Epstein Secrets

nship between a sitting President and his living predecessors is rarely easy. According to "The Presidents Club," by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, Lyndon Johnson sometimes drafted the popular former President Dwight D. Eisenhower into his publicity schemes, which frustrated Ike, who complained to aides about

olitical figures in America who have those numbers are Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama." In November, not long after the round of golf, Messina and Axelrod made a pilgrimage to Clinton's Harlem office. Messina brought a PowerPoint slide show and briefed the former President on campaign strategy. At the

c rules of operation." The Times says Biden "enters with a deeper understanding of the legislative process and politicians than any president since Lyndon Johnson, a former Senate majority leader," but the question is whether his "legislative prowess is, well, a little bit sepia toned. When Mr. Biden talks abo

-duty police officers under investigation for allegedly participating in the violent and chaotic insurrection earlier this month." The Hill (1/23, Axelrod, 5.69M) reports in its "Briefing Room" blog that prosecutors filed charges against another two men for "assaulting a police officer during the viole

ence of recent incumbents offered no guidance. No President since Dwight D. Eisenhower had served two full terms. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson, overwhelmed by the war in Vietnam, had declined to run for reelection in 1968. Richard Nixon resigned less than seventeen months into his second

were devoted to managing the gridlock created by the backlash against the first two, with a resurgent Republican Party intent on Obama's defeat. Axelrod told me that Obama has learned from recent history. "President Bush claimed a mandate after the last election and took steps that he never ran on,"

n party, the G.O.P.— couldn't fail to summon a contrasting portrait. The biographer Robert Caro has also been a guest. Caro's ongoing volumes about Lyndon Johnson portray a President who used everything from the promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of the legislative agenda th

. "He has learned through those vicissitudes that every day is Election Day in Washington and everyone is writing history in ten-minute intervals," Axelrod told me. "But the truth is that history is written over a long period of time—and he will be judged in the long term." Obama stepped up to a platf