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

Author(s): Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs

Society & Culture

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.


The Presidents Club will change the way we think about the presidency, for the club itself is an instrument of presidential power.


Product Information

"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

General Fields

  • : 9781439127728
  • : Simon & Schuster
  • : Simon & Schuster
  • : February 2013
  • : United States
  • : February 2013
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs
  • : Paperback
  • : 2018
  • : 973.099
  • : 656