American Leaders

In times of turmoil, when we seem to hit rock bottom, with newspaper headlines screaming bloody murder and talking heads on TV predicting disasters of Biblical proportions, it’s always nice to just sit back, relax, take a deep breath, and to reflect on events long ago.

Take American second President, John Adams. His biographer John Ferling has noted, “Adams’s great failing seemed to be his volcanic temper, which could explode with such suddenness and so little provocation that some of his colleagues feared that passion occasionally eclipsed reason.” The only advisor Adams ever took seriously was a member of his own family: his wife, Abigail.

Adams also had little tolerance for dissenters in the media. As you may recall, on the ninth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which punished journalists who made what were deemed “false, scandalous and malicious” statements against government officials with both hefty fines and prison sentences.

Adams’s eldest son, John Quincy, had an even harder time getting along with people.
As he wrote in his diary, “my political adversaries /call me/ a gloomy misanthropist; and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage.” Biographer Paul Nagel, describes him as “notorious for his harshness, tactlessness and even rudeness.”

On top of this, Adams had no use for party loyalty. As a young Federalist senator from Massachusetts, he repeatedly sided with the Democratic-Republicans; the Federalist party honchos were greatly relieved when he resigned his seat in 1808.

Interestingly enough, this undiplomatic man turned out to be quite a good diplomat. Notably, as the chief negotiator of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, although he was unable to maintain cordial relations with fellow U.S. delegates such as Albert Gallatin, the treasury secretary under Jefferson, he managed to get the Brits to agree to accept the status quo ante bellum. And as James Monroe’s two-term secretary of state, he authored the Monroe Doctrine.

The young Andrew Jackson liked to punch people out, and rage attacks would remain a constant throughout his life. As one biographer put it, “He could hate with a Biblical fury and would resort to petty and vindictive acts to nurture his hatred and keep it bright and strong and ferocious.” However, “again and again at crucial moments of his public life,” concludes biographer H. W. Brands, “Jackson carried the day because opponents were terrified of his temper.” Jackson was constantly threatening to let his wrath loose on his opponents—and because of his record of getting carried away in duels and brawls, everyone was forced to listen to him carefully.

The race between President John Quincy Adams and Mr. Jackson in 1828 was one of the ugliest ever, with partisan newspaper headlines making accusations against the candidates, ranging from murder and adultery to pimping.

For instance, when Mr. Jackson married his wife Rachel years earlier they didn’t know her divorce had not yet been finalized. So, some called Jackson an adulterer.

For his part, Jackson and company accused Adams of impropriety while he was minister to the country of, wait for it… Russia.

Jackson’s win is connected to phrases like “rise of the common man” and “the birth of populism.”

He appealed to the newer Western states of the frontier that responded well as Jackson criticized the aristocratic establishment.
He mocked the masculinity of wig wearing founders. The first six presidents were all wealthy, educated, easterners, said Jackson, but he was a self-made man who said education wasn’t necessary for political leadership.

And since there were no property requirements for voting in the West lots of people with little to their name used their voting power with eagerness to take down the prominent D.C. insider of a long-standing political family.

John Tyler was not only combative, but lusty. He liked to fling around sexually explicit language.

For example, in his first speech on the floor of the House, the 26-year-old Virginia congressman compared popularity to “a coquette—the more you woo her, the more she is apt to elude your embrace.”

In 1844, a couple of years after the death of his first wife, Tyler, then in his final year in the White House, married a raven-haired beauty with an hourglass figure, Julia Gardiner, who was 30 years his junior.

For the rest of his life, Tyler would brag about his sexual prowess, noting, for example, after the birth of their fifth child, that at least his name would not “become extinct.”

Actually, no U.S. president has had more children than Tyler. He had fifteen kids to two wives. Finally, Tyler was accused of fathering children to at least one of his slaves.

Sure, we revere Lincoln today, but in his lifetime the bile poured on him from every quarter makes today’s Internet vitriol seem dainty. His ancestry was routinely impugned, his lack of formal learning ridiculed, his appearance maligned, and his morality assailed.

George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and diarist, wrote that Lincoln was “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.” Henry Ward Beecher, the Connecticut-born preacher and abolitionist, often ridiculed Lincoln in his newspaper, TheIndependent (New York), rebuking him for his lack of refinement and calling him “an unshapely man.” Other Northern newspapers openly called for his assassination long before John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger. He was called a coward, “an idiot,” and “the original gorilla” by none other than the commanding general of his armies, George McClellan.

The Ohio Republican William M. Dickson wrote in 1861 that Lincoln “is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity … and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”

Today we talk about the power and lyricism of his speeches. Consider, for instance, this passage from the first inaugural address:

“I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Yet this speech was characterized by an editorial writer in the Jersey City American Standard as “involved, coarse, colloquial, devoid of ease and grace, and bristling with obscurities and outrages against the simplest rules of syntax.”

As for the Gettysburg Address, a Pennsylvania newspaper reported, “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” A London Times correspondent wrote, “Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn’t be easy to produce.”

And the second inaugural address, etched in limestone on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.? A. B. Bradford, a Pennsylvania pastor and a member of one of the oldest European families in America, wrote that it was “one of the most awkwardly expressed documents I ever read … When he knew it would be read by millions all over the world, why under the heavens did he not make it a little more creditable to American scholarship?” The New York Herald described it as “a little speech of ‘glittering generalities’ used only to fill in the program.” The Chicago Times: “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln could produce a paper so slip-shod, so loose-jointed, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.”

Imagine all those critical voices from the 19th century as talking heads on cable television. Imagine the snap judgments, the slurs and put-downs that beset Lincoln magnified a million times over on social media. How many of us would or care to hear him clearly?

Moving on to more recent past, according to Evan Thomas’s Ike’s Bluff, when President Dwight Eisenhower (aka “the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang”) told aides that his mother had taught him how to control his emotions, they would respond sotto voce, “And she didn’t do a very good job.”

Notoriously, Lyndon Johnson’s success in gaining a Senate seat at this comparatively early stage in his career involved questionable raising and use of campaign funds, and probably last-minute ballot-stuffing to secure a narrow win over his equally unscrupulous rival. As an ironic comment on the outcome of the election and the way it had been won, Johnson was known as “Landslide Lyndon” throughout his first term.

Here is what some had to say about him:

“He hasn’t got the depth of mind nor the breadth of vision to carry great responsibility… Johnson is superficial and opportunistic.” Dwight Eisenhower

“He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognise truth or falsehood.” Robert F Kennedy.

“People said my language was bad, but Jesus, you should have heard LBJ.” Richard M Nixon

Nixon was right — in 1965, for example, in discussing the situation in Cyprus, Lyndon Johnson did tell the Greek ambassador to the US to “f…your constitution.” But for the most part, LBJ tended to confine his potty-mouthed rages to his private discussions with White House insiders such as those he held from his perch on the potty.

Indeed, rather than put a conversation on hold, he would have reporters and aides follow him into the bathroom where the dialogue was supposed to continue. Needless to say this often inspired discomfort.
Johnson is reported to have had conversations while exposing his genitals, urinating in the sink, and sitting on the toilet, but as far as the observers could tell, it never caused him any embarrassment.

But surely he wouldn’t do it in front of women or influential people . . . right? Wrong. Presidential historian and former White House aide Doris Kearns Goodwin remembers not only regularly accompanying him to the restroom, but also his criticism of his National Security Advisor’s response when asked to accompany him in a similar manner. Apparently extremely uncomfortable with the situation, McGeorge Bundy stood in the farthest corner of the bathroom with his back toward Johnson. The president, dissatisfied with the speaking arrangements, said, “Come closer, come closer.” Bundy complied, and Johnson later remarked, “I thought he was going to sit on my lap! Hasn’t that guy ever been in the Army?”

LBJ was notorious for treating his subordinates badly. At 6-ft., 3-in. tall and 210 lbs., he liked to lean over people, spitting, swearing, belching, or laughing in their faces. According to one (possibly apocryphal) story, he even relieved himself on a Secret Service agent who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson allegedly said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.”

He was an enthusiastically reckless driver, who enjoyed driving guests at 90mph around his Texas ranch in his Lincoln Continental while drinking whiskey from a paper cup. He’d drive down a steep incline toward the lake, pretend to lose control, and then yell, “The brakes don’t work! We’re going in! We’re going under!” The car would splash into the lake, and as everyone else was screaming, Johnson would be doubled over laughing. Turns out, Johnson was the proud owner of an Amphicar, the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.

Johnson had “an unfillable hole in his ego,” then White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers says. Feelings of emptiness spurred him to eat, drink, and smoke to excess.

Sexual conquests also helped to fill the void. He was a competitive womanizer. When people mentioned Kennedy’s many affairs, it made Johnson furious. He’d pound his fists on the desk and scream, “Why, I had more women on accident than he ever had on purpose!”

And that may very well have been true. Johnson brought a lot of pretty young things back from Texas to work in the White House, even if they couldn’t type. He even had a buzzer installed in the Oval Office so that the Secret Service could warn him when his wife was on her way.

Moving on, Elias P. Demetracopoulos, a Greek journalist who had fled Athens in 1967 after the colonels’ coup, had learned that Greece’s military dictators had funneled more than half a million dollars into the Nixon-Agnew campaign. He gave this information to Larry O’Brien, Humphrey’s campaign manager. Demetracopoulos urged O’Brien to put this potentially incendiary news before Johnson; CIA Director Richard Helms, Demetracopoulos said, could confirm its accuracy. O’Brien took the story to the President, but Johnson, according to what O’Brien told Demetracopoulos, refused to act on it. He would neither ask Helms to investigate the report nor leak it to the press should it prove to be true.

Well, I don’t think I need to go into details about Richard Nixon’s time in office or his paranoid rants against “disloyal” Jews and other political enemies.

The list goes on… Nothing’s just black and white in life and in history.

So, when the media laments the knightly behavior and Prince Charming personalities of American presidents before Trump, it may be worth taking another look both at raw facts and also at how these leaders used to be perceived in their times by their contemporaries.