Friends in High Places

F irst ladies, first children, first siblings, and even first dogs have served as frequent grist for the mill in the (often bloated) presidential-journalistic-industrial complex, but to the best of Gary Ginsberg’s knowledge, no one has yet systematically explored first friends: those close White House companions who furnished counsel, support, and constructive criticism before, during, and after the presidency.

A longtime journalist, lawyer, and political strategist, and a veteran of the Clinton White House, Ginsberg sets out to chronicle “how a First Friendship — one of the most intimate relationships in a very public life — can provide insight into the president himself” and to explore “how and where these friendships have helped shape, for better or worse, not only presidencies and their legacies, but our country.” Put differently, the lens of friendship both reflects and refracts the light that presidents and their friends emit.

First Friends centers on two simple insights: the “universal” realization that “the presidency is larger than life” and the “personal and human” discovery that “even someone aspiring to the most powerful office in the world can use a friend just like anyone else.” Mostly to their benefit, sometimes to their detriment, and always with an impact on the nation’s development, presidents throughout our history have come to rely on their intimates.

Ginsberg begins with the Founding Fathers, documenting how, “as their friendship developed, Jefferson and Madison jointly developed our nation’s highest ideals and, with them, the hybrid foundation for our democracy.” At first glance, the extroverted opponent of a strong central government and the taciturn Federalist make for unlikely chums. In their correspondence, Jefferson expressed enthusiasm for, and Madison abhorrence at, the French Revolution and Shays’s Rebellion. In Ginsberg’s telling, “Jefferson feared that the Constitution overreached in curtailing liberty, while Madison felt that the documents did not go far enough in containing popular passions.”

And yet close friends they became and remained, each Founder’s philosophy subtly influencing the other: Jefferson ultimately came around to the Madisonian nature of the Constitution, but only after Madison embraced and incorporated the Jeffersonian Bill of Rights. Their friendship strengthened in the 1790s as Madison abandoned Alexander Hamilton and much of his own erstwhile commitment to Federalist principles. And when Jefferson ousted John Adams in the 1800 election, he promptly appointed Madison secretary of state, grooming him as an eventual successor. Their bond, of course, also reflected the Sage of Monticello’s unique magnetism, to which, as Gordon Wood demonstrates in his magnificent Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, even his bitter rival Adams proved vulnerable. But both Jefferson and Madison plainly drew strength from their deep-rooted relationship.

So did Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. While in his 20s, Honest Abe befriended Speed, a dry-goods merchant in Springfield, Ill. (So intimate was their friendship that they shared a bed for four years, although Ginsberg convincingly refutes the unfounded speculation that their relationship was romantic or sexual.) Speed compassionately but firmly bucked up Lincoln during the latter’s occasional depressive episodes, “refus[ing] to indulge him and press[ing] him to show more strength in moving beyond his illness,” while Lincoln encouraged the younger man in matters matrimonial.

But it was their correspondence over slavery, the burning issue of the day, that cemented their bond and proved most consequential for the fate of the Republic, and once Lincoln became president, he counted on the advocacy of Speed, a slaveholder who had returned to his native Kentucky, where he became active in state politics, to keep the Bluegrass State in the Union. Even the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which threatened to alienate a border state like Kentucky, served to tighten the friends’ connection, as Speed “in time came to share Lincoln’s vision” and liberated his own slaves.

Some friendships were largely one-sided, such as the one between Franklin Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley, who served as FDR’s “confidante, cheerleader, companion, and later archivist.” Other first friends helped bring about historic, if serendipitous, decisions: Eddie Jacobson, a Jewish Missourian, convinced his old pal Harry Truman to support Israel’s establishment, and David Ormsby-Gore, JFK’s London drinking buddy and the U.K.’s ambassador to Washington, provided sage counsel during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

On other occasions, presidents have been ill-served by friendships they cultivated. Take Woodrow Wilson, who, shortly before his presidency began, fell under the influence of Colonel Edward Mandell House, a banking and real-estate magnate in whom Wilson placed “near absolute confidence . . . to conduct many of his most important responsibilities” while in office and to whom he “delegated an unprecedented measure of authority.” Forged by the inferno of World War I, America’s military and foreign policy for the next century took shape at the hands of House, who had “gained a strong psychological hold on Wilson.” From the sinking of the Lusitania to the Zimmerman telegram to the Paris Peace Conference to the League of Nations, the confirmed foreign-policy realist House tempered the often-naïve idealism of Wilson, the determined internationalist.

But at Versailles, their alliance began to unravel, as Wilson came to understand that his friend, who coordinated the peace negotiations, had proven too conciliatory to the demands of the victorious allies that a defeated Germany be humiliated. Soon thereafter, ratification of the treaty failed in the Senate, and the president, partly fueled by the hostility of Edith, his first lady, blamed House for that as well. In the end, Wilson’s relationship with House “stands as a cautionary tale of a president who in the end grew too reliant on a single friend — a man he barely knew before empowering him — and lived to regret it.”

In other instances, close friendships have reinforced toxic tendencies. Richard Nixon embroiled his confidant Bebe Rebozo, a Miami playboy, in the Watergate conspiracy, while Bill Clinton leaned on his bosom buddy Vernon Jordan to find a job for the jilted Monica Lewinsky. More than a century earlier, Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne spiraled downward in unison. The pair met at Bowdoin College and grew close enough as to etch their initials into a walnut tree outside Hillsborough, N.H. Hawthorne hitched his wagon to Pierce’s rising political star, even writing a slavish “biography” during the latter’s successful 1852 presidential campaign that, among other tributes, lauded Pierce’s “marvelous and mystic influence of character.”

But Pierce proved a disastrous chief executive, flaccidly supporting states’ rights, empowering Jefferson Davis, unleashing the calamitous Kansas-Nebraska Act, and even managing to lose the nomination four years later to James Buchanan, widely regarded as the worst president in American history. Yet throughout it all, Hawthorne stood proudly by, unabashedly mocking abolitionism and exalting his friend for supposedly opposing “any ideas that were not entertained by the fathers of the Constitution and the Republic.” The author’s unflinching loyalty compelled him to endure the indignity of a 19th-century form of cancellation, as Thoreau, Emerson, and Longfellow cut ties with their onetime literary colleague; Pierce, too, fell out of favor in his native and fiercely anti-slavery New Hampshire. “Ultimately,” Ginsberg reckons, “theirs would prove to be among the most tragic of First Friendships, ravaging their reputations and leaving a trail of ignominy behind them.”

Finally, some presidents seem not to have any true friends. When it comes to our 45th president, Ginsberg wonders whether “the presence of a real friend” could have saved Donald Trump “from his worst moments: softened his intemperate behavior, given him a calm that so often eluded him, and perhaps provided him with unvarnished honesty at seminal moments when everyone else seemed terrified to offend him.”

Ginsberg’s lionizing of JFK and Clinton, his former patron, sometimes verges on cloying, and there are any number of additional White House friends that he might have explored, but in First Friends, he paints a crisp, well-proportioned portrait of an otherwise under-considered area of presidential history.