Project President

by Ben Shapiro

  The haircut didn’t hurt Kennedy. “On the campaign trail, growing crowds roared their approval for Kennedy,” JFK hair biographer Neil Steinberg said. “Women wept, fainted, crawled onto the hood of his car, or hopped up and down, trying to see Kennedy above the heads of crowds.” One senator called Kennedy a cross between Elvis Presley and FDR.62

  JFK had tremendous hair; he also had an opponent with boring hair. Richard Nixon wore a rather greasy widow’s peak atop his high forehead. During the first televised presidential debate, Nixon’s widow’s peak did nothing to hide his sweaty forehead. Nixon also had to contend with his facial hair. For years, Herb Block of the Washington Post drew cartoons of Vice President Nixon with heavy stubble—and during the debate, Nixon lent credibility to those images by appearing with a five o’clock shadow.

  “He has very translucent, almost blue-white skin,” explained Ted Rogers, Nixon’s campaign media advisor. “You can actually see the roots of his beard beneath his skin. TV is just an electronic development that goes beyond X-rays and radar. This X-ray quality of television made Nixon a bad visual candidate for television.”63 Kennedy, by contrast, looked cool, clean shaven, and collected—a man in control of both his facts and his bodily functions. Predictably, television viewers favored Kennedy, while radio listeners liked Nixon. “Snippets of behavior—such as Richard Nixon’s . . . apparent five o’clock shadow during the 1960 presidential debates—can lead to trait impressions such as being shifty or unreliable without any explicit prompting,” political scientist Carolyn L. Funk noted.64

  Kennedy’s slim victory over Nixon in the 1960 election did not spell the end of hats, as so many commentators have mistakenly reported. It is a myth that the hat industry died because Kennedy didn’t wear a hat during his inauguration; in fact, he revived a tradition by wearing a silk top hat. As Steinberg pointed out, hats had been in fashion decline since 1903. It is true, however, that Kennedy rarely wore hats, a fact that irked manufacturers.65

  Kennedy’s election did, however, spell the dawn of a new day for hair. JFK’s hairstyle legitimated bigger and longer hair. Steinberg theorized that JFK’s hairdo paved the way for the Beatles’ moptops:

  “An argument can be made that the Beatles hairdo is a descendant of Kennedy’s style, which in 1963 was just a little shorter than the hairstyle John Lennon was wearing. The chain of influence is definitely there—after Kennedy’s election, barbers in the United Kingdom said that young men were imitating Kennedy’s mop of hair.”66

  And there is no doubt that Kennedy’s haircut has continued to serve as an inspiration for Democratic politicians to this day. Jimmy Carter’s crop of thick gray hair brushed across his forehead in a wave, just as JFK’s did; Bill Clinton’s hairdo closely followed the JFK pattern.

  THERE’S LONG HAIR, and then there’s long hair. JFK’s haircut marked the outer limit of hair discretion; in 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s followers crossed the line. Americans were already perturbed with the rise of the hippie generation, and McGovern’s candidacy did nothing to alleviate those fears. McGovern’s nomination followed on the heels of the catastrophic 1968 Democratic National Convention, in which longhaired college students had clashed with police, likely dooming Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy. Now those same long-haired college students supported McGovern.

  Columnist Jack McCallum, a McGovern supporter, fondly remembered the days when “with long hair and soiled T-shirts, we had clamored loudly for George McGovern.”67 “I also favored bell bottoms and long hair, and campaigned for George McGovern,” agreed Dottie Ashley. “I was out one day handing out fliers promoting McGovern for President when a kid yelled, ‘Mom, there’s a Communist hippie at the door!’ In spite of my chagrin and fury, I had to admit that the labels ran both ways. My clothes had given away my true image.”68 Then representative Tip O’Neill summed up the McGovern campaign in a nutshell. McGovern, he said, had been nominated “by the cast of Hair.”69

  Where JFK distanced himself from the counterculture, McGovern embraced it. Though his hair was thinning on top,McGovern grew an imposing set of sideburns—columnist Mike Royko said that McGovern grew his sideburns “as lush as he could without impairing his hearing.”70 He shot his commercials using cinema verité, filming spontaneous statements with a handheld camera. He wore no jacket and a loosened tie,Howard Dean-style. The results were less than flattering. His off-the-cuff comments were often incoherent or tautological. “I would not pick McGovern in the first ten candidates that I’ve worked for to use that method [cinema verité],” said Charles Guggenheim,McGovern’s ad-man. “McGovern would not be my first choice of a person to use on television period.”71

  It became clear as the campaign went on that McGovern would receive a historic drubbing at Nixon’s hand. Desperate, McGovern ran the worst campaign commercial in the history of presidential politics. The ad shows a man in a voting booth, considering which candidate ought to get his vote. He speaks in a voiceover, as he stares at the ballot:

  Well, either way it won’t be a disaster. What am I looking for? I mean—so I’ll vote for Nixon. Why rock the boat? I’m not crazy about him. Never was. I’ve got to decide, though. I’ve got to make up my mind. I don’t know about McGovern. I don’t have that much time. I can’t keep people waiting. The fellows are voting Nixon. They expect me to vote for him, too. Me vote for Nixon. My father’d roll over in his grave. The fellows say they are. Maybe they’re not. Crime—I don’t feel safe. Prices up. I’ve got a feeling—don’t vote for Nixon. Why am I confused? Who am I measuring McGovern against? Gut feeling, my gut feeling. McGovern. This hand voted for Kennedy and it’s just possible McGovern’s straight. Maybe he can. That’s the way.

  Americans had a gut feeling that anyone who would run a commercial that bad would make a rotten president. Nixon swamped McGovern in a landslide of epic proportions. Long-haired hippies aren’t much of a voting bloc.

  “A LITTLE DAB’LL DO YA!” So runs the slogan for Brylcreem, the first mass marketed men’s hair product in America. Brylcreem gives hair a high glossy sheen; it was a hallmark of the pre-JFK “wet” look. In the aftermath of JFK, sales of Brylcreem declined. But there was one man who stuck with Brylcreem through thick and thin—1980 Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s rich head of dark hair puzzled his political opponents. Even some voters doubted whether Reagan’s hair color was real. When reporter Peter Hart interviewed a schoolteacher in Missouri, she stated, “I want to know if he dyes his hair. If he does, I will not vote for him.”72 Reagan frequently received letters from supporters asking him whether he dyed his hair.73

  He didn’t. “I know for certain that no dye ever touched Reagan’s hair,” swore Michael Deaver, Reagan’s White House deputy chief of staff. “For years, the Reagan haters had literally sifted through his barber’s trash can, searching for a dyed gray lock that could serve as a tiny metaphor for a phony man and an even more phony presidency. They searched in vain. It was an old actor’s trick—Brylcreem—that gave Reagan’s hair that dark gloss, not Clairol for men.”74 When one reporter asked Reagan whether he dyed his hair, he leaned forward and told the reporter to grip his hair. It was natural and dry.75

  Reagan’s hair helped him immensely. As the oldest presidential candidate in American history, Reagan’s dark coif eased fears that he was too decrepit to handle the presidency. “Crow’s-feet may crinkle the corners of his eyes and a few strands of silver fleck his chestnut hair, but at 68, Ronald Reagan, lean, fast and fit as a ranch hand, seems to be the Republican to beat as he enters the Presidential campaign,” stated Newsweek in October 1979.76

  “For a man of 69, Mr. Reagan looks great,” reported Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail. “The hair is almost jet black, the cheeks are as red as McIntosh apples, the shoulders are wide and strong, the smile is warm and friendly and his speech is effortless. Many expected the age question to become a big issue in the campaign but it hasn’t.”77

  Reagan’s opponent, incumbe
nt president Jimmy Carter, wore whiter hair at age fifty-five than Reagan did at sixty-nine. “Carter must have a pretty fair stylist,” observed Steve Martini, the presidential barber for Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, “but he needs to get his hair a bit darker. He would come across as a stronger person. Now he has that tintype look, all white and washed out.”78 Carter’s reputation as a weakling received another boost when he decided to reverse the part in his hair from right to left.79

  A little dab did indeed do the job for Reagan. Reagan’s Brylcreem look contributed to his carefully crafted image—old enough to know, but young enough to do. In the election of 1980, he trounced Carter.

  HAIR REMAINS A PROMINENT FEATURE of today’s presidential campaigns. The 2004 race pitted the Democratic “all-hair” team against incumbent President George W. Bush. Democratic nominee John “$1,000 Haircut” Kerry spent piles of money and oodles of time perfectly crafting his hair; his running mate, John Edwards, had such a beautiful hairdo that Rush Limbaugh dubbed him the “Breck Girl.”

  But the Democrats forgot something in 2004: hair is a means, not an end in itself. By focusing all their attention on their hair, the Kerry-Edwards ticket seemed lightweight and elitist. Kerry lent credibility to this idea when he explained the ticket’s popular appeal.

  “This is the dream team,” he said. “We have better ideas, better vision, a better sense of the difficulties in the lives of average Americans. And,” he added, “we have better hair.”80 This didn’t entirely mesh with the facts—President Bush’s hair is quite underrated. In fact, in a poll commissioned by Wahl Clipper Corporation, Bush’s hair defeated Kerry’s by a broad 51–30 margin.81 Nonetheless, the perception stuck: Kerry was more focused on hair than policy.

  Edwards, too, had his hair troubles. Bald and tubby Vice President Dick Cheney slapped Edwards repeatedly, quipping, “People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, his sex appeal, and his great hair. I say to them: How do you think I got the job?”82 Edwards’s hairy situation has continued to dog him throughout the 2008 race. A YouTube video that shows Edwards primping his hair for a full two minutes and gazing at himself in a compact to “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story has received hundreds of thousands of hits.

  So hair matters—but it isn’t all-important. Nixon, Reagan, and H.W. Bush campaign advisor Roger Ailes said:

  Sometimes we can make mistakes about others if, as we view them, we segment them and only get a partial picture. This person has good-looking hair; that person has no hair.This person should lose weight; that one should gain weight.We look at all these parts of people, but then we quickly perceive the person in totality. You can have the greatest head of hair in the world, or the greatest smile, or the greatest voice, or whatever, but after two minutes you’re going to be looked at as a whole person. All of those impressions of your various parts will have been blended into one complete composite picture, and the other person will have a feeling about you based on that total impression. Enough of that image has to be working in your favor for you to be liked, accepted, and given what you want.83

  Without hair, a candidate may be doomed, as John Quincy Adams was—or he may emerge triumphant, as Dwight D. Eisenhower did. With great hair, a candidate may win the White House, as JFK did—or he may go down in flames, as John Kerry did.With facial hair, a candidate may meet with disaster, as Horace

  Greeley did—or he may meet with victory, as Ulysses S. Grant did. Hair, in isolation, does not define a candidate. It does, however, help shape candidates’ images—and we use those images to pick our presidents.Who in the world would Warren G. Harding have been if he had been cursed with male pattern baldness? He certainly wouldn’t have been president.

  7

  A Woman’s Touch

  THE ELECTION OF 1884 WAS CLOSE—too close for President Grover Cleveland’s comfort. The first Democrat to enter the White House since before the Civil War, Cleveland had been savaged during the election race. His Republican opponent, former secretary of state James G. Blaine, had a reputation as a corrupt bureaucrat; Edwin L. Godkin of the Nation claimed that Blaine had “wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool.”1 But Cleveland had a reputation as a boorish womanizer.

  That reputation was not unfounded. On July 21, 1884, the Buffalo Telegraph had published a bombshell report, entitled:

  A TERRIBLE TALE

  A Dark Chapter in a Public Man’s History

  The Pitiful Story of Maria Halpin and Governor Cleveland’s Son

  The story reported that Cleveland had sired a child out of wedlock with Maria Halpin, that the child was now ten years old and named Oscar Halpin Cleveland. The story stated further that when Cleveland had lived in Buffalo, he had used his bachelor pad as a “harem.”2

  Cleveland responded to the story by making a clean breast of things. “Whatever you do, tell the truth,” he wired to one of his campaign advisors. Cleveland admitted that he had engaged in an illicit relationship with Halpin, but refused to claim paternity, since Halpin had been around the block rather regularly.3 Republicans leapt on the scandal, quickly distributing the most famous song in political history. It was entitled “Ma, Ma,Where’s My Pa?” The chorus:

  Ma! Ma! Where is my Pa?

  Up in the White House, darling,

  Making up the laws, working the cause,

  Up in the White House, dear.4

  Republicans took up the chant. At rallies, they would yell, “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” Democrats soon came up with a retort: “He’s gone to the White House, ha! ha! ha!”5

  Fortunately for Cleveland, Blaine’s personal background raised questions too. Political opponents charged that Blaine had impregnated his wife before the marriage—that they had been married, in fact, only three months before his wife gave birth. Everyone had heard that “James G. Blaine betrayed the girl whom he married . . . at the muzzle of a shotgun,” puffed the Indianapolis Sentinel. “If, after despoiling her, he was craven to refuse her legal redress, giving legitimacy to her child, until a loaded shotgun stimulated his conscience—then there is a blot on his character more foul, if possible, than any of the countless stains on his political record.”When confronted with the issue, Blaine sued the Sentinel, claiming that he had secretly married his wife before the impregnation.6 His claim was unconvincing and did little to dispel questions about his moral virtue or his truthfulness.

  Cleveland just squeaked by Blaine—his margin of victory was only twenty-three thousand votes.7

  If he wished to repair his image, the forty-seven-year-old, three-hundred-plus pound Cleveland needed to take a wife. His choice was Frances Folsom, the daughter of his old law partner. Today, we would label the choice borderline perverse. Cleveland had been present at Frances’s birth; he bought her first baby carriage. When Frances’s father died in 1875, Cleveland became the eleven-year-old’s de-facto guardian. Frances grew into a hot number, tall and well proportioned. When she turned twenty-one, Cleveland married her.8

  Cleveland’s supporters were thrilled. “Fair, fresh, genuine, in figure tall and graceful, with soft, brown hair and deep kindling eyes, she stood before all, the embodiment of all that is best, loveliest and sweetest in the womanhood of our nation,” gushed an 1892 campaign biography. “She charmed everybody, and for a time even cast the President into the shade. No lady of the White House, not even Dolly [sic] Madison, was ever so popular.”9

  Cleveland’s marriage did not silence his critics. During the 1888 election cycle, the incumbent president was accused of beating his young wife; the Democrats responded by placing Frances on campaign posters, the first use of the first lady in such a manner. Frances herself proclaimed the accusations “wicked and heartless lies. I can only wish the women of our country no better blessing than that their homes and their lives be as happy, and that their husbands may be as kind and attentive, as considerate and affectionate as mine.”10

  Cleveland won the popular vote but narrowly lost the 1888 election in the electoral c
ollege. Four years later, he returned to the presidency, Frances by his side. Where the 1884 election had focused primarily on Cleveland’s personal life, the 1892 election virtually ignored it. Young and beautiful Frances Cleveland helped quash the personal attacks of elections past—she softened Cleveland’s rough edges, making him seem warmer and more palatable to a broader audience.

  Frances remained a controversial figure. Fiery columnist William Cowper Brann accused Frances of marrying Cleveland for his fame and money, caustically observing:

  Probably she has regretted a thousand times that she bartered her youth and beauty for life companionship with a tub of tallow, mistaken at that time for a god by a purblind public, but even though it be true, as often asserted, that the old boor gets drunk and beats her, a woman could scarce apply for a divorce from a man who has twice been president. Furthermore, association with such a man will lower the noblest woman to his level. Every physiognomist who saw Frances Folsom’s bright face, its spirituelle beauty, and who looks at it now and notes it [sic] stolid, almost sodden expression must recall those lines of Tennyson’s:

  As the husband is, the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,

  And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

  Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule,

  Cursed be the gold that gilds the straighten’d forehead of the fool.11

  And Hillary Clinton thought she had it tough.

  CANDIDATES’ WIVES RARELY MAKE or break a presidential campaign. For the first century of presidential politics, candidates’ wives were rarely seen or heard—naturally, since presidential candidates did not openly campaign for much of that period. In many cases, the absence of wifely presence redounded to candidates’ benefit. George Washington would have had difficulty coping with questions about his fortune hunting; he likely married Martha not out of love but out of desire for her sizable assets, since she was one of the richest women in Virginia at the time of the wedding. The good widow Martha had inherited seventeen thousand acres, thirty thousand pounds sterling, and 150 slaves from her recently deceased hubby.12