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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Bush kept his promise. One day, Clinton would return the favor.

  The very next morning, on November 19, 1992, a peculiar valentine appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

  “President Elect Bill Clinton deserves high marks for aggressively addressing a number of important issues during the transition period,” it began, a pretty watery compliment given the fact that the transition was barely two weeks old. “But as was the case during the campaign, the most important issue since the end of World War Two has received minimal attention.”

  The rest of Richard Nixon’s essay went on at some length about how Boris Yeltsin’s government was in “mortal danger” and needed an infusion of Western aid. But the sorry state of U.S.-Russian relations wasn’t the reason Nixon wrote the op-ed; the sorry state of Nixon-Clinton relations was.

  Nixon wanted the new president’s ear. And despite its mostly positive tone, Nixon’s Times essay was actually the second stage of one of his trademark good cop/bad cop routines. The thirty-seventh president had already sent Clinton a handwritten letter on the morning after the election, in which he congratulated Clinton on his win, calling it “one of the best” in memory and giving a special “never-give-up” shout-out to Clinton for overcoming doubts about his Arkansas background and character as he won the White House. Nixon promised to be a help and not a hindrance to the forty-second president, and stroked him to the point that Nixon apologized to his research assistant Monica Crowley for laying the frosting on a little thick. “The guy’s got a big ego,” Nixon said, “and you gotta flatter the hell out of him if you are going to get anywhere.”

  But the secret, morning-after letter had produced no reply. Frustrated and angry, Nixon decided to escalate things a step or two. He wrote the Times op-ed in mid-November as a kind of friendly shot across Clinton’s bow, one that was designed to say, “if you don’t get back to me in private, we can have this conversation in public if you prefer.”

  Nixon wanted a back channel to a new president. And he would get it, one way or another.

  Eight days after the Times op-ed, Clinton’s motorcade pulled up to the Century City skyscraper in Los Angeles where Ronald Reagan had his post-presidential office. Clinton was spending a few days in town with friends and had sent word to Reagan, now eighty-one years old, that he wanted to stop by and chat.

  A meeting was quickly arranged. The two men were thirty-five years and a world apart in outlook, a gap nearly as great as the forty-three years that had separated Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy when they met four decades before. Reagan had met Clinton before, in the White House, when Clinton attended a reception for the governors with his wife, Hillary. But the seventy minutes the two men spent in L.A. were historic. They talked about the need for a line item veto and how to hold down spending. And then Reagan offered Clinton two vital pieces of advice. First, he said, get out of Washington every weekend you can and make thorough use of Camp David. The fresh air, the chance to freely roam the complex’s roughly 150 acres, even the brief time away from Washington, Reagan told Clinton, were all good for body and soul.

  That piece of advice was predictable. The other was not. Clinton, Reagan insisted, needed to learn how to salute. The older man had noticed during the campaign that Clinton didn’t have any idea how to execute a proper military greeting. As commander in chief, Reagan suggested, Clinton would need a good, crisp up-and-down slash of the hand to get the job done right.

  This was not strictly true. Until Reagan came along and made it part of the role, U.S. presidents rarely, if ever, saluted men in uniform. Uniformed personnel are required to salute the president but not the other way around. As president, Reagan had been concerned enough about his preference for returning salutes that he consulted ahead of time with the Marine commandant to make sure there was no formal reason that he could not repay the gesture to the men who stood like stone griffins at the feet of the Marine One and Air Force One stairways. The general told Reagan he could do pretty much whatever he liked when it came to saluting people, regardless of what tradition dictated or what his predecessors had done. And so Reagan, astute in all ways a president performed his role, started doing it.

  It helped that Reagan knew how to salute, both as a former Army cavalry officer and a former actor who played one in the movies. The trick was pacing, he told Clinton. Soldiers liked to bring the hand up slowly, as if dripping with honey, and then shake it off briskly, as if it were covered with something less pleasant. Clinton, having never served in uniform (and having spent a small portion of his campaign explaining his youthful draft evasion), was more than ready to hear Reagan’s message.

  And so the eighty-one-year-old Reagan proceeded to give the forty-six-year-old Clinton a private tutorial. The two men stood there in Reagan’s L.A. office, thirty-four floors above Beverly Hills, perfecting their salutes.

  When the lesson was over, Reagan rewarded Clinton with a jar of red, white, and blue jelly beans, explaining that they had prevented him from becoming a nicotine addict. Clinton thanked him, shook hands, and headed downstairs to his car. Clinton later spent time practicing his salutes with aides who had served in the military—and some who had not. The jelly beans remained in Clinton’s office for the next eight years.

  The Club Gets a Crush

  A month later, by January 1993, Nixon had tried everything short of voodoo to get Clinton’s attention. He’d done the private letter. He’d unleashed his flirty op-ed piece. He pressed his former aide Roger Stone to make contact with Clinton types who could push the president to call the old man in New Jersey. When all that yielded nothing, Nixon asked Dick Morris, a Clinton advisor, to make some calls and get it done. Still nothing. Stone, an old Nixon hand, kept at it, pressing longtime Democratic sachem Tony Coelho to put in a good word, implying that Nixon was about to come unglued. Finally, Stone made contact with White House speechwriter Paul Begala. Nixon, Stone said, was drafting another op-ed piece that, depending on whether Clinton picked up the phone, could be friendly or hostile. Begala managed to get a memo about Nixon’s desperation in front of the president. Word came back: Clinton would call.

  Nixon, now eighty, was in a hurry. He was scheduled to make his ninth trip to Russia in early February and desperately wanted Clinton’s blessing before he departed; such things gave him added maneuvering room overseas, of course, but also guaranteed a second hearing when the trip was over. Foreign policy advisor Dimitri Simes put in a call to Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s new point man on the former Soviet Union, and asked: might they meet before the trip? Certainly, Talbott replied.

  Talbott and Nixon went back a few years. As Time’s Washington bureau chief in the mid-1980s and later as the magazine’s editor at large, Talbott had interviewed Nixon several times in the Reagan and Bush eras—interviews that usually turned on U.S.-Soviet relations or foreign policy. He was also part of an irregular group of reporters—most of whom were too young to have covered Watergate—who received occasional invitations to dine off the record with the Sage of Saddle River. Talbott understood that Nixon’s private hospitality and his public obsession with U.S.-Russian relations were part of an elaborate rehabilitation scheme, designed to blur lingering memories of Watergate while serving as a reminder of his own, widely praised foreign policy accomplishments when he was president.

  So when he and NSC aide Toby Gati finally turned up at Nixon’s hotel on March 4, 1993, Talbott knew exactly what was about to unfold. It was “an encounter that was awkward bordering on weird,” Talbott recalled in his memoirs. “Nixon opened with five minutes of stilted bonhomie laced with phony compliments and strained jokes, followed by a 30 minute lecture that was carefully prepared, artfully crafted, substantively dense and delivered as though Toby and I were an auditorium, full of people whose hostility Nixon took for granted but whose views he was sure he could influence by the sheer force of his experience, intelligence and—his favorite word—hard headedness.”

  Nixon was certainly unplugged. At times, his
language was coarse; he called the leaders of the G7 nations “assholes” for shortchanging Russian aid; he repeatedly referred to Yeltsin as “Yelstin.” Talbott told Nixon that the new administration supported his upcoming trip and wanted to hear more when he returned. Nixon made it clear he was keen to help Yeltsin, despite the Russian’s well-known tendency to drink too much and speak too expansively. Finally, Nixon urged Talbott not to make the same mistake that Bush and his team had made when it came to the club. Translation: take me seriously. After an hour, Talbott and Gati thanked Nixon for his advice and departed. That night, Talbott reported the gist of the conversation to Clinton, who had dropped by Talbott’s Calvert Street home for dinner. Clinton needed no convincing when it came to boosting aid to Yeltsin. “He’s preaching to the converted,” Clinton said. “In fact, he’s preaching to the preacher.”

  Nixon left for Russia on February 7. He spent two weeks in the region and even from Moscow continued to sound the don’t-ignore-Boris alarm. Foreign and domestic policy, he told the New York Times’s Moscow correspondent, were indivisible. “Separate them and they die,” he warned a faraway White House. Without further aid to Russia, “you can kiss the peace dividend goodbye.”

  Nixon returned home on February 23 and waited by the phone. When several days passed without a word from the White House, he unsheathed his pen and began writing another New York Times op-ed piece. But before he could send it in, Clinton called. A White House operator telephoned on March 3 asking Nixon to stand by for the president. Five minutes passed. Then another eight. Then the operator came back on to apologize: Clinton could not be found. “I’ll wait,” Nixon replied. “He’s a helluva lot busier than I am.” Just after ten, the White House called again and this time Clinton came on the line.

  The conversation swept Nixon off his feet. The two men talked for forty minutes that night and the policy was just the appetizer. They discussed Russia and the Chinese economy, as well as defense spending at home. Nixon delivered a report on his trip and his assessment of Yeltsin (upshot: wounded but salvageable) and Clinton told Nixon he admired Yeltsin’s nerve. They talked of the approaching U.S.-Russia summit in Vancouver, scheduled in April. “Will he last?” Clinton wanted to know of Yeltsin. Yes, Nixon assured him.

  Nixon was impressed by the substance of the conversation, but he was astonished by what came next. A president he had never met, the leader of the opposite party, a man nearly half his age, seemed to take him completely into his confidence. It was like alchemy, Nixon thought, an almost instant partnership that comes when two men have sat at the big desk. And yet Jerry Ford had never talked to him this way, nor Reagan, nor Bush. And Nixon had the sense that Clinton needed to talk. There are some questions that no one else can answer, and Clinton began asking them: How did you do this job? What is the best way to organize your day? Clinton gave Nixon the hour-by-hour breakdown of his daily work schedule—how he rose early, jogged, ate breakfast with his daughter, and then worked through the day until retiring around eleven—in order to ask Nixon if his routine was typical for a president. This exchange delighted Nixon; he had harbored a similar curiosity some forty years earlier as he watched Eisenhower in the job. “You want to know,” he recalled, after his exchange with Clinton, “if you are doing it right.” As he recounted the conversation the following morning, Nixon was still impressed. “He was very respectful with no sickening bullshit,” Nixon said. Best of all, Clinton invited him to the White House on March 8.

  And for that meeting, Nixon prepared like a grad student before his oral exams. He made notes, aligning his arguments and his evidence just as he had for the session with Talbott and Gati. He knew, he told Crowley, how he wanted to “structure” the conversation with Clinton.

  And the White House knew how it wanted to structure the conversation as well. White House aides didn’t go out of their way to boast about the meeting, but they didn’t try to hide it either. Clinton aides brought Nixon in and out by a side door, divulging both the meeting and the earlier phone call in the course of regular press briefings. Nixon was under no illusion about Clinton’s game. He guessed that a young Democratic president with virtually no foreign policy experience calculated that he could only be helped if he was occasionally seen consulting a president with a black belt in diplomacy. But Nixon didn’t care. He was thrilled to be back in the loop. And just in case the larger world somehow missed the development, he leaked word of the late-night call to his old friend Bill Safire, who wrote a New York Times column that appeared on the very morning of their March 8 meeting.

  As he stepped off the private elevator and out into the second-floor residence that afternoon, Nixon was met by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Nixon found Hillary a little unnerving—she had worked on the House Judiciary staff charged with preparing the impeachment case against him nineteen years earlier—and so that day he was all charm. He reminded the first lady that he was raised as a Quaker and that his own daughters, Julie and Tricia, had also attended Sidwell Friends, where Chelsea was in school. Trying to bond over the one thing he knew Hillary cared most about, he said, “You know I tried to fix the health care system more than twenty years ago. It has to be done sometime.”

  “I know,” Hillary replied, stroking him right back. “And we’d be better off today if your proposal had succeeded.”

  When the two presidents finally sat down, alone, over Diet Cokes, Nixon did most of the talking. He told Clinton that how he managed Russia would matter far more to history than how he managed the economy (an unlikely but provocative thesis). He urged the president to press Congress for more aid to Russia and to recruit top American business leaders to lobby lawmakers for that aid as well. Nixon urged Clinton to be tactical as well as strategic; there were many ways to help Yeltsin succeed, he said. U.S. pipeline builders, for example, could boost the performance of key Russian natural gas pipelines if more American aid was authorized. That would help Yeltsin too.

  Then Nixon suggested that Clinton consider the past before moving forward. LBJ and Carter lost control of their presidencies, he said, because of foreign policy failures. If Clinton failed to meet this challenge, his presidency might end prematurely as well. This was a lopsided comparison; it was never clear that the challenge of helping Russia modernize in the 1990s was as existential a threat to Clinton as Vietnam or Iran had been to LBJ or Carter. But it was on the Washington-Moscow axis that Nixon had made his mark as president and it served his larger purpose to make his stand there in his twilight years.

  Clinton paid Nixon the compliment of not trying to flatter him. What Clinton liked most about Nixon’s advice was that it was well prepared, tough-minded, and as far as he could tell did not carry some hidden agenda beyond Nixon’s personal need for redemption, which Clinton could weigh well enough for himself. Nixon, Clinton realized, had a rare ability to see past the minor worries and considerations that often dominated foreign policy debates and take the long view.

  Clinton told enough people that he found Nixon’s advice helpful that word of his appreciation made its way quickly back to New Jersey. Democratic Party wise man Bob Strauss told Nixon that Clinton said that it had been the best conversation he had had with any former president. In public, Clinton praised Nixon—at least on Russia policy. “We are pretty much on the same wavelength, and we have been pretty much on the same wavelength on this issue for more than a year now.” And Nixon paid him right back. “I think Clinton is making a gutsy call, really the mark of a leader,” he told Time a few weeks later, speaking about Russian aid.

  But apart from the theatrics, Clinton genuinely appreciated Nixon’s help. Soon after, he sent Nixon an autographed snapshot of their meeting and in an attached note asked for one in return. Nixon complied, sending a photograph to Washington turning his inscription into an odd joke, thanking Clinton for his help with “aid to China.” “It was,” one Clinton aide recalled, “something of a mutual admiration society.” A few weeks later, the White House released a single picture of the Clinton-Nixo
n conversation.

  It was—what else could you call it?—a Nixon-to-China moment: though Nixon’s own Republican contemporaries had treated him like something of a pariah, the much younger Democratic president was embracing him like a long-lost uncle. Clinton called his new friend on March 24 and again Nixon marveled at Clinton’s confiding nature. This time, the two men had a more detailed conversation about how to handle Yeltsin in Vancouver. Clinton was now cramming for his early-April summit and wanted to know if Nixon thought he should consult Henry Kissinger in advance as well. Nixon instead urged him to talk to Brent Scowcroft, but he gave Clinton a tip: when seeking advice from people who are more experienced than you, Nixon urged, tell them what you plan to do first—and then ask for their reaction. Don’t ask for advice and then ignore it. That way, Nixon coached, you save on bruised feelings. The détente continued as Nixon prepared to leave for China in early April and Clinton’s national security advisor, Tony Lake, phoned Nixon with a few messages to deliver to the Chinese leadership. At a refueling stop in Alaska, Nixon tuned in to the news from Vancouver to see how his new protégé was doing.

  In late April, after Nixon returned, Clinton called once more, this time to discuss the worsening situation in the Balkans. Before signing off, Clinton told Nixon he wanted to talk about China soon. That tease, Nixon guessed, was designed to keep Nixon thinking he was indispensable—at least, for a while longer. “The guy knows how the game is played,” Nixon remarked.