by Wright, Ben;
So does a tippling President make for a better commander in chief? US historians and political scientists love ranking their political leaders and Franklin D. Roosevelt is always placed near the top of the table. The four-time President first defeated the Great Depression and then led America through the Second World War. And throughout these tumultuous years the cheerfully patrician FDR kept a martini close at hand. Roosevelt prized his pre-dinner cocktail hour, when friends and colleagues would meet at the White House to unwind over a drink. Samuel I. Rosenman was one of Roosevelt’s speech writers and later described the ritual:
The President made quite a ceremony out of this daily cocktail hour, mixing the drinks himself from various ingredients brought to his desk on a large tray. People who were more accustomed to drinking than I, and who knew more about the mixing of drinks, were a little nonplussed at the nonchalance with which the President, without bothering to measure, would add one ingredient after another to his cocktails. To my unpracticed eye he seemed to experiment on each occasion with a different percentage of vermouth, gin and fruit juice. At times he varied it with rum – especially rum from the Virgin Islands. The President liked to press a second, and at times a third, cocktail upon any guest who was at all willing. His usual expression, on noticing an empty glass, was: ‘How about another little sippy?’25
It was sometimes too much for Rosenman, who used to pour second servings into a plant pot. Other witnesses to this presidential bartending say Roosevelt used to add drops of absinthe to his martini concoctions for extra flavour.
Cocktail hour took place in the President’s second-floor study, his favourite room in the White House. Among the leather sofas and piles of books, the pressures of politics and war were swapped for drinks, storytelling and gossip. The former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice, Robert H. Jackson, said Roosevelt took huge pleasure in the conviviality of cocktail hour but rarely had more than a couple of drinks: ‘Any impression that the President was given to any considerable amount of drinking … is a mistake. I never knew him to take more than a couple of cocktails, nor did he want anyone about him who drank to excess.’26
Jackson was trying to correct the impression left by Roosevelt’s son Elliott that drinking formed a large part of the President’s wartime diplomacy. His 1946 memoir frequently finds the younger Roosevelt fixing his dad an Old Fashioned, or buzzing around the margins of meetings filling up glasses for his father and Churchill while they argued about the future of the British Empire and post-war Europe.27 When Churchill first visited President Roosevelt at the White House in December 1941, the two leaders cemented their fraternity over drink, despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s disapproval. Decades later Elliott Roosevelt wrote: ‘Winston liked to down a few brandies as the night wore on, so Father would have himself an extra cocktail or two to keep him company, which was another reason for Mother’s objections.’28
The Cold War Franklin Roosevelt had striven to avoid was well under way by the time two of America’s heaviest-drinking Presidents occupied the White House. The daiquiri-sipping John F. Kennedy was not a big drinker (like Clinton, Kennedy preferred women to wine) and kept a clear head through the Cuban Missile Crisis. It might have been different if two of his successors had been in the Oval Office in 1962.
On his political ascent through the Senate in the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson made a show of being a clubbable heavy drinker, one of the boys. But in the early years it was something of a charade, according to Robert A. Caro, Johnson’s magisterial biographer. The Senator used to say, ‘drinking makes you let your guard down,’ and he was careful not to lose control. Staff in his Senate office were instructed to make drinks for visitors stronger than his own glass of Cutty Sark Scotch and soda.29 But after becoming the Democrat majority leader in 1955, Johnson began to drink more. Returning to his office after the Senate had recessed for the day, he would be given a drink and sink into a big leather chair. There, writes Caro, Johnson ‘would throw back his head, empty the glass in a single gulp, immediately hold it out and rattle the ice cubes for another Cutty Sark and soda, and another and another. More and more, the man who never wanted to be “out of control” because of drinking was out of control.’30
Reports of Johnson drinking and chain-smoking like someone facing the electric chair began to circulate around Washington dinner parties. But he saved the serious drinking binges for the privacy of his Texas ranch. Once, while recovering from a heart attack there, Johnson’s doctors told him to relax and do more of the things he enjoyed. He told them he enjoyed nothing but ‘whisky, sunshine and sex’.31 Johnson craved sensation and escape, whether with women or a whisky bottle. It didn’t stop him getting to the White House though; and one of the most vivid snapshots of presidential drinking was captured by Joseph A. Califano Jr, Johnson’s special assistant for domestic affairs. Califano had been summoned to the ranch in July 1965, shortly after being offered the job. Here he recalls a ride with President Johnson:
In the early afternoon, the President, with me next to him in the front seat, took his white Lincoln convertible, top down, for a drive around the ranch. It was incredibly hot; the dust clouds made it hard to breathe. But there was relief. As we drove around we were followed by a car and a station wagon with Secret Service agents. The President drank Cutty Sark scotch and soda out of a large white plastic foam cup. Periodically, Johnson would slow down and hold his left arm outside the car, shaking the cup and ice. A Secret Service agent would run up to the car, take the cup and go back to the station wagon. There another agent would refill it with ice, scotch, and soda as the first agent trotted behind the wagon. Then the first agent would run the refilled cup up to LBJ’s outstretched and waiting hand, as the President’s car moved slowly along.32
Nixon’s Nemesis
Perhaps only Franklin Pierce was as dependent on and damaged by alcohol as Richard Nixon when President; and both careers ended in humiliation. Often ranked among the worst US Presidents, the amiable but frequently drunk Pierce managed to split his own Democratic Party and accelerate the United States’ slide towards civil war. In 1974 Richard Nixon became the only President to resign the office after facing certain impeachment following the Watergate cover-up. As Air Force One flew him back to California for the final time, Nixon nursed a martini, the drink he had consoled himself with during the long nights of his presidency.
When asked by the press about the President’s drinking, the White House would claim Nixon only sipped the occasional glass of white wine. But it was a lie, as several biographies have since revealed. By 1972, both Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, and his Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig, were referring to the President behind his back as ‘our drunk’.33 But his propensity to hit the bottle when under strain had been evident twenty years earlier. After losing the governorship of California in 1962, Nixon went on a ‘roaring bender’, according to the Washington journalist Don Fulsom and corroborated by others.34 The following morning, hungover, red-eyed and trembling, Nixon appeared in front of the cameras and famously declared he was quitting politics. ‘Just think what you’ll be missing,’ he said. ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, gentlemen, because this is my last press conference.’ A propensity for embittered self-pity was already evident, but the press did not comment on Nixon’s haggard state, even though it must have been obvious to reporters. For much of Nixon’s life, the American people were completely unaware of his drinking.
Richard Nixon didn’t bow out of politics in 1962. Instead he won the presidency six years later. John Ehrlichman served as domestic affairs adviser in the Nixon White House, but only agreed to work on the 1968 campaign if the candidate laid off the booze. He believed Nixon’s drinking was serious enough to cost him any chance of a return to public life.35 And to begin with, Nixon hoped to keep his alcohol intake under control, telling the journalist Theodore White in 1969 that now he was President he wouldn’t drink in the way he had done: ‘You can’t drink and think clearly … two drinks and y
our mind isn’t quite as sharp and you may not be able to think clearly when that phone rings at night … no more drinking … no more late hours.’36
It was a pledge he failed to keep. Slurred and rambling late-night telephone calls to aides were a fixture of the Nixon presidency until it collapsed in 1974. White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman put them down to a mixture of fatigue and drink. ‘One beer would transform his speech into the rambling elocution of a Bowery wino,’ he wrote.37
Most witnesses agree it didn’t take much alcohol to release a snarling, unpleasant and paranoid drunk. Nixon’s character was one of the most complicated of any President and not that of a typical politician. He was socially awkward, introverted, insecure and self-pitying. He loathed small talk and had no time for flattery or charm. In Henry Kissinger’s view, Nixon drank in part to compensate for the political skills he lacked. According to Kissinger, ‘alcohol had a way of destroying the defences he had so carefully constructed to enable him to succeed in a profession based on a conviviality unnatural to him’.38 But Kissinger dismisses as ‘absurd’ the suggestion that Nixon staggered through his presidency with a bottle by his side and claims the President only drank at night, never in the Oval Office and never in the context of major decisions. ‘The trouble was that Nixon could not hold even a small quantity of alcohol. Two glasses of wine were quite enough to make him boisterous, just one more to grow bellicose or sentimental with slurred speech … The few of us who actually witnessed such conduct never acted on what he might have said.’39
Since Nixon could have ordered a nuclear attack with the power to obliterate the planet, we should all be grateful that Henry Kissinger at least was sober. According to Kissinger’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, the Secretary of State used to tell aides he was the one man who kept that ‘drunken lunatic’ from doing things that would ‘blow up the world’.40 And late-night threats of military action were actually made. When North Korea shot down a US spy plane in April 1969, an enraged Nixon ordered a tactical nuclear strike and told the Joint Chiefs to recommend targets. According to the historian Anthony Summers, citing the CIA’s top Vietnam specialist at the time, George Carver, Kissinger spoke to military commanders on the phone and agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.41 A memo from June 1969 obtained by the National Security Archive in Washington in 2010 showed the Pentagon had drawn up plans for a tactical nuclear strike against North Korea, codenamed Freedom Drop. A former US bomber pilot, Bruce Charles, told National Public Radio in 2010 that he was put on alert to attack North Korea with a nuclear bomb hours after the US plane was shot down. After several hours of waiting an order to stand down came through.
Whether President Nixon did actually order an immediate drink-fuelled nuclear strike on North Korea isn’t clear. But a nuclear response was considered. As it was in October 1973, when it seemed the Soviet Union was poised to send forces into the Middle East and Brezhnev issued a letter to Nixon warning that the Soviet Union was prepared to act unilaterally. But on the night of 24 October, the President had crashed out early and gone to sleep. Some believed he was drunk, others that he was merely tired.
Alexander Haig decided Nixon should not be involved, so the President was left to sleep upstairs while defence chiefs gathered in the White House situation room. The world was closer to nuclear war than it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis and US forces were notched up to DEFCON III alert, two away from war. At US bases, B-52s loaded with nuclear bombs lined up on runways and nuclear-armed submarines waited for orders close to the Soviet coast.
The next morning another letter from Brezhnev arrived as if none of the previous threats had been made and the crisis petered out. But at this critical moment the US President had been out of action. Later, in 1997, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, remembered the night: ‘We had to go on nuclear alert without his permission. The reason we had to do that was because he could not be awakened. Nixon obviously had too much to drink … I was told at the time that they were not able to waken him.’42
By now, Watergate was beginning to choke Nixon’s presidency and he was relying ever more on drink and sleeping pills to cope with the pressure. On the evening of 11 October 1973 he was incapable of speaking to the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, on the phone. Heath was keen to discuss the latest developments in the Arab-Israeli War, but a transcript of the conversation between Henry Kissinger and his assistant Brent Scowcroft revealed that the President was too drunk to talk to the Prime Minister. ‘Can we tell them no?’ Kissinger asks his assistant. ‘When I talked to the President, he was loaded.’ Scowcroft replies: ‘Right. OK. I will say the President will not be available until first thing in the morning but you will be this evening.’
By 1974 the pressure on Nixon was immense. He was drinking excessively and unable to sleep, prone to wandering the halls of the White House at night talking to the portraits of former Presidents on the walls.43 Nixon’s aides were afraid Watergate might end with a presidential suicide. But in the end he capitulated to the inevitability of resignation, spending one of his final nights in the White House drinking uncontrollably, weeping and praying with Henry Kissinger in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Kissinger tried to convince the broken President that historians would treat him more kindly than his contemporaries, while knowing that Watergate would be Nixon’s epitaph. He is a warning to future Presidents on the danger of mixing hubris with drink.
D.C. Drinking
Kyle sat stiffly on a bar stool sipping a mint julep. His $200 suit and schoolboy side-parting jarred with the clubby red leather, brass fittings and marble-covered counter of the Round Robin Bar. He had heard the Willard Hotel was the place in town to mint new political contacts.
An ice cube’s throw from the White House, the Willard is said to be where the term ‘lobbyist’ was first coined, after Ulysses S. Grant was collared by people wanting favours every time he arrived at the hotel hoping to have a quiet brandy and cigar at the bar. However, the Oxford English Dictionary records that in America the verb ‘lobbying’ first appeared in an Ohio newspaper in 1837, thirty years before Grant went to Washington. And in Britain, ‘lobby’ was the name given to the place where people met Members of Parliament as early as the 1640s.
But none of this mattered to Kyle. He was a young man in his early twenties who had migrated from Alabama to Washington in the hunt for politics, power and a like-minded tribe. A few weeks into his adventure, Kyle had done some unpaid photocopying at a conservative think tank and was now bombarding Congressional offices with his resume. But getting a foothold in Washington, he told me, was about who you know. And he didn’t seem to know anyone. So he spent his evenings hunting out drinks parties and receptions where he hoped to meet the contact who would unlock a political career. And when the drinks were over he slept on the couches of people he hardly knew. Tonight Kyle had taken himself off to the Willard alone. More drinks, more awkward introductions, more hopes.
Unluckily for him, it was only me who was perched on the neighbouring bar stool, able to offer nothing more than sympathy and encouragement. Elsewhere in Washington that evening, an army of Capitol Hill staffers were fanning out into Happy Hour. At the renovated Hawk ’n’ Dove, a once legendarily political dive bar on Pennsylvania Avenue, the cream chino-clad bag carriers of Congress were eating ‘Filibuster Flatbreads’ and ‘Opening Statement’ appetisers with their beers. It was the same crowd at Tune Inn a few doors down, where towers of cheese-covered nachos were washed down with pints of Fat Tire. In bars like these, thousands of press secretaries, diary schedulers, errand-runners and letter-openers drink and dream of something better. Most, like Kyle, are fresh out of college and will soon quit Capitol Hill for something better paid and less precarious. But others will stick at it, looking for the key that will open a world of Georgetown cocktail parties, lobbying lucre and political clout.
‘Suck-up City’ is what one Obama adviser called Washington during the 2008 campaign and sucking up is esse
ntial to getting on. ‘Sucking up is as basic to Washington as humidity’, wrote Mark Leibovich in an excoriating dissection of the city.44 Others have compared D.C. to a school, full of bullies, over-achievers, nerds and life’s natural milk monitors. Kyle, I feared (or hoped), wasn’t cut out for it. I left him to his mint julep and his yearning for a serendipitous encounter with a Congressman.
At the other end of Washington’s social ladder are the ones who have clambered to the top: the Congressmen, Senators, White House advisers and lobbyists. Governor Haley Barbour glows with his own good fortune. Rotund and ebullient with a helmet of silver hair, Barbour has been at the heart of Republican politics for decades. He was political director in the Reagan White House, chaired the Republican National Committee in the 1990s and served two terms as Governor of Mississippi. Barbour founded the lobbying firm BRG and thought about a run for President in 2012. He’s also a throwback to a time when US politicians did business over bourbon and cross-party friendships were sealed with a drink. I meet him at his wood-panelled Washington office. Bottles of Maker’s Mark bourbon stamped with Barbour’s face line the top shelf of a bookcase, presents from the Kentucky distillery to one of its favourite Washington friends. In his Mississippi drawl, Haley Barbour describes how Capitol Hill drinking has changed over five decades.
‘When I was a college boy I came up to Washington to see Senator Eastland from Mississippi. He was having a drink. Teddy Kennedy was there having a drink. Two or three conservative Republicans having a drink together. Couple of other Southern Democrats. Seven or eight Senators. Liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats, conservative Republicans. And they did that all the time. They were friends, and they were very social. It was very bipartisan. Lots of stuff they disagreed on but they spent time in each other’s offices. You don’t see that any more. There is not as much social bipartisanship.’