Nancy Gibbs Quotes

The wand is mighter then the sword.

Nixon to Clinton: "When seeking advice from people who are more experienced than you, tell them what you plan to do first, and then ask for their reaction. Don't ask for their advice, and then ignore it. That way you save on bruised feelings.

If compassion and mercy are not compatible with politics," Ford said, "then something is the matter with politics.

Lydon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.

Maybe as times get worse we get better. Our pain makes us feel other peoples too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway...

The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident.

Lyndon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.

We want you to succeed," the younger Bush told Obama. "Whether we're Democrat or Republican, we all care deeply about this country...All of us who have served in this office understands that the office transcends the individual.

Praise of blame in the moment means little: it is how their decisions play out over time that matters, and so the redemption they're looking for is of a more lasting kind. They are one another's peers; who else can really judge them?

Eisenhower was the living symbol of what felt in 1969 like an easier age, when greatness was an American birthright, when the torrents of change had not yet crashed into every corner of the culture, when there was a majesty about the presidency that allowed Eisenhower to leave office as beloved, respected, and above all, trusted, as he had been when he assumed it.

Eisenhower's military life taught him that talent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. The only way to guarantee smart decisions, Ike believed, was to bring all the responsible parties together and have them fight it out. "I do not believe in bringing them one at a time and therefore being more impressed by the most recent one you hear," he later said. "You must get courageous men, men of strong views and let them debate and argue with each other".

Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.

(Billy) Graham went through passages of hypochondria and his closest friends had to assure him that he was not about to die.

It was a stirring piece of bravado but Powell deftly set it aside. "My wife would understand perfectly your loyalty as a general's wife," he said, "but I tell you there is no honour in throwing away lives when the outcome is already determined.

The elder Bush explained later that "watching your son taking a pounding from his critics was much, much harder" than being president. "Barbara quit reading the papers and watching the new, but I couldn't do that

The phone would ring, and they would put their son on speakerphone. Ever sensitive to charges of puppeteering, Mrs. Bush let it known that certain restrictions were observed. "The rules are: no repeating what he tells you and no giving unsolicited advice and no passing on things that people ask you to give the President...gifts or advice or ideas or wanting job," his mother recalled. "We just have made that deal because we were there. We know what it's like

You know, when a president is about to leave office, most of the time most people are dying for him to go on and get out of there. But there are a few little rituals that have to be observed. One of them is that the president must host the incoming president in the White House, smile as if they love each other and give the American people the idea that democracy is peaceful and honourable and there will be a good transfer of power

If the Presidents Club had a seal, around the ring would be three words: cooperation, competition and consolation. On the one hand, the presidents have powerful motives - personal and patriotic - to help one another succeed and comfort one another when they fail. But at the same time, they compete for history's blessing.

Presidents rise and fall according to how they handle a crisis - an invasion, a depression, a massive oil spill - but there's no glory in prevention, in foreseeing and forestalling and keeping the bad from getting worse. We know what happened when each president presided; they are often just as proud of what didn't happen.

Eisenhower advocated a variety of strong actions which he had never taken when he was president. Maybe this was just the pattern of former presidents; maybe it reflected how much the circumstances had changed on the ground.

But Eisenhower's advice was consistent, from his days as a general, to his years in the White House, to his role as veteran counselor: don't fight unless you are in it to win. Don't waste time and lives with half measures.

The club is bound together by an unspoken pledge to protect the presidency; but its members are often driven by an even more fierce desire to protect a legacy

By this time the Vietnam War was such a confusing issue to most Americans that Nixon could take as many positions as he liked and find support somewhere for them all. Roughly equal numbers wanted to expand the war as negotiate a peace.

It was a classic Nixon move: goad an opponent into attacking, then ride a wave of sympathy s you defend your honour.

If the club creates a natural bond among its members, something of that sympathy extends to their families as well. The first ladies share the unique burden of being perhaps the only person left on the planet who can keep the Leader of the Free World grounded, tell him to pull his socks and quit feeling sorry for himself. They know, and their children know, what it means to live in the bell jar; to have family vacations turned into photo ops; to wonder at the sudden surfeit of friends and absence of intimacy.

Jimmy Carter did not present himself as perfect or pious ... Neither did he compromise his understanding of the Gospel by verbal dodging or double talk. He took a political risk by being so forthright about his faith; in the end though, I believe his candor worked in his favor.' - Billy Graham

The relationship between Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham is the most contradictory of all those profiled in this book. No president was closer to Graham theologically or spiritually; but no president save Kennedy was as distant personally from him, either. Carter alone among the presidents studied here taught the Bible throughout his life, wrote books of religious meditations, and needed no help with scripture or its challenges ... And yet Jimmy Carter uniquely did not need Billy Graham - and for most of his time in the Oval Office, he more or less ignored him.

She held my hand the whole time in our private time,' Graham recalled. 'And she was just so sweet. She is different from the Hillary you see in the media. There is a warm side to her

The Graham family's roots to North Korea were considerable: Ruth had lived in Pyongyang as a teenager

This was - there is no other way to describe it - a new kind of stump speech: a candidate who was putting his faith at the center of his bid for the presidency. And it was no improvisation. Stuart Eizenstat, who was one of Carter's earliest campaign aides, recalled that whenever Carter sat down to make a list of his strengths as a candidate to be included in a basic stump speech, he routinely listed hist Christian faith among his assets. Attempts by Eizenstat, who doubled as a sometime speechwriter, to remove that detail from Carter's standard campaign remarks kept going nowhere: "I kept striking that out in every draft and he kept putting it back in every draft.

Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelist who edited Sojourners, said the pivot on arms control was the direct result of preaching overseas. 'Any good preacher, any good evangelist, in order to speak to people, you have to fall in love with your congregation. So he's speaking to these huge crowds in Eastern Europe and he [Billy Graham] realizes, 'My country has nuclear weapons targeted on these people with whom I'm falling in love, who I want to bring to Jesus Christ, and I have a problem with that.' I don't think he ever had questions about nuclear policy until he went to the Eastern bloc.

In his last conversations with Doris Kearns Goodwin, before he died in January 1973, Johnson talked about the odds that history would remember him kindly - or at all.

I am convinced there are sinister and evil forces at work taking advantage of the race problem whose ultimate objective is the overthrow of the American government. - Billy Graham in response to the Watts riots in 1965

Oh, I would just love to talk to you sometime, maybe we could have lunch,' she recalled. But Graham politely declined, explaining to the governor's wife that he did not dine alone with women - be they single or married. 'Oh, well, I'm sorry,' Hillary said. 'Maybe we could have a lot of people there.' Graham replied that he would think about it. ... And so five people sat down at a found table in Little Rock's ornate Capital Hotel that fall.

He would say, 'I have a strong wife, you know, people don't realize how strong Ruth is.

It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled,” he argued. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again . . . who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

assassinated just four days before. “It was like

occupying the office Hoover once

You know the great thing about Truman,” he told Goodwin, “is that once he makes up his mind about something—anything, including the A bomb—he never looks back and asks ‘should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it?’ No, he just knows he made up his mind as best he could and that’s that. There’s no going back. I wish I had some of that quality.

Talbott understood that Nixon's private hospitality and his public obsession with U.S.-Russian relations were part of an elaborate rehabilitation scheme, designed to blur lingering memories of Watergate while serving as a reminder of his own, widely praised foreign policy accomplishments when he was president.

..., but he gave Clinton a tip: when seeking advice from people who are more experienced than you, Nixon urged, tell them what you plan to do first - and then ask for their reaction. Don't ask for advice and then ignore it. That way, Nixon coached, you save on brusied feelings.

Presidents, even when they get some things right, never cease to be punch lines, and it was telling that Nixon regarded his comic potential as a metric for comparing himself to his successors.

The modern Presidents Club was founded by two men who by all rights should have loathed each other. There was Harry Truman, the humble haberdasher from Missouri, hurled into office in the spring of 1945, summoning to the White House Herbert Hoover, a failed Republican president who had left town thirteen years earlier as the most hated man in America, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit. They were political enemies and temperamental opposites. Where Truman was authentic, amiable, if prone to eruptions of temper, Hoover could be cold, humorless, incapable of small talk but ferociously sure of the rightness of his cause.

The only way to guarantee smart decisions, Ike believed, was to bring all the responsible parties together and have them fight it out. “I do not believe in bringing them in one at a time and therefore being more impressed by the most recent one you hear,” he said later. “You must get courageous men, men of strong views and let them debate and argue with each other.

As I hung up and walked slowly back to our table,” Nixon recalled, “it dawned on me that I had just participated in a probably unprecedented series of conversations. In the space of less than ten minutes, I had talked to a former President of the United States, the present president and the President-elect!” And they, in turn, had all talked not just to the current vice president, but a future president.

As a final indignity for the defeated warrior, Vice President Nixon had to preside over the roll call of the Electoral College. “This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated,” he told the assembled members of Congress. “I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system.” He got a standing ovation.

Eisenhower had run the Army; he knew all the ways decision making can go off the rails, and insisted on collective debate precisely to prevent senior officials from freelancing, or putting their departmental interests first. For all the formal machinery, Eisenhower was very literally the commander in chief, making the key decisions himself and monitoring closely how they were carried out. Even years after D-Day, when critics needled him for not being on the front lines with the invading forces, he retorted, “I planned it and took responsibility for it. Did you want me to unload a truck?

Fields, Alonzo. My 21 Years in the White House. New York: Crest Books, 1961. Gibbs, Nancy, and Michael Duffy, The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).

As journalist Nancy Gibbs once quipped in Time magazine, “IQ gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted.

Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. —Nancy Gibbs

His manner somehow friendly and courtly at the same time.

To one degree or another every president is haunted by those who went before, but few so literally as Johnson. No president had ever witnessed the slaying of his predecessor or endured such a brutal transfer of power.

In his final remarks to the White House staff, on the day he resigned his office, Nixon applied a version of the lesson to himself. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.

If the Presidents Club had a seal, around the ring would be three words: cooperation, competition, and consolation. On the one hand, the presidents have powerful motives—personal and patriotic—to help one another succeed and comfort one another when they fail. But at the same time they all compete for history’s blessing.

Bill Clinton was lucky in many ways; but when it came to former presidents, he won the lottery. When he was elected president, he had five former commanders in chief at his disposal: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, the most of any president in the twentieth century. Not all of them had been helpful to one another, in or out of office. But some combination of his charm, their needs, and the new global challenges of the post–Cold War age allowed Clinton to deploy nearly all to his advantage—especially, as it turned out, the Republicans.

Kennedy may not have cared what Ike had to say. But he knew he at least had to appear to. If nothing else, the image of the two of them consulting would go a long way to reassuring people that the young president was getting the advice he needed.

Nixon urged Clinton to maintain his relationship with Yeltsin but make contact with other democrats in Russia. He warned Clinton away from some ultranationalists and toward those interested in liberty and reform. He pressed Clinton to replace his ambassador in Kiev and concentrate future U.S. economic aid on Ukraine, where it would matter most.