Project President

by Ben Shapiro

  Running against the six-feet-one-inch military hero Andrew Jackson, Adams’s image molehills became mountains. Jackson was tall and rather striking looking. “Extremely slender and slightly round-shouldered,” wrote biographer Robert Remini, “he stood six feet tall and had strong cheekbones, a lantern jaw, a long, straight nose, and a mouth which ‘showed rocklike firmness.’ His teeth were long and loose and gave an ugly ghastly expression to his nasal muscle.”41 Anne Royall, one of Jackson’s contemporaries, described Jackson as “very tall and slender . . . His person is finely shaped, and his features not handsome, but strikingly bold and determined.”42

  Comics of the time capitalized on the height discrepancy between Jackson and Adams. One political print from 1824 depicts Jackson, Adams, and Henry Clay in a footrace for the presidency. While Jackson is nattily decked out in his military uniform and shiny knee-length boots, Adams resembles Wallace Shawn circa The Princess Bride, bending forward at the waist to stretch for the finish line, wearing low-cut shoes that leave his ankles exposed.43

  Adams’s height probably didn’t cost him the 1828 election; after all, he never debated Jackson. Nonetheless, Adams’s short stature made it easier for Jackson to paint him as an aristocratic pantywaist.

  POLITICIANS MAY COME AND GO, but height is forever, barring osteoporosis. Lincoln didn’t just benefit from his height in the 1860 election; he benefited from his height four years later. Running against Union Army general George McClellan, Lincoln exploited his height again to the fullest.

  George McClellan was an average-sized fellow. Dubbed “Little Napoleon” for his early Civil War successes and his five-feet-eight inches stature,44 McClellan looked shorter than he was because of his unnaturally large upper body. “He was commenced for a tall man and built for one, as far down as the hips,” wrote a journalist.45

  McClellan had been made general of the Union armies in November 1861, and he had butted heads repeatedly with Lincoln. McClellan was exceptionally arrogant; he wrote upon his arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1861:

  I find myself in a new & strange position here—Presdt., Cabinet, Genl. Scott and all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—there I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self-denial!46

  In 1862, McClellan began mailing political advice to Lincoln—advice such as leaving slavery intact.47

  McClellan wasn’t merely arrogant. He was remarkably reluctant to enter battle. The Powell Doctrine states that you should not undertake military action unless you have and are prepared to use overwhelming force; the “McClellan Doctrine” (if there had been one) would have stated that even if you have overwhelming force, it would be better to wait until a few more guys show up. McClellan would have felt comfortable only if armed with nuclear weapons and facing an enemy army manned entirely by small, mewling kittens.

  This, of course, led to some conflict with Lincoln, who preferred that the Union win sometime before the end of the nineteenth century. The conflict between Lincoln and McClellan led to one of the funniest exchanges in the history of warfare. After Lincoln told McClellan to keep him updated on proceedings in the field, an exasperated McClellan fired off this missive:

  To President Abraham Lincoln

  Washington DC

  Have just captured six cows.What shall we do with them?

  George B. McClellan

  Lincoln fired back:

  General George B. McClellan

  Army of the Potomac

  Milk them.

  A. Lincoln48

  Another exchange was more cutting.After McClellan claimed that his cavalry was fatigued, Lincoln responded, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”49 At one war council, Lincoln remarked to a group of assorted generals that if McClellan was not going to use the army, he “would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.”50 It was not much of a surprise when Lincoln fired McClellan in November 1863.

  The election of 1864, then, was a grudge match. In this grudge match, McClellan had the early advantage. The 1862 midterm elections had been disastrous for Republicans, leaving them with a bare eighteen-vote majority in the House of Representatives.51 The defeat at Fredericksburg in late 1862 added to the gloom. Richard Henry Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams, “The most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held tomorrow, he would not get the vote of a State.”52

  The tide began to turn with the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But battlefield reversals could always turn the tide; subterranean splits within the Republican Party threatened to shatter the surface. Horace Greeley wrote, “Who does not see that [McClellan’s] fortunes rise as the country sinks, and that his chances would be brightened by his country’s ruin?”53

  McClellan ran as a war candidate, repudiating his own party’s platform. By running as an advocate for the war, however,McClellan made enemies within his party.And they exploited his height. Henry Raymond of the New York Times ripped McClellan as “calculating, whiffling, mousing, hopping here a little way and there a little way, full of consequence and yet ever trying to hide in his own little shadow; all ambition and no courage, all desire and no decision.”54

  Raymond wasn’t the only one rapping McClellan about his height. Cartoons universally depicted McClellan as an undersized, pugnacious little gentleman. One print compares the 1864 election to a game of bagatelle, a table game similar to billiards. Lincoln is tall; McClellan is dressed as a child, crying, “This Cue is too heavy! and the Platform’s shakey!! O! O! I want to go back in the yard!!”55

  A cartoon from Harper’s Weekly on September 17, 1864, depicts Lincoln as huge, literally holding “Little Mac” in the palm of his hand.56 Lincoln is about the size of his modern-day monument; McClellan looks like a GI Joe action figure. A December 1864 cover cartoon for a periodical called Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun depicts a chasm over which lie two planks: one Republican, one Democratic. The Democratic plank is two planks tied together; one is marked “War Democracy” and the other “Peace Democracy.” Lincoln stands, strong and tall, next to the single Republican plank; McClellan, looking like Verne Troyer with a handlebar mustache, stands next to the Democrat plank. Lady Columbia, who must cross the chasm, leans toward the hardy Lincoln.57

  Lincoln won his reelection handily over the undersized but feisty McClellan. Harper’s Weekly celebrated with a cartoon of Lincoln stretched, like silly putty, from the top of the page to the bottom. The caption: “Long ABRAHAM LINCOLN a Little Longer.”58

  FOR ALMOST SIXTY YEARS, height mattered very little in presidential elections. It became an issue again with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. It wasn’t an issue because either candidate was undersized; Hoover stood five-feet-eleven-inches, and FDR stood six-feet-two-inches. Height became an issue because FDR was wheelchair-bound.

  In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, FDR was infected with either polio or Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Paralysis spread up both sides of Roosevelt’s body from legs to chest;59 only with physical therapy was he able to simulate walking using a cane.60 FDR quickly realized that the nature of his condition would have to be hidden from the public. Jonathan Alter wrote, “Contracting a disease such as polio meant being excluded from normal life, if not shunted away in dark back bedrooms or dismal hospitals that looked like prisons and had names like the Home for Incurables and the New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled.”61

  FDR’s people quickly informed the media that he was on his way to full recovery. The media was complicit in burying the story—in the seven years from 1921 to 1928, until his inauguration as governor
of New York, the New York Times ran no more than six articles mentioning FDR’s polio crisis.62 During FDR’s presidency, the press took no photos of FDR struggling to walk, sitting in a wheelchair, or being lifted into or out of his wheelchair.63

  Alter counted FDR’s polio as a political plus: “Polio wiped the residue of Harvard snobbery off FDR’s public image.”64 But it wasn’t the polio itself that aided FDR—it was his apparent recovery from it. A man with polio—through no fault of his own, of course—gives the impression of physical weakness. A man who has beaten polio gives the impression of renewed physical strength. FDR ally and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith elucidated the traditional view: the presidency, he said, “requires a man of great vigor and bodily strength to stand the physical strain of it.”65 FDR also engaged in health baiting. During the 1932 campaign, his team undermined potential Democratic rival Newton Baker by raising questions about the health of his heart.66

  So for the rest of his life, FDR would play the part of the mildly inconvenienced polio recoverer. In 1924, he introduced possible Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith while supporting himself on the rostrum.67 During his 1928 gubernatorial race, he fielded inquiries about his health by sarcastically stating, “Well, here’s the helpless, hopeless invalid my opponents have been talking about. I’ve made 15 speeches today.”68 In 1931, FDR hired journalist Earle Looker to “challenge” him about his health; FDR then agreed to be examined by three doctors, all of whom would testify to his physical soundness. Though one doctor blanched at giving FDR a clean bill of health after examining him, the ruse went as planned. FDR’s spokesman compared his disability to having a glass eye or going prematurely bald.69

  To underline his physical health, FDR decided to fly to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and make his acceptance speech there; he was the first president to make a formal acceptance speech.When asked about flying, a procedure that was still relatively dangerous, FDR jocularly pledged to bicycle from New York to Chicago.70

  Notably, Hoover never made an issue out of FDR’s health. In 1958, Hoover wrote a touching tribute to FDR’s battle against polio: “I greatly admired the courage with which he fought his way back to active life and with which he overcame the handicap which had come to him. I considered that it was a great mistake that his friends insisted upon trying to hide his infirmity, as manifestly it had not affected his physical or mental abilities.”71

  Perceptions of FDR’s height—and by extension, his health—carried forward through his election in 1944. FDR’s personal physician informed the public that the president had “nothing wrong organically with him at all . . . He’s perfectly OK . . . The stories that he is in bad health are understandable enough around election time, but they are not true.”72 FDR again stressed his physical health, delivering a speech at Soldier Field before one hundred thousand people, riding through New York City in an open car in a chilly rain.73 Not surprisingly, his opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, declined to make FDR’s health a campaign issue.74

  Of course, Dewey had image problems of his own, especially with regard to his height. During the 1944 election cycle, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, TR’s daughter, uttered the quip that would dog Dewey for the rest of his political career. Dewey, she said, “looks like the little man on the wedding cake.”75

  The remark was damaging because it was so apt. Dewey stood five-feet-eight-inches76 and was perpetually insecure about his height. He would not allow photographers to take his picture if he was not posing, fearing that they would make him look short; he told aides to keep tall men away from him when photographers were near. Somehow, a photographer snapped a shot of Dewey sitting atop a telephone book at his desk.77

  Dewey’s problem cut deeper than his height. Like the little man on the wedding cake, he was aloof, cold, austere. As governor of New York, wrote Irving Stone, Dewey’s legislature found him “cold, hard, dictatorial, unsympathetic, and unfriendly; they didn’t like him as a person.”78Time magazine criticized Dewey’s “lack of humor, his unwillingness to pose for trick shots for the photographers, his narrow range of facial expressions, his tinge of Scoutmasterishness . . . his lack of warmth (he rarely visited newsmen in the lounge car) and his superefficiency (which sometimes leads him, in normal conversation to say ‘period’ at the end of a sentence, as if he were dictating).”79

  In 1944, Dewey ended up the bridesmaid—off the wedding cake completely.

  And he would never be the bride. In 1948, Dewey ran again as the Republican nominee. This time, he seemed assured of victory.Truman was massively unpopular; the war in Korea was massively unpopular. While FDR had been “larger than life, even in a wheelchair,” wrote David McCullough, Truman “would always be the ‘little man from Missouri.’”80 Truman stood five-feet-nine-inches tall.81

  But Dewey’s image problem would not go away. He was still cold. Mencken described Dewey’s speeches as “essays sounding like the worst bombast of university professors . . . [Truman] made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them.”82

  And he was still relatively short.Truman himself never attacked Dewey’s height during the campaign,83 but no one had forgotten the Longworth line.Walt Kelly, a cartoonist for the New York Star, began drawing Dewey as the man on the wedding cake.84 Journalist Pete Hamill, then a youngster, remembered his father observing of Dewey: “One good shot of whiskey and he’d be on his face on the floor.”85

  In the most shocking election result of the twentieth century, Truman defeated Dewey . . . by an inch or so.

  JIMMY CARTER GOT LUCKY IN 1976. For the first time since William McKinley in 1896, Carter won the presidency as the shorter, nonincumbent candidate. Of course, he was running against Gerald Ford—and the legacy of Nixon and Watergate. Carter was still concerned about Ford’s height (six feet). Before the debates, Carter’s television advisor, Barry Jagoda, requested that Ford stand in a hole to offset his height advantage, a request immediately rejected by the Ford team.86

  But for Ford, the potential image advantages usually attached to height had been worn away by years of jocularity about his perceived clumsiness. Tall men are often perceived as stately, determined, decisive; Ford, through little fault of his own, became known as a moronic bumbler. On June 1, 1975, Ford fell down the last few stairs of an airplane ramp while disembarking from a plane in Salzburg, Austria. One network newscast showed the clip eleven times, including once in slo-mo.87

  Chevy Chase imprinted the image of Ford as bumbler into the public consciousness on Saturday Night Live. First, he stated on “Weekend Update” that Ford’s new campaign slogan would be “If He’s So Dumb, How Come He’s President?”88 Chase also made clumsiness a staple of his Ford impersonation, including slapstick gags in which Chase stapled his ear to his head,89 stabbed himself with pencils,90 and stumbled into everything in sight. Once Chase stumbled into a lectern and hit himself in the crotch so hard that he had to miss two weeks of airtime.91 Chase admitted that his impersonation was politically motivated, calling Ford a “terrible president” and shrugging, “Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest laugh is the physical joke.”92

  The irony is that Ford was likely one of the more athletic presidents in American history. In his college days, he played varsity football at the University of Michigan and received pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers. Ford was an avid skier, swimmer, and golfer. Nonetheless, the American public thought he was a clumsy oaf.His size only mattered in that the American public saw him as a big, clumsy oaf.

  Despite his image problems, Ford closed the electoral gap in the late days of the 1976 election. He didn’t close it enough; Carter took the election by almost two million votes.

  In 1980, Carter would not be so lucky. This time he faced a taller man without the baggage of Nixon or the perceived clumsiness of Ford. Ronald Reagan embodied a certain dignity; standing six-feet-one-inch, Reagan walked tall and handled himself with aplomb. His affabi
lity compensated for his stateliness—he never seemed out of touch with his audience.During the 1980 campaign, the Washington Post described Reagan as “tall and handsome.”93 During a stop in Gilford, New Hampshire, a white-haired elderly woman read a poem about Reagan:

  He’s a man

  And he stands

  Ten feet tall . . . 94

  The poem was printed nationally, thanks to the Post.

  Meanwhile, Carter was “a modestly built man, fragile-looking and soft,” a man who looked “vulnerable,” according to Edward Walsh of the Post in 1980.95 Like Thomas Dewey, Carter was uncomfortable about his height and manipulated photo ops so that he would be the tallest man in the picture.96 Garrett Epps speculated that during the 1980 election Carter would use a presidential rostrum fixed with a “man-maker”—an aptly titled device designed to boost Carter’s height.97

  Carter’s physical stature damaged him because of his reputation for general weakness and incompetence. He looked wimpy. The American public thought he was weak, and his personal appearance didn’t convince them otherwise.

  Reagan won the 1980 election easily. Executive recruiter Robert Half partially attributed Carter’s loss to his size: “While there were, clearly,many reasons for the outcome of the 1980 presidential election, the fact that Ronald Reagan (six-feet-one-inch) is more than Jimmy Carter may be extremely relevant.”98 But Reagan could not have won on size alone; his stature was greater than Carter’s in more ways than one.

  THE 1988 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION featured the largest height gap of the twentieth century. Republican vice president George H.W. Bush stood six-feet-two-inches; Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis stood five-feet-eight-inches. Dukakis had to exaggerate his height throughout the campaign. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, marketers created life-size cardboard cutouts of the Democratic candidates. The cutout of Dukakis wasn’t exactly life-size, however—it was an inch taller than Dukakis himself. “If we had him his normal height,” photo vendor James Lane explained, “people would think our cutouts aren’t the real size.”99