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

by Nancy Gibbs

  And it turned out that Nixon would continue to be a small source of some inspiration long after Clinton left the presidency. In an interview in late 2011, Clinton could still recall in some detail the contents of Nixon’s last letter. “The thing that struck me about Nixon was that he really cared about [Russia] and that his mind was working great and his ability to write coherent thoughts in a compelling way was still there. . . . It was so lucid, so well written, and some of it seems dated today.”

  And how did he know that?

  “I reread it every year,” he said.

  It would also turn out to be Nixon’s farewell address. Just before 6 P.M. on April 18, 1994, Nixon suffered a stroke while working at home. The galleys of his last book, Beyond Peace, had arrived only that morning. He was preparing to speak to a group of Republican fund-raisers in a few days. Time was preparing to excerpt the book in its next issue. Instead, Nixon was transferred to New York–Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan where he slipped into a coma the next day. Billy Graham, who was in New York at the time, called the White House when he heard the news, got Clinton on the phone, and asked the president which hospital Nixon was in so that the preacher could visit. Clinton didn’t know but said he’d find out. A few minutes later, Clinton called Graham back with the details. Within minutes, Graham was at Nixon’s bedside, praying with his daughters. At the White House, Clinton worried about Nixon’s condition. “I hope it hasn’t affected his mind,” he told Gergen.

  Graham, who had known Clinton for nearly a decade and prayed with the then Arkansas governor at the deathbed of a mutual friend in 1989, kept Clinton informed about Nixon’s deterioration over the next twenty-four hours. During one call, after it became clear Nixon would not recover, Clinton asked Graham if the family would permit him to attend the funeral in Yorba Linda. Graham assumed so but said he would check with Julie and Tricia. A few minutes later, Graham called back and gave Clinton the okay. Nixon’s daughters later called Clinton and asked him more formally to attend. By this point, Clinton was ruminating with advisors about the meaning of Nixon’s life, both his achievements and shortcomings. He believed that Nixon had been a brilliant, troubled, emotionally complicated man. “He was one of those husbands,” he told Branch, “who couldn’t live with or without his wife.”

  When Nixon passed away just after 8 P.M. on April 22, several hours passed before the news was made public. And who made the announcement? The former president’s new best friend, in a somber Rose Garden statement later that night that Johnny Apple of the New York Times described as “unstinted.” Clinton praised Nixon as a statesman who redefined resiliency. “It’s impossible to be in this job,” he added, “without feeling a special bond with the people who have gone before.” In a proclamation, Clinton declared the following Wednesday a national day of mourning. He closed the federal government, canceled postal delivery, and ordered that the U.S. flag be lowered to half-staff, both at home and at U.S. bases overseas, for a month. “I encourage the American people to assemble on that day in their respective places of worship to pay homage to the memory of President Nixon and seek God’s continued blessing on our land.” Nixon would have liked that most of all.

  Clinton offered the Nixon family a state funeral, but Nixon had made it clear before he died that he wanted only to lie in repose at his library in Yorba Linda in Orange County. Clinton put a backup military transport once used as Air Force One at the Nixon family’s disposal. Meanwhile, White House aides argued about how to properly eulogize a former president whose name was still something of an epithet in Democratic circles. Clinton wanted, among other things, to reframe Nixon as the last liberal Republican before Reagan had ushered in a more conservative era. Moderates, led by Gergen, wanted to throw a light blanket of redemption over Nixon’s life now that it was over. George Stephanopoulos worried that a wholesale absolution would inflame Clinton’s base and cause him no end of trouble. And so Clinton changed the one key line in the eulogy—“The day of judging Richard Nixon based on one part of his life alone has finally come to an end”—at Stephanopoulos’s suggestion to: “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”

  The club was smaller now, but newspapers and magazines splashed the dramatic image of Clinton, the four remaining members, and their wives all sitting in the front row at the funeral in Yorba Linda. Nearly as memorable were Clinton’s remarks. After praising Nixon for making strong advances in cancer research and environmental protection, he said: “For the past year, even in the final weeks of his life, he gave me his wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia. One thing in particular left a profound impression on me. Though this man was in his ninth decade, he had an incredibly sharp and vigorous and rigorous mind. As a public man, he always seemed to believe the greatest sin was remaining passive in the face of challenges. And he never stopped living by that creed.”

  Less than a week later, musing on the death of his mother in January, Clinton told CNN’s Larry King that he missed Nixon in similar fashion. “Just today I had a problem and I said to the person working with me, ‘I wish I could pick up the phone and call Richard Nixon and ask him what he thinks we ought to do about this.’”

  21

  “I’m Sending Carter. You Think It Will Be OK, Don’t You?”

  —BILL CLINTON

  When Bill Clinton became the nation’s youngest governor in 1978, President Jimmy Carter sent a note that was as much challenge as congratulation: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals for our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.”

  Well before the start of one man’s presidency in 1976 and well after the end of the other’s in 2000, the Carter-Clinton relationship would always be fraught. Despite the fact—or maybe because—they shared Southern roots, a Baptist’s faith, and bragging rights as the only Democrats to win the White House between 1964 and 2008, the two men quarreled as much as they got along. Each man would test the other’s ability to forgive.

  The relationship began well enough. Carter had spotted Clinton as a rising political star, helped him in his first run for Congress in 1974, and then offered him a job in the 1976 presidential campaign. (Clinton declined that offer in order to run for Arkansas attorney general.) By the time Clinton was governor, Carter invited Clinton to the White House on occasion and named his wife, Hillary, as the first female chair of the Legal Services Commission. All this made the Clintons certified Carter people: though he had many liberal friends, Clinton was never tempted by Teddy Kennedy’s bid to unseat Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Carl Wagner, who was close to Clinton but worked as one of Kennedy’s top political aides in that contest, recalled that Clinton wasn’t even worth trying to peel away from Carter’s camp. “He was loyal to Carter,” Wagner explained, “no matter what.”

  That loyalty was soon tested. In May 1980, Carter sent eighteen thousand Cuban refugees, most of whom had come ashore illegally along the Gulf Coast, to be interned at Fort Chaffee in northwest Arkansas. When several hundred Cubans broke out of the facility and began to roam the streets shouting “Libertad! Libertad!” Clinton had to send in state police and the National Guard to maintain order. He called Carter to complain, but was told to take his problems to a midlevel White House official instead.

  Clinton briefly won a White House promise not to send any more Cubans to Fort Chaffee but that vow was soon broken. On August 1, three months before the election, Carter ordered that all the Cubans that he had already sent to refugee centers in the politically more important states of Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania be shipped to the less important state of Arkansas. Fort Chaffee’s population quickly tripled. This was a political disaster and a personal double-cross for Clinton. “You’re fucking me,” Clinton screamed at his midlevel Carter White House contact. “How could you do this to me? I busted my ass for Carter. You guys are gonna’ get me beat. I’ve done everything I could for you guys. This is ridiculous. Carter’s
too chicken-shit about it to tell me directly!” Carter eventually phoned; the call did not go well.

  Clinton kept his anger to himself, but his ties to Carter quickly frayed. Frank White, Clinton’s Republican opponent in 1980, ran a television ad that featured footage of the Cuban refugees running amok with the line, “Bill Clinton cares more about Jimmy Carter than he does about Arkansas.” Within a few months, both Clinton and Carter had been unseated. Clinton later blamed Carter in part for his defeat.

  Twelve years later, there had been little thaw. Carter had been no more than lukewarm about Clinton’s candidacy in 1991 and 1992 and it was simply not in Clinton’s interest in 1993 to be in any way associated with someone who was perceived as a failed, one-term Democratic president. In Little Rock, where Clinton was putting together his transition team, Carter’s advice was not sought and his presence not welcome. The Georgian’s calls to the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion—Carter wanted to discuss a variety of foreign policy challenges with the incoming president—went unanswered. Clinton went so far as to ask Warren Christopher, who had been the deputy secretary of state under Carter and was poised to take the top job for Clinton, to break his longstanding ties with Carter as a condition for employment. When Carter called Christopher to congratulate him, the secretary of state designate let days pass before returning the call. Maybe worse, he delegated the job of handling Carter to a deputy; who in turn attempted to delegate it to his deputy. These slights did not go unnoticed in Plains.

  Carter soon found a way to express his grievance. While promoting a new book in early January 1993, Carter told the New York Times that he was “very disappointed” the Clintons had elected to send their daughter, Chelsea, to the Sidwell Friends private school rather than to the Washington, D.C., public schools, as the Carters had done with their young daughter, Amy. Carter also shared his low opinion of Clinton’s skills with a hammer and nail, which he had observed when Bill and Hillary swung through Georgia over the previous summer and spent a day with Carter building houses for Habitat for Humanity. “He was obviously not an experienced carpenter,” Carter recalled.

  This was accurate; Clinton had been hopeless in shop class. But such remarks were unhelpful to a former president trying to establish diplomatic relations with a new commander in chief. A week later, at the Clinton inaugural festivities in Washington, Carter and his wife were kept conspicuously at arm’s length from the new president and his inner circle—a snub that Rosalynn Carter certainly detected. Carter understood that Clinton needed to blaze his own trail as the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years. But it galled him that Clinton’s foreign policy team was shot through with veterans from his own presidency and yet he could not get his phone calls returned. When he finally sat down with Christopher in March and argued that he was uniquely positioned to perform some missions that U.S. diplomats could not, he got a polite, but firm, brush-off from his old friend. “When George Bush senior came into office, I had the best relationship I have ever had since I left the White House,” Carter recalled. “When President Clinton came into office, that relationship dissipated.”

  Savior or Stuntman?

  The first real chance for partnership came in April 1994, when North Korean leader Kim Il Sung began to remove plutonium-packed fuel rods from one of his country’s aging Soviet-style nuclear reactors without permitting international inspectors to monitor the procedure. North Korea’s decision to refuel its reactors, often a precursor to diverting plutonium from peaceful to military purposes, sparked a crisis in Washington about how to respond. Clinton’s foreign policy advisors suspected that Kim probably had enough plutonium for a handful of ten-kiloton bombs and feared that if he continued defueling the reactor, he could double or triple his atomic stockpile very quickly. The question with North Korea was familiar: was this a hostile act—or just a play for more wheat? When the threat of further economic sanctions did nothing to halt Kim’s direction, Clinton asked his generals to review plans for a possible invasion involving as many as 400,000 U.S. troops—and to do it quickly.

  Clinton was in a difficult spot: Kim warned that he would treat every move from economic sanctions to further deployment of U.S. troops as a provocation for war with South Korea—and no one in Washington believed a shooting war would end well for either side. Some U.S. military officials were genuinely worried that Kim might launch a preemptive strike on the south. Over the course of several weeks in late April and May, the United States quietly deployed extra combat troops, attack helicopters, Patriot missile batteries, spare parts, and ammunition to South Korea. It was no exercise.

  Clinton had already spent a lot of time in early 1994 trying to find the best scout to send to Pyongyang to figure out what Kim really wanted. He urged Billy Graham to travel there in January and gave Graham a letter to deliver to Kim. When that mission went slightly awry, Clinton floated the idea internally of sending Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, an idea Kim at first welcomed and later spurned. Clinton wanted a dialogue with Kim, but had no way to start one.

  Which is how Clinton, after keeping Carter at bay for months, finally turned to him for help. Carter had kept at his courtship of the new president: he spent the night at the White House in September 1993, when Clinton invited all the former presidents to witness the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israeli Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Yassir Arafat and then stay on for an event the next morning, all in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Clinton and Carter stayed up late talking the first night; Carter explained that he felt ignored by Christopher and the State Department; Clinton pretended to know nothing of this arm’s-length treatment and promised to turn to him for help more often. So when Carter called Clinton on June 1, 1994, and expressed his concern that the war of words with Pyongyang was getting out of control, Clinton saw an opening. He dispatched his top Korean negotiator, Robert L. Gallucci, to Georgia to brief the former president on possible next steps.

  Gallucci came away from his three-hour meeting in Plains on June 5 convinced Carter would probably go to North Korea whether the administration okayed such a visit or not. Carter came away convinced the Clinton administration had no idea how to bring the situation under control. Someone had to keep war from breaking out. And who better than the thirty-ninth president?

  The North Koreans trusted Carter: as president, he had reduced by 10 percent the number of U.S. forces on the peninsula, and had hoped to make even larger troop withdrawals. Since then, Kim had invited Carter to Pyongyang three times, in 1991, 1992, and 1993. Each time, the White House, whether under Bush or Clinton, had declined Carter’s request to go.

  Five days after the Gallucci visit, Carter informed Vice President Al Gore that he wanted to go to North Korea and see what he could do.

  After some back-and-forth negotiations between Carter and Gore about how exactly to word this “request” from a former president to a sitting one, Gore called Clinton, who was on his way to Europe to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Normandy invasion, and made the case for Carter to go. Warren Christopher opposed the trip, aware of just how unpredictable Carter could be to work with. But Gore liked the idea and so did Clinton, who was looking for a way to help Kim step back from the brink. It couldn’t hurt, Clinton figured, and it might help. He needed to do something; as he landed in Europe, Time’s editors chose a cover depicting a menacing-looking Kim with a fiery nuclear explosion in the background. “Is Kim Il Sung bluffing or will he go to war?” A few days later, Gore called Carter to approve the visit.

  On June 10, Carter flew to Washington for pre-trip briefings. The sessions went badly. For starters, the Clinton White House was so sensitive about turning to Carter for foreign policy help that National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Gallucci, and NSC aide Dan Poneman opted to meet the former president and his wife at National Airport; that was as close to Pennsylvania Avenue as they wanted him to get. Lake told Carter that he would be traveling as a private citize
n and would have no authority to negotiate on behalf of the United States. His mission, Lake added, was not to cut a deal, or make promises, but simply to divine Kim’s intentions—were they peaceful or not?—and remind the North Korean leader that the United States had the right to take reasonable defensive steps until the crisis passed. Carter, Poneman observed, “seemed to chafe at these limits. [He] clearly viewed his own role far more expansively than as a messenger between Washington and Pyongyang.”

  The State Department briefings a few hours later went just as poorly. One assistant greeted the Carters as “Mr. President and Mrs. Mondale.” Aides offered the two Georgians Pepsi to drink once the backgrounders began—something of an insult to anyone who had spent any time in Coca-Cola-proud Atlanta. And as the detailed session began on nuclear weapons, nonproliferation, and internal North Korean politics, the former nuclear engineer made it clear he was nobody’s errand boy. “How many times have you visited North Korea?” he inquired of each expert. And each time Carter asked, the answer was “none.”

  The contradictions about Carter’s role were hard to ignore, but both sides did so: he was traveling as a private citizen but he was charged with carrying out a vital, presidentially sanctioned mission. At the same time, though he was serving as Clinton’s official, unofficial envoy, he openly opposed the administration’s push for U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang and had a well-deserved reputation for ignoring orders. When Carter left for Korea two days later, some of Clinton’s own aides believed that they had launched an unguided missile.