David M. Shribman
Over the years, presidents have leaned on their predecessors for help in the White House. Lyndon Johnson, for example, asked Harry Truman for assistance to win approval of Medicare. More often, however, they have kept their distance. “All the time I’ve been in politics, there’s only two people I hate, and he’s one,” Truman said of Richard Nixon. He meant it.
Even so, if the country is very lucky, sometime tomorrow morning Joe Biden might pick up the phone and instruct the White House Communications Agency to put in a call to Donald Trump. It would be perhaps the least likely, but most consequential, president-to-president telephone call since John F. Kennedy telephoned Dwight D. Eisenhower 59 years ago at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.