 Good evening. I'll mark up to grow the director of the LBJ Library. I want to welcome you to a brand new season of programming. In particular, I want to welcome a group of students who are brand new to the LBJ School of Public Affairs. May I ask you to stand, please? Welcome. I hope this is the first of many programs that you attend here at the LBJ Library. Welcome again. This season promises to be one of our best. In the next couple of months, you will have, gracing this stage, outgoing Senator K. Belly Hutchison, former astronaut and former Senator John Glenn, and former First Ladies Barbara Bush and Laura Bush. They'll all be here between now and November, the end of November. And in December, we will be cutting the ribbon on our brand new exhibit on the life and formidable legacy of our 36th president. And while we'll be opening that officially to the public on December 22, we'll be giving you a sneak preview shortly beforehand. And I think you will find it to be a remarkable use of our time and resources. This is a brand new look at LBJ by the light of the 21st century. And I think it will breathe new life into this august institution. We start the season of programming very auspiciously with Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, who will discuss their most recent collaboration, the President's Club, inside the world's most exclusive fraternity, which has been critically acclaimed and has been on The New York Times' best seller list almost since the day that it launched. So that's over three months of being on that best seller list. That's a remarkable accomplishment. This is the second book from Nancy and Michael. Their first book, The Preacher and the President's Billy Graham in the White House, enjoyed similar success critically and commercially. Nancy and Michael are not only best selling authors, but colleagues at Time Magazine, where they've spent the bulk of their career. And they're also very dear and old friends of mine from my days at Time Magazine. So this is a particularly enjoyable night for me. Nancy Gibbs is the deputy managing editor of Time, which is the magazine's number two position. She has written more than 150 cover stories for the magazine, which is by far a record. And she has been called by politico.com, the poet laureate of presidents. Michael Duffy is no slouch when it comes to presidents either. He is the executive editor and Washington bureau chief for Time and has covered all things political and presidential. He is the author of Marching in Place, status quo presidency of George Bush. And you've probably seen him many times on shows like Face the Nation, and Meet the Press, and on CNN, and PBS's Washington Week in Review. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming my friends, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy. Good evening. I get to start simply because we flipped a coin. And to start, I want to take everyone back to essentially 40 years ago this month, when there was another re-election campaign underway in 1972. Coming out of the Democratic Convention, George McGovern wanted to have an audience with former president Lyndon Johnson at the ranch here in Texas. And that meeting would take place, and neither man was particularly close to the other. And that meeting wouldn't change that very much. But before that meeting took place, there was another fight going on between the two men who were running the campaign here in Texas for George McGovern. One was named Taylor Branch. The other was named Bill Clinton. And Branch and Clinton were having an argument because both wanted to go down to the ranch and meet Lyndon Johnson. And there was only one staffer allowed to go. You can imagine how at least one of those two men was feeling about that meeting. So they decided to flip a coin to see who could go and meet President Johnson. They were both 26 years old. Clinton lost the toss. And Taylor Branch, who would go on to become a writer in his own right, got to go to the meeting with George McGovern and Lyndon Johnson. Clinton did not get to go. But he did get, as a consolation prize, a picture of President Johnson signed by President Johnson to Bill, who Johnson had never met. And that picture now sits bigger than any other picture on the credenza next to Clinton's desk in his Harlem office, which when you walk in, you see immediately is a museum to all the former presidents. And when we saw the picture there, we asked him the question. We asked President Clinton the question. We always wanted to ask him, did you ever meet? He says, no. And then he told us the story of the picture and the tossing of the coin. And he said to us, but history will be very kind to President Johnson, which as it turns out is one of the mottos of the president's club. That actually started with the people that we count as its founding fathers. This very unlikely pair. Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, who when this picture was taken, they had never met each other. They had nothing in common with each other. They had no reason to trust each other or have anything much to say to each other, except for the fact that Harry Truman, who had been in office at this point for maybe three weeks, had an emergency that he was facing. And this was the humanitarian catastrophe that was looming in Europe as the war was coming to an end. And as children were starving, as many as one in four in Belgrade weren't making it to their first birthday, agriculture had been destroyed, infrastructure was destroyed, transportation was gone. A humanitarian crisis that really would take enormous expertise. And the person who had that was Herbert Hoover. And for years, people had been telling Franklin Roosevelt, you should call Hoover. He can help with this. And Roosevelt would say, well, I'm not Jesus Christ. I'm not raising Herbert Hoover from the dead. Harry Truman, like history, would tend to be kinder. And so just a few weeks in office, Truman secretly mails a letter to Hoover saying, would you come see me so we can talk about the food situation in Europe. Hence this meeting. Neither man thought anything would come of it. They were still sort of, it was a get to know you. And maybe Hoover might have some idea as well. As it turned out, out of this meeting, within a year, Truman would give Hoover a plane. A staff sent him to 27 countries in 55 days. He met with seven kings and about 30 prime ministers and the pope. And engineered one of the most massive humanitarian relief efforts to the point that you could argue that these two men working together probably saved more lives than any two men in the 20th century. And it was out of that moment and that partnership, which evolved over the rest of Truman's presidency that gave rise to this moment at the inauguration of Eisenhower in January of 1953. And this is sort of the founding myth of the President's Club, Hoover goes over to treat Greek Truman. We had a former President's Club. Truman's great. You be the president. I'll be the secretary. And you could say that they were joking. And this was all very lighthearted. And in a sense, when Michael and I started the research for this book about five years ago, the club was just our shorthand for the group of former presidents. We never imagined that it was anything like a real club until we started reading and searching and interviewing and hearing from the presidents themselves and from people close to them about how real it is to them. And from this moment, it became more and more and more of a real thing. In 1957, through an act of Congress, the former presidents were granted pensions and mailing rights and office space. It was President Johnson who extended them not only secret service protection and the use of White House planes and helicopters, but even the projectionist and the White House Film Library so that if they were being treated, for instance, at Walter Reed, they could send over to the White House and pick out what movies they wanted to screen. But it never became more real than when Richard Nixon was in the White House. Early in Nixon's presidency, he discovered that he had a complicated partner in former President Johnson who would, on occasion, call the place he used to work, the White House, and say, I'm coming to town. Can you give me a ride, a lift on a plane? Is there a place I can stay? Maybe a place to work, a place to make some calls? And the job of taking care of President Johnson fell to a young Air Force colonel who was just getting his start in politics, a part of his job, as a up and coming military mind. His name was Colonel Brent Scowcroft. And Scowcroft didn't know very much about Lyndon Johnson, but he became kind of phone pals with him. And Scowcroft told me, he goes, you know, I really liked him. You know, we'd get on the phone. We'd talk about stuff. And he goes, I would get him planes, and I would get him cars. And eventually, he came so regularly or needed things so frequently that we finally just got him a house. And today, 40 years later, on Lafayette Place, 716 Jackson Place, it's called, is an unmarked building that is essentially the, you know, I would call it the hostel, the president's club, where they can come to town and use the space. And it has many nice features. A couple of very nice sitting rooms downstairs, a very nice kitchen, some, a bathtub in the middle of the master bathroom, which that's kind of an interesting step. And then if you ever wake up in the morning in the president's clubhouse and you aren't really sure what you used to do, you could kind of look down toward your toes. And there, it'll tell you that used to be a president. And these privileges of the club, which began to pile up over the years, continued with President George Herbert Walker Bush, who began to occasionally send private notes, regular reports. And the club begins to take on by then something of a life of its own. If there was a single, this was not an alliance of politicians doing policy together so much as it was a brotherhood of combat-hardened warriors who knew what the office does to you. And that experience of the burdens and the loneliness, the scars that they all emerged with, more than anything, I think, was what defined the relationship amongst them. And what was fascinating to us and often very heartening was to see how it transcended what were often tremendous differences in political philosophy, ideology, generation. In this case, you had the oldest president in the century handing over power to the youngest. These two men also had no use for each other. Eisenhower referred to Kennedy as little boy blue. He thought he was a playboy whose father had bought him everything he had ever achieved. He was very dismissive of him. And Kennedy was not nearly as reverential of Eisenhower as a majority of Americans were when Eisenhower left office still with a 65% approval rating. And yet, when the moment came, early on in Kennedy's presidency, when everything went so catastrophically wrong with the Bay of Pigs invasion, he calls Eisenhower, asks to meet at Camp David. This is the picture that Kennedy, more than anything, needed on the front pages of the newspapers, needed to be seen almost literally a trip to the wood shed with the great war hero. It's the first time Kennedy has ever been to Camp David. Eisenhower shows him around. And the two men talk and have a real breakdown of what had gone wrong in the decision-making process and the planning and the execution of the Bay of Pigs. And it's a pretty bark-off conversation. At one point, Kennedy says, no one knows how tough this job is until you've been in it for a few months. And Eisenhower says, forgive me, Mr. President. I tried to tell you that a few months ago. But having grilled him and having really chastised him, I would say, for the failures in the planning, Eisenhower then greets the reporters waiting afterwards of what emerges from this incredible summit. And all he has to say to them is, I think it's important for everyone to support the president in a time like this. And a week later, when a group of Republican congressmen make a pilgrimage to Gettysburg to talk about how great the honeymoon is over and now it's time to pile on, Eisenhower will have none of it. He says, I don't want any looking backwards and raking over the ashes. I don't want any witch hunts. It is very important that we support the president. That is necessary for him to be able to conduct an effective foreign policy. And so while whatever the private differences were between the men, what we saw again and again was a willingness to provide a kind of sympathetic ear, often hard-nosed advice, and discretion. That was especially true when President Johnson was in office. It was the night of Kennedy's assassination that he called both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. And he says to Eisenhower, I've needed you for a long time, two Texans who had a lot of history together by that time. He says, I've needed you for a long time. I need you more than ever now. And Eisenhower, the next morning, gets in his car, drives to Washington, comes to the White House, has lunch with President Johnson, writes out for him in longhand ideas for what he ought to say to the joint session of Congress five days later to help signal stability and continuity. And basically, it was a Republican president telling a new Democratic president to do everything he could to realize the Democratic agenda. Because Eisenhower's calculation then was not a party ideological, political one. It was, what did the country, in a moment of national trauma, need to hear from their president? And both at that moment and in the years that followed, Johnson would call Eisenhower, and every now and then he would say something like, can you make up some reason why you need to be in Washington so that you can come see me at the White House? I don't want anyone to think there's some emergency, but can you come up with a cover story and come spend the night, you can have the Lincoln bedroom. And in a couple of cases, basically turned meetings over to Eisenhower to run so that he could listen. And once again, even when Johnson was coming under fire from many sides for foreign policy, Eisenhower pretty consistently would say, I think it is the responsibility of all Americans to support their president. This is from a chapter I call Three Men in a Funeral. Because these are three men who, as we talked about before, had not had much in common, did not know each other very well in some cases. And yet it was President Reagan who turned to them upon the death of Anwar Sadat in 1981 to fly to Cairo and attend the funeral. It was not regarded as safe for either President Reagan or Vice President Bush to do so. What's great about this story, and some of you probably know it, is that while the flight over was frosty and totally weird, because the three men were kind of eyeing each other. And they all kind of had to agree to do everything at the same time. For example, when President Reagan flew them to Washington, it was arranged that they all would land at Andrews Air Force Base within 30 seconds of each other. Because they weren't exactly sure who was senior. As they get on the helicopter to fly to the White House to talk to President Reagan, they stop. And they're trying to figure out who gets on the helicopter first. And it's President Nixon who says, I think it's President Carter who goes first, because he's the most recent. So they all get in, and they all get out in the same order. And they've talked to President Reagan, and President Bush is there. So it's kind of a five-president moment in the White House, kind of, if you count it that way. These are things that haven't happened very often in American history. Former presidents getting together. It's a function of the club in the modern era that they were electing them earlier. They're living longer afterward. They are able to do things for each other in a way that they hadn't been previously in our history. The three men get back on the helicopter again in the right order. They fly back out to Andrews. And finally, Ford from the Midwest has just had enough of this. Mr. President, Mr. President, Mr. President, Mr. President. And so he says, somewhat famously, why don't we just make it Dick, Jimmy, and Jerry? The great thing about the story is on the way back from Cairo after the funeral, Carter and Ford, who got along least well among this trio, actually multilaterally disarm at the same time. They just simply stop being enemies. They realize they have some things in common. They both are kind of got a long life ahead of them. And they're not quite sure what to do. They both have to raise money for the presidential libraries. They both don't like Ronald Reagan. They have much in common. They realize there's no reason to be separate. And they become, at 35,000 feet, they actually start a friendship that would last for, I guess, almost 30 years until President Ford died. They would become such friends, these two men, that they would work on 25 projects together on all kinds of things in all kinds of countries over the next 25 years. They would vow to give the elegy of the other, depending on who died first. I think they realized these two men with men like Reagan and Nixon and prowling around in the club of much less President Clinton or President Bush, that they would need maybe to team up to be a factor. But they just liked each other. They became friends after a really tough campaign in 1976. This is a movie I'm waiting to be made, because you would not have thought that these two men would have anything in common at all. When President Clinton is elected in 1992 and is sworn in in 1993, there are five living former presidents. This is a record in American history since Abraham Lincoln was sworn in the first time, I think, five former presidents. And they all want to get to know the new guy. They all are volunteering to help. They all want to do what they can. They all have sent him notes. No one is trying as hard as Dick Nixon. He's practically standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, waving his arms. Pick me, pick me, pick me. He first writes a letter to Clinton privately on the night of the election, so you ran a great race. I'm ready to help you. Clinton ignores it. He then too, Nixon's upset. He writes an op-ed saying what a great transition Clinton was having. The transition was 10 days old. It was a weird Valentine. And then about three weeks later, when he still hasn't heard from Clinton, he starts sending back channel notes saying, if you don't call me, it's going to get nasty. So he's kind of good copping, bad copping the president. And finally, Clinton calls him. And what's interesting about this relationship, just for starters, is that over the next year and a half before Nixon dies, the two men become late night phone pals with Clinton calling him and asking him for advice about Russia and China, and Clinton treasuring the advice, finding it more hardheaded than anything he's getting from his aides. They start to correspond a little bit. And he would eventually be able to, as when we saw him just before we finished reporting the book, I guess was this last fall, Clinton was able to quote from a letter Nixon had sent him in April of 1994. And I said, how are you able to quote from this letter by name? By memory. And he said, because I take it out every year and reread it. I don't think any of us imagined that we would see the extraordinary image in our lifetimes of a son following the father into the White House. And whole tomes have been written and will be about the Bush-father-son relationship of some mad atable fantasy in which the son follows his father's footsteps, never quite living up to him at and over at Yale in the military, in the Air Force, and finally having a presidency that was all playing out some incredibly complicated psychic drama. And the Bushes themselves sort of joke about this because it is, I think, been such a temptation to doctoral students and journalists the world over. But I think it misses the really interesting story, which is that not so much how the father-son relationship affected, particularly George W. Bush's presidency, but how the presidency affected the father-son relationship. The one thing that both men, I think, understood was that presidents have a great many advisors. They only have one father. And every president says a version of the same thing, which is that once you leave office, your willingness and ability to offer advice is greatly curtailed because you more than anyone realizes now how much you don't know. President Bush Sr. told us that the day you get your first intelligence briefing is the day you really understand what you are up against and what the office means. He said, you can have been near the presidency. You can have run for the office, campaign for it. But the day you get your first briefing and suddenly the nation's secrets are really open to you and then you realize how much you didn't know before is transforming. That means by the same token when you leave office and are no longer getting those briefings, are no longer read in, as President Bush puts it, it tends to make you much more circumspect about thinking that you've got useful advice to offer. And so one thing President Bush would say frequently in public is I'm not advising my son. He has more information than I do. But also an understanding that of all the things that his son might need, foreign policy advice was not anywhere near the top of the list. And instead what happened was this interesting transaction which George W. Bush describes where the son became the comforter. And all of the criticism and all of the blowback and all of the controversy and division around that arose in the course of the second Bush presidency was so painful for the father. He understood the agony of the burdens his son was bearing. He too knew what it was like to be ordering soldiers into battle. He knew the weight that that represented that his son had to carry. That alone was so difficult as a father to watch. And then to hear the criticism. And so Barbara Bush would call the White House and say, George, can you call your father? We're trying to get him to turn off the TV and to stop reading the papers. And so the son would call and say, Dad, I'm fine. I'm doing fine. You don't have to worry about me. And there was a role reversal in terms of the comfort and the compassion between the two of them. And the son in a way becomes the father. The only thing more extraordinary maybe of having a father and a son in office is to have a virtual father and son in office. These two men had lunch yesterday. One of many, they have become so close. Barbara Bush called her husband the father Bill Clinton never had. The Bush family generally has now come to welcome Bill Clinton into their midst. Whether he's invited or not. With the ultimate acceptance, which is that they've given him a nickname. They call him their brother from another mother. There's this, you may not know this story, but when President Bush Sr. was given a sort of gala at the Kennedy Center a couple of springs ago, maybe two springs ago, there were 37 Bushes there backstage. And I think Lord Bush wanted a picture. Because you don't get the family together that often. Let's get the picture. And they get everybody together. And offstanding in the wings are President Carter and President Clinton. And they're there, of course, because all the presidents are there. And I think it's either Neil Bush or George W. says, Bill, Bill, get in the picture. So now they're 38 Bushes. I've got the picture. It's not bad. Now, at this point, you could easily, you could be forgiven for thinking that the dynamic of the president's club is all one of sweetness and light. And that would be wrong. Because like any fraternity, it has its feuds and tensions and rivalries. And often, circular relationships that come together come apart, come together come apart. Of them, one of the most interesting to me is the one between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, partly because these two men came together at such a critical moment, meeting for the first time in June of 1945 when Eisenhower returned to Washington. A million people come out to see the man who saved Western civilization. Harry Truman is the president. And he's awestruck at the chance to meet the great general and pin another Oakleaf cluster on him. And the two work very cordially together in the years that follow in creating really the post-war national security structure that gave rise to the Marshall Plan, to NATO, to a Western alliance that served very well and was by no means a given. It took someone of Eisenhower's stature, I think, to help Harry Truman sell the idea of NATO to a very skeptical Congress. They worked so closely together that in the 1948 election as it approached, Truman took Eisenhower aside and said, you know, if you want to run, I'll get out of the way. I'll even serve as your vice president. Eisenhower wasn't interested in 1948. That had changed by 1952. And at that moment, these two still formal, but I think very respecting friends had what Life Magazine called one of the epic health or leather grudge matches of American politics. And it basically happened when Eisenhower, campaigning in Wisconsin, missed an opportunity, deleted from his speech a chance to denounce Joe McCarthy. It wasn't that Eisenhower had any use for McCarthy. He didn't. But he chose not to denounce him at a moment when he could have and when Truman and many other people felt it would have made a great difference. And Truman was horrified at this. And started going around the country basically saying, I knew him. I trusted him. I thought Eisenhower would make a good president. He's betrayed everything I thought he stood for. And basically starts campaigning as though the 1952 race is not between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower, but between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. It becomes so bitter that after Eisenhower wins his landslide, it's inauguration day. He comes to the White House. Initially, he doesn't want to get out of the car to greet Truman. They barely speak on the ride to the Capitol. And for the next eight years, Truman does not step foot in the White House. It is an extremely bitter feud, except these things have a way of circling back. And so the next time that the two men really have occasion to spend any time together, turns out to be when they're sharing a limousine home from Arlington Cemetery in November of 1963. And maybe it's that moment in the twilight of their lives and the twilight of that horribly tragic day. Truman turns to Ike and says, you want to come up for a drink? And I said, sure. And they go up to Blair House and the two old soldiers end up spending the evening drinking and talking and burying the hatchet. That was not going to be quite as easy as the next pair of this chapter. I think we called scorpions in the bottle. I don't think there was ever a more fascinating Battle of Wits as that that occurred between Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. What was extraordinary was that it played out over five years, three continents, two presidential elections. And for the highest possible stakes, this was not a personal disagreement between these two and, in fact, they were personally quite respectful of one another. But as many of you will remember and understand, in that 1968 election, what Lyndon Johnson wanted more than anything was to be able to leave office as a peacemaker. And Richard Nixon understood this about him. And it is so fascinating. And thanks to this library among other places, you can listen to their phone calls where Nixon would call Johnson during that summer and then during the fall, as the 1968 race between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey is heating up. And Nixon would call Johnson and say over and over and over again how much he respected him, how much he agreed with his policy in Vietnam, how he would make sure that when peace came, it was a peace with honor and that Johnson would get the full measure of credit that he deserved. And Johnson, partly as a result, was not lifting a finger to help Hubert Humphrey until the point he realized that Richard Nixon was actually secretly undermining the Paris peace talks. Telling the South Vietnamese, don't go along with anything, you'll get a better deal when I'm in office. The last thing he wanted was a peace breakthrough in October that would have certainly exalted Johnson and fulfilled his dream and not incidentally, most likely have elected Hubert Humphrey. So now Johnson faces one of the most extraordinary dilemmas I think any modern president ever faced. He knows through some very sensitive wire taps and intelligence gathering that the candidate of the opposing party was arguably committing what he called treason. And it's five days until election day. And this is a year when we've seen Bobby Kennedy assassinated, Martin Luther King assassinated, blood in the streets of Chicago, how much could the country stand at that point? And in the end, he decides not to expose him. And I think partly as a result, President Nixon's very solicitous and continuous outreach to President Johnson was entirely understandable because he knew what Johnson knew. And so he is planning birthday parties for him. Nixon sends a jet down to the ranch every Friday with briefing papers and with anything you want, Lyndon. Gets the clubhouse. Gets the clubhouse. All wanting to make sure that Lyndon Johnson is happy and never tells anyone what he knows. Well, that might have all worked out just fine until Watergate. And as the Watergate investigation is gathering steam in the early weeks of 1972, the Senate inquiry is starting to gather force. And so the White House calls President Johnson down at the ranch and says, you know, you need to get your friends in the Senate to back off on this Watergate investigation or else we'll reveal that you were bugging us during the 1968 campaign to which Johnson artfully responds well. You do that and I'll reveal what I learned when I was illegally bugging you during the 1968 campaign. So you have two presidents essentially blackmailing one another and you think how is it that this did all not erupt into the headlines? Well, it's largely because President Nixon is inaugurated for his second turn on January 20th and two days later Lyndon Johnson died of a heart attack. And since Harry Truman had passed away that Christmas, there is now no club. It is the first time basically since George Washington. There are no living former presidents and Richard Nixon's all alone. It would be really an overstatement to say that all presidents even a cross party get along. At Time Magazine, we have an expression that is, goes like this, some pictures don't need a caption. We gave it one anyway. Jimmy Carter was a one-term president who, what's today, the 20th, 13 days ago on September 7th became the longest living former president in American history beating Herbert Hoover's record of 31 years, eight months and 21 days. That's a burden all its own. Carter had to essentially create for himself as did Hoover and William Howard Taft a second career and he has done a magnificent job of it. He has trotted the globe and solved problems from agriculture to health to election reform. He's done a lot of work in this hemisphere, done a lot of work around the United States. He really is the very model of a modern former president and he'll say, I've done a better job of being a former president than I did of being a president. Which isn't that surprising, he's had 28 more years to do it. But he does also tend to say things like this, I've been a better former president than the other former presidents. Which doesn't always really endear him to his fellow members of the club. I think in the book we say that every club has to have a black sheep, it gives the members something to talk about. And to some extent Carter plays that role but I would also say that President Carter for every president who has followed has been, is and will be the model of how to conduct themselves in office after leaving office. To some degree or another, he's redefined what it means. He's made being president kind of a good career move. And he's a complicated personality and yet every president since has used him, has put him to work, has sent him on missions. Both President Bush's, President Clinton and President Obama, he has not always followed those missions to the letter. But he has been sent. This is another one where no caption could really capture it. Pretty good eye contact there I think. This is a very interesting relationship. You've been witness to it now for four or five years. These are two men who are essentially allies at the moment as the campaign enters its final 50 or 60 days. Clinton has obviously, you've seen him on television talking about President Obama. You saw him at the convention giving one whale of a speech for the incumbent president. But they are essentially rivals. They're not personally close. They are rivals for history's favor in a way. We write in the book that each one has his own idea about how to take, how to yank a kind of a center right country back toward a more progressive stance. Clinton had one idea about how to do it. Obama has a very different idea. Obama sort of in his first book criticized President Clinton as an imperfect vessel for that agenda. Something that in the wake of the Obama-Hillary Clinton campaign did not go over well with the former president. They spent a couple of years kind of more getting to know you. They have reached a kind of reasonable arrangement. But I do think one of the things you see in the President's Club is that presidents of different parties get along better than presidents of the same party. And the thing about that that really struck us most was how often we saw presidents acting against their own often personal interest or their party's interest in service of a larger cause. And again, this goes back to our founding fathers. The reason the Republican Congress in 1947 was delighted to put Herbert Hoover in charge of the huge commission that was gonna overhaul the executive branch was because they trusted him to completely dismantle the machinery of the New Deal. Harry Truman's government was 10 times the size that Hoover's had been. And Republicans in Congress wanted that shrunk. Truman went along with this because he understood something very important about what being president does to you. If the Republicans in Congress at that time wanted a smaller government, Truman and Hoover wanted a more effective one. Truman understood that Hoover had left office not only the most hated man in America, his motorcades being pelted by rotten fruit. He had left feeling that he had encountered a national crisis and not had all the tools he would have liked to meet it. So by the time Truman is in office and now we're living in the nuclear age and the world is an even more dangerous place and the challenges the president faces is even greater, Truman trusted Hoover to help reinvent the presidency to make it a more powerful office, a more flexible one, give it more tools in order to meet the challenges that would come. Which Hoover subsequently did, about 70% of the recommendations of the Hoover commission were enacted. It gave us the CIA, the NSC, the Council on Economic Advisors, the General Services Administration. Whole branches of government, institutions of government that we now take for granted were born again out of this very unlikely alliance. And strengthened the presidency. And strengthened the presidency. This is the first time that the club functioned as an instrument of presidential power. We saw a similar thing after the very, very close election of 1960 when both Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower counseled Nixon not to challenge a often very dodgy vote count. On the grounds, as Hoover said, we're in enough trouble in the world today. America was a model for all sorts of young democracies around the world and a peaceful transition of power was one of the most important things that we modeled. And so two Republican former presidents tell another Republican candidate not to challenge the results of that election. In a series of phone calls over about 10 minutes, it was a very fast, like what, just quickly tell the phone call, could you just do the, I love the phone call story. Okay, so Joe Kennedy, President Kennedy's father who had been on the Hoover commission calls Herbert Hoover and says, you know, do you think you could, do you think President Hoover would be willing to call Vice President Nixon about maybe getting together? This of course was the photograph. This is sort of the concession photograph that they wanted to have happened. So Joe Kennedy calls Hoover, Hoover calls Nixon says, don't challenge the results. Nixon hangs up, dials the White House to get Eisenhower on the phone 10 minutes later. Calls Eisenhower. Hoover says, I shouldn't challenge the results. What do you think? Eisenhower says, he's right. You'll look like a sore head and it wouldn't be good for the country. Don't challenge it. Nixon hangs up the phone. The next call is from Kennedy. Would you like to meet Nixon? By this time, having been convinced, says fine. So Nixon talks to two former and one future presidents. So that's a for president phone call basically over the course of 15 minutes that gives rise to this meeting which was one for which Nixon was widely praised as for his statesmanship and his willingness to again to put the country first. It happens again certainly at this most painful moment in Gerald Ford's presidency. His decision to pardon Richard Nixon, which arguably cost him his own chance of being elected in his own right in 1976. Ford concluded that the spectacle of a prolonged trial would make it impossible for him to function as president. The presidency itself would have stopped in its tracks. And again, it was too dangerous a time for that to be possible. And so as he worked through his reasoning about the need for the pardon, some of his aides watching him said, it was like watching him commit Harri Keary in front of us. And yet Ford was convinced that that was the right thing for the country. The historical irony here is that it fell to another president's family many years later. The Kennedy family granted Ford their Profiles and Courage Award for his decision to grant that pardon in 1998. And so it was as though the family of one president pardoned another president for pardoning a third president. The clubs can get complicated. One of the things I like about this particular picture is that though we think of them as president and vice president, they actually met in 1949. When Ford is sworn in as a freshman congressman in the well of the house by Sam Rayburn that year, the first person to come up to him is freshman congressman. The other, he's been in congress for two years, Dick Nixon, puts out a hand and says, I am Dick Nixon. The two men would be carpooling together to work within a few months. So they were old friends. This is another unlikely combination. Most people don't even know these two men met. It actually looks like a photoshopped picture, but it's real. It took us a long time to find it though. This goes back to that moment when Clinton has just been elected, but not yet sworn in. There are five former presidents. They're all interested in him, but Clinton goes and pays a courtesy call on Ronald Reagan, who we haven't talked about much tonight, but has his own interesting relationships with all these men. Clinton goes to see him in LA at Century City where he had an office in those days. He went up to talk to him and said, do you have any advice for me? They talked about some things, and Reagan said two things. He said, I want you to use Camp David because it's good for your heart and soul and you need to get out of that building and out of the bubble and have some normal time, which they all did, all said that. Clinton took a long time to take that advice. And the other thing Reagan said is he said, I've been watching you on the campaign trail and you're really bad at saluting. And you got to learn how to salute. If you're gonna play this role, you got to learn how to salute. And it took someone of Reagan's who had an exquisite understanding of the role perception plays in leadership to say to Clinton, this piece, you've got to get right. And so Clinton said, well, how do you salute? Because he'd never been in the service. And as you know, he spent some time avoiding it. And Reagan had been in the service, both in fact and in 40 or 50 movies. So he knew how to salute. And so the two men stood up in Reagan's office in LA, practicing their salutes. And when it was over, Reagan gave Clinton a jar of jelly beans as a reward. And those jelly beans sat on Clinton's desk for eight years in the Oval Office. So this is where we end up. A few weeks before the inauguration of Barack Obama when the modern club assembles in the Oval Office. And it's an extraordinary moment. And of course, they're not talking about what to do in Afghanistan. They're talking about what it's like to raise teenage daughters under the white hot lights of the White House and handling the staff and just what is it like? And one of the extraordinary things to come out of this, President Bush says to Barack Obama, we want you to succeed. He says, all of us, Democrat or Republican, we know what's important. All of us who've served in this office understand that the office transcends the individual. And again, that same message over and over again, the office is bigger. We believe in protecting it. For America to prosper and to be safe, it needs the presidency itself to be strong and to function well. We need our presidents to succeed. And since then, given any number of opportunities to criticize the president, George W. Bush will say things like, I don't think it is good for our country to undermine our president and I don't intend to do so. That has been his consistent message. And I think what we have found, as Michael and I have traveled over the last five months, is what we hear more than anything is, why doesn't anyone talk this way? This isn't the song we're hearing sung in this campaign among our politicians. It doesn't sound anything like this. And I think when our politics is so bitter and so divided and often so dispiriting, I know I take a lot of comfort in what we have seen so consistently over so many years among these men who have served in this ultimate role on all of our behalf, presidents of all the people, is how much they reach out to one another and help each other. It doesn't mean they subvert their own principles, it doesn't mean they don't disagree with each other, but the abiding motive and mission that they have together is to help one another because they believe you help the president, you help your country, and that that's what matters most. Thank you. Michael and Nancy have graciously offered to take questions, and there are microphones in the aisles, but before we see the cues start forming, I'm gonna ask you my own question, which is of all the moments of the club, which is your favorite? Oh, I'll answer in one second, but I first wanna say, and I should have said at the top, hail to Archive, Mark. Yeah. Mark's own work in the whole fraternity area is well known to you and was helpful to us, and he's been incredibly gracious about this from the start, we owe you debts, not just in fact, but also in all the systems, so thank you, Mark. My favorite moment. Well, you know, I do like the story about the Toinkos. I like the fact that Clinton and Bush 41 could get together, and it's in the book. At some point, another natural disaster happens, and I guess this is now Haiti, and Clinton calls up Bush 41 and says, let's hit the road again, you know. Let's get the band back together. And at this point, you know, 41 has jumped out of the airplane at 85, but he's had enough, and he says, no, it's my turn's over, called George Jr., called W. And Clinton says, I can't do this without you. That's an amazing moment for me, and of course he does call W, and they do get together, and they are now involved in some things, and that relationship, if you had to look forward, it's the two there, it's W, and Clinton are the ones I think to watch to see how this next chapter unfolds, that's my answer. Oh, I have a lot of them, but I think there's one when, right after Johnson wins his enormous victory in 1964, Harry Truman calls him to congratulate him, and Johnson says to Truman, who by this time is sort of, he's retired in Missouri, and he's almost invisible, and Johnson says to Truman in that call, he says, I just want you to know that you are still part of this, that as long as I am in this office, you are in it, and there is not a power of it, or a privilege of it that is not yours, and your plane is there waiting, and your bed is made upstairs, and anything you want, this office is still yours, and that to me captured so well this sense that these are the most individual figures, they are so alone on the stage, and yet they're awareness of one another, and how they are fraternity across time, they are so conscious of that, they all become presidential historians, I think President Bush read something like 17 biographies of Lincoln while he was in office. President Bush too. Bush too, that these people that we think of as these individual symbols of power, when you pull the curtain back, and you see them not as symbols, but of humans, not as individuals, but as brothers, they look very different, and so again and again and again, we who have been writing about presidents for the last 20 years, suddenly we're looking at them in a completely different way, and that was the most exciting thing, I think. Is there a hierarchy in the future? You're talking about Carter being the black sheep, which is certainly true, but is there a hierarchy to two term presidents have a higher station than one term president? Talk about that. I don't think so. The ones in the girl room and the ones you can get into the dining room. I was never a member of a club, I don't know. To me, there are two things about this club that are interesting. One is, I do think the oldest member is President Herbert Walker Bush, and he is kind of the president of the president's club, and I asked him, how does it feel to be the president of the president's club? And he naturally said, I never saw those election results. I kind of thought he would like to see them. Like all presidents. They kind of defer to him. They all wait. Even President Carter, when they get lots of invitations, as you know, and lots of requests for it to do things and go places and shoot videos, and they all kind of look to the eldest to make a decision. If he's good with it, they'll go. If he's not, they're not. He said, can't be a leader when the Pope died in 2005, and President Bush II wanted to get them all together to go. None of them really wanted to go. They all had other things to do. But finally, I think he prevailed upon his father, and then the father started working the others, and Clinton was sick, and Bush said, don't worry, I'm gonna have a doctor on the plane. And Clinton had just had, I guess, an open heart surgery, and not open heart, but bypass, and so Clinton told his doctor that he could go because President Bush told him it was okay. And the club's a funny place. But there's something else about this club that I just think is worth noting, you know? What a group. A couple of months ago, there was an election in France, and as you know, Sarkozy was tossed out and in came Francois Hollande, who many French commentators said was, oh, such a relief to have Hollande in because he was so much more like Giscard de Stang and you know, Chirac of the class of leaders that the French had long been accustomed to, coming from the same elite schools, and had probably been trained by the same people and had had very similar career paths and had came from the same class and probably were members of the same French clubs if the French have clubs. And that put the whole French chattering class at ease because one of their own was back. I'm thinking, well, that's not how we do things here. I mean, this is such an, and throw in Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson and Dick Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower if you want and think about sort of the quintessentially American nature of this thing. There's no country who would put this group together to be a part of anything and there's no club in America where they have all these members in it itself. So we create this and no group of Americans would have created it but we created it as a country and it's kind of amazing. And to me, what's great about the club is that essential American unique thing that it is. So that's my favorite thing about the club. We have a question. Is there a similar club among first ladies? It may not surprise you, but we are very often asked that and I think people have a natural assumption that surely there must be some parallel and I think there is in a very informal way which is a number of first ladies have talked about how helpful former first ladies were to them. Again, particularly about the challenge of raising children. Hillary Clinton talked about how helpful Jackie Kennedy was to her about when the Clintons were heading towards the White House and Chelsea was still a young teenager and I'm struck by of course how many first daughters we had specifically raising daughters in the White House. You had the Nixon girls and of course the Johnson girls and Chelsea and Sasha and Malia and the Bush twins, a lot of girls and so there are lots of things for the first ladies to talk about and to counsel each other on but it is not the same and we never came across anything that was comparable to the bond that exists again because sort of of the ordeal of the presidency. So would you say that? That's right. We have time for these two questions. We'll start on the left, sir. Thank you. I'm a student at the LBJ school nearby and at the LBJ school we have a lot of collaborative writing assignments and I tend to think of writing more as an individual endeavor most of the time but you two having collaborated on this book, I was wondering if maybe you could share some insights into how to effectively collaborate writing. It's very simple. I just asked Nancy to do it all. It's so not true. I actually had the easy job. We sort of, in this case, we divided our presidents. I had the dead ones, he had the living ones, my interviews were much easier but then we had the great advantage of having written about 70 time covers together and had a process by this time and the one process that most of which I wouldn't wish on anyone else and wouldn't recommend but there is one thing that we have told our writing students over time that was very helpful to us which is that when we think we're done, we read everything out loud to one another and we read this book probably more than once, two or three times over the phone. Michael is based in Washington, I'm in New York, we would get on the phone and read each chapter out loud fixing as we went. Fixing as we went because that's when you hear what is wrong and awkward and horrible and that is the ultimate editing tool. It actually has nothing to do with a pencil, it has to do with your ears and it helps to have, in that sense, it helps to be doing it, have it with two people. Last question. Thank you very much. Looking at this photograph and recent pictures of President Obama, I'm struck by the common denominator that runs through almost all of the president to the next president and that is white hair. How did George Herbert Walker Bush escape that particular fate? It's a great question, you know, he always has been a young looking man. You know, he had even more of a baby face I think than the others so that when you see him at age 40, he kind of looks 26. So I think he started with that kind of advantage some people have in life. Beyond that, we're into some science where I am not capable of going. So it's kind of a hard to answer question. Two of the five had two terms. Could have been a factor. Two terms probably make it worse. Although Clinton was quite white by the end of the first. So I, you know, some men wear this easier than others and so far only men wear this office a lot more lightly than others. And I think that is the kind of non-scientific answer that probably counts. And some have harder times and some just don't juggle as hard. Not to say in a bad way, but they just have an easier time with the challenges. In my very unbiased opinion, Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs are among the very best in extraordinarily competitive field. We thank you for being with us. Thank you. Thank you so much.