Presidential
Temper
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?
