American History Revised (52 page)

After Bryan, the second-youngest candidate was the Republican Thomas E. Dewey, in 1944. He was forty-two. Four years later, at the age of forty-six, he blew a sure-win race against Truman by acting complacent and not campaigning vigorously. A more mature and seasoned Dewey would have won.

Harry Truman, Dewey’s opponent, had every reason to be skeptical of bright, flaming youth. In 1960 he accused the forty-three-year-old John F. Kennedy of not being mature or experienced enough to be president. Kennedy’s response: “To exclude from positions of trust and command all those below the age of forty-four would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, Madison from fathering the Constitution, Hamilton from serving as secretary of the treasury, Clay from being elected Speaker of the House, and Christopher Columbus from discovering America.”
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A clever response, but writing the Declaration of Independence or discovering America isn’t the same as being president of the United States. Looking back on our past, we see another bright flaming youth who rose like a rocket, then crashed because of youthful poor judgment. A college graduate at seventeen, a lawyer at twenty, a congressman at thirty-one, and vice president of the United States at thirty-six—the youngest man ever to hold that office—John C. Breckenridge ran for president at forty, lost the party nomination to Stephen Douglas, and ran as an independent, finishing third. That was as far as he got. At the pivotal decision point in his life, he switched sides and joined the Confederate Army, rising to the position of Confederate secretary of war; at the end of hostilities, forced to flee for his life as a traitor to the Union, he made his way to Cuba and spent the next three years in exile. Pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868, Breckenridge returned home and died six years later, at the age of fifty-four, still under the cloud of treason.

Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield offers this shrewd insight on age and political wisdom:

1904
When the Barbary pirate Sherif Mulai Ahmed ibn-Muhammed er Raisuli had the temerity to kidnap a wealthy American living in Tangier, Ion Perdicaris, President Theodore Roosevelt was delighted. With a troublesome presidential election coming up, he needed a headline-grabbing cause around which to rally the nation. An American held for ransom by a ruthless pirate—how perfect! “The President is in his best mood,” said the French ambassador. “He is always in his best mood.”

Putting America’s honor and prestige on the line, TR dispatched seven warships to the scene, got the French to prop up the reigning sultan, and, after weeks of pointless negotiating, sent the electrifying demand, “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” The Republican Party delegates, after hearing the telegram read aloud, stomped their feet and renominated Roosevelt by acclamation. In the meantime, back in Morocco, Raisuli finally released Perdicaris and American prestige was saved.

What was not known, and was kept secret until 1933, was that Perdicaris was not an American! Apparently, during the Civil War he had become a Greek citizen to avoid being drafted by the Confederacy, and had never bothered to reclaim his American citizenship. For the president, who only found out about it during the middle of the crisis, it was most embarrassing. “It is bad business,” murmured the secretary of state; “we must keep it excessively confidential for the time present.” No word of this secret leaked out, and Roosevelt went on to win the 1904 general election by the largest popular majority ever given to a presidential candidate.

1912
In this election, the incumbent president had so much respect for his challenger that he was prepared to leave office immediately if he lost, and not wait around for the four-month interregnum between administrations.

He therefore concocted the following plan: he would order his vice president and his secretary of state to resign immediately,
then replace the secretary of state with the newly elected president, and then resign himself. There being no president or vice president, the secretary of state would automatically become president. An ingenious idea, but it never happened. Because President Woodrow Wilson won a surprise victory at the last moment (by a scant 3,775 votes in a pivotal state), the issue of whether Charles Evans Hughes would have accepted this unusual offer never came up.
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Farfetched? Hardly. It almost happened again—in 1946. Harry Truman had been thrust suddenly into the presidency. In the midterm congressional elections of November 1946, all six Democrats seeking reelection were routed. “The New Deal is kaput,” said the
New York Daily News.
“It is finished. It is over. Historians to come will lift it out to study as a species, as they study the Thirty Years’ War or the Black Plague and other disasters.” The
New York Herald Tribune
did a conversion of congressional votes to state electoral votes and computed that if the midterm elections had been a presidential election, the Democrats would have been clobbered 357–174 (as opposed to their 432–99 landslide win in the 1944 FDR-Dewey election).

Leading Democrats hung their heads in shame. Why postpone the inevitable?

Marshall Field, the Chicago newspaper magnate, and Arkansas senator J. W. Fulbright were Truman supporters. They both advised Truman to appoint a Republican as secretary of state, then resign. There being no vice president at the time, the Republican secretary of state would become president. Senator Fulbright even suggested a specific individual: Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Truman, of course, went ballistic, and once again this novel theory of presidential succession never occurred.

Could it happen again? Yes, in slightly different form, using the vice presidency instead of the secretary-of-state position. The Succession Act of 1947 changed the third in line of succession from the secretary of state to the Speaker of the House. But the 1967 Twenty-fifth Amendment specified that there must be a vice president at all times, and gave the president the power to nominate the occupant of the position, subject to confirmation by both houses. (This is what happened in 1974.) If Wilson were president today, he could have his vice president resign, and then appoint Hughes to the vice presidency. Same for Truman: he could follow Senator Fulbright’s advice and appoint Vandenberg to the vice presidency, then resign.

1919
It seems like a non sequitur to say that a key qualification of a presidential candidate is that he stay alive—except that it has happened three times in our history that we have been denied a likely president because of premature death.

The first, as mentioned in
chapter 2
, was William Lowndes. A second instance was Bobby Kennedy, assassinated in 1968 while on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination. Both candidates had as good a chance as anyone to make it all the way.

There is a third candidate: he definitely would have made it. His sudden death shocked and traumatized millions of Americans: they knew what they had lost. In March 1919, they woke up and were stunned to hear that their senior statesman who everyone expected to win the presidency again in 1920—eight years after losing a three-way race to Wilson—had died of a pulmonary embolism in his sleep: Theodore Roosevelt. He was only sixty years old.

1951
The two top Republican contenders for a sure-win victory against a lame-duck Democratic administration had a secret meeting. The leading Republican was the powerful senator from Ohio, Robert Taft. Eisenhower, the victorious general from World War II, was the popular candidate. But Taft was the one who had the upper hand: Eisenhower came to him, not he to Eisenhower.

In their private negotiation in the spring of 1951, Eisenhower offered to stay out of the campaign and let Taft be the nominee, if Taft would support the principle of collective security in Europe. All Taft had to do was compromise.

Son of the only man to hold the top two positions in the U.S. government—President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft—Taft was a man one would think had good political instincts. He did not: he refused the offer.