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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Democrats facing reelection found it useful, however, to have Clinton at their side. A Gallup survey in mid-October revealed that all voters, but particularly independent voters, would be more likely to vote for candidates if Clinton campaigned on their behalf than if Obama did. Clinton jumped back into the game like a man starved for a meal. He campaigned for sixty-five candidates at more than a hundred events, appeared on Meet the Press, The Daily Show, even Fox News. He drew crowds of two thousand in Denver, five thousand in San Jose, and six thousand on the campus of UCLA. While Obama could draw many more, Clinton had more room to take the Tea Party on directly: “Some of these positions people haven’t held for 110 years,” he said in Denver. “Don’t be fooled, don’t be played and don’t stay home,” he told a crowd in Washington State. Clinton went to West Virginia, where Obama had a 29 percent approval rating, and warned Mountaineer voters: “I am old enough to know that if you make a decision when you are mad—and I am not just talking about politics here—there is an 80 percent chance you will make a mistake.” Remarked Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a longtime supporter, “He’s all upside and no downside. He’s welcome anywhere in the country.”

  Though Clinton was careful in all his conversations never to say anything critical about Obama, he often sounded like the lifeguard who was trying to save a drowning man. “Most of the things they’re saying about him they said about me,” said Clinton, “so I’m much more sympathetic to him than most people. And when you get in there, if you’re an earnest policy wonk like he is and I was, it’s hard to believe there are people who really don’t want you to do your job.”

  But all of Clinton’s public testimony could not avert the inevitable. Voters turned Election 2010 into a revolt, tossing dozens of incumbent House Democrats overboard. Republicans gained sixty-three seats (and majority control) in the House, and narrowly missed gaining control of the Senate; they captured more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928. At his postmortem press conference Obama called it “a shellacking.” Now the two presidents, whatever their personal differences, had more in common than ever. Both had been elected against great odds, both had seemed to promise a politically moderate agenda; both had veered further to the left than many of their supporters had expected; both had been rebuked by the voters in the midterms.

  Obama needed some club magic; so on December 10 he summoned the spirit of one predecessor and the presence of another. He invited several former aides to Ronald Reagan to come in for a chat, pressing them for details about how the Great Communicator had coped with uncertainty and doubt when he was in office. Did he worry about his direction? Did he have trouble hiding his doubts from the public? How did he get through those passages? When the Reagan séance ended, Clinton arrived and the inquiry moved from temperament to tactics. Obama wanted to know what Clinton thought of the $858 billion tax cut package that was making its way through Congress.

  As they sat in the Oval Office, Clinton told him it was the best deal he could get and volunteered to help Obama sell it to liberal House Democrats. But Obama declined and instead asked him to go before the cameras in the White House Briefing Room and endorse it there. This was a reversal: only months after his aides had worked to restrict Clinton’s movements and visibility, Obama now needed him back onstage to defend the kind of compromise with Republicans that he had seemed to criticize Clinton for forging just a few years before. Obama may not have cared for Clinton and Clintonism in 2007 and 2008, but after two years it was hard to see what exactly set them apart from Obama and Obamaism. Maybe it was a measure of Obama’s growing confidence that he felt no need anymore to keep Clinton in a box; maybe it reflected the inevitable learning curve, as a president comes to understand the complexity of the job, the luxury of the theory versus the limits of the practice.

  In any event, Obama needed the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from Clinton on, of all things, a massive tax cut deal and, by the way, could he possibly do it in the Briefing Room?

  “I’m a little out of practice,” Clinton said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Obama replied. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  Obama was certainly right about that. The two men strolled into the Briefing Room around 4:20 P.M. “I just had a terrific meeting with the former President, President Bill Clinton. . . . And I thought, given the fact that he presided over as good an economy as we’ve seen in our lifetimes, that it might be useful for him to share some of his thoughts. I’m going to let him speak very briefly,” he added before saying he might have to leave soon for a Christmas party.

  And then the former president, as if ten years had never passed, held forth for the next half hour. He explained that Obama’s tax bill was “the best bipartisan agreement we can reach to help the largest number of Americans.” Asked what advice he had given the president, Obama interrupted to say, “I’ve been keeping the First Lady waiting for about a half an hour, so I’m going to take off.”

  Clinton didn’t seem to mind going solo. “I don’t want to make her mad,” he said with a smile. “Please go.”

  Clinton carried on alone for another twenty minutes. It felt like time travel, as though a decade were rewound and replayed. Asked if he preferred consulting to governing, Clinton replied, to some laughter, “Oh, I had quite a good time governing. I am happy to be here, I suppose, when the bullets that are fired are unlikely to hit me, unless they’re just ricocheting.” Clinton’s performance led The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart to remark, “Barack Obama, I’m not saying you don’t have Jedi potential, but maybe you want to wait until term two before you get Obi Wan back in the briefing room.”

  It would not be the last time Obama invoked the club to fortify himself. In the summer of 2011, when Obama was fighting his toughest battle yet to pass a budget deal, raise the debt limit, and avert a global economic meltdown, he invoked them all, living and dead, as he campaigned for a superdeal that would force both parties to compromise in taxes and spending. The only solution to America’s problems, he argued before a crowd in Maryland on the hottest of summer days, was shared sacrifice. “It’s a position that’s been taken by every Democratic and Republican President who’ve signed major deficit deals in the past, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.”

  And then he reached further, higher. Compromise can be framed as selling out your convictions, he admitted. But “I think it’s fair to say that Abraham Lincoln had convictions. But he was constantly making concessions and compromises.” It’s a president’s prerogative to decorate the Oval Office with his vision and trophies; on the wall of Obama’s office hangs the Emancipation Proclamation. If you read that document, he told the crowd, you’ll discover that it doesn’t emancipate everybody. There were all sorts of gimmicks and giveaways, provinces carved out that would be allowed to stay in the union but keep their slaves.

  “Now think about that,” he said. “‘The Great Emancipator’ was making a compromise in the Emancipation Proclamation because he thought it was necessary . . . in preserving the Union and winning the war.

  “So you know what? If Abraham Lincoln could make some compromises as part of governance, then surely we can make some compromises when it comes to handling our budget.”

  It was a speech that Bill Clinton—or anyone else in the club—could have given.

  CONCLUSION

  Margaret Truman told a story of a small dinner that her father hosted for Winston Churchill just before leaving the White House. Defense Secretary Robert Lovett was there, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Ambassador Averell Harriman, General Omar Bradley—wise men all.

  Churchill was not one to miss an opportunity or let a conversation lag, so he threw out a challenge to a president soon to relinquish his office: “Mr. President,” he said to Truman, “I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before Saint Peter and he says ‘I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?’”

  Well, tha
t could have been an awkward moment. But Lovett came to the rescue.

  “Are you sure, Mr. Prime Minister, that you are going to be in the same place as the president for that interrogation?”

  Churchill sipped his champagne, and pronounced himself confident that the great creator of the universe would not condemn a man without a hearing—a trial by jury of his peers.

  With that the game was on. Imagine they were gathered at the gates of heaven: “Oyez, Oyez,” cried Acheson. “In the matter of the immigration of Winston Spencer Churchill, Mr. Bailiff, will you empanel a jury?”

  That would be a jury of Churchill’s peers, the other great men of history, who, like Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman, had faced the mortal threats, wrestled impossible choices, and left to history the judgment of their crimes, follies, and misfortunes.

  Each guest assumed his role as a member of the jury, conjuring up any great leader they liked. General Bradley decided he would be Alexander the Great, Margaret Truman recalled; others cast themselves as Julius Caesar, Aristotle, though Churchill blocked Voltaire (an atheist) or Oliver Cromwell, on the grounds that he did not believe in the rule of law. When Acheson stood in as George Washington, Churchill decided he would be better off if he waived the jury; he was prepared to trust in the presiding judge—Harry Truman—who proceeded to acquit him of all charges. Truman certainly understood as well as anyone: forced to choose between the unacceptable and the intolerable, leaders nonetheless have no choice but to lead.

  During that visit, Churchill made a confession to Truman: he too, he admitted, had been pretty discouraged when Truman suddenly succeeded Roosevelt. “I misjudged you badly,” said the prime minister. “Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western Civilization.”

  If the Presidents Club had a seal, around the ring would be three words: cooperation, competition, and consolation. On the one hand, the presidents have powerful motives—personal and patriotic—to help one another succeed and comfort one another when they fail. But at the same time they all compete for history’s blessing. Praise or blame in the moment means little: it is how their decisions play out over time that matters, and so the redemption they’re looking for is of a more lasting kind. They are one another’s peers; who else can really judge them? Truman “had strong opinions about the presidents who succeeded him,” Margaret recalled, but he would not voice them; he believed that “more time must pass before anyone, even an ex-president, can evaluate the performance of a man in the White House.”

  So they take the longer view; that perspective is, among other things, more forgiving. Just about every president becomes a presidential historian. They read the diaries, devour the biographies, decide whose portrait should hang where, so that the eyes that follow them through their day are sympathetic. Hoover even wrote an entire book about Woodrow Wilson. Late at night, Nixon would walk around the White House, look at the paintings. “You cannot walk in those old rooms,” he said, “without feeling or hearing the footsteps of those who have gone before you.” They had all left office tattooed onto history. How would he compare, he wondered? “Presidents noted for—FDR—Charm. Truman—Gutsy. Ike—smile, prestige. Kennedy—charm. LBJ—vitality,” he wrote in notes to himself. But then . . . “RN—?”

  A whole wall of Bill Clinton’s study was filled with books on the presidents: Truman, Kennedy, FDR, Lincoln. “At times,” his aide George Stephanopoulos recalled, “it seemed as if his predecessors were the only people who could understand him.”

  Maybe it’s not surprising that they all find themselves drawn to Lincoln, the one who started lowest, rose highest, faced the great test, and triumphed. Abraham Lincoln was the archetype of presidential greatness. Eisenhower identified so strongly that he bought a farm in Gettysburg, painted a portrait of Lincoln, and gave prints of it to the White House staff for Christmas. As Kennedy flew home from his grueling summit with Khrushchev in June of 1961, his secretary found a slip of paper that fell to the floor, in his handwriting: it was a quote from Lincoln. “I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming. If He has a place for me, I believe I am ready.” It was as though Lincoln had given him a pep talk, across a century. Among Nixon’s most prized possessions was the framed picture of Lincoln his grandmother gave him on his thirteenth birthday. On the strangest, most revealing night of his presidency—May 9, 1970, in the wake of the Kent State shooting—Nixon and his valet, Manolo Sanchez, left the White House at 4:15 A.M. and, to the horror of the Secret Service, drove to the Lincoln Memorial and talked to some student protesters camped out there. He copied the monument’s inscription in his diary: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

  Clinton read David Herbert Donald’s epic Lincoln biography: “I don’t know if he could get elected today with his mental health history,” Clinton said of Lincoln. “But what I learned was that when Lincoln became president and the country was coming apart at the seams and he was trying so hard to hold it together, he almost became so absorbed in the work and the mission and the suffering of others that it lifted the burden off of him.” George W. Bush admired his vision so much, he read seventeen different biographies of him while in office. “I’ve got his painting right there,” he said one day in the Oval Office. “I have sat here and thought about what it would be like to be the President when brother was fighting brother and cousin killing cousin. He clearly saw what needed to happen about keeping this country united.” Barack Obama, the first African American president, looked to the Great Emancipator to console himself about his own instincts; even the acts for which Lincoln was most exalted were themselves compromises.

  Historians measure and rank presidents. But when they take the longer view, presidents do not just compare themselves to one another; they weigh their leadership against what might have been. A president knows, each day, that if he makes the wrong call on fiscal policy a million more people could lose their jobs, or the wrong judgment about an enemy means thousands lose their lives. Presidents rise or fall according to how they handle a crisis—an invasion, a depression, a massive oil spill—but there’s no glory in prevention, in foreseeing and forestalling and keeping the bad from getting worse. We know what happened when each president presided; they are often just as proud of what didn’t happen. They wind their way toward solutions, commuting back and forth to the alternative reality where they glimpse the damage if things don’t go as planned. When the weight of office is finally off their shoulders, this is often what they remember most. Eisenhower the general was honored for winning the great war. But Eisenhower the president was proudest of not fighting one. “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my Administration,” he argued in retirement. “We kept the peace. People asked how it happened. By God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.” Johnson, retired to his ranch in Texas, refused to talk about the mistakes he might have made. “I will not let you take me backward in time in Vietnam,” he growled to his biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin. “Fifty thousand American boys are dead. Nothing we can say will change that fact. Your idea that I could have chosen otherwise rests upon complete ignorance. For if I had chosen otherwise, I would have been responsible for starting World War III.”

  Every president lives with his own version of this. Ford’s aides sat mute as he explained his plan to pardon Nixon and spare the country prolonged agony. “The President’s logic was unassailable,” one advisor recalled, “yet I felt as if I was watching someone commit hara-kiri.” George W. Bush owned the legacy of Abu Ghraib and waterboarding and the costs of making “hard calls” but left office able to say, We were not successfully attacked a second time on my watch. Every time his aides told him he had to admit his mistakes, he brushed them off. It is far too soon to tell. “I truly believe that the decisions I made will make the world a better place,” he said. “Unfortunately, if you’re doing big things, most of the time you’re never going to be aroun
d to see them. . . . And I fully understand that. If you aim for big change, you shouldn’t expect to be rewarded by short-term history.”

  This is another reason for the club’s protocols, of support and silence and solidarity. All presidents are fellow travelers in the parallel universe where past, present, and future blur, where the terrain of regret looks very different and where there is hardly ever such a thing as a perfect outcome. They are the jurors who will not pronounce a verdict, because they know they have not heard all the evidence—and they are predisposed to be merciful.

  Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover, three architects of the postwar world, were honored at Princeton’s bicentennial in June of 1947; though Hoover and Ike were the two Republicans, Hoover and Truman became the closer friends. (Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library)

  Truman got to visit with Hoover at the dedication of the Hoover library in August of 1962. “I feel that I am one of his closest friends,” Truman said, “and he is one of my closest friends.” (Harry S. Truman Library)

  Truman first met Ike when he presented him with the Distinguished Service medal in June of 1945; they had dinner that night. “He is a nice fellow and a good man,” Truman told his wife, Bess. (National Park Service, Abbie Rowe, Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library)

  Eisenhower wanted to keep his distance from the Red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy, but when they campaigned together in October of 1952, it led to open war with his old friend Truman. (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum)

  Eisenhower welcomed President-elect Kennedy to the White House in December of 1960. The exalted general’s shadow would remain long after he left office. (Abbie Rowe/White House, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)