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

"This is essential reading for anyone interested in American politics." --Robert Dallek, bestselling author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963" "Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs have taken us inside one of the most powerful and unusual families in American life--the brotherhood of former presidents of the United States. Political junkies, historians, psychologists and main street citizens will find the tales of friendship, envy, conspiracy, competition and common cause irresistible." --Tom Brokaw, bestselling author of" The Greatest Generation" "Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy have given us a great gift: a deeply reported, highly original, and wonderfully written exploration of a much-overlooked part of American history. The tiny world of U.S. presidents is our Olympus, and Gibbs and Duffy have chronicled the intimacies and rivalries of the gods." --Jon Meacham, bestselling author of "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House" "A fabulous book . . . I absolutely love it." --Greta Van Susteren, FOX News "Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs offer more than a fresh and fascinating first look at the world's most exclusive men's club. It's a book of real substance about clashing egos and strange bedfellows at the top." --Jonathan Alter, bestselling author of "The Promise" ""The Presidents Club "is magnetically readable, bursting with new information and behind-the-scenes details. It is also an important contribution to history, illuminating the event-making private relationships among our ex-Presidents and why we should do a far better job of drawing on their skills and experience." --Michael Beschloss, bestselling author of" The Conquerers" "This is a great scoop . . . Amazing." --Chris Matthews, NBC "This is a brilliant idea for a book, wonderfully written! At Eisenhower's inauguration, Hoover and Truman half-jokingly decided to form a 'President's Club.' With surprising reporting and insights, this book reveals the relationships and rivalries among the few men who know what it's like to be president. It gives a new angle on history by exploring the essence of the presidency." --Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of "Steve Jobs "and "Benjamin Franklin" ""The Presidents Club" is a lucid and well-written glimpse into the modern presidency and its self-sustaining shadow organization. It's worth reading and rereading for its behind-the-scenes insights." --"USA Today" "Forget Rome's Curia, Yale's Skull and Bones and the Bilderbergs--the world's most exclusive club never numbers more than six. . . . Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs have penetrated thick walls of secrecy and decorum to give us the most intimate, revealing, and poignant account of the constitutional fifth wheel that is the ex-presidency. Readers are in for some major surprises, not to mention a history they won't be able to put down." --Richard Norton Smith, author of "Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation"

Over the years that followed-and to this day-the presidents relied on, misunderstood, sabotaged, and formed alliances with one another that changed history. The world's most exclusive fraternity is a complicated place: its members are bound forever because they sat in the Oval Office and know its secrets, yet they are immortal rivals for history's favour. Some presidents needed their predecessors to keep their secrets; others needed them to disappear. Truman enlisted Hoover to help him save Europe; Kennedy turned to Ike on Cuba; Nixon sought Johnson's advice on getting re-elected, but then tried to blackmail him; Ford and Carter couldn't stand each other until they saw what they had in common; Reagan and Clinton relied on Nixon as an emissary to Russia; Bush put Clinton and his father to work and they became like father and son; and Obama and Clinton became quiet rivals for the same crown. ThePresidents Clubwill change the way we think about the presidency, for the club itself is an instrument of presidential power.