American History Revised (53 page)

Eisenhower entered the race, painted Taft as an isolationist who didn’t know what he was doing, and won the nomination and then the election against Adlai Stevenson.

Rarely has a front-runner blown it, fair and square. William F. Buckley once said he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. The same can be said of Robert Taft,
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first in his class at Yale and first in his class at Harvard Law School: too smart to be president.

1960
John F. Kennedy’s wild philandering—with as many as four hundred women, complete with many photographs showing him naked with a lovely broad—provided ready grist for the tabloid mill. Any one of these flibbertigibbets could have been a walking time-bomb had she opened her mouth during the close election contest with Richard Nixon. Kennedy won the election by only 118,000 votes out of 68.3 million ballots cast. According to a
Life
magazine poll in 1984, “A third of Americans say that if they had known of his [Kennedy’s] affairs, they would not have voted for him.”

Kennedy was lucky to have Nixon for an opponent. Warned by his aides that Nixon might use one of the photographs against him, John Kennedy responded, “He won’t use it.”

Kennedy was also lucky to have a compliant press. Said one former Associated Press reporter, “There used to be a gentlemen’s agreement about reporting such things.” Even Ben Bradlee, the Washington bureau chief of
Newsweek
and later the editor of the
Washington Post
who helped bring down Nixon during the Watergate scandal of 1974, was surprised when news of Kennedy’s womanizing began to come out after JFK’s death. The prevailing moral ethic of the 1960s was, “You don’t talk about my private life and I don’t talk about yours.” Kennedy knew the score perfectly, and played it to the hilt: “They can’t touch me while I’m alive,” he once said, “and after I’m dead, who cares?”

1972
Anyone who thinks the vice presidency is a good training ground for the presidency should look at the only time in our nation’s history when both office-seekers were former vice presidents: 1972 (Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey). “That fact alone,” says one historian, “should have tipped off the nation that the executive branch was about to enter its darkest hour. By the time the next presidential election came around, neither Nixon nor Agnew would be in office, both having been forced to resign in disgrace.”

The real benefit of the vice presidency, for ambitious men seeking the presidency, is practice running for national office—and not winning the prize (lest the poor fellow waste four years of his life, with nothing to do). This was the route taken by FDR in 1920 and JFK in 1956. The national exposure they gained, and the subsequent freedom to pursue their real objective after losing, served them well.
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Serving as vice president is not a good training ground for serving as president. Running for vice president, however, is a good training ground for running for president.

1980
Two of our leading presidents rose to power largely on the basis of their public speaking ability. They wrote most of their speeches themselves, practiced their delivery many times until they got their rhythm and cadence right, and always endeavored to close their speeches with a strong summing-up statement.

Even rarer, they both were masters of the homespun anecdote. At a moment’s notice they could draw upon a wealth of pithy yarns to disarm their audience and make their point, be it one-on-one or in a formal debate or in a speech. They could relate to people easily.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was running for president, he was told that only three chief executives of America’s largest five hundred companies had endorsed his candidacy. He voiced no concern: “I’ve got to be the candidate of the shopkeeper, the farmer, the independent, the entrepreneur—there are a lot more of them.”

This common touch, developed after years in the public speaking arena, molded his campaign strategy when he sought the presidency. In so doing, he was following the example of Abraham Lincoln. “Don’t shoot too high,” said Lincoln; “aim lower and the common people will understand you. They are the ones you want to reach.”

1789–2000
Every four years, Americans enter the polling booth, pull the lever for their candidate, and hope for a man with the qualities that made some of our earlier presidents great.

Brains is not one of them. If intellectual dexterity were the criterion for judging presidents, the winner would be James A. Garfield. This classical scholar not only developed an elegant proof of the Pythagorean theorem, he could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other, simultaneously! Or Herbert Hoover, who also spoke several languages. (Whenever he and his wife wanted privacy in the White House, they conversed in Mandarin.) Or Calvin Coolidge, whose idea of relaxation was to read Dante’s
Inferno
—in medieval Latin. Or George H. W. Bush, who breezed through Yale in two and a half years, Phi Beta Kappa. Our most intellectual president was not John F. Kennedy, who won a Pulitzer Prize for
Why England Slept
—his rich father’s ghostwriters deserve most of the credit. For original authorship, we have to credit the president with a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa,
Theodore Roosevelt. He wrote forty books, including a multivolume history on the winning of the West that still stands today as a work of fine scholarship. Still, though he prided himself on his intellectual achievements, he was the first to put it in proper perspective. “I am only an average man, but by George, I work harder than the average man!” Or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of TR’s distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt: “A second-rate mind with a first-rate temperament.”

The two Georges

And what makes for a good temperament? A happy family life? If that were the model, the winner would be George H. W. Bush, who once said the achievement he was most proud of was that his children always came back home for the holidays. The same cannot be said of his predecessor Ronald Reagan, whose daughter wrote a book depicting her First Lady mother as being a witchlike “Mommie Dearest.”

Many presidents, it seems, have come from rather unhappy if stable family backgrounds. When this man died at age twenty-eight, his name appeared on at least four marriage licenses, two divorce decrees, and three birth certificates—including one of a future president of the United States. Who was his son? An even better one: A hard-driving entrepreneur,
with a thriving business in three states, he had six children, including a ne’er-do-well son who could never hold a job for long and was always borrowing money. He left his son out of his will. Seven years later his son became president of the United States.

The first son was Bill Clinton; the second, Ulysses Grant. Grant had a hard time not only with his father, but also with his father-in-law. When the Civil War started and “Sam” Grant needed to borrow money to buy his Union Army uniform, both his father and his father-in-law turned him down, they thought so little of him. Harry Truman also had a confidence problem: when he married his local sweetheart, his fiancée’s mother warned her in no uncertain terms, “You don’t want to marry that farmer boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.” At least that wasn’t as bad as what Warren Harding had to go through: when he got married, his father-in-law was so angry he disinherited the bride and tried to drive him into bankruptcy.

We don’t know what Abraham Lincoln’s father thought of his son, but we know what Abe thought of his father. Lincoln, probably the most compassionate man ever to occupy the White House, did not invite his father to his wedding, never visited the man, and declined to attend his father’s funeral in 1851. George Washington wrote more than a thousand letters in his lifetime, but mentioned his father in only two of them.

People looking to marital bliss as a clue to presidential greatness are also likely to be disappointed. One of our leading presidents spent his pre-inaugural night alone, while his wife spent the night down the hall with her girlfriend, to whom she was to write some 2,300 letters during her lifetime. The president was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. After his death in 1945, Eleanor admitted she and her husband hadn’t slept together for twenty-nine years.

If obvious qualities like brains and family happiness are not harbingers of presidential success, what ideals should voters look for? Rather than answer this impossible question directly, let us look at examples of modesty, statesmanship, and perspective that suggest wisdom. Asked whether the responsibilities of the job worried him, FDR said, “If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy!”

That Thomas Jefferson was a remarkable man goes without saying. Who else “could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin”? Who else could read the Bible in four languages? Said President John F. Kennedy to a group of Nobel Prize winners at a White House dinner, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever gathered at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
When Thomas Jefferson died, he requested that his three major life achievements be inscribed on his gravestone.