Project President

by Ben Shapiro

  So Reagan offered to sponsor the debate himself. Except that he then invited Dole, Baker, Anderson, and Crane to show up.10

  The other candidates showed up on the night of the debate. Understandably, Bush was miffed. His campaign manager, James Baker, refused to allow the debate to go forward if the other candidates were given slots. The crowd sat confused for half an hour as the candidates milled about the stage. Finally, Reagan decided to tell the audience what was going on. He picked up his microphone and began to speak.

  Joe Breen, the editor of the Nashua Telegraph, ordered the soundman to cut off Reagan’s microphone. Reagan looked stunned for a moment. He stood up from his chair, hesitated, and then picked up the microphone. He leaned forward. “Is this on?” he asked. The crowd responded that it was. Reagan sat down again. “Mr. Green,” he said, mispronouncing Breen’s name, “if I could—” Breen again ordered the microphone cut off.

  Then, in one of the great campaign moments in American history, Reagan turned, glared, and angrily stated, “I am paying for this microphone,Mr. Green.” The crowd and the other candidates went wild with applause, as Reagan sat, righteous fury still etched on his brow.11

  It was a triumphant moment for Reagan. He had demonstrated his strength and power. He was still youthful enough to get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Ailes described the reaction: “Everybody jumped back and said, ‘Holy cow, there’s more to this guy than we thought. He’s capable of getting tough. He’s capable of being decisive.’ That was the turning point of his campaign.”12

  Reagan later wrote, “Well, for some reason, my words hit the audience, whose emotions were already worked up, like a sledgehammer. The crowd roared and just went wild. I may have won the debate, the primary—and the nomination—right there. After the debate, our people told me the gymnasium parking lot was littered with Bush-for-President badges.”13

  Reagan won the nomination handily. He defeated Jimmy Carter in the election. On Election Day 1980, he became the oldest elected president in American history.

  The age issue cropped up again four years later. By the 1984 election, Reagan was seventy-three years old, three years older than Dwight D. Eisenhower had been when he left office. His opponent, fifty-six-year-old Walter Mondale, again tried to use Reagan’s age against him. This time it seemed to be working. Reagan fumbled during the first presidential debate; he looked and seemed unsure of himself, unclear in his grasp of the facts. Though Reagan had been tough during his first term—surviving an assassination attempt, standing up to the Soviets, ending stagflation, even lifting weights and chopping wood at his ranch—Mondale’s accusations began snowballing. Two days after the first debate, the Wall Street Journal headlined with the age issue: “New Question in Race: Is Oldest President Now Showing His Age?”14

  The second debate would be the critical test. If Reagan could stand up to Mondale’s pressure, he could be reelected. If he looked befuddled, Mondale would gain ground.

  Sure enough, the issue of age reared its ugly head during the debate. One of the moderators, Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun, asked Reagan if he had any doubts whether he would be able to function on little sleep in an emergency. Reagan pounced on the question like a cat on a mouse: “Not at all, Mr.Trewhitt, and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”15 Even Mondale had to laugh. Reagan campaign consultant Ailes described it:

  It was not just the president’s words. It was his timing, inflection, facial expression, and body language which made the moment powerful. As far as I was concerned, the debate was over. The news media had their lead quote for the next day, and everybody had a laugh. I watched Mondale’s face. Even he broke into a smile, but I could see in his eyes that he knew it was over, too. I could almost hear him thinking, “Son-of-a-gun, the old man got away with it! He got a laugh on that line, and I can’t top it.” The public had the reassurance they were looking for, and Reagan had the election won.16

  Age was an asset for Reagan because he was reassuring, fatherly. He didn’t hide his age in his television appearances. He never acted as though he were forty-five. The public trusted Reagan for the very reason he cited in that crucial second debate with Mondale: “I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don’t know which, that said, ‘If it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.’ ”17

  AGE ISN’T JUST A NUMBER. It’s a major factor in presidential elections, and it always has been. How the public perceives age, however, is largely up to the candidate. An older candidate may come off as stodgy, old-fashioned, stuck in his ways—a Bob Dole type—or he may come off as Ronald Reagan did: traditionally strong, fatherly, a solid figure guiding America through troubled waters. A younger candidate may seem wet behind the ears, green, too brash—William Jennings Bryan circa 1896—or he may seem confident, energetic, powerful—John F. Kennedy.

  Most of our presidents are elderly gentlemen. Of course, part of this is the constitutional requirement that presidents be thirty-five years of age. The Constitution was framed in 1787; the average life expectancy in 1750 was about thirty-two years. Yet during the nineteenth century, when life expectancy ranged from forty years old (1815) to forty-four (1900),18 the average president was elected at age fifty-six. The youngest elected president of the nineteenth century was Ulysses S. Grant, aged forty-six, and he was elected based almost entirely on his Civil War heroism. Politics was indeed an old man’s game.

  The twentieth century didn’t change things much. The average life expectancy rose dramatically over the course of the century, but the average age of our elected presidents remained surprisingly stable, at fifty-six years old. And the television age didn’t skew matters toward younger candidates: in elections from 1952 on, Americans elected presidents with an average age of fifty-eight.

  The fact is that Americans trust men who look experienced. Not every younger face is JFK.During the nineteenth century, candidates under age fifty lost seven of the twelve elections in which they ran; candidates under age forty-eight lost seven of nine times. During the twentieth century, candidates under age fifty didn’t fare much better: they lost six out of ten times. This isn’t to say that men over fifty have fared well across the board, but they also compose the vast majority of presidential candidates. Age may not preclude defeat, but it can certainly pave the road to both the presidential nomination and the White House.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON TURNED fifty-one years old on February 22, 1783. Seven months later, the Americans and British signed the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the War of Independence. And two months after that, General Washington rode for Annapolis, Maryland, to deliver his farewell address to Congress.

  During that address,Washington played the part of the weathered man, aged by the burden of patriotic leadership.

  “[T]here was hardly a member of Congress who did not drop tears,” wrote founding figure James McHenry. “The General’s hand which held the address shook as he read it.When he spoke of the officers who had composed his family, and recommended those who had continued in it to the present moment to the favorable notice of Congress he was obliged to support the paper with both hands. But when he commended the interests of his dearest country to almighty God, and those who had the superintendence of them to his holy keeping, his voice faultered and sunk, and the whole house felt his agitations.”19

  It was quite moving. But that was no surprise—Washington was a terrific actor. Washington’s future vice president, John Adams, called Washington “the great actor,” and suggested that Washington owed his success to “Shakespearian and Garrickal excellence in Dramatic Exhibitions.”20 This wasn’t empty praise. Just hours before that display of frail nobility, Washington, who loved to dance, danced away the night with a long line of colonial ladies, all of whom longed “to get a touch of him,” according to a witness.21

  But perhaps that’s unfair to Washi
ngton—perhaps the dancing tired him . . . or not.Washington gave the F. Murray Abraham-as-old- Salieri performance on at least one other occasion. At New-burgh, eight months before Washington’s encore performance, Washington similarly played up his age while speaking to his troops. The troops were thinking of using the threat of military force to pressure Congress into paying their wages; Washington undercut them by playing his decrepitude to the hilt.While speaking before the troops,Washington pulled a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and gravely remarked, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.” Officers broke down in tears. The planned military coup dissipated. “On other occasions he had been supported by the exertions of the army and the countenance of his friends, but in this he stood single and alone,” wrote Captain Samuel Shaw of the episode.22 As Marvin Kitman put it, “It was a magnificent piece of theater and politics that could have won him an Emmy.”23

  Washington would live another fifteen years and survive eight years of presidency. He would go on to preside over the formation of the Constitution. He would only die at age sixty-six because he insisted on riding around his estate in freezing rain and snow.24

  But at age fifty-one, Washington already realized the value of age. The father of our country campaigned as the father of our country.

  JOHN ADAMS WAS LESS SUCCESSFUL on the age issue.Whereas Washington, as the symbol of Americanism generally, could safely proclaim that his age signified a lifelong love affair with America, Adams, a far more divisive politician, became the target of antiFederalist wrath. Whereas Washington, a tall, stately figure, could rely on his powerful outward appearance to repel accusations of agedness, Adams, short and stout, could not. During the 1796 election, muckraking journalist Benjamin Franklin Bache labeled the fifty-nine-year-old vice president “old, bald, blind, querulous, toothless, crippled.”25

  And Adams, unlike Washington, felt old.Washington had the gift for acting; Adams did not. Adams was, as Benjamin Franklin described him, “always an honest man, often a great one”; Thomas Jefferson agreed, calling Adams “as disinterested as the being who made him.”26 That honesty carried over into his perceptions of his own decrepitude. It was “painful to the vanity of an old man to acknowledge the decays of nature,” he wrote to his son, John Quincy, but he had to admit that with weak eyes and trembling hands, “a pen is as terrible to me as a sword to a coward.”27 By the election of 1800, the sixty-four-year-old Adams felt more than his age. “I am old, old, very old,” he reported, “and I shall never be very well—certainly [not] while in this office, for the drudgery is too much for my years and strength.”28

  Adams’s imperious manner, elderly appearance, and caustic honesty earned him the unremitting ire of his political enemies. They cashed in on his age, labeling him “quite mad.”29 Opponent Jefferson paid scurrilous journalistic hitman James Callender to spread libel about Adams.30 In Callender’s widely distributed, Jefferson-endorsed pamphlet, The Prospect Before Us, he went after Adams with both guns blazing: “The reign of Mr.Adams has been one continued tempest of malignant passions . . . Reader, dost thou envy that unfortunate old man with his twenty-five thousand dollars a year, with the petty parade of his birth-day, with the importance of his name sticking in every other page of the statute book. Alas! he is not an object of envy, but of compassion and of horror.”31 He added, for good measure, that Adams’s writing style betrayed his senility. “Few other men,” he wrote, “were capable of cramming so great a quantity of nonsense within so small a compass of words.”32

  Even Adams’s supposed allies attacked him. In one of the greatest political back-stabbings in all of American history, leading Federalist and former secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton released a letter regarding Adams. In it, he accused Adams of less-than-impressive “intellectual endowment . . . he is a man of imagination sublimated and eccentric; propitious neither to the regular display of sound judgment, nor to steady perseverance in a systematic plan of conduct . . . to this defect are added the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object . . . He has certain fixed points of character which tend naturally to the detriment of any cause of which he is the chief, of any administration of which he is the head.”33 Hamilton’s letter likely turned the tide of the 1800 election in Jefferson’s favor. It was no wonder that Adams hated Hamilton, whom he labeled “the bastard brat of a Scots peddler.”34 Hamilton’s legendary ambition, said Adams, sprouted from “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find enough whores to draw off.”35

  In the election of 1800, old, cranky John Adams lost to the younger, taller, more aristocratic looking Thomas Jefferson. As David McCullough wrote, “To the victorious Republicans, and to generations of historians, the thought of the tall Jefferson, with his air of youth at fifty-seven, assuming the presidency in the new Capitol at the start of a new century, his eye on the future, would stand in vivid contrast to a downcast, bitter John Adams, old and ‘toothless’ at sixty-five, on his ‘morning flight’ to Baltimore.”36 Age isn’t always a boon.

  PERCEPTION OF AGE MATTERS far more than actual age. Never was that truism truer than during the election of 1840. General William Henry Harrison, at sixty-seven, was the oldest major party presidential candidate in American history, a title he would retain until the candidacy of Ronald Reagan 140 years later. Incumbent president Martin Van Buren was a decade younger than Harrison. In the end, however, it was “Old Tippecanoe” who monopolized the perception of youth, while Van Buren got stuck with the “old ninny” label.

  The opposition press routinely attacked Harrison’s age, calling him “Old Granny” Harrison37 and suggesting that he was “failing, in body and mind from the approaches of old age.”38 Harrison was, said one newspaper, a “superannuated and pitiable dotard.”39 Representative Isaac Crary, a Democrat from Michigan, accused Harrison of senility.40

  Harrison may have been old, but he was an old soldier—and as General MacArthur put it 111 years later, “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” Unless, that is, they choose not to fade away. And Harrison would not fade away. Like Reagan, Harrison confronted the age issue head-on, dissolving perceptions of decrepitude by campaigning vigorously. He had done the same thing in 1836 when he ran for president, taking to the campaign trail “to counteract the opinion, which has been industriously circulated, that I was an old broken down feeble man.”41

  Harrison broke with tradition in actively campaigning, leading one newspaper to scornfully observe, “When was there ever before such a spectacle . . . as a candidate for the Presidency, traversing the country, . . . advocating his own claims for that high and responsible station? Never [!] . . . the precedent thus set by Harrison . . . appears to us a bad one.”42 But friendlier sources noticed that Harrison’s campaigning did much to relieve him of the “Old Granny” stigma. “He is about 5 feet 9 inches in hight [sic],” wrote one onlooker, “very slender and thin in flesh, with a noble and benignant expression of countenance—a penetrating eye, expansive forehead and Roman nose. He is not bald but gray, and walks about very quick, and seems to be as active as a man of 45 . . . He appears better in the social circle than he does in public. —There is nothing of the ‘Old Granny’ about him, I assure you.”43 Harrison had a powerful voice and he didn’t hesitate to use it, canvassing areas and speaking for hours on end.44 And he was strong enough to handle a drink, swigging hard cider on the campaign stump.45

  Meanwhile, Harrison capitalized on his old soldier image. He used it to explain his incoherent speaking style: “I am not a professional speaker, nor a studied orator, but I am an old soldier and a farmer.”46 He used it to mobilize his base of support, appealing to “the pioneers and old soldiers of the west.” He characterized himself as “the oldest and most extensively known of the Veteran Pioneers.”47 He was not particularly modest. An abridged transcript of one of his speeches contained eighty-one “I”s. “
What a prodigy of garrulous egotism!” one newspaper editor opined.48

  One of Harrison’s supporters, a young Whig named Abraham Lincoln, plagiarized Washington in making hay out of Harrison’s age. “When an individual’s hairs have grown grey, and his eyes dim in the service of his country, it seems to us, if his country-men are wise, and polite, they will so reward him, as to encourage the youth of that country to follow his example,” Lincoln wrote for the Sangamo Journal.49

  Harrison, like Andrew Jackson, united experience with a youthful vigor. Political prints of the time invariably make him look twenty years younger than he actually was. Harrison’s youthful vigor lasted for a month after he took office. Then he died.

  FRANKLIN PIERCE WAS a very handsome fellow. At forty-seven, Pierce had a nicely coifed head of hair, piercing dark eyes, and chiseled, movie star features. D. W. Bartlett, Pierce’s campaign biographer, described him in predictably glowing terms:

  The personal appearance of General Pierce is elegant and commanding. He is within a few inches of six feet in height; is rather slight and thin than inclined to obesity; has a very pleasant and impressive address. His eyes are bright and piercing; his hair is greyish; his forehead, and indeed, face, very fine, open and frank in their expression. It is difficult to gain a fair idea of the man from a portrait. You need to see the gentleness of his manners, feel the kindliness of his nature, and witness the easy politeness of all of his actions.There is not a spice of aristocrat in the man; he is as polite to a beggar as to a prince, as free and generous to a farmer as to a Senator in the halls of Congress.50