Savaging Presidents

...It was the Reverend Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, who observed of Thomas Jefferson that his administration promised an age in which, "We may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution, soberly dishonored, speciously polluted...

...Two centuries later, in the 1992 South Carolina Republican primary, conservative Pat Buchanan experienced a similar rebuke when he ran a highly graphic ad accusing the Bush administration of using taxes to support "pornographic and blasphemous" art...

...A stoic president like George Washington tried to be above it all...

...And when it came to the anti-Semitism of his day, the aristocratic Roosevelt knew exactly what to do...

...But far more common on the part of Washington's successors was open acknowledgment that the savaging hurt, even if one had the compensation of being the most powerful elected official in the nation...

...barely drew a protest from voters, Dole's plea did not, as he knew, have a chance of success...

...NICOLAUS MILLS is currently at work on a history of the savaging of the president...

...DLJRING THEIR time in office and later in their letters and memoirs, our presidents have voiced complaints about the savaging they received...

...In his influential 1996 Nation essay, "Seduced by Civility," the social critic Benjamin DeMott, defending the value of irreverence, argued that too much civility can give us a false sense of comfort and mask deep social conflict...

...Looking back to a time when we did not keep such precise track of a president's popularity, we see the same phenomenon at work...

...Believing he was "the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history," Ulysses Grant was outspoken on the pain it caused him...

...THE TRADITION of savaging the powerful has long and honorable roots in American politics, beginning with the revolution and the savaging of King George III and his ministers...

...As individuals we may be repelled by the savaging of a president and, as a consequence, feel great doubts about leaving private life to run for office, but as voters we have during the course of the last two centuries assumed presidential savaging was inseparable from American democracy...

...We also assume that savaging a president invariably succeeds, when in fact it can backfire, especially if it runs counter to popular opinion...

...Who would care for these women if they got pregnant before they married...

...On the eve of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt was compared to Hitler...

...Much more useful, if we want to get at the core of what savaging the president reveals about American political life, is a narrower definition, which sees savaging as an attempt to humiliate rather than an effort to poke fun or argue...

...In 1802, when Jefferson's political enemy James Callendar wrote in the Richmond Recorder about Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings, his sole purpose was to hold Jefferson up to ridicule, not seriously explore the question of miscegenation or abuse by slaveholders...

...were designed to humiliate him...

...Instead of running from the charge that he was secretly a Jew, Roosevelt declared that he could only trace his family ancestors back to 1649...

...The savaging of the British reflected the colonists' growing hatred of arbitrary power, but it also marked the start of a tradition in which political freedom in America was inseparable from free expression at its most extreme...

...J. is not spared, and my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb . . . has been dragged forth by Hammond and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro...

...It remains savaging, however, so long as its principal aim is the humiliation of the president...

...Kennedy's recklessness, particularly during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when America and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war, was certainly helped by his sense that he could get away with anything...

...An easy target is always comforting...

...Today, when voter turnout is low, it is no surprise that so many in the media seek to link voter apathy to negative campaigning, despite mixed polling data supporting this connection...

...In the wake of his Farewell Address, George Washington was labeled by the opposition press as "the source of all the misfortunes of our country," a man who "cankered the principles of republicanism...

...The classic case of political savagery in American politics took place in 1856, when Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a leading abolitionist, and nearly beat 44 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 SAVAGING PRESIDENTS him to death with his cane...

...But the other side of the coin is that savaging creates an opportunity for those who are relatively powerless and who lack easy access to the media to have their voices heard...

...Some of the mechanisms—notably the Internet and the Office of the Independent Counsel—that made it easy to attack Clinton were recent historical developments...

...Mrs...

...When we go back to the nineteenth century and look at the way newspapers developed, we see that they, too, gave those savaging the president a vehicle for reaching voters that DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 45 SAVAGING PRESIDENTS changed over the decades...

...A history of the savaging of the president reveals not a continuum so much as a series of zigzags...

...Harry Truman was sufficiently angered by the Chicago Tribune's calling him a crook that he asked his attorney general, J. Howard McGrath, to file a libel suit against the paper...

...In the long run, our most resourceful presidents have been able to turn their savaging into a plus...

...In the distant past, they may have been Jews," he happily told the press...

...The intensely personal attacks on Jefferson were helped by the fact that the papers of his day, which had jumped from a total of ninety in 1789 to nearly two hundred in 1800, were controlled by political parties and expected to be fiercely partisan...

...A similar point holds for Ronald Reagan...

...AS HE ACCEPTED the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Bob Dole, one of the Senate's toughest infighters for more than a decade, cautioned his supporters that President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were "opponents, not enemies...

...What such anxiety overlooks is, however, both revealing and encouraging: it is the capacity of the electorate to see through presidential savaging that lacks merit, even when the president being savaged does not have a great claim on our sympathy...

...It was aviation hero Charles Lindbergh who told a Madison Square Garden audience that in the 1940 election Americans had as much free choice over foreign affairs "as the Germans would have been given if Hitler had run against Goring...

...What has happened has been far more modest...

...It is the kind of problem that James Madison worried about in Federalist 63 when he warned of the people being "misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men...

...His most recent book is The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self...

...In the case of presidents, the value of this tradition of savaging has been its deflationary and subversive power...

...A president cannot expect to be immune from savaging...

...There is a similar desire to degrade that lies behind the savaging of the president...

...It was radio in the 1930s that gave the enemies of Franklin Roosevelt, such as the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and Louisiana senator Huey Long, the chance to lash out at the president and be heard by millions...

...But long before the Internet, the Independent Counsel, and the negative campaign ad, we savaged our presidents with gibes, caricature, and invective...

...Later in the century, the scorn heaped upon Grover Cleveland for fathering a child out of wedlock was helped by the growth in newspaper circulation (from 2,800,000 in 1870 to 24,200,000 by 1899) and the corresponding emergence of a readership fascinated both by muckraking and the humaninterest story...

...The savaging has often been personally brutal, and even when unjustified, it has made governance difficult...

...In 1998, the savaging of President Clinton for his relationship with Monica DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 47 SAVAGING PRESIDENTS Lewinsky led to a jump in Clinton's political standing, lifting his approval rating to 61 percent, seventeen points higher than it had been two weeks earlier, before the Lewinsky allegations became public...

...That as voters we often pay attention to those who do the most colorful savaging means that a questionable journalist, such as Matt Drudge, can get attention he would otherwise be denied...

...And it was the Internet in the 1990s that gave Bill Clinton's enemies a vehicle for spreading the rumor that the president had fathered an illegitimate child...

...Abraham Lincoln, while in office, was described as a "half-witted usurper" and a "mole-eyed" monster...

...The brutal treatment of Abraham Lincoln— a "joke" the powerful New York Herald once called him in a headline—was helped by the rise of large-circulation daily papers led by editors who commanded a broad readership...

...Indeed, the real problem in describing the kind of savaging of the president that has been going on in America for the last two hundredodd years stems from the degree to which political savaging is often so sweepingly defined that it is equated with satire or harsh criticism...

...Callendar went out of his way to demean Flemings, calling her a "slut as common as the pavement" and describing her children as a "litter," before going on to observe that Jefferson sent to the "pigstye" for Hemings when he wanted her company...

...In the struggle for public opinion a president engaged in verbal battle with those who had savaged him could quickly be brought down to their level...

...In recent times we have seen the difference between what is and is not savaging revealed in the contrast between the harsh criticism that Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman directed against President Clinton for his "immoral" behavior with Monica Lewinsky and the prurient narrative that filled Independent Counsel Ken Starr's report to Congress...

...48 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...

...I am not surprised that one who began his presidential career in drunkenness should end it in crime...

...nor will they work any other effect in my mind," he wrote in 1796...

...It was television in the 1960s that gave Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War opponents the opportunity for street theater in which they portrayed Johnson as a murderer and asked, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today...

...I welcome their hatred," Franklin Roosevelt said of those who accused him of being a traitor to his class...

...The attacks on Thomas Jefferson for having sexual relations with Sally Hemings were designed to shame Jefferson...

...The investigation of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, was helped by Nixon's unpopularity and the trashing of him by the left, both earlier in his career and during his first presidential term...

...THEN, AS NOW, the lesson remains the same...

...From the start, John Kennedy received very easy treatment from reporters and critics, and it is not at all clear that their deference to him or their reluctance to explore his private life SAVAGING PRESIDENTS benefited the nation...

...In such cases savaging provides insight into our anxieties...

...Although experienced politicians and public figures by the time they reached the White House, none found it easy to ignore the attacks he was forced to endure while leading the country...

...It frequently distracted voters from the crucial issues of the day, and it put pressure on presidents who did not want to see their reputations besmirched to try to humiliate their attackers...

...If we treat the savaging of the president as simply a blot on our political landscape, we lose sight of these complexities...

...they have often been among the brightest and most respected figures of their day...

...Even more telling, those trashing the president have not just been political hacks or partisan editors...

...The assaults on the shy and somewhat pompous Cleveland—especially the cartoon that showed a fat man being pursued by a woman with a wailing baby yelling, "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa...

...and in his speeches and letters, Truman was just as combative...

...For much of his time in office, Reagan was the "Teflon president," who was constantly given the benefit of the doubt and who never got stuck with the criticism of his administration...

...Still cruder was the Jeffersoninspired pornographic verse, which Callendar happily printed in his paper, that led drinking men at the start of the nineteenth century to sing: "A lass so luscious ne'er was seen/As Monticello Sally/Yankee Doodle, who's the noodle/What wife was half so handy?/To breed a flock of slaves for stock/A blackamoor's a dandy...

...He publicly referred to the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson as an SOB, and, in a letter to Senator William Benton, he described two of the Washington papers that had been hardest on him as "the snotty little news" and a "sabotage sheet...

...Savaging may be driven by a variety of additional factors—partisanship, personal hate, opposition to a policy—that complicate it...

...It was the revolutionary writer Tom Paine, who, in an open letter in the Aurora, celebrated Washington's retirement by praying for his death and calling him an "impostor...

...WHEN IT COMES to the savaging of the president, we are certainly no more under the sway of the media than our ancestors were...

...The assault on President Clinton by Paula Jones's lawyers, who, in an effort to embarrass the president and make their client seem truthful, claimed that Jones could identify "distinguishing characteristics" of the president's penis—namely, that it was "crooked"—certainly constitutes a political low point, but it is hard to see Jones's legal attack or the perpetuation of it by both radio talk-show host Don Imus and the Washington Times as worse than the sexual savaging of Thomas Jefferson while he was in office...

...It is easy to see why our presidents have raised such objections to the savaging they received while in office...

...These attacks, unjust and unpleasant as they are, will occasion no change in my conduct...

...But here, too, the assaults raised serious questions that the country was unprepared to deal with: In a Gilded Age society in which an increasing number of young women were leaving the farm to live in the city, what would happen to sexual standards...

...Dole's words of caution made for a great sound bite on the evening news, but in the context of the 1990s, when campaign bumper stickers asking, "Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when his country needs him...

...My Reputation has been so much the Sport of the public for fifty years and will be with Posterity, that I hoped it a bubble, a Gossameur that idles in the Wanton Summer Air," John Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson years after both had left of46 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 fice...

...We have even recorded our highest electoral turnouts-75 percent or more from 1880 to 1892—in years when the political savaging was particularly vicious and its targets were presidents and presidential candidates who were not strong leaders...

...We make a mistake, however, if we look back on the 1990s and think that the savaging of President Clinton was unprecedented...

...I never wanted to get out of a place," he declared, "as much as I did to get out of the Presidency...

...Paine's reputation never recovered...

...Tom Paine's attack on George Washington made Paine the target of critics who labeled him a "sot and infidel" and compared him to a "reptile infusing its venom into the Atlantic...

...Indeed, for our presidents, the ability to withstand savaging has in practice turned out to be still another test of character...

...The same kind of anxiety may be seen in the attacks launched in the 1880s on President Grover Cleveland for having had a child out of wedlock...

...It was a situation that gave him a false sense of security, and the result was that Reagan was able to avoid paying a price for his failures until the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986 put his administration in jeopardy...

...The ad created a backlash of disgust, and in one of the most conservative states in the nation, swung voters to President Bush...

...The examples from earlier centuries are just as striking...

...Even the staunchest Federalist would not call the descriptions of John Adams as "His Rotundity" and the "Duke of Braintree" more than satirical attacks on Adams's conservatism...

...What would happen if slavery were ended and former slaves became full-fledged citizens...

...It has helped make grandiosity impossible in our leaders, and more recently, when we are threatened by packaged and over-managed presidents, savaging has made it difficult for a president to keep the public at arm's length...

...Those trashing the president have simply learned to accommodate themselves to whatever delivery systems served their purposes...

...Malignity therefore may dart her shafts...

...But they also raised very serious questions that voters were not prepared to confront openly: How was America to deal with the children of white plantation owners and slaves...

...The whole object of the coalition is to calumniate me," Andrew Jackson complained of his opponents...

...Over the last eighty years, the changes in these systems have been dramatic...

...The twenty-four-hour news cycle has made attacks on the president more incessant than they ever were and guaranteed the success of gotcha politics, but from Washington's time on, the savaging of the president has not fallen into a pattern in which we can say the media determined the message...

...Since the end of the eighteenth century, it is a fate that no president, no matter how successful his administration, has been completely able to avoid...

...Callendar, who referred to Hemings's son who was said to look like Jefferson as "our little mulatto president," was, however, far from alone in heaping abuse on Jefferson for his sexual conduct...

...In a decade of attack ads and negative campaigning, real political power was firmly in the hands of those who, in the words of veteran Republican consultant Ed Rollins, believed their job was "to diminish the reputation of the other side...

...The real question, barring exceptional luck, is when it will come and if at that time he finds a way to govern the country without being crippled by the trashing of his character and judgment...

...A history of the savaging of the president is not history from the sewer up...

...The paradox is that although the savaging of the president has taken a political toll on the country, it does not follow that we would be better off if it never happened...

...The ridicule heaped upon Lincoln's successors, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, was helped by the flourishing of the illustrated weekly and the damage that could be done by a political cartoonist like Thomas Nast, whose drawings, like today's television attack ads, created an immediate impression and allowed him to declare, "I try to hit the enemy between the eyes and knock him down...

...When the savaging of a president does hit home, it exposes issues in a way that would not happen if we stayed within the bounds of conventional political discourse...

...When we define the savaging of the president as the effort to diminish his status by humiliating him, what changes immediately is our notion that the current attacks on the president reflect a continuum that has only gotten cruder over time...

...DeMott's warning is one that directly applies to the savaging of the president...

...There is, on the other hand, no mistaking the venom in the 1868 attack on Andrew Johnson during his impeachment by an Indiana Congressman who declared, "I am in favor of the official death of Andrew Johnson...