Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents

by Cormac O'Brien

  Critical Duncity

  Though he graduated in the top third of his class at Yale and had an extraordinary grasp of economic issues, Ford earned a reputation as a clod. As Lyndon Johnson once said, Ford had “played football too long without a helmet.” In 1975, while descending the stairs from Air Force One in Salzburg, Austria, Ford lost his footing and went tumbling onto the tarmac below. His presidency was never the same afterward. Chevy Chase performed scathing impressions of him on Saturday Night Live, the press jumped on every remotely klutzy thing Ford did, and the country began to believe that the president was a buffoon. Ford even got locked out of the White House one night while walking his dog.

  PUBLIC SPEAKING 101

  Ford did nothing to dispel his thick-headed image with his pronouncements, some of which bordered on the moronic. While speaking at Iowa State University, he referred to the audience’s institution as Ohio State University. He declared at a party celebrating Lincoln’s birthday that “If Lincoln were alive today, he’d roll over in his grave.” But nothing damaged his reputation so much as a remark he made during a televised debate with Jimmy Carter. In response to a foreign relations question about the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, Ford proclaimed, “There is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and there never will be during a Ford administration.” Anyone with a map knew this wasn’t the case, and the president was met with a firestorm of criticism. He only made things worse by trying to explain what he had meant with such crystalline statements as, “We are going to make certain to the best of our ability that any allegation of domination is not a fact.” Oh, my.

  BRAWN WITH THE WIND

  Lyndon Johnson once claimed that Gerald Ford was too dumb “to walk and fart at the same time.” Perhaps. But Ford could definitely fart while standing still, which he apparently did with alarming frequency and abandon. According to his Secret Service detail, the president would loudly let one rip and then always attempt to put the blame on one of them with indignant remarks like, “Jesus, did you do that? Show a little class.”

  HOW TO GIVE A GUY A COMPLEX

  On September 5, 1975, while walking to the California capitol building in Sacramento, President Ford saw a group of well-wishers and went over to press the flesh. Unfortunately, not everyone in the group was wishing him well—particularly Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. An old member of the Charles Manson “family,” Fromme took the opportunity to express her hatred of the American status quo by producing a pistol and aiming it at her president. Secret Service agents wrestled the weapon from her hand and took her into custody. In San Francisco just seventeen days later, Ford was met with a similarly warm reception—this time by Sara Jane Moore, who, unlike Squeaky Fromme, managed to squeeze off a shot at her target. Ford’s security shoved him into his limousine, jumped on top of him, and got him back to Air Force One without harm. Moore’s bullet struck a nearby taxi driver.

  In 1976, just as Ford was getting over his fear of California, a fellow named Chester Plummer managed to get over the White House fence and advanced on the White House with a metal pipe in his hand. He was shot on the lawn by guards.

  39 JAMES EARL CARTER

  October 1, 1924–

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1977–1981

  PARTY: Democratic

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 52

  VICE PRESIDENT: Walter Mondale

  RAN AGAINST: Gerald Ford

  HEIGHT: 5′10″

  NICKNAME: “Jimmy”

  SOUND BITE: “In a very Christian way, as far as I’m concerned, he can go to hell” (referring to the Reverend Jerry Falwell).

  On his inauguration day in 1977, “Jimmy” Carter took his wife, Rosalynn, and young daughter, Amy, in hand and walked the mile and a half to the White House rather than ride in a bulletproof limo. It drove the Secret Service crazy, but it was vintage Carter all the way. He’d won the election against Ford by claiming to be one of the people, an ordinary guy from an ordinary place with ordinary values. Unfortunately, the issues he had to confront as president required an extraordinary man.

  Jimmy Carter remains the only president to have reported sighting a UFO.

  Americans were ready for a Washington outsider in 1977, and that’s exactly what they got. Jimmy Carter was an extremely intelligent man who graduated 59th in a class of 820 from Annapolis, then studied nuclear physics while training for the navy’s prestigious submarine program. He had intended to pursue a lifelong career in the navy, but he ended up taking over his family’s extensive peanut farm in Plains, Georgia, an operation that would eventually make him rich. By the time he announced his candidacy for president, the most impressive political credentials on his résumé were one term as governor of Georgia. But after years of getting screwed by professional politicians who were schooled in every dark secret of Washington power brokering, the nation welcomed this D.C. newbie who spoke of returning power to the people. That he was a soft-spoken, painfully sincere, born-again Christian who seemed about as likely to lie as take the Lord’s name in vain didn’t hurt, either.

  But the very quality that got Carter elected in the first place—his “outsiderness”—was precisely the thing that most bedeviled his presidency. He not only failed to grasp how Washington worked, he seemed determined not to learn. The vast majority of those appointed to his staff were also outsiders, and the administration butted heads with Congress over every bit of the presidential agenda. From government reorganization to immigration reform, Carter’s ideas were stymied by members of Congress—including those in his own party—who didn’t think the president had any concept of give-and-take. The president’s folksy manner, as exemplified by the televised “fireside chat” he gave dressed in a cardigan sweater, was increasingly viewed by the rest of the government as political naïveté. Though he managed to get through some laws that protected the environment and helped ease the plight of the poor, much of his agenda either fell by the wayside or attracted widespread disdain (as was the case with his treaty to return control of the Panama Canal to Panama).

  The ailing economy wasn’t helping the president’s situation. In addition to double-digit inflation, the nation stooped beneath the burden of a severe oil shortage that resulted in skyrocketing prices at the gas pump. Carter urged his fellow Americans to conserve energy and personally kept the White House thermostat turned down to a temperature that required staff members to type with gloves. As lines at gas stations grew longer across the country, the oil shortage got even worse when Iranians stormed the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. The resulting shock to the world’s oil market was severe, but Carter now had much more than an energy shortage to worry about. Close to seventy people, the majority Americans, were taken prisoner by Iranians enraged that Carter had allowed Iran’s deposed shah to receive life-saving surgery in the United States. Later that same year, the Soviets celebrated Christmas by invading Afghanistan. America had truly lost its ability to shape the course of international events.

  Though Carter seemed incapable of enforcing his nation’s interests abroad, he scored his greatest victory with international diplomacy. In 1978, he managed to get Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat to come to Camp David to settle their differences. The result was the Camp David Accords, which ended thirty years of conflict and promised hope for a peaceful Middle East.

  But a peaceful resolution to the hostage crisis in Iran proved elusive. After a disastrous military rescue attempt that left the charred remains of American helicopters and servicemen in the desert, Carter continued to negotiate with the Iranians, but to no avail. The stalemate ultimately destroyed his chances of winning reelection against Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, whose cheery, nationalistic rhetoric seemed so appealing after Carter’s tired ineffectiveness. After losing in a landslide, Carter endured the humiliation of seeing the hostages released on Reagan’s inaugural day.

  Virtually none of Carter’s original campaign promises came true, a fact the
press drove home with ruthless glee. But if Carter was something of a dud as America’s chief executive, he has evolved into the greatest living former president in recent memory. He turned his presidential library into the Carter Center, a sort of think tank devoted to the pursuit of peace around the world, and—when not helping to build homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity—he has gone on to negotiate peaceful resolutions to several international conflicts. No wonder he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He is perhaps the greatest man ever to be a lousy president.

  JIMMY WHO?

  Jimmy Carter wasn’t just a Washington outsider—when he began his campaign for the White House, he was a virtual unknown. Even his mother didn’t believe he had it in him. After hearing her son’s intentions to run for president, her first words were “president of what?” Just three years before the 1976 presidential election, the then-governor of Georgia appeared on an episode of What’s My Line? The panel came very close to not guessing his identity.

  THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JIMMY

  A born-again Christian since 1966, Jimmy Carter was one of our most religious presidents. He juggled his duties as chief executive with a Bible class he insisted on teaching regularly at the First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. In a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine, the president admitted to having “lusted in [his] heart”—i.e., he felt attracted to women he’d seen from time to time, which, for him, was as bad as cheating on his wife, Rosalynn. Unfortunately, he sometimes attempted to hold his staff members to the same high standard. He is known to have told several federal employees to get married to their significant others and stop “living in sin.”

  White House Weed

  Willie Nelson once performed at the Carter White House, after which he enjoyed the first family’s hospitality by staying over. That night, the country crooner climbed up on the roof, took in a little star-gazing, and—while marveling at the way in which the city’s streets converged on the executive mansion—lit up what he called a “fat Austin torpedo.” Security agents were nowhere to be found. As Nelson insightfully recalled after the experience, “The roof of the White House is the safest place I can think of to smoke dope.”

  THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

  According to Jimmy Carter, while attending a 1969 Lion’s Club meeting in Georgia, he and several others saw a genuine UFO. His official report to the International UFO Bureau described a noiseless object “as bright as the moon” that came to within 900 yards of him and his party. Carter is the only president to have admitted to a UFO sighting.

  DROPPING THE BALL

  Jimmy Carter was a micromanager who insisted on personally handling duties that most presidents would have delegated, from line-editing detailed reports for grammar to overseeing White House plumbing. Staffers who wanted to use the White House tennis courts had to get his personal approval.

  Carter wasn’t nearly as fussy when it came to matters of national security, however. During the first family’s vacations in Plains, Georgia, military personnel who carried the “football”—the portable case holding codes for releasing the nation’s missiles in case of nuclear attack—were forbidden to stay on the president’s property. As a result, they had to stay in the town of Americus, ten miles away. Because the “football” can only be utilized by the president in person, any response to a Soviet strike while Carter relaxed in his Plains home would’ve required that he get into a car and drive the ten miles to Americus. One wonders if there would’ve been anything left of the country by the time he got there.

  40 RONALD REAGAN

  February 6, 1911–

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1981–1989

  PARTY: Republican

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 69

  VICE PRESIDENT: George Bush

  RAN AGAINST: Jimmy Carter (first term); Walter Mondale (second term)

  HEIGHT: 6′1″

  NICKNAMES: “Dutch,” “The Gipper,” “Ronnie,” “The Great Communicator”

  SOUND BITE: “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?”

  As President Ronald Reagan once admitted, “I don’t know if I could do this job if I weren’t an actor.” And therein lies the central issue with our fortieth president: After a career of starring in B movies with monkeys and military hardware, he finally got to play the role of a lifetime as leader of the Free World. To him, it was another acting part, and he played it to the hilt.

  Ronald Wilson Reagan graduated from Eureka College in Illinois and got his start in showbiz as one of the Midwest’s most popular radio sports announcers. After breaking into movies in the 1930s, he secured supporting roles in such films as Brother Rat, King’s Row, and Knute Rockne, All American (featuring Reagan as terminally ill football player George Gipp, who inspired Notre Dame to win one “for the Gipper”). After World War II broke out, Reagan joined the army—but the only shooting he did was on the sets of propaganda films. Such hokey roles irrevocably damaged his career, and by 1951, he found himself sharing the camera with a chimpanzee in the irritatingly insipid Bedtime for Bonzo. He made the switch to television, hosting the weekly General Electric Theater and introducing Death Valley Days. By 1964, despite having fifty-three films to his credit, Reagan’s most interesting Hollywood accomplishments were being married to starlet Jane Wyman (who divorced him in 1948) and arousing the ire of Errol Flynn (who, upon discovering at a movie shoot that Reagan was the only actor to show up sober, told him to “go fuck himself”).

  Acting in movies with a chimpanzee named Bonzo didn’t hurt Reagan’s chances of becoming president.

  So Reagan decided to give politics a try. As leader of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952, he had been a dyed-in-the-wool New Deal Democrat. But the 1960s witnessed a dramatic change of heart in Reagan, and in 1964 he gave a rousing television appearance on behalf of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. The party loved it, and Reagan was on his way. He served two terms as governor of California, came close to stealing the Republican nomination away from Gerald Ford in 1976, and then beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 with a campaign based on extreme right-wing rhetoric about love of country and economic hope. Reagan had become the first actor in American history to make it to the White House.

  He was also the oldest man to become president, a fact that gave the nation pause when Reagan was shot just weeks into his first term by John Hinckley, Jr. Reagan made an impressive recovery, all the while keeping the hospital staff in stitches with his good humor and off-the-cuff remarks. Wisecracking optimism was the new president’s modus operandi, an artifice he used to keep everybody smiling while he drove home an economic agenda that many thought was mired in hopeless absurdity. To undo the recession he inherited from Jimmy Carter, Reagan wanted to push through drastic tax cuts and take on the national debt; to hold the Soviet Union (the “Evil Empire”) to ultimate account, he intended to make an outrageous increase in military spending. Even his old simian costar from Bedtime for Bonzo could’ve seen the impossibility of marrying the two. But Reagan just plowed ahead, duping Congress, the press, and the American people with his polished actor’s panache. Even those who criticized the president’s policies found him irresistible.

  The results were mixed. The economy showed signs of recovery, enough to give Reagan a 1984 victory against Walter Mondale in the biggest electoral landslide in presidential history. And America’s willingness to spend lavishly on arms brought Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to the point of making unprecedented conciliations. The two superpower leaders developed a closeness that ultimately helped end the Cold War and bring down the Soviet Union. But the Reagan administration’s cut-and-spend policies saddled America with a gigantic national debt and trade deficit. Add to that an increase in bold terrorist activity around the world, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, a growing gap between rich and poor, a stock market crash in 1987, and Reagan’s own struggle with prostate cancer, and you have the makings of a troubled presid
ency.

  Military adventures in Grenada and Libya couldn’t diffuse the growing fear that Ronald Reagan was losing his grip on the reins. When it came to light that the administration was selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, then using the profits to illegally fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, it spelled doom for Ronald Reagan. But the Great Communicator’s hold on the populace, combined with his subordinates’ willingness to take much of the blame, saved him from the sort of disgrace that befell Richard Nixon. Reagan claimed not to know a thing about the Iran-Contra scandal—and as he blithely smiled his way through the congressional hearings, the majority of Americans decided to let him off as an aging, doddering delegator. If that isn’t the performance of a lifetime, what is?

  Did Reagan really know what his White House was doing in the Iran-Contra mess? We will probably never know—especially since Reagan has long since descended into Alzheimer’s disease. Whether you admire him or not, the fact remains that Ronald Reagan is one of the most beloved presidents in history. He is also one of the most loathed. One thing is certain—few presidents have ever been able to get voters to pay more attention to image than to substance. In that capacity, Reagan was certainly an actor to the end.

  DADDY’S LITTLE BOY

  Reagan’s father was an alcoholic who once had to be dragged inside the house by his son after passing out on the front lawn. But the elder Reagan did make one contribution to his son’s future. When he observed his infant son Ronald screaming his head off one day, the man remarked, “For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he sure makes a hell of a lot of noise.” The name “Dutch” stuck and would be one of the future president’s frequent nicknames.

  GO FIGURE

  In 1940, Reagan was voted “Most Nearly Perfect Male Figure” by the University of California. As a result, he had the honor of posing, nearly naked, for art students attempting to sculpt the human physique.