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

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

Time magazine editors and presidential historians Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy offer a new and revealing lens on the American presidency, exploring the club as a hidden instrument of power that has changed the course of history.

About the author

Michael Duffy
Michael Duffy
Michael Duffy is an Australian author and former journalist and broadcaster. He and his wife the artist Alex Snellgrove own the publishing company Duffy &…
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Gridlock, polarization, obstructionism — if there’s one thing Washington can agree on, it’s that Washington can’t agree on anything. The public’s sufferance in recent years of petty filibusters, destructive budget showdowns and stridently partisan news outlets has given rise to a yearning for what’s imagined to be a lost culture of reasonableness. It’s easy now to pine for an era like the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill could put aside foundational differences and get down to business.

This desire for comity has overwhelmed fidelity to history. In reality, Reagan’s presidency, too, was deeply divisive and fraught with bitterness. Ideological warfare is frequently a handmaiden to democratic debate.

Yet democracies do need statesmen. In “The Presidents Club,” a lively history of the crisscrossing personal relationships among America’s post-World War II presidents, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy suggest that it has often been former chief executives who have put aside partisan concerns to help achieve larger national goals. Sharing a unique bond based on their common (and uncommon) experience as leaders of the free world, all of our presidents have left the White House convinced that only they and their fellow occupants of that august office — with its power, privileges and burdens — can truly know what the job is like. That shared knowledge and experience have forged a special relationship among them that has helped them work together for what is deemed the common good.

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