by Nancy Gibbs
Several government officials who knew and served both men suggested that both Bush and Clinton left office with such deep scars—impeachment for one, Iraq for the other—that it was inevitable that they would find in each other some unexpected solace in private life. No one else—not even one’s spouse—can really imagine what it is like to go through what each man endured, these officials said; so who better to understand the challenge of living with all those bruises for the rest of your life? Helping cure the relationship was another factor: Bush and Clinton were, in effect, the club’s first two business partners. From 2009 on, the two men occasionally appeared at joint speaking events around the world, where they would take questions for an hour or so and each receive a six-figure check in return. These marquee assemblies drew big audiences in civic arenas and convention centers from Toronto to Tokyo, where people paid several hundred dollars to see a pair of global celebrities sit in comfortable armchairs and talk about what it is like to be president.
Clinton’s deep regard for Bush senior, coupled with his friendship with the son, meant that he was soon operating almost like family in Kennebunkport, inviting himself up for weekends, arranging to keep an eye on the eighty-six-year-old Barbara Bush at Betty Ford’s July 2011 funeral, even helping Bush’s daughter Jenna land a big scoop after she became a special correspondent for the Today show (the scoop would be an interview with Clinton himself). The elder Bush enjoyed watching his son and Clinton become friends and spied a common thread. “They both like to get things done,” he said. “Neither is afraid to say what they think. Each considers the other a friend.”
Clinton treated his new brother with a respect that not everyone in his party appreciated. In interviews he was careful never to criticize the younger Bush by name. In private, he said, he urged his friends to take the long view. “Let’s take something we disagree about, the decision on Iraq and everything else,” he explained. “I said, ‘I tell you one thing about that man, whether you think it’s right or wrong, he believed it was the right thing to do. And he did it.’ And I said, ‘So right now, it doesn’t look too good, [but] who knows what it will look like a hundred years from now?’”
In late March 2011, Carter, Clinton, and George W. Bush turned up in tuxedos at the Kennedy Center in Washington to pay tribute to the oldest member of the club. A few months shy of his eighty-seventh birthday, the elder Bush was slowing down; he had developed a mild form of Parkinson’s disease, which made his legs wobbly and upset his balance. After jumping out of an airplane for his eighty-fifth birthday in 2009, he had cut back on public appearances in 2010, declining most interviews. The Kennedy Center event was held to celebrate Bush’s support for voluntarism and raise $30 million for the Points of Light Initiative, a nonprofit outfit named after the federal initiative he started while in office. But it was also something of a last waltz. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, and Mavis Staples sang; two choirs and an orchestra backed them up; eloquent volunteers from all around the nation testified about their volunteer projects, and the three American presidents (as well as Barack Obama, via video) praised Bush’s lifetime commitment to national service. Carter spoke first; then Bush’s son. But it was clear from the start that Clinton would perform the cadenza.
He had been fiddling with his remarks as he sat next to the guest of honor throughout the show’s first half. When Clinton finally spoke, he began with a club secret. “You know, when a president is about to leave office, most of the time most people are dying for him to go on and get out of there. But there are a few little rituals that have to be observed. One of them is that the president must host the incoming president in the White House, smile as if they love each other and give the American people the idea that democracy is peaceful and honorable and there will be a good transfer of power.
“You might be interested to know that the only thing George Herbert Walker Bush asked me to do is to preserve the Points of Light. I’ve always been grateful that he asked and I listened. So when I was leaving, and George W. Bush was coming in, the only thing I asked him to do was to preserve AmeriCorps . . . and he did. And I thank you . . .” When it’s time to depart the White House, he explained, you want to leave something ennobling behind.
“Then George W. Bush did me one of the great favors of my life,” Clinton went on. “He asked me not once, but twice, to work with his father. We took 7 trips together. This man who’d I’d always liked and respected and run against . . . I literally came to love . . . and I realize all over again how much energy we waste fighting with each other over things that don’t matter. . . . He can virtually do no wrong in my eyes, even though every 5 years he makes me look like a wimp by insisting on continuing to jump out of airplanes.”
With that, Clinton bowed his head, stretched out his arms, and said, in front of several thousand people, looking straight at Bush senior, “I love you.”
And in what amounted to an official baptism into the tribe, the family paid Clinton right back, conferring on him the highest possible honor: a family nickname. Before the Kennedy Center event concluded, Laura Bush asked all twenty-seven Bushes in attendance to gather for a family picture. The Carters and Clinton were standing quietly off to the side backstage, watching the big family take its places for a photographer when the call from Neil Bush rang out: “Bill, Bill! Brother of Another Mother! Get in here!”
And so he did, taking his place in the back row, near some grandchildren. “Yeah,” Clinton mused, recalling the moment a few months later, “the family’s black sheep. Every family’s got one.”
OBAMA AND HIS CLUB:
The Learning Curve
In the Presidents Club, there are many rooms: a Situation Room for secret briefings, an office of management consulting, a confession booth, an annex for charitable works. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century, with Barack Obama in the White House, the family room had to be enlarged. Because the club by 2009 was beginning to resemble a sprawling, modern, blended family, with George H. W. Bush as the father figure.
The three brothers, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, had plenty to quarrel about: Clinton, christened by novelist Toni Morrison as “America’s first black president,” did not have an easy time welcoming a new messiah, let alone the man who beat his wife for the nomination. Meanwhile, relations between the younger Bush and Obama would never be much more than just correct after Obama spent most of the first two years in office blaming nearly everything on his predecessor.
But when Obama was elected, the club swooped in to pat him on the back, teach him the secret handshake—and let him in on its oldest secret. “You know, they were all incredibly gracious,” Obama said, after hearing from the brethren a few days after his election. “I think all of them recognized that there’s a certain loneliness to the job. You’ll get advice and you’ll get counsel. Ultimately, you’re the person who’s going to be making decisions. You can already feel that fact.”
Obama’s bond with the club would grow as he got his hands dirty in office, cutting deals, falling short of expectations, and simply getting through the day when you have two wars to fight and a recession is picking your pocket. Bush refused to criticize him; Clinton found ways to help him. And the club’s presiding officer, George H. W. Bush, understood maybe better than any of them what a young president needed most, which had nothing to do with problems solved or messages delivered. Sometimes it was as simple as quietly stopping by the White House and telling him jokes.
26
“We Want You to Succeed”
—GEORGE W. BUSH
At a key moment in his 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama declared that Ronald Reagan was a more transformative president than Bill Clinton. Clinton’s reaction—defensive and excessive—suited Obama’s needs perfectly: it fed directly into one of his central arguments, that he was a new kind of Democrat, cooler, more cerebral, and far less obsessed with ancient gripes and grudges than the generation of Democrats who had come of ag
e in the 1960s and 1970s.
This was a clever, and entirely deliberate, intra-club smackdown: Obama had invoked the ghost of one former president to provoke a second into overreacting, in ways that served Obama’s ambitions nicely. But the feud between Clinton and Obama was really a fight between Clintonism and Obamaism, two supposedly different strains of the Democratic genome. Both men coveted the same prize: to be the leader who changed the way Americans thought about Democrats. Each man believed he could, through sheer force of personality and argument, lure an electorate that had been trending conservative since the mid-1960s back to the center or perhaps even further. Reagan had figured out how to talk to restless voters and carted them away; each man thought he knew the melody for whistling them back home. Obama watched how that had turned out for Clinton, watched the grand progressive vision shrink and the compromises accrue, and saw that presidency as a great opportunity lost.
There was little chance of the two men making peace until the new president had learned for himself what all the former presidents understood: that promising great change and delivering it are two entirely different things.
The Change Agents
Obama all but dismissed Clinton’s claim to transformational change when he announced, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Yes, he admired the way Clinton tried to “transcend” the divisive politics of the Reagan era and advance progressive policies at a time when voters were suspicious of big government. But Clinton never pulled it off, Obama argued in his book The Audacity of Hope, and he thought one of the reasons was Clinton himself. The forty-second president was a less than perfect vehicle, Obama believed, for transforming a largely conservative electorate into a permanent progressive majority. Obama noted how “frighteningly coldhearted” Clinton had been when as Arkansas governor he declined to stay the execution of a mentally disabled death row inmate during the 1992 campaign. Obama derided that decision as a “clumsy and transparent” effort to woo Reagan Democrats back into the party fold. That might yield short-term successes, Obama argued, but nothing like permanent transformation. Obama also believed that Clinton’s goals had been essentially “modest,” and “hardly radical.” It became something of an Obama campaign mantra that at a moment when the end of the Cold War and the arrival of the Information Age allowed for a great leap forward, Clinton squandered the opportunity, settling for small steps and superficial accomplishments. In his sales catalogue for Hope and Change, Obama promised he had grander things in mind.
This was a conveniently selective reading of the Clinton presidency: true, Clinton’s second term was shot through with initiatives to make sure that children’s car seats were simple to install and to provide cell phones for neighborhood watch groups. But Clinton also oversaw the passage of NAFTA, the first genuine reform of welfare in thirty years, the first balanced budget in a generation, and the first crime bill in a decade. None of these measures had been easy to pass; all, it should be noted, were deeply unpopular on the left. So if Obama had a gripe, it was that Clinton had failed to do enough big liberal things, which was a little like accusing him of failing to do the impossible.
By 2007, however, memories of Clinton’s achievements were fading, which helped to explain the third Obama criticism of the Clintons and Clintonism: they were, to Obama’s mind, just increasingly passé, no longer suited to solving the nation’s problems in a new century. Obama believed that for too long American politics had been following a script written at the height of the Vietnam War by a generation that was fixed in its ideological ways. Younger leaders were needed, who could “bring us together as Americans,” he argued, playing to his obvious advantage. “In the back and forth between Clinton and [Newt] Gingrich and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he wrote, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—and played out on the national stage.”
Obama implied on the stump that he, unlike the Clintons, could run and govern as a post-partisan leader. And though the Clintons and their supporters quietly rolled their eyes at this gauzy notion, it was an appealing vision at the end of the Bush era. As Obama said in Des Moines in late 2007, “I don’t want to spend the next year or the next four years refighting the same fights we had in the 1990s.”
Clinton’s performance on his wife’s behalf played into Obama’s hands. Both from behind the scenes and in his public appearances, Clinton leveled the kind of criticisms at Obama that Obama could claim had poisoned American politics. It was Clinton who said on Charlie Rose in December 2007 that a vote for Obama was a “roll of the dice.” It was Clinton who alleged on the eve of the New Hampshire primary that Obama had fudged his opposition to the Iraq War. “Give . . . me . . . a . . . break,” he croaked before a crowd at Dartmouth. “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” Obama’s operatives absorbed these shots and then returned them to sender. “We put the Clinton attacks front and center as a rationale to vote for change,” campaign manager David Plouffe noted.
The Obama campaign even invited the attacks. In a January 14 interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, Obama let fly a rocket straight at the Clinton brand: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it . . . he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was that we want clarity, we want optimism and a return to a sense of entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
And then Obama added the coup de grâce. It was “fair to say,” Obama added, “that Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time over the last ten to 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging the conventional wisdom.”
Obama knew exactly what he was doing. To Bill Clinton, being called idea-free was like being told your mama was ugly and your pickup was for sissies. “It aggravated something about which the Clintons felt a great deal of pride,” said a longtime Clinton aide. Clinton was so aggrieved he hyped Obama’s remarks into something even worse, telling an audience in New York that Obama had said that “President Reagan was the engine of innovation and did more, had a more lasting impact on America than I did.”
This exaggeration gave Obama the opening to swoop in and say Clinton was overheating again. At a January debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he made Clinton the issue in his race against Clinton’s wife. “President Clinton asserts that I said that the Republicans had had better economic policies since 1980. That is not the case.”
Then it was Obama’s turn to make it personal. He told Hillary during the debate: “What I said is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to. Because while I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Walmart.”
Hillary replied that she had never mentioned Ronald Reagan by name.
“Your husband did,” Obama replied.
“Well, I’m here,” Hillary said. “He’s not.”
“Okay, well, I can’t tell whom I’m running against sometimes.”
The riposte did its work: Obama tied Hillary even more tightly to her husband, who was to Obama’s way of thinking, ancient history.
The 2008 primary went on for months, longer than any presidential heat in either party since 1976. By the time Clinton finally suspended her campaign in early June, her husband had withdrawn from the scene and both camps were putting out cautious feelers to the other side. When the former president reemerged to endorse Obama in Denver, he wore his club robes. “I want all of you who supported [Hillary] to vote for Barack Obama in November,” he said, “and here’s why: I have the privilege of speaking here, thanks to you, from a per
spective that no other American Democrat, except President Carter, can offer.” That would be, of course, the perspective than can only come from knowing what it takes to do the job. As for the unpleasant primary season, he quipped, “That campaign generated so much heat, it increased global warming.”
When Obama asked Hillary to be his secretary of state, she was worried about her campaign debt, uncertain about leaving the Senate, fearful that she might not get along with the president-elect. Her husband was a factor too: he moved around the world virtually at light speed, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. The list of donors to his foundation and library were many, secret, and almost certainly full of foreign personalities and factions that would raise issues for his wife if she became America’s top diplomat. It’s not going to work, she said. But Obama was undaunted. I need you, he replied.
Bill Clinton, for his part, sounded game. “I’ll do whatever they want.”
That turned out to be a lot. On December 12, top aides to Obama and Clinton signed a “memorandum of understanding” that was unlike any arrangement between a president and one of his predecessors. Under its terms, Clinton released a previously secret list of more than 200,000 contributors to his foundation. He also agreed to publish his donor list every year that his wife served as secretary of state, separate his foundation from his charitable work at the Clinton Global Initiative, forgo annual meetings of the CGI outside the United States, and stop taking contributions from overseas or soliciting them worldwide. Clinton also consented to running future speeches by administration officials for their okay.