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

onal security advisor to the resident and his chief foreign- policy speechwriter. After getting an . at New York University and abandoning a novel, Rhodes gave up a publishing job and moved to Washington to write speeches for Rep. Lee Hamilton, eventually helping to draft the 9/11 Commission and Iraq

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

nt; the building was filled with foreign-policy luminaries. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was climbing up the staircase alone as I descended. Rhodes's windowless office has a large printer marked with a sign that says "Classified." On his desk was a thick briefing book, "The President's Trip to

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

shington was "trapped in very stale narratives." "In the foreign-policy establishment, to be an idealist you have to be for military intervention," Rhodes went on. "In the Democratic Party, these debates were defined in the nineties, and the idealists lined up for military intervention. For the Presid

re, his private barber was cutting his hair. I was seated next to him while he got his haircut, and he dictated notes to me. It wasn’t as bad as what Lyndon Johnson would do, requiring aides to join him in the bathroom. While working at Kay, Scholer, I had the first fancy restaurant meal of my life. I was asked

ord B.A. in the Honor School of Jurisprudence and then enter Law School in the United States. In those days Jewish boys (only males were eligible for Rhodes) from Brooklyn were not selected by the Rhodes Committee, and despite my academic, political and athletic accomplishments, I did not even get an inte

pressed him to invoke Andrew Jackson as his populist model, and he had loaded up on Jackson books (they remained unread). But his real beau ideal was Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a big man who could knock heads, do deals, and bend lesser men to his will. Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the bette

ved, was a key leaker, if not one of the architects of the Obama administration’s continued effort to connect Trump and his team to Putin and Russia. Rhodes, many in the White House believed, was the deep state. They also believed that every time a leak was credited to “former and current officials,” Rhod