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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Bush 43 noticed that his father was lagging behind with Clinton. At one point, eager to eat lunch and then leave, Bush sent a search party out to find them. “Tell 41 and 42,” Bush said to Clinton Foundation boss Skip Rutherford, “that 43 is hungry.”

  Chief of staff Andy Card was certain the two men would team up well; Clinton, he knew, was keen to get back into action. During George W. Bush’s first term, Card would occasionally call New York senator Hillary Clinton at her home in Northwest Washington. More often than not, the former president would pick up the receiver. Card often found himself in extended conversations with 42, doing mini-briefings for the former president, exchanging information, even passing along the latest gossip. “He would talk to me and ask me what was going on and we would sort of trade information,” Card recalled. On one occasion, the Card-Clinton conversation went on so long that Clinton finished talking and Card would have to call back and say it was Hillary he had called for in the first place.

  After the tsunami hit, Card called both men separately and had them signed up in minutes. Within days, 41 and 42 were in the West Wing with 43, getting their orders for what was supposed to be a fairly narrow assignment: tour the region, ask local governments for advice about how to target and deliver private aid, and then come back to the United States and get busy raising money. The White House put an Air Force Boeing 757 and a small team of State Department handlers at their disposal.

  The two men worked virtually nonstop on their four-day swing through the region. Each man was greeted like a pasha at every stop, but in some places the crowds leaned toward the younger man. “If you’ve ever had an ego problem,” Bush said later, “don’t travel with President Clinton to the Maldives. It was like traveling with a rock star: ‘Get out of the way, will you? Clinton’s coming.’ It was terrible.” Along the way, they rediscovered that they had been allies before they had become rivals: Clinton backed Bush early in his presidency on a variety of controversial education initiatives when other Democrats declined to help; Clinton recalled that Bush had hosted his family at Kennebunkport in the early 1980s and how, on one occasion, when three-year-old Chelsea explained that she had to go to the bathroom, Bush took the little girl by the hand and led her to the nearest loo. In midair, each man insisted the other guy take the lone bed. (Bush slept in the state room while Clinton stayed up all night playing cards with Bush aide Jean Becker.) “You get into a campaign and there’s understandable hostility,” Bush said later. “But I’ve always had a rather pleasant personal relationship with him and he said . . . he felt the same way about me. So it’s not surprising to us. But it is surprising to everybody else.”

  Clinton told friends that Bush made the alliance work, because the older man had to swallow his pride and embrace a former opponent. “He deserves far more credit than I do,” said Clinton. But it is also important to remember that post-presidencies have their own challenges; finding something appropriately challenging can be difficult. Raising money for a natural disaster was a job that approached in scale the size of things that used to keep them both up late at night. “You feel like you’re doing something bigger than your own political lives,” Bush said, “or bigger than your own self.”

  The Buddy Movie

  Once back in the States, the two men became an item. The club had, in its sixty-year history, no precedent for this public display of affection. They greeted fans together at the Super Bowl in January and they played golf with Greg Norman in a rainy charity tournament in March; the next day, Clinton checked himself into a New York hospital to remove scar tissue and fluid from around his left lung, and within hours his predecessor was on the phone checking up on him. How do you feel? What do your doctors say? Are you sore? How much can you exercise? Are you using your treadmill? Dr. Bush was back on the case a few weeks later when the White House asked 42 and 41 (as well as President Carter, who declined) to join Bush 43 on the Air Force One flight to Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II. The senior Bush told Clinton not to worry, the pace would be manageable and, besides, there would be a doctor on board at all times. When Clinton told his own skeptical physicians he was making an overseas trip so soon after major surgery, he explained that his friend in Maine said everything would be okay.

  By the time Clinton flew to Maine in June for a weekend of fishing, golfing, and boating with Bush, the Secret Service was no longer in charge of transport and transfer. Bush made it clear that he would personally pick Clinton up at the Portland, Maine, airport—in his speedboat. Bush wanted to take his high-performance racer up the coast in the morning, and bring Clinton back himself, riding the waves at 50 mph in time for lunch. It was a slightly harebrained idea, and happily, a dense Maine fog intervened to kill it. When lunchtime arrived, Bush proposed to make that journey by sea, explaining how he and Clinton would go down the coast about twenty minutes to a local seafood joint called Barnacle Billy’s, with the Secret Service following in chase boats. But the seas still looked sketchy to Clinton, who, suddenly begging a weak stomach, opted to go by car instead. (At the restaurant, Clinton ordered fried clams and then ate heartily.) But Bush ultimately got his wish, taking Clinton out on the waves later that afternoon when the visibility improved for a ride that Clinton later likened to wingless flight. “He drove like a bat out of hell,” Clinton recalled. “He’s got these three giant engines that were so quiet . . . until he revs ’em up, right, and then it was well, we were practically levitating across the water at the speed of sound. I thought the G-forces were gonna kill me.” A framed picture of the moment rests on Bush’s sideboard in his private office in Houston.

  The rest of the Bush family looked on with amusement. Barbara Bush began referring to the two men as “the odd couple.” Jeb Bush, the Florida governor, announced that he was going to refer to Clinton as “Bro.” And at the white-tie Gridiron Dinner in Washington that spring, Bush 43 joked about how Clinton, recovering from the March surgery, “woke up surrounded by his loved ones: Hillary, Chelsea . . . my Dad.”

  Teaming up as they did in the middle of an ugly political era, the odd couple was a hit with the public. It had been a long time since Americans had actually seen politicians of different parties work together to achieve anything—much less two presidents—and then invite the rest of the country to join in the effort. Both men knew they were modeling an alternative method in an age of partisan political cagefights. “I think people see George and me and they say, ‘That is the way our country ought to work,’” Clinton said.

  The arrangement also had obvious advantages for both men—and their deeply political families. A friendship with the older, steadier Bush conferred a legitimacy on Clinton that he had partly squandered in his final years in office. For Bush, the political math was just as obvious—and even closer to home: his son, the president, was a divisive figure across the nation and having the spiritual leader of the Democratic Party as a partner made it more likely that the forty-second president would deliver his criticisms of the forty-third in a kinder, gentler fashion. “He’s been very good about not criticizing the president,” Barbara noted in 2005. “As of today’s paper, he did not criticize the president. And I appreciate that.”

  If the public cheered the sight of adversaries as partners, longtime Bush and Clinton seconds were not so charmed. Partisan allies both to the Bushes’ right and Clintons’ left found the string of public performances disturbing, almost like sleeping with the enemy. Clinton told aides that he took numerous calls from Democrats who asked, in effect, “What the hell are you doing, letting them use you?” Another of Clinton’s more liberal former advisors took up the matter with Clinton directly, only to hear 42 explode on the phone: “This is much more important than politics.” Bush endured the same treatment. A longtime Bush aide told Time in 2005 that he phoned his former boss to discuss the partnership that summer but discovered Bush would brook no criticism of it. “Don’t start with me,” Bush told his old ally. “Clinton’s been very deferential and we’ve been doing good thing
s.”

  And the relationship had limits. Clinton confessed at one point that he practically “needed a rabies shot” whenever the topic of the Iraq War came up at public events. Bush, the father, sometimes tired of Clinton’s nonstop chattering. “They are truly good friends,” said one of Bush’s oldest allies. “Bush genuinely likes him—but he will be quick to say that it has to happen in small doses. Clinton just talks too much for Bush.” Bush explained it this way: “We have a lot in common and I cherish it. But I’m out of the game. He’s not. He’s going to be active for a good while longer.”

  But by the middle of 2005 it was clear they just liked each other. Too many of their meetings took place too far from cameras for the relationship to have been designed for public consumption. Each man visited the other’s library to raise money and then meet with major donors. They both flew to Little Rock in the spring to shoot the public service announcements that would become ubiquitous on cable TV. Afterward, they stopped for conversation in the half-sized mock Oval Office on the Clinton museum’s third floor, one man sitting in one wing chair, the other relaxing in another. Peeking in from a doorway, a visitor remarked, “It looked like the wax museum in there.”

  Common Ground

  Bearing winds of 125 mph, Hurricane Katrina smashed into the east side of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. The storm left a debris field that stretched nearly five hundred miles, from the eastern Texas Gulf Coast to the Florida Panhandle. Katrina would turn out to be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history and the deadliest in seventy-five years.

  It took a piece out of George W. Bush too. For while the storm looked like a wanton attack by Mother Nature, it soon became clear that man-made forces, some years in the making, had done far worse damage. The flood protections designed by the Army Corps of Engineers were wholly inadequate and ill-conceived, the response plans by local and state officials a mess; but it was the White House and especially the Federal Emergency Management Agency, run by Bush crony Michael Brown, that became the all-purpose target of disgust among people who watched in horror as hours, then days, passed without help reaching those trapped in the broken soup bowl that was New Orleans.

  Thousands of people who waited out the storm in the Superdome were stranded there without food, hygiene products, or medical care. At the hospitals, nurses hand-pumped the ventilators of dying patients after the generators and then the batteries failed. As the temperature rose, the whole city was poached in a vile stew of chemicals, corpses, gasoline, snakes, canal rats; many could not escape their flooded homes without help. The pictures of so many African Americans standing on roofs literally dying to be rescued suggested that the U.S. government had lost the ability—and the will—to take care of its own.

  How could it be, after so many commissions and commitments, bureaucracies scrambled and agencies wired, emergency supplies stockpiled and pre-positioned, that when a disaster struck, the whole newfangled system just seized up and couldn’t move? By the time President Bush touched down in the tormented region days after the storm, more than just the topography had changed. Fifty-five nations had already offered aid—including Sri Lanka. So Bush once again drafted his father and his surrogate brother. And, once again, Bush and Clinton quickly signed on.

  Both men had deep emotional ties to the region. Clinton had grown up in Hot Springs and Little Rock, Arkansas, two towns for which New Orleans is a regional mecca. Bush was likewise anchored in the Gulf: it was as a Houston oilman in the early 1950s that he had made his fortune in offshore oil drilling—and then made his name as a politician. And it was in the now infamous Superdome where Bush had secured the Republican nomination in 1988 and where he made his call for a “kinder, gentler nation.” For Bush and Clinton, Katrina had devastated what was literally common ground.

  And so once more they hit the road, taping the public service announcements, doing the interviews, and dividing up the big lists of likely donors. They did their fact finding separately—one man took New Orleans and everything east; the other took everything to the west. They begged governors and mayors for ideas and then swapped what they had heard by email and phone. Rather than direct the funds they raised to private charities, as they had with the tsunami, Bush and Clinton set up their own joint nonprofit foundation and asked people to send their checks directly to their offices in Houston and New York. This new feature was a huge boon, for nearly everyone in the country liked one man or the other, or the remarkable fact that they were in this together.

  Millions poured in: it came from bands of Girl Scouts and dozens of foreign governments; from corporate moguls and little kids running lemonade stands. Some of the envelopes contained checks made out to the two men personally; others were paid to the order of the Red Cross or Toys for Tots but mailed to Bush and Clinton with the confidence that the two former presidents would get it in the right hands. Golfer Michelle Wie donated $500,000 and got to play a round of golf with Clinton in Las Vegas on a Sunday morning in October. Another woman, who would remain anonymous, asked only to meet Bush in person so she could present the check herself. Bush made arrangements to simply cross paths with her on a tarmac in Boston, where the woman quietly handed him a check for a half million dollars. Even Bush was dumbfounded. “People just wanted to give to them,” said Clinton aide Jay Carson.

  Before they were done, they had raised $130 million. Then they had to sit down and figure out together how best to spend it. Both believed the private money would best be spent to fill in the cracks that the government response missed. But the government response was so hapless that the two men, as one aide put it, “saw cracks on about Day 3.” Bush wanted to help small business and tap churches and faith-based groups to distribute it; those ideas were fine with Clinton but he wanted to do direct aid, particularly to educational institutions—an idea that Bush liked as well. “We had mini–public policy discussions,” recalled Clinton, “as if we were all still in government.” In the end, millions went to schools and colleges to help them reopen; but smaller amounts went to buy new fiberglass boats for fishermen who had lost their vessels in the storm. The two men named a bipartisan board of trustees to distribute additional funds that rolled in during 2006. “I never asked him and he never asked me to discard our convictions where we honestly disagreed,” Clinton explained. “But if you do it in the right way, you are always working for that more perfect union.” When the money stopped coming in, the two men decided to shut down the charity, divide up the remaining cash, and let each man spend their portion in the region as he saw fit. “He made one hundred percent of the decisions on [his] money and I made one hundred percent of decisions [on mine],” Clinton explained, adding wistfully, “It all worked well. . . . If we can just get that trust up again, all over the world . . .”

  Brother of Another Mother

  The partnership between Clinton and Bush set the stage for Clinton and Bush’s son to do the same a few years later, after George W. Bush had left the White House and retired to Dallas. But it wasn’t automatic: after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti in January 2010, leaving tens of thousands dead and millions more homeless, Clinton called Bush 41 about swinging back into action, hitting the road again, doing the joint appearances, raising money, and then handing out cash. But the elder man, now eighty-five, begged off. Talk to my son, he said. I’m too old; it’s George’s turn.

  “I can’t do this without you,” Clinton told the older man. But Bush insisted, urging Clinton to call the White House, offer his services, and propose that President Barack Obama reach out to his predecessor in Dallas and invite him to join Clinton in a club mission on Haiti’s behalf. Soon after, when the father privately floated the notion of joining forces with Clinton, the son had just one request: it was a matter of club protocol. Obama had to be the one who does the asking.

  Meanwhile, Clinton proposed the idea to the White House. Not long after, Obama called both Bush 43 and Clinton and asked them to pitch in. The trio met at the White House three days later. Obama lo
oked appreciative; Clinton, something of a Haiti expert, looked serious. Bush got to the point faster than either of them: “I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water,” he told a press conference, pausing for a second. “Just send your cash.”

  A few weeks later, the two men flew on separate airplanes to Haiti to make a tour of the ravaged capital area. Bush arrived in Port-au-Prince first, stepped out of his plane, and was ready to go. Clinton was late and when his plane finally arrived, Bush walked over to the aircraft and waited on the tarmac below, like he was the mayor of Port-au-Prince welcoming some foreign dignitary. But Clinton stayed onboard a few minutes longer, unaware that his buddy was waiting below. It was all the famously impatient Bush could do, an aide later explained, not to climb the stairs to find out what was holding things up. But during their Haiti partnership, each man found ways to defer to the other: Bush let Clinton, who was a special UN envoy to Haiti, take the lead with organizing the relief effort; Clinton’s much larger staff shouldered much of the heavy lifting associated with raising and distributing funds. Clinton made sure that a former Bush aide ran the overall charitable effort, a move that was appreciated in Dallas. By mid-2011, the two men had raised more than $53 million. And they were exchanging birthday and Christmas presents: Bush sent Clinton foodstuffs from Texas; Clinton liked to send books and music.