Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents Hardcover – September 28, 2004
by Bob Greene 
 
“What if you set off on a vacation trip in search of history—and your destination was the men who had been president?”

Asking himself that tantalizing question, bestselling author and award-winning journalist Bob Greene embarked on a long journey across the breadth of the nation, hoping to spend time with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. The result of his odyssey is Fraternity.

Rich with the sounds of the presidents’ own voices, Fraternity is dramatic, surprising, funny, revealing, inspiring, tragic, touching and unforgettable: a story destined to be read and enjoyed not just now, but far into the future as Americans think about who we are as a people.

Here is Nixon, in an unmarked office high above Manhattan, explaining the reason for his solitary walks through New York streets at 5:30 every morning. Here is Carter, riding in a Secret Service van, recalling the sting of his family’s being mocked for their rural Southern heritage, even after he had won the White House. Here is Ford, beside a golf course fairway, laughing at his startled discovery that of all his presidential papers, the one worth the most on the open market was a letter from a woman who tried to kill him. Here is Bush, on the road with his son, remembering his despair and anger at encountering a swastika carved into the sand behind an elegant resort on American soil. And here is Nancy Reagan, in a Beverly Hills hotel, on the haunting first night she must stand in for her husband after the announcement of his illness.

A travelogue of the national spirit that chronicles a quest stretching over fifteen years and starring the biggest names in the modern American saga, this is living history of the most human kind, and Bob Greene at his very best.
 
From Publishers Weekly
With his warm, affable syndicated columnist's voice, bestselling author Greene (Once Upon a Town, etc.) searches out the coterie of U.S. ex-presidents, that "smallest and most exclusive fraternity in the world." Starting with a rare 1983 tête-à-tête with Nixon, Greene interviews Carter, Bush Sr. and Ford. (Reagan's absence is due to his illness; the obvious omission of Clinton is never explained.) Avoiding talk of policy and politics, Greene delves into the safe minutiae of presidential lives: he peppers the fraternity with inane queries about exercise routines ("Is the Secret Service around when you do your sit-ups?"), wardrobe, favorite songs and movies (Ford's is Mrs. Doubtfire), the novelty of sleeping in the White House and wounded feelings over partisan name-calling. Above all, he goggles at their unfathomable fall from exalted supercelebrity to approachable semicelebrity. "Can you just go into a clothing store?" Greene demands of Ford. "What about that whole thing of going into the changing room?" Greene's few wrestlings with the meaning of the office ("It's like you're president of every town," he blurts to a preternaturally patient Bush) can verge on the inchoate. Carter, with a more substantial postpresidential public life than the others, receives the most substantial profile as a serious, tight-lipped micro-manager.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.