The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy

(Simon & Schuster, $32.50)

Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy have uncovered a “powerful secret fraternity” that for decades has guided the actions of almost every one of our sitting presidents, said Bill Desowitz in USA Today. But don’t break out the tinfoil hats just yet. In this “brilliant investigative work,” the two Time editors detail conversations and meetings in which members of this shadow organization have consistently put aside ideological differences to advise the presiding commander in chief on significant policy matters. Unofficially, this informal club was founded when Harry Truman, after suddenly ascending to the presidency, reached out to his only living predecessor, Herbert Hoover, for advice. The tradition has been generating odd alliances ever since.

The very idea of “an Ex-Presidents Club sounds like a punch line,” said Ben Jacobs in TheDailyBeast.com. A few of the specific alliances might seem like joke setups, too. Unlikely as it seems, Bill Clinton counted both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon as confidants. Reagan taught the younger man the proper way to salute, and Nixon so ingratiated himself that Clinton claims to make an annual habit of reading a seven-page letter that Nixon wrote to him about Russia and the former Soviet bloc.

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At least one ex-president seems to have been “just plain trouble,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “Some of the book’s livelier moments” detail Jimmy Carter’s “rogue efforts to operate as a one-man State Department.” But there aren’t enough such passages. The author’s simple theme—that each president enters office as a know-it-all, gets in over his head, and eventually develops respectful relationships with his predecessors—would be enough to carry a Time cover story. But the relationships aren’t all that deep, and Gibbs and Duffy try to paper that over with “a closing burst of canned lyricism about eternally simpatico commanders in chief learning to take the long view.” In fact, they’ve created a compilation of mildly interesting anecdotes about the modern presidency, but not much more.