Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents
Page 13
Wilson was a big fan of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a film that glorified the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.
And what a war it turned out to be. Wilson the archliberal found himself presiding over a government that exhorted its masses to battle with hideous, sanguinary propaganda. Those who spoke out against the war—or, for that matter, against the proliferation of violence against German Americans—were shamelessly and hurriedly jailed. Despite all the ugliness, Wilson, ever the optimistic Presbyterian, never lost sight of the prize: a peaceful future. So there’d be no excuse for failure, he even made it easy for the world by creating his Fourteen Points, which envisioned the upcoming peace settlement as an opportunity to create a League of Nations to settle disputes by arbitration.
Unfortunately, many of the professor’s students weren’t taking notes—indeed, some of them were skipping class altogether. The president may have been welcomed as a virtual messiah in Paris, but European leaders had revenge on their minds and couldn’t wait to kick a defeated Germany where the sun doesn’t shine. Even worse, Wilson’s own backyard was doing some kicking of its own, walloping his posterior with a Republican takeover of the Senate that started picking over his Fourteen Points like vegans at a Mongolian barbecue. Wilson ended up compromising with the Europeans, but when senators started making some sobering edits to the final treaty before ratifying it, Wilson dug in his heels, took the debate to the American people by embarking upon an ambitious national tour . . . and had a stroke. While Wilson languished at death’s door, his opponents finally got their way, and the League of Nations came into being without the nation whose president had cooked up the idea in the first place (and who won a Nobel prize for it, no less). Now that’s humiliation.
Wilson lived until 1924, long enough to see a Republican elected to replace him in a resounding repudiation of all things Wilsonian. He remains the only president buried in Washington, D.C. (within the National Cathedral). What grade would the schoolmaster have given himself in the end? Despite some profound achievements, history offers something like a B-. Betcha he would’ve asked for an extension.
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UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Wilson suffered from a myriad of ailments his entire life. As a boy, he was dyslexic and could not read until he was nine. As a young man, he suffered from constant bouts of nausea, constipation, and heartburn. He even used a stomach pump to combat the build-up of acid in his stomach with infusions of water. Most attribute the cause of his frailty to excessive tension which led to problems with his stomach and, eventually, his heart. Little wonder that the pressures of stumping on behalf of the League of Nations finally caused the stroke that paralyzed his left side and prevented him from concluding his presidency with a bang.
BERMUDA LOVE TRIANGLE
Wilson’s handshake was once compared to “a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper.” There’s no doubt that he was austere, aloof, sanctimonious, and generally ill at ease in intimate social circumstances. But Wilson, surprisingly, had a romantic side that burned like a furnace. The letters he wrote to his first wife simmer with sexual desire, and thousands of them survive. It was a truly touching correspondence, and it stands in stark contrast to the strictly reserved image we have of Wilson as the repressed son of a Presbyterian minister.
But the marriage was not without its share of missteps. In 1907, Wilson traveled to Bermuda on his doctor’s orders to relieve some of the stress that was burning a hole in his stomach. There he met one Mary Allen Hulbert Peck, a worldly divorcée whose charm burned a hole in Wilson’s heart. Though it is not known whether the two consummated their obvious closeness, Wilson made several trips to Bermuda, always with the intent of seeing Mrs. Peck. While the relationship threatened both Wilson’s marriage and his presidential campaign, it ultimately failed to mess up either. (Peck refused to sell her letters from Wilson to the Republicans, and Wilson’s wife, Ellen, forgave him.)
TITILLATING TYPO
When Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, died of Bright’s disease in 1914, the loss nearly resulted in the first presidential suicide. He was utterly heartbroken and descended into depression. But Wilson soon met Edith Bolling Galt, and they were married in December 1915. Reporting on one of their first dates to the theater, the Washington Post made an infamous typo when it wrote that, rather than entertaining his lady friend, “the President spent most of his time entering Mrs. Galt.” Edith became his closest confidante and advisor—she even encoded and decoded his messages to the diplomatic corps abroad and, after his stroke, carefully screened his visitors, leading many to conclude that she was acting president.
PEACE, LOVE, HARMONY, YADDA, YADDA, YADDA
Wilson was a visionary when it came to international peace and fighting for common workers against big business. But his plans for bettering the lot of humanity didn’t quite extend to blacks. A white supremacist, Wilson allowed segregation to creep into the Treasury Department and the U.S. Post Office. He was a big fan of D.W. Griffith’sThe Birth of a Nation, a film that portrayed blacks as virtual animals and glorified the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. “It’s like writing history with lightning,” Wilson said about the racist epic, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
He didn’t like women voters, either. He was slow to come around to the suffrage movement, whose picketers once converged on the White House and turned down the president’s invitation to come in for tea. First Lady Edith was no fan of suffragettes, either; she called them “disgusting creatures.” Despite Wilson’s feelings, the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, giving women the right to vote.
29 WARREN G. HARDING
November 2, 1865–August 2, 1923
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1921–1923
PARTY: Republican
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 55
VICE PRESIDENT: Calvin Coolidge
RAN AGAINST: James M. Cox
HEIGHT: 6′
NICKNAME: “Wobbly Warren”
SOUND BITE: “I am a man of limited talents from a small town; I don’t seem to grasp that I am president.”
Warren Gamaliel Harding won the 1920 election by an enormous landslide, served an uneventful two years as president, and then died a beloved national figure. Not bad for a guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
Harding was editor of the Marion, Ohio, Star, a small-town newspaper, and he loved every minute of it. He had to be persuaded to run for the Senate, where he served from 1915 to 1919, and liked it only because the workload was light and he felt as if he’d become a member of a fashionable gentleman’s club. The presidency would never even have occurred to him were it not for his domineering wife, Florence Kling De Wolfe, who was dead set on getting her husband into the White House. (Harding referred to her as the Duchess.) She had run the business end of the Star and ran the business end of his campaign with the same skill and hard-driving devotion. The 1920 election was the first in which women could vote, and, with their help, Harding won an unprecedented 60 percent of the popular vote.
His striking good looks, impressive build, and easygoing nature endeared him to virtually everyone he met. But he was utterly befuddled by the enormous responsibilities of his office and always felt like a fish out of water. His time in office witnessed a historic naval limitation treaty signed by the United States, Great Britain, Italy, France, and Japan; a protectionist tariff; and onerous immigration legislation that began limiting the influx of people from the “less desirable” regions of southern and eastern Europe. Congress led the way through nearly all of it, however—Harding was more than pleased to let Congress govern while he golfed, played poker, and had sex in White House closets with his mistress.
Harding may not have had many enemies, but he did have plenty of friends—and they ended up being just as harmful. Though his cabinet featured some talent, he stocked much of the executive branch with buddies from his Ohio days. Many of them wo
uld take advantage of him, most notably in the Teapot Dome scandal, in which government oil reserves in Wyoming were leased to unscrupulous, high-paying business interests. By the time the investigations were over, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall would become the first cabinet officer in American history to go to jail, and two of Harding’s pals would commit suicide.
Poker was Harding’s obsession. During one heated game, he bet an entire box of priceless White House china and lost it.
But none of this came to light until well after Harding’s term was cut short. Just two years into his presidency, he suffered a heart attack in a San Francisco hotel and died. Largely ignorant of the scale of the late president’s incompetence, the nation mourned the passing of its agreeable, debonair leader.
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CLOSETED AFFAIRS
As Harding’s wife, “the Duchess,” once said, “I know what’s best for the president. I put him in the White House.” But her husband had his own ideas about what was best for him, and the Duchess wasn’t one of them.
And so he had affairs, two of which are infamous. The first was with Carrie Fulton Phillips, the wife of an old friend. It began in 1905 and ended only when Harding won the Republican nomination, forcing him to clean his closet. Carrie and her husband were sent on an all-expenses-paid tour of the world, care of the Republican party.
The other, begun in 1917, was with Nan Britton, thirty years Harding’s junior. While Harding was president, Nan was routinely ushered through the West Wing of the White House for their liaisons by Secret Service agents who were instructed to keep it all a secret from the first lady. Harding and Britton were not above resorting to closets for their lovemaking, especially when the Duchess was known to be nearby. Britton eventually bore an illegitimate child by Harding, Elizabeth Ann Christian, in 1919. He would never set eyes on her.
IT’S IN THE CARDS
Poker was a lifelong obsession for Harding. Back in his Ohio days, he won a controlling interest in the Marion Star by winning at cards. Once he made it to the White House, his “poker cabinet” gathered regularly to play and—Prohibition notwithstanding—drink whiskey. (He’d conveniently forgotten that before becoming president, he supported the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale of alcohol.) As he used to say, “Forget that I’m president of the United States. I’m Warren Harding, playing poker with friends, and I’m going to beat hell out of them.” He didn’t always, though. In fact, he once bet an entire box of priceless White House china and lost it.
GAY OL’ TIME
President Harding never let his pressing responsibilities prevent him from visiting the Gayety Burlesque. The theater had a private box for him in which he could watch the girls unnoticed.
Confidence Man
Warren Harding never had much faith in himself. Though he loved working in the newspaper business, the pressures of the job sometimes overwhelmed him, and he once suffered a nervous breakdown. Being president of the United States couldn’t have been any easier.
Fortunately for the country, Harding didn’t suffer another breakdown after becoming president. But he whined incessantly about his new job. “May God help me, for I need it,” he said to the Duchess upon learning of his victory. His anxiety only grew with time; he once flat-out admitted, “I am not fit for the office and should never have been here.” To his mistress Nan Britton, he once wrote, “I’m in jail and I can’t get out.” He was just as blunt with Senator Frank Brandegee: “Frank, it is hell! No other word can describe it.” But nothing offers a window into Harding’s confused, horrified mind quite like the time he fell apart in front of a White House secretary over a tax issue: “I don’t know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells me all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it. . . . My God but this is a hell of a place for a man like me to be!”
30 CALVIN COOLIDGE
July 4, 1872–January 5, 1933
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1923–1929
PARTY: Republican
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 51
VICE PRESIDENT: None (after Harding’s death); Charles G. Dawes (elected term)
RAN AGAINST: John Davis
HEIGHT: 5′10″
NICKNAME: “Silent Cal”
SOUND BITE: “When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results.”
In September 1919, when Calvin Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts, the Boston police force went on strike. Coolidge responded forcefully by breaking up the union and issuing the famous proclamation, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” It was a bold statement that earned him national attention and made him the Republican party’s choice for vice president on the Harding ticket. But once Harding’s death launched Coolidge into the presidency, he would become famous for saying—and, for that matter, doing—as little as possible.
Coolidge slept at least ten hours every day. He was in bed by ten, often slept until eight, and always took an afternoon nap.
In addition to governor, Coolidge had been a city councilman, state representative, mayor, state senator, and lieutenant governor. The Boston police strike notwithstanding, his political convictions reflected a belief in limited government that fit well in the unambitious Harding administration. Coolidge was vacationing at his father’s farm in Plymouth, Vermont, when word of Harding’s death arrived by messenger. (The New England homestead had no electricity or phone.) At 2:47 A.M., on August 2, 1923, Coolidge changed out of his bedclothes and into a black suit to be sworn in as president of the United States by his own father, a notary public. He then changed out of his suit, crawled into bed, and descended into the state that would consume much of his presidency: sleep.
“I think the American public wants a solemn ass as president and I think I’ll go along with them,” said the new chief executive. Solemn he was—as well as taciturn, stoic, and shamelessly sluggish. Aside from hunting down the malcontents who had steeped Harding’s administration in corruption and scandal, his chief exertion was vetoing things—especially bills geared toward relieving the hardship of economically stricken Americans. He further widened the gap between rich and poor by giving the country’s wealthiest a giant tax cut in the hopes of increasing productivity. And he remained conspicuously silent on social issues at a time when the Ku Klux Klan, whose legions had swelled to more than five million members, marched on Washington in a show of racist solidarity. In an age when government was expected to avoid intervening in the affairs of business and cultural matters, President Coolidge did his part—by dozing away the afternoons and spending his time smoking cigars in the rocking chair he put on the White House porch.
His term wasn’t without tragedy. On July 7, 1924, his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., died after contracting blood poisoning from a blister he’d suffered while playing tennis on the White House courts. The president, already maudlin, became an emotional void. Though reelected that year, the office increasingly held no joy for him. On August 2, 1927, while vacationing in South Dakota, he summoned reporters to an impromptu press conference and handed them all a slip of paper on which was printed, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” He answered no questions. It was the terse conclusion to a terse presidency. Coolidge lived long enough to witness the Great Depression that most historians believe his inactivity helped to bring about; he passed the time writing newspaper articles that promoted his tragically outdated maxims on government frugality. Dorothy Parker captured the frosty essence of the man when, upon hearing that doctors had declared him dead, she asked, “How can they tell?”
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MOUTH OFF
No president has ever tried so hard to say so little as Calvin Coolidge. Silence was a religion to him. “Nine-tenths of a president’s calle
rs at the White House want something they ought not to have,” he said to successor Herbert Hoover. “If you keep dead still they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.” When First Lady Grace Coolidge was met by a woman who was going to be seated next to the president at an upcoming state dinner, Mrs. Coolidge replied, “I’m sorry for you. You’ll have to do all the talking yourself.” Another woman approached the president at an engagement and told him that she’d made a bet that she could get more than two words out of him that night. “You lose” was his reply. Even his press conferences were a joke. Here’s one from the 1924 campaign:
“Have you any statement from the campaign?”
Coolidge: “No.”
“Can you tell us something about the world situation?”
Coolidge: “No.”
“Any information about Prohibition?”
Coolidge: “No.”
The best part? As the disappointed reporters made for the door, Coolidge reminded them all not to quote him.
EARLY TO BED, LATE TO RISE
As H. L. Mencken once wrote, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Coolidge only snores.” Calvin Coolidge’s favorite pastime was sleeping. He was in bed every night by ten and usually rose between six and eight in the morning. His daily afternoon naps ran between two and four hours, and he never missed one. It all made for a total of at least ten hours of sleep a day. The president’s drowsy demeanor was no secret—at a performance of the Marx Brothers’ show Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx discovered Coolidge in the audience and cried out to him, “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Calvin?”
Easy Rider