How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (13 page)

Pierce’s decision to sneakily become president against Jane’s wishes and behind her back did irreparable damage to their marriage. Tragically, not too long before Pierce was about to move into the White House, the train that carried Franklin, Jane, and their young son went off the rails and crashed. Franklin and Jane survived with just a few scratches, but their son died. This, Jane believed, was punishment for Pierce seeking office when he shouldn’t have.

From then on, Jane wore all black every day and stayed away from the White House as often as possible, abdicating her hosting responsibilities (First Ladies typically hosted lots of parties and
entertained guests). Pierce just kept on presidenting, because that was the kind of man he was. He wanted power and glory, and nothing, not a crushing knee injury and not the love of his life or the loss of his son, was going to get in his way.

Which was weird, because he was a really crappy president. Pierce was more focused on the
job
than he was on the
country
. He spent so much of his time playing the political game and ensuring his spot in the White House that he never looked around to notice that the issue of slavery was very quickly ripping the nation apart, and that the president was going to have to do something about it. We were on the verge of civil war, and Pierce’s inaugural address went on and on about the great period of peace and prosperity taking place in America. He was a solid politician but, as the book
The American President
puts it, was “timid and unable to cope with a changing America.”

Also, he was arrested as president for running over a woman with his horse—but was discharged due to a lack of sufficient evidence. This doesn’t relate to any grand, meaningful truth about Pierce, and it doesn’t tie into anything about his character or administration or
anything, it’s just crazy. A president got arrested. For a horse accident. That’s nuts. Anyway.

Like Millard Fillmore before him, Pierce was not nominated by his party after his first term. The antislavery members of the Democratic Party turned on Pierce when he vocally supported slavery as president, a position he’d hidden from the antislavery Democrats during his initial nomination process. Also like Fillmore, he made no real impact on the presidency and is largely forgotten today. Unlike Fillmore, he (probably) ran over a lady with his horse and got arrested for it. Wacky.

Know that, when you fight him, he will most likely be drunk. Pierce’s alcoholism plagued him his entire life and only worsened when he assumed the presidency. Jane’s love and support kept him away from the bottle, but with her removed from the White House, there was nothing to stop him from turning to booze whenever he felt stressed or depressed or literally any other emotion. Pierce wasn’t the sort of fun and lovable drunk glorified in
Animal House
or the Grant administration; he was a
drunk
drunk. The tragedy of losing his son, coupled with the anxieties of presiding over a nation divided, exacerbated his drinking, and “Franklin Pierce is a drunk” was whispered all throughout Washington; his political opponents took great joy in calling Pierce the “victor of many a hard-fought bottle.” When he left the White House and someone asked him what his post-presidency plans were, Pierce replied, “The only thing left to do is get drunk,” and that’s exactly what he did until it destroyed his liver enough to kill him. In your fight, his drunkenness could work to his advantage (as he’ll be less likely to feel any pain in his inebriated state), or disadvantage (as he will be sloppy and maybe even peeing himself).

Here’s hoping you get the peeing-himself version of Pierce, but if he gets on a horse, you’d better watch the hell out. There’s nothing more dangerous than drunk Pierce on a horse.

James Buchanan has the build of a fighter but the spirit of a bed-wetter. It was under his watch that America split in two. Modern historians have voted his failure in the face of secession as the worst presidential mistake ever made. Not that he actively
forced
secession, but his do-nothing attitude and his inability to take a firm stance on national issues left the Southerners no other choice—and, incidentally, it is that same attitude that will help you in this fight.

Buchanan’s worthless presidency is a real shame, not just because it damaged the country, but because Buchanan showed such early promise as a cool little badass. In college, he could often be found breaking university policy by smoking cigars and drinking to excess on campus in the middle of the day, getting into trouble (he was temporarily expelled), and pissing off his teachers, because even though he clearly wasn’t studying or taking school seriously, he was
still getting better grades than
almost everyone
. He did well enough in school that he earned a special academic honor but, because he was such a smart-ass, his professors got together and decided not to give it to him on graduation day. He was like Zack Morris in that one episode of
Saved by the Bell
where Zack got a 1500 on his SATs, if Zack Morris smoked cigars and then eventually indirectly caused the Civil War.

Buchanan cleaned up his rebellious streak after college and enjoyed a series of very successful careers before his presidency. He lived by his often-repeated personal slogan, “I acknowledge no master but the law,” which with its similarity to “I am the law” makes James Buchanan our most Judge Dreddian president to date. He was known for his sharpness, his perceptiveness, and his near-superhuman hearing ability (he confessed that he could clearly hear what people were saying even if they were whispering in a neighboring room). I’m trying to link his freakish hearing ability to his presidency in some way, trying to find some kind of big, profound connection between his hearing and his policies, but I can’t. One didn’t impact the other at all. I only bring it up because I think it’s neat.

Buchanan rode his “cool college kid” reputation all the way to the White House. He threw a
ton
of parties as president and even wrote the official presidential liquor supplier once to complain that the bottles of champagne and whiskey they were sending weren’t large enough (“Pints,” Buchanan wrote, “are very inconvenient in this house, as the article is not used in such small quantities”). While Pierce was the scary and dangerous “Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week Drunk” that made people feel uncomfortable, Buchanan was the fun-loving and incorrigible “Frat-Movie Drunk” that made people feel hilarious and sexy (and, eventually, disastrously hungover). Buchanan would drink two or three bottles of wine
in a single sitting
and then top it off with some whiskey while still maintaining his composure. Plenty of ambitious men came to the White House and tried to keep up with the president, and all of them failed. The White House would have been wise to install a room specifically reserved for drunken senators and world leaders to recover from the fool’s errand of trying to keep up with President Drunkasaurus Rex. His nickname would have been “Buchanan the Booze Cannon” if anyone around him had ever been sober enough to think of it. People saw Buchanan drinking J&B Scotch Whisky so often that they assumed the
J
and
B
stood for “James Buchanan” and Buchanan saw no reason to correct them because he was more whiskey than man, so they were technically right. Again, in case there are children reading this (shit!), it would be irresponsible to claim that being able to outdrink all of Washington makes you cool.

But it does make you
kind
of cool. And anyway it was the only rad thing Buchanan had going for him as president.

There is a longstanding and fairly well-researched theory that assumes that James Buchanan, the only president who remained a bachelor his entire life, was gay. Because we don’t and likely will never know for sure, I don’t feel I have the historical authority to say conclusively whether he was or he wasn’t (James Polk called him an “old maid” and Andrew Jackson’s nickname for Buchanan was “Aunt Fancy,” but that’s hardly conclusive).

So I won’t talk about rumors, but I
will
talk about what a crappy
president he was, because that’s
definitely
true (and a very fun thing to do). It’s easy to say that the American Civil War was inevitable, and war didn’t officially start until Lincoln’s presidency, but
secession
started under Buchanan. When people talked of secession to Jackson, Jackson threatened to hang every last one of them. This is where Buchanan’s “no master but the law” mantra hurts him, because when people talked of secession under Buchanan’s watch, Buchanan, handcuffed by the law, did nothing to stop them. Buchanan’s official stance on secession was that while it was unconstitutional for states to secede, it was
also
unconstitutional for him as president to stop them. If that sounds to you like Buchanan is trying to stop people from seceding by threatening them with a completely unenforceable law, then you’re exactly right. It was a bullshit copout; Buchanan was basically saying, “Don’t secede because it’s against the law, even though I won’t do anything if you break it, because doing something is also against the law. So, please?” South Carolina chose to secede almost immediately, because
of course they did
. They asked Buchanan to remove Northern troops from South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, and he would have, had one of his cabinet members not pointed out, “Hey, Mr. President, I don’t want to step on your toes or anything, but just so you know, acquiescing to the South at this point in history would be
an act of fucking treason, you idiot
.”