The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity
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Five days after Christmas, on December 30, Clinton picked up the phone and called Ford. The most unusual club negotiation since Ford pardoned Nixon then commenced, only this time it involved no intermediaries. Clinton told Ford that he had not committed perjury, but Ford would have none of it. And though the tone of the conversation was even and businesslike, Ford was resolute: “Bill, I think you have to admit that you lied,” Ford said. “If you do that, I think that will help, and I will help you. If you’ll admit perjury, I’ll do more.” But Clinton stuck to his story. He had not lied when he testified in January 1998 in a sexual harassment suit, he insisted, and wasn’t about to change his story now to avoid a Senate trial. “I won’t do that,” Ford recalled Clinton saying, “I can’t do that.”
Ford reminded Clinton that Congress could grant immunity in exchange for a confession. But Clinton said he doubted that a bloodthirsty Republican Congress would provide such a shield for him. To which Ford replied, “Bill, I spent 25 years up there and came to the conclusion that they can pretty much do whatever they want to do.” Immunity, Ford reminded Clinton, was still possible. But Clinton would not budge. The two presidents had arrived at an impasse. One had done all he could to help the other.
Or almost all. Ford remarked that the coming Senate trial would be long and unpleasant for the nation. To which Clinton replied: can you call Senate majority leader Trent Lott and impress upon him the downside of an extended trial? Ford agreed. When he did call Lott, he warned him that Clinton was in no mood to make a deal, and then made the case for a short trial.
It was common in those days to observe of Clinton, “That which doesn’t kill him only makes him stronger.” And by now, it occurred to Ford that Clinton might not really be looking for a way out, that he no longer feared a fight with the Republicans, and that, in some ways, he actually relished one. Coming on the heels of an election that had cost the Republicans seats in the Congress, how much worse could it get for Clinton? Why not just fight it out? While Ford was willing to reenter a conversation about rebuke or censure, it was clear to him that Clinton had decided the politics were working for him.
One More Bouquet
Clinton did not mention his secret negotiations with Ford in his memoir, My Life. And Ford only talked about them with New York Daily News reporter Tom DeFrank on an embargoed-until-I-die basis for DeFrank’s 2007 book, Write It When I’m Gone. In August 1999, months after the Senate acquitted him of all charges, Clinton presented Ford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The following year, Clinton watched Ford steal the show at the two hundredth birthday party for the White House, when the East Room swelled with club members. Ford wowed the crowd with embarrassing stories, particularly one about dancing with Queen Elizabeth while the Marine Band played “The Lady Is a Tramp.” “I only wish I could be in such good shape when I’m 87,” Clinton said of Ford afterward. “Of course, I don’t think I’ll ever see 87.”
Ford lived to be ninety-three, the longest post-presidential tenure since Herbert Hoover. Ford chose other presidents—Carter and George W. Bush—to speak at his funeral. But Clinton found his own way to pay tribute. A few months after Ford’s death, in June 2007, Clinton flew to Grand Rapids to speak at the annual black-tie dinner of the local Economics Club. Before his speech that night, he turned up at the Ford Museum downtown, bearing a bouquet of flowers and asking if he might visit the former president’s tomb alone. Marty Allen, chairman of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, escorted Clinton to the gravesite, which is set along the Grand River in a semicircular garden of gently sloping stone. Engraved in the sheltering wall above the tomb are the words “Lives Devoted to God, Country and Love.” Clinton went in the gated area by himself, with no aides or photographers around, and laid his bouquet at the foot of Ford’s grave, lingering longer than his hosts had expected. He then emerged, Allen recalled, obviously moved. The simplicity of the grave, Clinton remarked as he departed, “was reflective of President Ford.”
And then the two men took a stroll around Grand Rapids at dusk. The bustling commercial activity downtown surprised Clinton, as did the numerous construction sites and tower cranes. Ford’s hometown reminded Clinton, he told Allen, of Little Rock.
BUSH AND CLINTON:
The Rascal and the Rebel
Born forty-four days apart in the summer of 1946, the closest birth dates of any two American presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would become the political polar icons of the baby boom generation. One seemed a model conformist, who followed the pedigreed path of his Greatest Generation father almost step for step: Andover, Yale, the military, and then to West Texas for the oil business. The other was, at least in appearances, an American mutt, born into a family of mystery in Arkansas, who marched into the turmoil of the 1960s, dodged the draft, and missed a lot of law school to work on improbable Democratic political campaigns. But that contrast is what appears in a wide-angle lens. Close up, Clinton was the establishment’s idea of a dream date: he was marching band and Boys State, Georgetown and a Rhodes Scholar, the earnest undergrad who interned for senators and talked at age twenty-two of deferring his military commitment in order to maintain his “political viability.” And while Clinton was elected a governor at the record age of thirty-two, Bush was going nowhere until he was forty, caught in the whirlpool of entitlement and rebellion: the grandson of a senator and son of a vice president who was wrestling with booze, struggling at business, trying to find his place in the world. Bush was far more of a renegade in his family than Clinton had ever been in his: as a teenager, Bush snuck out of the family compound in Kennebunkport to smoke and drink; Clinton snuck out of his house in Hot Springs to send his allowance to Billy Graham.
One man never met his father; the other couldn’t escape his father’s shadow. Each would serve eight years as president; each would divide, polarize, and at times infuriate a nation; both would endure implacable criticism for their actions. One would be impeached for lying about sex; the other accused of lying to justify a war. Both would be blamed, each in his own way, for failing to stop the attacks on September 11, 2001. And each would limp out of Washington battered, exhausted, unapologetic; the club would become their infirmary. In their post-presidencies, a sense of purpose was welcome; a sense of peace even more so.
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“He’s Never Forgiven Me for Beating His Father”
—BILL CLINTON
In November 1997, the club had a reunion. Nine presidents or their kin shared the stage to mark the opening of the George Herbert Walker Bush Library in College Station, Texas. Bush thanked everyone for coming—David Eisenhower, Caroline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Julie Nixon, Nancy Reagan, plus presidents Ford, Carter, and Bill Clinton, all of whom made it to the Texas A&M campus to be a part of what a grateful Bush called a gathering of “this rather unique club of former presidents.”
Of course, a future president was there too, and when the governor of Texas stepped to the microphone to welcome the crowd, he praised his father as a man who “left office with his integrity intact.” That was widely seen as a dig at the man who had forced his father from power. From that day on, the relationship between Clinton and Bush the younger had nowhere to go but up.
Clinton got his next good look at Bush eighteen months later and he didn’t much like the view. The encounter came at a governors’ conference in Washington in February 1999, ten days after the Senate had voted to acquit Clinton of all charges stemming from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. That was merely the official conclusion to the outlandish episode; the aftershocks would unsettle the political terrain for months, even years, to come. At that moment, Bush was ascendant: he had won a second term as Texas governor and would soon announce his own bid for the White House; he was traveling the nation raising money, testing themes, quietly promising a restoration of Republican rule after the nation’s embarrassing experiment with a Democrat. The Bushes were coming back and the son made it sound like a combination of rescue and revenge.
When Clinton’s aides noted that George W. seemed particularly uncomfortable that night in the White House, Clinton came to his defense: “Look, the guy’s just being honest. What’s he supposed to do, like me? I defeated his father, he loves his father. It doesn’t bother me, this is a contact sport.”
The Shadow
There’s no way to measure what portion of Bush’s presidential ambition arose from the desire to punish Clinton and the Democrats for ejecting his father from office. As Bush noted in his memoirs, if he had always longed to be president, he would have done a lot of things differently when he was younger. But politics was always part of the picture. He dabbled in campaigns as early as 1964; he had run for Congress in 1978 and lost; ten years later, he was in Dallas buying into a baseball franchise and plotting a race for Texas governor. Some part of Bush’s interest in the top job was simply about wanting to beat the odds: after his father was elected, Bush allowed an old friend to produce a report for him measuring how the children of all previous forty presidents had fared in life. This telling exercise produced a discouraging forty-four-page result: many, it turned out, couldn’t hold jobs, died young, struggled with addictions and depression. While one had gone on to be president himself, none had been elected governor. Bush had groaned when he learned that. His memoirs make only the most cursory mention of why he wanted the top job—cutting taxes, reforming education and entitlements—but the truth is he had a natural feel for the game. “I love campaigns,” he said in 2000. “My heritage is a part of who I am.”
Watching his father lose to Clinton in 1992 was also part of that heritage, an experience that capped what he called the “worst year of my life.” But if Bush was running in part to avenge his father’s defeat, Clinton’s sexual escapades certainly helped to make Bush’s candidacy credible. Bush never mentioned Clinton’s womanizing on the campaign trail, but when he promised at every stop to “restore honor and dignity to the White House,” everyone knew what he meant. Close friends reported that Bush was privately appalled by Clinton’s behavior, not only what he had done but where he had done it. For Bush, the sex was a metaphor for Clinton’s general lack of discipline. Watching one of Clinton’s epic State of the Union speeches, which were usually lengthy to-do lists for the coming year, Bush remarked impatiently, “A good leader sets priorities—he doesn’t just list.”
All that may explain why, by the time the Republican race got fully under way in early 2000, Clintonian was such a nasty, room-clearing label that even Republicans hurled it at one another to gain an advantage. When dirty tricks in the days before the South Carolina primary led John McCain to charge that Bush “twists the truth like Clinton,” Bush’s advisors portrayed the remark as outrageous, unthinkably unfair, “the worst insult one Republican could hurl at another,” Bush advisor Karl Rove said. And so Bush made a point of firing back in these words: “When John McCain compares me to Bill Clinton and said I was untrustworthy, that’s over the line. Disagree with me, fine. But do not challenge my integrity.”
Clinton assumed, if only because of his name and his money, that Bush would win the nomination easily. And as he watched Bush push McCain out of the race, he gained a grudging respect for the Texan as a political combatant. But as the prospect of a Bush matchup against Gore emerged, he grew concerned. He believed that Bush was running a shrewd, virtually substance-free campaign, and that his “compassionate conservative” slogan was fresh enough to sound appealing but vague enough to avoid criticism. “I studied him closely,” Clinton told us in 2011. “The first time he did that compassionate conservative thing, I picked up the phone and called Gore’s guy and I said, ‘Bush is the only one that can beat you. Because you don’t get what this compassionate conservative thing is really about. Forget what is in the headlines, this is saying to the swing voters, we’ll give you the same economy Clinton did with a smaller government, bigger tax cut, how can you be against it?’ I said, ‘It’s a genius slogan. It’s a genius slogan.’”
Clinton was conflicted; on the one hand, he didn’t think much of a personality-based campaign that argued, in effect, that voters should choose the candidate they’d rather have a beer with. On the other hand, he could see that it was working. Whatever he thought of Bush’s policy positions, even Clinton found Bush personally appealing. Attending the funeral mass in New York of John Cardinal O’Connor in May, Clinton reached across four other worshippers to pass the peace to Bush, telling a friend afterward, “I don’t always respect the guy, but you just gotta’ like him.”
While many Americans assumed that Bush II would be a reprise of the kinder, gentler era of Bush I, Clinton could see that the younger Bush was a much tougher customer than his father and Bush’s choice of Dick Cheney as a running mate in midsummer confirmed that for him. Clinton feared that Bush would roll back his accomplishments—not the centrist ones like NAFTA and welfare reform, but certainly the tax increases of 1993 that set the nation on a path toward a balanced budget as well as some of his anticrime initiatives. He wanted Gore to enlist him as a fellow soldier in the campaign, but the vice president kept Clinton at arm’s length. Clinton tried to help anyway: he slipped into full-blown parody of Bush at a private midsummer Democratic fund-raiser, complete with a Texas twang, that suggested just how worried he really was. “Well, how bad could I be? I’m a governor. My Daddy was president. I owned a baseball team. They like me down in Texas.”
That was an honest rendering of how Clinton felt but a sloppy thing for a president to have said. Bush deftly swatted away the parody, warning the White House that Clinton would be wise to stay on the sidelines. Asked in October about Clinton’s infidelity, Bush replied, “I’m not running against President Clinton. That’s a chapter . . . most of us would rather forget. I don’t think there’s a lot of politics to be gained by talking about him. As a matter of fact, I think most Americans would rather move on, and that’s what I’m going to do.” But, Bush added, “if he decides he can’t help himself and gets out there and starts campaigning against me, the shadow returns.”
The shadow, of course, was the Lewinsky affair, the very thing that Gore believed was costing him votes and made it impossible for Gore to ask Clinton for help the way Bush had relied on Reagan. Clinton doubted this logic, telling a few friends, “There isn’t one person in America who thinks Al would have had an affair with Monica Lewinsky.”
When the votes were counted, no clear winner emerged. Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000, but Bush was ahead by a few hundred votes in Florida, which meant he would win the Electoral College and the presidency if the tallies held. The recount in Florida—and the legal fight about whether to have one—lasted five weeks, until the Supreme Court voted 5–4 to uphold Bush’s victory in mid-December.
Four days later, Bush flew to Washington, spent
fifteen minutes with Gore at the Naval Observatory, and then met Clinton at the White House. By then, with the election over, his wife, Hillary, safely elected to the Senate, and his own future wide open, Clinton could afford to be the gracious host. This was an especially unusual handoff; Bush wasn’t so much moving in, as moving back. So aware was Clinton of how many nights and weekends Bush had already spent in the White House while his father was president that he joked that his guest already knew where the light switches were. Now the terms of their fraternal relations were shifting; they clicked virtually from hello this time, talking first in the Oval Office and then moving to the residence for a ninety-minute lunch. They talked about the transition, some last-minute judicial appointments, free trade (where they agreed), and the economy (where they didn’t). Clinton asked Bush to protect his beloved AmeriCorps national service program, just as Bush’s father had asked Clinton to preserve the Points of Light Initiative eight years before. The conversation quickly turned personal: Bush asked Clinton if he minded the mention of “the shadow” during the campaign; he had done it, Bush explained, to keep Gore off balance. Must have worked, Clinton replied, as Gore rarely wanted me at his side.
Before leaving, Bush made a surprising request. Recalling Clinton’s comically dull 1988 Democratic convention speech in Atlanta at which Clinton had droned on so long he was eventually heckled and booed, Bush said: “With all due respect, you used not to be so great a speaker. You’re good now.” How, Bush was asking, did Clinton become so deft at shaping the national conversation?