The literature is rich with quotations about friends and friendship.
One of my surprises when reading Gary Ginsberg’s best-selling First Friends, a fascinating book about “the powerful, unsung (and unelected) people who shaped our presidents,” was the dearth of quotations about friends or friendship.*
But, on second thought and paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ginsberg’s book itself is a quotation.
First Friends does not need quotations about friends or friendship because Ginsberg’s own powerful words about the intimate, lasting, frequently history-shaping relationships between nine presidents and their best friends are the essence of real friendship and will be quotable themselves.
First Friends is about intimate friendships such as the one between Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. Friends who shared a (double) bed in Speed’s living quarters for four years during a time when sleeping accommodations were scarce and costly and when Speed’s close friendship helped save Lincoln from extreme depression.
Without his close friend’s “timely and compassionate intervention, Abraham Lincoln might very well have been lost to history,” writes Ginsberg. Theirs became a friendship that would eventually make Speed one of the closest confidants of American presidents. Speed’s counsel would help to save the Union even though Speed and Lincoln had divergent views on the divisive issue of slavery.
There would be other “First Friendships” that, according to Ginsberg, directly or indirectly helped change the course not only of American history, but of world history, in peace and in war time:
Eddie Jacobson, the son of a Jewish shoemaker, an early World War I Army buddy of Truman and then a business partner in the Truman & Jacobson Haberdashery, would become a critical champion for President Truman’s recognition of the State of Israel in 1948. “I think it’s the single most consequential example actually of how a lifelong friendship can alter the course of history,” Ginsberg told DailyMail.com.
Young John Fitzgerald Kennedy bonded with equally young British aristocrat and intellectual David Ormsby-Gore in pre-World War II London while Kennedy’s father was ambassador to the United Kingdom. Ormsby-Gore went on to become President Kennedy’s closest and most valued (unofficial) foreign policy advisor and certainly influenced and steered Kennedy through the young president’s and, at the time, the world’s most perilous period, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Later, Ormsby-Gore influenced a reluctant Kennedy to sign the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union.
Ginsberg also notes Ormsby-Gore’s deep friendship with Jackie Kennedy culminating in a quiet marriage proposal by Ormsby-Gore four years after the assassination of the president. A year later, Jackie married Greek billionaire Aristotle Onasis with whom she hoped to “find some healing and some comfort…with somebody who is not part of my world of past and pain…” as she wrote to Ormsby-Gore when she declined his marriage proposal.
Not as well-known as other First Friends is Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She, quietly and discretely, became President Roosevelt’s most trusted confidante, went on to command “intense interest and affection from the most powerful man on the planet,” and helped the “lonely and overworked president” navigate the Great Depression and World War II.
While others have speculated about a possible romantic relationship between Daisy and Roosevelt, Ginsberg is delicate and circumspect and leaves it to Daisy’s letters, papers and diary to sort it out. Reflecting on Daisy’s final entry in her diary “in candid words that must be respected on their own terms,” Ginsberg writes:
In the end, it may all be as simple as that: FDR – a lonely man shouldering the burdens of his office at a critical juncture in history – drew solace and strength from Daisy’s steady devotion, loyalty, and discretion. For Daisy, FDR opened the door to his world and made her feel cherished within it.
Ginsberg is equally discrete when navigating through the sex scandal that consumed the nation and imperiled President Bill Clinton’s second term. A scandal centered around the “Monica Lewinsky Affair” and salaciously investigated and prosecuted by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.
Bill Clinton’s, and Hillary’s, closest friend — during the scandal and before and after – was Vernon Jordan, a charming, prominent Black civil rights leader and attorney and successful business executive who stood head and shoulders above Clinton’s “large and diverse collection of friends,” an accumulation unlike that of “any other president in modern presidential history.”
It was a long, unbreakable friendship, one that got Clinton back on his political feet after his failed reelection bid for the governorship of Arkansas and one that helped save the Clintons’ marriage after the Lewinsky affair, but also one that threatened to drag Jordan himself into the Lewinsky maelstrom.
Ginsberg is not as delicate and generous when it comes to describing the corrupt Nixon presidency, but he does find some redeeming qualities in Nixon’s unassuming First Friend and perhaps Nixon’s only true friend: Cuban exile, Florida banker and businessman — “a gifted moneymaker” — Charles Gregory (“Bebe”) Rebozo.
Ginsberg describes Rebozo as being “much more comfortable in his role as loyal companion than provocateur” and offers: “In spite of his proximity to power, Rebozo never sought to advance an initiative or espouse. Nor did he even appear to enjoy or seek any fame at all as the president’s best friend.”
Rebozo stuck with Nixon throughout the “Watergate Scandal” that destroyed his friend’s presidency and that thrust him into the (negative) national spotlight
As with the Daisy-Roosevelt friendship, Ginsberg brings up the speculation about the “real” nature of the Nixon-Rebozo friendship, and offers “the most likely: that Nixon, even beyond his loveless marriage, found in Rebozo a level of comfort and intimacy otherwise absent from his life.”
Equally eloquently and powerfully described – albeit less titillating — are the friendships between three other presidents and their First Friends:
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House
Conspicuously absent in First Friends is a chapter on the 45th president’s First Friend.
While, in his book’s preface, Ginsberg is circumspect about Donald Trump’s friends and friendships (“… the strongly held perception — fair or not – that [Trump’s] friendships were transactional rather than genuine…”), he opens up more during a recent interview with Brian Williams in MSNBC’s “11th Hour.” In the interview Ginsberg shares with Williams that he would have done a chapter on Donald Trump’s First Friend if he had been able to ascertain that Trump indeed had such a friend.
However, Ginsberg adds that his source “finally confirmed that the President really doesn`t have a first friend. Nor did he say he needed any close friends. [The source] said basically, the friendship just wasn`t part of his emotional makeup…”
In his preface, Ginsberg wonders “whether the presence of a real friend during [Trump’s] years in the White House…, most critically in those fateful last two months of his presidency, might have saved him from his worst moments…and perhaps provided him with unvarnished honesty at seminal moments when everyone else seemed terrified to offend him (and those who did were ridiculed or fired).”
Perhaps a tenth chapter with a single quotation might have sufficed:
“Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.” – Jean de La Bruyère.
* At the end of the chapter on Kennedy’s and David Ormsby-Gore’s “special relationship,” Ginsberg quotes Percy Shelley:
“Friendship . . . a dear balm, A smile among dark frowns; a beloved light:
A solitude, a refuge, a delight.”
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Gary Ginsberg, lawyer by training, has spent his professional career at the intersection of media, politics, and law. He worked for the Clinton administration, was a senior editor and counsel at the political magazine George, and then spent the next two decades in executive positions in media and technology at News Corporation, Time Warner and SoftBank. He has published pieces in the the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and was an on-air political contributor in the early days of MSNBC.
