Using up the president
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers USING UP THE PRESIDENT THE PROCESS IS ONE OF ALMOST FEUDAL INTIMACY POOR JIMMY CARTER. There wasn't enough of him to go round. A college friend told me a story...
...I was about eight years old...
...One looks at a president's tired face and can't help but wonder—so many have taken so much of the substance of the man, a bit at a time, ten seconds for a handshake, ninety seconds on the phone—if there is anything left...
...At the moment he's a state senator...
...The story was that he had signed each and every one personally...
...You could see something of the effect in the photographs which appeared in the morning paper during the campaign—the hollow smiles, baggy eyes, lines of tension about the mouth...
...Sometimes the process is fudged...
...It goes on all day, every day, and of course the demands for a piece of the president—or of a presidential candidate—are even greater during a campaign...
...He went on the appointed day and spent four or five minutes in the Oval Office...
...The president was really there with all those state senators, substantial contributors .public officials, foreign dignitaries, aides and their families, spreading himself around...
...Lyndon Johnson used to call it "pressing the flesh," and there is a lot of flesh to press...
...There are not minutes enough in the day to touch all the bases...
...My friend said one look was all you needed: the man was crazy...
...The president very much wants to speak to you but he just received a call from the president of Pakistan...
...An aide led him away by the arm but still he turned to wave, the grin fixed...
...I slept badly...
...A college friend told me a story recently about a classmate running for Congress in Connecticut...
...Lyndon Johnson invited people into his bedroom, even into his bathroom...
...One allows oneself to doubt...
...Every president, for example, seems to have his own technique for dealing with the agony of shaking hands...
...This was a very curious experience...
...There are countless thousands of short messages on White House stationery floating around "signed" by recent presidents...
...A man with a mellifluous voice who'd forgotten I was coming...
...I was exhausted at the end of every day...
...He had to do the campaigning, but running it was beyond him...
...I've never shaken a president's hand, unless you count Eisenhower's, when he was president of Columbia University...
...Would you hold on please, senator...
...he seemed far away, just like all the others...
...Some weeks later the White House called again and invited our classmate down to meet the president in the Oval Office...
...I had slipped into a kind of fugue state...
...But what is the effect on a president, who is pressed from all directions all the time...
...But somehow everybody asked the same questions, and I always gave the same answers, never changing anything more than the inflection of a word...
...Nothing could have reached me at that point, short of an actual weapon...
...Mr...
...The authority is his...
...Someone once described to me an Inaugural Ball—I think it was Nixon's—where the new president shook the hands of a long line of notables...
...A president must spread himself around...
...The conversation was general...
...It is the office, of course, which gives a president his power, but while he holds the office the power resides in his person...
...When he left the building he spotted a small group of construction workers standing near-by—six or eight men in blue plastic hardhats...
...Even the interviewers who were angry with me asked the same questions...
...I am told there is a man at the Capitol who does nothing all day but run flags up and down the flagpole so they can be given out to people who will say this flag flew over the Capitol...
...When Lyndon Johnson published his memoirs a special edition included a bookplate with his autograph...
...A sense of unreality slipped down over those days like a shroud...
...Nervous exhaustion must be every president's chronic condition...
...A photographer stood by, recording each handsake, so the signed pictures could go out later...
...He pumped their hands—so good of you to come, so glad to see you, very pleased to be here...
...A year ago I published a book and made the standard book tour—two or three cities in the northeast, a day or two in each...
...A blonde girl in Philadelphia, wearing a shawl and terribly distressed by the subject...
...This was shortly before Nixon was elected in 1968...
...Our classmate said he'd be glad to wait, and a fewmoments later the president came on the line...
...The pace of a presidential campaign amounts to a shattering personal ordeal...
...Carter was friendly...
...A bride and bridegroom go through it for the duration of a wedding...
...One can only surrender to the moment, grant everyone who approaches that piece of the self to which they are entitled by right and occasion...
...I have read he conducted one official conversation while receiving an enema...
...A feminine voice came on the line...
...Autograph collectors are going to have a tough time with the auto-pen, which came in with Kennedy, I think...
...He was too tired, harassed, confused, excited, and irritable...
...The president kept at it, ten or fifteen seconds for each greeter, bestowing a tiny touch of his power and authority with each shake of the hand...
...He shook one hand a third time...
...A funeral can be the same confusion of faces, identical words, floating in through a cloud...
...He can delegate it pretty much as he likes, but no document can substitute for his person, time in his presence, words from his mouth...
...Rosalynn's voice faded as she held up her phone in the Oval Office, pointing it in the direction of her husband...
...But photographs at least can't lie...
...One tried to be wounding, to break my composure, to crush my arguments and back me into a corner...
...The entire phone call lasted perhaps ninety seconds...
...A friend told me of seeing Nixon once on Fifth Avenue...
...I sometimes did six or eight interviews in a single day, most of them on radio, from seven in the morning until ten or eleven at night...
...That was our classmate's reward for his support at the convention...
...The president would like to speak to you...
...Early this year, well before the convention in August, he got a phone call one morning from the White House...
...Rosalynn's voice returned...
...I remember somewhere that John F. Kennedy's hand was often red and swollen at the end of the day...
...The radio people were all severely particular...
...He's talking to him right now...
...Even when they are "alone" they are surrounded by friends, advisors, aides, and cronies...
...He must ask for support personally, and he rewards it in person...
...That suggests he had conquered the barriers of privacy, and could do in public what others can only do in quiet alone...
...Others do...
...It was alarming to watch...
...I'm a quick study," he said.' 'Tell me what your book's about.'' The television people were all sleeker and more distracted...
...He sprang over to them with a broad fixed grin, his skin taut and orange in color in the harsh daylight...
...Did you hear him...
...He grew confused and shook some hands twice...
...I don't imagine I squeezed very hard...
...He must learn to 21 November 1980: 645 do as he's told, to depend on aides for the names of cities, to read the speeches he's given, to remember the stock answer for every question...
...A candidate has got to surrender himself like a swimmer caught in a rip tide...
...I apologize for the delay , but I felt I had to take the president of Pakistan's call...
...Senator, thank you for waiting...
...A side benefit was the aid it gave him in moving the greeter on...
...We live in an ancient world, and this is one of the oldest things in it...
...He should be free in a moment...
...Carter then asked our classmate for his support at the convention, which our classmate promised...
...A president will sometimes use twenty or thirty pens to sign a single bill, so they can be handed out later...
...Nixon had a technique of grabbing his greeter's arm with his left hand as a way of reducing the manly squeeze of the greeter's right...
...One remembers the story of the New York doctor who specialized in "vitamin" shots for public figures...
...Hello, senator, this is Rosalynn...
...The next day was always exactly the same...
...He talked a mile a minute throughout—at the reception before the lunch, to his luncheon partners, to the assembled guests after dessert was cleared...
...I could hardly read...
...Hundreds of other delegates must have received similar treatment...
...Our classmate could hear the hollow murmur of the president's voice in the background...
...An hour, two hours...
...I think this sort of experience must be more common than is generally supposed...
...I don't think Humphrey saw anything at all...
...A photographer took pictures, and a copy soon arrived in the mail with the president's signature...
...A president must spread himself in the same way...
...Theodore White figured that one reason Nixon lost the election of 1960 was his insistence on running his own campaign...
...Others had to think and feel for him in the quiet of their privacy...
...It seems that some grow addicted to the press...
...An elderly man in Boston, partially paralyzed...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 646...
...But there is a vast difference between an Athenian city state and a great modern nation of 250 million people...
...Receptions, public ceremonies, official meetings, the signing of bills into law...
...Our classmate waited...
...The line went on and on...
...During that same election I once covered a fundraising lunch given for Hubert Humphrey...
...We'd both appreciate it...
...Can you hear him in the background...
...President," said our classmate, "I think you made the right decision...
...But I suspect that like other presidents he, too, had been flushed out into the open, that his inner self had been broken up into bits and pieces...
...There is no substitute for the person in which power resides...
...College graduates feel it when a big family presses in close, and all the other big families of friends...
...The "vitamins" were amphetamines, the raw fuel of nervous energy to penetrate the exhaustion...
...I don't think Nixon was really crazy, but I think I know what my friend saw—a mixture of inner tension with a sense of unreality...
...The process is one of almost feudal intimacy...
...It's taken as a sign of manhood...
...His attempts were transparent—he was truly angry—but it had no effect whatever...
...Can you wait...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 21
