Nancy Gibbs > Quotes

“The wand is mighter then the sword.”
― Nancy Gibbs

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

“If compassion and mercy are not compatible with politics," Ford said, "then something is the matter with politics.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

“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...”
― Nancy Gibbs

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“He would say, 'I have a strong wife, you know, people don't realize how strong Ruth is.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“His manner somehow friendly and courtly at the same time.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“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?”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs

“assassinated just four days before. “It was like”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“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.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“occupying the office Hoover once”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Presidents Club

“The Graham family's roots to North Korea were considerable: Ruth had lived in Pyongyang as a teenager”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House