Shortly after winning reelection in 2004, George W. Bush was
asked whether he thought more or less highly of his predecessors,
now that he’d been in office awhile.
“Of my predecessors? Very interesting,” he said, before
immediately adding, “More highly of them all” because “I’ve got a
much better appreciation of what they’ve been through.”
That anecdote, told by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy in their
new book The
Presidents Club, captures how most American presidents
feel about one another. Nobody quite knows what it’s like to be
president except other presidents.
American presidents “are the jurors who will not pronounce a
verdict, because they know they have not heard all the evidence,”
the authors write in their closing sentence, “and they are
predisposed to be merciful.”
If the Presidents Club had a charter, it would be guided by the
three S’s: support and silence and solidarity. While most U.S.
presidents have followed those protocols, even across party lines
and with former rivals, President Obama has consistently and
conspicuously broken them.
Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman became extraordinarily close. “I
feel that I am one of his closest friends,” Truman said, “and he is
one of my closest friends.”
After Kennedy beat Nixon by a slim margin in 1960, the
president-elect invited his former adversary to meet. “I would like
to fly down from Palm Beach to have a chat with you — if it won’t
interfere with your vacation,” Kennedy said to Nixon. Nixon was
happy to go, and they had what Kennedy described as “a very cordial
meeting.”
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy reached out to Nixon, who
visited the president in the Oval Office to offer his advice. The
young president also met with Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower. “I
asked President Eisenhower here to bring him up to date on recent
events and get the benefit of his thoughts and experience,” JFK
said. He called on all three for guidance again during the Cuban
missile crisis.
Lyndon Johnson was, the authors found, “fully conscious of the
power of his predecessors and protective of their privileges. He
studied them, fed and tended them, sent flowers, cuff links,
statues, put Air Force jets and helicopters at their disposal, had
his aides research every single contact he had ever had with any
one of them, going back to his earliest Senate days.”
“I cannot tell you adequately my gratitude for your wisdom and
counsel, and, for the fact that no one has found it possible to
divide you and me,” LBJ told Eisenhower, whom he called “the best
chief of staff I’ve got.”
Johnson solicited advice from both Ike and Truman, especially as
the situation in Vietnam deteriorated. In asking Truman to visit
him in the White House, Johnson wrote, “I don’t want to tax you,
but I always want you to know I need your counsel, and I love you.”
LBJ called Truman “One of the few comforts I had during the
war.”
Nixon and his staff kept in touch with Johnson down on his Texas
ranch. “Cabinet members called him regularly with updates, and
Henry Kissinger came in person to discuss the progress of the peace
talks,” Gibbs and Duffy write.
In August 1969, to mark Johnson’s 61st birthday, Nixon flew the
Johnson family to his Western White House at San Clemente for a
party, where Nixon led the group as the guests sang to Johnson, who
“stood smiling, holding his felt hat and looking a little dazed in
the brilliant California sun.”
During the Watergate scandal, Nixon refused to release a story
about how LBJ had wire-tapped the Republicans in 1968. He didn’t
want to expose LBJ — that was against the code. “The difficulty
with using it, of course, is that it reflects on Johnson,” Nixon
said. “He ordered [the bugging]. If it weren’t for that, I’d
[exploit the crime].”
President Gerald Ford performed perhaps the greatest act of
graciousness toward a predecessor in pardoning Nixon even though
Nixon refused to admit he had done anything wrong. Ford’s decision
helped cost him the 1976 election.
Ronald Reagan helped rehabilitate the image of Nixon, who
regularly advised Reagan on political and foreign policy
matters.
When George H.W. Bush became president, he sent National
Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to visit all four living former
presidents (Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon). He asked them what
they might want in the way of regular briefings and other
logistical favors. Bush also offered to install secure telephone
lines so that he could reach them at a moment’s notice. He also
sent them semi regular dispatches to keep them informed of what was
going on in the White House — what the authors refer to as “a kind
of club newsletter.”
George H.W. Bush deployed Ford and Carter to help oversee an
election in Panama, and sent Carter again to usher in a peaceful
transfer of power in Nicaragua. Former rivals George H.W. Bush and
Clinton have taken many trips together and are so close that Bush
has suggested on a few occasions that he might be the father Bill
never really had.
Clinton made good use of the five presidents at his disposal at
the start of his presidency, especially Nixon, who practically
served as a part-time advisor. A Clinton aide called his
relationship with Nixon, “something of a mutual admiration
society.” Clinton compared Nixon’s death to the passing of his own
mother.
A newly-inaugurated Clinton paid Reagan a special visit in Los
Angeles, where the former president gave Clinton a much-needed
tutorial on how to salute. Clinton deployed Carter to North Korea
and to Haiti to handle very sensitive issues.
George W. Bush has been particularly gracious toward his
successor. “We want you to succeed,” he told Obama after the 2008
election. “All of us who have served in this office understand that
the office transcends the individual.” Obama, Bush says, “deserves
my silence.” He has said, “I love my country a lot more than I love
politics. I think it is essential that Obama be helped in the
office.”
Perhaps the worst criticism Bush has leveled at Obama is “Well,
I might have done it differently.”
Bush’s graciousness toward Obama stands out in part because it
has not been reciprocated. Obama’s 2008 campaign is remembered as
much for Obama’s berating of Bush as it is for his promises of
unity and post-partisanship. As the New
Yorker’s Ryan Lizza put it, “There was an almost
obsessive singularity in the way that Obama and [his strategists]
saw the contest. In their tactical view, all that was wrong with
the United States could be summarized in one word: Bush.”
As president, Obama has continued his compulsive Bush-blaming.
Obama’s inaugural address was one long indirect but unmistakable
swipe at Bush. With Bush only a few feet away, Obama declared,
“Starting today we must pick ourselves off, dust ourselves off, and
being again the work of remaking America.”
Obama has continued to make Bush his scapegoat. As columnist
Charles Krauthammer has said about Obama, “Is there anything he
hasn’t blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the
credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism
abroad — everything but swine flu. It’s as if Obama’s presidency
hasn’t really started.”
That was 2009. Three years later, Obama is still blaming Bush.
In December 2011, Obama was asked what he would say to black
Americans living in poverty who are disillusioned by the
administration. “[T]hey understand what an incredible mess had been
made as I was coming into office, and we’ve been spending the last
three years cleaning it up.”
In February 2012, he said, “We’ve made sure to do everything we
can to dig ourselves out of this incredible hole that I inherited.”
In March, Obama complained, “When I came into office there had been
drift in the Afghanistan policy.… Over the last three years we have
refocused attention on getting Afghanistan right. Would my
preference had been that we started some of that earlier?
Absolutely. But that’s not the cards that were dealt.” The same
month he said, “When I took office, the efforts to apply pressure
on Iran were in tatters.”
Obama has not treated Bill Clinton much better. When he sent
Clinton to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American
women, the White House didn’t want Clinton to get credit. It
notified the two women that when the plane landed in California,
they would descend the airplane steps alone while Clinton stayed
hidden in the cabin. One of the women complained, and the white
house eventually relented. “But it was a reminder that the White
House was not really comfortable having Clinton back in the
picture,” Gibbs and Duffy write.
In September 2010, Obama introduced his wife at an event in New
York City for the Clinton Global Initiative. As Jodi Kantor relates
in her book The
Obamas, Obama could not resist the urge to take a swipe at
Clinton:
The former president came out first and praised the current one
to the skies. The stimulus! A new college loan program! America’s
bright future, the coming wave of high-tech jobs! But Obama was not
there to discuss his work; he was there to discuss his wife’s.
“Bill Clinton understands where I’m coming from,” he said after
taking the podium. The former president, perched on a stool a few
feet away, nodded, smiling. “He knows what it’s like to be married
to somebody who’s smarter, somebody’s who’s better looking…” — the
familiar Clinton smile grew a little tighter, as if he was not sure
he appreciated the assessment of him or his wife by the younger man
— “somebody who’s just all around a little more impressive than
you are.” On “impressive,” Obama let out an uncharacteristic
high-pitched giggle. Clinton’s eyes crinkled and he broke into a
slow, exaggerated clap.
We’ll know much more about what goes on between Obama and his
predecessors once he leaves office. Time will likely soften any
hard feelings and animosities that have been created among
them.
But from what we’ve seen so far, it’s clear Barack Obama is at
best a reluctant member of the Presidents Club. Obama has always
seemed like he believes he’s too good for the public who voted him
into the presidency. It appears he feels similarly about those who
were there before him.
