A Treasury of Great American Scandals (16 page)

Of course, wagging Washington tongues cannot be relied upon to establish anything for certain about Buchanan's sexuality, but his own words, and those of King, do add a touch of credibility to the gossip. When King was appointed minister to France by President Tyler in 1844, Buchanan seemed out of sorts and pining for his man. “I am now solitary and alone,” he wrote a friend, “having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any of them. I feel that it is not good for a man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.”

King, who would briefly serve as Franklin Pierce's vice president before his death in 1853, seemed to miss Buchanan's company, too, writing: “I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation.” Again, there is no proof of a sexual relationship. Maybe Buchanan and King were just very good friends.

Andrew Johnson (1865-1869)

 

 

 

 

Being president is an ego trip; some men let it go to their heads. Martin Van Buren strutted the White House like a self-important little fop. Tom Jefferson, for all his egalitarian posturing, raised a pinkie or two in his day. Presidents have tended to put on airs, but Andrew Johnson never lost touch with the little folk. Even the very little folk.

Johnson was an accidental president, a Tennessean chosen by Abraham Lincoln as a running mate to appease the South. With Lincoln's death, Johnson inherited a bleeding nation and a Congress determined to punish the defeated Confederacy and speed Reconstruction. By and by, Johnson's resistance to this, and his general pigheadedness, got him impeached. Never before was the resolve of the young nation so tested: Would its leaders corrupt the Constitution to achieve petty political ends? Everyone looked to Johnson for leadership, but Johnson remained holed up in the White House, sending emissaries to speak on his behalf. What was he doing in there? Theories abounded. Was he busy plotting a brilliant tactical strategy, remaining imperially above the fray? Was he busy secretly building alliances? As it turns out, he was busy going sweetly bonkers.

Historians report that in those waning days of his administration, Johnson developed a peculiar hobby. His daughter, Martha Patterson, had declared war on the mice that had made themselves at home in the White House; she imported cats, set traps, and spread poison. Johnson couldn't stand it. Possibly he felt for the rodents, hounded as he was by his own yowling predators. Spotting one of the unfortunate critters one night in his bedroom, the president took pity. He placed some flour by the fireplace, allowing the mice to “get their fill.” That was just the beginning.

He would soon boast to a bewildered aide that he had finally won the confidence of “the little fellows,” as he called the mice. The president began not only to feed them but to add “some water that they may quench their thirst.” The president had become a mouse rancher! Anyway, it all turned out fine. The Senate failed to convict, and the presidency was saved—though it had been a close squeak.

Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877)

 

 

U. S. Grant was a war hero. A cigar smoker. A drinker. A killer. And something of a girlie man. It's the oddest thing. It has confounded historians. “Young Grant had a girl's primness of manner and modesty of conduct,” biographer W. E. Woodward wrote. “There was a broad streak of the feminine in his personality. He was almost halfwoman.”

This is a somewhat uncharitable attitude, perhaps, but General Grant did indeed have a certain prissiness about him that minced and sashayed, in contrast to his battlefield swagger. He hated dirty jokes. In the field, he bathed in a closed tent so that not even his aides would see him naked. Foul language rattled him. As a cadet at West Point, Grant was mortified at a court-martial hearing when he had to repeat the offending words of a cadet who had called an officer a name. The name was “shit-pants,” or some such.

It is perhaps unfair to poke fun at a man for exhibiting what in a more enlightened era might simply have been called sensitivity. What fault was it of Grant's that he lived in rugged times, among rugged men, in the rugged business of making war? Still, it bears mentioning that when President Grant was informed that his personal secretary was involved in a scheme to defraud the government of liquor tax revenue, he took the following executive action: He burst into tears.

Grover Cleveland (1885-1889, 1893-1897)

 

 

 

 

Grover Cleveland was our second-fattest president, the only one elected to nonconsecutive terms, the only one who got married in the White House, and the only one who ever admitted to having an illegitimate child. Until John F. Kennedy, he was renowned for having the prettiest first lady. He was a good guy and a hard worker who might well have been a great president had anything at all important occurred during his tenure. Alas, it didn't, and so he is not particularly noteworthy, except for one item on his résumé that qualifies him for inclusion here.

Before getting to that, however, it is important to lay to rest for all time the scurrilous rumor, often reprinted, that when Cleveland had a law office in Buffalo he had a habit of relieving himself out the window and was once sued by a drenched passerby. This story is apparently apocryphal; it stays alive only because unscrupulous history writers keep gleefully repeating it.

Now, what did make Cleveland somewhat memorable was his rather commendable unwillingness to delegate responsibility. Many persons in high public office must make decisions of life and death, but they tend to do it from comfortably afar. Harry Truman did not fly the plane and drop the bomb. Abe Lincoln did not fire a musket at Gettysburg. But as sheriff of Erie County, New York, in the 1870s, Grover Cleveland assigned to himself the role of official hang-man. Twice the future president of the United States stood on the gallows, affixed the noose, and personally yanked the trapdoor open.

With Cleveland, the buck really did stop there.

William McKinley (1897-1901)

 

 

 

 

William McKinley may not have been a captivating orator, or a skilled internationalist, or an inspired leader. He was so enslaved by public opinion that he permitted a newspaper to declare war on Cuba. The speaker of the House once said of McKinley that he kept his ear so close to the ground “it was full of grasshoppers.” Still, he dearly loved his wife. No other president was as devoted a husband. It was a protectiveness bordering on obsession. Ida McKinley was a semi-invalid, subject to piercing headaches and frequent epileptic seizures. The condition left her something of a recluse, shut in her room for hours with nothing to do but knit. McKinley would abandon affairs of state to squire her around, taking her out for afternoon strolls. He even broke protocol by having her sit next to him during formal dinners.

It was at one of those dinners that McKinley performed a strange act that is evidence of either extreme solicitousness or almost breathtaking callousness, like a locker room joke involving a woman and a paper bag. You decide. William Howard Taft recalled sitting with the couple at that dinner and asking the president for a pencil so he could take notes. As McKinley reached into his pocket, “a peculiar hissing sound” came from Ida. She was apparently having an epileptic seizure. Her features began to contort. Without missing a beat, the president calmly dropped his napkin over her face and proceeded to hand over the pencil, as though nothing remotely out of the ordinary had occurred. A few moments of awkward conversation ensued. When Mrs. McKinley recovered, she removed the napkin and resumed dining.

William Howard Taft (1909-1913)

 

 

 

 

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the fact that William Howard Taft was the nation's fattest president. If that was all there was to it, he wouldn't merit inclusion here. As it happens, there was more. William Howard Taft was the nation's fattest president who could not stay awake. Big Bill's corpulence contributed to his habit of falling asleep at the most inopportune times—sitting in the front row at a state funeral, or riding in an open car during a New York campaign. It got to be quite an embarrassment.

Attending the opera one evening, Taft aide Archie Butt recalled agonizing over the slumbering president during the entire first act, hoping he would wake up before intermission so the audience would not see the president snoring through a command performance. Mercifully, he did. After one dinner for cabinet members, President Taft called for some music on the Victrola, but he fell asleep during the first selection. When he woke up he called for another tune, then dozed off again before the record was even put on. Attorney General George Wickersham then suggested the sextet from
Lucia di Lammermoor,
since “it will awake anyone but a dead man.” When the song failed to rouse the slumbering president, Wickersham declared dourly, “He must be dead.”

“I will make a conscientious effort to lose flesh,” Taft once wrote his wife, Helen. “I am convinced that this undue drowsiness is due to the accumulation of flesh.” He never did lose the weight. After he finished being the fattest president ever, he went on to become the fattest U.S. chief justice ever.

Taft did have a sense of humor about his avoirdupois, however. He encouraged the retelling of a story from his days as governor general of the Philippines. He had cabled Secretary of War Elihu Root from Manila. “Took long horseback ride today; feeling fine,” was the message, to which Root immediately cabled back: “How is the horse?”

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)

 

 

 

 

Woodrow Wilson is by no means an obscure president—far from it—but he is included here because there was a hidden side to him, one that he rarely revealed. To the world, Wilson projected an image of professorial gravity as he led the nation through World War I, but when courting his second wife, a Washington widow named Mrs. Edith Galt, he behaved more like a giddy teenager. The president's letters to his lady love dripped with sentiment.

“You are so vivid. . . . You are so beautiful!” he wrote. “I have learned what you are and my heart is wholly enthralled. You are my ideal companion. . . . You are my perfect
playmate,
with whom everything that is gay and mirthful and imaginative in me is at its best.” In another, the president wrote, “How deep I have drunk of the sweet fountains of love that are in you . . . how full of life and every sweet perfection!” So enthralled was he that, after a date, a Secret Service agent recalled the president skipping along the streets of Washington and whistling a popular ditty, “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”

The
Washington Post
inadvertently added an element of scandal to the relationship when it reported on the front page in 1915 that “the president spent much of the evening
entering
Mrs. Galt.” It was a typographical error. The story was supposed to say that he was
entertaining
her.

Wilson's courtship also provided plenty of material for Washington's wags. “What did Mrs. Galt do when the president asked her to marry him?” went one popular joke of the day.

“She fell out of bed!”

John Tyler (1841-1845)

 

 

 

 

Some ex-presidents retire to the golf course. Others write their memoirs, seek to rehabilitate their reputations, or go on the road and make expensive speeches. John Tyler went to work for an enemy government.

Tyler was the first accidental president, inheriting the office after the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841. (Harrison had made a long and tedious inauguration speech in the cold rain and was dead of pneumonia a month later.) After serving most of Harrison's term, and facing a threatened impeachment in the process, Tyler retired to his Virginia estate where he lived quietly until the dawn of the Civil War fifteen years later. Tyler took up the rebel cause, backed Virginia's secession from the Union, and was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1861. Unfortunately, he died just before taking his seat, depriving him of the opportunity of being the only U.S. president to serve two different governments. And opposing ones at that.