Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents

O•N•E

Voices

Here is what they said—some of it.

I don’t allow my feelings to be hurt, Richard Nixon said. I learned very early on that you must not allow it to get to you. And as the years have gone on—and this used to infuriate my critics during the White House years—I made the decision not to respond, no matter how rough the attacks were.

I asked him about those two famous catchphrases—Tricky Dick, and Would you buy a used car from this man? They had been thrown off so glibly, so routinely, for so many years by so many people who may have assumed that there was not really anyone on the receiving end, at least anyone who was listening. I wondered about the person who was, indeed, on the receiving end—Nixon himself. Had he ever heard the lines—the Tricky Dick and used-car lines?

Oh, my, yes, Nixon said. Yeah.

Were his feelings ever hurt?

If I had feelings, Nixon said, I probably wouldn’t have even survived.

Here, along the journey, is what they said—some of it:

I went to visit a middle school, Jimmy Carter said. "One of the bright young girls asked me why there’s an old person who loses Social Security payments. I told her that couldn’t happen—once you start drawing Social Security you don’t lose it unless your income goes up.

"She said, ‘No, my granddaddy doesn’t make anything, and he lost his Social Security.’ And I said, ‘Sweetheart, you must be mistaken.’ She said to me, ‘Mr. Carter, you are mistaken.’ She said, ‘My granddaddy lives on the bridge over by the new domed stadium, and since he doesn’t have a mailing address they cut off his Social Security.’"

Carter was talking about the mysteries of compassion—why the need to help others kicks in in some people’s lives, and why others are able to walk away from the troubles of people who don’t have enough—or at least are able to turn their heads, in the hopes of not seeing the troubles.

He said that the question from the girl in the middle school—the girl whose grandfather lived on the bridge—was not a question he would have heard in the schools of his own, more affluent, grandchildren, in their own, more prosperous, communities.

I think most of us find it difficult to cross the barrier that we erect around ourselves, Carter said. "We prefer naturally to be among folks just like us, so we feel at home and we talk the same language, we wear the same clothes, drive the same kind of cars, go to the same kind of schools, live in the same neighborhoods, and we feel that that circle of friends won’t put a burden on us.

You know. They won’t make us feel guilty. They won’t make us feel obligated.

Here is some of what they said:

We were out at a hotel in Hawaii, George Bush—the first President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush—said. Maui.

This was after he had left the presidency, he said. He and his wife had gone for a walk on the beach early in the morning, just to get some exercise and talk to each other and look at the water before the sun was all the way up, before the sand was full of tourists and vacationers. At a time of the morning when they could still have some solitude and privacy.

So George and Barbara Bush were walking near the ocean.

And they had, on the beach, carved deep into the sand, a swastika, he said.

He said he didn’t know who had done it.

And in the middle of it, the Star of David, Bush said. "And next to it, another swastika.

I got so mad—it was six in the morning, and I was walking with these Secret Service agents, and I was almost just crying.

He said he was unable to continue with his walk. The hotel, he said, was a very rich, unbelievably secluded thing, and there was the swastika, on American soil, and the old World War II combat pilot who had become president of the United States thought of some of his comrades from the war, men who never made it home: people who gave their last breaths, he said, to defeat the Nazis.

Six o’clock in the morning, Bush said. I took a rake, and I said, ‘Let’s clean this up, Barbara.’

He did it himself—he found a rake and erased the swastika in the sand?

Yeah, Bush said. Yeah.

Here is what they said, some of it:

I would be scared, Gerald Ford said.

We were talking about how Ford would feel if he had a child growing up in an American city today.

Ford had always seemed so optimistic about the country—he had always seemed to be skittish about nothing, nervous about no one. But he would be frightened for his sons and his daughter if they were children today?

I would, he said.

And not just for his children. For himself, too.

If he didn’t have Secret Service protection, he said, he would not want to take a walk through downtown New York or Los Angeles or Chicago all by himself late at night.

I’d be apprehensive, alone, Ford said.

But he was always known as a big, strong guy, a former athlete who kept himself in shape.

That doesn’t do you much good when somebody comes up with a knife or a gun, he said.

In fact, such people had come up to Ford twice when he was president. Two women, on two separate occasions, had tried to assassinate him. Because the women failed, many people before long forgot about the incidents, at least about the specifics.

I asked Ford if he remembered the women.

Yeah, the two of them, he said. Sara Jane Moore, and . . .

He tried to come up with the other woman’s name.

One of them wrote me, Ford said.

She had? From prison? I asked him which woman it had been. Squeaky Fromme?

Squeaky, I think, Ford said.

So the woman who tried to kill him actually dropped him a note?

There was a strange letter, he said. Of course, she tried to and did escape. They caught her two or three days later.

Did the Secret Service show him the letter she had written to him?

Well, that’s interesting, Ford said. The letter came to me, and I’ve saved letters from all kinds of people. Before I became president and after. And I had these evaluated for—I just wanted to know their worth. That was one of the most valuable.

He had shown the letter to an autograph dealer?

He started to laugh. It’s amazing, he said.

You didn’t sell it, did you? I asked.

Oh, no, Ford said.

So of all the presidential papers he had saved, all the documents that played a part in affecting the course of nations and of world politics, the one that would bring the most on the open market was a letter from a woman who had wanted to shoot him?

Yeah, Ford said, laughing anew.

Here is what they said:

Come on out, Ronald Reagan said. Come have a visit.

He said it in a letter from the house where he lived in retirement in California.

By the time I got there, things had changed.

There’s one thing they never said—never asked.

None of them asked what I was doing there. None of them asked why I had come to call.

T•W•O

Off to see the Wizard

I’m not certain I could have given them a very good answer.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there myself.

The best I had been able to sift it out in my own mind was that this was a trip of sorts—a vacation trip in search of history.

Many Americans make such trips—always have. They head onto the road to seek out the narrative story of our country—to see the places where the history has unfolded. Mount Vernon, Gettysburg, the White House, the Liberty Bell, Appomattox—there has long been a draw to packing a suitcase, buying a plane ticket or loading up the car, and setting forth to take a look at the saga of the United States close-up.

I don’t know the precise moment when it occurred to me that it was possible to give oneself a different kind of trip like that. A trip to beat all trips—a journey that had the potential to be more fun than anything a travel agent could book. An uncharted excursion into American history.

The presidents—those who were still living, those who had held the office and had then gone back to their own lives—could be a destination in themselves. They were members of a fraternity—the smallest and most exclusive fraternity in the world. If they would say yes—if they would agree to the visits—the journey held the promise of providing memories that would last a lifetime.

Only in this country, it seemed to me, was such an idea even conceivable—only in the United States could a person decide to go looking for the men who had been the most powerful in the world, and stand a chance of the idea succeeding. The authority that Americans bestow on their presidents is born of the democratic instinct upon which the country was founded; a president is given his power because the citizens decide to grant it. Maybe—or so I thought—the members of the fraternity, the recipients of the gift of that power, never forget it. Maybe, in the backs of their minds, the instinct still exists to open their doors. Once, a long time ago, when they were first asking for votes, each of them had to knock on doors to introduce themselves to strangers. Maybe—I hoped—they would not reject a knock.

I knew, of course, that I could not just literally knock. I would have to write and ask in advance, and the trip could take years to complete. I also knew that, for this to work, I should not come to their doors in pursuit of breaking news. That’s not what this journey was about—each of these men had seen his name in enough headlines to last him for eternity.

Instead, I would let the agenda and the itinerary write themselves. It would be a what if? journey. What if you set out on a long trip, with the hopes of encountering some people along the way—and what if the people were the presidents? What if you were determined to look for lowercase history—history spoken quietly, history related in unhurried tones by the men who, against all odds, had been the shapers of uppercase history?

What if you sought history as sort of a travelogue—history you went out to visit and then brought home from the airport with you?

Ours is an enormous nation—around the world our size and strength and wealth are oftentimes resented. But as vast as the American canvas is, its open secret is that when you look closely at the canvas, you always find the details to be utterly life-sized.

Any trip, or so I have learned over the years, has the potential to be a good one, depending solely on the people you run into. I wanted to start this trip with certain people in mind—I wanted to run into them on purpose. I wanted to try to go see the presidents, and to listen to them, just to find out what would happen.

Beyond the seeking-the-echoes-of-history of it all, in the back of my mind the trip had a theme. I hoped that the theme wasn’t as quixotic as it sounded—these were men of substance, and we would, I hoped, talk about some substantial things along the way—so I never said the theme out loud, to the men or to anyone else.

But as I set off to find them—these men whose names were known all over the world; these men who had achieved immense authority but who, because they had risen to such high station, were inevitably cut off from the everyday lives of their fellow citizens; these men who were known by all but known by no one, whose exalted office had made them, paradoxically, ubiquitous to their countrymen yet, in the end, mysteries . . .

As I set out to find them, my silent, exhilarated thought was that of going off to see the wizard.

Follow the yellow brick road . . .

T•H•R•E•E

Do You Know How Much That Milkshake Cost?

This did not seem like the place where one would necessarily find himself waiting to see Richard Nixon.

The cafeteria—on a bottom level of a federal office building in lower Manhattan—was bare-bones and government-issue all the way, from the harsh fluorescent lights in the ceiling to the no-nonsense steel utensils, some wet and warm from just being washed, on the countertops around the big room.

It was well before 9 a.m., and most of the tables were occupied by men and women endeavoring to get their still-tired eyes opened with the assistance of jolts of coffee, before beginning their workday shifts for the various cogs of the bureaucracy of the United States, New York City division.

This was on a weekday morning early in the 1980s; it would be the first stop on my journey to visit the presidents, although at the moment, in the cafeteria, I had no idea there would be a journey, or that it would take the better part of the next two decades before the journey was through. All I knew, on this Manhattan morning, was that unless I had fallen for some intricately constructed prank pulled on me by someone with access to Richard Nixon’s stationery, I would be seeing him within the next hour.

Nixon’s letter had said to come at nine, but I am not a New Yorker and did not know my way around town all that well; I didn’t want to take a chance on getting lost in traffic and being late. So here I was. A woman at the next table ate an egg-and-muffin sandwich and washed it down with—of all things, at this time of the day—a root beer. I made notes—jotted down questions I might ask him, if he really showed up.

I wasn’t certain he would. Not that I would have any reason to think that—his letter to me had been clear that he would, in his words, welcome a visit—but this was at the juncture of Nixon’s life when he had yet to reemerge from the almost total exile into which he had gone after leaving the White House. What would surprise me was not if he would cancel at the last minute; the only thing that had surprised me was that he had said yes in the first place.

His letter had been in response to one I had written to him. Mine was not one—I had thought upon mailing it—that was guaranteed to succeed. In the letter I had told Nixon that when he was elected to the presidency, I had been a young man in college—part of a college generation many of whose members had vocally and endlessly professed to dislike him and everything he stood for. During those years—the years of his first successful campaign for the White House, and then his time in office—despising Nixon, among large numbers of young people, seemed, for a while, almost to be a required course. During those same years he had the reputation, not without good reason, of being wary of those people.

In my letter to him, I said that as a young man I had not been a person who would have been classified as a fan of his. I had accepted all the stereotypes. He had seemed the most distant of public persons, easily summed up in a dark set of adjectives. Yet as I grew older, and especially after he left office in the way he did, it occurred to me that there had been no player in the national drama during the last half-century who loomed larger in the country’s life. More cumulative inches on the front pages of the newspapers, more covers of Time magazine, more total hours on the network evening newscasts—the idea of Nixon felt somehow central to being an American during that period of the nation’s history.

So I told Nixon that I very much wanted to meet him—but that I would understand if he was hesitant. Although I worked for a newspaper, I told him that if he would allow me to come sit with him and talk, and he preferred, because of the silence with which he had surrounded himself, that I not write a word about it, that would be fine with me. If he would permit me to visit, and didn’t want it reported, I would pay my own way to New York instead of asking my employer to do it, and keep it private.

I wasn’t interested in honing in on Watergate, or the gap that had appeared on the tape Rose Mary Woods had been assigned to transcribe, or the intrigues of the current political season. I knew that inquisitors far more skilled than I had tried to pin him down on those things, and I knew that Nixon had said about as much as he would ever say. To come to New York and watch him frost over and clam up—that’s not what I had in mind.

I just wanted to come see him.

And when, against all expectations, his letter had arrived saying that the visit would be all right with him—and that he would not ask me to keep it private, that I could do anything I wanted with it—I could hardly quite believe that it would ultimately come to pass. It had seemed like the longest of long shots.

Which is why, as I sat in the cafeteria, checking my watch every few minutes, I still feared that when nine o’clock arrived I would be greeted with a message that Mr. Nixon was very sorry, but that he had been called out of town on short notice and had to cancel.

His office phone was unlisted; I had been given a floor to report to in this federal high-rise, and had been told to find a door with a certain number. In the cafeteria I looked around at the government workers eating their breakfasts, and asked myself how many of them were aware that Nixon was up there on the floors above us (assuming he was). In Washington, every time you pass by the White House you think about the president walking around inside; it was not the same with this building. I doubted that New Yorkers walked or drove by it and automatically thought: Nixon’s in there.

At quarter to nine I rode the elevator upstairs. As I got off, I encountered Spanish-speaking people looking for an immigration-processing office. I thought for a second that I was on the wrong floor.

Thirty feet down the hallway I found the door with the correct number. There were no words at all—it could have been the door to a storage area. I tried the knob. It was locked.

I knocked, and a woman let me in. On a wall directly in front of me were big color enlargements of photos from the Nixon presidency: Nixon riding in a motorcade, smiling and waving. Nixon with Leonid Brezhnev. Nixon with his arm around a young Chinese boy. In front of the photos, sitting in a chair facing the door I had just walked through, visibly bored and reading a copy of National Geographic, was a Secret Service agent in a brown suit. The phones did not ring.

I took a seat nearby. The secretary and the Secret Service man spoke neither to each other nor to me. I figured that Nixon, if he was indeed there, would make me cool my heels for a while. Not out of discourtesy, but just to let the anticipation build. The Rolling Stones never hit the stage right at the hour printed on the ticket—to do so would be to dilute the mystique. The biggest acts not only can afford to do that—it increases their impact to do it. I was prepared to sit and wait.

But at nine o’clock straight up, the secretary approached me and said: Would you like to come with me?

We walked through a door, and there, at the end of a long and dimly lit room, sitting next to an illuminated globe, was Nixon.

Mr. President, you have a visitor, the secretary said.

He rose. She left. It was just the two of us.

I was having trouble processing it. Alone with Nixon.

So, he said, still standing. Did you just fly in?

And—I couldn’t help it, this was involuntary—my first thought was: Dan Aykroyd.

All those years of seeing Nixon in parody . . . all those years of seeing the cartoon versions of him . . .

Especially in the years since he had left office, when he had by choice remained invisible so much of the time, his countrymen had come to know him mainly as caricature. With Nixon, for much of his career, often it was as if he really were just an idea. The man who had inspired such passions in the land was sometimes treated as if he was not a person, but a particularly potent symbol—was sometimes treated as if he was not someone who was alive and breathing.

And here he was, grayer than I had expected, wearing a blue suit and bent over ever so slightly. Did you just fly in? he said, in that voice, and all I could think of was Aykroyd on the old Saturday Night Live. Nixon was standing there and—against my will, there was nothing I could do about it—I was thinking that he was doing a pretty good Nixon, almost as good as Aykroyd’s.

I must have been staring and saying nothing, because Nixon was talking quite a bit, filling the air with words, making small talk as if to assure there wouldn’t be the chance of even a few seconds of uncomfortable soundlessness. Or maybe he was just accustomed to doing this—maybe, for so many years, he had seen so many people grow momentarily mute upon encountering him that he had developed this routine for breaking the ice, for letting the other person become accustomed to the unique reality of being with Nixon. A toe in the water.

Where did you stay last night? Nixon asked.

I told him the name of the hotel.

How much did it cost? he asked.

It was not a question you are usually asked, but he seemed to want to know.

I told him how much my hotel bill had been, and he said: That’s a lot of money. I had some friends who came to New York, and they said they had gone to Rumpelmayer’s. And they asked me how much I thought a milkshake cost.

I waited for Nixon to continue.

I thought to myself, Nixon said. ‘McDonald’s. Eighty cents? Ninety cents?’

He looked at me, as if he expected me to say something. When I didn’t, he said:

Do you know how much that milkshake cost?

No, sir, I said. I don’t.

He looked me in the eyes and said:

"That milkshake cost three dollars and