Oval Office Oddities

by Bill Fawcett

  TOMBSTONE

  The following was written before his death by Thomas Jefferson to be inscribed on his tombstone:

  Here was buried

  Thomas Jefferson

  Author of the Declaration of Independence

  of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom

  & Father of the University of Virginia

  Now that is an impressive list of accomplishments, but did you notice what he left out? How about being president of the United States?

  8

  PRESIDENTS AS PEOPLE

  Studying the men who have been president gives a certain perspective. Among the many benefits is that you realize that some of the men who led the United States were brilliant while a surprising number were incompetent, others were clinically depressed, and a few apparently didn’t care. Yet despite all this, the nation has gone on and prospered. This can be most reassuring while watching the candidates gyrate on TV as they try to get elected.

  NOT READY FOR GQ

  President James Monroe was very proud of having fought in the Revolution. He was wounded and decorated. Perhaps this was why while president he always wore the same style of clothes he had worn forty years earlier. To get the equivalent picture, imagine the current president wearing a gold chain, paisley, and a Nehru jacket. The cocked hat Monroe wore had been out of style for decades, as were his coats and breeches.

  PROUD TO SERVE

  After he had been president, some of John Quincy Adams’s colleagues chastised him for “demeaning” himself by returning to the Congress as a representative. His reply was to state that no man could be degraded by serving the people. He was sitting in the House of Representatives when he collapsed while working at his desk, at the age of eighty. Adams died two days later. A small plaque commemorates the location, which is in today’s Statuary Hall. If you visit, the exact point where the bronze plate sits is also on a “whisper spot”—where a soft word can be heard clearly at another focus spot across the room, but not a few feet away.

  BEQUEST

  In 1826 James Smithson, an Englishman and scientist, fascinated by the new country, left to the U.S. government a substantial bequest (a lot of money) expressly for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Now, any government can always find a use for more money, but John Quincy Adams spent years passionately defending the fund and fending off attempts to raid it. He succeeded, and eventually all the money was used to found the Smithsonian Institution. Yes, our national museums were started with a gift from the British.

  “P” AND THAT STANDS FOR POOL

  After eight years of the presidency of “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson, maybe the nation was just not ready for the abrupt change in style that came with his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren. Where Jackson had been used to frontier living, and rather left the White House reflecting this, the next president was a polished sophisticate with tastes to match. While personal friends with his predecessor, Van Buren found the condition of the White House to be unsuitable as both his home and the residence of a national leader. Almost the day after entering office, the eighth president began remodeling. He quickly convinced Congress to give him $27,000 to pay for repairs, new furniture, and decorations. (That would be would be $648,000 in 2007 dollars.) Many people were just not ready for serious elegance. They raised a cry over the fact that the cut glass and china to be used at state banquets was imported. Another complaint was the fact that a “foreign” chef now cooked the presidential meals. The silverware became a specific target with a barrage of accusations stating that Van Buren ate with a “golden spoon,” which was what such autocrats as the czar of Russia used. But the final straw that everyone agreed illustrated the decadence of the new president was that fact that he included in the new furnishings a billiard table. Martin Van Buren did not take the criticism lightly or well. Too many times in the first year of his administration did a guest return to Ohio or Tennessee with quickly-printed tales of the president’s extravagance. During the later part of his term, only select friends were invited into the White House and state receptions were kept to a minimum. Even though this all happened almost two centuries ago, doesn’t it sound very much like something that would happen today?

  AS A HOUSEKEEPER, ZACHARY TAYLOR WAS A GOOD GENERAL

  President Zachary Taylor was a field general in an era when that meant rough living on the edge of the wilderness. Both he and his wife were much more comfortable in a fort than at the White House. So they basically treated the Executive Mansion as if it were part of a frontier fort. Zachary smoked and chewed. Mostly he spit tobacco and rarely hit the spittoon, if he even tried. The First Lady chain-smoked a pipe, and not always with the smoothest tobaccos. When you add to that the dirt—Washington still had mostly dirt roads—and the general lack of consideration for the building and its furniture, you have one awful mess. The carpets were stained, many beyond hope, and the walls coated with smoke and dirt. Many of the former presidents had used several pieces of their own furniture to fill out the White House rooms, often leaving them upon departing. The Taylors, having learned to live light on the frontier and at army posts, had none to move in. They entertained less, perhaps for obvious reasons, than most presidents and had little interest or incentive to keep the mansion up. When Millard Fillmore moved in, he found the White House was a serious “fixer upper.” Beyond stains, dirt, and rooms used as stalls, there was little furniture and most of it was unsalvageable, and the Blue Room floor was completely covered with straw. It took weeks to render the building what the Fillmores considered habitable and even then the place was a mess. Rotting tobacco juice smells strongly. The new president’s father, a man of almost eighty, once visited and departed much earlier than planned. When asked why not stay longer he responded, “No, no, I will go. I don’t like it here. It isn’t a good place to live. It ain’t a good place for Millard either. I wish he was at home in Buffalo.” Considering how undistinguished Millard Fillmore’s presidency was, maybe he should have listened to Dad.

  JOB SECURITY

  At one time in 1880, due to being elected while still holding a previous office, James Garfield was simultaneously a member of the Ohio House of Representatives, senator-elect from Ohio, and president-elect. Perhaps there was a politician shortage in Ohio that year?

  THE GREAT PRESIDENTIAL YARD SALE

  The whole thing began because Chester A. Arthur had become president after Garfield’s death. The real cause was the fact that the two presidents were very different men. President Garfield was, to be kind, less than a good housekeeper. Under Garfield, and to a lesser degree the earlier presidents, the White House had been more used and abused than maintained. The carpets were soiled, the furniture worn and stained, and even the inside walls covered with smoke stains and mold. Beyond this, the storage areas of the White House were packed with discards and boxes going back to the Madison presidency. A few of the items were valuable, but most were simply junk that the departing presidents did not feel were worth taking with them when they left office. President Arthur was a scrupulous man who had high standards of both cleanliness and presentability in a residence. He chose to stay in his own home until the White House could be cleaned and new furniture provided. The process eventually included the removal of enough boxes, furniture, and old clothing to fill twenty-four wagons.

  Everything was then offered for bid at an open auction. Many items were simply trash, but others ranged from trivial to authentic pieces of history. No matter, everything must go, and it did. Items sold included pants and a tall silk hat that belonged to Lincoln, the rat trap which caught a rat that once ate part of a pair of Lincoln’s pants, an elaborate and well-carved sideboard that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had given to President Hayes. The irony of that last sale is that the sideboard was bought by a prominent saloon owner who used it in his Washington establishment. Fortunately, being so placed it was unlikely any of the original contributors ever saw it stacked high with liquor and wines. Histori
ans swarmed over the items. The last time such White House items had been offered to the public was under Buchanan and there was never another sale like it. Prices were high and bidding strong. A total of three thousand dollars was raised by the White House rummage auction, a considerable sum for the day. Even the rat trap sold for a relatively large amount.

  LEFT OVER VACATION DAYS

  If President George W. Bush is setting a record the for most days off while president, James K. Polk has the record for the opposite. In the times before air conditioning, Washington, D.C., was virtually uninhabitable during the hot summer months. Not very long before, the city had been just a swamp, and the humidity that environment generated still remains. But Polk had a work ethic that just would not quit. He was the first president to stay in Washington, D.C., and continue working during the summer. In fact, over his four-year term he was out of the city no more than a total of six weeks. Isn’t that about how long President Bush was on his ranch last year?

  PRESIDENTIAL PARLOR TRICK

  It is hard to determine exactly why he developed the skill, but James Garfield could simultaneously write in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other. He developed the skill while a “classics man” in college. I wonder if there was extra credit?

  RUNAWAY

  In the nineteenth century it was still common for an apprentice to sign himself into servitude in exchange for the support and training of the master. Such was the case for the often maligned and hapless seventeenth president, Andrew Johnson. At one point he found such a life in North Carolina unbearable and became a poor and homeless runaway apprentice.

  JUST SHOP TALK

  Before he ran for office, the self-made and self-educated Andrew Johnson was a tailor. It was more than just a job to the seventeenth president. In fact, considering the muddle he made of being president, you could speculate he remembered his days as a tailor as the good times. He was, it was said, a very good tailor. Even when he was president, Andrew Johnson simply could not walk by a tailor shop. If he happened to pass by one, he would drop in and talk shop with the owner and staff. While serving as governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson personally made a suit for the governor of Kentucky. That governor had once been a blacksmith and returned the favor by sending Governor Johnson a shovel and tongs he had made. So, all in all, when you examine the presidency of Andrew Johnson, it is safe to say that as a president he was a good tailor.

  GOOD OL’ PREZ

  Grover Cleveland had a tendency to do, and overdo, anything he enjoyed. Chief among his interests were food and beer. While he disliked exercise, he knew he needed more and eventually took an avid interest in hunting and fishing. A sign of his enthusiasm was the name he gave his hunting rifle, which he called “Death and Destruction.”

  BAD LUCK

  For a modern leader known for being progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was surprisingly superstitious. He held strongly to the World War I superstition that three on a match was bad luck. The reality of this was that in the trenches during World War I each side had snipers who watched across no-man’s-land for targets on the other side. It took time to find and aim at a light or movement. The time it took was normally about the same time as it took to pass a lit match to a third smoker. While meaningless for a president, as a rule and not a superstition it made sense in that specific situation. Roosevelt also refused to sit down to any meal that had thirteen people at the table. In fact he was a triskaidekaphobic who feared and disliked the number thirteen. He refused to start a trip on any Friday, or do much of anything on a Friday the thirteenth. Only once was his no Fridays travel rule broken; under the circumstances, he could not object. The funeral train carrying FDR’s body from Georgia to Washington, D.C., started its journey on a Friday the thirteenth.

  SHADES OF BILL

  Warren Harding’s wife virtually put him in office. She was a woman of iron will and immense determination. The “Duchess” ran first his newspaper and then his campaign in 1920. She may have had another motive for having her husband run for office. It seems that, on a personal level, the Hardings were not very close. In fact, by the time he was president, they kept apart most of the time, including nights. For years before the presidential campaign, Warren Harding had been having a fairly public affair with one Carrie Fulton Phillips. Once he was running for president, that relationship had the potential for causing serious harm. When you combine this with the fact that the Duchess was actually the one running the campaign, it is not surprising that Carrie and her husband suddenly found themselves on a world tour. A tour whose expenses were all paid by the Republican Party.

  But the Duchess’s effort gave her only temporary respite. Once in office, Warren Harding developed a relationship with the much-younger Nan Briton. Great efforts were made to avoid suspicion or being seen by the Duchess. In what may be, but probably isn’t, another first for Harding, he used his body guards to sneak his mistress into the White House. They were under orders to make sure that, at all costs, Harding’s wife didn’t see or suspect anything. In 1919, Nan Briton bore Harding a daughter, Elizabeth Christian, but he died before ever seeing the child.

  If large parts of the above sound familiar, then just substitute Bill and Hillary for Warren and the Duchess. Bet you didn’t realize Monica was just part of presidential tradition.

  COOL HAND MCKINLEY

  Shaking hands is one of those things that presidents have to suffer through. There is a certain prestige to having shaken the national leader’s hand. Perhaps this goes back to when the king’s touch was thought to cure disease. In any case, the desire and demand for a presidential handshake became even more strident after photographers were able to take a picture of the event. The out and out champion presidential handshaker has to be William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president. The last president of the nineteenth century was clocked at shaking an amazing two thousand five hundred hands per hour. This is not to say other presidents were slackers. The next president, Theodore Roosevelt, was recorded as having shaken hands with 8,100 New Year’s Day White House visitors in 1902. In 1906, this number was still around 8,000 on a single New Year’s Day. His personal best was the astonishing and hand wrenching total of shaking the hands of 8,513 New Year’s visitors in 1907. Such handshaking extravaganzas often lasted all day and left the president’s hand sore, though the show of support was surely gratifying.

  TESTED IN BATTLE

  Although he was a civil engineer, and a good one, and not a soldier, Herbert Hoover saw his share of conflict. In June 1900, Herbert and his wife, Lou, were in Tientsin when the Boxer Rebellion broke out. He and several hundred other foreigners were trapped in one small part of the city. The incident was made into a hit movie titled 55 Days in Peking starring Charlton Heston. Heston didn’t play Hoover, but the future president had a vital part in the defense and survival of the enclave.

  Herbert was in charge of food and supplies; Lou had the much more dangerous task of bringing supplies to the men defending the front lines of the besieged foreign quarter. This brought her under fire several times. Once, her tire was shot out. Another time she was thought lost and the Peking paper printed her obituary. Her reaction was to be thrilled that they had given her death three whole columns in that day’s newspaper.

  HUMANITARIAN

  In America we remember Herbert Hoover as a failed president who was unable to slow or prevent the Great Depression. But Herbert Hoover is remembered very differently in Europe. During World War I, after making sure all American civilians were safely out of the war zone as a favor to the American consul general in France, he took charge of the program to provide food and necessities to the war-ravaged nations of Europe. Hoover personally ran the gauntlet of mined and submarine-infested waters forty times while crossing the North Sea and the English Channel while supervising the massive relief effort. Because of his program millions of British and French children and adults were saved from starvation.

  BLUE RIBBON FOR BLUE LANGUAGE

  Not sinc
e Andrew Jackson had there been as profane a president in the White House as Harry Truman. His down-to-earth language and occasional outbursts were renowned among those who worked with him. When told FDR had chosen him to be his vice president (being elected was virtually assured), his less-than-diplomatic response was “Tell him to go to hell.” He later agreed. For a while he likely held the record for the president with the bluest language, but twenty years later the Nixon tapes left no question that the thirty-seventh president far exceeded in bad language even the most notorious efforts of Harry Truman. But not even the earthy Nixon could match Truman for obscene eloquence. President Nixon’s use of racial epithets and constant use on his tapes of vulgar and obscene terms to describe anyone he disliked or distrusted, which was just about everyone, set a very high standard for disgustingly low speech.

  LOCAL TRAFFIC LAWS

  The LBJ Ranch was a big spread, even for Texas. Lyndon Johnson often drove himself when entertaining important visitors and the road that was, in essence, his driveway ran a good distance. Occasionally these rides could be quite an experience. Since he was effectively the law on his ranch, Johnson was known to drive at speeds up to ninety miles per hour with one hand on the wheel and a cup of scotch in the other. If that didn’t shake up his guests enough, LBJ had another trick. He owned one of the world’s few amphibious cars. But the vehicle looked only a little different from a normal vehicle. Johnson would take the guest he wished to terrify on a ride around the ranch in it and, when near a lake, would seem to lose control. Most guests panicked as they hit the water, which sent the president into fits of laughter.

  THE LBJ TREATMENT