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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Clinton aides noted in private that the terms of the memorandum of agreement ran well beyond what was required by law; his allies griped that it went too far. But then no other former president had ever lived to see his wife in someone else’s cabinet, either. It would have been inappropriate for the foreign governments with which Hillary Clinton was negotiating to have been able to make donations, secret or otherwise, to an entity that directly or indirectly supported her husband. But there was also a sense that the Obama team pushed for more in the way of concessions than it needed for its own protection. Some of the terms seemed designed in part to remind everyone who had won and who had lost.

  Exit Gracefully, Stage Right

  At Obama’s suggestion, Bush the younger held a White House lunch for the club in January 2009. The lunch itself was a historic event, the first time since Sadat’s death in 1981 that all living presidents had gathered at the White House (only this time there would be five, not four). The five men met in the small private dining room adjacent to the Oval Office. Lunch was a little on the thin side, not much more than a sandwich, Carter recalled. The conversation turned less on policy and politics than simply on the difficulty of making a home in Washington. “We spent an hour talking about how we dealt with the White House staff and what living accommodations were and what to do about putting our kids in school in Washington . . . and how much of an intrusion it was on our private affairs to have security,” Carter said. “We were trying to educate President-elect Obama in a nice way without preaching to him, by letting him hear us just exchange ideas, back and forth, about what experiences we had.” The five also discussed the Congress and foreign policy briefly.

  “We want you to succeed,” the younger Bush told Obama. “Whether we’re Democrat or Republican, we all care deeply about this country. . . . All of us who have served in this office understand that the office transcends the individual.” During the car ride to the swearing-in a few days later, Bush urged Obama to move early in his tenure to lay down a clear and unalterable policy about presidential pardons, which had bedeviled both Bush and Clinton in their final days in office. “I gave him a suggestion,” Bush recalled. “Announce a pardon policy early on and stick to it.”

  It was hard to tell the difference between Obama and Clinton as the new president assembled his White House team. On the one hand, it sure looked a lot like a Clinton Revival: Obama turned to John Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff, to run the transition. He tapped Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton troubleshooter, as his chief of staff. There was Larry Summers, Clinton treasury secretary, back as top White House economic advisor. And Carol Browner, Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency director, as his environmental czar. And of course, his secretary of state was named Clinton. Virtually everywhere you looked, many of the people who had served in the White House a dozen years before were now back, some in the same job they had held before.

  With so many Clinton veterans on hand, the White House seemed to bend over backward to remind people there was actually a new president. Inside the West Wing, this sensitivity was palpable: the quickest way to kill an idea in the Obama White House was to call it Clintonian. Former Clinton officials who worked in the Obama White House—and there were many—had to breathe deeply at such moments. And yet the fact that the word “Clintonian” could be a slur inside a Democratic White House was a reminder of the fundamental differences between the two men’s personalities. Clinton loved politics and his instinctive feel—hunger, really—for the never-ending contest for voters’ hearts got him up in the morning and recalled no one so much as Lyndon Johnson. Obama seemed to have less of this drive once he got into the White House; the instincts that had served him so well in his campaign seemed at times to turn less on action than intellect. It was too much to say the forty-fourth president was all head and the forty-second was all heart, but it wasn’t far off, either.

  Even the agenda seemed like a reproof: at the top of Obama’s to-do list—as important in some ways as repairing the economy—was health care reform. To the Obama way of thinking, the Clintons had blown their big chance for a health fix by refusing to compromise with moderates. Instead of writing their own legislation, as the Clintons had in 1993, Obama would leave the details to Congress. “We’ve tried the stone tablet route of depositing a bill on the steps of the Capitol,” said senior Obama advisor David Axelrod. “It wasn’t well received.”

  While Obama was defining himself against Clinton, Bush was busy redefining himself as an ex-president. The Bushes bought a comfortable home on a North Dallas cul-de-sac near Southern Methodist University. Friends reported that he was friendlier and more relaxed than he had been in years, all the burdens gone, all the worries now in someone else’s inbox. “The relief is visible to anyone who knows him,” an old friend told the Washington Post. “This is where he’s comfortable.” He began working on his memoirs, planning his library, and raising money: in the first one hundred days of Obama’s presidency, Bush managed to bring in $100 million.

  Bush otherwise kept his head down. About Obama, he said virtually nothing. “He deserves my silence,” Bush said in March. “I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There’s plenty of critics in the arena. I think it’s time for the ex-president to tap dance off the stage and let the current president have a go at solving the world’s problems.” It was a smart move, given the weak economy; smarter still when compared to that of his old sidekick. Like Bush, Dick Cheney had moved out of Washington, but the former vice president resettled only a few miles away in McLean, Virginia, where he laid siege to the new administration, criticizing any number of foreign policy decisions by the new president. While these assaults were cheered by many conservatives, many Bush loyalists disapproved. Once again, being in the club, and not just merely near it, made a difference. “I love my country a lot more than I love politics,” Bush said. “I think it is essential that Obama be helped in the office.”

  Friends insisted Bush was untroubled by the tell-all books or the damning assessments about his eight years in office, “confident to the point of serene,” one said, that history would offer him a better place than the journalism of the moment. After reading several books on George Washington, he remarked to an aide that if the first president was still being scrutinized, what did he have to worry about? “Bush is totally zen-like about his eventual resurrection,” a former advisor explained. “He is incredibly disciplined about not criticizing Obama, despite what he thinks of him. He has never raised the comparison himself. And even when he is asked directly about something Obama has done, the most he will say is, ‘Well, I might have done it differently.’ But in most cases, like financial reform, he is big enough to add, ‘Something had to be done.’”

  If Obama had little contact with Bush the son, the father was a different story; he instead seemed to go out of his way to woo the older man. “I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush,” he told New York Times columnist David Brooks in May 2008. Bush for his part had admired the way then Senator Obama had turned up on the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, anxious to help but not interested in publicity. “He came without fanfare,” Bush recalled. “I could quickly see that he was someone who genuinely cared about others.” Early in 2009, the White House established some friendly back channels to Kennebunkport; Obama aides invited Bush to Washington to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which he had signed in 1989; they let Bush know the president would like to arrange a courtesy visit sometime, preferably in Texas. Which is how it happened that in October of 2009, Obama arranged to attend the twentieth anniversary of the Points of Light Initiative at the Bush School of Government and Public Service on the campus of Texas A&M. This was Bush 41’s sentimental home; for all the time the Bushes had spent in Houston and Kennebunkport, it was to College Station that they would come in the end: Bush and his wife had made plans to be buried in a secluded creekside woods on campus. The Bushes’ first dau
ghter, Robin, had already been reinterred there on a gently sloping hill framed by oak trees.

  Texas A&M is a famously traditional campus with proud military customs and when it was announced that Obama was stopping by, not everyone was pleased. Fearing an imperfect reception for the president, Bush wrote the entire Aggie community an open letter pleading for a warm welcome. “Howdy,” the letter began, “I am honored that the president, our president, is taking the time and making the effort to come to College Station,” noting that it would put A&M in the global spotlight. “I cannot wait for President Obama to experience the open, decent and welcoming Aggie spirit for himself.” Bush wanted the Obama visit to take place outdoors, but the Secret Service refused to go along.

  Obama used the visit to offer Bush a full-throated salute. “George Bush isn’t just a president who promoted the ethic of service long before it was fashionable,” Obama said. “He’s a citizen whose life has embodied that ethic. . . . He could easily have chosen a life of comfort and privilege, and instead, time and again, when offered a chance to serve, he seized it.”

  When it was over, Bush feared he would slow the president down and so urged Obama to leave without him. But Obama delayed his motorcade’s departure until Bush could join him in the presidential limousine for the brief ride to the airport. The visit to Texas, the images of two men from two parties together, were all good politics for Obama; inside the Bush family, where the club is more than just an idea, the little tributes the younger man paid to the older counted for a lot. And Bush would repay the favor. A few months later, when Bush slipped into Washington for the annual Alfalfa Club dinner, he spent the night at the clubhouse on Lafayette Square. When Obama heard he was there, he invited him over for coffee. The snow was blowing sideways when Bush’s limousine pulled up to the West Wing entrance. Within minutes, Obama and Bush were together in the Oval Office, telling stories. It was Bush, mostly, who did the telling. One picture of the meeting, which Obama sent Bush a few days later, shows the two men in shirtsleeves and Obama laughing as Bush, a renowned storyteller, gets to the punch line.

  Bubba to the Rescue

  While Obama and Bush parleyed, relations between Obama and Clinton gradually thawed. Once a president takes office, he learns that the office is its own arena, and that the tactics, tools, and talents that had helped him rise so far so fast were useful only to a point. And so what had seemed to separate Clinton and Obama so dramatically at first—personally, politically, philosophically—became harder to detect as time went by.

  Obama may have disparaged Clinton’s politics and the cynical tactics they sometimes entailed. But when he decided that the time had come to resort to them, he did not hesitate to ask the master for help. As long as it was all done in secret. When the White House needed to make a Pennsylvania Senate primary challenger disappear in June 2009, Clinton got the assignment. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel asked Clinton to find out if Democratic representative Joe Sestak, a former Clinton aide, might accept an executive branch appointment of some kind in exchange for not challenging incumbent (Republican-turned-Democrat) senator Arlen Specter. Sestak declined the White House offer—and the offer remained a secret for months until Sestak disclosed it to rally listless Pennsylvania Democrats in his uphill primary battle against Specter.

  Obama even turned to Clinton for help in public, although the request came with strings attached. In May 2009, a North Korean tribunal convicted two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, of illegal entry and other crimes after they were found shooting TV footage on the border with China. During June and July, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Jimmy Carter all volunteered to travel to Pyongyang to negotiate the women’s release. But the North Koreans wanted a special tribute, a man who represented a kind of golden age of diplomatic relations, when the Hermit Kingdom claimed the attention, if not exactly the respect, of the rest of the world. They wanted Bill Clinton.

  The former president was game, in part because he had hoped to visit the country during his final year in office as president and because, while talking it over with his wife and daughter, Chelsea had said, “Dad, you have to go. What if it was me over there?” But as he explained later, “I can’t do it if the president doesn’t want me to.” Some State Department officials worried about what Clinton’s return would mean for his wife, who was scheduled to be in Africa during the rescue mission. What would Hillary’s role be? What would prevent Clinton from going too far with Kim Jong Il, as Jimmy Carter had nearly done on a similar mission (but with Kim Il Sung, his father) for Clinton in 1994? What if Clinton somehow failed to win the journalists’ release? At the White House, meanwhile, National Security Council aides weren’t crazy about a former president negotiating with a rogue nation on a sitting president’s behalf. And there was, on top of all that, some White House discomfort with turning to Clinton for help on any front, especially after they had worked so hard to build a fence around him just a few months earlier.

  But when those aides briefed Obama, he didn’t see much of a downside. As one official involved in the conversation put it, “Obama was like, ‘Are you kidding me? If he is willing to go, let’s send him.’”

  And so off Clinton went to Pyongyang, in a private plane, as a private citizen, much as Carter had done for Clinton years before. Little about the visit was pleasant, except the outcome; the women were freed, and as they all flew home together, Clinton called the White House to share the good news. The New York Times practically hyperventilated: “The riveting tableau of a former president, jetting into a diplomatic crisis while his wife was embarking on a tour of Africa in her role as the nation’s chief diplomat, underscored the unique and enduring role of the Clintons, even in the Obama era.”

  But that role had its limits and in the view of the Obama administration needed careful management. On the way home, the White House notified Ling’s sister Lisa that when Clinton’s plane landed in Southern California, the two women would descend the steps alone while Clinton remained, unseen, in the cabin.

  Ling, an ABC news contributor, could not believe what she was hearing: was the Obama White House really so concerned about Clinton’s role in this diplomatic success story that it was trying to erase him from the arrival and reunion picture? Apparently so. She pressed the White House official to reconsider. “I’m sorry, Lisa,” came the reply. “We feel very strongly about this decision.” Ling argued her case in a subsequent call and again was waved off. Later that evening, she fired off a stiff email to some friendlier State Department officials. “As someone who works in the media, I would be remiss if I didn’t say one more time that keeping President Clinton on the plane may very well invite a whole shit-storm of speculation and chatter that you may not want. I’m fairly certain that he’d be fine with not saying anything, but to have him stay on the plane is just plain awkward.” Ling was right, of course, and in the end, the White House relented and Clinton was permitted to come down the steps with the rest of the party. But it was a reminder that the White House was not really comfortable having Clinton back in the picture.

  A few weeks later, Clinton met privately for forty minutes with Obama in the Situation Room delivering his firsthand assessment of Kim, who had not been seen in public for some time and who U.S. analysts had believed was ailing. Instead, Clinton found him to be very much in charge while his son, Kim Jong-un, was nowhere in evidence. Afterward, Obama invited Clinton to the Oval Office to continue talking. Mindful of how Carter had overstepped his role sixteen years earlier, Clinton was careful to observe club protocols in public: when asked about his mission on CNN, he explained that he had found Kim “alert, in better health than most people thought and clearly in command of the situation. . . . But beyond that, I think I shouldn’t say anything because I don’t have any policymaking authority anymore.”

  By this time Clinton had a chance to assess how Obama was holding up as well. “I can tell that it has worn on him,” he told Larry King a few weeks later, “but I think he’s also
growing into the job. As I did, as nearly everybody does. Nobody shows up just ready to be president.” Obama was working hard, and is very smart, Clinton noted. But “you really can’t tell until, you know, like a couple of years pass, as to how it all works. . . . He’s trying to do the right thing and he can keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time, which is exceedingly important in a complicated time.”

  The reset of American politics that Obama had imagined in 2008 was premature; the economy had restarted, then stalled; the explosion in federal spending gave voice to the Tea Party tribunes, who saw the massive auto, insurance, and bank bailouts not as a capitalist lifeline but as a socialist death sentence. By midsummer 2010, Obama’s ratings were wilting; it was clear that the Democrats would lose the House, and they might lose the Senate as well.

  Obama’s aides believed the midterm elections were a matter of divide and conquer: they would remind voters that Bush and the Republicans had run the economy into the ditch then ask for more time to finish the cleanup. Clinton privately questioned this line of argument. In conversations with senior Obama officials, Clinton argued that it made more sense for Obama to brag—and loudly—about the things he had accomplished—health care reform, a massive stimulus, and new financial regulations—than simply attack the Republicans and then plead for more time. “The Democrats need to say, ‘This is what we did, this is what happened, this is what we are going to do,’” Clinton explained in mid-September. “I think their only chance here is to shake their own voters out of their apathy and respond to the legitimate voter anger by saying, ‘What do we need to do and who’s more likely to do it?’” But the White House resisted this strategy, partly because it looked backward, and partly because it required defending the wildly unpopular stimulus bill; it preferred to emphasize Republican faults over Democratic strengths.