Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  When Harry Truman was first elected to the Senate in 1934, he was very, very nervous about taking his place among what he regarded as an august and magisterial fraternity of legislators. But his qualms were put to rest when one of the senior members of the Senate took him aside and told him, "Harry, for the next six months you're gonna wonder what the hell you're doing here. After that, you're gonna wonder what the hell the rest of us are doing here."

  Truman was elected FDR's vice-president in the 1944 election, and met with the president soon thereafter for tea in the White House garden soon thereafter. After leaving FDR, another person present at the lunch said something to the effect that the president was dying. "I know," Truman said, "and it scares the hell out of me."

  On April 12, 1945, Truman was having a drink with some friends in the Senate lounge when an urgent message summoned him to the White House. He ran over and was greeted by Eleanor Roosevelt, who informed him that Roosevelt had died earlier that day in Warm Springs, Georgia.

  Ever the solicitous gentleman, Truman asked, "Mrs. Roosevelt, is there anything I can do for you?"

  "Harry," Eleanor replied, "is there anything I can do for you? You are the one in trouble."

  Richard Nixon was not known for his sense of humor, but he did have a few amusing moments.

  When he was Eisenhower's vice-president he engaged in a series of debates, public and private, with Soviet Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon always researched the background of foreign leaders he was to encounter (and his book about them, Leaders, is still fascinating reading), so it was with interest that he learned that Khrushchev, like himself, had some childhood experience in rural life dealing pigs. Khrushchev grew up on a farm in the village of Kalinovka, in the indeterminate border between Russia and Ukraine, and had been a pig herder in his childhood. Nixon's father had been a grocer in Whittier, California, and as part of the meat market side of the grocery, had raised some pigs to which young Richard had tended.

  Vice-President Nixon and Communist Party Secretary Khrushchev met in the American exhibit at a trade fair in Moscow and got into a vigorous debate while standing in a facsimile of an American kitchen. (Hence the nickname, "The kitchen debate.") At one point during the encounter, Khrushchev shouted at Nixon that his opinions were "bullshit." To which Nixon replied, "Yeah? Well, your opinions are pigshit. And you and I both know that nothing smells worse than pigshit!"

  Khrushchev stared at Nixon in astonishment for a moment, and then burst into uproarious laughter.

  During the 1960 presidential campaign, VP Nixon spoke proudly about he held his own in the kitchen debate. His opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy, observed that good many married men could say the same thing.

  A more characteristic anecdote about VP Nixon highlights his fervid imagination and paranoid streak. In 1957, President Eisenhower met with Khrushchev (and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) in Geneva, Switzerland. The summit conference went very well and seemed to presage a thaw in the Cold War; but Nixon, ever alert to the insidious machinations of the hostile press (which to his mind was the only kind of press there was), was taking no chances with negative publicity. Nixon was worried that any improvement in relations between the US and the USSR could be compared with the attempt to solve the Sudeten Crisis in Munich in 1938, where British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain gave in to the demands of Adolf Hitler.

  Like many Englishmen, Chamberlain always carried an umbrella, and the umbrella had become a popular symbol of the "appeasement" policy that many said led the way to the Second World War. Therefore, to forestall any invidious comparison between Ike and Chamberlain, Nixon saw to it that when Eisenhower returned to the US and made his scheduled statement on the tarmac at the airport, there would not be an umbrella anywhere in sight.

  Of course, predictably, it was pouring rain when Eisenhower disembarked.

  A photograph taken at the time shows a drenched President Eisenhower attempting to read a statement from a soaked, sodden, disintegrating piece of paper, with an equally drenched Vice-President Nixon standing beside him, looking angrily around with thinly disguised suspicion.

  Nixon lost the presidential election of 1960 by one tenth of one percent of the popular vote, but he accepted his defeat by John Kennedy with equanimity. He appeared on the Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack Paar, soon after Kennedy's inauguration, and Paar asked him what he thought of Kennedy's inaugural address.

  "Well," Nixon, replied, "he said some things that day that I wish I had said."

  "Such as ... ?" Paar prompted.

  "Such as," Nixon said, "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States ..."

  Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first VP, was a man prone to ethnic epithets. On one occasion on Air Force 2 (as it is popularly if unofficially known), returning home from Asia with the press onboard, Agnew saw a Japanese-American journalist taking a nap, and he asked loudly, "What wrong with the fat Jap?"

  He then apologized, and the journalist of course accepted the apology. But the fact that anger and hurt feelings remained was evidenced by the fact that as Air Force 2 approached Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the journalist shouted, "Bombs away!"

  Vice-presidents have often been treated disrespectfully by presidents. The two figures are rarely associates, and never friends. Theirs is usually a marriage of convenience, and is frequently strained. When FDR died and Truman became president, the Secretary of War took him aside to tell him about the Manhattan Project. It had never occurred to Roosevelt to inform his new vice-president about the atomic bomb. When Lyndon Johnson went from being Senate Majority Leader to JFK's vice-president, he went from being one of the most powerful people in the country to being a virtual nonentity, and he resented not only the demotion but also the disrespectful way many of Kennedy's people (especially the president's brother Robert) treated him. Perhaps for that reason he mistreated his own VP, Hubert Humphrey. LBJ frequently forgot to ask Humphrey to attend cabinet meetings, and on one occasion asked him to go and get him a sandwich. And when President Eisenhower was asked at a press conference during the 1960 presidential campaign if he could name any policies to which VP Nixon had contributed, he replied, "Give me a couple of weeks and I might be able to think of one."

  But Reagan's VP, George H.W. Bush, had a sense of humor about his role. Reagan never attended the funerals of foreign dignitaries, always sending his vice-president in his stead. Bush eventually mused that he should change his middle names from "Herbert Walker" to "You Die, I Fly." And during the 1988 presidential campaign, he referred to his foreign policy experience, including meetings with foreign leaders and then added, "Some of them were actually alive when I met them."

  J. Danforth Quayle, VP for the first President Bush, has an undeserved reputation for stupidity. He actually is simply inarticulate and tends to suffer from a form of mental aphasia. He expresses complete thoughts incompletely and phrases things in such a way as to convey meanings the exact opposite of what he intended. In addition, his reputation has been injured by numerous ridiculous statements falsely attributed him. (He did not, for example, say while visiting Latin Americathat he wished he had taken Latin in high school.)

  But he did say "I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." What he meant was that he vacationed frequently in California while he was living in Arizona. He did say, "One word summarizes what it means to be vice-president, and that one word is to be prepared." He did say, "Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child." He did say, "The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century." And in attempting to express his interest in political science by frequently rereading Plato, he did say, "Every year I try to read The Republic," which does not quite convey the same meaning. When addressing a meeting of the United Negro College Fund, he garbled their slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." "What a waste it is to lose you
r mind," Quayle said. "Or not to have a mind is very wasteful. How true that it."

  A particularly prime example of Quayle’s unfortunate lack of rhetorical skills was a speech he gave to an assembly of NASA officials and astronauts, with the president and the first lady in attendance. He began by saying, “Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.” He then went on to say that “Space remains a high priority for NASA”; to note that “We see what we think are canals on Mars. Where there are canals, there is water. Where there is water there is oxygen, which means we can breathe”; and to express optimism by predicting that “The future will be better tomorrow.” Of course, scientific progress depends upon quality education, Quayle said. We must support the country’s teachers, because “Teachers are the only profession that teaches our children.” Our goal thus must be to have “The best educated American people in the world.”

  Real Quaylisms abound, as numerous websites attest. This writer's favorite comes from a speech he gave to a Thanksgiving festival in Virginia: "I suppose three things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family—which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be." Sheer poetry.

  DICTATORS AND DICTATORSHIPS

  Benito Mussolini reveled in his well-documented virility and amorous predisposition. When a journalist asked him what the first thing he did in the morning, he replied, "I jump right out of bed. No matter how lovely the head beside me on the pillow."

  On another occasion, and with uncharacteristic modesty, Mussolini said, "A man in my position must be stupid at least once a day."

  Adolf Hitler hated flying in airplanes. Benito Mussolini loved piloting them.

  This led to an awkward situation during one of Mussolini's early visits to Germany. Neither man knew the other very well, it being early in their relationship, so each was eager to impress the other. Hitler proudly showed Mussolini a new experimental sea plane that his new Luftwaffe was building, and Mussolini insisted upon flying it. Hitler reluctantly agreed, and the two dictators boarded the sea plane for a quick spin over the North Sea. The problem was that despite his enthusiasm for flying, Mussolini was not a very good pilot and was unfamiliar with the controls of the sea plane. These facts were made quickly apparent by the way the plane lurched, dipped, rose, and basically wobbled with a nervous Duce at the helm and a terrified Führer sitting beside him. Mussolini eventually managed to land the plane and taxi to the dock. When the two dictators emerged, both were acting quite self-consciously as if nothing were amiss, but both their faces were as white as sheets; and they then, deeply engaged in conversation and paying no attention to their surroundings, walked arm in arm to the end of the dock, kept going, and fell face first into the cold waters of the North Sea.

  Despite his record of bloodshed and his fondness for terror, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was also the unsophisticated product of a small provincial city. On one occasion he was in the apartment of Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov when he noticed a "position book" on the table, i.e., a manual illustrating a variety of positions for sexual intercourse. After paging through it and examining the pictures, he turned to Litvinov and asked, "Tell me, Maxim Litvinov, do people really do this sort of thing?"

  Stalin's elderly mother was equally rural, provincial, and unsophisticated, and more than a little obtuse. Stalin had already consolidated his power and his control of the Soviet state when he had his mother brought to the Kremlin from Tbilisi, Georgia, for a lengthy visit. She returned home sullenly content that her son seemed to be doing well, but for the life of her she could not figure out what he did for a living.

  One must, as it has been said, give the devil his due. Corporal Adolf Hitler was a brave soldier in World War One, and he single-handedly captured seven enemy soldiers.

  During the Battle of the Somme, the murderous clash of Germans, English, and French that lasted from July to November, 1916, and left one and a half million men dead or wounded, Hitler served as a dispatch runner. Telecommunications in warfare were very limited in 1916, and if a message had to be sent from one part of the battlefield to another, it often had to be physically carried. This was the job of the dispatch runner, and Hitler did his duty with enthusiasm. It was a dangerous assignment—Hitler was shot at one point—but it was a vitally important one.

  On one occasion, surrounded by gun smoke, fog, and the darkness of early dawn, Corporal Hitler heard a babble of voices that were quite obviously French. He was alone and armed only with a revolver, but no one could see anything, so he decided to brazen it out. He began shouting orders as if he had an entire platoon with him, and then demanded that the French drop their weapons and surrender. They did, and Hitler marched them back to German lines. For this act of bravery (not to mention bravado) he was awarded the Iron Cross.

  Hitler subsequently was injured by mustard gas. One cannot help but wish that he had inhaled more deeply.

  I hate the Schweinhund too, but it's safer if you stand up.

  Benito Mussolini was also a brave soldier in the First World War, also a corporal, though on the other side, of course. (Italy was fighting Germany's ally, Austria.) He was also wounded, but did not discuss his injury very often. It seems that Corporal Mussolini realized that the mortar he was firing was growing dangerously hot, and he warned the officer in charge that it needed to cool down before being fired again. The officer stupidly ignored him and ordered another shot. The mortar exploded, and a piece of shrapnel hit Mussolini in the buttocks. He regarded such a wound as undignified, and he rarely mentioned it.

  Considering what was to come, a remark made by Hitler to Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg in 1938, shortly before the German Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, is particularly chilling. Schuschnigg had been summoned to Hitler's Alpine villa for a few hours of haranguing invective culminating in a series of demands that the Austrian chancellor felt compelled to accept. (They would all be rendered moot by the Anschluss.) When the meeting was over, Hitler concluded with the following words: "I think we have settled our relations for five years to come. But keep this is mind: Germany today has the most powerful army in the world. Why do you think we spent all this money to create this army? For parades?!"

  A comparison of the dietary habits of the three major dictators of early 20th century Europe is interesting.

  Mussolini was athletic and health conscious. He was stricken by a stomach ailment in 1923, and from that point on ate almost entirely fruit and cereal, with very little meat but copious amounts of fish sautéed in olive oil. Red wine in moderate amounts was not uncommon. He was in fine physical condition right up until partisans stood him up against a wall and shot him to death in 1945.

  Hitler was a strict vegetarian who neither drank nor smoked and regarded killing for food as cruelty to animals (!). His only indulgence seems to have been a fondness for sweet, creamy pastries, which he consumed in vast quantities. When he hosted dinners for his entourage he ate a vegetable plate as they consumed a normal German meal, and would say, "I hope you are all enjoying your carrion."

  In stark contrast to Mussolini's health-conscious abstemiousness and Hitler's sugar-based vegetarianism, Stalin ate like a pig, drank like a fish, and smoked like a chimney, which may be as much as reflection of Russian culinary habits and table manners as his own behavior. Evening dinners at his dacha rarely ended with any of his guests able to stand up or walk straight (or walk at all, for that matter.)

  Stalin lived well into his seventies, and died in bed. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

  The shadow of nuclear annihilation lay across the world through the entire era of the Cold War. Leaders on both sides usually exercised decorum when discussing the so-called nuclear option, but there were occasions when a more sinister perspective became evident.

  At a meeting of the Cominform leaders in Moscow in the 1950s,
Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedung) told Czech Communist Party head Klement Gottwald that China did not fear a nuclear exchange with the west. "We could lose 300 million lives and still have over half our population left."

  "But Comrade Mao," Gottwald said, "your population is huge. Mine is small, only 15 million. In such a war Czechoslovakia would be wiped from the face of the earth!"

  Mao nodded sympathetically and then said, "Sacrifices must be made."

  Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism, was once asked if he enjoyed listening to music (which meant, of course, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.) "Yes," he replied, "but I do so infrequently. It makes one soft. You can't listen to music and then go out and smash heads."

  The bizarre racial theories of Nazi Germany involved a detailed system of racial categorization, with everyone in the country fitting into some place in the descending nomenclature from Aryan at the top to Jew and Gypsy on the bottom. The ancient Aryan race of blond-haired, blue-eyed giants no longer existed, the Nazis said, because of interbreeding with lower forms of humans over the millennia. (This ancient race actually never existed at all, of course.) This explains why Hitler, for example, despite his piercing, hypnotic blue eyes, had brown hair, or why Herrmann Goering, through robust and powerful, was only 5'8".

  But a problem arose with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and one of the most powerful men in Germany. He was short, skinny, dark haired and sallow-complexioned. After racking their brains for an appropriate description, the regime's anthropologists came up with a category to which Goebbels and Goebbels alone belonged: he was ein Nachgedunkelte Schrumpfgermane, which translates roughly as "a dwarf-like Germanic who darkened."