How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (28 page)

Truman parlayed his status as a war hero into a job in politics, which is certainly a step down in terms of badassedness but a step up in not-getting-shot-at-ness. As a Missouri senator, he became well-known for his decency and honesty. Truman was a hard worker who spent his time cracking down on corruption in the government and, in particular, the military. He formed special committees that were put in place to make sure no money was being wasted and that none of the weapons, vehicles, and uniforms being used by America’s soldiers were defective or shoddy.

He did
such
a good job that then-president FDR demanded that Truman be his vice president leading into his final term. At first it was a request, but when Truman seemed reluctant to take the job, it
became
a demand. As tough and as confident as he became in the war, Truman was still nervous at heart. Truman’s first words on learning that FDR had hand-picked him specifically were “Oh, shit.”

When FDR died, thrusting Truman into the presidential … throne? Hammock? I don’t know where presidents sit. Beanbag chair, probably … Anyway, Truman stepped up. Truman is one of the few men tasked with filling in for one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had, which is no easy feat. It was a tough act to follow, but Truman performed admirably.

Still, like most presidents, Truman had a sneaky, devious side too. He brought his honesty and integrity into the White House, but didn’t hold on to it for long; he made tough choices when he felt like he needed to. Tough and, let’s say, unpresidential and possibly illegal choices.

Put yourself in Truman’s shoes; it’s 1947, World War II is over, but you still want to keep a large military presence in Eastern Europe to keep the Soviets from taking over governments in various European countries like Hungary and Austria. Unfortunately, the American people don’t
want
to devote the time/money/resources that such a thing would require, because Americans in 1947 didn’t really give a crap about what happened to the government in Austria. But you’re not the American people, you’re President Truman. And you
want
that strong, powerful international presence. You want to
go over to Europe and establish America as an international peacemaker/police force. So what do you do? You convince the country that they’re a heartbeat away from another war.

You lie.

It’s true that the Soviets in the 1940s weren’t exactly the “good guys,” but that doesn’t change the fact that Truman manipulated information and had people outright lie for him to scare the ever-loving shit out of the American people. Truman had Lucius Clay, the commander of military forces in Europe (and a man who personally believed that American troops in Eastern Europe were “as secure … as they would be at home”), write a letter to Congress claiming he believed that war could break out at any minute. A
general
who wrote private letters talking about how secure everyone was, was ordered to
lie to Congress
to scare the American people enough to green-light whatever Truman wanted for this looming war.

The truth was that the Soviet Union was in no real shape to wage a war at the time; they simply weren’t strong enough. But Truman wanted the draft reinstated and more money for the military, so he bent and broke the truth and warned everybody about a war that wasn’t coming. (It worked, by the way.)

Truman may have made a name for himself in politics by seeking and taking out corruption in governmental committees, but he is one sneaky motherfucker. He’s not one of the bigger or stronger presidents, but he’s certainly one of the most devious, especially when he thinks he’s right. Like Jackson, Truman has a fiery temper and isn’t afraid to show it off—so much so that David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was generally afraid that Truman’s tendency to occasionally flip out would bring about World War III. That’s not hyperbole. Truman was the president who dropped the bomb.
This was a real concern
. Be on guard.

Also, one time he said that “being a president is like riding a tiger.”

So Truman knows how to ride a tiger. Hopefully he won’t bring one to your fight.

While we know now that most presidents were super crazy, there’s a fairly clear pattern to the
kind
of craziness. Modern presidents were crazy
ambitious
and obsessed with power to an unhealthy degree, while early presidents were crazy in a more general, certifiable sort of way. A way that develops when you’re born before laws and decency have been invented.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Ike”), our thirty-fourth president, bucked the trend of modern presidents and embraced a tradition of old-school aggressive insanity pioneered by men like Andrew Jackson and George Washington. He was an early-1800s kind of crazy in a 1960s world. Even his name was tough as shit (
Eisenhower
is German for “one who cuts iron”), meaning Ike was born several degrees more badass than you, right at birth.

Ike spent most of his childhood getting into fistfights and settling
real or imagined scores with enemies using his tiny, bald fists. If he didn’t have any schoolyard bullies to take on, Eisenhower would take on nature; once when he wasn’t allowed out on Halloween, he punched a tree trunk until his knuckles bled. Rumor has it that, if you listen closely every October 31, you can still hear that tree crying, desperately trying to figure out what it had to do with Ike’s Halloween.

When Ike grew up and ran out of trees to humiliate, he served in the army and excelled at it. While he never personally saw any action, he thrived as a commander, a man who had a high military IQ and knew how to plan attacks and inspire men to follow him. Ike was so good in the military that he never really tried to do anything else. In between World Wars I and II, Eisenhower stuck around in the general field of warfare, even though there were no wars to fight. He studied military history and worked on and wrote about tanks. It’s very likely, in fact, that Ike’s decision to build the Interstate Highway System as president was based on his time working on tanks; he didn’t think the tanks were traveling across the country fast enough for his tastes, so he
built an entire highway system
. He earned so many different badass military titles, some of which (Military Governor, Supreme Allied Commander), sound completely made up, and he even taught himself to fly a plane (even though no one asked him to), just in case he ever wanted to dabble in being a fighter pilot at some point. Ike was just a professional soldier, running tanks and killing bad guys for his nine-to-five.

As Captain Doctor Supreme Allied Commander Wizard of Military Forces during World War II, Eisenhower orchestrated the Allied invasion of Normandy, made famous by
Saving Private Ryan
and one of the better
Medal of Honor
video games. Eisenhower originally scheduled the invasion for June 5, because the tides were in Allied favor (there were only ten days in any given month when the tides
would
be favorable to an invasion of this kind), but he had to delay it as a result of bad weather that would have resulted in the loss of who
knows
how many troops. The weather was
also
supposed to be terrible on June 6, but Ike was tired of letting God delay his plans and so he ordered the invasion. Even though a huge storm was
supposed
to hit, it didn’t, and the weather cleared up at the last minute. Was it simply luck, or did nature, as a result of Eisenhower’s established reputation as a bloodthirsty tree-boxer, retreat out of fear of Ike’s wrath? It is the perhaps obvious stance of this book that luck had nothing to do with it; God had seen what Ike was capable of and would not dare cross him.

The Invasion of Normandy was a major turning point in the war and allowed Ike to add Super Sexy Supreme Defeater of Adolf Hitler to his already impressive military résumé.

When America ran out of made-up military titles to give Ike, they made him president. One of Ike’s first orders of business involved looking at the Korean War—a complex, lengthy, and involved struggle—and saying, “Yeah, that’s enough of that,” and ending the hell out of it with a single swing of his massive balls. As much as Ike loved war, and as skilled as he was as a military strategist, he wasn’t going to let his own passions dictate how he would run the country. Eisenhower ended the Korean War during his presidency and did so without involving America in any other wars, because he wanted peace and believed it could be achieved. When the Department of Defense demanded more money for more bombs, Ike turned them down, asking, “How many times do we need to destroy Russia?” When Senator Joseph McCarthy went on the wild Communist witch hunt that divided America, Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to get McCarthy censured (the political version of “Shut the fuck up”). Eisenhower worked behind the scenes on that, by the way, because, in his words, he “refused to get in a pissing contest with a skunk,” because presidents talked cooler back then than they do today. America didn’t “lose a soldier or a foot of ground” during Ike’s administration. President Eisenhower controlled the arms race and kept the peace.

Still, don’t let Ike’s peacekeeping and the fact that he never personally served on the frontlines in any battle fool you into thinking our most tree-fightingest president wasn’t tough. By the time Ike was halfway through his presidency, he’d had a screwed-up knee, malaria, tuberculosis, high blood pressure, spinal malformation, shingles, neuritis, one heart attack, one stroke, Crohn’s disease, and bronchitis. That’s all according to his official medical history, but if you’d asked Eisenhower or read his diary at the time, you’d see that
he
casually summed up the whole ordeal by saying “lots of troubles with my insides lately.” That’s it. Not “Boy, it sure feels like death inside my body, all of the time, holy shit.” Just “lots of troubles … 
lately
.”