With the forty-first president of the United States George
H.W. Bush languishing in the hospital, you might be surprised to know that one
of the people most upset about this development is the forty-second president,
Bill Clinton. If you remember the two of
them dueling for the Oval Office in 1992, you might think they wouldn’t have a
good word to say about the other. You
would be wrong.
I recall a number of years ago being shocked to hear that
Jimmy Carter counted his predecessor, Gerald Ford among his closest
friends. They say politics makes
strange bedfellows, and whoever “they” are, they’re right on the money, as you
will find in “The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive
Fraternity”. This 641-page volume,
written by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, was the best book I read all
year. It was at once about both
politics and history, informative and anecdotal, serious and dishy.
These relationships
between former presidents, as well as those between sitting and former chief
executives are chronicled back to the time of Truman’s elevation to the top
spot. They could have gone back much
further. John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, our second and third presidents, were best friends when their terms
of office expired, though they had rarely agreed on anything as statesmen. In fact, it has been recorded that John
Adams last words from his death bed were, “Jefferson lives!” He may or may not have been correct; Jefferson died that same day, July 4, 1826.
The easiest explanation also happens to be the correct
one-no one else could ever understand what you faced as the most powerful man
on the planet except for a person who’d occupied that chair. It is a distinction that crosses party lines
and is bigger than any ideology. Yet
despite their similarities, this council of wise men was sometimes a godsend
and in other instances an albatross for a sitting president.
Truman, thrust into the presidency by the death of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, was thought by many to be woefully unqualified. He may have shared these thoughts, as he
reached out to the only living alumnus, Herbert Hoover, who had been living in
virtual exile, blamed for many of the circumstances surrounding The Great
Depression. Hoover had been instrumental
in feeding war-torn Europe after World War I, and Truman knew that winning the
peace would be at least as hard as winning the second World War. With infant mortality soaring, Hoover, with
some reservations, answered the call of the Commander in Chief. Truman was later the driving force in
restoring Hoover’s name to the dam that had been his namesake, having been
churlishly re-titled Cooley Dam under F.D.R.
Authors Gibbs and Duffy take you inside the secret briefings
Eisenhower received from Kennedy as world peace teetered on a precipice during
the Cuban Missile Crisis; they show you
that Nixon was at turns a brilliant tactician and an outright son of a bitch
years before his perfidy at the Watergate Hotel. Shockingly, it was Nixon who was the first president in nearly a
century without an ex-president to consult after the back-to-back deaths of
both Truman and Lyndon Johnson. One
wonders if he would have listened to the advice of these men when he needed it
most…you could also wonder if they would have taken his phone call. The book ends about mid-way through Barack
Obama’s first term, as our current president reached out to both George W. Bush
and Bill Clinton. Both answered the
call.
Please consider these other items written and/or performed
by Marc Holland:
Live performances at:
Three plays co-written with Mike Davis-
Crenshaw Family Reunion
Beauty and the Deceased
Night of the Livid Dad (one-act)
One play co-written with Kathy Holland-
Warren’s Peace
Are all available at:
Coming Soon: A new one-act co-written with Kathy Holland-
Jobbed
Will be available at:
Novels under the pen name Quentin Tippler-
Hats Off For Homicide
And Coming Soon:
On the QT: The Collected Short Fiction of Quentin Tippler
Are for sale at:
Novels under the pen name Carl Stafford-
Son of Mann
And Coming in 2014:
