Duffy Michael - The Presidents Club: Inside the Worlds Most Exclusive Fraternity

Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs have taken us inside one of the most powerful and unusual families in American lifethe brotherhood of former presidents of the United States. Political junkies, historians, psychologists, and Main Street citizens will find the tales of friendship, envy, conspiracy, competition, and common cause irresistible.

TOM BROKAW, bestselling author of The Greatest Generation

This is a brilliant idea for a book. At Eisenhowers inauguration, Hoover and Truman half-jokingly decided to form a presidents club. With surprising reporting and insights, this book reveals the relationships and rivalries among the few men who know what its like to be president. It gives a new angle on history by exploring the essence of the presidency.

WALTER ISAACSON, bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin

Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy have given us a great gift: a deeply reported, highly original, and wonderfully written exploration of a much-overlooked part of American history. The tiny world of U.S. presidents is our Olympus, and Gibbs and Duffy have chronicled the intimacies and rivalries of the gods.

JON MEACHAM, bestselling author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

The Presidents Club is magnetically readable, bursting with new information and behind-the-scenes details. It is also an important contribution to history, illuminating the event-making private relationships among our ex-presidents and why we should do a far better job of drawing on their skills and experience.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS,
bestselling author of The Conquerors

This is essential reading for anyone interested in American politics.

ROBERT DALLEK,
bestselling author of An Unfinished Life:
John F. Kennedy, 19171963

The first history of the private relationships among modern American presidentstheir backroom deals, rescue missions, secret alliances, and enduring rivalries.

The Presidents Club, established at Dwight Eisenhowers inauguration by Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover, is a complicated place: its members are bound forever by the experience of the Oval Office and yet are eternal rivals for historys favor. Among their secrets: How Jack Kennedy tried to blame Ike for the Bay of Pigs. How Ike quietly helped Reagan win his first race in 1966. How Richard Nixon conspired with Lyndon Johnson to get elected and then betrayed him. How Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter turned a deep enmity into an alliance. The letter from Nixon that Bill Clinton rereads every year. The unspoken pact between a father and son named Bush. And the roots of the rivalry between Clinton and Barack Obama.

Journalists and presidential historians Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy offer a new tool to understand the presidency by exploring the club as a hidden instrument of power that has changed the course of history.

Forget Romes Curia, Yales Skull and Bones, and the Bilderbergsthe worlds most exclusive club never numbers more than six. Its rules are inscrutable, and its members box the compass politically and stylistically.... Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs have penetrated thick walls of secrecy and decorum to give us the most intimate, revealing, and poignant account of the constitutional fifth wheel that is the ex-presidency. Readers are in for some major surprises, not to mention a history they wont be able to put down.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH,
author of Patriarch: George Washington and the
New American Nation

NANCY GIBBS and MICHAEL DUFFY are editors at Time and the authors of The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.

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BACK JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM):
COURTESY RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY; ED CLARK/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY
IMAGES; OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA; GEORGE SKADDING/TIME
LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY; LBJ LIBRARY
PHOTO BY MIKE GEISSINGER; COURTESY OF DIANA WALKER; ERIC DRAPER,
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
COPYRIGHT 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

A LSO BY N ANCY G IBBS AND M ICHAEL D UFFY
The Preacher and the Presidents

Simon & Schuster
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New York, NY 10020
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Copyright 2012 by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2012

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Designed by Joy OMeara

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4391-2770-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-4871-6 (ebook)

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THE PRESIDENTS CLUB

INTRODUCTION

S o youve come to talk about my predecessors. Bill Clinton greets us in his Harlem office, looking thin, sounding thin, his voice a scrape of welcome at the end of a long day.

It is late, it is dark, pouring rain outside, so beyond the wall of windows the city is a splash of watery lights and street noise. But inside, past the two armed agents, behind the electronic locks, the sanctuary is warm wood and deep carpet, a collectors vault. A painting of Churchill watches from the west wall; a stuffed Kermit the Frog rests on a shelf, while a hunk of an old voting machine, with names attached and levers to pull, sits behind his desk. This is my presidential library, from Washington through Bush, he says, pointing to bookcases full of memoirs and biographies, and in the course of the sance that follows he summons the ghosts not just of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt but Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes.