it.
Why had Carter done it? What made him take matters in his own hands in such a dramatic and furtive fashion? Those who have known him longest say it is a combination of factors even beyond his deep aversion to violence; a personal faith that the Middle East was a province only he understood clearly; and the fact that he didn’t really care what anyone else thought. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the entire episode was not that it happened but that it remained a club secret for years. Despite the fact that his letters had been sent around the world and to the White House itself, word of Carter’s insurrection was not made public until three years later, when the New York Times disclosed the story. His last-minute plea to Arab leaders on behalf of peace would remain largely unknown until Brinkley unearthed it. Though the Bush White House believed that Carter had committed an unpardonable sin, it was not in the administration’s interest to disclose Carter’s strange maneuvering in the midst of a national mobilization. Besides, leaking word of Carter’s behavior would itself have been a violation of the club’s genteel rule against intra-member warfare. Instead, Bush aides took more punitive but discreet action: they simply cut Carter out of future foreign policy partnerships. There would be no more teaming up on overseas hot spots or elections; Carter’s requests for aircraft and other assistance now went unanswered by Baker’s State Department. Unable to trust Carter, the Bush team discarded him as an ally.
He would have to wait until someone else became commander in chief.
SIX PRESIDENTS:
The Golden Age of the Club
Bill Clinton was lucky in many ways; but when it came to former presidents, he won the lottery.
When he was elected president, he had five former commanders in chief at his disposal: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, the most of any president in the twentieth century. Not all of them had been helpful to one another, in or out of office. But some combination of his charm, their needs, and the new global challenges of the post–Cold War age allowed Clinton to deploy nearly all to his advantage—especially, as it turned out, the Republicans.
Clinton studied their personalities and presidencies closely; he wanted to know more about each of them. When he invited the entire club to breakfast during the fall of his first year, he had an aide find out the last time that had happened (answer: never). And in turn, the veterans wanted to meet the new boy, were curious about his instincts, eager for his attention, and in need of help for the missions and projects that kept their retirements interesting. He’d turn out to have the least rapport with the one with whom he had the most in common. Clinton shared with Carter, his fellow Southern Baptist political prodigy, a colorful mother, a strong-willed wife, and deep roots in the loamy soil of pragmatic liberalism. Clinton began his political life as a Carter man; but by the time he had become a once and future Arkansas governor, he felt Carter had betrayed him, and so had little compunction about ignoring him completely as he made his own bid for the White House. As he had before with Bush, Carter would prove to Clinton just how useful, and how enraging, a former president could be.
The Republicans, on the other hand, were more valuable assets. Reagan would fade quickly from view during Clinton’s first term, but not before he taught the young president a lesson. Clinton turned to Ford for help in escaping Washington—and later to elude a trial by the Senate. He marveled at, and later modeled himself after, George Herbert Walker Bush. Most improbably of all, Clinton found in Nixon a welcome tutor and a helpful confessor.
And when Nixon died, Clinton likened the loss to that of his mother.
20
“The Guy Knows How the Game Is Played”
—RICHARD NIXON
Fate and modern medicine conspired to make January 20, 1993, a milestone in the annals of the club. For the first time since Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861, five former presidents were alive to see the swearing in of a sixth.
The five—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush—represented twenty-four years in the Oval Office. This historic expansion in club membership was chiefly the result of presidents getting elected younger, being thrown out of office faster, and then living much longer than their nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts. But as a quintet, they were particularly distinctive. Except for Reagan, all had left the White House under unhappy circumstances: Nixon resigned; Ford was defeated after two years; Carter and Bush were rejected after one term. Nixon spent twenty years in retirement, Ford more than twenty-five, and Carter is likely to become the longest-living former president in history (he is set to surpass Herbert Hoover, who spent thirty-one years in retirement before dying in 1964). Nixon, the thirty-seventh president, was elected to Congress in 1946, the same year that Clinton, the forty-second president, was born.
As Clinton took the oath, he had the club on his side. All his predecessors had pledged to be helpful; several secretly wanted to be recruited; and one had solemnly vowed to do no harm—provided Clinton played by the rules.
The Golden Age of the club had begun.
Two months earlier, on November 18, Bill Clinton paid a courtesy call on George Bush at the White House during a quick, thirty-six-hour visit to Washington.
Bush had taken the defeat very hard. His aides told him, right up until election day itself, that the race was close and that he’d probably squeak by. He told himself that voters would never dismiss all his experience as president and opt for someone so much younger and of such different bearing and character. Neither hunch turned out to be right.
On the evening of his defeat, Bush stayed up well past midnight, writing in his diary that it “hurt, hurt, hurt and I guess it’s the pride, too. . . . On a competitive basis I don’t like to see the pollsters right at the end; I don’t like to see the pundits right; and I don’t like to see all of those who have written me off right. I was absolutely convinced we would prove them wrong but I was wrong and they were right and that hurts a lot. . . . Now to bed, prepared to face tomorrow: Be strong, be kind, be generous of spirit, be understanding and let people know how grateful you are. Don’t
get even. Comfort the ones I’ve hurt and let down. Say your prayers and ask for God’s understanding and strength. Finish with a smile and some gusto and do what’s right and finish strong.”
Clinton came by to visit two weeks later. The presidents huddled in the Oval Office for close to two hours, sitting in wing chairs by the fireplace and talking mostly about foreign affairs. “Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia,” Bush recalled. “I told him I thought that was mostly likely to be the prime trouble spot.” Bush also told Clinton he felt the same sense of excitement and wonder at the end of the four years as he had on the first day. But he was already preparing for life after the White House. He had made plans to build a new house in Houston and was dabbling more with personal computers. He chose a self-mocking email username and shared it only with his closest friends: “former leader of the free world.” As Clinton prepared to leave, Bush offered a benediction. “Bill, I want to tell you something. When I leave here, you’re going to have no trouble from me. The campaign is over, it was tough and I’m out of here. I will do nothing to complicate your work and I just want you to know that.”