A Treasury of Great American Scandals

by Michael Farquhar

  Ulysses S. Grant’s administration was nearly done in by the shenanigans of the president’s younger brother, Orvil, a thief and scoundrel of the first order. Orvil and Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, lined their pockets with kickbacks from the sale of lucrative trading post franchises on the Western frontier. Since army regulations required soldiers to patronize the posts, a franchise was a valuable commodity with a guaranteed clientele. Annual payments to Grant and Belknap, however, forced traders to charge outrageously high prices for goods; even General George Armstrong Custer felt the pinch. Custer caused a huge sensation when he testified against Belknap and implicated Orvil Grant during a Senate investigation that clinched Grant’s as the most corrupt administration to that date.

  Lyndon Johnson did his darnedest to avoid being shamed by his unpredictable brother, Sam Houston Johnson, but his efforts ultimately backfired. Like many siblings of the successful, Sam Houston lived in his brother’s shadow. LBJ even had him living at the White House during his administration so he could keep an eye on him and control the fallout from his famous fondness for drink. Sam came to refer to the president’s home as “the penitentiary”: While being driven up the driveway he would hold his wrists together as if cuffed and shout, “Back to my cell.” For a time LBJ was successful in reining in his brother, keeping his profile so low with busywork that people started calling him “Silent Sam.” The silence, however, was soon to be shattered. Lyndon Johnson was said to have been deeply embarrassed by Sam’s book, My Brother, Lyndon, which was released soon after the president’s inglorious departure from the White House in 1969. Sam’s portrait of his brother was hardly flattering. “I’ve always said that anyone who worked for my brother for at least a month deserved the Purple Heart,” he wrote. The estrangement between the brothers lasted until LBJ’s death in 1973.

  If uncouth behavior really is an unconscious form of sibling rivalry, Billy Carter—the mother of all embarrassing brothers—had to have been waging war. This hillbilly cartoon of a character, however, never failed to entertain. Whether holding court in front of his Plains, Georgia, gas station, or making one of his numerous, and well-paid, public appearances—like judging and participating in a world championship belly flop competition—he was ever dependable as a goofy foil. Like when he was seen urinating in public while waiting at the airport for a delegation of Libyans he was hosting. Indeed the Libyan relationship was Billy Carter’s crowning glory, especially when he accepted a $220,000 loan for representing the outlaw nation’s interests, and got a federal investigation aimed at him just in time for Jimmy’s reelection campaign. The president always said he was loath to interfere in his brother’s business, possibly because Billy had already announced what he’d do if big brother ever did: “I’d tell him to kiss my ass.”

  Part II

  Cold Wars

  Hatfield vs. McCoy may be the most famous American feud, but it was by no means an aberration. We the people have made bickering among ourselves a treasured pastime, especially the most prominent among us. The winding path of U.S. history is strewn with great spats—some lethal, others just plain old nasty.

  1

  Feuding Founding Fathers

  Busy as they were building a new nation, the Founding Fathers always managed to squeeze in enough time to tear one another apart. In this mode, they came off looking more like squabbling fish-wives—hurling insults and nursing petty resentments—than a brotherhood united in the quest for freedom. John Adams, “the crankiest Founding Father,” as historian Jack D. Warren calls him, was involved in many of these sometimes vicious quarrels. He seems to have had a gripe with just about all of his esteemed colleagues, including George Washington, under whom he served as the nation’s first vice president.3

  “The rushing and dashing and roaring of the word Washington, Washington, Washington,” Adams wrote resentfully, “like the waters at Passaic or the tremendous cataract of Niagara, deafens stuns astonishes and bedizzards, all who are within hearing.”

  It wasn’t that Adams disliked Washington—he actually admired him in some ways—but all the laudatory attention he received, especially after his death in 1799, drove Adams nuts. “The feasts and funerals in honor of Washington,” he complained, “is as corrupt a system as that by which saints were canonized and cardinals, popes, and whole hierarchical systems created.” That his fellow Federalists idolized Washington galled Adams, who declared that they “have done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious and even moral Pope, and ascribing everything to him.”

  The roots of Adams’s resentment of “the superstitious veneration that is sometimes paid to Genl Washington” lay in part with his own diminishing reputation. After his defeat in the presidential election of 1800, he was obsessed by what historian Joseph Ellis calls “a frantic and uncontrollable craving for personal vindication, a lust for fame,” and “an acute awareness that history would not do him justice.” To Adams, it just wasn’t fair that Washington was getting all the credit for fathering the new nation. Many leaders, including himself, played key roles in the revolution, he insisted, complaining that it “offended against eternal justice to give to one, as the People do, the Merits of so many.” Besides, Washington wasn’t so great to begin with. In a letter to Benjamin Rush, Adams listed the “talents” to which Washington owed “his immense elevation above his fellows,” noting sardonically that none of these talents involved “reading, thinking, or writing”:1. An handsome face. That this is a talent, I can prove by the authority of a thousand instances in all ages. . . .

  2. A tall stature, like the Hebrew sovereign chosen because he was taller by the head than the other Jews.

  3. An elegant form.

  4. Graceful attitudes and movements.

  5. A large, imposing fortune consisting of a great landed estate left him by his father and brother, besides a large jointure with his lady. . . .

  6. Washington was a Virginian. This is equivalent to five talents. Virginian geese are all swans. Not a bairn in Scotland is more national, not a lad upon the Highlands is more clannish, than every Virginian I have ever known. . . . The Philadelphia and New Yorkers, who are local and partial enough to themselves, are meek and modest in comparison with Virginian Old Dominionism. Washington, of course, was extolled without bounds.

  7. Washington was preceded by favorable anecdotes.

  8. He possessed the gift of silence. . . . This I esteem as one of the most precious talents.

  9. He had great self-command.

  10. Whenever he lost his temper, as he sometimes did, either love or fear in those about him induced them to conceal his weakness from the world.

  If Adams was jealous of George Washington, he absolutely despised Benjamin Franklin, no slouch himself when it came to cultivating enemies—including his own son.4 Adams called Franklin “the old Conjurer,” dismissing him as a phony who managed to fool people with trite philosophies and contrived charm. Franklin didn’t think much of Adams, either: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

  Oddly enough, the two Founding Fathers had gotten along relatively well while serving together in the Second Continental Congress. Adams even wrote to his wife, Abigail, that Franklin was a “great and good Man,” if a tad overrated as a leader. Trouble only began later, in 1778, when Adams joined Franklin in Paris as part of a three-man commission seeking to buttress France’s support for the American war against Britain. Their first mistake was living together, and even sharing a bed—a sure way of transforming quirks of personality into glaring annoyances. Franklin’s shameless flirtations with the ladies of Paris shocked Adams’s Puritan sensibilities, as did his lackadaisical approach to work. (Ben was not one to follow his own aphorisms such as “Early to bed, early to rise. . . .”) It probably didn’t help matters that Franklin was revered in France while Adams’s arrival barely made a ripple
. A bruised ego no doubt informed the newcomer’s assertion that Franklin had “a Monopoly of Reputation here [in France], and an Indecencey in displaying it.”

  The relationship was further strained when Congress dissolved the commission less than a year after Adams arrived in France. With no new assignment, Adams was despondent and determined to return home. He was booked to sail on the American frigate Alliance, but just as he was about to depart, Franklin informed him that the naval hero John Paul Jones needed the ship and that he would have to stay in France for a few more months. Adams, who didn’t much care for Jones either, felt slighted—sacrificed, he believed, to Jones’s ambition. His resentment was soon replaced by the nagging suspicion that Franklin was deliberately upsetting his travel plans to prevent his telling “some dangerous Truths” at home, presumably that Franklin was in cahoots with a French merchant trading with America, and that he was profiting at the public’s expense. “Does the old Conjurer dread my voice in Congress?” Adams wrote in his diary. “He had some Reason for he has often heard it there, a Terror to evil doers.”

  Adams did eventually make it home on another ship, but it wasn’t long before he was back in France, appointed by Congress as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate an end to the War of Independence. Needless to say, he did not move back in with Ben. He didn’t even tell his former housemate the exact details of his appointment, lest Franklin find a way to sabotage it. Though they always maintained a cordial façade, the animosity between the two men intensified over their conflicting approaches in dealing with France, now America’s indispensable ally in the war with Britain. Adams thought Franklin was too acquiescent with the French, too fearful of upsetting them. Franklin, he charged, believed “affairs in Europe ought to be under one direction, and that the French ought to be the center.” For his own part, Franklin thought Adams too strident in pursuing American interests. “Decency and Delicacy,” he said, were vital in securing greater assistance from France. Adams, he felt, lacked both.

  French foreign minister Charles Gravier Vergennes, a snob of the highest order, preferred Franklin’s more deferential style and quickly grew tired of Adams’s bold entreaties on behalf of the United States. After receiving a letter from Adams calling for French naval support, Vergennes cut off communications completely, announcing that henceforth he would deal only with Franklin. “The King [Louis XVI],” he disdainfully informed Adams, “[does] not stand in need of your solicitation to direct his attention to the interests of the United States.” Vergennes also sent a packet of Adams’s pushy letters to Franklin with a note saying, “The King expects that you will lay the whole before Congress.”

  This Franklin did with apparent relish, adding his own note of condemnation. “Mr. Adams has given extreme offense to the court here,” Franklin wrote to Congress. “Having nothing else wherewith to employ himself, he seems to have endeavored to supply what he may suppose my negotiations defective in. He thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; for that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should show spirit in our applications. I apprehend that he mistakes his ground.”

  Adams never forgave Franklin for this wholly unnecessary public slam, and later he expressed his contempt in a letter to Robert Livingston: “Sir, I must say, that I can lay no stress upon the Opinion of this unintelligible Politician [Franklin]. If I was in Congress, and this gentleman and the Marble Mercury in the Garden of Versailles were in Nomination for an Embassy, I would not hesitate to give my Vote for the Statue, upon the principle that it would do no harm.”

  John Adams may not have made many friends among the other Founding Fathers, but he did consider Thomas Jefferson a pal—particularly since the Sage of Monticello, eight years younger, always managed to give Adams his propers. Jefferson knew just how to stroke his colleague’s prickly ego and leave him purring like a placated cat.

  “Spent the evening with Mr. Jefferson, whom I love to be with,” Adams effused in his diary, one of many such entries during the period they spent together as American ministers in Paris. Even Abigail Adams, always a hawk when it came to her husband’s interests, was drawn in by Jefferson, “one of the choice ones of the earth,” as she described him.

  With Jefferson, however, nothing was ever quite as it appeared on the surface. Sure, he admired Adams in some ways, but the homage he paid to the older man’s face was not always in keeping with what he had to say behind his back. In one letter to James Madison, for example, Jefferson likened Adams to a poisonous weed: “He hates Franklin, he hates [John] Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere? His vanity is a lineament in his character which had entirely escaped me. His want of taste I had observed. Notwithstanding all this he has a sound head on substantive points, and I think he has integrity. I am glad therefore that he is of the commission [in Paris] and expect he will be useful in it. His dislike of all parties, and all men, by balancing his prejudices, may give the same fair play to his reason as would be a general benevolence of temper. At any rate honesty may be expected even from poisonous weeds.”

  Adams, of course, only saw the side of Jefferson that Jefferson wanted him to see, and was completely enamored of it. “Jefferson is an excellent hand,” he gushed in a letter to Elbridge Gerry after Jefferson joined him in Paris. “You could not have sent better.” To Henry Knox, Adams wrote, “You can scarcely have heard a character [ization] too high of my friend and colleague, Mr. Jefferson, either in point of power or virtues. . . . I only fear that his unquenchable thirst for knowledge may injure his health.” For a man of Adams’s temperament, this unrestrained praise was highly unusual, especially compared to what he had to say about that “old Conjurer” Franklin, or any of the other Founding Fathers he felt had done him wrong. It was obvious that Jefferson’s outward deference went a long way with a man feeling as chronically unappreciated as Adams did.

  The two men worked harmoniously together as commissioners in Paris and were sad to part company after Adams was appointed the first American minister to Great Britain in 1785. “I shall part with Mr. Jefferson with great regret,” Adams wrote, while Jefferson sent tender sentiments to Adams in London: “The departure of your family has left me in the dumps. My afternoons hang heavily on me.” The two maintained a friendly correspondence back and forth between London and Paris, and at one point took a two-month tour together of the English countryside, after which Jefferson even praised Adams in private. It was an idyll in their relationship that was not to last.

  The French Revolution that began in the summer of 1789 was celebrated by Jefferson, recently returned from France and serving as George Washington’s secretary of state, as an epic fulmination of Republican ideals. Adams, now vice president, was skeptical of the revolution’s excesses. “Everything will be pulled down. So much seems certain,” he wrote. “But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? . . . Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in imposters?”

  Jefferson “deplored” Adams’s failure to embrace the revolution in France, viewing it as an embarrassing betrayal of all they had worked for in America. Adams believed Jefferson was becoming a fanatic. Though the two remained cordial members of Washington’s cabinet, their differing views on the events in France represented an emerging factionalism in American politics that would soon make them enemies.

  The growing alienation between Adams and Jefferson was made excruciatingly public in 1791 when Jefferson sent an early copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man to a Philadelphia printer with a note endorsing it as the answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” The printer included Jefferson’s words on the title page, and it was obvious that the “political heresies” of which he spoke belonged to Adams for his cautious stance on the French Revolution. In a letter to George Washington, Jefferson acknowledged that he was indeed referring to Adams, but claimed to be “mortified” at “the indiscretion of a print
er” in making his position public. He was, he said, loath to offend his “friend Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have cordial esteem”—despite “his apostasy to hereditary monarchy.”

  Jefferson’s endorsement in The Rights of Man made Adams the object of ridicule in many newspapers as an avowed monarchist dismayed by the march of freedom in France. It was a charge that would plague him for the rest of his political career, and one for which he blamed Jefferson. To Adams, his old friend had become almost as radical as the violent extremists in France. While Jefferson reveled in the execution of Louis XVI, writing that “the spectre of royalty [would now be] broken in pieces, in every part of the globe,” Adams was horrified. “Mankind,” he wrote, “will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots”—a position borne out in France by the ensuing Reign of Terror.

  The unleashing of opposing political parties, largely brought on by the events in France, eventually drove Jefferson out of George Washington’s administration early in 1794. Adams was not sorry to see him go. “Jefferson went off yesterday,” he wrote on January 6, “and a good riddance of bad ware.” Though Jefferson was temporarily out of the picture, this was not the end of his simmering conflict with Adams. Both entered the presidential race of 1796. Adams narrowly won, but Jefferson, as runner-up, would be his vice president.5 Perhaps unaware just how far politics had driven them apart, Adams expected Jefferson would be a loyal, nonpartisan vice president. How wrong he was.

  France, now at war with Great Britain, was still the great, divisive issue. The United States was officially neutral in the European conflict, but its shipping was under constant assault by France in an effort to cripple American commerce with Britain. The Adams administration wanted peace with France, but not at any price. The president advocated negotiation, but he strengthened defenses as well. Jefferson, leading the Republican opposition, believed Britain should be defeated in the war and sought to undermine the president’s perceived anti-French policies. In a private meeting with Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, the French chargé d’affaires, Jefferson said America was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” According to Letombe, Jefferson also had a few choice words for President Adams, describing him as “vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” So much for loyalty.