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

ference, which helped start Nixon's late-career return to respectability, but the two men eventually fell out over Reagan's Soviet policy. In 1989, George H. W. Bush recruited Jimmy Carter to help with policy toward Panama; that helped revive Carter's reputation, but the relationship soured in 1991, when Carter

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

reform, and created a separate new department," that of Veterans Affairs. Obama's campaign is well aware that he may end up like Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush, the two most recent one-term Presidents, who were both defeated despite some notable—even historic—accomplishments, including the Camp David Accor

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

elatively modest executive orders on gun control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush. "Wait, wait, wait," Obama said. "Before everybody starts clapping, that's not how it works. We've got this Constitution, we've got this whole thin