TR proved to be as much of a “damned cowboy” in the White House as he’d been in New York. He enforced antitrust laws, fought for conservation, won approval of the Food and Drug bill, and moved to regulate the notoriously filthy meat-packing industry.
Not surprisingly, Teddy Roosevelt was the first president who understood how to manipulate the modern media. He created the institution now known as the White House press corps so he could have reporters on call when he had something to say. Those scribes who uncritically followed the White House line kept their access while those less inclined to TR worship didn’t.
In 1912, when a gunman tried to kill him in Milwaukee, the force of the bullet was blunted by the manuscript of the day’s speech and the iron spectacles case he carried in his chest pocket. The result was that the slug did not penetrate far into his chest. Bleeding, Teddy went ahead and gave the speech. “I do not care a rap about being shot,” he declared with classic TR bravura.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A West Point grad from Abilene, Kansas, Dwight David Eisenhower was a colonel when World War II began. Chosen to lead the invasion of North Africa in late 1942, he proved his ability to hold the allies together. In 1944, he directed the Allied invasion of Europe, again proving both his military and diplomatic skills.
With the war won, both the Democrats and the Republicans tried to recruit General Eisenhower, but he turned them down. While serving as president of Columbia University, he was appointed by President Harry Truman to be the supreme commander of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts who played the key role in getting Eisenhower to run for president. On a July tour of NATO headquarters in Paris, Lodge urged his World War II commander to run. When the five-star general refused, Lodge ignored him and took the plea public, proposing on Meet the Press that the country needed him.
In the subsequent months, a well-organized buildup would bring the war commander into the fight for the Republican nomination. The “I like Ike” campaign would take the immensely popular war hero all the way to the White House.
Once in office, Eisenhower lived up to his campaign pledge to end the Korean War. While conservative on domestic issues, he continued the internationalist foreign policy of Roosevelt and Truman. A strong Cold Warrior, Ike spent eight years trying to limit the Soviet worldwide advance. He reigned over two terms of what he called “peace and prosperity,” but by 1960, the American people were once again looking for a man of action. They would find him in a young World War II veteran who promised to “get this country moving again.”
John F. Kennedy
It was 1946, and a young Jack Kennedy from Massachusetts was running for the House seat in Boston’s eleventh Congressional District. Kennedy had served as a Navy lieutenant in the South Pacific during the war, where he was assigned to skipper a PT boat. While on a routine patrol mission, Kennedy’s boat had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer and sliced in two.
The young Kennedy and most of his crew survived the initial impact, and Jack, as the ship’s commanding officer, took responsibility for his men’s well-being. They swam to a nearby island with Kennedy towing a burned crewman whose lifejacket he gripped with his teeth. After days of dodging the Japanese and scrounging for enough food and fresh water to stay alive, Kennedy and his men were rescued.
It was John Hersey’s New Yorker article on Kennedy’s ordeal, reprinted in Reader’s Digest, that transformed this young veteran into a bona fide hero. When Kennedy’s ambitious father, a ruthless self-made millionaire, used his Hollywood clout to get a newsreel produced narrating the tale of his son’s wartime heroism, the boyishly handsome JFK became an instant celebrity.
“World War II was their greatest campaign manager,” Kennedy campaign aide Billy Sutton would say of those politicians who were elected to Congress just back from the war.
But to the young Jack Kennedy, the time he’d spent in harm’s way could not be counted in press clippings or even at the ballot box. He would confide later that, at the moment of his vessel’s collision with the Japanese destroyer, he truly believed he was at the moment of his own death. It was as life-changing as only such instants can be, and the lasting effect of it was that he felt deeply bonded with other men of his generation who’d seen action in the South Pacific.
I firmly believe that as much as I was shaped by anything, so was I shaped by the hand of fate moving in World War II. Of course, the same can be said of almost any American or British or Australian man of my generation. The war made us. It was and is our single greatest moment. The memory of the war is a key to our characters. It serves as a breakwall between the indolence of our youths and earnestness of our manhoods. No school or parent could have shaped us the way that fight shaped us. No other experience could have brought forth in us the same fortitude and resilience. We were much shrewder and sadder when that long battle finally finished. The war made us get serious for the first time in our lives.
Whether or not the voters attached any deep significance to Kennedy’s character-building World War II experience, it is clear that he himself did. He believed the war had “made” him, setting him down in a situation where he had either to act or die. However immature he had been—the Harvard-educated, playboy son of an autocratic father—before he shipped out, Jack Kennedy understood himself to be far different on his return.
It’s hard not to agree with this assessment. The commander in chief who steered the country through the nuclear dread of the Cuban Missile Crisis was a grown-up version of the young skipper who got his crew home from the Solomons. Whether the voters actually were able to sense this about their choice in 1960, they could see it in October 1962. Told he had to choose between Cold War appeasement and thermonuclear war, he refused to take the bait. He proved himself not just tougher than the Soviets, but shrewder than his generals.
CHAPTER 5
The Common Man
For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.
SENATOR HAMILTON LEWIS OF ILLINOIS TO THE
NEWLY ELECTED SENATOR HARRY TRUMAN OF
MISSOURI, 1935
One of the notions we Americans hold dear is that the regular guy is just as good as the person born to privilege. In Europe, royalty makes for a great tourist attraction. Back in the United States, even homegrown snobs will agree that this is a country where, if you’ve got the stuff, you deserve a shot at showing it.
The movie Dave has a simple but very American plot. Dave Kovic, a small businessman who makes extra money as a presidential lookalike, gets recruited by the White House staff to serve as a decoy. The real chief executive, it seems, has a rather active libido. Our ringer’s job is to be seen leaving a hotel so that the president, otherwise occupied, can linger longer and undetected.
The plot turns on the fate of the real president. Enjoying his young companion far too enthusiastically, he suffers a massive heart attack. Sadly for the White House staff, there’s no way to explain how their man, seen leaving a hotel alive, should be discovered just hours later in that same hotel dead.
The only way, figures the conniving chief of staff, is to park Dave Kovic upstairs at the White House for the night.
It’s the old twist, à la Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which is to say, the impersonator turns out to have a definite flair for the job.
But Dave needs help with the details. He calls in his accountant, Murray, from Baltimore. We see them sitting at a vast White House table with papers strewn all around them. There in front of them is a large leather volume labeled “Federal Budget.”
MURRAY: I gotta tell ya, Dave. I’ve been going over this a bunch of times and a lot of this stuff doesn’t add up. Who does these books?
DAVE: I’m not sure.
MURRAY: I just think they make this stuff a lot more complicated than it has to be.
DAVE: I’m not surprised. Can we s
ave anywhere?
MURRAY: Well, yeah. But you gotta start making some choices.
DAVE: Choices?
MURRAY: You know—priorities. Remember when you couldn’t get your car fixed ’cause you wanted to get that piano?
DAVE: You could buy it on payments.
MURRAY: Yeah. That’s how you end up with a 400-billion-dollar deficit.
The fun of this scene lies in the premise. Rule-bound bureaucrats and overlobbied congressmen routinely fail, but a guy with simple math and common sense can figure it out. Want to house homeless children? Well then, hold off paying defense contractors until they’ve done the work. Want honest government? Put in honest people to do the job.
Americans are suspicious of elites, both social and intellectual. Save us from the know-it-alls and the think-they’re-better-than us types. Let’s find ourselves some regular people to run the country.
The Minutemen
Ever since 1776, this notion—that the common man can do the job—reliably pops up every four years. One could argue that it all started with those ordinary Americans in homespun clothes who stood up to the gaudily uniformed British troops at Lexington and Concord.
They were called Minutemen because they were citizens who vowed to be “ready in a minute’s notice” to defend their communities and homes. Before dawn on April 19, 1775, a ragtag group of them assembled on Lexington Green to meet an advancing British force. There were only thirty-eight in all—barely enough to form one straight line across the green.
The standoff between the Minutemen and the British regulars that morning led to the famous “shot heard ’round the world.” The American Revolution had begun.
No one knows who fired that first shot. According to the historian A. J. Langguth, most of the Minutemen did not fire until the battle had begun. Yet this did not stop the Redcoats from attacking. “At most,” he writes, “a handful of . . . militia fired at the British, and that was only after the infantry was already pumping shot into the backs of fleeing Minutemen.”
The Americans turned the tables down the road at Concord. At the Old North Bridge, the British had left only a few dozen men to guard the entrance to the town. The Minutemen force comprised, in Langguth’s description, “four hundred grim farmers armed with muskets.” Once again, there’s disagreement over just who fired the first shot—but it didn’t matter. This time, the Minutemen would rout the British, forcing them to break ranks and flee.
The disciplined British forces had better weapons and military training, but the Minutemen were fighting at home. It was where every hiding place was known to them. Practically invisible, they picked off the British soldiers as they marched on the road back to Boston. By day’s end, the British had seventy-three soldiers dead, 174 wounded. The Minutemen lost forty-nine, had thirty-nine wounded.
There is a great bronze statue at Old North Bridge outside of Concord. It stands across the creek from the spot where the Redcoats tried so desperately to defend their position. It is the figure of a Minuteman. He grips a plow in his left hand and a shotgun in his right. He is the reluctant warrior, but he is also the common man—these two powerful archetypes are at the heart of our national character, and it is impossible, over two hundred years later, to gaze upon the Minuteman without feeling moved.
The freedom of this country was won by its people. Any nation that owes its liberty to the courage and tenacity of its citizens forgets that at its peril.
Andrew Jackson
Just as Thomas Jefferson had bestowed his vision on his nation as it sought to free itself from foreign rule, so Andrew Jackson himself came to embody that vision once independence had been won.
After taking the oath in 1829 and delivering one of the shortest inaugural addresses ever, Jackson, a man of little formal education, walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, inviting the entire crowd along the way to join him at the White House. The First Family’s home filled with hordes of people, and china and glassware were broken in the excitement. People left only when they learned that refreshments were being served out on the lawn. Jackson himself had to escape the commotion through a back door.
According to the Jackson biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the scene prompted Daniel Webster to note sarcastically that “the shouting crowd on Inauguration Day . . . really seemed to think the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.”
While some looked on in horror, others proclaimed it a victory for the common man. “It was a proud day for the people,” wrote the Argus of Western America, “General Jackson is their own president.” It called the new president “plain in his dress, unaffected and familiar in his manners,” and a “hero of a popular triumph.” The backcountry folk had already been on his side; now the rest of the American citizenry was seeing what sturdy, plain cloth he was made of.
Jackson went on to give federal jobs to two thousand of his supporters. Government positions should be kept “so plain and simple,” he said, that any qualified applicant could fill them on a rotating basis.
His election enlivened the nation. The political establishment had been put on notice.
Abraham Lincoln
Is there anyone who doesn’t know Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin? He spent his youth and young adulthood on the verge of poverty because his family, like so many settlers on the western frontier of the era, was perpetually starting all over again.
School was a luxury. At one point, the tall, strong young man hired himself out to split rails for neighbors’ fences, and for a time he was nicknamed “the Rail-splitter.” But he is more widely known as “Honest Abe,” for his determination to pay off every debt in the face of even the worst setback.
Despite his lack of a fancy education, Lincoln would be the most eloquent man ever to serve as president. His Gettysburg Address was a mere 268 words. Yet they are among the most unforgettable ever spoken. He proclaimed that the Union must be saved and urged those attending to resolve that the battle dead buried beneath them “shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In his Second Inaugural Address, perhaps the most magnificent speech ever given in this country, Lincoln saw biblical meaning in the horror of the great Civil War:
The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”
Born a common man, he had an uncommon vision of his country’s destiny. To Lincoln, the survival of the world’s only country committed to democratic society was paramount. It was his central belief in the cause—saving the union he believed to be “the last, best hope of earth”—that gave his leadership in the time of this country’s worst crisis its eternal power.
Harry S Truman
Americans like to hope that a president, tested, rises to the office. If we elect him, he will do the job as it should be done. Harry Truman, who became president upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt just weeks before the final defeat of Germany in World War II, is the most splendid example of this.
Sworn in as vice pr
esident just three months earlier, Truman had never expected to go so far in life. He hardly knew FDR at all and had been selected to run with him in 1944 as a safe choice over the left-leaning incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace. He had scant contact with the president during the brief time they served together. When he got word that Roosevelt was dead, he was stunned. “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me,” he would confess later.
“He was not a hero or a magician or a chess player or an obsessive,” Mary McGrory wrote upon Truman’s own death. “He was a certifiable member of the human race, direct, fallible, and unexpectedly wise when it counted.”
Yes, he was. Forced with the unimaginably difficult decision whether to use the newly developed atom bomb to end the war with Japan and therefore avoid a million American casualties in an invasion, Truman gave the go-ahead. When the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin nearly succeeded in bringing Greece and Turkey into his sphere, Truman immediately sent aid to the two vulnerable countries.
Thus was born the “Truman Doctrine.” That same year, 1947, he fought to win congressional approval for an ambitious blueprint to rebuild Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was the perfect Cold War action, its premise the idea that an economically strong Europe could more easily withstand the lure of communism. Ultimately, thanks to the Marshall Plan, a standard of freedom and comfort was set that made the captive nations of Eastern Europe more aware of their deficiencies.
There was little in Truman’s background to suggest he could ever emerge a leader of vision. When he heard that he was being proposed as a senate candidate in 1934, he couldn’t sleep that night he was so overwhelmed. “I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 171