SPECIAL PRESENTATION THE PRESIDENTS CLUB: INSIDE THE WORLD'S MOST EXCLUSIVE FRATERNITY

Transcription

1 SPECIAL PRESENTATION THE PRESIDENTS CLUB: INSIDE THE WORLD'S MOST EXCLUSIVE FRATERNITY MODERATOR: JOHN FORTIER, DIRECTOR OF THE DEMOCRACY PROJECT, BIPARTISAN POLICY CENTER REMARKS BY: MICHAEL DUFFY, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, TIME MAGAZINE 10:00 AM 11:00 AM THURSDAY, JULY 12, 2012 TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION

2 EILEEN MCMENAMIN: Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming. Welcome to the Bipartisan Policy Center. I m Eileen McMenamin, the vice president of communications here. For those of you who are not familiar with the Bipartisan Policy Center, we re a think tank founded by former Senator Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell. We work with Republicans and Democrats to develop solutions to the key problems facing our country. Today s discussion is part of a series we call On Leadership which focuses on well-known public and private figures who have led big institutions. Our past On Leadership speakers have included John Rowe, chairman former chairman and CEO of Exelon, and Senators Tom Daschle and Trent Lott, who discussed the inner workings of their relationship and their leadership style while serving together as Senate majority and minority leader. On October 19 th, we will host former Republican presidential candidate, Governor Jon Huntsman, and we hope you ll all join us for that conversation. Today, we have the honor of being joined by one of the nation s top journalists, Time magazine s Washington bureau chief, Mike Duffy. He s here to discuss a book he coauthored on the leadership and brotherhood of the presidents of the United States. The book title says it all: The President s Club: Inside the World s Most Exclusive Fraternity. And it is exclusive. To date, it has never numbered more than six living members at any one time. Unfortunately, Mike s coauthor, Nancy Gibbs got delayed in New York and could not make it this morning, but let me take a moment to brag about the book. It has received great reviews and so far has spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. It just so happens you can purchase a copy of the book in the lobby. And I m sure Mr. Duffy will be happy to sign it for you. In the book, the authors write that it has often been former presidents who have put aside partisan concerns to help achieve larger national goals, something we obviously value at BPC. Their unique experience and shared bonds mean that only these men at least so far they ve only been men can truly know what the job is like. There s no experience you can get President Kennedy said after two years in office that could possibly prepare you adequately for the presidency. No wonder these men come to rely on each other and turn to their predecessors for advice regardless of political affiliation.

3 In doing so, they have set an example of placing country above party that we believe more of Washington s leaders could learn from today. As Duffy and Gibbs write of the former presidents, these are the men who have worked at the same desks, slept in the same beds, shaved in the same mirrors, raised their children in the same backyard. When they return to the White House to visit, they check out how the new tenant has redecorated, but they all know that in fact the man does not make the presidency. It s the other way around. We re really looking forward to this conversation today. I d like to acknowledge Secretary Dan Glickman, who is a co-chair of the Democracy Project. We re so thrilled to have his leadership here. And BPC s Democracy Project director, John Fortier, Time magazine s Mike Duffy. Thank you. (Applause.) JOHN FORTIER: Thank you, Eileen. I m very much looking forward to this conversation. And I m going to hold up the book, which I highly recommend. I wish it was the time of year I can tell you to buy it as a stocking stuffer, but, you know, plan early and get it on Amazon or wherever you might find it in local bookstores. One thing that Michael didn t reveal in the book is perhaps that the inspiration for this was for those of us who are a little older watching Saturday Night Live and that famous ex-presidents skit. If you remember the ex-presidents turn into superheroes who would come in to save the day. And we like to think of the PBC as a kind of version of that with the majority leaders in capes with Ss on their fronts as we are founded by and have all of the majority leaders here. But certainly ex-presidents have played very large roles in helping current presidents, in working amongst themselves. And it s an aspect of leadership as we go through various types of institutions the Senate majority leader, which we talked about earlier this year; we re going to hear from Jon Huntsman, partly about his time on the campaign trail as well as a governor. But why don t I give you first an opening question. Just can you lay out why did you take on ex-presidents? And what was the one thing that you found that seemed to set them apart from other types of leaders? MICHAEL DUFFY: Thank you for having me. Thank you, Eileen. I think we think about presidents one at a time. We love reading biographies of them one at a time. We love McCullough on Truman, or Dallek on Reagan, or Bob Caro on Johnson, and we love reading those books, but we thought we know in our lives that relationships matter, and we thought, what if we held them up next to each other and watched to see what happens, watch both the sparks fly but also see what they could do together and what they did together. We knew from writing a previous book about Billy Graham and the presidents that Mr. Graham had acted as a go-between when they got upset with each other. He had

4 created deals with them when they needed someone, a middle man. And we thought, okay. There s a club here. Let s go find out what it s about. We thought of the club as our construct, as our conceit, our closed line in the book, not theirs. But as we did our reporting and started looking at the relationships, we realized that they thought of it as a club. They talked about it, as Hoover said, as our mutual trade union. Reagan called it the club. And it s Herbert Hoover who goes up to Harry Truman on dais of the 1953 swearing-in of Ike and says to Truman, I think we should start a presidents club. And Truman said, fine. You be the president, I ll be the treasurer. And it s still just a joke, except that when Eisenhower gives them franking privileges, and then Johnson gives them Secret Service protection, and then Richard Nixon creates the Secret Club House on Lafayette Square. And George Herbert Walker Bush starts sending them monthly memos and offering them secure telephones. So it becomes much more than a construct. And we thought when you create something like that quietly what can happen. And we thought we d just find out. MR. FORTIER: Well, why don t I start you at the beginning of the book, you mention Truman and Hoover. That s where you say the club begins. And this is actually a pretty extraordinary relationship, not only that they came together, but how much they did together. Can you say something about the beginning? MR. DUFFY: It s perhaps the mostly unlikely and the most productive relationship in the book. Here you have Herbert Hoover, a man who left office in 1933 literally as toxic as you can be in American politics. FDR would not have him back in the White House for 13 years. So when Harry Truman, who s looking at a massive famine problem in Europe in 1945 and 1946, needs someone who knows how to feed a lot of people fast says, there s only one person who s done that, and that s Hoover, who did it after the First World War. And he calls him up. No. He secretly writes Hoover a letter. He does it secretly because the New Dealers who are still in his White House this is still a Democratic White House have long ago insisted that Hoover will always be the enemy. In fact, it was FDR who said, I m not Jesus Christ. I m not going to raise Herbert Hoover from the dead. (Laughter.) But Truman doesn t care. He s from the Midwest. He just wants to solve problems. So he secretly writes him a letter and, of course, Hoover doesn t really trust it at first. He thinks this is he s setting me up. But there are backstage negotiations and he s finally brought into the Oval Office. And within months weeks really, Truman has given him a plane and a staff and he flies 55,000 miles around the world and he meets with all these leaders. And, within a

5 year, he d fed 100 million. He gets the countries that have the food to send it to the countries that don t. It s essentially a global eight-month mission. And they repeat it again a couple of years later when they remake the executive branch. Truman knew that it would take a Republican to convince a largely Republican Congress to give the presidency more powers. And so, again, a bipartisan moment that everyone thought would never work and it worked brilliantly. MR. FORTIER: You led right into what I wanted to ask about, about the Hoover Commission, which is a very prominent public service commission that Herbert Hoover ran, but can you tell us a bit about this is a Democratic president working with a Republican, but it is cast in a very different way because it begins before the 1948 election, is perhaps going to be just derailed by the election, and Herbert Hoover is no so thrilled of Harry Truman s talking about Hoover on the campaign trail in a way. And then, finally, it takes a whole new look after surprisingly Truman wins. MR. DUFFY: Yes. Remember, after the Second World War, the government was huge. It was vast. It was like involved even bigger than it is today and something like a third of every transaction, dollar for dollar transactions that the United States conducted. And the Republicans were keen to shrink it. Hoover knew it was terribly bloated. But he also knew that if he handed it to someone in his own party to do, it probably wouldn t work very well and it probably would never fly with the Republicans in Congress. So he gave it to the one person who was still alive at that point who knew who understood the government and he made sure that the part about reorganizing the presidency was done by the one person who had the job. And Hoover s into it. He s back. He s been redeemed. He s got something to do now. He was a young man. Herbert Hoover will be and remains I think the longest serving the longest living former president in the American history and it s really Truman who brings him back. And these two men create the modern executive branch. They really repower the presidency. They rewire it and then they repower it. And they do it together and they do it while both their parties are watching in horror. And it s a great story. It s a great story of two men who just you know, we can come back to this in the end, but there s something about people who are the top of their parties and we ve seen that all summer long all year long who behave differently than people in them, and we can talk about that. But it s a great tale. And, Hoover, of course, would go on to live until 1964 and his role would continue with other presidents who followed. MR. FORTIER: Well, I have my favorite in your book, but I m going to move away from the happier story to perhaps some bad blood between presidents.

6 MR. DUFFY: It s not all kumbaya. MR. FORTIER: Yes. It is not. So maybe you could tell us your the moment in the presidency where there s the most tension between a president and an ex-president, lots of I m asking advice, seeking advice, seeking advice, it becomes more of a club, but it didn t always go so well. So what s your pairing that you put up there as the worst bad blood? MR. DUFFY: There are great moments where they do things that we wish we saw more of every day and in many ways it s a blueprint for bipartisanship. There are other moments that are kind of the opposite. And while it s hard to choose what moments of sabotage are the greatest, I think my favorite is when a sitting president and a former president try essentially to blackmail each other at the same time. It s like it s essentially two master poker players playing an incredible hand of draw and then both of them are cheating, like the scene from The Sting. And it takes place over five years. In 1968 Lyndon Johnson has decided he s not going to run again. He s desperately trying to craft just a ceasefire and peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He s doing that in Paris. It s not going very well. He s trying to get it done before the election to help Hubert Humphrey. He discovers through means of electronic surveillance that Dick Nixon, who is the Republican candidate, is back channeling to the South Vietnamese through Anna Chennault to slow down, to do nothing, don t agree to what Johnson is proposing. He s telling the South Vietnamese, you ll get a better deal if you wait for me. Johnson finds this out with about two weeks to go before the election in 68. This is 68. And he has this choice: do I tell the country, which has been through sheer hell in 68, about this? I basically have a man committing treason who is now the Republican nominee and kind of leading not really, but it s a very close race, very close, or do I keep it to myself because it would be a huge crisis constitutionally and otherwise I suppose if this information was made public. Johnson decides with about a week to go not to leak it. He privately sends signals to Nixon to cease and desist, and Nixon, of course, denies it what? What possibly could you be talking about? But he s pretty much got him dead to rights. And the election happens. Nixon wins very narrowly. And it wouldn t matter so much except that four years later actually five years later, 73, early 73 when Watergate is starting, Nixon is trying to get the Senate to slow their investigation and in fact stop it so he has his guys call Johnson down at the ranch. And he knows that Johnson has known about this, what he did in 68 all the time, but he says to Johnson, could you please call your guys in the Senate and get them to quell the investigation or

7 I m going to leak that you were bugging me in 68. And Johnson says, fine. If you leak that I was bugging you in 68, I ll tell them what you said. So you ask, why didn t that blow up into a story we all know about? And the answer is that about three or four days later I can t remember, maybe it was within a week Johnson drops dead of a heart attack. And Nixon is reelected in a landslide. So it s a good tale of snakes in a bottle. The club, like all clubs, has its moment of tensions and difficulty and strife, and this one is no different. MR. FORTIER: So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about maybe there are two eras of the presidency that you cover here. The first, from Truman to Nixon, all these figures interacted with each other. They ran against each other. They were rivals within the same party, eying the presidency and worried about them before they became president. In many ways, our presidents after that are somewhat strangers to each other. Certainly, father Bush and son Bush know each other and Reagan has some interaction, but many of them are outside or governors. What s the difference between the presidents club in that early period where there is rivalry and wrangling and today, where they sometimes have to just get to know each other to begin? MR. DUFFY: Yes. I think they came more one at a time before They kind of marched stately along and we don t have four or five of them all at once. And then, in the second half of the book, there are lots of folks on the stage. When Clinton is elected, sworn-in in 93, there are five former presidents, the most since ever, since Lincoln was sworn-in in So it s a big club in the second half of the book, in the second. But there are amazing moments in that first half. And my favorite really in terms of polity and comity happens in late 1960 when Kennedy has won very narrowly in that election. Narrowly might be a euphemism. Nixon s trying to decide whether to contest the election. His instinct is not to. His daughters are raising money for the recount fund. And about three days after the election, they both go down to Florida to take some time off. And Nixon gets a call from Herbert Hoover saying, for the good of the country, for the sake of continuity going forward, don t challenge the results. And Nixon listens to Hoover, of course, because he s a former president, but he wants to double-check the math. So he calls Ike. And Ike, of course, is still the president and he says, should I do this, and Ike isn t arguing idealism he s being practical. He says, we can t send a signal overseas that we re doing this right now. It s just in this era of sort of the colonial period is ending and he doesn t want to so Hoover tells him for reasons of sort of national unity; Ike says don t it for reasons of sheer pragmatism.

8 And then he called Kennedy and says, let s get together. And they have a very famous picture out in front of the place in Palm Beach. But it s impossible to imagine that so much right now I think. But it was a three-president moment in about the space of about 35 minutes. MR. FORTIER: I wonder if you can think today about presidents working with presidents ex-presidents of their own parties. We ll then go to the other party. But what s the relationship between presidents and presidents of their own party? Sometimes good but sometimes more tense. MR. DUFFY: A distinct pattern is that presidents from different parties get along better than those of the same. I think so you have Ford and Carter having a 25-year relationship, doing 25 different projects in 25 years, a relationship so close that each man would pledge to the other to give the eulogy at his funeral, a friendship that was born after having real strife in 76. Amazing. The same thing, obviously, between Clinton and Bush 41 and, of course, Hoover and Truman. So those tend to be more effective partnerships. Inside individual parties, as you would predict, maybe not so much they re still rivals for things. You know, Reagan and Nixon, two men from Southern California, both conservative they never really hit it off. They struggle from start, in 1947, all the way through to Nixon s death in 94. It is a fraught relationship. And I think it s because they re rivals inside their own party for who is the greatest agent of change, who is the truer conservative, who is the more transcendent Republican. This is true obviously of what s going on between Clinton and Obama, who will be the president who really is able to affect progressive change in an essentially a centerright age. That s their rivalry. They both have different ideas about how to do it. They ve clearly tussled the (inaudible) in That was in some ways the total (inaudible) of that campaign. Even though Hillary was running, it was sort of a proxy war between Clinton and Obama. And if you read Obama s first book, it s all about that, at least at the start. So I think inside the parties, the relationships are just too sensitive. Clinton and Carter could never get along, long innings but not brotherhood, not that kind of back to each other in a jungle. It s different. And that s interesting and I think it s reflective of how the parties are still you know, there s plenty of rivalry inside these parties. MR. FORTIER: You mentioned Jimmy Carter, who I think in a few months could surpass Herbert Hoover s record as longest ex-president. And many people have really praised his ex-presidency for working for Habitat for Humanity and voting overseas. But his relationship with presidents has been somewhat more tense. And that s not just because of the same-party factor with Clinton. How much of a maverick is Jimmy Carter? How much does he stand out as maybe a little less deferential than the others?

9 MR. DUFFY: He s a huge challenge for the club. You know, every club has its black sheep. It gives the others something to talk about. And every club has to have one. And Jimmy Carter plays that role in the presidents club. He s just a difficult guy. And I think it s because he was probably tossed out of office earlier than he imagined. He will become the longest living former president in American history on September 7 th about 12:30 p.m. in the afternoon not that I m counting 31 years, eight months, and 17 hours. And that s a big responsibility to be out of office for 31 years. That s a lifetime and then some. So he s had to reinvent what it means to be a former president. He has done it better than anyone else. He will tell you that he s a better former president than he was president. He will also tell you that he was a better former president than the others are former presidents. (Laughter.) So he s a complicated partner. And yet and yet, what s interesting about Carter is all of them have turned to him Clinton well, Bush One, Clinton, Bush Two, and Obama have all sent him on secret missions, not so secret missions overseas to do things that they can t do and their government apparati (sp) can t do. And that s because he has a he s worked really hard over the last 35, 31 years and eight months to maintain relationships with people that the U.S. government can t, among other amazing accomplishments. So he is an unusual partner, but they all he will MR. FORTIER: Could you tell one of the stories about either the Clinton or Bush stories about how he wasn t playing the role that he envisioned or how he went out. Yes. MR. DUFFY: It s hard to pick a favorite here. I ll tell two real quick ones that not everybody knows. I guess the most interesting one is when Clinton, against the advice of his advisors, in 1994 sends Carter to North Korea to defuse a nuclear refueling crisis that had been provoked by the North Koreans, because, of course, they were trying to get more food aid, which in the end would happen. Carter goes over with fairly narrow instructions from Clinton and Tony Lake and just not only gets the information Clinton was hoping to get but then far exceeds it and practically cuts a new deal and goes on television and makes the case for it before he even reports back. And the White House is furious at him. They don t want him to come back. They don t want him to come back to Washington. They don t want to see him. He comes back anyway. Clinton and Gore leave town rather than see him. He then walks into Tony Lake s office and rather than just having a conversation like we re having, proceeds to read his 20-page report to a group of people. He s a complicated partner.

10 Interestingly, enough, Barack Obama sent him to North Korea in 2010 very few people know this to free an American who was held hostage there. This is after Clinton had done it with the two women, but the Obama people, having learned from history, made him sign a 10-point agreement about things he would not do and one of which was talk to the press about it, which I learned when Carter told me about it. (Laughter.) MR. FORTIER: Another theme among ex-presidents is being able to resurrect your reputation after being a disgraced or a badly beaten president. And I think particularly about our two Quaker presidents, Hoover and Nixon. Can you say something about that? And then I m going to move on to the Bushes, who perhaps Bush One didn t quite follow that same script. MR. DUFFY: The club has a room, the room of redemption. It s a fairly big room in the club house. And they all go through the room of redemption. Some spend more time in that room than others. And it s a powerful lure because many of them don t leave office the way they intended or sooner than they expected and feeling that they had left things undone or badly done. And one of the things in talking to them I think you pick up quickly is that even the presidents who were successful, who we would say were did much of what they came to do and left office in fairly good terms with the public, all have regrets. They all have things they d like to do over as we all have those. They have them too. Theirs are just bigger. And they all come out with scars and welts. And I think one of the thing that makes the club particularly in its second half of the book when there are more of them floating around, powerful and important to them as opposed to just a construct of a couple of authors is whenever are done with something, especially a job like this, the only people who can really understand you are the people who sat in that chair. I mean, your wife and your spouse can help you and your kids can help you and your friends can help you, but really, it s only the people who have been through it who really understand what it s like to have come out of it with all those bruises and then try to move forward with your life. I mean, it s a much more human story about how we put one foot in front of the other when we ve done what we came to do, and we inevitably don t do it perfectly. And they talk about that a little bit. As Carter said to me, we all have our sorrows. And there aren t a lot of other places they can go where people offer that kind of balm. And I think so across party lines and across ideology, and across age, these men provide for each other on some level I don t want to go too far with this and understanding. Or as Bush One said to me, you know, three s just some things we don t have to talk about. This is the one place they can go where they don t have to explain themselves. You want to start answers and questions? MR. FORTIER: No. I want to move on to the Bushes. Two things I want to ask about the Bushes, clearly I want to ask about the relationship father-son, but that s second. The first question is Bush One really did retreat in many ways from the public

11 life. And I think the son has followed that example as well. Can you say something about his decision to do that and whether that s MR. DUFFY: Bush One. MR. FORTIER: Bush One, and then whether Bush Two followed it. And what was the effect of that compared to other ex-presidents? MR. DUFFY: Bush One was just I think smart, practical and you know, knew himself and knew that it was time to exit the stage. And he took that loss in 92 really hard. He was surprised and hurt. And there s an amazing passage in the book about him that night, he stays up writing about how he s feeling, and it s one of my favorite passages in the book. It s not anything we wrote. It s what he wrote. It tells you about what happens when the public basically rejects you. And then he resolves in that conversation he s having with himself, says, go for it. Put the country first. Be gracious. It s far more powerful than anything we could have written. But it s about how you reconcile with yourself when the public decides to go a different way. And you literally you can hear him putting the country ahead of his own feelings and it s I think breathtaking. And he didn t talk about it at the time because I was covering him. But he modeled it and he clearly modeled it for his son. I think he modeled it for Clinton when it was time for Clinton to go. He s a if the presidents club has a president now, it s the 87-year-old George Herbert Walker Bush. It s interesting. The club s numerically a very interesting place at the moment. I m not into numbers, but I ll just share a few. Two members born in 1924, both of them will be 88 this year; two members born in 1946, both of them will be 66 this year. I m not interested in the numbers per se. I m just saying the pairings are interesting. And my favorite detail about the club at the moment in addition to Obama is that Clinton and 43 Bush are the two most closely born American presidents in history, six weeks apart, 1946, both baby boomers, both polar opposites as baby boomers go, right? I mean, they couldn t be more different, culturally, stylistically, whatever. And yet, even they have become buddies. They are in fact they re business partners. They go around the world giving speeches together sometimes, three or four times a year, little known secret. The club has a financial room apparently too. They re now in business together kind of. And those speeches they give around the world, Tokyo, Vancouver, Chicago, including one a couple of weeks ago, you know, they each walk away with six-figure checks. Bush 41, by the way, he calls that white collar crime. Okay. I got lost on that whole tangent. MR. FORTIER: I want to move to a president and then his son becomes president. George W. Bush is president and one of the ex-presidents is his father. What

12 is that relationship? And people from the outside obviously thought that it was a very policy oriented relationship. What was that relationship while he was in the White House? MR. DUFFY: It was a real I thought really very kind of the Bush family, which knew we were writing this book, to go ahead and elect 43 as president because it really adds a family element to the club that we lacked. It s pretty amazing to think that we lived through only the second time really in American history that a father followed a son with the time distance being much shorter. You know, the father-son relationship is everybody s favorite Rorschach s test and there are lots of different theories and I ve wrestled with a few over the last decade, myself. I m not sure mine s any better than anyone else s, but what I found most compelling again was the redemptive piece. I was less interested in whether the father was I think it was very common among liberals to think that somehow the father was banging on the door during the Iraq war saying, do this, don t do that, and the son wasn t listening. Or that the son was somehow a reaction to the father s politics at home. We knew he was more conservative. We knew he was more activist. Those things were manifest before he even became president. What we found interesting and what that chapter about father and son is mostly about is about how I think the father spent most of those years while his son was president worried and fretting not about the policies, but about his son. I think 41 looked around, and like most fathers would say, well, he s got advisers. He has plenty of the cabinet to help, but he s only got one dad. And if you have kids, the role you play for a second and third is that. I think that s what the father did. And I think inside that fairly normal dynamic, some interesting things developed, and who nursed who and who provided solace to who surprised us. MR. FORTIER: To come back to a couple of other presidents, but you ve alluded to the club, but maybe you could say something about more of the accoutrements of the club, the club house and how it s developed as a somewhat more formal structure. MR. DUFFY: Yes. I think the way it works is and I do think the presidents, even to this day, are in more close contact than we might think. I think their chiefs of staff are in contact every day. They re constantly getting offers. There s a long history of sort of advice that they give each other about what to say no to. Hoover counsels everyone who follows while he s still alive to resist various kinds of proposals. Nixon does that to Reagan after Reagan comes out don t do this, don t do that. This is all in the book. Don t talk to people who are from here, but consider this, talk to groups let s have a conversation before we move together. And now, there is a regular conversation among them about what things to do and what things not to do.

13 And a minor example is I think on the week that Osama bin Laden was killed, the White House put out some feelers to all of them saying, would you meet us in New York at Ground Zero, and they all said, no, that s just way too political for us. So there is a and I think that was as good as close to a collective decision as in the real time that is in there. It s just an example, but there are other things too they meet on. The first part of the question was MR. FORTIER: How close the newsletter MR. DUFFY: Well, the club had an interesting the thing about the club that s great is that when Nixon comes in 69, you know, Johnson retires to the Texas Hill Country and he s just fevered still. By the end of 68, he wasn t sure he really wanted to go, but it s too late. He had already said he was going. He s banging on the door all the time for planes and jets and he wants office space and he wants this, that and other thing. And the young military aide who s assigned to get Johnson what he wants is being drive almost to distraction by Johnson s requests. He s a colonel in the Air Force named Brent Scowcroft. And finally Nixon says to Bret, just find him some space. Just get him an office. Just get him a place he can stay, because they were running out of time. And so they requisitioned this rundown townhouse on Lafayette Square, which was then I think owned by HUD it was in renewal and they bought they found the money for it and then he fixed it up, kind of, and they create this two-bedroom house at 716 Jackson Place. And the presidents go and they stay there after that. But it s still kind of a dump. And I think Barbara Bush, who declared it officially a dump while her husband was staying there in 1990s, at least had the advantage of having her own son follow into the White House he made sure that he got fixed up. And right now, it s really a very nice Four Seasons. I was in it about three months ago for the first time. Well, the thread count on the sheets is like a bazillion. And up in the main bedroom there s two bedrooms, and it s in (inaudible) and mauves. It s very, very trendy. And in the main bedroom, if you wake up there some morning and you re not sure what your job was, you can look down at your feet, and there s a giant presidential seal on the bedspreads. You can be reminded that you used to be a president. It s like all clubs. It reminds his members of who they once were: previously important people. MR. FORTIER: So we often think about how is leadership different of institutions now that our world is polarized, political parties are so polarized? And I was thinking about it in this question: is it true that the presidents in the earlier part of your book may have worked across the aisle, but had something in common. Eisenhower and

14 Truman had internationalism and they were in a way fighting wings of their own party. Today, presidents certainly work across the aisle, but is it less about political agreement on some issues and more about humanitarian or symbolic or just advice as how to be a president rather than agreement on issues? MR. DUFFY: Whether it s Carter and Ford working over that quarter century on things like arms control and budget deficits you know, they did a book together in 1988 and they handed it to the new President Bush. Ford and Carter wrote basically an American agenda: here are the things that the next president, regardless of party, needs to do. It was like 300 or 400 pages. It had people from both parties who wrote chapters in it. They wrote the forward. The forward is a desperate plea for bipartisanship. They handed it to Bush in an Oval Office ceremony, I guess (inaudible) ceremony in Those two men had a long history of doing things that were substantive and policy oriented. And while the Clinton-Bush partnerships have tended to be more about relief and disasters as was with Clinton and Bush Two in Haiti, the public reaction to seeing these men who used to be rivals working together was astonishing. Even traveling around the country talking about the book is like water on a thirsty desert. The interest in seeing our leaders and it s our leaders who matter working together in an era where they simply don t see it anymore, where there is little evidence of it, is kind of a revelation. And one of the reasons those men have been able to raise so much money for those causes is people just like seeing them doing stuff together. They don t see it anymore. So when you see it, it seems new and different when, of course, 20, 25 years ago, it was totally common certainly more common. And so I think that they and they know this. The men in the club know this. They are aware that it s gone and they are aware that their own presidencies sometimes got caught up in hyper-partisanship. And so they have there s a quote in one of the Clinton chapters that says and this isn t accurate, but it s close enough at the end of the day, after we re done arguing, we just want to see something good happen. It s not because we re saintly. It s because what else is there? And I think that they all come out of their experience as presidents, one of the scars and bruises is a feeling, you know, it got away from me on some level on the partisanship. So they come back together and they find someone who has the courage that they have to do something across party lines. That s rare. I think it s powerful as a political idea, a public idea. And I think they all get that and they all can talk about it. And it s a message that s missing. MR. FORTIER: Last few questions before we open it up to the audience are about President Obama. First, President Obama on the campaign trail really looked to an ex-president who was not alive at the time Ronald Reagan as a model. Now, that was partly to needle Bill and Hillary Clinton in the primary, but there s a way in which today

15 you see that blueprint on a more liberal presidency from the Reagan presidency. What can you tell us about Obama s looking to Reagan as a model, whether there was more digging or talking to people or thinking about it? MR. DUFFY: The first (time I heard?) about Obama and Reagan is at the end of 2010, the same day that he invites Clinton in to have that famous press conference where Clinton took over and Obama left the room, which led Jon Stewart to say, you know, President Obama, don t ever give your light saber to Yoda. You re not quite a Jedi yet. That afternoon, he actually had some Reagan people in to talk about how did Reagan cope with difficulties? This was in 2010 after he just lost the House. How did Reagan cope with disappointment? How did he show what did he show the public of that? How much did he show and how much did he so I think he was interested in Reagan as a potentially transformative guy who could reach across, who could appeal to people in both parties. But I think it was also to needle the right wing of the Republican Party. President Obama hasn t used the club that much. He asked George W. Bush to get the club together before he was sworn in. I think Bush s guys were saying, Carter too? You know, he said, yes, Carter too. So he s relied most heavily I think on Bush 41, but he has his moments with Clinton and there seem to be they have their ups and downs, as you can tell. Hasn t had much to do with 43. Forty-three has just stayed away and said, you know, he (resembles myself?). It s pretty classy. And even when Bush Two, 43, came out about three or four weeks maybe it was April, maybe it was a couple of months ago, and finally kind of broke I think the radio silence on Obama and he gave him very gently suggestive, constructive criticism about maybe how to approach tax policy or energy policy in one very brief speech. He then said, but I do not believe our country should undermine our president. So he has been very careful. And we ll see if that changes. If Obama gets the second term, there may be a different kind of relationship with the club. And, of course, if he doesn t get a second term, he s going to be the newest, youngest member of the club and that will be interesting too. MR. FORTIER: Last question. And you ve alluded to the relationship with the Clintons and especially, of course, running against Hillary Clinton. And you alluded to the fact that he likes to sign 10-point agreements. Of course, he had an agreement that Bill Clinton had to sign. MR. DUFFY: A pre-nup, I call it. MR. FORTIER: Yes. MR. DUFFY: It was a pre-nup.

16 MR. FORTIER: That s sort of a presidential club pre-nup. Describe a little bit the relationship, but then maybe lead us up to today. We do see some signs on the campaign trail of Bill Clinton endorsing other candidates that helped him. MR. DUFFY: Obama and Clinton. MR. FORTIER: Obama and Clinton. Yes. The Obama and Clinton relationship. MR. DUFFY: I do think this is two rivals for who is the most effectively progressive president in a center-right era. And I think that s their debate. That s their fight. And they have different ways of going about it. I think their presidencies are shaping up to be remarkably similar in contour. Both came out of the box kind of liberal. Both got shellacked in their first midterms. And then both moved to the middle but that s where we re not sure where they re going to end up yet. Clinton was much more dramatic in his moving to the middle Obama not so much. We ll see which they watch each other constantly. That s the other part of club membership. They always are judging and reading and watching each other and figuring out who s going to handle what situation well. Clinton wrote a book last year essentially, here s how to get reelected. Here it is. Here s my plan. You re not listening. On the other hand, they quietly sent a delegation the Obama team sent quietly a Senate delegation up to Chappaqua. It s July now. I m guessing that was February, November, December to sit at the foot of the master and figure out what lessons he had to offer them. So they kind of quietly reach out to him, publicly not so much. But we ll see. I suspect he ll do 40 or 50 events for Obama on the road this fall. He ll be sure to do that, because who knows, his wife might run. And then, just for the purposes of the club, it could be really great to have a husband and wife potential club I can see that really working for them, roomies. (Laughter.) My own kind of dream scenario it s going to be hard if Romney wins it would be to have Jeb Bush and Hillary run in 2016 because then we d have an inter-club fight and that would be really good for the club. MR. FORTIER: Well, I promised I would stop talking and open it up to the audience. I m sure there are a lot of questions. We have a mike here if you could identify yourself. I want to hear as well and I m not sure I was going to ask Dan if you want a question? No. We ll wait on that. All right. We ll go right here in front. Q: (Off mike) THIS for Diplomats. There s a certain thing about 41 and 43 and the relationship between what the father did and what the son did with where the father was. Forty-one was head of the CIA. Forty-three used the CIA in a different way.

17 Forty-one was U.N. ambassador. Forty-three used the U.N. in a different way. Forty-one was a congressman. Forty-three used the Congress in a different way. Forty-one had a broad coalition for the first Gulf War. Forty-three had a small coalition for Iraqi Freedom. And 41 st was a war hero. And 43 was an Alabama hero. So this really astonishes me how 43 sort of win against 41 s way of doing things. Could you comment on that? MR. DUFFY: Well, they re obviously different people. I think if 43 were here today, I think he d probably say something like this: when the time came for the Gulf War let back up one step. I think that 41 and his foreign policy team in the late 80s and early 90s were driven by one basic idea, and that was to maintain stability and to contain instability. And they were really good at it. They were really good at it. They did zillions of things none of us will ever know about to keep things from blowing up. And they managed to follow the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in ways that I think could be called masterful. And they did quietly, and partly because they were able to. American power was strong and they were careful not to get overextended. And I think by the time 9/11 happens, I think the son says, well, that model just isn t really any good anymore. We can t operate that way. We can t proceed toward containment. We can t approach it. It just doesn t work the way it used to. And so I think they probably had a disagreement about your basic two different approaches of foreign policy, but I think Bush, this elder knew better than anyone that unless you re there and getting what the president s getting and reading what the president s reading, you probably don t know quite as much as you think. And on that score, they probably disagreed about what the era required. My own view about the inter-bush, inter-family stuff is I think all families have things that are too difficult to talk about. We all do. And I m guessing that it s just in the Bush family it s the presidencies. MR. FORTIER: Michael s next book is about the black sheer brothers of the expresidents of which there are a few. Yes. MR. DUFFY: I don t think it s going to be a next book. MR. FORTIER: I think we have a question in the back. Is that right? Q: Paul Bedard with the Examiner. Mike, you did a lot of interviews for this book, especially with the presidents. Which one did you walk into with a view of is this way and come out of it different, and why?

18 MR. DUFFY: Carter. I knew that Bill Clinton would probably want to talk about this so we could get some time with him and I suspected George Herbert Walker Bush would like to talk about it. Carter was trickier to get, but when I got him, he was great. He was thoughtful and talkative and had a memory it was fabulous. You know, he is fairly open about his own I think errors when he was president and steps and missteps as former president. I found him I mean, the others were candid, but in some ways, Carter was more than I expected and generous with his time. And it s important for that because he plays such a controversial role in the second half of the book. So I was kind of most thrilled by that, Paul. This goes back to something that Eileen said at the top, which is that I think that these men do come to see the bipartisan piece of this club as a kind of asset I don t want to say a national asset because that s dramatic, but as just an asset, something that s good and something that s inherently valuable and something they are uniquely able to do. And when they do agree and they don t always but when they do agree on something, they can move some numbers and move the public. And they re careful about when they do that, but they know they can. And they re careful about when they shouldn t do something. And Carter was talkative about that as well. So in some ways, he was the most he could step back, have a little more altitude. So that I guess is the one that surprised me the most. MR. FORTIER: Was he self-reflective about how some would say he often went on CNN before the president is that his style? MR. DUFFY: Probably his most difficult moment came in 1991 when he launched a private personal campaign to fight the coalition against the First Gulf War that George Herbert Walker Bush had erected. He personally lobbied members of the U.N. Security Council and then the Arab League to get out of the U.S.-led Bush coalition. The Bush people thought this was obviously treasonous and in violation of the Logan Act, which keeps any of us as private citizens from doing private foreign policy. And I asked Carter. I said, you know, the whole 1991 thing, if you can do that over, would you no, no. I d do it the same way. So good memory, not always contrite. But he said, no, no. I knew what I was doing. MR. FORTIER: All right. Eileen. Q: Yes. Mike, could you talk a little bit about what presidents have learned from each other in their dealings with Congress?

19 MR. DUFFY: Yes. Yes. The secret they all spend a few hours together before they become president and those conversations are interesting in that they all ask each other something. You know, Clinton asked Reagan any advice, and Reagan said, go to Camp David and then Reagan taught Clinton he looked at Clinton and said, you know, I ve been watching you on the campaign trail and he just you don t know how to salute. You re kind of a and so Reagan taught Clinton how to salute because Reagan had acute understanding of how you were perceived. The role of how you are perceived plays are president. I think he understood that. Bush Two asked Clinton you know, some pointers about how to give good speeches. I think Bush came to admire Clinton s ability particularly in State of the Union speeches to move the country, to change the conversation, to reset the table. At other times, Bush thought Clinton s speeches were too long and too detailed, but I think he admired his ability to set the agenda through his ability to give a speech. When they get together when Obama gets together with the five of them and the White House at that lunch that Bush threw in 2009, the conversation in fact, Carter told us it isn t about Congress. Kind of thought it might be, but it turns out to be, how do you raise daughters here. How do you how easy you re being a parent and a spouse in a big spotlight. That s hard. It s hard enough when the spotlight s off. When the spotlight s on, it s really hard. And so how do you do that? And I think my favorite moment of the congressional piece comes between Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, where in the thick of impeachment, Ford, who has walked one president essentially out of office in the 1970s and then pardoned him to save his own presidency, watches what s happening between Bill Clinton and Congress and impeachment and is screaming like the Edvard Munch photo, oh, no. And he writes an op-ed saying to both sides, don t go down this road. Don t go to the wall on this. This is not worth going to the wall on. This is lying about an affair. This isn t worth the constitutional crisis. Just censure let s do a censure. Congress can do a censure. Clinton will go to the wall of the House. Step back from the brink, boys. This is the most critical piece of inter-club congressional advice. The op-ed comes out in the New York Times. The Republicans in Congress just laugh at it. Are you kidding? We re going all the way. We re going all the way. Gerald Ford s from a different era. It s true. He was. Carter reads the Ford op-ed and he calls Ford and says, let s do another op-ed and let s do it about the Senate this time. And they re-propose a slightly more complicated solution short of impeachment in the Senate. And this time the White House picks up the phone and they start calling you know, Chuck Ruff, counsel, called Ford, Gore calls Carter. They start trying to make a