Oval Office Oddities

by Bill Fawcett

  STRIKE BREAKER

  Cal Coolidge was no friend of labor. He often sided with the big companies. By 1923, when Harding died and Coolidge became president, he felt strongly that there had been more than enough reform legislation passed, and it was time for him as the new president to put an end to more. When once asked by Samuel Gompers, leader of the AFL, to help make sure that striking Boston Police officers be hired back, Coolidge replied “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” And Coolidge was not alone, as many in the United States felt that by 1924 the government had become unwieldy and top heavy, and the “he who governs least, governs best” attitude made Silent Cal popular. You have to wonder what he would make of today’s ungainly federal structure and bureaucracy.

  FIRST AND LAST

  The marriage between Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR may never have been idyllic. Who is to blame can be debated. The first time the split became public was in 1918. In one of those “oh no” moments, Eleanor discovered the love letters that were still being written between Franklin and his mistress, one Lucy Mercer. She went off on the future president and even threatened to divorce him, which would have crippled his political career, if he did not stop seeing Lucy immediately. Just to make certain he straightened up, FDR’s mother, Sara, joined the argument with the threat to cut her son off from the family money if he didn’t clean up his act. The result of all this was two-fold. Firstly, FDR broke off with Lucy Mercer and soon replaced her with a new mistress. The second effect was the almost-total emotional alienation between Eleanor and Franklin. It is likely that from that point on the couple were never again physically close. FDR’s new mistress, Missy LeHand, remained with him until she died in 1944. FDR then returned to the arms of Lucy Mercer, and was with her at the Calabogie Gardens resort in Georgia when he died. Knowing of Eleanor Roosevelt’s antipathy, all traces of Lucy’s presence had been removed before the grieving widow arrived.

  OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

  Once the marriage between Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt became loveless, both turned to others for companionship. Eleanor developed a very close relationship with a reporter named Lorena Hickok, who moved into the White House, into a bedroom directly across from that of the First Lady. It was well known that they were both emotionally and physically close. But even though Lorena was herself a reporter, there was virtually no mention by any of the papers or radio commentators about the two women. Strange as it may seem to the modern reader, this was due to a gentleman’s agreement between presidents and press that kept such things out of the news until the new journalism of the sixties.

  AN S BY ANY OTHER NAME

  Due to a disagreement on what to name him, Harry S. Truman had no middle name. All the records and his birth certificate have only the letter S. Eventually the dispute over which name the letter stood for was forgotten or ignored. No name was ever assigned to the letter and the S remained undefined all his life.

  AIR FORCE FUN

  Before there was an Air Force One, President Truman had at his disposal a C4 fitted for travel. The name of this aircraft was Sacred Cow, which would be the name they used when contacting a tower. At one time, Truman was able to cajole the pilot into buzzing the White House. Trouble is, no one radioed ahead to warn the First Family or security staff of what they planned. The result was that when the large aircraft roared low over the building, his wife and daughter were rushed to a safe spot and the Air Force scrambled to intercept the plane they thought had been hijacked by assassins. Fortunately the plane’s real occupants were made known before it was shot down.

  DRIVING MISS, ER, SOMERSBY

  While commanding the Allied Forces in Europe, General Eisenhower was constantly chauffeured around. He was assigned one driver, the very attractive Kay Somersby, whose driving and other skills he seems to have greatly appreciated. She became his permanent driver and by all accounts, including hers, also something much closer.

  I LIKE IKE

  Dwight Eisenhower was not the only Eisenhower child to go by the nickname “Ike,” though he was certainly the best known. Ike, it seems, was a sort of generic nickname used by the entire family, including his five brothers.

  ENOUGH SAID

  At least some of the stories about JFK and Marilyn Monroe were true. Also, according to her, you could throw in Bobby as well. Jealous?

  BESTSELLER

  The famous and still-selling book by John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, was actually his second bestseller. A younger JFK turned his senior thesis into a book entitled While England Slept, which was a study of how Britain failed to prepare for World War II. The book was not exactly Pulitzer material, with factual errors and less-than-inspired writing. It was an instant bestseller, but only because his father bought thirty thousand copies that ended up in storage.

  MATA HURRY

  In the second year of his presidency, John Kennedy was involved for some months with Ellen Rometach. She was the wife of the military attaché at the East German embassy. She was also one of the most expensive prostitutes serving the better class of clients in Washington, D.C. It appears, not very surprisingly, that Ellen Rometach was also working as a spy for the East Germans. When her espionage connection was discovered by Kennedy enemy J. Edgar Hoover, the State Department deported her so quickly that no one was able to question her about any of her high-placed customers, including the president.

  TIME OUT

  With all his energy, LBJ often had little patience for meetings he did not feel were productive. Loving technological gadgets, he wore a watch that also contained an alarm clock. In meetings, his alarm would go off and the president would hurry out. There were occasional suspicions that those alarms had been set by the president just minutes before going off.

  MONO-MONOGRAMS

  The entire Johnson family had the same initials, even the daughters. Lady Bird Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lucy Baines Johnson, and Lynda Byrd Johnson. All were LBJs. Did the girls get to steal Daddy’s monogrammed shirts?

  TRUE SUCCESSOR

  LBJ was very much the successor of Jack Kennedy in a number of ways. It seems this president, too, was quite a womanizer. Lady Bird and Lyndon slept apart. Lyndon often did not sleep alone. He had two longtime mistresses. One affair lasted, nonexclusively, for twenty-one years. LBJ gave her cars and even a house. Another was a woman who shared his liberal views and bed for upwards of thirty years. But Johnson was almost always looking for a young, well-built conquest. If the president liked them enough, he even brought them back to Washington from Texas. The girls, often totally unqualified, were given make-work jobs during the day and performed their patriotic duty nights. LBJ was a philanderer, but not a complete cad. Once the president tired of one of these young women, he made sure they were sent to a new government position, but one that was far from the White House and his new companion. It seems likely that the hanky-panky was not limited to the presidential suite. Johnson had a buzzer installed in the Oval Office that gave warning when Lady Bird was approaching. If you were president, could you resist doing it there?

  THE KING

  Nixon acted like he was a king, but not the time he met “The King.” One of the most famous presidential photos is a shot of Nixon and Elvis Presley arm in arm and smiling broadly. Elvis collected badges and was there to get the president to give him one for the narcotics feds. To sweeten the offer, just before the photo he presented Richard Nixon with a gold-plated.45-caliber handgun. The ironies here are too many to list, but start with Elvis asking for a badge from the people who arrested drug users.

  GERALD FORD WAS NOT A KLUTZ

  When in college Gerald Ford played center on scholarship for the University of Michigan. He was not only a team leader, but was also so good at football he was voted one year’s most valuable player. The many tales of his being a klutz began in almost a joking manner and took on lives of their own. Part of the reporting may have been a reflection of the dissatisfaction everyone felt when he pa
rdoned Richard Nixon. Another part comes from the fact that President Ford still skied and practiced other sports with enthusiasm. But when he fell while skiing down an advanced slope it made the news. You have to wonder how many other people wiped out skiing that winter day.

  HUNK

  How about a president who when young was a state athlete and so good looking he was a model in a photo spread on “Beautiful People” for Look magazine and on the cover of Cosmopolitan? We had one—Gerald Ford.

  OUT THERE

  While at a Lions Club meeting in 1969, the later-President Jimmy Carter and several others saw a UFO. Carter was sure enough of what he saw—a flying object as bright as that night’s moon which flew to within about a third of a mile of where he stood—that he sent in a written report. He is the only president to have reported a UFO. When elected there was some excitement among UFO buffs that he might expose the whole government “cover-up.” Why the thirty-ninth president did not was a matter of much speculation and disappointment. We are still waiting for our guided tours of Area 51.

  LONG PASS

  Jimmy Carter liked his privacy and to get totally away from the job of being president when he returned home for a vacation. He was also very casual and often negative about things military, even though he was himself a naval veteran. Occasionally he took this attitude to a dangerous extreme. There was, and still is, a military officer who escorts the president with a device that resembles a football. That device is the only way the launch codes for nuclear missiles are released in the case of an attack. President Carter did not want the man carrying the launch codes to stay with or near him while he was home in Plains, Georgia. This meant that the football sat ten miles away in Americus, Georgia, every time Jimmy went home. Since the window for a successful retaliation to a Russian first strike was less than the almost fifteen minutes it would have taken to bring the codes to the president, let’s all be happy the Russians never pulled the trigger while Jimmy was on break.

  BAD TREE

  Ronald Reagan did really once state that trees caused eighty percent of the world’s pollution. He was quickly corrected and no trees were lost.

  STAR POWER

  When things feel out of control, people will look in the strangest places for security. Such was the case toward the end of the Reagan Administration. Frightened by the assassination attempt on her husband, Nancy Reagan turned to an astrologer, Joan Quigley, for advice on keeping her husband safe. Very soon White House schedules, event times, even the time at which Air Force One would take off and land, were being dictated by the astrologer. Ms. Quigley’s star charts became a major factor in everything the president did. His chief of staff would often peruse the charts to determine when the president would be available to make crucial decisions.

  5

  GEORGE WASHINGTON

  “The Aggregate happiness of society, which is best promoted by the practice of a virtuous policy, is, or ought to be, the end of all government.”

  George Washington

  FIRST IN WAR

  The first and only president to muster an army himself and lead it personally was George Washington. This army was not mustered against the British, pirates, Indians, or any other external threat. The purpose of the army was to put down what has since been called the “Whiskey Rebellion.” The year was 1791, and the nation had just gotten started. One of the genuine problems Washington faced was to make the United States into a real nation and his administration into a real government. One of the unfortunate side effects of being a government was the need for money. Under Washington the Congress enacted a number of taxes. The trouble was that this close to the American Revolution there was still a lot of bad feeling toward any central government and especially toward new taxes.

  The tax that brought this to a head was a seven-cents-per-gallon tax on each gallon of whiskey sold anywhere in the nation. This was wildly unpopular in the counties of western Pennsylvania. The four counties south of Pittsburgh erupted into violence and outright revolt. The homes and offices of the federal tax collectors were attacked and even burned. Hundreds of local whiskey makers simply refused to pay the tax and defied Washington to do anything about it.

  In response, the first president sent out a call for volunteers in Virginia, Maryland, and nearby eastern Pennsylvania. The lure of this was great for both those who had served with Washington in the Revolution and those who were too young and could now join up. Over twelve thousand men joined the ranks and were formed into companies. This massive army, Washington at its head for the first six days, then marched toward Pittsburgh. As the president likely expected, the show of force was enough. Those with land or assets realized that this was serious and quickly changed their attitudes. Those who still could not stomach the tax picked up and moved beyond the frontier into Tennessee and Kentucky. Many of their descendants today likely are among those who still refuse to pay whiskey taxes and run moonshine in a family tradition started by Washington’s army over two centuries ago.

  TOOTHY TALE

  George Washington lost his teeth fairly early in life. This was common in the eighteenth century. He wore numerous replacements, none of them wood. No one really used wooden teeth. It just wasn’t practical. Wood decays quickly when exposed to the acid of saliva, it has splinters, and it is relatively soft even before rotting in your mouth. Washington’s teeth were mostly carved from bone. He may also have worn bone teeth taken from cadavers; ghoulish as this may sound today, it was common practice three hundred years ago. Exotic materials were tried. In those days teeth were made from any animal bone or horn that was large enough to carve, including porcelain. There is a record that Washington used a set of teeth carved from a hippo bone. But hippopotamus bone proved very porous and when the first president imbibed his favorite port wine they were quickly stained black and discarded.

  FATHER ONLY OF THE COUNTRY

  At the age of seventeen, George Washington was sick simultaneously with both malaria and small pox. There was no way to check either in the eighteenth century, but there is a good chance that the effect of the combined illnesses was to render the future president sterile. While he doted on Martha’s children from an earlier marriage, Washington never had any of his own. This, strangely, was one of the reasons everyone considered him the perfect candidate to become the first president. To understand this you have to realize two things. One is that the colonies had just finished a revolution, and it was an era when the rule of kings had a negative reputation. The year Washington was elected saw the beginning of the French Revolution. The second consideration was that there was no real precedent for how the president would act or what the office would be like. When you combine this with the overwhelming popularity Washington enjoyed, there could and would be a concern that the presidency might become a “royal” office held by Washington and passed through his family in the same way the Caesars ruled. “Divine right” was a lot more familiar to most people than “will of the masses.” Because George Washington had no blood descendants, there was no risk of this happening. So his lack of a true heir actually was considered a major plus in the minds of the revolutionaries who were now forming the new government.

  THE GREAT PROGRESS

  Everyone who has visited the original thirteen colonies has seen more than one “Washington Slept Here” sign. Most of us tend to discount the veracity of these signs due to their sheer number. Actually it is likely that most of them are accurate, for at least one night’s stay. As the first president, Washington insightfully believed that a big part of his job was to help solidify into a nation thirteen rival colonies that each had their own government already in place. To do this the people had to think of themselves as citizens of the United States first and of their state second. He did this in a number of ways.

  One way was to have a presence in each state. That meant to go to that state and be seen there, meet with the people, the local leaders, the merchants, and let everyone know he was their leader. To do this Washington traveled e
xtensively during his eight years as president. The tradition of a ruler moving around the country was an old one. For hundreds of years kings and queens had made a circuit of their countries, staying with and being hosted by their kingdom’s nobles along the way. This could be a very expensive proposition for their host as the royal Progress often included a few hundred nobles, guards, and support personnel who also had to be housed and fed. In fact there are records of where a king or queen was unhappy with a noble and so would show up and cost their temporary host a fortune by simply sticking around for days or even weeks. What the Progress did accomplish was to let people all over the kingdom see that their sovereign was not only aware of them, but had been in their area. Washington used his travels as president for the same purpose, but in a much more friendly way. He traveled with a relatively small retinue and, especially in the smaller towns, often stayed in rooming houses or private homes each night. This meant that over the months he would have gone to a town, met with the people there, and then spent the night in hundreds of locations all over the original states. So when you see those “Slept Here” plaques and wall signs, there is a good chance he did, at least for one night.

  HE DID NOT HAVE SEX WITH THAT WOMAN

  One of the most intriguing aspects of Washington the man is his relationship with Sally Fairfax. The beautiful Sally Fairfax was the sister-in-law of his half-brother Lawrence Washington. In the interest of promoting Lawrence’s interests with the much richer and more prestigious Fairfax family, young George would often visit the Fairfax estate. There he met and befriended an older man named George William. He also became completely enamored with the woman that George William soon married, Sally Fairfax. Eventually George Washington was also married—to Sally’s best friend Martha Custis. Martha was a rich and socially important widow, which gave Washington the status and wealth he desired. The two couples often met socially and traveled in the same social circles until about 1773. Although over the years Sally and Washington exchanged many letters, it shows something about his personal sense of honor and high standards that the relationship went no farther. This is not to say that there was no passion, but more that nothing came of it. You get a sense of both the restraint and the depth of feeling from this excerpt from a letter from Washington to Sally: