At age 63, I'm now living in the twelfth presidential administration of my lifetime. I don't remember Harry Truman as president and have only a vague recollection of President Eisenhower, but the rest are engraved somewhere in the alleys and byways of my cerebral cortex, and as a student of modern American history I've done some considerable reading about them. So, I thought I might provide some presidential anecdotes and trivia to perhaps lighten someone's day.
Harry Truman was a small town boy from western Missouri who married the love of his life and lived with her in her mother's very large house for the rest of their lives, except when he was in Washington. The evidence of rumpled bedsheets indicates that they continued to have an active sex life together into their mid-sixties at least.
Truman enjoyed vacations to Key West where he ostensibly went fishing with pals, but there's reason to think fishing was not nearly so important on those holidays as were drinking and playing poker. The president called himself a "lightfoot Baptist," meaning he didn't take the Baptist strictures against alcoholic beverages very seriously.
President Eisenhower enjoyed a cocktail, but doesn't seem to have been much of a drinker. He did smoke, which might have contributed to the heart attack he suffered during his first term. Until he became president, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower had never really had a home of their own. They did buy a farm at Gettysburg Pennsylvania during that first administration, however, probably a sweetheart deal aided by wealthy supporters.
Eisenhower separated his professional and personal lives more than most politicians do, and nowhere was this more apparent than in his relationship with his vice-president, Richard Nixon. Once later in his presidency Eisenhower gave a speech outside his Gettysburg house with Nixon present, then afterwards walked into the residence with some friends, leaving Nixon outside, remarking bitterly, "You know, he's never once invited me in that damn house."
John Kennedy was a sickly boy and as an adult was tormented by recurring back pain and Addison's disease. Even though he publicly insisted he was healthy, and made a fetish of physical fitness, by any reasonable standard he was too sick to be president. Early in his presidency he injured his back during a tree planting ceremony and was in severe pain through much of his first year in office. To relieve his suffering, his doctor prescribed both amphetamines and barbiturates. Yes, the president of the United States was on speed.
Kennedy's was Catholic, but Senator Eugene McCarthy, in a rather catty comment, claimed that when the two men attended mass together McCarthy had to stop giving the Latin prayer responses because Kennedy obviously didn't know them, and McCarthy didn't want to embarrass the president.
Kennedy did go to Catholic confession, but feared that a blabbermouth priest would know his voice and reveal what the president had confessed. So he would stand in the middle of a line on Catholic secret service agents to avoid recognition. It didn't always work. Once he entered a confessional, and the priest immediately said, "Good evening, Mr. President." Kennedy answered, "Good evening, father," stood up and walked out.
Lyndon Johnson was kind of a big papa bear in the White House, remarkably adept at getting what he wanted from Congress - for a while. Johnson seems to have had a thing about scouring his body. As president he had shower heads installed in the presidential bathroom that delivered over one hundred pounds of pressure, nearly what a firehose puts out.
He could be very human. Once he pulled up his shirt to show the press corps his gall bladder surgery scar.
I think Johnson had a personal animosity towards Dr. Martin Luther King, and did what he could to marginalize the civil rights leader. Perhaps he felt that the street protests were counter-productive.
Johnson had lusted after the presidency, but gradually became embittered by the office and by the Vietnam war. After leaving the White House he was heard to say that he felt he had sacrificed the love of his life - his Great Society program - for that bitch, the war.
Richard Nixon was a psychologist's dream, paranoid and afflicted with an inferiority complex in my opinion. I believe he never forgot an insult, whether it was real of he had imagined it. The whole Watergate mess resulted from his obsessive hatreds.
Nixon also believed in an extraordinarily expansive vision of presidential powers. He is quoted saying, "If the president does it, it's legal."
He liked his luxuries and his prerogatives. Two small examples: Nixon took congressional leaders on cruises aboard the presidential yacht and served them wine that cost $5 a bottle. He drank his own wine from a towel-wrapped bottle that cost $30. In addition, Nixon enjoyed fires in the White House fireplaces. At the same time he was exhorting Americans to use less electricity to ease the energy crisis, he insisted that fires be kept burning in the White House during August, while the air conditioning system worked struggled to cool the very air the fires were heating.
Gerald Ford was a good and decent man who had a marked tendency to stumble and nearly huhostagert himself. This propensity became a kind of national joke in the hands of Chevy Chase and the brand new Saturday Night Live television show. He was almost hurt for real in two assassination attempts, only two weeks apart. In one of these, the would-be murderer managed to get within a foot or two of the president, but her gun failed to discharge. This was Lynette "Squeaky" Fromm, a follower of Charles Manson.
Ford accepted a challenge to debate his challenger in the 1976 presidential contest, Jimmy Carter, but probably wished he hadn't after he made a huge gaffe, claiming the Soviet Union did not control Poland. The high unemployment rate and the public revulsion against the Republicans in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal damaged his chances, but that one mistake probably doomed his candidacy. Carter could hardly wipe the "gotcha" grin off his face when Ford made that boo-boo.
There is a kind of presidential mojo, and President Carter lost his somewhere around 1978. In fact, I think Jimmy Carter was the unluckiest president of my lifetime. Almost from the start of his term things didn't work out well. Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy didn't see eye to eye, the president wanting to emphasize energy independence and the senator wanting to push for national health insurance. His first winter was the coldest in many years and Carter urged Americans to conserve, something most people tired of pretty quickly. It was hardly Carter's fault that the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had a containment crisis, or that Mount Saint Helens blew its top, but I think people just came to think the man was jinxed.
It hurt his presidency badly that the Iranian revolution occurred during his term and fanatics took American diplomats hostage, though there was some warning and his administration might have evacuated before the seizure of the embassy took place. In fairness, this was almost unprecedented in modern times, so his failure to anticipate it is understandable. When the rescue mission failed disastrously though, he looked both irresolute and weak.
Carter made much of his religious faith, but even that seemed to betray him, and what was soon called the "religious right" was very instrumental in his failed re-election bid.
If Jimmy Carter had bad karma, his successor, Ronald Reagan, was born under a lucky star. Reagan was the son of a shoe salesman who was also an alcoholic. At least twice during his childhood his mother had to gather him and his brother and flee the house to avoid her husband's drunken rages.
Reagan attended public high school and then college on an athletic scholarship, running track and swimming. He majored in economics, though he later admitted he mostly studied sports and girls.
He graduated from college in the depths of the Great Depression, but soon found work as a sports announcer, doing remote broadcasts of Chicago Cubs games, then segued into Hollywood and movies. He was never a big movie star, but proved to be a capable professional actor and was still getting work in pictures well into his forties. He then became a corporate spokesman for General Electric, drawing a substantial salary as a kind of company cheerleader.
Originally a New Deal Democrat, he swung over to the Republican party in the early 1950's, alarmed and repulsed by what he felt was the growing influence of communism in American life. Soon he was among the most conservative of all Republicans.
His entry into politics was rather late in life and almost accidental, but he made a well-received speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater's doomed candidacy for president in 1964 and soon was asked by wealthy California Republicans to run for governor.
It turned out he was a formidable debater, who was taken too lightly by a succession of Democrats, including President Carter. He won the White House, promising to cut taxes, balance the federal budget and rebuild the military. He said he would accomplish this using the precepts of "supply side economics."
The result was a severe recession in 1982, a downturn that might have crippled his chances at re-election, but for the failed assassination attempt of 1981 and the man's remarkable personal magnetism. He was wounded much more dangerously by the assassin than the public was told, but his recovery added to his popularity and made it easier to get what he wanted from Congress.
The federal deficit exploded from $60 billion to $200 billion per year during his first term, but who cared, the economy was booming by 1984, fueled in part by military spending and partly by rapidly increasing worker productivity which itself was fueled by better and cheaper office machines - that is, computers.
Not everyone loved Reagan or his policies, but enough people did to give him a 49 state sweep in the 1984 election over the hapless Walter Mondale.
Like many presidents, his second term was not so successful though he did see the implosion of the Soviet Union during those years. He also provided arms to the Mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan who would soon become a major irritant to the United States.
By 1988 the country had seen sixteen years of Republicans in the White House to four years of Democrats and pundits said the nation was ready for a change. Though Reagan remained popular all the way to the end of his second term, his potential successor, George Bush, did not share the outgoing president's personal attributes. To get elected he waged what I think was the nastiest presidential campaign of my lifetime. Bush and his surrogates simply assassinated the character of his opponent, Michael Dukakis, though it must be said Dukakis ran the most inept campaign I ever saw.
Bush is famous for the "no new taxes" pledge he made when accepting the Republican nomination, but sensibly broke the pledge in 1991, making a budget deal with the majority Congressional Democrats. Though the bargain was made in a bipartisan spirit of compromise, something the public says it wants from our politicians, it infuriated Bush's hardcore base, and, along with another recession, paved the way for the election of Bill Clinton.
Bush was an elitist. He vacationed in Maine and went surf fishing there, something most Americans have never done. He expressed surprise at a grocery store in 1992 over barcodes, something that had been in use for ten years at the time, making people wonder if he ever went to a store himself. He checked his watch halfway through a presidential debate, looking as if he just could hardly wait to get out of there, and when asked how the recession had affected him personally he answered, "What do you mean? I don't get it." You could almost hear people all over America saying, "Well, that's the problem, George, you just don't get it."
Bill Clinton. What shall we say about Bill Clinton? A man of undeniable political ability, ambitious to a fault, charming but personally sleazy. Henry Stimson, way back at the beginning of the twentieth century, was asked his opinion of successive presidents. Of Theodore Roosevelt, he said, "A man's man." Of William Howard Taft, he said, "A lady's man." And when asked about Warren Harding, he opined, "A sporting lady's man."
Clinton, whose candidacy was nearly terminated in 1992 by Gennifer Flowers, didn't learn to keep his pants zipped, and subjected the nation to the spectacle of an impeachment in 1998 and 1999 over his extra-marital relationship with an intern and alleged lies about it, and an attempted seduction under color of authority years earlier while still governor of Arkansas. Never mind that the Republicans fanning the flames of impeachment were base hypocrites, hiding their own transgressions while hounding the president for his.
Clinton escaped the presidency in 2001, still comparatively popular, but his would-be successor, Al Gore, was damaged by the White House scandal. Indeed, Gore could claim the country was prosperous and at peace after eight years of the Democrats, but George W. Bush insisted he would bring honor and integrity back to the White House, and that made the election a virtual dead heat.
I don't think I'll discuss the 2000 election in depth. Most people remember the story. I'll just repeat a question being asked in the aftermath. "If you were told about a third world country where an election was extremely close and the outcome depended on returns from a single province where one candidate's brother was governor, and where the counting of ballots was very suspicious, wouldn't you think the whole thing was real fishy?"
George Bush was a ne'er-do-well as a young man. He formed successive companies that always seemed to be on the verge of failure when he'd be bailed out by wealthy friends of the family. He invested $600,000 of borrowed money to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team and a few years later sold his interest for $15 million in what can only be called a sweetheart deal.
He was often drunk. Here in Colorado Springs we point out the Broadmoor Hotel were George Bush supposedly awakened one morning in the mid-1980's, hungover, and decided to reform his life.
Bush's major economic premises were tax cuts and privatization. The tax cuts left government checks in most people's mailboxes, which made them happy but didn't change anyone's life. Quietly, the tax rebates to wealthy Americans were much much larger than what average folks received. The "Bush era tax cuts" are still a matter of political debate ten years later, though when they were enacted they were supposed to be a temporary stimulus.
I think the country was ready to fire George Bush in 2004, but John Kerry, viciously attacked by "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," whose commercials were paid for by a wealthy Bush supporter, didn't give people a good enough reason to do so. I also think that if Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans in 2004 instead of 2005, and people saw how inept the federal response was, Bush would have lost the election.
Of President Obama, I'll say very little. According to his first book, he did sleep in a New York alleyway his first night in the big city, and in the morning cleaned up with a hose before attending classes at Columbia. He has been bedeviled by "birthers" who deny he's an American by birth and therefore his presidency is illegal, though he has shown a birth certificate and the state of Hawaii acknowledges their paper birth records have been destroyed.
He seems to be getting thinner and grayer as his term progresses.
Well, this is a long post and I have to get to work. Bye
