Barbara Holland

From Hail to the Chiefs:

“The greatest glory of our system is its dazzling variety. Like snowflakes or fingerprints, no two Presidents are exactly alike and most are totally, amazingly different. Given our national attention span, this is just as well. Every four or eight years, we get somebody new to watch.

“If we voted for him, we watch to see if he’s going to prove us wrong. If we voted against him, we watch to see if he’s going to prove us right. We watch his goings out and his comings in, his children, his dogs, his wife. If the sun shines and the armies win, we cheer him; if the stock market hits the fan and hurricanes rage, we hiss and boo; if the times are boring, he bores us. He’s our national sponge, chosen by the people to absorb the national moods and happenings. He’s only a few moves away from the ancient scapegoat that soaked up our sins and troubles and then carried them away into the desert. Eight years later, at most, he disappears into the wilderness, leaving us cleansed and righteous and ready to watch the next.

“Imagine having to listen to Castro’s speeches for forty years. Imagine living in a monarchy. If the times are peaceful and you get yourself a young and healthy king, you could be watching the same First Family for fifty years. You would see his children born, go to school, grow up, and have children of your own, and by then you’d know more about them than about your own. His or her majesty’s portrait would be hanging on classroom walls for generations.
When he finally dies, nobody gets to guess who’s next; his eldest son succeeds, and you’ve been hearing about this prince for as long as you can remember and nothing he does will surprise you.

“Americans would never stand for this. Even sixteen years of George III was too much to bear. However exciting a President may be, eight years of the same show is plenty. We are not naturally monogamous. Americans pine for fresh fields and pastures new, different clothes in the White House closets, somebody else to think about.

“Sometimes the system coughs up a hairball, sometimes events overpower a perfectly decent fellow, but the system gives us chance after chance after chance, and always we keep our eye on the horizon, waiting to see who’s next.

“The Founding Fathers invented a glorious game.”

George Washington: “You’ll want to know about his teeth. Everyone asks. Well, before he was fifty he’d lost most of them, though he did hang on to the lower left premolar until he was sixty-five, and his dentures had a hole punched out for it to stick through. He was sentimental about it, and why not? (President Harding’s son wrote an article about it for the Journal of Oral Surgery.) One set of dentures had eight human teeth - I don’t know whose - screwed in with gold rivets. One set was made with a pound of lead. The set you’re thinking of, the one that makes him look so constipated in the Gilbert Stuart portrait, was carved out of hippopotamus ivory and was no good for chewing. It was just for cosmetic purposes. (A man who needs hippopotamus teeth for cosmetic purposes is a desperate man.) It was held in place by a spring device wedged into his jaws, but it would have fallen out if he’d smiled. It wouldn’t have been proper for him to smile anyway. Eisenhower was the first military president who smiled, and that was years later.”

John Adams: “It was never easy being an Adams, and marrying them was even worse. It was the kind of family where nobody ever said dumb things like ‘Hot enough for you?’ or ‘How about those Mets?’ They only talked about lofty matters like political economy and astronomy and international relations. In every generation a child cracked under the strain and took to drink or suicide, and the ones who survived scarcely knew a carefree moment.”

James Polk: “James Polk was not much fun and neither was his wife. They had no sense of humor. They were pious and didn’t drink, or dance, or play cards, or have children. Sarah’s receptions were so genteel that she not only didn’t serve punch, she didn’t serve anything to eat either. There was nothing to do but stand around, or slip across the park to Dolley Madison’s instead. At the inaugural ball, when the Polks walked in the dancing and music stopped and for two solid hours you could hear a pin drop. Then they went away and the party resumed."

Franklin Pierce: “There may even have been times when he ducked into the pantry for a nip of brandy. He was arrested for running over an old woman with his horse. The policeman let him go when he saw who it was he’d collared,and I’m not suggesting Frank wasn’t perfectly sober at the time, but just the same it’s funny no other Presidents rode down old ladies. On the other hand, he does seem to have been the world’s worst rider, drunk or sober.”

Grover Cleveland: “Grover Cleveland was elected back in the dark days before television, back even before we learned that Presidents ought to be charming, physically toothsome, and fit as fiddles. He was none of the above. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds and wore an immense walrus mustache with bits of corned beef and cabbage in it. The orator Robert Ingersoll said he could slip his collar off over his head without unbuttoning it, which gives you an idea of his neck, and he had a high squeaky voice and some unrefined personal habits. I’ve heard it said that when he was practicing law in Buffalo he couldn’t be bothered to go down the hall and relieved himself through his office window, and once a passerby sued.”