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

by Nancy Gibbs

  The Club Strikes Back

  Monica Crowley’s extensive accounts about her years at Nixon’s side during this period make it clear that Nixon’s appreciation for Clinton was never unalloyed. Whatever satisfaction Nixon felt for finally winning Clinton’s ear on Russia or China or Bosnia, he was routinely dismayed by many of Clinton’s personnel choices, domestic priorities, and what Nixon saw as the president’s decision to virtually share power with his wife. He admired Clinton’s brains, his guts, his confidence, and surely his energy. But he disliked, at least as Crowley related his remarks, his sloppiness and his reliance on multilateral solutions; and he distrusted his youth. Nixon also found Clinton graceless: he noticed during his White House meeting that Clinton had not inquired after his wife, Pat, who was suffering from lung cancer.

  Human nature makes it easy to root both for, and against, someone who comes along to do the job you once held. But at times, an element of competition seemed to have Nixon by the throat. After returning from China in late April, for example, Nixon remarked several times that he never enjoyed the kind of favorable press coverage that Clinton did—a comment Clinton would have found amusing given that his own press clips were withering during his first year in office. Nixon also complained that late-night comics continued to make fun of him decades after he left the White House—but seemed to give Clinton a pass. Presidents, even when they get some things right, never cease to be punch lines, and it was telling that Nixon regarded his comic potential as a metric for comparing himself to his successors.

  On June 22, Pat Nixon passed away at the age of eighty-one. Clinton phoned his condolences in an awkward call later that day. Both Clinton and his wife skipped the funeral in California. Instead, he issued a statement and sent his old friend Vernon Jordan, who carried a personal letter of sympathy from one president to another. Crowley recorded that Nixon “exploded” at Clinton’s absence after the funeral service.

  But if Clinton was distracted, it was in part because he had a more pressing club problem: someone had tried to kill one of its members.

  A few weeks earlier on April 14, former president George Bush and his wife, Barbara, along with former secretary of state James Baker, former secretary of the treasury Nicholas Brady, and former White House chief of staff John Sununu, visited Kuwait to take part in a celebration of the allied invasion two years before that had driven Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein out of the country. A few weeks afterward, Kuwaiti authorities informed their U.S. counterparts that they had uncovered a plot to kill Bush and captured a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying 180 pounds of explosives in its door frames, along with detonators and timers. They had arrested fourteen men and charged them with conspiracy to assassinate Bush by detonating a car bomb. U.S. officials sent CIA and FBI investigators to find out who was behind the plot, though they could well have guessed the source. One of the plotters cooperated with investigators and on June 24, two days after Pat’s death, FBI officials informed Clinton that they had traced the evidence back to Saddam’s intelligence ministry.

  The next question was what to do about it. The politics were not complicated: an attack on any American overseas was unacceptable and merited a response; a premeditated attack on a former president was outrageous and required one. But what response, exactly? Attempting to kill a sitting president might justify a full-bore declaration of war; but what is the commensurate response for trying to kill a former president? The United States was still in a half war with Iraq: the U.S. Air Force and Navy maintained a no fly zone over most of the country and had to routinely destroy Iraq’s antiaircraft radars to keep the skies clear.

  But the attempt on Bush’s life was a far bolder assault against American sovereignty than anything Iraq had done since the end of the Gulf War. A more dramatic response was required and other forces may have fueled Clinton’s need to respond. Sheer inexperience, bad luck, and almost nonstop internal second-guessing lent Clinton’s first six months in office a chaotic, amateurish quality. Clinton had an excellent cabinet but a weak White House staff, which struggled to keep up with events, expectations, and an unforgiving press corps. He suffered a heart-stopping twenty-point drop in the polls in June, overhauled his staff, and brought in David Gergen, a former aide to Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, to steady his listing West Wing. Time’s cover on June 7 summed up the problem: The Incredible Shrinking President.

  Clinton met with his advisors on June 24, to review the evidence from Kuwait as well as his options. There was general agreement among Clinton’s aides for a coordinated cruise missile attack on the government ministry that had hatched the plot. Clinton and his team discussed the best time for an attack and how to explain it to the public. Secretary of State Warren Christopher identified the only yardstick that mattered: “You’ll be judged on whether you hit the target.” Clinton signed the orders; the attack would come in forty-eight hours.

  As the president prepared to address the nation two days later, he made a few calls to alert key foreign leaders and then phoned Bush himself. An unusual exchange followed: here was Clinton, an embattled young president who defeated the Prospero of the Gulf War just the year before, calling to explain why he couldn’t let an attempt on Bush’s life go unanswered. The impending U.S. attack would be Clinton’s first use of military force as president; he wasn’t merely informing his predecessor of his decision; he was seeking his advice.

  And perhaps, in a way, his consent. As Clinton’s advisor George Stephanopoulos recalled it, Clinton said, “We completed our investigation. Both the CIA and the FBI did an excellent job. It was directed against you. I’ve ordered a cruise missile attack.” Stephanopoulos recalled that Bush seemed to be concerned most about the possibility of collateral damage in Baghdad, and Clinton assured him that the United States was taking every precaution. “I think he thinks we are doing the right thing,” Clinton said when the conversation ended. “Thought it was a tough call.”

  Clinton dispatched Christopher to Maine to brief Bush in person. That was in part to seal the deal with Bush. In his memoirs, Stephanopoulos tried to capture the implicit transaction between Bush and Clinton at this unprecedented moment. “Clinton wanted and needed Bush’s approval as much as Bush needed—although he may not have wanted—Clinton’s protection. Bush may have been the only man in the country, with the possible exception of Colin Powell, who could have single-handedly stopped the attack. All it would take is a well-placed leak to the press or a sotto voce call from Brent Scowcroft to Tony Lake. The message would suggest, perhaps, that Bush would publicly criticize Clinton for a hollow, opportunist gesture—a hasty retaliation, based on shaky evidence—that was more about propping up Clinton’s political fortunes than punishing Saddam Hussein. But that wasn’t Bush’s style. Whatever made him diffident at the prospect of having a military strike ordered in his defense, he kept to himself. Presidents, especially gentlemen presidents, didn’t do that to each other.”

  On June 26, the U.S. Navy launched twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles, nine from a destroyer in the Red Sea and fourteen from a cruiser in the Persian Gulf, at the Iraqi intelligence services headquarters in Baghdad. The raid was only a partial success: the missiles destroyed a section of the building but three of the missiles missed their target and landed in a residential neighborhood, killing eight and wounding twelve. The news broke early on a perfect midsummer Saturday evening in Washington; reporters turned up at the briefing room near dusk to hear the president announce the first military strike of his presidency: “From the first days of our Revolution,” Clinton said, “American security has depended on this phrase: Don’t tread on me.”

  Nine years later, another president, George W. Bush, launched a war that led to the overthrow, capture, and eventually the execution of Saddam Hussein—the man he once referred to as “the one who tried to kill my dad.”

  A Vacation . . . and a Sleepover

  A few weeks later, Gerald Ford invited Clinton, his wife, and his daughter to Vail for a few days of R & R. Ford bare
ly knew Clinton. But he knew that Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, a budding ballerina, wanted to take part in the Bolshoi Academy, which was in residence in Vail that summer. So he invited Chelsea and her parents to join him for a weekend.

  Ford arranged for the first family to stay a few doors down from his own mountainside house. The two presidents played golf by day and then had dinner each night with their families. However brief, the few days in Colorado were the first real vacation Clinton had taken during his first seven months in office. Ford was enchanted by Chelsea and charmed by Hillary, the Republican-turned-Democrat who regaled Ford with stories about her formative days as a Goldwater Girl in Illinois. Hillary presented Ford with a framed copy of a photograph of her standing between Ford and former congressman Melvin Laird when she was a college intern on Capitol Hill. (The original photo was one of Hillary’s father’s proudest possessions; it had still been hanging in his bedroom when he died just a few months before.) When she gave Ford a copy, Hillary apologized for having “strayed from the fold.”

  Ford was touched by the gift and sent it to his own presidential library. After attending a performance of the Bolshoi on the first night, Ford and Hillary danced together at a tented, post-ballet reception while a band played “New York, New York.”

  Ford was struck—dazzled might be a better word—during the two-day break by Clinton’s political skills, and he would liken him in conversations with friends to an evangelist, a Chautauqua charmer, and the ultimate salesman. He found Clinton much more affable than he expected and much more persuasive as well. He could see that Clinton was more sure-footed on domestic affairs than foreign policy though he wasn’t sure what, if anything, Clinton really believed in. The new president, Ford said later, “moves in, seduces everybody and then starts to compromise his position based on the pressures that he gets politically and otherwise. . . . This guy can sell three day old ice.”

  But if Ford admired some of Clinton’s political talents, he was alarmed by what he saw of his golf game. The forty-second president’s habit of repeated mulligans and outrageous gimme putts unnerved and even upset the thirty-eighth president. Locals as well as reporters hovered nearby as Clinton, dressed in a blue golf shirt, beige slacks, and a panama hat, hooked drives, missed putts, was swallowed by sand traps, and sometimes voiced his frustration (“Owww, you idiot!”) as part of a foursome of Ford, Jack Nicklaus, and Enron chairman Ken Lay. At the end of the first day of golf together, the First Duffer proclaimed, “That was great; let’s do it again tomorrow.” Ford wasn’t sure that was such a great idea.

  Asked about the conspicuously bipartisan nature of his golf quartet, Clinton remarked from his cart, “It’s the way I’m going to try and run the rest of my administration. I don’t ever want the kind of polarization we had the last six months.” His host was more circumspect: “We’ve got a few things,” Ford said, “where we have similar views.”

  One of those things was free trade. In late summer, Clinton invited all five former presidents to join him at the White House for a pep rally to support the North American Free Trade Agreement, launched by Bush but now languishing in the Congress.

  But with Clinton things are never simple, and so the invitation had two parts. Clinton wanted the former presidents to join him on the South Lawn on the first day for the signing of a Middle East peace treaty between Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, sleep over that night in the White House, and then join him for a NAFTA booster event the next day.

  Nixon, who was still sore at Clinton’s missing Pat’s funeral, declined. Reagan was limiting his appearances with the onset of Alzheimer’s. Ford and Carter agreed to participate. But what about Bush? It had been less than a year since Clinton had won the election and White House officials worried it might be too soon to ask for a favor. It was easier for Kennedy to tap Eisenhower, who had retired with honors after two terms, than for Clinton to invite a man he had defeated back into the fray after eight months. And so chief of staff Mack McLarty checked with former secretary of state James Baker first, just to be sure an invitation wouldn’t upset the former president. Baker guessed that Bush would rise to the challenge and when McLarty finally called, Bush quickly agreed. Somewhat to Clinton’s surprise, Bush agreed to stay overnight in the White House. So did Carter. Ford begged off, staying at a downtown hotel.

  The next morning, when the presidents met for breakfast, Clinton told his guests they were making history over bacon and eggs: it was the only time four presidents had dined together at the White House. The conversation dragged until someone brought up Ross Perot, who had emerged that summer as the leading opponent to the NAFTA treaty. And then the four presidents went around the table, one after the other, criticizing the Texas industrialist. The club contest for who disliked Perot the most was spirited: Ford said he regarded Perot as a fraud, who sought and won government contracts and then turned around and pretended to be a spokesman for free enterprise. Carter, who had dismissed Perot as a demagogue, recalled how Perot had stoked the fever to rescue the Iranian hostages in the late 1970s without understanding the risks. Clinton insisted later that he had remained relatively quiet during the breakfast but, of the four, no one seemed to take more pleasure in deriding Perot than Bush, who had known him for years in Texas and then faced him as a candidate in 1992. Asked later if he among the quartet was the most outspoken about Perot, Clinton would only say, “There were other candidates for the prize.”

  At the East Room event a few hours later, it was Ford who made the most convincing case for ratifying the treaty. Recalling his own votes for reciprocal free trade in the late 1940s, Ford said it had required bipartisan teamwork to undo the “stupidity of what had been done in 1930 and ’31 by the . . . Smoot Hawley Tariff Act” and it would take such partnership again. Otherwise, he warned, “We, the United States, could not sell abroad.”

  Nixon watched the NAFTA event on television and dismissed the bonhomie as a presidential dog and pony show. “I see where Bush [spent] the night at the White House. What is wrong with him? I can’t understand why they all want to go back to the goddamned place.” But when Israel’s Rabin called to thank Nixon for his contributions to Middle East peace, the exiled president began to have second thoughts about having skipped the slumber party. He had missed his chance to go back. He would only get one more.

  The Club Buries Its Own

  By fall, Clinton was relying on Nixon again. He called in October to talk about Somalia, where his administration had stumbled and lost nineteen U.S. servicemen as part of a U.N. peacekeeping force. Nixon urged Clinton to use the U.N. as a tool, but not become a prisoner to its strange ways and means. And then Clinton called again later in the month to discuss Haiti, where the corrupt military regime of General Raoul Cédras was turning an impoverished country into a lawless and bloody one as well. Whatever anger Nixon had harbored at Clinton for missing Pat’s funeral had passed; Nixon once more was serving as a part-time Clinton advisor.

  In December of 1993, the two men watched as parliamentary elections in Russia produced a popular comeback for the nationalists and communists—exactly the sort of regression Nixon had been warning about for the previous two years. The uneasy clarity of 1993 had shattered as Russians went to the polls, and within a few weeks some of Yeltsin’s top aides quit and Russian officials began to sound a lot like their Soviet predecessors. Clinton called Nixon in January before the president flew to Moscow to meet with Yeltsin.

  In February, Nixon decided he too needed to see what was going on in Russia and laid on a trip to Moscow. Nixon’s final trip to Russia revealed how closely he was coordinating with Clinton by early 1994. Working through Dimitri Simes in Washington, Nixon checked to make sure every visit on his six-day itinerary was approved by Clinton aides. NSC aide Nicholas Burns made a special trip to New Jersey to brief Nixon a few days before the departure. U.S. officials called Nixon’s trip a private fact-finding mission. Clinton phoned to talk through the itinerary.

  Before leaving, Nixon wrote an
op-ed for the New York Times that he would have been better off sticking in a drawer. The column asked whether Yeltsin was “losing his grip.” And then he urged, much as he had to Bush in 1992, that the United States should look beyond Yeltsin and build bridges to other players on the Russian political scene. As strategic advice to the president, Nixon’s observation was spot-on. As a public, prearrival calling card, it was unwise.

  But this was a minor misstep compared to the trip itself. Soon after arriving in Moscow, Nixon was photographed virtually embracing a Yeltsin rival. The sight of that on Russian TV led Yeltsin to abruptly cancel his own appointment with the former president and yank both Nixon’s security detail and motorcade. It was a rash overreaction—but the damage was done: Nixon had been blackballed at the highest levels.

  Clinton came to Nixon’s defense back in the United States, urging Yeltsin to sit down with Nixon in part because he feared the snub would weaken Republican support for Russian aid in Congress. Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, made a similar plea. And before Nixon left Russia, Yeltsin backed off a little, permitting his aides to meet with Nixon but leaving town himself to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral.

  When Nixon got back, he sent Clinton a seven-page letter on his findings. Clinton pored over the memo, wowed by its intelligence, showing it only to his wife and Vice President Al Gore. Never made public, Clinton paraphrased it briefly in his memoirs: “Nixon said I had earned the respect of the leaders he visited and could not let Whitewater or any other domestic issue ‘divert attention from our major foreign policy priority—the survival of political and economic freedom in Russia.’” But the letter went further than that: Nixon urged Clinton to maintain his relationship with Yeltsin but make contact with other democrats in Russia. He warned Clinton away from some ultranationalists and toward those interested in liberty and reform. He pressed Clinton to replace his ambassador in Kiev and concentrate future U.S. economic aid on Ukraine, where it would matter most. And he predicted that the former Soviet Union would come under even greater pressure internally from ethnic and subnational groups in the future. Clinton told Taylor Branch a few weeks later that it was the smartest document on foreign policy he’d received as president. “The letter was a tour de force,” Clinton recalled. “Nixon at his best.”