How bad is it when Presidents get really sore?
The rumor first began to spread around Washington last year: Senator John McCain had a skeleton in his closet. Was it something to do with his past as a war hero in Vietnam? His voting record in the Senate? The role he played as one of the “Keating Five” in the savings & loan scandal?
No, it was something much worse than all that. Supposedly, John McCain had—a temper. The rumor was apparently bruited about by George W. Bush’s campaign, which would make an appropriate bookend to his family’s sojourn in national politics. After all, it was George pere’s allies who put it about in 1988 that either Michael Dukakis or his wife or both had a history of mental illness.
What all this speaks to—besides the willingness of Bushes young and old to go to the mat—is how much importance we now attach to “character” in the Oval Office. Why character—and why now? On a political level, it probably reflects how the differences between the two major parties have shrunk to almost nothing. And as a people, Americans have become more “attuned” to their feelings that ever before in our history—sometimes to an almost nauseating degree.
But—to put it in full psychobabble—just what do we mean when we talk about character? And is it really such a bad thing to have a temper when you’re president? To judge from our history, the answer to the latter question seems to be “No”—as long as it’s the right kind of temper.
Most presidents—and nearly all successful presidents—have had displayed some kind of temper at some time in their tenure. It’s simply too difficult to get so far in politics without so invaluable a tool. Sooner or later, it’s going to behoove any president to get tough with trucculent senators, evil foreign dictators, willful special interests, corrupt criminal syndicates, recalcitrant state governors, shillyshallying bureaucrats, and feckless relations. And then there’s the rest of us. Any man who could get to be president without becoming at least occasionally fed-up with all the silly, self-serving demands we make of him would have to be possessed of an almost unnatural serenity.
About the only presidents who seem to have been consistently genial were William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, and Warren G. Harding (at least, until Harding discovered that all of the erstwhile friends he appointed to public office were robbing the country blind.) None of them fared very well in office, save for McKinley, who was assassinated by a man in a reception line who pretended to have a bandaged hand. A little more impatience—“Why is that idiot trying to shake my hand with a cast?”—might have served him well.
Of course, not all tempers are created—or regarded—as equals. The Bush rumormongers were obviously trying to imply that McCain had an uncontrollable, perhaps a psychotically bad temper—that he was a sort of “Manchurian candidate,” permanently warped by his wretched wartime experiences.
The only president generally thought of as possessing a “crazy” bad temper is Richard Nixon. Releases of tapes from the National Archives continue to confirm the widespread notion that Nixon spent much of his time in the White House doing a sort of free-form imitation of Captain Queeg. (Some of the most recent excerpts, in the course of a single conversation with Ehrlichman and Haldeman: “We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls…Mexico is a much more moral country [than the U.S.]…You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them…You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags…the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out.”)
Even in his own time, Nixon’s sort of temper did not play well—no doubt in part because of his repeated, Freudian need to let his darkest inner conflicts slip. At the end of the first debate in the 1960 election, for instance, in closing remarks supposedly designed to show that he, too, wanted to “get America moving again,” he repeated over and over again, “We can’t stand pat…”—thereby inadvertently invoking the name of his wife.
Lyndon Johnson’s temper was less tortured but probably even more vitriolic than Nixon’s, and found release in repeated, disgusting humiliations of his wife and closest aides. It was at least a useful component in the famous “Johnson treatment” of alternating flattery, intimidation, and general cajolery that got so much legislation passed. It might have been better applied, though, to all those respected Wise Men and Ivy League experts who kept telling LBJ how we could win a war on behalf of a people who did not want to fight. (Hey, it worked with the French…)
Peevish bad temper also fails to play well—something that Bob Dole might have noted before his 1996 campaign. One need only look at the Adamses, John and John Quincy, who were smarter than nearly everyone else and spent most of their careers letting them know this. John, Sr., once went so far as to call George Washington “a muttonhead”; it was not surprising that the disastrous Alien and Sedition Acts he signed clamped down on ridiculing cartoonists and columnists.
Certain tempers have more-or-less faded out of style. While Washington famously exploded at one of his generals, Charles Lee, for blowing the Battle of Monmouth during the Revolution, he mostly specialized in a sort of majestic aloofness—something that did wonders for establishing the dignity of the office, but that would scarcely be tolerated today. Then there was Calvin Coolidge, who got out his aggressions by bullying his wife and playing tiresome practical jokes on the White House staff. This sort of temper is enough to make one thankful for the tell-all memoir.
There are two sorts of temper that seem to have been all but indispensable in the presidency. One is contrived indignation. Nothing is more valuable in politics than the ability to summon up false anger on a moment’s notice. A recent example is Bill Clinton conveniently blowing up at Jesse Jackson within earshot of reporters during the 1992 campaign. The all-time, Academy-Award-winning performance, though, was put on in 1980 by—unsurprisingly—Ronald Reagan, when he waylaid George Bush in a New Hampshire primary debate by declaring “I paid for this microphone!” No matter that his campaign had set up the whole incident—or that his lines were taken almost verbatim from a speech by Spencer Tracey in the 1948 film State of the Union. It was an extremely effective piece of political theatre.
The other most effective presidential temper seems to be the ability to channel all of the office’s inherent frustrations and aggravations into a focused, useful, limited hatred toward various person or persons. Just how limited, of course, depends upon the president. For Andrew Jackson, it extended (in part) to the Bank of the United States (“The bank is trying to kill me, Mr. Van Buren, but I will kill it!”), Henry Clay (“the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his God”), John C. Calhoun (“I will hang him higher than Haman!”), and the British Empire (see “New Orleans, Battle of”).
And yet, here is where the line between performance and reality becomes smudged, as it always does in politics. No one would accuse Jackson of faking his rages—yet as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., pointed out in The Age of Jackson, even his famous temper was often wielded for political effect. He cites a quote from a Jackson contemporary, Henry A. Wise:
“He [Jackson] knew that the world…counted him of a temperament weak, impassioned, impulsive, and inconsiderate in action; and he often turned this mistake as to character into a large capital of advantage. He was a consummate actor, never stepped without knowing and marking his ground, but knew that most men thought he was not a man of calculations. This enabled him to blind them by his affectation of passion and impulse.”
Somehow, the objects of Jackson’s wrath all proved to be very useful enemies, whose mutual animosity helped advance Jackson’s own career. Most successful presidents have had their personal bete noires, who have proved similarly helpful—as long as these hatred have been kept within reasonable bounds. For Jefferson, it was Aaron Burr; for John Kennedy, Richard Nixon. For Woodrow Wilson, the United States Congress, which was certainly understandable but a little too much. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was Robert Moses. FDR knew enough to stop when his hatred threatened public works funds for New York City during the 1930s—but only with the very human appeal to a visitor, “Is the President of the United States not entitled to one personal grudge?”
Hatred can be an animating force for statesmen, and sometimes a very creative one. Theodore Roosevelt was renowned as “a good hater,” and one who “knew how to cut a throat.” Yet these seem to have been mostly his attempts to, in Satchel Paige’s phrase, “angry up the blood.” As biographer Edmund Morris put it, “The man’s personality was cyclonic, in that he tended to become unstable in times of low pressure. The slightest rise in the barometer outside, and his turbulence smoothed into a whirl of coordinated activity, while a stillness developed within. Under maximum pressure, Roosevelt was sunny, calm, and unnaturally clear.”
One president who seemed genuinely unable to contain his anger was Harry Truman, and it cost him. It was one thing when Truman chewed out the Soviet ambassador—supposedly telling him, when he protested such treatment, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t be spoken to that way!”—or when he fired nasty barbs in the direction of Bernard Baruch, John L. Lewis, and Drew Pearson. It was another when he accused the Marine Corps of having “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s”—or when, in December, 1950, he wrote an almost comically nasty letter to the Washington Post’s music critic, Paul Hume.
“Some day I hope to meet you,” Truman warned Hume, who had dared to give daughter Margaret Truman’s recital a bad review. “When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for bad eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”
Never before had a sitting president threatened to knee a music critic in the groin. This was just the sort of outburst we now cherish about Harry Truman, but it did not go over so well at the time, once the Washington News printed the letter on its front page. The U.S. was enmeshed in the worst stage of the Korean War at the time, our troops being pushed back by the Chinese onslaught, and millions of worried American mothers and fathers were in no mood to sympathize over Margaret’s professional travails. Letters poured into the White House, denouncing Truman as “uncouth,” “common,” and even mentally unstable.
Yet Paul Hume himself had tried to keep the letter from being published, and was cognizant of the fact that Truman had recently endured the death of his lifelong friend and press secretary, Charlie Ross. Hume announced that he had voted for Truman and supported him still, adding “I can only say that a man suffering the loss of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper.”
What better proof that Americans will tolerate the hottest temper, so long as they believe it is wielded on our behalf?