Oval Office Oddities

by Bill Fawcett

  George Washington

  James Monroe

  Andrew Jackson

  James Polk

  James Buchanan

  Andrew Johnson

  James Garfield

  William McKinley

  Theodore Roosevelt

  William Taft

  Warren Harding

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  Harry Truman

  Lyndon Johnson

  Gerald Ford

  Fifteen of the forty-three presidents were Freemasons. The list has several distinguished members, but if they are really in control, could the Masons not have done better than Polk, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and the short term of Garfield? Maybe they just were on a bad streak with these always low-rated or short-term presidents.

  CORRUPTION CAUSED CASTRO

  The administration of James Buchanan was marked by inaction and corruption. One of the worst scandals involved the theft of $870,000 by a relative of the secretary of state, John Floyd. (Multiply by twenty-five to see what that would be in today’s dollars.) The secretary of state was clearly involved and the Congress livid. Part of the fallout of this scandal was that when this same John Floyd presented Congress with the opportunity to peacefully buy Cuba from Spain, they refused to trust him with the money. The chance was missed and it wasn’t until decades later, after the Spanish-American War, that Cuba became free. If we had bought Cuba in 1860, it would likely have become part of the United States and its history would be very different. But due to the lack of trust for the corrupt Buchanan presidency, the opportunity was lost to have no Castro and no Bay of Pigs.

  THE BLAME

  The first income tax was instituted by Woodrow Wilson. At the time, it affected only the top one percent of all taxpayers with a tax rate ranging from one percent to six percent maximum. To get the new tax passed, he made the first joint session appearance before Congress that had occurred since John Adams was president. And yes, he promised Congress that the average worker would never have to pay income tax. He lied.

  15

  ON THE RECORD: PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES

  Presidential libraries, and the access to information they bring, are among the unique wonders of modern America. Few of us realize just how amazing it is to have access to almost all the records of what our leaders have done. Just as American is the fact that the presidential libraries are just as different and idiosyncratic as the men they commemorate.

  One of the unique elements of the modern U.S. government is that the records of our recent presidents are available to the public and to scholars. You have to realize that the papers of European heads of state are almost never open to anyone. While we have recently made it a law that the official records of the presidency and Congress are retained and eventually made public, this was not always the case. At first, what paperwork and notes existed were considered the personal property of the president. As such, these papers were often sold by the family of former presidents, normally after their deaths. The records of George Washington’s two terms were not owned by the government or available until they were bought by the government for $55,000 in the years before the Civil War. Three presidents’ papers were lost in fires and can never be recovered, those of Zachary Taylor, John Tyler, and William Henry Harrison.

  Perhaps the most striking example was that of Andrew Johnson. His was not a happy term. Anyone succeeding Abraham Lincoln would probably have looked bad, but Johnson was often very ineffective. The embittered seventeenth president took the complete records of his administration with him when he left the White House. This included virtually every action of the period, including the complete files on his impeachment, which may explain why everything was taken.

  WHO PAYS

  On one level, the presidential libraries are one of the taxpayer’s few bargains. No government money goes into their construction or preparation. Instead each one is financed by a private foundation that is controlled by the president while in office. Once the library is complete and the records moved into it, the building is taken over and run by the National Archives and Records Administration.

  GOING ON THE RECORD

  The trend to making presidential papers a national asset began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The thirty-second president ordered the National Archives to take possession of the records of his administration. Since these covered both the Great Depression and World War II, they have been invaluable to scholars. This was formalized by his successor, who created the first presidential library: Harry Truman. Every president since has helped with the creation of a library. This process was formalized when Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955.

  This process is not without its dark side, though. It means the sitting president has to raise millions of dollars in contributions for the creation of a building whose purpose is to immortalize him and his actions. Beyond the ego boost this must give, there is no oversight or limit on who can contribute to the library’s fund. This means that even a lobbyist, who cannot buy a lunch for a congressman, is allowed to donate thousands or even millions of dollars directly to an organization that is run by the president and which has no other supervision. There is a potential for abuse, the selling of favors, or the awkward appearance of outright bribery. The result is generally wonderful for historians and even reporters, but the process is just asking for a scandal. One such scandal came at the end of the Clinton administration. Just before he left office, William Jefferson Clinton pardoned a number of individuals. One of these was a fugitive named Mark Rich. He was sought for significant financial crimes and a wanted man. His wife contributed $450,000 to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library Fund within days of when Clinton pardoned her husband. His reasons for pardoning a wanted man whose case had not been heard and who had been a fugitive for years were never revealed.

  PERSONAL PREFERENCE

  Since the president controls the design and creation of his own library, they tend to reflect both the man and his attitudes. When you compare, say, the Truman Library to the Kennedy Library you easily see the small-town Missouri background in the library of Harry Truman in comparison with the stylish building and hip interior of Kennedy’s or the massive size of Lyndon Johnson’s ostentatious and very Texas library building. Nixon, when president, was most concerned with foreign affairs (and getting reelected). His library reflects this in its famous Hall of Leaders with life-sized bronze statues of the world leaders he dealt with when president. Perhaps it says something about Bill Clinton, as well, that when you walk thought his library it is impossible to be more than a few feet from a speaker, and often a monitor, featuring some speech or appearance of the forty-second president. You have to judge for yourself if the Clinton library might also reflect another part of President Clinton’s background. More than one commentator or architect has observed the strong resemblance between the Clinton Presidential Library and, very large mobile home. This is likely unkind or at least unintended by the architect, but then again, for all his faults, Bill Clinton has a wonderful sense of humor. He couldn’t have…could he?

  COLLECTOR’S CHOICE

  The first libraries contained what their president chose to send them. In 1978 the Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. This made the files of each president since then a nationally owned item. As such, everything now has to be passed on to the library. To allow the president access to what records he needs for personal use or memoirs, each president now has twelve years after leaving office before everything has to be submitted. This was significantly watered down by Executive Order 13233 issued in 2001, which cites national security. This order allows a sitting president to declare any limit he wants before the records of his administration or any previous administration have to be turned over.

  DIGGING THROUGH

  One of the reason the contents of the libraries is left to the president is the sheer volume of the materials stored. You certainly need someone as familiar with what happened to find the right papers and information.
There are twenty million pages of paper in the Ford Presidential Library!

  WE DID SAY PERSONAL PREFERENCE

  Another understated entry in a presidential library is that for the Bay of Pigs in the Kennedy Library. His last-minute abandonment of the Cuban rebels the CIA and military had supported and promised to assist was one of the really low points of the Age of Camelot. On the bright side, you can find an entire gallery extolling the virtues and accomplishments of the Peace Corps, which was founded and fostered under the JFK administration.

  There is a mosaic made completely of jellybeans in the Reagan Library. It is a larger-than-life image of the fortieth president, who always kept of jar of his favorite candy on his desk in the oval office. But if you want to find out about the Iran Contra scandal, it will take some searching. It is mentioned only on a small text panel hidden away in a dark corner of the displays.

  16

  THE UNSINKABLE TEDDY ROOSEVELT

  by Mike Resnick

  “No president ever enjoyed himself in the presidency as much as I did.”

  Theodore Roosevelt

  You cannot research the life of President Theodore Roosevelt without being carried away by the sheer exuberance and joy of life that characterized this exceptional man. He was not perfect and, by today’s standard, a jingo and exploiter, but he was just somehow bigger than life, knew it, and enjoyed it.

  His daughter, Alice, said it best: “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

  But then he had a little something to say about his daughter, too. When various staff members complained that she was running wild through the White House, his response was, “Gentlemen, I can either run the country, or I can control Alice. I cannot do both.”

  He was Theodore Roosevelt, of course: statesman, politician, adventurer, naturalist, ornithologist, taxidermist, cowboy, police commissioner, explorer, writer, diplomat, boxer, and president of the United States.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was widely quoted after inviting a dozen writers, artists, musicians and scientists to lunch at the White House when he announced that “this is the greatest assemblage of talent to eat here since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It’s a witty statement, but JFK must have thought Roosevelt ate all his meals out.

  Roosevelt didn’t begin life all that auspiciously. “Teedee” was a sickly child, his body weakened by asthma. It was his father who decided that he was not going to raise an invalid. Roosevelt was encouraged to swim, to take long hikes, to do everything he could to build up his body.

  He was picked on by bullies, who took advantage of his weakened condition, so he asked his father to get him boxing lessons. They worked pretty well. By the time he entered Harvard he had the body and reactions of a trained athlete, and before long he was a member of the boxing team.

  It was while fighting for the lightweight championship when an incident occurred that gave everyone an insight into Roosevelt’s character. He was carrying the fight to his opponent, C. S. Hanks, the defending champion, when he slipped and fell to his knee. Hanks had launched a blow that he couldn’t pull back, and he opened Roosevelt’s nose, which began gushing blood. The crowd got ugly and started booing the champion, but Roosevelt held up his hand for silence, announced that it was an honest mistake, and shook hands with Hanks before the fight resumed.

  It was his strength of character that led to his developing an equally strong body. His doctor, W. Thompson, once told a friend: “Look out for Theodore. He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll ever say he’s tired.”

  In fifty-nine years of a vigorous, strenuous life, he never once admitted to being tired.

  Roosevelt was always fascinated by nature, and in fact had seriously considered becoming a biologist or a naturalist before discovering politics. The young men sharing his lodgings at Harvard were probably less than thrilled with his interest. He kept a number of animals in his room. Not cute, cuddly ones, but rather snakes, lobsters, and a tortoise that was always escaping and scaring the life out of his landlady. Before long most of the young men in his building refused to go anywhere near his room.

  Roosevelt “discovered” politics shortly after graduating Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, of course). He attacked the field with the same vigor he attacked everything else. The result? At twenty-four he became the youngest assemblyman in the New York State House, and the next year he became the youngest-ever minority leader.

  He might have remained in New York politics for years, but something happened that changed his life. He had met and fallen in love with Alice Hathaway Lee while in college and married her very soon thereafter. His widowed mother lived with them.

  And then, on February 14, 1884, Alice and his mother both died (Alice in childbirth, his mother of typhoid fever) twelve hours apart in the same house.

  The blow was devastating to Roosevelt. He never mentioned Alice again and refused to allow her to be mentioned in his presence. He put his former life behind him and decided to lose himself in what was left of the Wild West.

  He bought the Maltese Cross Ranch in the Dakota badlands. Then, because he was Theodore Roosevelt and couldn’t do anything in a small way, he bought a second ranch, the Medora, less than forty miles from the first ranch. He spent a lot more time hunting than ranching, and more time writing and reading than hunting. (During his lifetime he wrote more than 150,000 letters, as well as close to thirty books.)

  He’d outfitted himself with the best “Western” outfit money could buy back in New York, and of course he appeared to the locals to be a wealthy New York dandy. By now he was wearing glasses, and he took a lot of teasing over them; the sobriquet “Four Eyes” seemed destined to stick.

  Until the night he found himself far from his Elkhorn Ranch and decided to rent a room at Nolan’s Hotel in Mingusville, on the west bank of the Beaver River. After dinner he went down to the bar—it was the only gathering point in the entire town—and right after Roosevelt arrived, a huge drunk entered, causing a ruckus, shooting off his six-gun, and making himself generally obnoxious. When he saw Roosevelt, he announced that “Four Eyes” would buy drinks for everyone in the bar—or else. Roosevelt, who wasn’t looking for a fight, tried to mollify him, but the drunk was having none of it. He insisted that the effete dandy put up his dukes and defend himself.

  “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” muttered Roosevelt, getting up from his chair.

  The bully took one swing. The boxer from Harvard ducked and bent the drunk in half with a one-two combination to the belly, then caught him flush on the jaw. He kept pummeling the drunk until the man was out cold, and then, with a little help from the appreciative onlookers, he carried the unconscious man to an outhouse behind the hotel and deposited him there for the night.

  He was never “Four Eyes” again.

  The dude from New York didn’t limit himself to human bullies. No horse could scare him either.

  During the roundup of 1884, he and his companions encountered a horse known only as “The Devil.” He’d earned his name throwing one cowboy after another, and was generally considered to be the meanest horse in the badlands. Finally Roosevelt decided to match his will and skills against the stallion, and all the other cowboys gathered around the corral to watch the New Yorker get his comeuppance—and indeed, The Devil soon bucked him off.

  Roosevelt got on again. And got bucked off again.

  According to one observer, “With almost every other jump, we would see about twelve acres of bottom land between Roosevelt and the saddle.” The Devil sent him flying a third and then a fourth time.

  But Roosevelt wasn’t about to quit. The Devil couldn’t throw him a fifth time, and before long Roosevelt had him behaving “as meek as a rabbit,” according to the same observer.

  The next year there was an even wilder horse. The local cowboys knew him simply as “The Killer,” but Roosevelt decided he was going to tame him, and a tame horse needed a better name than t
hat, so he dubbed him “Ben Baxter.” The cowboys, even those who had seen him break The Devil, urged him to keep away from The Killer, to have the horse destroyed. Roosevelt paid them no attention,

  He tossed a blanket over Ben Baxter’s head to keep him calm while putting on the saddle, an operation that was usually life-threatening in itself. Then he tightened the cinch, climbed onto the horse, and removed the blanket. And two seconds later Roosevelt was sprawling in the dirt of the corral.

  A minute later, he was back in the saddle.

  Five seconds later he was flying through the air again, to land with a bone-jarring thud!

  They kept it up most of the afternoon, Roosevelt climbing back on every time he was thrown, and finally the fight was all gone from Ben Baxter. Roosevelt had broken his shoulder during one of his spills, but it hadn’t kept him from mastering the horse. He kept Ben Baxter, and from that day forward “The Killer” became the gentlest horse on his ranch.

  Is it any wonder that he never backed down from a political battle?

  Having done everything else one could do in the badlands, Roosevelt became a deputy sheriff. And in March of 1886, he found out that it meant a little more than rounding up the town drunks on a Saturday night. It seems that a wild man named Mike Finnegan, who had a reputation for breaking laws and heads that stretched from one end of the badlands to the other, had gotten drunk and shot up the town of Medora, escaping—not that anyone dared to stop him—on a small flatboat with two confederates.

  Anyone who’s ever been in Dakota in March knows that it’s still quite a few weeks away from the first signs of spring. Roosevelt, accompanied by Bill Sewell and Wilmot Dow, was ordered to bring Finnegan in, and took off after him on a raft a couple of days later. They negotiated the ice-filled river and finally came to the spot where the gang had made camp.